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André de Ridder conducting the NZSO – image Latitude Creative/NZSO

RAVEL – Pavane pour une Infante Défunte / BRYCE DESSNER  Trombone Concerto
SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 8 in C Minor Op.65

David Bremner (trombone) New Zealand Symphony Orchestra / André de Ridder (conductor)
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Thursday, April 9th, 2026

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s latest concert brought together three disparate works under the generic title ”Resonance”, demonstrating orchestral music’s well-nigh infinite variety of evocation in drawing from both specific and integral sources.

The most directly effusive of these was American guitarist and composer Bryce Dessner’s trombone concerto, one substituting for  a similarly-conceived work (Slip: Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra) by American composer Andrew Norman, one intended as a premiere! – disappointinngly, the original  soloist, Dutch virtuoso Jörgen van Rijen (who’s principal trombonist with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra), was prevented by injury from presenting the work. However, the NZSO’s own principal trombonist, the deservedly popular David Bremner, gave at short notice the inspired substitute choice of Dessner’s work with a truly sparkling performance that merited an enthusiastic “local hero” audience ovation.

At the orchestral helm for this presentation was André de Ridder, the NZSO’s Music Director Designate for 2027, due to take over from Gemma New at the conclusion of her five-year tenure in the position. De Ridder began the concert with the orchestra in fine fettle for Maurice Ravel’s sheerly beautiful Pavane pour une Infanta défunte, procuring winsome solo lines from firstly a horn (a shade late, I thought, in sounding its opening note, but flawless thereafter), and winds and strings, each counterbalancing the music’s meticulous symmetries, until the whole orchestra lustrously returned to the piece’s opening melody, the harp as before gently caressing the piece’s breath-catching luftpauses. Conductor de Ridder’s ear seemed as fastidious as the composer’s in realising the music’s beguiling textures throughout.

Bryce Dessner’s Trombone Concerto certainly put player and instrument through their respective paces, even if the end result seemed for much of the work’s duration a kind of compendium of capabilities on the part of a skilled player of a distinctive-sounding instrument rather than an expression of distinctive pictorial, emotional or philosophical content. Perhaps the slow movement focused more directly on the solo instrument’s attempts to cohere with its sonic surroundings, a kind of metaphor for modern life’s isolation – with orchestral backdrops in places withdrawn and spectral- sounding, and in others contesting the ambient spaces with the soloist. And the third movement broke into different “dance” trajectories in places, seeming to invite (or perhaps “dare”) the trombone to join in (with trombone and trumpet actually sharing a few slinky measures of roguish alliance). I thought the work more entertainment than anything else, as befitted the traditional role of a concerto, Davd Bremner and his instrument well-nigh inseparable in their shared ownership of the work’s capabilities!

No two works could have made more of a contrast with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony which took up the concert’s second half. Written in 1943 and following the enormous success of the composer’s Seventh Symphony as a wartime statement of patriotic resistance, the Eighth was straightaway a different kettle of fish. This work completely and utterly turned its back on the Seventh’s triumphal aspect and its glorification of the Russian people’s resolve in the face of the Nazi invasion – instead Shostakovich called the new Symphony “a poem of suffering”, and  “an attempt to reflect the terrible tragedy of war”.

Consequently, its Moscow premiere in November that same year, by the work’s dedicatee, Evgeny Mravinsky, though acclaimed by the audience, brought only tepid critical reviews, and savage official disapproval, which resulted in the work being withdrawn until its second-only Moscow performance in 1956! Since then, it’s gradually clambered towards a position of near pre-eminence among the composer’s symphonic works, as much for its historical range of ambiguities as its overall singularity of purpose. To a violinist in one of the early performances who remarked to Shostakovich on the wonders of the C Major passage that began the finale, the composer replied, “My dear friend, if only you knew how much blood that C Major cost me!”

This presentation from the NZSO was one to resound in the memory – André de Ridder briefly introduced the work to his audience, relating the music’s intents and purposes to the prevailing misery and hardship faced by people in the world’s present-day troublespots, and then plunging the orchestral strings into the dark-browed ambiences of the work’s at once sonorous and incisive beginning. Under his continued direction the sounds coalesced slowly and purposefully, the strings leading the way for similarly-wrought wind-playing, gradually building the tensions up to the movement’s series of utterly cataclysmic crescendi with their overwhelming evocations of widespread suffering caused by war and oppression. These were acknowledged eloquently by the extended cor anglais solo (here superbly delivered) which followed the orchestral maelstroms, and in tandem with the strings whose sounds seemed to us to emanate from the very souls of all who thus suffered. A brief brass fanfare attested to the human spirit’s refusal to accept defeat before returning to the lament, whose wrung-out intensities occasioned, at the end, the feeling of a  huge but guarded exhalation of breath!

Such an evocation brought forth not just one scherzo-like response, but two diametrically different reactions – the first, an Allegretto, was given amazing sweep and grandiloquence dressed up as grotesquerie, the irony savage in its futility, here brilliantly depicted by the winds, especially the piccolo and bassoon, and later joined in the onslaught by the percussion, with strings and brass gleeful collaborators. Then came the third movement Allegro non troppo, a savagely insistent orchestral toccata, here given the most trenchant performance I’d ever encountered since hearing Russian conductor Kyril Kondrashin’s 1960s Moscow recording – this was a fiercely relentless assault punctuated by a macabre circus-like sequence for solo trumpet and side-drum (brilliant, burlesque-like playing!), the energies veering in effect between wild exhilaration and fraught anxiety, and with de Ridder encouraging his players to occasionally push the intensities further forwards. It was a sequence culminating in some almost destabilising timpani-playing driving the needle into the red at the music’s climax while simultaneously giving birth to a sombre fourth-movement Passacaglia.

Here, the music’s previous agonies were echoed in a new and terrible kind of tranquility, called by one commentator “an expression of timeless grief”, and leading up to the  numinous impact of that C major chord which brought a ray of hope . De Ridder and his players performed as if inspired, here, with the sounds lifting us from out of the slough, reinvigorating energies and teasing out sensibilities as well as plunging us once more into a brief reiteration of those hellish first movement depictions of destruction and terror wrought by war and brutal dictatorship. After this we were dazedly brought back to our senses by a trio of instrumental voices whose superbly-wrought equivocal interactions and powerfully muted orchestral responses seemed to suggest that life for each one of us, despite its vicissitudes, would nevertheless go on.

Benjamin Britten – Les Illuminations  – 50th Anniversary Concert
Gabriela Glapska (piano), Carleen Ebbs (soprano), Jessica Oddie (violin),

St.Michael’s Church, Upland Road, Kelburn, Wellington
Monday 9^th March 2026

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C)

The last time I heard Benjamin Britten’s haunting song-cycle “Les Illuminations” make an appearance in a Wellington concert programme was in 2009, featuring tenor Benjamin Fifita Makisi , with Marc Taddei conducting the Orchestra Wellington Strings. So, already feeling in “overdue  mode” regarding this work “live”, I suddenly found my interest in this particular 50^th anniversary tribute to its composer compounded all the more by the prospect of hearing the work from a trio of soprano, violin and piano.

Britten had originally written the work for soprano and string orchestra, though it came to be strongly associated with his long-time partner, tenor Peter Pears, via a famous composer-directed recording! But rather than inhibiting further divergence, “Les Illuminations” has enjoyed almost more interpreters that one could count, and with each that I’ve heard imparting a singular kind of pleasure in bringing out a particular aspect of this music’s many-faceted character.

The opening declamations proclaimed a magnificent unity of purpose from all three musicians – Gabriela Glapska’s piano sounding the fanfares whose exhilarating insistence brought forth soprano Carleen Ebbs’ wonderfully stentorian declaration of confidence –“I alone hold the key to this savage parade”, to which violinist Jessica Oddie’s highlighting of certain of the instrumental lines made a perfect foil in places for both voice and piano, enriching the instrumental texturing, and deepening and diversifying  a character of exchange between the voice and its accompanying phrases on both instruments. In places the “ensemble” between the vocal tones and its accomplices recalled the richness of a chamber group rejoicing alike in an alternation of unity and divergence.

The second verse, “Villes” captures and revels in all kinds of excitable physicalities and profane imaginings  – “Des cortèges de Mabs” generates from voice and players a positive whirlwind of propulsion, while “Les sauvages danset sans cesse” (the savages dance unceasingly) until body and mind remove themselves and us to calm confusion.

Then what a change comes with the following “Phrase”, the eeriness fully captured by violin and piano, as Ebbs’ voice transports us to tremulously ecstatic heights from which we serenely fall without a moment’s discomfort at the end. Her serenade “Antique” has a kind of adoring idolatry, whose longing is betrayed by the loveliness of the descending vocal line, beautifully filled out, here; while the following “Royaute” depicts a kind of commoner’s gentility in a fanciful world of heroic, quixotic music.

I enjoyed Ebbs’ courting impulses of abandonment and confidence in  riding the syncopations in “Marine”, just as I relished her different treatment of the ”savage parade” motif in the following “interlude, sounding “entranced” rather than savage and determined, and imparting poise and feigned indifference at first to the subject of her “Being Beauteous” – a mood that turns to urgency as ecstasy and its darker side crystallise our responses to beauty – piano and violin similarly “play” with the singer’s anxieties.

No time was wasted with “Parade”, with singer, pianist and violinist busily cooking up the sloughs of misery and malcontent, depicting the “cruel procession of tawdry finery” and Ebbs’ voice and characterisation enjoying the deliciousness of the descriptions, the whole scenario put in perspective by the singer’s authoritative “I alone hold the key to this savage parade”. How beauteous, after all of this, was the end, with Ebbs’ voice serenely rising and falling with the instrumental lines, and partly heartbreakingly, partly stoically leaving the instruments to allow the silences to surge softly backwards at the end – all as satisfying as it was harrowing.

On the strength of this I would readily encourage groups performing this work without an orchestra to consider employing at least a violinist to join with the singer and pianist – would a cellist joining such a group work? – Though I found the violin’s addition amply satisfying, one might try, perhaps even with a string quartet! – however, this present trio of musicians made moments of real magic in St. Michael’s with this work – Britten himself could well have been amazed and possibly even delighted with it all!

There were other things on the programme as well, two works in arrangements by Britten and two adorable pieces by Elgar preceding the main work – and afterwards, we heard the trio perform an excerpt from Handel’s opera, from “Theodora – the ravishing  – “O Sleep, why dost thou leave me”; and Reynaldo Hahn’s “A Chloris”, the latter a beautiful setting remarked on by one commentator as “beyond doubt the summit of Reynaldo Hahn’s art as a pasticheur”, so readily does it reflect the Classical world.

The Britten settings, firstly of the folk-song “Down by the Sally Gardens”, followed by an arrangement of Purcell’s “If Music be the Food of Love”, set a delicate, nostalgic folkish sweetness against Purcell’s  wonderfully elaborate concoction, both songs given appropriate vocal colour and elegant “turnings of phrase” to bring out their respective characters, as well as  enabling us to enjoy the sound and vocal artistry of Carleen Ebbs’ voice, further anticipating the major Britten work on the programme.

From another time and place came the two works for violin and piano by Edward Elgar, neither of which I’d heard before as solo violin and piano arrangements. Jessica Oddie and Gabriela Glapska deliciously charmed us with both of these pieces, performed with just the right amount of simplicity and subtlety of nuance that left one hanging upon each note as a kind of object to be savoured – very much a a listener’s delight in small pleasures.

Just as significantly, these introductory items also gave us ample opportunity to enjoy the glorious sound of the human voice as captured by St,Michael’s Church, whose existence as a concert venue I hadn’t discovered until relatively recently, and whose qualities I would certainly enjoy exploring again in the near future. In sum, a delightful and memorable concert experience

Darkness to light never brought so much relief! – from Shostakovich to Mozart via Ross Harris, at Roseneath’s Long Hall

Comfy Concert #8 from the Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat Minor
ROSS HARRIS -Long Hall Quintet 2025
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – String Quintet in C Major KV 515

Helene Pohl, Donald Armstrong, violins
Nicholas Hancox, Chris van der Zee, violas
Rolf Gjelstan, ‘cello

Special Guest Item – KASTURUN (Traditional Javanese composition)
(performed by The FIrst Smile Gamelan Ensemble)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday 15^th November 2025

Kaibosh Food Rescue Benefit Concert

This eighth and final 2025 Comfy Concert marked the 80^th anniversary of The Long Hall (built in 1945) and called for a special presentation, which the organisers and musicians involved  responded to with memorable and resonant results! Violinist and founder of the “Comfy Concert” Series Helene Pohl shared with us in a programme note details of both the year’s performances and the successes of the concert’s affiliated Charity Kaibosh Food Rescue, and its associated colleague organisation Arohanui Strings, as well as introducing all of today’s performers, including a Special Item from the First Smile Gamelan Ensemble  which concluded the concert.

Though not officially sporting the title “From Darkness to Light” today’s presentation couldn’t have been better described in terms of its overall trajectory. Beginning with the Fifteenth and final String Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich, the occasion brought to us the uniquely fascinating culmination of the composer’s epic but sadly unfinished journey towards realising his dream of producing a string quartet in each of the twenty-four keys.  We were confronted right at the outset with a work that itself all too readily seemed to proclaim that “this was the end” for its composer.

Both the work’s genesis itself and preparations for its first performance were instigated under profound difficulties, and not only for Shostakovich, with his by then recurring health problems (the work was finished in May of 1974 while he was convalescing in a Moscow hospital). At this time Sergei Shirinsky, the cellist of the Beethoven Quartet (the group to whom the composer had entrusted the premieres of nearly all his quartets) was himself already ill after suffering a heart attack earlier that same year, and died not long after the group had begun rehearsals of the work. Shostakovich had to reassign the work’s premiere to another ensemble, the Taneyev Quartet, to whom he had previously shown the work as well, and who were thus able to fulfil the task in November 1974.

Every detail of the quartet contributes to its singular character – all six or its movements are marked  Adagio, with the fifth movement, Funeral March, given the extra descriptive weight of Adagio molto. All are in the key of E-flat Minor, and are played without a break, adding to the concentration of intensities throughout. As well, the Quartet gave the work here in the relative gloom of shuttered windows and drawn curtains, heightening the almost funereal atmosphere of the music’s world – not that there was absolute stasis throughout the work, which in places demonstrated both agitated and heavily louring trajectories – but all such impulses were transfixed, encapsulated throughout in a kind of over-riding heartbeat of inexorable transience….

Interestingly, Shostakovich’s instructions to the performers were recorded as “Play the first movement so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience leaves the hall out of sheer boredom” – however, I felt entranced instead, charmed by the quasi-hymn-like lines and their evanescent harmonies, and definitely left not wanting to leave! But then, with the Serenade, introduced by the first violin’s sforzando-like exclamation, followed by several of the others’ similarly disconsolate cries (even the ‘cello joins in, after some initial hesitation!), the “dream” took a darker turn, the waltz-tune that follows fraught with anxiety, as were the aggressive pizzicati that punctuated the continued sforzandi! The Intermezzo (superbly addressed by Helene Pohl’s frenzied figurations!) felt for much of the time in the nature of sharing a space with a trapped and frightened animal, before calm returned, and the Nocturne’s wonderfully “haunted”, almost creepily luscious melody was sung on Nicholas Hancox’s sonorous viola, before the ensemble took the music on a kind of “walk on the wilderness side” – a real “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” moment in the work!

The Funeral March grandly reclaimed the work’s focus with both viola and ‘cello soliloquising in between the solemn, more “publicly-delivered” ensembled statements – Rolf Gjelsten’s  cello eloquently voiced the private emotions of the music in contrast with the grander outbursts, everybody “chording” passionately and ambiently, while the solo instruments gave utterance to their individual lines.   How like the composer to then counter such focused moments of both public and private feeling with an Epilogue which returned us, as here, to the uncertainty of life’s existence!

Helene Pohl’s frantic agitated salvos at the movement’s beginning unnervingly took us into a kind of bedlam out of which we heard snatches of the work’s opening hymn-like chanting, with Donald Armstrong’s violin desperately trying to reclaim what seemed like a distant memory – one that was obscured by the cello’s churning disquiet from the depths, and the violins’ disconsolate duetting – but we were also diverted by the onset of strangely fairy-like agitations, unquiet spirit voices which unnervingly haunted both solo lines and the ensemble’s briefly-concluding chorale-like note.

At the end, one could only sit and reflect in the silences that “surged softly backwards” at what visions, strains and impulses the composer had seen fit to characterise as his “swan-song” in this genre……very great honour and credit to the players for taking us with them to what felt like such unnerving degrees of visceral immediacy! (Incidentally the Quartet was, in fact not “the end” for its composer, as its music seemed to suggest – the following year he completed a Viola Sonata Op.147, a work dedicated to Fyodor Druzhinin, violist of the aforementioned Beethoven Quartet – sadly Shostakovich died
in hospital within a month of finishing the work and without ever hearing it performed.)

This concert enjoyed a “thrice-blessed” aspect – not only had we participated in the tribute played by the series to a great twentieth century composer, but we could then witness and enjoy another “tribute”. This came from Wellington composer Ross Harris who had attended several of these “Comfy Concerts and been inspired by a number of features which gave the occasions their singular kind of distinction – the composer himself made reference to the distinctive charm of  the hall  and the miracle of its preservation as a community resource, as well as representing a bulwark standing firmly in support of musicians who were presently experiencing “tough times”.  With Shostakovich himself being a kind of embodiment from a different era of “tough creative artist times”, his quartets’ performances seemed here more than apposite – though Ross confessed that his main stimulus in composing for the venue a commemorative work was hearing at one of the earlier concerts a string quintet by Mozart!  Of course it all fell together very nicely when in tandem with another of the divine Wolfgang’s quintets programmed to finish this concert.

Beginning with a ‘cello solo, the music resonated through the instruments in turn, with the second violin inverting the melody and modulating entrancingly, even toying with a kind of “re-inversion”! A running theme from the violins was cheered on by a pizzicato viola figure, before a chorale-like section proposed further inversions decorated by beautiful descending pizzicato notes – I liked the Ravelian touch of violin and viola in unison octaves, and the dance-like sequence underlined by the pizzicati. Even Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht came to mind at one point, with an extended viola solo taken further by the ‘cello, a few breaths of mosaic-like textures fixedly engaging our sensibilities. Then, a square-dance theme danced across the spectrum, eventually giving way to a dream-time sostenuto mood, achingly sustained into a silence. One needs, of course, further hearings to “place” these detailings more coherently, but on first acquaintance each seemed to me delightedly satisfied with its own “moment” in time and space, and along with its composer at the end were given all due appreciation.

The Mozart Quintet which followed was not one I’d heard for some time, and I’d forgotten just how extraordinarily detailed both the first movement exposition and development were – such rapid-fire modulations which at one and the same time “flowed like oil” and took one by surprise with their adventurousness, such as the major-to-minor contrasts of the opening theme, and tne “light-as-a-feather” touchings and elaborations of the second subject – beautiful playing in thirds in so many places, after all of which the insouciance of the ending was an all-the-more delightful touch.

The Minuetto, brisk and athletic, seemed straightforward enough until the onset of  the Trio’s churning chromaticisms! – what were these, and where was it all leading to? Had Mozart lived longer he might well have further anticipated Beethoven’s  “new paths” and perhaps even bypassed some of it in taking his own way! The Andante is largely an amiable dialogue between Helene Pohl’s violin and Nicholas Hancox’s viola, with Rolf Gjelsten’s ‘cello counterpointing the viola to mellifluous effect in places – while the finale is a truly ensemble affair, with crisp, energy-sharing exchanges involving plenty of major-minor variants of phrase-swapping, and nifty thirds bounced in tandem by the “pairs” racing around and about the anchoring cello – it was all so memorable and celebratory and, and boded well for continuation of “the same but different” at the “Long Hall” in seasons to come!

Finally came the third of the “tributes” which helped give this occasion its distinctive flavour – this was a special performance item featuring  “The First Smile”, the name taken by  the gamelan ensemble whose instruments and regular performance activities are centered around  “The Long Hall”, which is now established as the group’s home. The Instruments were first brought to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1974 by Allan Thomas, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Victoria University of Wellington from Cirebon, West Java, who had located the instruments from a collection of heritage items held on location at a once-active royal court, and with the help of fellow-ethnomusicologist and composer Jack Body organised their purchase and transportation to New Zealand.

The instruments are played regularly by a small group of dedicated musicians, as well as by students from Roseneath School (The Young Smile) and preschoolers and new entrants (The Little Smile). In December 2024, The First Smile released an album of compositions for the ensemble, available through Rattle Records as a CD or digital download.

This afternoon we heard the ensemble perform Kasturun, a traditional Javanese composition, said to evoke an image of angels standing in heaven, a conjuring up of traditional imageries wrought by musical structuring which employs repetitions of the same motif. The sonority of the instruments was partly determined by their different sizes, resulting in vastly different kinds of timbres associated with particular images and emotions – endlessly resonant evocations and fascinations drew us into an interior world of a different order to that which we’d experienced earlier in the afternoon, and we couldn’t hep but feel refreshed and reinvigorated by the experience of renewed gratitude for yet another aspect of “The Long Hall” and its bounty.

WYO/WYS/WYC at the Michael Fowler Centre, October 2025  – photograph: Jiani Li

EARTH
Wellington Youth Orchestra,
Wellington Youth Sinfonietta,
Wellington Youth Choir

Solace Ward (viola)

Conductors: Mark Carter (WYO)
Chris Van Der Zee (WYS)
Rowan Johnstone (WYC)

Programme:
JAAKKO MANTYJARVI – Announcements
SARAH HOPKINS – Past Life Melodies
REUBEN RAMEKA – Waita
ANDRE J THOMAS – Rockin’ Jerusalem
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Overture “Egmont”
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Viola Concerto
Interval
FRANZ SCHUBERT – Symphony No. 8 (Ist Movement)
JAKE RUNESTAD – “Earth” Symphony
GIUSEPPE VERDI – Grand March from “Aida”

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Sunday, October 19th, 2025

A “One-of-a-kind” Concert, said the publicity – and in terms of range of repertoire, performers and level of achievement, this presentation by the combined forces of Wellington’s various “Youth” music ensembles certainly lived up to its description! Nor were the items all “standard” repertoire, but in some cases were chosen to highlight particular aspects of the concert, adding to the “special character” of the event. Consequently, we were treated to a feast of different kinds of music-making, both instrumental and vocal, and featuring individual as well as ensembled skills.

A particular feature of the afternoon’s presentation was award-winning solo violist Solace Ward’s performance of New Zealand composer Anthony Ritchie’s Viola Concerto. At the conclusion of the concerto, and to the delight of the audience, Solace was presented with the Tom Gott Cup (from the trophy’s actual namesake himself!) which added to the pleasure and singularity of the occasion!

In a masterstroke of programming, the concert’s opening was one of delightful singularity from the Wellington Youth Choir under Rowan Johnston  –   a whimsical item courtesy of Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, sporting the unnecessary title Announcements. We were both informed of and enjoined by the choir to observe the usual pre-concert protocols associated with health and safety, including emergencies  – my favourites were the request for our cell-phones to be switched off, with its paused reminder “Do it now!” which followed – and the somewhat Kafka-esque (ICE-like?) message that “unaccompanied minors will be removed – and may be destroyed” …..

Australian composer Sarah Hopkins’ work Past Life Melodies which followed was once performed by a choir of over 7,000 students with orchestra, didgeridoo and harmonic whirlies at a 2000 international sports event – while this performance didn’t replicate the sheer magnitude of that presentation, it still presented a unique kind of ambient realisation of what the composer terms her  “deeply resonating inner voices”, besides drawing upon influences such as “open-throated” chant singing from Eastern Europe traditions, and Aboriginal-inspired chant and overtone singing. Its beginnings were hummed, then differently voiced, the chant-like melody accompanied by drone notes, the sounds then fanning out beautifully, employing different repetitive patternings and vocalised syllables. Gradually whistling sounds joined the textures, whether voice- or instrument-produced I couldn’t tell, but the effect was certainly at once inner-worldly and redolent of incredibly vast spaces and long- past times…….

At first I thought the next item’s title was a misprint for the word “waiata” – but it turned out to be Reuben Rameka’s Waitā – the name of one of a collection of stars whose grouping creates the Matariki cluster, one associated with the oceans and the foods gathered from it, and with the associated tides and floodwaters. Waitā speaks to listeners of the responsibilities of caring for the ocean environment to which, of course, we owe such gratitude for our continued sustenance.

The words and music described the mingling of fresh and salt waters, the tides that ebb and flow, and the journeyings made to these places of great abundance in the domain of Tangaroa. Single voices evoked the coming together these waters from the land to the sea,  the choir giving voice to the star clusters of Matariki to shine upon the people below and give them signs for the  necessary gathering of food, naming the great oceans and the multiplicity of food that abounded in them.

Different voice texturings  described the tides that ebb and flow and move in unison and as the various fish species were named, the soprano voices floating a unison over the more vigorous lines. Single voices exchanged lines as the canoe  moved to shallower waters, to gather seafood “for a mouth-watering feast from the domain of Tangaroa” – the piece readily evoked a sense of ritual, of order , and of tradition regarding such resource-gatherings  – “Ki tai toitu te marae a Tangata Toitu te tangata”…..

Concluding the Youth Choir’s  bracket of items was Andre J. Thomas’s Rockin’ Jerusalem, a song in the Afro-American tradition – the choir’s male voices began a jazzy rhythm, joined by women’s descant voices, who then took up the rhythmic patterns and punched out the words with crystal-clear declamation! Heartfelt and inspiring, in an upbeat and compellingly physical way, the performance scored a great ovation at the end, a tribute incorporating the choir’s overall achievement!

Came the Youth Orchestra’s turn, introduced by conductor Mark Carter, and beginning with the inspirational “Egmont” Overture by Ludwig van Beethoven – a work based on a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about a 16^th-century nobleman, Lamoral, Count of Egmont in the Netherlands, one executed by the Spanish for his resistance against the oppressors of his country. Mark Carter got splendid attack from all his players right from the opening chord, and especially with those famous repeated lower string notes right in the middle of the allegro section, answered so plaintively by the winds. And how well the players kept up the excitement of the concluding “Victory Symphony”, with its steadfast piccolo flourishes ringing splendidly out at the end!

The Anthony Ritchie Viola Concerto brought soloist  Solace Ward onto the stage for what I thought a by turns sensitive and invigorating performance – the work got away to a wonderfully attention-grabbing opening, with almost Oriental-like texturings bolstered by exotic-sounding winds and percussive splashings, and the viola vigorously dialoguing with garrulous winds, giving an impressive of being on an urgent journey to somewhere! The brass cooly and insouciantly slowed things down (I was reminded of Holst’s “The Perfect Fool” ballet music momentarily) while the viola tended to gravitate towards the more fun-loving strings and winds’ tumbling antics, despite a brief but arrestingly expansive interlude. We were again borne aloft by the music’s renewed momentums, with the viola striding confidently along in the flow of it all, when a gong seemed to sound a “that’s enough” kind of warning, bringing the flow of fun to an end.

But what a heartfelt outpouring from the soloist we then heard, taking over the new movement’s beginning, with horns giving the player support and the theme additional colour! Oboe and piccolo joined in with the strings  in supporting the continuance of the soloist’s melodic venturings until a timpani sounded a kind of counter-trajectory, the viola dancing with the winds as the timpani strengthened its rhythmic pulsings  – but the soloist steered the music back to the rhapsodical – leading to a further idyllic cadenza and making the most of these “all creation standing still” moments!

Came the dance, hesitant and quixotic at first from the viola, but gaining confidence and elan, the orchestra joining in – suddenly the mood was almost Coplandesque, the rhythms proudly prancing, the violist folkishly “bending” some of their notes and an even more vertiginous mood overtaking the trajectories. And then, with the music seeming to flip-flop between sinuous grace  and vigour,  the brass decided to sound a concluding note as if enough fun had been had for one day!  I actually enjoyed it all immensely and could have gone on dancing and singing until the cows (?) came home, but…..still, well-deserved applause for Solace Ward as much for their partnership with others in the concerto as for their soloistic efforts – one day, if I’m lucky, I hope I will hear them play the Walton viola concerto!

After the interval it was a largely symphonic second half, with firstly Chris Van Der Zee on the podium and his charges, the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, taking on the first movement of Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony – a big “ask” for anybody when considering the enormity of the piece in so many different ways, but a task that the young players seemed to relish! The lower strings struck the right amount of gravitas with the opening, the oboe and horns articulated their notes with suitable wonderment, and the whole orchestra dug into the chords that completed the sequence. The second subject had a lovely “lilt” to all its parts, with tenderly-phrased string-tones, contrasted with the sharp attack on the answering chord and its successors! We got a repeat of all of this which more than doubled the pleasure, before the players took to the awaiting excitements of the development section with gusto, Chris Van Der Zee guiding them through the varied soundscapes of conflict and respite with ease and surety.

Then came the concert’s most ambitions item, a performance of US composer Jake Runestad’s “Earth Symphony”, a five-movement work with chorus, whose text by poet Todd Boss chronicles a “conscious history” of Planer Earth over eras of awakening, longing, devastating, lamenting and renewing, with human beings characterised as “mirabilia”, whose marvels and miracles were misused by ambition, characterised by archetypal legends such as the fall of Icarus, and the lamenting by the betrayal and death of the Carthage Queen Dido, but with Nature planning renewal on her own terms, with the eventual return of “a day like the first day”.

I had no text to follow at the concert, being a technophobe when it came to ‘phones and cyber-things, but still caught enough of the choir’s message to follow the basic outline of the run-together sequences, marvelling at the forebearance and stamina of the musicians involved in their unflagging saga of presentation throughout the work –  the epic scale of utterance and its many contrasts enough to demonstrate  what seemed a cosmic tale of endeavour and tragedy.

Beginning the work with primordial-like utterances from percussion and lower instrumental forces, an archetypal scenario of self-creation brought forth “humankind” with the name “Mirabilia” from thought and desire, with instruments and voices almost lullabic in describing the act with the words “You mirrored me to you”. A parallel was drawn with the Icarus legend by the choir’s fearful “How have you fallen so soon?”, a scenario growing from joyous dance and exhilaration to tragedy at ambition so overweening  – “waxen wings undone”  –  the exultation breaking off, with the brass sounding warnings and the sounds gathering weight and urgency. The choir gave voice to fears with cries of “terrore atmosphaera” as a litany of destruction was enacted, the earth itself crying “I am rage! I am war!”, and most damning of all rebukes – “Briefest of species, what have you done?”,. The brasses sounded grotesque mutterings and the strings and cor anglais took up a lament, as the words “Sleep now, my children” were intoned by the choir to Purcell’s well-known “Lament” from “Dido and Aeneas”, the Earth reiterating its message  by the full choir delivering the melody and the orchestra following with a tortured, twisted version of the same.

The final “Recovery” seemed beyond time as we know it with eerie sounds characterising what seemed like a now-humanless world, which the choir described as “empty space – dormant stone”, then murmuring an almost “Sleeping Beauty” scenario of nature overgrowing and subsuming all “human stain”.  However, the enigmatic ending, after describing a “none shall witness – none shall weep” kind of realm, had the Earth addressing this thought to the empty spaces using the aforementioned name “Mirabilia” – is human life here being given a second chance?

Whatever one’s thoughts regarding the work, the achievement of conductor Mark Carter and his forces in bringing it to a level of performance enabling its merits to be considered was of stupendous mettle! – I would have been supremely content to have left the hall at this point with such a multifarious panoply of sounds resonating in my memory – but under the circumstances an all-in finale involving both of the youth orchestras was as appropriate in a different sense! – so the midships were crowded for a spirited rendition by all available hands of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Grand March” from “Aida” which certainly brought the house down in a different way! Great singing and playing did it all proud, with the brass in particular heartily enjoying themselves – as, in fact, did we all!

Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington –  Photo: Andrew Best

Orchestra Wellington presents:
SECRETS
WILLIAM PHILIPSON – House of the Faun
with Arohanui Strings
Lior Balachness – conductor
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major K. 364
with Benjamin Baker – violin
Yura Lee – viola
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony  No. 4 in C Minor Op.43
Marc Taddei – Music Director
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre,
Wellington

Saturday, 20^th September, 2025

This, the fourth concert in Orchestra Wellington’s 2025 season will go down in my memory as one of the most remarkable! Everything about it seemed from the outside like a collection of  interestingly vivid but disparate ideas. These had chronological “through-lines” of their own, but however “connected” with previous and future happenings they seemed almost totally unrelated to one another as part of a single evening’s music-making. And yet, despite such seeming “randomness” there was, from the opening item onwards, some over-riding synergising force , coded liasoning routine or archetypally-understood aspect which either dissolved or flowed over, through or around all impediments, and, against all odds, sculpted out from the music an impression that nothing was impossible, ill-fitting, awkward or cross-purposed which couldn’t be put to rights or made to work if the spirit was willing, resourceful and determined!

Classical music concerts have in the more recent past been mostly streamlined, well-organised, uninterrupted, stylised, moderated, time-honoured events whose success nearly always depended on a certain degree of homogeneity in terms of presentation relating to style, content, repertoire and performance standard. All of these things have been features of Marc Taddei’s successful tenure as Music Director of Orchestra Wellington, but his ever-increasing readiness to interact with his orchestra’s “community”, has established and enabled a wider homogeneity with local musicians, composers and music educators who make up the fabric of musical life in the capital.

An ongoing relationship with such a group has been with the ever-delighting and tantalising Arohanui Strings’ group, whose students of all ages have often participated in the Orchestra’s concerts, as was the case this evening. The programme prioritised the group’s involvement by beginning with a work from William Philipson, a 2025 SOUNZ commission for Orchestra and Sistema Youth Orchestra, “House of the Faun”, one inspired by Philipson’s visit to the ruins of Pompeii, Italy,  where remnants of a famed “House” were excavated, many centuries after the Mt Vesuvius eruption. Distracted as I was  by talking with various people nearby and watching the stage comings-and-goings, I didn’t get to read the composer’s descriptive programme notes, before the Arohanui Strings’ conductor Lior Balachness was on the podium, and, with the older Arohanui students sitting in front of the Orchestra, ready to begin the piece!

Opening impressively. with arresting percussion-primed introductory chords, firstly with strings and then winds and brass, the music set us amongst ambiently rolled-out sound-pictures featuring languid winds, gradually nourished by strings and then reinforced by the brass and percussion – osmotic scenes of slow, but momentous waves breaking and washing over gorgeously-sculpted beachscapes. It all seemed to unfold of its own accord, thus suggesting an ancient, even timeless kind of process, though with the subsequent crescendi levels approaching the seismic in both volume and monumentability – occasionally a solo instrument characterised an individual detail (I noted a solo cello at one point and a solo violin at another) – but though the human element was briefly represented, it was the music’s Ozymandias-like implacability that stayed in the memory, tending to dwarf such detailings as faun statues, mosaic floorings and Doric columns, all muted in the face of nature’s disdain for these past glories.

All the while I thought the playing a well-nigh indissoluble match for the music – but once “The House of Faun” had  sounded and then relinquished its spell, we were then given a  demonstration of the group’s abilities with a “classic”  –  in this case a strings-dominated version of Tchaikovsky’s “Russian Dance” from the evergreen “Nutcracker” Suite,  bringing forth more of the same appreciative audience response.

Next, we were charmed by the entrance of the even younger Arohanui players, mostly with their violins, though I noticed a single horn-player, not much bigger than the instrument she (I think) carried, but possessing rhythmic skills proving of inestimable value to the proceedings!  I actually didn’t know the first tune the group presented, but the horn-player kept the piece’s trajectories on the rails with penetrative notes inserted in the right places each time round. I knew “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”, which bounced along in fine style, but the best came with “Tutira mai nga iwi”, with which we were encouraged to join in ( with all those years of “Music in Schools” doing the trick here, nicely! – I even heard the occasional “Aue!” from some of the audience!).

During the performance stage’s rearrangement after the youngsters’ departure, Marc Taddei introduced the orchestra’a 2026 programme, “Collaborations”, giving nothing away except a general idea involving partnership “with  (to quote the maestro himself) as many extraordinary individuals, ensembles, choirs, dancers and composers as we can”!  So, with that tantalising glimpse into the oncoming musical year with Orchestra Wellington, we were then able to settle down to enjoy the next item on this evening’s multifaceted programme – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s adorable Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat, for violin, viola and orchestra, K.364.

I had seen and heard Kiwi Ben Baker play before, but Yura Lee was a name new to me. Korean-born, and currently Los Angeles-based, she had begun her musical career as a violinist but was attracted to the viola because of the instrument’s frequent exploration of a deeper range of internal harmonies and sonorities than the violin afforded – so she’s now a virtuoso on both instruments, here taking the viola’s part. The rapport between the two musicians made tonight’s performance one I shan’t leave behind for a long time!

From the beginning, the soloists played with the orchestra, creating a kind of visually “integrated” feeling about what the players were doing with this music, advancing musical rather than display-centred attitudes about the work, and, of course, giving that opening tutti an enhanced richness and sonority, especially the “Mannheim crescendo-like” buildup to those wonderfully “tone-drenched” repeated notes at its climax – a simply marvellous moment! Then, when the soloists came in, their sounds simply grew out of the textures in a most naturally-evolving fashion.

Together Baker and Lee as much “danced” as “conversed”  their exchanges, in places with almost “Astaire and Rogers” accord, their interactions feeding the growing excitement which then broke out so joyously at the first big orchestral tutti in terms of pleasure and delight, underlining the minor-key seriousness of the development all the more, as well as the relief of the lines being able to come together again for the opening’s brief recapitulation. The same infectious orchestral energies highlighted the playfulness of the cadenza’s “anything you can do” exchanges and the satisfactions evinced by the orchestra’s concluding measures.

We could hear from this work’s slow movement something of the composer’s grief at his mother’s unexpected death the previous year , all poignantly shaped by conductor and orchestra at the beginning, with the occasional emphasis on certain notes tugging at the heartstrings. Baker and Lee intertwined their utterances mellifluously, giving an impression of one voice “listening” to another before replying, with perhaps the most heart-stopping moments to be found in the shared cadenza, where the two voices mirrored each other’s tones at once in accord and yet so distinctively.

After this the finale was pure release! – light and quick and playful, with characterful interchange suggesting ongoing rather than conclusive utterances! Baker and Lee make it all music of response and interaction rather than anything striving for effect – each player’s concluding flourish feels like an invitation to the other to share rather than a declaration of independence! It all produced a great and demonstrative ovation at the end for all concerned.

And so to the Shostakovich Symphony, the work which had to wait for twenty-five years after its completion before being performed. The composer had finished the work in 1936 for its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic, and rehearsals were actually under way, when suddenly the scheduled performance was abandoned. Accounts differ as to why this actually happened, but the consensus has adjudged the work was withdrawn because of pressure exerted by the authorities in the wake of the “Muddle instead of Music” attack on Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” made by Stalin and his Pravda minions earlier that year.

Orchestra Wellington Strings play Shostakovich – Photo: Andrew Best

Though the full score of the abandoned symphony was lost during the war a complete set of orchestral parts were found and the score was reconstructed. But though this was some time after Stalin’s death it was not until December of 1961 that the Fourth Symphony received its actual premiere  in Moscow, with Kyril Kondrashin conducting. When the composer was later asked whether his later work would have been more like the abandoned symphony had the latter been played and accepted in the 1930s, he replied, “I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage; I would have written more pure music….” And then he added, “But I am not ashamed of what I have written – I like all my compositions.”

Though not a New Zealand premiere, the work by dint of its rarity in performance still generated some interest and excitement akin to a landmark event in Wellington’s musical life. It might be apposite to mention here that, tenuous though the connection might have been, the composer himself was not unaware of interest in his music in this part of the world – when in 2008 I interviewed the wonderful Invercargill-born pianist Janetta McStay towards the end of her long and fruitful life she told me that, late in 1957, upon hearing about a particular new work of Shostakovich’s and making an enquiry she was eventually sent a copy of the score of his recently-written Second Piano Concerto from the Russian firm who published his music – and included in the package was a little note of thanks from Shostakovich himself concerning her interest in his music – she soon afterwards gave the New Zealand premiere of the work!

Though its own premiere took place shortly after the new Piano Concerto’s composition the Fourth Symphony’s music, written fifteen years earlier, couldn’t be more different – by turns epic and ironic, grandiose and volatile, harrowing and playful, desolate and garrulous. Its size (over an hour), its instrumental proportions (normally over a hundred players, with more strings than Orchestra Wellington could muster on this occasion) its gargantuan formal structurings (sonata forms of outsize proportions) and its incredible profusion of thematic ideas (both outer movements are mini-epics in themselves!) seemed to ally Shostakovich with Mahler as a symphonist, as did ear-tickling moments like the cuckoo calls in the first movement, the ironic second movement’s dance-like rhythms, recalling the scherzo from the older composer’s “Resurrection” Symphony, and the funeral march that begins the third movement, drawing from  the older composer’s own death-marches from his First and Fifth Symphonies.

Orchestra Wellington winds – Photo: Andrew Best

I need to state unequivocally that, in giving this music its best possible chance to “speak”, Marc Taddei and his Orchestra Wellington players sensationally performed miracles! I wrote some observations down as best I could while things unfolded in spectacular fashion! – to begin with, the opening had incredible impact, with winds and brasses striding out firmly and purposefully, followed by the strings’ and winds’ suggestively furtive handling of their subsequent polyphonies, then coming together with the brasses to create a textural panoply that astonished as much with its vigour and confidence as in its sense of knowing  where it was going! The winds did brilliantly with their triplet overlays and warning-sounding chorales, but the ensuing orchestral crescendi that grew out of the string murmurings were not to be denied! To the rescue came the bassoon, as it would do repeatedly throughout the work, with empathetic support from the harps (such a feast of texture, timbre and colour! – and wot larks were enacted between perky strings and poisonous sounding brasses at one point!) Sterling tuba and trombone warnings were ignored by similarly vociferous winds, who simply wanted a good romp, despite the brass raspberries that came their way. And then the strings once again!  – playing well above their weight, at Marc Taddei’s bidding they dashed into the insanely frenetic fugato that rippled through the ranks – incredible stuff! The brasses couldn’t resist, and neither could the percussion! What a furore! The strings stepped away and into a nebulous realm out of which timpani and orchestra came swinging with huge roars – away went the winds, climbing onto the backs of the double basses and swinging away down the symphonic road, but coming suddenly to three wise sages, a cor anglais, a solo violin and a bassoon (with a double!), each of whom gave his/her own version of “sensible advice” of the “take a break” variety – so they/we did, and so it proved, the cor anglais double-checking with us, just to make sure!

Came the middle movement – moderato con moto – a droll four-note theme was our companion, first with the strings, then the winds and then the brass and timpani – a wistful second theme (strings again) was augmented by lovely horn-playing, before the winds decided to have some raucous fun until being told off by the timpani. The strings just couldn’t resist some fugal play, capricious but easy on the ear – “we can do that too!” intoned the winds, then deliberately playing atonal lines just to annoy others, until the brass brought things back into line by interrupting with the second theme, more martial than wistful, which fired everybody up! – suddenly, it was if as if a skeletal apparition had appeared, dancing to the tune, grinning spectrally and – vanishing!

Orchestra Wellington horns and percussion – Photo: Andrew Best

There was something undeniably Mahlerian about the finale’s opening, the portentous tread of footsteps and the plaintive cries of the winds all combining to produce a funereal atmosphere which some icy string chords helped along – the textures piled up splendidly as the brass and percussion joined the march – some echt-Shostakovich string textures were evocatively floated, and the winds contributed a mournful cantilena – as the winds intensified the line the strings jumped in with two-note phrases that suddenly became urgent and thrustful with the brass’s help – suddenly all was turmoil with wailing winds seemingly trapped with the strings in a kind of sound-vortex, becoming a vigorous tattoo with brass and timpani joining in, then subsiding – but what was this? Was the circus coming to town? Who were these knockabout figures? Extraordinary! What was happening to this music? Shostakovich suddenly introduced a kind of commedia dell’arte scene into which all kinds of characters made an appearance – whimsical playing from the many solo instrumentalists all of whom covered themselves with glory – such lovely swooning string-playing at one point, immediately followed by some kind of comic-turn, the instruments contributing all kinds of show-time star-turns! – and then it seemed, almost without warning, to melt into thin air, as if it never was – until out of the silences strode the timpani, repeatedly leading a tumultuous orchestral onslaught capped by the brasses and percussion. (Was it something Shostakovich obviously needed to get out of his system?) – Here in the Michael Fowler Centre I had never before heard quite such an orchestral tumult! – the aftermath was as if the cosmos had been somehow cleft in twain and left in tatters with only a few pitiless wind chords, a lone trumpeter-sentinel of the watch, and a gently weeping celeste left, the latter leaving us with a single, if equivocally ascending note.

To have made this symphonic journey anywhere would have been a profound experience – but to have been taken on such a one with such music brought to life by conducting and playing as we experienced here was to have been given something well-nigh unforgettable in cherish! Resounding kudos to Marc Taddei and his intrepid players for what I shall long continue to call a “sensational’ musical experience.