Category: Reviews – Concerts

Scandinavian and New Zealand players unite wonderfully for the two greatest clarinet quintets

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society

The Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet:
Anna McGregor (clarinet), Manu Berkeljon (violin), Sofie Sunnerstam (violin), Anders Noren (viola) and Tomas Blanch (cello)

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A, K 581
Brahms: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op 115

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 6 July, 2:30 pm

I understand that the Waikanae Music Society asked for and got a programme other than those that the promoters of the New Zealand tour (Chamber Music New Zealand) was offering. Both Chamber Music Hutt Valley and Wellington Chamber Music settled for either the Mozart or the Brahms plus ‘fillers’ in the first half.

This concert was first advertised as the Antithesis Quintet, which might have referred to the programme, sub-titled ‘Concert of Opposites’. But as a result of an injury sustained by one of the string players, the personnel was changed and subsequently the name, to Dalecarlia. The players are members of the Dalasinfoniettan orchestra, based in Falun which is in the region of Dalecarlia (Dalarna in Swedish) in central Sweden.

For the record, the original material that we posted on Coming Events on this website, listed the following members: Anna McGregor (clarinet), Hilda Kolstad Huse (violin), Sofie Sunnerstam (violin), Fanny Maréchal (viola) and Katrine Pedersen (cello).

Neither the interview with Eva Radich on Upbeat on Friday nor the websites we’ve looked at touched on the reasons for the three personnel changes and the name change.

I’d been at the Lower Hutt concert and had been impressed by the Mozart quintet but at Waikanae, from the very opening, there was something different, in the extraordinary beauty and gentleness of the clarinet’s rising phrase, and the same feeling of greater care and finesse from the strings. The pianissimi were breathtaking, from all the players.

I wondered whether the quite different acoustic might have explained what I felt was a more fine-grained and penetrating performance (still jet-lagged at Lower Hutt?). It has been customary to criticise the hall as a cavernous sports stadium but, apart from the sound becoming more dim for those seated far from the stage, the sound now is clear, seeming to enhance the distinct timbres and articulations of the individual instruments. I really relished the sound.

Naturally, the exquisite second movement, Larghetto, prospered is this space where the clarinet is very centre-stage, and it was possible to delight in Anna McGregor’s rapport with the strings (remarkable given that the group has really been together such a short time); I am often given to thinking as I listen to music of great beauty, that it is the most overwhelmingly beautiful creation ever, and this was indeed one of those times. And the Menuetto and Trio were not far behind: beguiling, unhurried, with long passages for strings alone, the first violin (Sofie Sunnerstam) producing a lean yet satin-smooth tone.

The last movement is in the theme and variations form, though the variety that Mozart introduces makes one quite overlook the fact that we are hearing the same basic tune over and over. The third variation, in A minor, gives the viola (Anders Noren) a gorgeous minute of exposure, a premonition of the longer Adagio of the fifth and last variation. These gracious slow phases seemed to me the most awesome moments of the work, though it ends with a restorative Allegro coda: just perfect.

Fancy getting the Brahms Quintet in addition, in the same concert! That will also be played at the Wellington Chamber Music concert at St Andrew’s this coming Sunday, along with pieces by Ross Harris and a Swedish composer.

Brahms makes a much more concerted work from his resources than Mozart had. Clarinet and strings play together, singing their distinct parts in more complex five-part ensemble. For this, the two violins changed places: Manu Berkeljon was leader here. At Lower Hutt I had felt that her violin blended slightly better in the ensemble, but at Waikanae I could not make such a distinction, though Sofie’s instrument sounded a little lighter in tone, lending a welcome contrast between the two.

Compared with the sunny, delighted mood of the Mozart, composed just two months before he died, Brahms, in B minor, sounded a great deal more weighed down by the burdens of the world (though his death was still six years off), with almost anguished passages in the first movement. Violins had the opening phrase of the first movement, but the clarinet opens the sombre Adagio with its three descending notes, leading to one of Brahms’s most beautiful, elegiac melodies; its stillness was transfixing.

The players handled the brief third movement, a disguised Scherzo, giving no pause for meditation. Like Mozart’s, the last movement is a set of five variations; it’s led by the cello (the excellent Tomas Blanch) into deeper waters, not to be misled by the tempo marking Con Moto.  Again, considering the shortness of their time together (though most of them are used to collaborating in the chamber orchestra in Falun), I was moved by the integrity, of their playing, of the same mind, exploring Brahms’s essentially serious nature through the complex strands of the Finale and finding profundity as well as enchantment in it.

The loud applause from the 350–plus crowd proved that the Waikanae Society had not been wrong to seek both these great works – after all, why not when you’ve travelled 20,00km to play them?

 

Wellington Chamber Orchestra – nostalgia, high spirits and adventure

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

LILBURN – Aotearoa Overture
HAYDN – Symphony No.99 in E-flat
SIBELIUS – Symphony No 1 in E Minor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Vincent Hardaker (conductor)

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

Sunday, 6th July 2014

Perhaps it’s awfully “New Age” of me – but I do like to make up some kind of all-purpose phrase to use as a heading, when writing a review of any concert. It actually provides a framework upon which one can hang aspects of an overall purpose for the music-making, even if it’s largely in the ear of this particular listener as it were. Of course, this “ear of the listener” is the true reality of any concert – we listen to and respond individually, not collectively, to music, however much we might like to compare notes (whoops!) afterwards.

This concert resisted my first attempts at finding a phrase that would adequately sum up the music played – I finally hit upon the idea that the ostensible “odd composer out” of the trio, Josef Haydn, could, in fact, be equated with his two youthful companions, Sibelius and Lilburn, on the score of being similarly “young at heart”. There’s certainly nothing in this particular Haydn Symphony to suggest anything other than youthful spirits and unflagging energy, qualities in abundant supply, of course, in each of the other works on the program.

So, on that score I’ve been able to link, however tenuously, both music and composers for this Chamber Orchestra presentation. Douglas Lilburn’s well-known Overture “Aotearoa”, which opened the concert, was written specifically for a “New Zealand Centenary Matinee” in London in April 1940 – the orchestra’s own programme note was, I thought, somewhat misleading in using the word “sadly”, when referring to the Overture being performed in London first of all, as it was that particular centenary soiree which specifically prompted the work’s creation and gave the young composer the opportunity of it being actually performed. It was, incidentally, Lilburn’s final compositional act of his student years in London, as he left shortly after the concert for New Zealand.

But to the present performance!  – and here I have to take my metaphorical hat off to conductor Vincent Hardaker and the orchestra players for a splendid performance of the work. Right from the first pizzicato-and-woodwind chord, it seemed to me that a certain quality was “there”, that the sounds made by the players brought to mind that unique character remarked upon by New Zealanders who heard that first London performance – “It’s Cape Reinga!”, one ex-pat Kiwi listener was heard apparently whispering to the other, during the work’s introduction!

What impressed was the evocation of the music’s character throughout – tones and textures by turns shimmered, sparkled and roared, as the interaction of sunlight, water and wind with rugged coastlines and towering mountains was brought to the mind’s view. True, there was a lack of really soft playing from the strings in certain places, and some of the composer’s characteristic whiplash rhythmic figurations occasionally lacked the last word in precision – but the spirit was at all times palpable, which, for me was more important than soulless accuracy.

I also liked Vincent Hardaker’s actual “shaping” of the music, particularly the way he allowed the central section of the work a little more time and space in which the sounds could expand and create a contrasting mood with the predominant allegro. It actually made the work “bigger” than I’d ever heard it played before, opening up the music’s realms during that particular sequence, and making the reprise of the allegro even more spine-tingling than usual. I’ll risk bias by particularly praising the winds for their characterful playing throughout, even if all sections of the ensemble had their moments of glory.

After this, the first movement of the Haydn Symphony (No.99 in E-flat) just didn’t seem to ignite, even in the wake of an introduction which showed some promise – the allegro which followed pushed the ensemble beyond the players’ manipulative capabilities, even if the music’s spirit sounded right in certain places. Better presented was the slow movement, written by the composer as a heartfelt tribute to a deceased friend. The strings prepared the way for some lovely work by the winds, the music then leading the players through some darker, tenser moments and as suddenly back into the sunlight once again. Notable, too, was the quasi-military sequence with properly stuttering brass and complaining winds, towards the end.

Anyone brought up on an “older school” of Haydn-playing (Beecham, Klemperer, Walter) would gasp and stretch their ears at what seem like the breathless “authentic” tempi at which today’s ensembles take some of this music. Hardaker’s tempo for the Minuet practically turned the music into a Beethovenian scherzo, most of which the players coped with, apart from some blurred figurations. A good thing the conductor relaxed the tempo a little for the Trio, though things were still pretty edge-of-the-seat lively for the players.

Fortunately, the finale was played largely for its wit and drollery, the conductor encouraging his musicians to enjoy their interactions, and letting individual voices “speak” (such as the oboe’s crescendo on the held note shortly after its entrance). We enjoyed the composer’s seemingly endless inventions as one orchestral group followed the other in a kind of tag-music game, demonstrating some adroit ensemble playing in the process.

Things moved up a few notches for the Sibelius Symphony after the interval – and the work got away to the best possible start with a stunningly-played clarinet solo from Robert Ewens, followed by passionate, soulful string-playing. Wind and brass gave stern responses, resulting in a mighty climax (the timpani slightly ahead of the beat, but the spirit certainly present!). There being no harp for whatever reason, a piano was used (the player nervous-sounding at first and misreading the opening rhythm – but things soon settled down), the winds setting to and “carrying” the atmosphere, one or two sluggish entries brought up to speed by the others.

The movement’s evocations of Nordic landscape and weather were conjured up with a will, strings digging into the reprise of their gloriously juicy lines, winds enjoying their icy-fingered chromatic descents, the brasses covering themselves in glory in places, and the percussion putting the final dusting of snow on the peaks! – though I did find in places the timpani too loud – I couldn’t hear the final string pizzicati at all, beneath the rattle of those skins, exciting though the noises were.

Such a gorgeous slow movement! – the lullabic character of the music was nicely caught by strings and winds over murmuring brass, though the harp was sorely missed in places. Occasionally I thought the winds TOO forthright, though the plangent tones weren’t out of place, even if the nicely-played solo ‘cello was somewhat overpowered in such company. The beginning of the allegro was well-managed, the rhythms dancing, the lower brass snapping at the dancers’ heels, amid great shouts and cymbal crashes, the strings maintaining the “howling wind” aspect well – the calm returned suddenly and effectively, the conductor taking all the time in the world with the music, giving room for his players to express the utmost tenderness and serenity – well done!

The timpanist made the most of his big moments in the scherzo, leading the way with those treacherous off-beat entries which everybody seemed to manage, along with the fugue-like passages for winds and strings, though I could swear the brass missed an entry at one point. Fortunately they were all there for the Trio, the horns in particular making lovely sounds, inspiring the winds to reply in kind, even if the oboes sounded a bit overbearing. The scherzo’s reprise culminated with an excitingly well-managed accelerando at the end, which all concerned must have enjoyed!

And so to the finale of this epic work! Singing strings and snarling brass with winds close at hand, at the start, made a good beginning. More lovely work by the strings with their recitatives and with the winds at the start of the allegro – conductor Hardaker steadily and surely building the galloping excitement with his players. I was surprised by how quickly he moved the second “big tune” along, giving the pianist little chance to make an impression with his “harp” entries. The lower strings shone with some agile “scurrying” work at the allegro’s return, then helped the rest of the strings to push the rhythms along, the brasses flailing the textures, heightening the energies and stirring the blood! At conductor Hardaker’s speeds, the aforementioned “big tune” had more urgency than majesty, and the brass seemed to run out of puff trying to keep up, though they rallied for the final few shouts of defiant triumph.

In all it was a performance that, for all its orchestral fallibilities, gave us the work’s essences – and parts, such as the work’s opening and the last few pages of the slow movement, were most satisfyingly and memorably realized. Together with the Lilburn those were the concert’s highlights for this listener – places where the music wasn’t overly “pushed” but allowed to articulate its character and truly engage the skills and sensibilities of the musicians. On this showing, I look forward to hearing more of Vincent Hardaker’s work with this orchestra.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet – getting the music through….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
The Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet

Sofie Sunnerstam, Manu Berkeljon (violins)
Anders Norén(viola), Tomas Blanch (‘cello)
Anna McGregor (clarinet)

Emmy LINDSTRÖM – Song for Em (2006)
Anthony RITCHIE – Clarinet Quintet (2006)
W.A.MOZART – Clarinet Quintet K.581 (1789)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Thursday July 3rd, 2014

“A concert tour of the new and old from the northern and southern hemispheres” was the entirely apt, refreshingly hype-free description of the undertaking which produced this concert at Lower Hutt earlier this month – Anna McGregor, New  Zealand-born clarinetist, was originally supposed to tour New Zealand with the Antithesis Quintet, a group she had founded in 2010 while studying and working in Sweden. Due to injury incapacitating one of the players, things were rearranged, post-haste, with two of the original quintet, Anna McGregor and Sofie Sunnerstam (violin), joining some of the principal players in the Swedish ensemble, the Dalasinfonietten, Falen, with whom McGregor has been on contract.

One of these was another New Zealander, Manu Berkeljon, originally from the West Coast, and an experienced orchestral violinist, having worked with groups in New Zealand, Australia and Europe. She’s currently Associate Principal 2nd Violin in the Dalasinfonietten. The new group, called the Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet, was completed by Anders Norén (viola) and Tomas Blanch (cello). The group brought the original Antithesis Quintet programme content with them, including the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets as well as Anthony Ritchie’s 20006 Clarinet Quintet.

The group chose to open their concert with the kind of item that the redoubtable Michael Flanders (of “Flanders and Swann” fame) might have described as “helping to get the pitch of the hall” – this was an unashamedly romantic piece by one Emmy Lindström, called “Song about Em”, a darkly-swaying piece with a discernible melody whose repetitions charmed without complication – rather like a light piece by, say, Alfven.

Sterner stuff hove to immediately afterwards, in the guise of Antony Ritchie’s Clarinet Quintet, written to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. We were advised by the programme notes that Ritchie took “motivic ideas from (Mozart’s) Quintet, but without direct reference until the third movement”. Though there exists the proviso that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, it seemed from the music, to me, that Anthony Ritchie had something else on his mind – the music occasionally was stalked by other shades, Bartok and Shostakovich having, to my ears much more of a resonant presence than did the near-divine Wolfie…..

The work began evocatively, a clarinet solo brooding darkly amid ghostly rustlings from the strings, leading to some quixotic declamations and the beginnings of motoric rhythms, begun by the strings and added to by the clarinet – edgy contouring, explosive accents and tight, highly-strung harmonies.

Moments of repose were given little room as the instruments took up the rhythmic trajectories once again, this time tossing the figurations between one another, tones and timbres beautifully playing off one another, each instrument at certain points raising and asserting its particular voice. I liked for instance the swaying, sighing violin line throughout one episode contrasting with the bouncy, driving rhythms underneath, before the voices were gathered in for a toccata-like ensemble, whose plain speaking obviously exhausted all participants, abruptly leading to the movement’s end.

Unisons from the strings fragmented into individual lines, leaving the clarinet to rhapsodize and ruminate, at the slow movement’s beginning. The strings persisted, the sounds becoming declamatory as an impasse was reached, the lines clustering together, prompting what seemed to resemble techno-timbres, the strings hissing and scratching, still trying to bring the rhapsodizing clarinet into line! The strings then drew deeply and “attacked” their chords, after which they worked through an intensely-wrought and closely-knit passage, gaining a truce with the clarinet and settling all issues when the latter followed the strings back to their movement-opening gestures at the very end. I got the feeling that this music had intuitive more than formulaic motivations for the sequences and instruments to be doing what they did – very Mozartean in that sense, I thought……..

I enjoyed the Nielsen-like oscillations of the finale, passing from instrument to instrument, and backdropping birdsong figurations from the clarinet taken up by the violins and intensified, making for sound-vistas whose barriers seemed gloriously expanded as the music went on. The players seemed to my ears to really “take” to the writing, building up Shostakovich-like intensities and creating a feeling of combatants at a tournament, before the music enigmatically gave up its ghost. As for the aforementioned Wolfie, he may well have been flitting between and around some of the phrases, but neither myself nor a musician friend with whom I sat caught any kind of pre-echo of the work we were going to listen to after the interval – we obviously needed a different kind of listening wavelength……

Still, the experience sharpened and focused one’s listening sensibilities, enabling a keener appreciation of the performance of the Mozart which followed, pre-echoes or no pre-echoes! I liked the slight “huskiness” of the string tones at the beginning, a sound with a distinctive character, not excessively and blandly moulded, one against which the clarinet’s liquid outpourings strongly and distinctively contrasted. The chording supporting the second subject had lovely “squeeze-box” timbres, perhaps enhanced by the Lower Hutt venue’s dry-ish sound, though any suggestion of restricted tones was soon dispelled by the ensemble’s lively dynamic range, from the softest breathings to fully assertive chordings at some of the cadences. I also liked how the players conveyed the sense of coming to this music for the first time, even when making the repeats – their sounds had a fresh, exploratory quality, probably as much to do with listening to one another as playing the music.

Surely the slow movement of this work contains some of the most heavenly utterances devised by a human being! – Anna McGregor’s playing of the opening had at once a purity and a warmth which suggested some kind of concourse between this world and the divinity of whatever persuasion – occasionally I wanted the first violin to sing a little more ardently in response, but only as a personal preference – there was no doubt as to the sensitivity of the interchanges. This could be heard as well in the deftness of the playing’s “touching in’ of darker hues before the final cadence. Then, a quicker tempo than I was normally used to for the Minuet made for the liveliest of contrasts, and some beautifully characterized sequences – for example the appropriately chalk-and-cheese Trios. First came a strings-only affair, sombre, edgy and unsettled, and a bit later the clarinet-led melody which is, of course, one of the world’s charmers.

From all of this one could presume that the theme-and-variations finale would go swimmingly – and so it proved, from the opening’s engaging “strut” of the strings, through the variants of rhythm, texture and mood presented by the different episodes, among which featured a kind of “lover’s complaint” from the viola. At the conclusion of the following “gurgling clarinet” section, whose playfulness between the instruments greatly delighted us all, a surprisingly strong and arresting modulatory swerve brought things to a sudden halt, allowing, after a luftpause, a beautifully-poised adagio to cast its spell, courtesy of Anna McGregor’s gorgeous tones. With such playing in mind one readily forgave the clarinettist a dropped note or two in the final phrases of the Allegro coda.

I’ll risk both chauvinism and ungraciousness by remarking that it was a pity we didn’t get to hear Anthony Ritchie’s other “programmed” piece (listed as a “possible” encore, but remaining a “might-have-been”) “Purakaunui at Dawn”. I think I would have preferred it to the somewhat bland Lindström work. Still, the two major quintets were the thing – and local audiences obviously owe Anna McGregor a debt of gratitude for hitting upon a way of getting around the troubles which befell the original tour arrangements, and enabling us to experience the work of such a fine group of musicians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baroque Voices – resplendent 20th birthday offerings

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BAROQUE VOICES – 20th Birthday Concert
Music from 20 years of performance

Baroque Voices
Pepe Becker (director)
Douglas Mews (harpsichord, organ, piano)
Robert Oliver (bass viol)
Daniel Becker (guitar, percussion)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Saturday, 28th June 2014

Wellington’s Baroque Voices celebrated twenty years of music-making with a concert on the last Saturday of June given in the same inaugural venue, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, in Hill St., Wellington – a splendid place for music-making by vocal ensembles.

It was a truly epic and resplendent affair – perhaps a trifle overlong for listeners and performers alike, though the presentation certainly succeeded in bringing to the fore a sense of the variety and depth of repertoire the ensemble has tackled since its inception. Music Director Pepe Becker, in the programme accompanying Saturday’s concert, outlined something of BV’s history, in the process setting down something of the extent of the ensemble’s range and sympathies regarding performance.

In those twenty years the group’s personnel has markedly changed, the only original BV members remaining being Peter Dyne and Pepe herself. But though singers have come and gone, the performance standards have been maintained, judging by the invariably enthusiastic reviews the group has received. I’ve been going to their concerts for at least ten of those years, and have always been delighted with both the repertoire and its presentation.

On this occasion I actually thought that the ensemble warmed increasingly to its task as the evening progressed, becoming more relaxed and better-focused, though I did get the feeling that the group had worked harder on some of the pieces than on others. Given the range of repertoire covered in the concert this wasn’t really surprising – in fact it was amazing that the group maintained the levels of accuracy and energy that they did, especially towards the end. We would, I think, have been more than satisfied with about four-fifths of the items – especially given that a few of the choices seemed to me a tad insubstantial compared with some others.

But any more comment along these lines would sound curmudgeonly – faced with such generosity of performing spirit one feels far more inclined to celebrate what was done with the group’s usual skill, refinement and panache – which was, in fact, most of the programme (all of the bits I would have wanted to keep!). These alone were in themselves worlds of delight and wonderment, and their performances worthy exemplars of the ensemble’s quality.

The concert’s very beginning in a sense paid homage to the venue, which repaid the gesture with appropriate resonance and ambient warmth – the singers came in from the church’s congregational entrance behind the audience, Pepe Becker leading the way and singing, purely and rapturously, Hildegarde of Bingen’s haunting plainchant O Euchari, with the other singers humming in the style of an accompanying hurdy-gurdy. It all made for a William Blake-like “augury of innocence”, of wonderment such as one might experience as a child at a rare and mystical ritual – a moment of magic!

Baroque Voices followed this with another special moment – a performance of the very first item sang by the ensemble at that inaugural 1994 concert. This was Monteverdi’s madrigal Ch’ami la vita mia (That you are the love of my life), from the First Book of Madrigals, for five voices – a sonorous, flexible performance with moments of pure quicksilver. Of course Monteverdi’s music subsequently became a major focus for the group, presently exploring the entire series of Madrigals, and having already performed, most brilliantly, the resplendent 1610 Vespers in 2010 (can it really be four years ago?). Two other Monteverdi madrigals were presented in the concert’s second half, contrasting the composer’s later (Second Practice) style, accompanied by continuo instruments, with his earlier practice, using voices only.

Another particularly fruitful undertaking for the group has been the commissioning and premiering of no less than thirty-five new works (to date!) by local composers. A number of these drew their initial inspiration from existing works, or from texts set by composers already in BV’s repertoire. We were “treated” to four instances of this during the evening, all of which the group had previously performed, two from Jack Body, one from Mark Smythe, and one from Ross Harris, as well as more “stand-alone” works by Carol Shortis and Pepe Becker herself.

Jack Body’s Nowell in the Lithuanian manner followed a lovely, properly austere three-part performance of the anonymous 15th Century English carol Nowell, sing we – Body’s work, from 1995, was a setting for four voices, with the interval of a second dominating the music, making for a resonant and repetitive antiphonal exchange of excitable impulses tossed back and forth in a kind of minimalist-folksy way, sounding fun to perform, as it certainly was to hear.

More resplendent and declamatory was the same composer’s Jibrail (the Islamic word for Gabriel), here performed immediately after its Latin equivalent “Veni Creator Spiritus” – we heard the Latin chant sung antiphonally by two groups, most of whose members then re-formed in a semi-circle as a gong ritualistically sounded (played by Daniel Becker), the singers chanting the word Jibrail, and capping the growing vocal intensities by picking up and activating hand-held gongs, as if the tintinabulations were spreading through the world like wildfire.

This wasn’t exactly conventional vocal or choral music, but was a demonstration of how a creative imagination can at times defy convention and produce something that really works by its own unique lights – rather like Beethoven introducing voices to symphonic structures, which no-one had ever dared do before him. It’s also a matter of having the versatility to employ non-conventional means for expressive or creative purposes, which composers like Jack Body have demonstrated on many occasions.

A different kind of creative inspiration produced a work by composer Mark Smythe (Pepe Becker’s brother, incidentally), from music originally written for rock band.This was a setting of an anonymous Latin text A solis ortus cardine (From the far point of the rising sun) which Voices first sang as per Nikolaus Apel’s fifteenth-century Kodex (collection), in which version the lines had a gorgeous “floating” quality, the effect being of several plainchant strands beautifully interwoven.

Mark Smythe’s setting followed, employing an electric guitar as a kind of ground bass (the premiere of this work in 2005 used voices only, the guitar being a more recent addition, played here by Daniel Becker), and assigning to the vocal parts the “rock” song’s main melody supported by harmonies from the guitar parts. The result was rhythmically catchy, and harmonically attractive, having what I think of as a kind of oldish, modal flavour in places, with ear-catching modulations. I also enjoyed the purity and sense of freedom and space evoked by those stratospheric vocal lines drawn by Pepe Becker and Jane McKinlay.

A composer whose music has always intrigued and delighted me is Carol Shortis, who’s written a number of commissioned works for BV. Each of her works has seemed to me to inhabit its own world, with nothing generalized or taken for granted; as with the work presented in this concert, five settings of Japanese “death-poems” called Jisei, which Baroque Voices premiered in 2010. Typically succinct and intensely focused “final thoughts”, the poetry required similarly precise, sharp-edged sound-impulses which would “inhabit” the words, and vice-versa – and Carol Shortis’s music seemed to speak, sigh, sing and breathe with the verses to a remarkable extent.

Except that I thought the second Jisei, Senseki’s “At last I am leaving” could have been sparer of tone, more distilled in its realization (evoking more sparingly the “rainless skies” and the “cool moon”), I thought the performances evocative and finely-drawn. I enjoyed especially the third setting, Gesshu Soko’s “Inhale, exhale”, with its wonderful oscillations, and soaring lines describing the flight of arrows through the void. And the wordless realizations of the concluding Jisei, the letter “O”, were appropriately remote and self-contained, a final exhalation of breath closing the symbol’s circle.

Ross Harris contributed a work via a Baroque Voices’ commission in 2009, a setting of the anonymously-composed hymn Ave Maris Stella  (Hail, Star of the Sea). The ensemble again “prepared” the audience by performing a mixture of the plainchant verses with parts of another setting by Guillaume Dufay, a wonderfully tingling, ambience-stroking activation. Ross Harris’s work was itself described by Pepe Becker as “sumptuous”, doubtless as a result of her having previously performed the work – its premiere, in 2009.

I enjoyed the music’s oceanic evocations, sounds patterned like recurring waves, the voices interlocked, and the lines clustered – but then I thrilled to the growing intensities of sounds at the words “Qui pro nobis natus tulit esse tuus” (Who, born for us, endured to be thine), and a corresponding rapt, haunting withdrawal of tones and colour at “Ut videntes Jesum semper collaetemur” (That, seeing Jesus, we may forever rejoice together). And both the joyous affirmation of “Summo Christo decus Spiritui Sancto” (Honour to Christ the Highest, and to the Holy Spirit) and the deep, sonorous closing pages were intensely moving.

I ought to mention Pepe Becker’s own work, the Kyrie from her Mass of the False Relation, a title which had me intrigued until I read about the particular compositional device employed by the composer – the substitution of a sharpened or flattened note, a “false relation” of the original, sometimes in juxtaposition with the actual original, the harmonic tensions and clashes making for highly expressive results – colourful and piquant in places, tense and edgy in others, the listener waiting the whole time for lines and harmonies to resolve. I liked the “hollow cluster” effect of the “masquerading relatives” towards the piece’s end, during the final “Kyrie”.

I’ve unashamedly concentrated on the New Zealand composers and their works written for Baroque Voices, in this review – the concert contained a number of other delights which time and patience preclude a mention. But I mustn’t forget to pay tribute to the continuo musicians, Douglas Mews, who moved adroitly between harpsichord, piano and organ, as the items required, and Robert Oliver, whose bass viol playing was, as always, a delight. These two players have especially supported Baroque Voices down the years, almost to the point where any concert by the group wouldn’t seem quite the same without them.

To my mind, this concert reaffirmed both Baroque Voices’ and director Pepe Becker’s status as national treasures. These are musicians whose efforts help us find and nurture expression for whomever and whatever we are, occasionally, as here, holding our efforts up against the rest of the world’s by way of reaffirming both our identity and our individuality. May Baroque Voices continue to do the same on our behalf with distinction for at least the next twenty years!

 Click on this link to comment and discuss the review on Reddit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSO under Venezuelan conductor triumphs with essential German and Russian masterpieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Payare with Alisa Weilerstein – cello

Schumann: Manfred Overture, Op 115
Prokofiev: Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra in E minor, Op 125
Mahler: Symphony No 1 in D

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 27 June, 6:30 pm

A couple of highly promising young musicians whose existence have so far escaped my attention appeared with the NZSO on Friday.  Rafael Payare is the product of Venezuela’s Sistema musical organisation that involves young people seriously in classical music, and has already given rise to one of the most illustrious young conductors, Gustavo Dudamel. Payare is obviously following a similar path.

He is married to Alisa Weilerstein, the cello soloist who played the Prokofiev.

It was easy to see how the orchestra has responded to Payare’s approach both to them and to the music; starting with the overture, Schumann’s Manfred. Apart from Shakespeare, only two English writers have become big business in other parts of Europe: Byron and Scott, and for composers in particular. Byron attracted Berlioz, Donizetti and Verdi, Liszt and Tchaikovsky. Schumann too who was drawn to Byron’s verse drama, Manfred. Byron dismissed Manfred, written in 1817, as something eccentric and untheatrical, writing that he didn’t know whether it was good or bad. He called it ‘mad’ and wrote that he had rendered it quite impossible for the stage. In spite of that, Schumann composed not just an overture but other pieces of incidental music for the play, suggesting that he did envisage that it might be staged. I don’t know whether it was. There was a good deal more contemporary dramatic literature in Germany in the early 19th century than there was in Britain.

The central attraction of the piece was a kind of supernatural being who lives with the guilt of an unnamed crime (it was no doubt that which attracted both Schumann, and Tchaikovsky, in his little-played Manfred Symphony). Byron wrote it in Venice after fleeing England after the exposure of his relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh.  It was the product of the age of Faust Part I (and the character Manfred owes something to Faust in fact – yes, I did read it many years ago) and other works of the Sturm und Drang era including Schiller’s Die Räuber, and the English Gothic novel.

I had not heard the Manfred Overture for many years and wondered whether its strong impression on me would still exist. It was, and very much. Schumann’s account of the subject is taut, melodically strong, portraying the hero’s sombre, disturbed character, and this performance was arresting and excitable, giving Schumann the most persuasive account one could hope for. It’s scored for a normal orchestra, double woodwinds, except for four horns which lent a fine dramatic resonance. The conductor handled the unexpected turns with panache, particularly the mock anti-climax at the end.

Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto was played by the NZSO with German cellist Alban Gerhardt about six years ago, in what I recall as a fire-eating performance, feverish, with pretty fast speeds.

Here there were smaller string numbers (12, 10, 8, 8, 6) and an otherwise conventional orchestra.  The cellist in the open phase did not project her sound very strongly, but her instrument carried the essentially lyrical solo writing engagingly, contrasting with the more sombre orchestral scoring, dominated by its repeating, stolid rising theme that opens the piece. It’s an arresting and dark rather than an ingratiating work however, even though the energy of the Allegro movement is compelling and there’s plenty of more conspicuous playing for the cello.

Most of those I spoke to, unfamiliar with the work, did not find it engaging, which was my own reaction when I first encountered it many years ago. A merely routine performance will never do: its enjoyment demands a highly persuasive performance, to turn what at first seems dry, rather laconic, melodically obscure music into a work that has some real emotional integrity, even at times, excitement. For example, after the cadenza in the middle of the Allegro the orchestra returns to a pulsing cross-string passage that is emotionally gripping, like the sound of a hammering steam train at high speed.

The second is the longest movement and seems to contain the widest variety of moods and speeds, and it’s here that a driving propulsion and a sense of purpose emerged, powerfully inspired by Payare’s direction of the orchestra. Though the last movement begins with what can only be described as a real melody, first-time listeners can be forgiven for sensing a severity and unforgiving character in the work as a whole, and that initial impression can be hard to shake off even as very interesting developments and quite memorable sounds create a work of art that is strong and original without recourse to alienating avant-garde techniques.

It’s quite a tough work nevertheless; and there was no doubt that the relationship between conductor and cellist lent the performance a special energy and displayed a belief in and an affection for the music.

Then came Mahler’s First Symphony. The orchestra reassembled after the interval, at full strength (which I discuss later). It opens with the most uncanny, ethereal sounds, such as no symphony at that time had approached in any way, an exploratory feeling, as off-stage trumpets and then cuckoo sounds on clarinet suggest a pastoral scene, reinforced by one of the most beguiling Wayfarer songs; and quotes from other songs, his own and ‘Frère Jacques’. From the very first, the orchestra created a sound world that was vivid and full of character.

For a first symphony, it is impressive both for its individual character, its novelties of shape and structure and in the size of orchestra used. Much of that character derives from its evolving growth and the revisions which the programme note covers to some extent – born as a five movement symphonic poem in two parts, begun when Mahler was 24 and first performed in Budapest when he was 29. That version included a movement known as Blumine (Flower piece) lifted from an earlier work most of which has been lost. That one movement, found in 1966, had been between the first and second movements when it was played in Budapest in 1889 and again in 1893 and 1894. The Budapest version was called ‘Symphonic-Poem in 2 Parts’.

Between the Budapest performance and the revision for Hamburg in 1893 Mahler added the name Aus dem Leben eines Einsamen (From the Life of a Lonely-one). Just before the Hamburg performance the name Titan was added, though he made it clear that it was not in any way about Jean Paul’s novel. But he removed that title after the Hamburg performance in 1893 and there is no reason for it to be so-called now. (Titan, published in 1800-03, is a somewhat wild, Romantic novel a prominent feature of which is its beautiful and evocative nocturnal landscape descriptions, a feature that can be easily visualised in the symphony).  The third performance was in Weimar on 3 June 1894. Here, the Blumine movement was deleted.

The orchestration of the Budapest version was conventional for the time, with double woodwinds and four horns, but by the 1893 Hamburg performance Mahler had supplied it with three of each woodwind instrument.

For Weimar in 1894 Mahler increased his winds: four each of the woodwinds, and 3 additional horns making a total seven horns. There are two sets of timpani as well as additional wind instruments to lend extra power in climaxes, mainly in the last movement. It still included the title from Titan.

The present form was only arrived at for the fourth performance in Berlin in 1896 when the title Titan was deleted and it was named for the first time, ‘Symphony in D major’.

Its provenance from a tone poem contributes to its greatness and its permanent place in the repertoire: a miraculous combination of imagination and narrative with the structure and discipline of the traditional symphony. This explains the remarkable originality of this first symphony, but it hardly accounts for the confidence its composer displays in handling very disparate materials and the triumph of creating a soundscape that met initially with strong criticism but which really assured its eventual and permanent success. It is that strong, original voice, along with a very rich melodic gift, that has kept it among the most popular symphonic works.

But music does not play itself, and it proved the ideal subject for a young conductor with exceptional energy as well as great musical imagination and the ability to inspire an orchestra that sometimes shows a certain resistance to the efforts of young, gifted, ambitious conductors. This time the orchestra was very obviously won over.

The other aspect of this and of Mahler’s other earlier works is the absence of any impact from the horrors of war, which were to affect to a greater or lesser degree, most composers who lived beyond the second decade of the 20th century. Mahler knew no wars. (There might be no wars to account for the more complex emotional landscapes of the later symphonies, but an increasingly tortured life can explain that).

He was only ten when the short but awful Franco-Prussian war took place and died three years before World War One began. I often contemplate the enormous emotional gulf between Mahler and the composer who was probably most influenced by him – Shostakovich, who grew up surrounded by the effects of the Revolution and then lived through Stalin’s terrors and the Second World War.

Out of the long peace that had brought the Austro-Hungarian Empire to its condition of decadent complaisance, the artist could indulge in the self-absorption that gave rise to Freud and a bit later, Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Salome, and compose a finale ending in huge triumphalism, with horns and trombones standing to point their instruments into the audience in an uproarious spirit of invincibility. And the house went wild, with far more noise and clamour than reticent Wellington audiences usually allow.

 

The lyrical and the spectacular from Thomas Gaynor at TGIF Cathedral lunchtime recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Thomas Gaynor – organ

Bach: Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541
Bach: From the Leipzig Chorales: “Schmücke dich”, BWV 654 ; Trio super: “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend”, BWV 655
Saint-Saëns: Fantaisie in E flat; Danse macabre
Widor: Organ Symphony No 6 – Allegro (1st movement)

Cathedral of St Paul

Friday 27 June, 12:45 pm

This year is the 50th anniversary of the dedication of Wellington’s Anglican Cathedral, and so the concerts staged this year celebrate that.

This particular recital was apparently organised by the late John Morrison, who, among many activities that helped the arts, particularly music, to flourish in Wellington, was chairman of the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Wagner Society. Your reviewer, as a member of the society, wants to record that link.

I arrived as Gaynor was about four minutes into the Bach Prelude and Fugue, the sounds thrilling about the great space of the cathedral. I’d missed the Prelude but the fugue was proceeding with energy and, given the great reverberant cathedral, was emerging with as much clarity as was consistent with the character of dense contrapuntal music and the need for it to resound in a way the echoed what Bach saw as life’s enigmatic meaning. There was an elasticity in the tempo and a familiarity with the capacities of the organ illuminated the music through well contrasted registrations.

Two pieces from what are known as the Leipzig Chorales followed: they are among the relatively few purely organ compositions written at Leipzig, BWV 651 – 668. “Schmücke dich” (‘Deck thyself’), a beautifully calm piece in which Gaynor played the prominent chorale melody on a distinct stop in sharp contrast with the comforting, weaving, quaver accompaniment. And the ‘Trio Super’ “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend” (‘Lord Jesus, turn to us’) followed without a break. I can find no explanation of the term Trio Super; its character was very similar to the preceding piece with the vocal line played, again, on a more prominent stop than the accompaniment (not being an organ expert, just a lover of the instrument, I hesitate to guess at the names or ranks of the myriad stops).  It was joyous and lively, moving colourfully through a number of keys.

In some ways the leap of 150 years or so from Bach to Saint-Saëns’s seemed less remarkable than the dates might have suggested; a commentary on Bach’s sophistication rather than any conservatism in Saint-Saëns. His Fantaisie in E flat is one of his earliest works (1857, age 22), evidently before he had developed any particular melodic individuality; after an unobtrusive opening, it struck out bold and fluent, demanding of the player plenty of virtuosity and Gaynor’s employing of a colourful range of stops allowed detail to be heard clearly.

Then came the most spectacular piece on the programme – the very popular Danse Macabre which I’d never heard played on the organ before. It’s had several incarnations: it began as a setting of a poem by Henri Cazalis with piano accompaniment, then came the orchestral tone-poem, with a violin replacing the vocal line; it was transcribed for piano, famously by Horowitz, and the standard organ version is by Edwin Lemare. Lemare’s arrangement exploited the organ’s most flamboyant characteristics and the organist’s skills and flair: it called for the most unusual individual stops and combinations thereof, re-creating the spooky effects, the dark rushes of all-stops-out of the climactic crescendo. In fact, the organ version seemed to capture the unearthly, dehumanised feeling of the piece even more dramatically than is possible with the orchestra, and Gaynor lost no opportunity to overwhelm us.

Charles-Marie Widor was ten years younger than Saint-Saëns, and so impressed the latter that he appointed Widor his assistant at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, age 24, in 1869, and the next year lobbied for his appointment to St Sulpice, in which the famous organ-builders, Cavaillé-Coll, had built their most spectacular organ; Widor was there till 1933.

The Toccata from his Fifth Symphony is his most famous piece. But here we had the welcome chance to hear something from another symphony, the first movement of the 6th. Quite a lot of rhetorical writing, clamorous flourishes, hectic turbulence, then arresting chorale-like passages, all adorned in authentic registrations that illuminated the intriguing contrapuntal writing and the variety of tones and colours that are there to be enjoyed.

Gaynor will spend the northern summer at courses in France and Germany before returning to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester for further post-graduate studies. Quite a large audience heard this recital and will have been highly impressed both by his committed and virtuosic playing and the chance to hear the wonderful resources of the organ being fully extended.

Stroma’s third “Mirror of Time” – thoroughly engaging fun

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – THE MIRROR OF TIME 3

Stroma
Vesa-Matti Leppänen, Rebecca Struthers (violins)
Andrew Thomson (viola), Rowan Prior (‘cello)
Rowena Simpson (soprano), Kamala Bain (recorders/percussion)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Michael Norris (artistic director/visuals/programme)

Sacred Heart Basilica, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 26th June, 2014

As I listened to this highly diverting and thoroughly engaging assemblage of music old and new, expertly put together by Stroma’s artistic director Michael Norris and stunningly performed by the ensemble and its conductor, Hamish McKeich, I was struck repeatedly by the profoundly unoriginal, but nevertheless compelling thought that this presentation was great fun!

Perhaps that observation might appear trite to some people, unworthy of inclusion in a “serious review”. But given that music of all kinds is performed for people to enjoy rather than endure, I imagined that for a good many concert-goers who regularly attend symphony, choral and chamber concerts, the thought of any encounters with “serious” music written after 1950, would straightaway come into the “endure” category. The idea of attending a contemporary music concert would be as remote for some as going to a lecture on, say, ancient Etruscan circumcision practices.

For a goodly number of years I’ve been going to exciting and innovative contemporary music concerts presented by both Stroma and Auckland’s 175 East, as a critic treading a fine line between being an enthusiast for new music and a representative of the general music-listening public. It’s certainly true that some of the works played by these groups are challenging and cutting-edge – but it’s good to keep in mind that so Beethoven’s music was to many music-lovers in the early 1800s!

For me part of the process of dealing with this music’s unfamiliarity was to accept it totally as a “new” experience, rather than try and unduly analyze or anatomize it – again and again I told myself that “these sounds are to be enjoyed”, and I reacted to them as wholeheartedly as I could on that basis. But to a greater extent than ever before, I think, during Stroma’s latest “The Mirror of Time” presentation, I found myself actually connecting with the music-performance as I would that of any of my favorite music – on a visceral, emotional and (I flatter myself!) intellectual level of response.

True, I didn’t go so far as race down to the library the following day and get a book out on the ancient Etruscans! But Stroma’s organization of the concert and wholehearted, skillful playing of these pieces of music, ancient and modern, convinced me, once and for all, that contemporary music can engage, excite, inspire, soothe, stimulate and satisfy as profoundly as can any music from any era. Of course, this was something I knew in theory, but was here enjoying as a practical, real-time, flesh-and-blood phenomenon. Exhilarating!

From the concert’s very beginning, we in the audience were made to feel as though we were part of the performance, encircled as we were by a quartet of string-players, each one positioned in a corner of the church’s nave. Stroma director Michael Norris put it well by remarking in the program note how “the spatialized position of the quartet gently sets in motion the resonance of the church”.

The “timelessness” of the sounds created by the musicians well reflected the music’s origins – a 1400BC Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, wife of the Moon God, a melody preserved for 3,500 years on clay tablets found in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit. Various attempts to “render” the melody, written in cuneiform, or “wedged script”, have been made by scholars, with one by Marcelle Duchense-Guillemin used here by Michael Norris, who reworked the tune for strings which play entirely in harmonics and in the form of a “prolation canon” – ie, one in which the individual voice-parts use variations of speeds and synchronizations. The result was totally mesmerizing.

Most of the subsequent pieces in the concert demonstrated different ways of presenting canonic treatment of music, the following Agnus Dei by Josquin des Prez being a particularly closely-worked example, with a delay of only one beat between the top two lines and a “crab-canon” (the same line, with one played BACKWARDS against the other!) taken by the two lower voices – wot larks! It must have helped that each of the higher voices was taken by a “pair”, but nevertheless it must have seemed for the performers like high-wire acrobatic work, at times! Soprano and recorder were interestingly paired, the singer (Rowena Simpson) bright- and shining-voiced, the recorder (played by Kamala Bain) mellow and dusky, but the timbres still coming through, the blendings with the strings in places exquisite.

Simon Eastwood’s work I had encountered previously at a 2008 NZSO/SOUNZ Readings Workshop, on that occasion a piece called Aurum, which I liked a lot. Here the composer’s starting-point was a quotation from Plato’s Republic, words describing a kind of journeying of souls to a point where universal structures of the cosmos are perceived as spheres and axes of light – the Spindle of Necessity is the thread-gatherer which collects and plays out these lines, enabling the revolutions of all the spheres and their orbits.

Ethereal, almost mystical in effect, the words were mirrored by the sounds of this work, the tones “analogizing” to and fro, up and down, stretching, bending binding, and loosening, growing in intensity and rising in pitch before falling away to almost nothing – subsequent irruptions, clusters, tensions, even a claustrophobic scream! – were all gathered in by the spindle, at the end a single note around which the sounds were safely bound. It was a case of new music that in some ways to my ears sounded strangely old.

14th-Century composer Johannes Ciconia provided some diversions from these play-for-keeps austerities with some lively, dance-like four-part (one part added by Michael Norris!) canonic interweaving, involving both pizzicato and arc strings accompanying voice and recorder in a song Le ray au soleyl, the words a kind of long-term medieval weather-forecast. The work’s exuberance in performance contrasted with the inner world evoked by Mary Binney’s work Enfance, which followed, a setting of haiku-like verses by Rimbaud dealing with past happiness and present disillusionment – spare music, whose silences serve to underline the focus of each note played and sung, a remarkable demonstration of “less is more”.

Another Agnus Dei, this time from Pierre De La Rue, who here demonstrated an almost Tom Lehrer-like mathematical exactitude in his setting of part of his L’homme arme Mass, by way of producing a richly-canopied, ritual-like processional. It was something whose textured framework provided a telling foil for Rachael Morgan’s Interiors II, which followed. Written for string quartet, these were sounds whose very fibres proclaimed their intent, from the opening solo violin’s initial single note through harmonics, octaves with gorgeously “bent” unisons and curdled timbres, the opening’s silvery tones wonderfully besmirched by later guttural, claustrophobic utterances, dying away as light and life were consumed.

The excitement continued with sixteenth-century composer Cipriano de Rore’s Calami sonum ferentes (The pipes that sound), a convoluted but hauntingly beautiful setting – one that might have temporarily unnerved soprano Rowena Simpson, who pitched her opening notes too high, and had to begin again! The music made an excellent match for the highly expressive manner of the author, the Roman poet Catullus – the poet’s weeping at the start was depicted graphically by the obsessive chromatic figures, as both voice and recorder in thirds and fourths firstly sounded the lament of loss, then at “Musa quae nemus incolis”, ravishingly invoked the Muse through whom the former’s grief could be expressed.

A different kind of Muse was summonsed by the recorder-playing of Kamala Bain during Maki Ishii’s anarchic Black Intention, a work that featured the gradual undermining of a Japanese folk-tune played on a single recorder by the introduction of a second recorder played by the same player, immediately striking a discordant note – like a disputation! As the second recorder attempted to “muscle in” on the first, player Kamala Bain firstly vocalized agitatedly while still playing, then suddenly roared at the top of her voice, and bared her teeth as she picked up a stick and furiously and resoundingly struck a nearby tam-tam!  We were thunderstruck – almost literally!

What better release after such demonstrations of frustration than to ride into battle and indulge in some sabre-rattling? Which is what the musicians did under the auspices of Heinrich Biber, with Die Schlacht (The Battle) from “Battalia”, a 17th Century equivalent to the 1812 Overture, strings angrily snapping and biting at the air. How different a scenario to that of Jack Body’s Bai whose sounds alternatively suggested playful “Make love, not war” energies, Andrew Thomson’s viola imitating a traditional Chinese “dragon-head” lute-sound in its characteristic ‘sliding” melodic aspect, supported by pizzicato violins and ‘cello.

And by way of refuting the “music should be heard and not seen” idea, the fourteenth-century French composer Baude Cordier provided us, by way of the musicians’ performance and a projected image of the manuscript – exquisitely “drawn” – with an example of “eye music”. This was a chanson whose words Tout par compas suy composes (With a compass I am composed) describe the notated layout of the music as well as its circular canonic motion – a refined and cultured game of chase, with the voice closely pursued by the recorder.

Chris Watson’s piece sundry good was a celebration of the musical device called the “ornament”, a kind of dissertation with gestural examples, instruments talking with one another in a playfully stylized way – in exchanges that varied both tempi and timbre, and which coalesced and deconstructed just as quickly – a middle sequence sounded to my ears like a kind of descent, from which tendrils began to push their way upwards and intertwine, before seeming to “take fright” with individual scamperings, patternings, and thrummings. It was as if the “ornaments” of the title were looking for love, but finding the dating sites a bit rough for comfort. As with Flanders and Swann’s famous Misalliance from their “At the Drop of a Hat” revue, I sadly feared a tragic end to the story (only to the heart, of course!) – the hushed tremolandi which concluded the piece suggested as much – a kind of ambient wilderness (or “what-you-will”) at the end.

Afterwards, it was all on deck for Carmina Burana with which to finish – the ensemble hove to with a lusty rendition, complete with handclapping, percussion and vocalizations, of a song from that famous manuscript, Tempus Transit Gelidum (The time of ice is passing), with the piccolo recorder “jigging” the rhythm, and giving a kind of medieval “hoe-down” feeling to the music. Verses and choruses enjoyed plenty of dynamic variation, and the strings’ harmonics most engagingly sang some of the accompanying lines, for all the world sounding like little piping wind instruments.

Yes, a good deal of “critical babble”, I know – but it all delighted me so much – I couldn’t have imagined a more enjoyable evening of music-listening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gamut of emotions – Orchestra Wellington’s second 2014 concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
WHAT LOVE TELLS ME

HAYDN – Symphony No.82 in C “The Bear”
MAHLER (arr.Leeuw) – Kindertotenlieder
MOZART – Symphony No.40 in G Minor K.550

Bianca Andrew (Mezzo-soprano)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Opera House, Wellington,

Sunday, 22nd June, 2014

The phrase “What Love Tells Me” which gave its name to this concert given by Orchestra Wellington is irretrievably associated with the music of Mahler. It’s the original title the composer gave to the sixth and final movement of his Third Symphony, titles that were dropped by Mahler after the work’s first performance, but have still “hung around” the work ever since. Mahler was often to experience this initial need for programmatic titles relating to a work’s composition, followed by a Janus-faced distaste for those same titles after the work had been completed.

So, although we didn’t get the gargantuan Third Symphony (the longest of the Mahler symphonies), we had instead a song-cycle, Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the death of children”), a work which at one point quotes a melody from the Symphony’s sixth, “What Love Tells Me” movement.

However, just to make matters more interesting, the other two works on the program inhabited somewhat different worlds again – Haydn’s wonderful Symphony No.82 in C, subtitled “The Bear” – and the most famous of all of Mozart’s Symphonies, No.40 in G Minor, for a while during the 1980s and 90s beloved of aerobics instructors and aficionados, though nevertheless a powerful and tragic work.

Conductor Marc Taddei had talked about the current orchestra concert-sequence being one of “experimentation” regarding venues, due to the present unfortunate (and hopefully temporary) closure of the Town Hall for “earthquake strengthening”. After the success of the opening concert in Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul, the orchestra found itself this time in the Wellington Opera House, which I recall was where one of the previous season’s concerts had taken place.

So far this year the combinations of venue and repertoire have worked tolerably well. Though not ideal for all the music on the program, the first concert’s Bruckner Seventh Symphony flourished and bloomed in the ample Cathedral acoustic. Conversely, the dryish and very theatrical acoustic in the Opera House suited Haydn and Mozart to a tee. The other pieces in each of the cases weren’t too disadvantaged – only the Haydn Symphony in the first concert suffered from an excess of reverberation in places like the finale.

I’m not sure whether there are other “halfway-house” venues in the capital which the orchestra could use – the truly wonderful St Mary of the Angels (with a reverberation perhaps not quite as marked as that of St.Paul’s Cathedral’s) is also out of commission at present, and other churches I know of are simply too small for orchestral forces. Which, of course, brings us back to the necessity of restoring the Town Hall – but like poet Philip Larkin’s “priest and doctor in their long coats”, mention of earthquake-strengthening procedures unfortunately brings the accountants, “running over the fields”.

Well, the show goes on, thankfully – and as with Orchestra Wellington’s opening concert it was a real cracker! There are purists who look down their noses at classical music works with nicknames, but I’m certainly not one of those. Haydn’s work in this case is “doubly-named” in that respect, being one of the six “Paris Symphonies” to begin with (itself a handy “signpost” for identifying a group of pieces within a body of over a hundred symphonies!), and then having its own descriptive label to boot – as do, of course, some of the later “London Symphonies”.

Here was a terrific performance by the orchestra, under Marc Taddei’s invigorating direction, of the work known as “The Bear”, so-called because of its rustic drolleries and drone-pipe sonorities in the finale, redolent of a circus bear’s dancing antics (a much happier animal, it must be said, than Stravinsky’s piteous, bedraggled fairground beast in his “Petroushka”). The playing here caught and delivered the tangy flavours and angularities with great gusto, the dryish sound allowing the instrument’s timbres full and direct impact, in particular those of the timpani.

Haydn actually wrote this set of works for a larger orchestra than he’d ever before encountered as a composer, the renowned Concert de la Loge Olympique, in Paris – a band which reputedly had forty violins and ten double-basses alone at its disposal. So after years of “making do” with the relatively limited ensemble numbers employed by his prince at Esterhazy, the composer could really let himself go with these works, in terms of imagining larger, weightier, more impactful sonorities.

Next came Mahler’s somewhat grisly-titled song-cycle, Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the death of children”). Mahler chose texts written by Friedrich Rückert, who had himself lost two of his children to scarlet fever – the poet, in fact, wrote over four hundred poems concerning the deaths of children, presumably in an attempt to come to terms with his loss, as they were never intended for publication.

The composer’s choice of these texts appalled Mahler’s wife, Alma, in view of the couple having at the time of the music’s composition two young children. It’s well-known that fate did, actually seem to take a hand in things, as one of Mahler’s children did, in fact, die, also of scarlet fever, four years after the composer completed the songs.

Bianca Andrew, the mezzo-soprano, gave what I thought a somewhat inward, very sombre performance of these works, choosing not to bring out the overtly emotional angst of some of the writing, but singing the first four of them, at least, almost as if in a state of shock – and though I missed the warmth of her usual refulgent tones, they simply weren’t appropriate for this music. As well, the vocal line seemed in places somewhat low for her voice – but the singer put across the texts with her usual clarity and focus.

In the fifth song In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus (In this weather, in this storm), she responded to the more volatile orchestral sonorities, and gave us moments of properly chilling force. Interestingly, as with Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, performed at the orchestra’s last concert, a chamber version of this present cycle was here used, one by Dutch composer Reinbert de Leeuw. His reductions mostly affected this final song, doing without the more overt percussion orchestrations, as well as replacing the glockenspiel throughout with a piano.

So keen, vital and vigorous was the orchestral attack in places, readily conveying the storm-tossed ambience of that last song, I can’t say I yearned for the missing instruments. Elsewhere both the oboe- and horn-playing, vital in this work, was of a particularly high standard. Oboist Merran Cooke smartly sent what sounded like a first-note-frog packing, before giving us some beautiful playing in tandem with Ed Allen’s horn, weaving melodies and counterpoints around and in lieu of the voice with comparable feeling throughout the whole cycle.

On paper, the second half – Mozart’s G Minor Symphony K.550 – did seem light in terms of playing-time, but Marc Taddei gave the work with all the repeats, making it all seem and feel more than usually substantial. Benjamin Britten made a famous recording of the work in the 1960s which did the same – and I remember some critics complaining that the repeats made the work too long!  Well! – there’s simply no pleasing some people!

Certainly the repeats helped reinforce the work’s gravitas – but the music’s dramatic utterance, sense of great unease and depth of feeling was in the first place recreated by conductor and players with unerring focus. Right from the urgent, insistent accompanying figure that began the work, through the plaintive opening melody and the harsh rejoiners from wind and brass, there was drama and energy aplenty – not a comfortable listening experience, just as I’m sure the composer intended.

This was music that kept on fighting to the end, without resolving into any kind of resignation or acceptance. In the finale, there’s a kind of angular, part-syncopated “bridge-passage” for strings, which most conductors keep in time with the music’s pulse – Marc Taddei elongated the pauses here, distorting the pulse and keeping us guessing as to when the next chord was coming – a wonderful and unsettling gesture! As with the playing elsewhere, the music was allowed to express its character – something that conductor and players achieved most successfully throughout.

Winner’s tour for Nikki Chooi, 2013 Michael Hill Violin Competition: a finished artist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nikki Chooi – violin, Stephen de Pledge – piano and Ashley Brown – cello
(Chamber Music New Zealand and the Michael Hill International Violin Competition)

Mozart: Sonata for piano and violin in E flat, K 302
Smetana: Piano Trio in G minor, Op 15
Beethoven: Violin Sonata in E flat, Op 12 No 3
Jack Body: Caravan
Ravel: Tsigane

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 June, 7:30 pm

Canadian Nikki Chooi won the 2013 Michael Hill International Violin Competition and this concert was in the middle of a series of sixteen concerts and recitals around New Zealand, which forms part of the prize.

Oddly, the biographical notes in the programme only listed the competitions in which he’s had success, orchestras with which and places where he has played. It neglected to say where and when he was born and had his early music education. Almost all the concerto engagements mentioned, like those in New Zealand, seem to have followed competition successes, mainly in Canada and Belgium.

He was born in Victoria, British Columbia, to parents of Chinese descent, began to learn the violin at the Victoria Conservatory at the age of four, and at  fourteen entered the Mount Royal University in Calgary. In 2012, he graduated Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music and was awarded the Milka Violin Artist Prize upon graduation. Though no website discloses his date of birth, he was under 28 when he won the Michael Hill Competition. He now studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, under Ida Kavafian and Donald Weilerstein.

Chooi played three programmes round the country, the common pieces throughout being Ravel’s Tsigane and the piece Jack Body was commissioned to compose for the competition itself.

Wellington’s allocation began with one of Mozart’s two-movement sonatas (in E flat, K 302) that he wrote for his ill-fated Paris tour of 1778.  The players eschewed any attempt at ‘historical practice’ since, after all, few halls are equipped with a fortepiano or harpsichord and one such as the Michael Fowler Centre would lose a lot of the sound. In truth, the character of Chooi’s playing seems to flourish with the music of the 19th century, with its warm, voluptuous tone and his genuine instinct for expressive ‘Romantic’ music.

These sonatas are titled with the piano first and the violin seeming to be the accompanying instrument. But there was no sign here of the violin being secondary, their contributions were equal and in accord. The two movements are not strongly contrasted, as the second, Andante grazioso, though different in rhythm and mood, was not markedly different in tempo.

Chooi’s violin was flawless, its tone opulent. It might have been a Beethoven of 20 years later.

After the interval, they did play Beethoven of 20 years later: the last of Beethoven’s first three violin sonatas, Op 12. It is common to approach Beethoven’s early, pre-1800 music as if it was more like Mozart and Haydn than his own later music. But the current broadcasts by RNZ Concert of Michael Houstoun’s piano ‘re-cycle’ series of all the piano sonatas last year has illuminated the gulf that exists between even his early works and his predecessors.

This E flat sonata was evidence. Again, the two musicians were in total sympathy in this, the most sophisticated of the set, with its combination of bravura and melodic inventiveness. In the slow movement, with charming quavers rippling from the piano, there was delightful ease and gentleness quite without self-attention. Can musicians who produce music of such evenness, tonal beauty and fluency really get to the heart of Beethoven? Well, yes, in this instance.

I became familiar with Smetana’s piano trio when it seemed to be quite frequently played, twenty years or so ago – perhaps in the days when Czech musicians used to visit more often; perhaps it was coincidence that led me to think it was somewhat central to the trio repertoire. But what prompted its inclusion here? It flows from the piano trio phase of the competition, in which cellist Ashley Brown was involved.

The Romantic character of the piece seemed to suit the players, especially the violinist for whom Smetana’s elegiac and tempestuous music offered broad scope. Opening with the violin, alone, in a strong, sombre announcement of the work’s prevailing character, even the first movement develops in various ways after cello and piano enter.

The Trio section of the second movement is divided into two distinct parts, continuing the quixotic mood changes that characterize the whole work, and which the players handled with aplomb. Often passionately rhetorical, occasionally calm, then agitated, this music offered the players scope for more passionate and grieving performance than they actually embraced, especially the violinist, whose commitment to producing beautiful sounds played down the pain in the music.

The last two pieces fall into the class of bravura, designed to tax the player(s) to the utmost. Caravan, for solo violin, might have seemed a little out of character for Jack Body for, in spite of its origin as a Persian song, there seemed little Persian in the style of the ‘arrangement’, as it was rather overwhelmed by the flamboyant music that proved ideal for its purpose. Chooi had its measure and delivered a spectacular performance. The same went for Ravel’s Tsigane in which the violin has a long, virtuosic, solo introduction before the piano entry. The piece is no mere aural spectacle however; it has musical substance and both musicians handled its pianissimo phrases and subtlety with considerable musical discretion.

Beautiful Britten, sterling Brahms – a heartfelt tribute to Norbert Heuser

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Old St. Pauls, Thorndon Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
Peter Barber (viola) / Catherine McKay (piano)

BRITTEN – Lachrymae, for viola and piano (after John Dowland)
BRAHMS – Viola Sonata No.2 in E-flat Op.120/2

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday, 17th June 2014

What would have been planned originally by violist Peter Barber and pianist Catherine McKay as an occasion featuring a richly-wrought and most gratifying pair of contrasting works for viola and piano took on an additional note of elegiac sadness by the time the two musicians came to present their concert. Two days before, the death had occurred of a former NZSO colleague of Barber’s – in fact, a fellow-violist, and a prominent member of the orchestra for no less than thirty-eight years, Norbert Heuser.

How appropriate and moving, then, to hear Peter Barber speak of his esteemed colleague and friend before the concert, in effect dedicating the performances to Heuser’s memory. Fittingly, the music we heard featured the viola, the instrument that each of these musicians played, of course – but even more appropriately, the venue (the exquisite and richly-appointed Old St.Paul’s Church in Thorndon) was that which was to be used the following day for the memorial service – a circumstance which obviously carried its own particular poignancy.

And what music had been chosen! – unwittingly, of course, as regards making any specific commemorative gesture, but with an unerring instinct on the part of both players for focusing on love and its power to heal all sorrows and restore what could be held fast of “this worlde’s joye”. The Britten work, which I had not heard previously, was particularly enthralling in this respect, though the Brahms sonata had, too, the capacity to express a kind of fierce joy occasionally tinged with loss and regret.

What power music which one encounters for the very first time can sometimes have! – and especially so when the performances are proper, flesh-and-blood, live, here-and-now experiences, delivered with skill, focus and rapt concentration! True, in situations such as these one’s critical responses are perhaps coloured (I very nearly wrote the word “clouded”!) by the delight of first sensations – rather, in fact, like falling in love! Thus it was here with me, upon hearing the Britten work.

A rich, sombre opening brought forth sounds that seemed to be wrung and resonated from the depths of feeling – in places tremulous and almost Mahlerian in effect (reminiscent of the finale of that composer’s angst-ridden Sixth Symphony). Here, the piano constantly oscillated with tremolando-laden emotion while the viola sounded Aeolian-like strands which were stretched across the vistas as if to resonate in sympathy.

More angular and quixotic, the following sequence exchanged ascending/descending figurations between piano and viola, before halting the vertiginous flow and setting viola pizzicati against richly-sounded piano chords – for all the world the sounds to my ears conveying the sense of a beating heart…..the string textures graduated towards rich double-stoppings as the piano’s chordings climbed, explored and intensified.

Britten was reputed to be no lover of the music of Brahms – in fact he’s on record somewhere as remarking to an acquaintance: – “I make a point of playing one Brahms recording a year, just to remind myself how awful the music is!”……such anecdotes are often relished more for their wit and outrageous sentiment than for veracity, and perhaps aren’t as such to be trusted. In point of fact, the very next exchange between the instruments – the piano stern and commanding, the viola dogged and determined – sounded to my surprised ears extremely Brahmsian, especially the way the piano chords were echoed and resonated by the viola’s energetic figurations.

Piano chords turned into flowing rivulets under Catherine McKay’s fingers, along with string figures coalescing into melody, seeming to want by this time to clothe the gestures in less angular and disparate utterances – though the night ride had a little way to go still, before the sunrise. The muse was yet to show her hand, waiting for her moment while still more quixotic gestures mockingly returned to the piano, Peter Barber’s viola dancing to the mood, though impishly punctuating the phrase-ends with pizzicato notes.

And then it was as though worlds gradually began to intertwine – at first through the gloom, then through coruscation and upheaval, and finally through rapture and ecstasy! Firstly pianistic tintinabulations sought to comfort the viola’s sorrowful sighings, but then tried a different tack, building huge blocks of sound with progressive portentous chords, the viola running between the great columns of sound towards the growing light, becoming more and more excited, and finally throwing itself into the piano’s open arms in a passionately-voiced embrace, an unashamed love-song!

From this it seemed at first something of a Brahmsian (sorry, Ben!) take on an Elizabethan melody, rich and pulsating! But both musicians were inspired at this stage, moving with ease and fluency into those leaner, sparser, more focused realms of Elizabethan sensibility – Peter Barber’s viola “centered” the melody as if it were a prayer, and Catherine McKay’s piano song resounded like a lute paying homage to love. How touching it all seemed by the end – more powerfully so, I think, by Britten’s deconstruction of his own sound world to connect with Dowland’s.

My apologies to the reader for indulging thus far in what seems far more like a fanciful commentary on the music itself rather than the performance of it – though having never seen nor heard the music previously, my remarks above can be taken as a set of reflections on the way it was played and interpreted, just as relevantly as regarding the actual work.

I almost needed somewhere to go and lie down after such an intense listening experience – but there was no rest for the wicked, as, after a short re-alignment of things we were off again, this time into a world of expression the previous composer loved to hate! The work by Brahms was a transcription by the composer of a sonata originally written for clarinet, one of two such pieces (incidentally both have been thus transcribed, to my great delight!).

The string timbres really make the sonata a freshly-minted work, more youthful, immediate and “striving” I think than does the rather more serene, somewhat Wordsworthian clarinet. Thus it was that, despite its opus number it seemed in places a young man’s work, borne out especially by the piano part. In places, it’s really of an order of difficulty which another pianist at the concert with me confirmed afterwards, by laughingly describing a certain sequence on the opening pages as “a pianist’s graveyard”!

Catherine McKay’s playing was, however, seized with such purposeful focus that the music, spills and all, leapt off the page most satisfyingly!  Neither player emerged completely unscathed from the more agitated of the opening exchanges, but the energy and teamwork was of an order that carried the music’s message with all the élan and presence that one would want for these sounds.

No let-up for the second movement’s Allegro appassionato – at the outset a dark, impetuous waltz-like trajectory gripped the music’s order, Peter Barber’s playing digging deeply into the instrument’s tones, and Catherine McKay’s in turn responding with real heft and passionate utterance. What a gorgeous hynm-like middle section this work has! – part ceremony, part deep forest mythology music, the Old St.Paul’s piano speaking in suitably nostalgic, somewhat forte-piano-like tones in places, charming and even rustic in effect. Processional-like, too, was the Andante con moto opening of the finale, in these players’ hands sounding like a “turn for home”, the tones and phrasings speaking to this listener of places “where the heart is”.

The variations that followed explored both according and contrasting exchanges between the instruments, with the players barely able to contain themselves in the excitable fifth variation, piano, then viola tearing into the fray, pulling the melody about every which way!  Finally the sounds were allowed a brief few moments of composure before a brilliant and emphatic coda gave us an ending we acclaimed with enthusiasm.

Rare and strange to find oneself within what seemed a matter of hours back in that same building, with the previous day’s concert’s tribute to Norbert Heuser still faintly resonating as people gathered for the memorial service. Came spoken tributes and more music from family and friends and ex-colleagues – daughter Brigitte Heuser sang JS Bach’s Erbarme dich mein Gott from the St.Matthew Passion, and a quartet of string-players performed Haydn, the “Emperor” Quartet’s well-known Adagio cantabile – and we watched projected images and heard recordings of other music that, with the spoken reminiscences very properly brought both laughter and tears. Life, as with music-making and concert-giving, is what happens when you’re planning something else. What happened here – sadly, not the life’s “something else” that was originally planned – was instead a response to the unforeseen that was on all sides affecting and memorable.