Uncategorized – Page 7

Days Bay Opera does it again with Handel’s “Theodora”

Posted on 11/02/201718/02/2017 by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Theodora (Oratorio in Three Acts, 1749)
(libretto by Thomas Morell)

Daysbaygarden Opera Company
Director: Rhona Fraser
Conductor: Howard Moody

Cast: William King (Valens, Roman Governor of Antioch
Maaike Christie-Beekman (Didymus, a Roman officer)
Filipe Manu (Septimus, a Roman, friend of Didymus)
Madison Nonoa (Theodora, a Christian noblewoman)
Rhona Fraser (Irene, a Christian)
John Beaglehole (a messenger)

Chorus: (Heathens/Christians) Emily Mwila, Emma Cronshaw Hunt, Sally Haywood,
Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby, Lily Shaw, Luca Venter, Isaac Stone,
Hector McLachlan, William McElwee

Orchestra: Anne Loeser (Violin, leader), Rebecca Struthers (violin),
Victoria Jaenecke (viola), Eleanor Carter (‘cello), Richard Hardie (d-bass),
Merran Cooke, Louise Cox (oboes), David Angus (bassoon),
Mark Carter (trumpet), Howard Moody (organ)

Canna House, Day’s Bay, Wellington,
Saturday, February 11th, 2017

(Next and final performance: Thursday 16th February, at 7:30pm)

One of the pleasures of reviewing for me is fronting up to performances of music which I simply don’t know, and subsequently asking myself (sometimes in tones of amazement and disbelief) why it is I’ve never encountered this or that work before, finding it so beautiful / profound / thrilling /whatever! Thus it was with this often compelling production of Handel’s oratorio Theodora, a work the composer wrote towards the end of his creative life, and regarded it as one of the best things he’d ever done!

It didn’t get off to a very good start in 1750, the year of its first performance – the consensus of opinion is that Londoners found less favour with the idea of the martyrdom of a Christian saint than with the Old Testament stories which Handel’s previous oratorios had presented. Whatever the case it was played only three times that season, and just once during 1755 before being dropped from the repertoire for well-nigh two hundred years.

According to the work’s librettist, Thomas Morell, the composer himself declared parts of Theodora superior to anything to be found in Messiah, particularly the final chorus of Act Two “He Saw the Lovely Youth”. Naturally Handel was disappointed in the work’s poor reception, though he himself had remarked (again, according to Morell) that his rich Jewish patrons ,who had flocked to hear Judas Maccabeus a few years previously, would probably not be interested in a presentation with such “Christian” themes and characters.

Amazingly, it wasn’t until the famously provocative Peter Sellars’ revival of the work at Glyndebourne in the UK in 1998 that Theodora made a proper “comeback” to the repertoire. It ought to be remembered that this was, of course, an oratorio rather than an original stage work which was inspiring such acclaim/alarm amongst enthusiasts for both genres. Sellars’ production simply put new wine into old bottles, relating the work’s themes of religious intolerance and persecution to contemporary tyrannical practices enforced by certain modern states and rulers.

Perhaps Rhona Fraser’s Days Bay Opera production didn’t generate quite the intoxicating charge of that Glyndebourne affair, but in places it may have effectively “trumped” it! The production’s reduced scale meant the adroit use of a multi-identity chorus whose members at appropriate times merely changed their garb, which here, I thought, worked really well. The staging proclaimed its intentions during the Overture, with chorus members echoing the recent political upheavals in Europe by carrying Brexit-like “Resist” placards, before being moved on by the commando-like armed guards.

The Overture’s grand-gestured opening turned into a nicely-sprung allegro, the players delivering plenty of energy and focus which easily filled-out the performing spaces (unlike with previous Days Bay productions, we were actually inside the house this time). The first solo voice we heard was that Valens, the Roman Governor of Antioch, whose entrance was rapturously augmented by his black-leather-clad brigade, some supporters carrying signs containing the unequivocal message “Make Rome great again”, as well as the more sinister legend “Torture really works”.

William King as Valens delivered a sonorous, strongly-characterised decree, commanding that all citizens commemorate the Emperor’s natal day by taking part in Jovian rites of worship, before similarly dismissing the plea of one of his soldiers, Didymus, for tolerance towards those people who professed a different faith. King brought the same strength and sonorous tones to his threatening “Racks, gibbets, sword and fire”, underlying the contrast of intent with that of Maaike Christie-Beekman’s Didymus, whose dissenting voice expressed all the warmth and pliability of tolerance and concern for those who might fall foul of the Governor in her aria ”The raptured soul defies the sword” – Christie-Beekman threw herself with abandonment into the incredible vocal melismas of the music, despite a couple of occupational spills along the way, emerging with great credit.

I thought the contrast well-drawn between the deeply-felt conviction of Christie-Beekman’s portrayal and the divided emotions of Septimus, a fellow-soldier, sympathetic to dissent, but loyal to his duty as a soldier. Filipe Manu’s assumption of the latter most effectively expressed the character’s inner conflict, his voice securely filling out the phrases of his aria “Descend, kind Pity”, with only a pinched phrase or two drying out the voice in places, not inappropriate to the character’s feelings of stress and conflict.

Theodora’s first entrance, featuring the bright, sweet voice of Madison Nonoa, was accompanied by markedly exposed string lines, suggesting the character’s purity and even isolation in the strength of her belief. Her aria “O flatt’ring world, adieu” carried this idea into even more beautiful and rarefied realms, the singer’s tones full and fresh, voiced accurately and sensitively. Supporting her was Rhona Fraser’s Irene, and the chorus in its Christian garb (having changed sides!), with a serene and radiant “Come, Mighty Father” accompanying the ritualisting lighting of candles.

Not even the entrance of a messenger (John Beaglehole) with his warning of impending arrest of any dissenters from the governor’s edict shook the resolve of the group, with Rhona Fraser investing Irene’s “As with rosy steps the dawn” with plenty of strength and security, emboldening the chorus to give of their best in the canonic “All Pow’r in Heav’n above”, which built to radiant climaxes. The group’s defiant mood disconcerted and frustrated the arriving Septimus, whose recitative “Mistaken wretches” and subsequent aria “Dread the fruits of Christian folly” were given plenty of energy and momentum, Filipe Manu managing the difficult runs with plenty of aplomb and appropriate bluster.

In the exchanges between Theodora and Septimus which followed, each singer “caught” their character’s crisis of moment, Theodora, the captive devastated by her enslavement into prostitution at “Venus’ Temple” as a punishment for her defiance of the Governor’s edict, and Septimus, her captor, torn between sympathy and a soldier’s duty. Madison Nonoa’s reply was to pour all of her artistry and beauty of voice into her character for one of the composer’s most beautiful arias “Angels ever bright and fair”, aided by sensitive and radiant instrumental support from conductor and players – a treasurable and memorable scene.

Didymus’s shock at being told of Theodora’s fate culminated in his resolve to rescue her, in a brilliant show of recitative “Kind Heav’n, if virtue be thy care” combined with aria “With courage fire me”, Christie-Beekman’s more vigorous sequences excitingly counterpointed a florid violin obbligato solo, generating tremendous excitement. It remained for the chorus to invest Didymus with the Almighty’s blessings (a wonderful “Go generous, pious youth”, as he changed his garb for that of a Christian, before setting off to rescue Theodora.

So ended Act One – to go through and “fine-tooth-comb” the rest of the performance would bog the reader of this review down in largely repetitive detail. Each singer by this time had amply demonstrated what they could do and how well they could”flesh out” each character, and no-one disappointed in those terms. While the production was in many ways “abstracted” by dint of its intimacy and confined spaces, Rhona Fraser’s direction firmly held to the essentials of dramatic interaction, allowing the singers sufficient theatricality to flesh out their characters in a totally convincing way. I did feel the chorus members seemed rather more “at home” with the pagan revels than with the Christian rituals, though that seemed a Miltonian problem as much as anything else, a matter for human nature to answer to!

Enough to say that the playing out of the drama was convincingly achieved, with a fine show of orgiastic revelry from Valens’ leather-clad entourage at the beginning of Act Two, the excesses of which were finely counter-balanced by the same singers’ in their opposing roles as the Christians at the “changeover”of Acts Two and Three (the composer described the lamenting chorus “He saw a lovely youth” as belonging to Act Two, though here the sequence in what the group imagines at first to be the death of Didymus was placed at Act Three’s beginning – but no wonder the composer himself had a high opinion of the piece!

I was puzzled by a curiously inert chorus response to the appearance of Theodora, disguised in Didymus’s uniform, in which she had escaped – however, the ensemble roused itself sufficiently to convey most effectively both the Heathens’ wonder at the dignity of the lovers’ response to their own deaths (“How strange their ends, and yet how glorious”), and the final Christian affirmation of the work – “O Love divine, thou source of fame”. here a properly and appropriately moving conclusion.

Each character brought a comparable intensity to his or her role in this playing-out of the story – William King’s Valens, drunk with power during the revels of Act Two, remained an imperious and implaccable presence in the face of pleas from various quarters to spare the lovers’ lives. The agony of Didymus’s soldier friend Septimus became more and more apparent as the denoument approached, from expressing his support for Theodora and Didymus in Act Two, to pleading to Valens for their lives in the final scene. Filipe Manu here brought a full and heartfelt outpouring of tones in “From virtue springs each generous deed”, ennobling his character further in doing so. And the Irene of Rhona Fraser, though following a less tortured moral trajectory, rewarded her part with steady, well-rounded vocalising, readily conveying her real human sympathy and conviction of faith in “Defend her, Heav’n”, sung over Theodora as a prisoner in Act Two, and her freshly-wrought and unquenchable hope in her release in “New Seeds of joy come crowding on” in the final Act, just before the final tragedy’s enactment.

Ultimately it was left to the two main protagonists to properly “carry” the essence of the story’s dramatic and emotional weight, with the help of all those mentioned, along with the instrumentalists and conductor. Maaike Christie-Beekman’s Didymus’s journeyings through what seemed like an entire gamut of emotion to a fulfilment of love reunited in death was classic operatic stuff, comparable in impact to other, later versions of the same, such as that of another soldier, Radames, in Verdi’s Aida, or the love-death of the knight in Wagner’s Tristan, each of these characters confident of progressing towards a loving reunion in another life.

Madison Nonoa’s Theodora was the object of Didymus’s desire, though less passive than that description suggests, her character embracing the idea of salvation in tandem with her once-heathen lover, for whom she was ready to sacrifice her life alone. Handel responded to these characters and their situations with some of his greatest music (he himself thought so too!), nowhere more exquisite than throughout Act Two where the lovers are reunited after Theodora’s arrest when Didymus with his friend Septimus’s help finds her in prison. Didymus sings his enamoured “Sweet Rose and Lily”, then tells Theodora he has come to help her escape though Theodora would rather Didymus kill her and release her unto “gentle death”. Didymus rejects her plea – “Shall I destroy the life I came to save?” and urges her to trade places with him and take his clothes and escape – but Theodora laments “Ah, what is liberty or life to me that Didymus must purchase with his own?” – such heartfelt stuff, and here, by turns, so gutsily and sensitively articulated, voiced and, above all, sung!

The pair’s subsequent duet in which their absolute trust in one another and in the mercy of a Higher Power, enabling them to meet “again on earth” or “in heaven” brought forth an exquisite intertwining of impulse, here full-blooded and forceful, and then rapt and breath-catching, an interaction that came full circle in the final scene of Act Three with their farewell duet “Thither let our hears aspire”. It was singing, and playing, which truly for we in the audience “woke the song and tuned the lyre”, and left us marvelling at the seeming endless invention of its composer. It just went to show that, for our delight, the joys of such music and, as here, its sensitive and whole-hearted presentation, are endless. In the midst of that realisation I felt truly grateful to be there, to Howard Moody, the conductor, to Rhona Fraser the producer, and to all who made the presentation of this glorious music such a profound and for me unforgettable experience.

Sydney’s Pinchgut Opera triumphs in Handel’s Theodora

Posted on 06/12/201614/02/2017 by Lindis Taylor

Theodora: dramatic oratorio by Handel

Produced by Pinchgut Opera
Artistic director and conductor: Erin Helyard; director: Lindy Hume; designer: Dan Potra
The Orchestra of the Antipodes
Chorus: Cantillation (music director: Antony Walker)
Cast: Valda Wilson, Caitlin Hulcup, Christopher Lowrey, Ed Lyon, Andrew Collis, Andrei Laptev

City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney

Tuesday 6 December, 2016, 7 pm

I’m glad that last year I broke the ice with Sydney’s Pinchgut Opera, for my delightful experience with Grétry’s L’amant jaloux made me more than ready for another.

The title Theodora did rang a bell: my first reaction was that it was an oratorio, as I was fairly sure that I’d recognise the names at least of most of Handel’s operas that have been much performed. Furthermore, it was in English and I knew that Semele was Handel’s only English opera (if you don’t count Acis and Galatea).

But nowhere in the publicity did the word ‘oratorio’ appear, not even in the programme itself – apart from an interview with one of the singers where the word ‘oratorio’ slipped past. But a quick check in my reference books confirmed it: his second to last. I’ve no doubt that the company had guessed, probably rightly, that the Or… word might have deterred prospective opera customers, knowing that oratorios are usually on religious subjects and are basically undramatic (not necessarily so). I’m sure that, generally speaking audiences for opera and oratorio are fairly different.

However, the piece is far from unknown today, as it has emerged suddenly as one of Handel’s great masterpieces: there have been various performances of it in recent years. Best known in the Anglo-Saxon world would be that by the Glyndebourne Festival in 1996, under William Christie, directed by Peter Sellars, with the unforgettable, late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Irene, Dawn Upshaw as Theodora and David Daniels as the male soprano Didymus. Among others: in Vienna from the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt in 2004; the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 2006 with Christie’s Les Arts Florissants; the Göttingen Handel Festival in 2015.

So far, all my Handel experiences have been good, and anyway, I was confident that Pinchgut would turn even the most unpromising sow’s ear into a rewarding and entertaining silk event.

From both musical and, with slight reservations, the story point of view, it is little short (perhaps not-at-all short) of a masterpiece. And the singing, of principals and chorus, and the orchestra, were world class. Only aspects of the production didn’t quite equal that.

Even though I confess that I didn’t specifically recognise much of the music, it proved great Handel, dynamic, dramatic and often very beautiful and moving. There were moments when it sounded like Bach, especially in the more conspicuously religious passages.

And before I go any further I must remind you that Days Bay Opera are presenting Theodora alongside their Eugene Onegin, with three performances from 11 February.

The story
The story is straight-forward enough and, being an oratorio, it is in English.

It tells the story of the love and eventual martyrdom of Theodora, a young Christian woman, and her lover, Didymus, a Roman soldier, in the city of Antioch.

The Roman governor announces that those who refuse to make sacrifice to Jupiter on his name day will be tortured and killed, the two lovers who are secretly Christians are each determined to sacrifice their own lives to save the other. They cannot bring themselves to comply with the city’s ordinance and eventually die. Interest lies in the portrayal of the chorus of the Roman militia, initially baying for blood, as becoming deeply affected by the quiet courage of the Christian lovers and their friends.

Opera seria in mid 18th century, even handling the most awful crisis, usually turned up a last minute rescue or change of heart by the villain so there was no blood on the floor. Death at the end of tragic opera became OK later in the century and has become the basic stuff of most opera ever since. So for the baddies to win should be no problem for audiences today.

The puff offered by the Royal Northern College of Music for their planned March-April 2017 staging of the work characterises it like this:

“The plot of Theodora resonates to this day as conflicts continue to erupt around the globe. Innocence, love, faith and courage bloom strong and full of promise, only to be struck down by the thirst for power and blind hatred.”

The theme was certainly heavily Christian and the two leads die rejoicing that they’ll be happy in heaven for ever after. I did find the story a bit laborious and piously religious in spite of its moving to modern times. Perhaps that explained why one local review remarked that the portrayal of the Christians failed to suggest the fundamental arrogance, fanaticism, even treachery, that undoubtedly coloured early Christian behaviour and would have aroused more than mild irritation in the authorities.

How it looked and sounded
The job of creating a credible environment for a late Roman story of authority against subversion, becomes almost impossible in sets and costumes of the present day; not that I’m suggesting it should have looked like a traditional production of La clemenza di Tito (set in the first century AD).

It was in modern dress, and one did note the inconsistency with rituals and behaviour that couldn’t be anywhere but in the late Roman Empire. Nothing unusual there. But the bulky and inconvenient furniture on a fairly small stage and the look and behaviour of the characters detracted from an evocation of the period and from the nature of the conflict as portrayed by the words.

The overall concept was the work of Lindy Hume while the design was by Dan Potra, who desgned for Wellington City Opera in the 90s – The Barber of Seville and Rigoletto.

And it struck me as perhaps resonating with what is happening now in a city not far away, Aleppo. Echoes of ISIS might have arisen as the Roman militia and populace in Antioch were harangued by the governor or pro-consul who insisted that any Christian refusing to pay obeisance to Jupiter would be killed or be persecuted. I wondered whether we were supposed to see the Roman rulers as Islamic State and the Christians as, well, Christians, or one of the many mutually antagonistic, anti-Assad factions in Syria. But that didn’t really stack up.

Perhaps a more serious issue was the fact, which I confess only dawned on me as I explored the libretto more carefully later, searching in the libretto printed in the programme book for arias and a duet that I caught in certain You Tube offerings, that it had been cut here and there. I felt that they could well have found room if certain of the over-long da capo arias had been abbreviated.

Singers
The singers, two non-Australian, were just wonderful. Australian soprano Valda Wilson sang the role of Theodora, a beautiful voice that soars above the orchestra.

A superb American counter-tenor, Christopher Lowrey, was magnificent in the role of Didymus, a Roman soldier, a Christian secretly in love with Theodora.

His army colleague Septimus was sung by English tenor Ed Lyon, who has extensive European experience in baroque opera, and he too was excellently cast vocally; he finally fails to rescue the couple.

Mezzo soprano Caitlin Hulcup sang the hardly less important role of Theodora’s friend Irene, with equal intensity and vividness.

The Roman Governor Valens was sung with excessive fury, practically unhinged, by Andrew Collis who’s familiar here as Don Magnifico in the 2015 Cenerentola and as Kissinger in the Auckland Festival’s Nixon in China last year. Uncontrolled histrionically, it didn’t really come off.

Individual arias and duets, especially between Theodora and Didymus, were just breathtakingly beautiful; pity we didn’t hear more of them.

Chorus and orchestra
And the wonderful chorus was, like last year in the Grétry opera, the famous Sydney ensemble, Cantillation, strong and entrancingly nuanced made one overlook any of the other minor shortcomings.

The whole assemblage was conducted by the same conductor as last year, Eric Helyard who taught at Vic for a few years (I wonder why he never seemed to do in Wellington what he’s so accomplished at in Sydney. Perhaps he did and I never noticed).

His baroque orchestra – the same as last year, The Orchestra of the Antipodes – an ever-present force: gutsy, elegant, often rhythmically thrilling and in balance with singers and chorus, with an unerring instinct for Handel’s detailed and effective orchestra. They specialised in really rich, throbbing basses – well, two double bass, three cellos and two bassoons, and timpani – as well as gorgeous natural horns and woodwinds: they made marvellous sounds.

Perhaps I’ll end by borrowing some fine words from Sydney reviews: ‘Christopher Lowrey animates a natural sense of line with elegantly stylish ornamentation, energised at times with sinewy agility without losing smoothness.’; ‘wonderful rose colours and freshness in her sound’ (about Valda Wilson); ‘rounded firmness, fluid mellifluousness and natural attractiveness’ (Caitlin Hulcup); Cantillation in a ‘tapestry of refinement’; Erin Helyard’s magic with the orchestra where ‘in some of the cadenzas time suspended itself for a moment so that truth and beauty could merge’.

If there were the negatives, the positive elements of the work, its production and performance, far outweighed them. Yes, a triumph at virtually every level and from every angle. It was a memorable evening and my journey was magnificently rewarded.

Schubert Concert at St.Andrews promises a weekend’s abundance

Posted on 03/06/201611/06/2016 by Peter Mechen

SCHUBERT AT ST.ANDREW’S
Concert One “Cornucopia”

Arpeggione Sonata in A Minor D.821
(for double bass and piano)
Oleksandr Guchenko (double-bass) / Kirsten Robertson (piano)

Octet in F Major D.803
(for strings, clarinet, bassoon and horn)
Yuka Eguchi, Anna van der Zee (violins) / Belinda Veitch (viola) / Ken Ichinose (‘cello) / Oleksandr Guchenko (double-bass) / Rachel Vernon (clarinet) / Leni Mäckle (bassoon) / Heather Thompson (horn)

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

Friday 3rd June, 2016

This was the first of what promised to be a delightful and rewarding “Schubertiade” of concerts featuring various solo artists and ensembles. The title “Cornucopia” possibly referred to the variety of instruments used throughout the evening; or else, to the range and scope of the composer’s writing for these instrumental combinations. Whatever the case, the results suited the “abundant supply of good things” description suggested by the word, regarding both the amount of interest generated by these combinations, and the quality of the music coming from its composer.

This concert began with something of a performance-rarity, that of the exotically-named “Arpeggione” Sonata which Schubert wrote originally for an instrument which had a brief period of popularity in the 1820s. This was a kind of ‘cello, played with a bow, but with a fretted fingerboard, just like a guitar. What possessed the maker to produce such an instrument is anybody’s guess, as it never really “caught on” among musicians.

Schubert’s work, in fact, was the only piece of any great significance written for the instrument. And, as if to underline this “poignancy of neglect”, the sonata was one of those works by Schubert which wasn’t published for many years after the composer’s death, by which time the arpeggione had all but disappeared. Today, the sonata is played most often on the viola or ‘cello, which made the prospect of hearing the work this evening on the double-bass an exciting and unusual prospect.

I confess to some surprise at what we were getting, as I would have thought the ‘cello more in keeping with the original instrument’s tonal qualities – and on the one recording I have of the piece, there’s a ‘cello (which had already disposed me more favourably towards that instrument in this work). However, I was, as the saying goes, keeping an open mind (and ears, of course), as we waited for the instrumentalists to take the stage and begin.

Our double-bass player was Oleksandr Gunchenko, a native of Kiev, whose early music training culminated in a professional orchestral appointment in Russia at the age of nineteen, emigrating to New Zealand in 1999 to play in the Christchurch Symphony, and then joining the NZSO in 2007. He was partnered in the Sonata by Christchurch-born pianist Kirsten Robertson, a graduate of Canterbury University and an ex-pupil of Diedre Irons, at present the NZSO’s principal keyboard player.

Used as I was to the ‘cello’s register, the first few notes of the double-bass line were a surprise, and took some getting used to – but what immediately took over from this was an impression of the performance’s fluency and musicality of tone, of phrasing and of give-and-take between the instruments. Apart from the occasional strained note in the double-bass’s highest registers the playing of both Guchenko and Robertson was impeccable, the pianist ever-mindful of her partner’s mellow-voiced instrument in helping to maintain the balance of the music’s sound-world.

The work’s middle movement gave ample opportunity for expression from both instruments, the piano beginning the hymn-like theme, then handing over to the double-bass, whose varied and characterful playing brought out the music’s sombre qualities with the help of some near rock-bottom notes! After this, the finale lifted the sombre mood with flowing, flavoursome sequences both in minor and major keys (the composer occasionally in “Hungarian Melody” mode). A particular delight was a sequence featuring pizzicati from the double-bass against the piano’s decorative statements,and the deftly-played lead-back to the flowing, dance-like passages, the music’s gentle major-key closure wrought by a mellow-sounding pizzicato chord – all very delicious.

The encore, a setting of Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, seemed at first to undo some of the beautiful work the players had done earlier – at first I found the piano too loud, the tones obscuring the double bass’s lines, which from my vantage point in the auditorium seemed to have little or no “carrying power” played in such a deep register. Things improved in that respect when the players repeated the verse with the bass up an octave higher – though more precarious as regards intonation, the balance between the instruments was more pleasing, and the string instrument seemed to find its singing voice, to our great delight and enhanced pleasure.

The concert’s second half presented us with a completely different sound-world, being Schubert’s Octet, for strings, clarinet, bassoon and horn. As with a couple of Schubert’s other works and Beethoven’s Septet, the Octet quotes a theme from an existing work by the composer, albeit a not very well-known duet from an early opera Die Freunde von Salamanka. I certainly didn’t experience any surprising and/or delightful “I know that!” reactions of the sort afforded by the “Trout” Quintet and the “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet, or Beethoven’s cheeky reminiscence in his Septet of a movement taken from his PIano Sonata Op.49 No.2.

All the musicians in the performance were either permanent or casual players with the NZSO, which accounted for the sheer technical aplomb of the music-making – this being the starting-point, the group mightily impressed with its teamwork and characterful individuality at all points. The composer certainly gives all the instruments the chance to shine, and these chances were taken most excitingly by each of the players – horn player Heather Thompson described the experience of playing the work as “climbing Mt.Everest”, which seemed to me as good a way as any of characterizing both the effort and the achievement of realizing the music in performance.

We got a beautiful, sonorous opening chord from the ensemble, the kind of sound that straightaway gives rise to unaccountable but luxuriant feelings of well-being – obviously a great beginning to the enterprise! Strings and winds played off against one another tellingly throughout, creating stores of energy and tightening tensions which the allegro then released in varied ways via exuberant ensemble playing and colourful solo lines. The music’s course was clearly-defined at all times, the essential character of the contrasting sequences of exposition and development brought out by the playing. I particularly enjoyed the adroitness of the interplay between the strings as well as the golden tones of the horn, the latter enabling a beautifully nostalgic ending to the movement after the joyously eruptive fanfares had sounded their “conclusive” bits!

The clarinet-led opening of the second movement Adagio was a heavenly sequence, continuing the pleasure with the first violin in duet, along with beautiful coloristic touches from horn and bassoon. Always the ensemble remained alive to the music’s expressive possibilities, “leaning into” the impulses of emotion which accompanied different sequences of the music, such as a splendid ceremonial-like statement from the horn, mid-movement underlined by the lower strings, and a lovely viola-supported flourish from the violin leading back to the reprise of the opening. There were, in fact, too many gorgeous solos to enumerate, each of them contributing as much to a sense of teamwork as to individual moments. And both the fateful-sounding accompaniments which towards the movement’s end pounded menacingly beneath the music’s surfaces, and the bleak, almost bone-bare moments soon afterwards were given their all-important weight as a reminder of all the things of heaven and earth undreamt in our philosophy…..

The ensemble took the Scherzo movement at a great lick, most excitingly exploring the music’s dynamic range to great effect, and achieving a whimsical contrast with the lyrical, long-breathed Trio. As much a different world was the following Andante, a “theme-and-variations” movement with some delicious moments, a lovely skipping sequence for clarinet and strings, a self-satisfied, semi-pompous sequence for horn, followed by a skipping, carefree ‘cello solo, and a swirling, minor-key variant with strings supporting the winds. Following this was a sweet-voiced strings-and-clarinet episode whose execution was simply to die for, and then, like some kind of wind-up clockwork conglomeration, a delicious dovetailing of rhythmic patterning, allowed to run down in a lovely, child-like “is it finishing?” kind of way.

Not content with merely a Scherzo, the composer had recourse to a Menuetto and Trio to boot, the music seeming akin to a prayer, one delivered with great poise and steadfastness, the clarinet contributing a lovely counter-theme to the dance-steps, with the horn adding a sonorous variant. An extremely “gemütlich” Trio completed a sense of relaxation, or, perhaps escapism, which the opening of the finale proceeded to demolish with frightening purpose and a sense of desolation – perhaps a premonition of death? An “are you ready?” gesture, and we were suddenly off on a gloriously garrulous jog-trot, one in which good humour prevailed right through almost to the piece’s end. There was a marvellous passage mid-movement in which fugal lines tightened around and about the trajectories, maintaining the tensions until the release-point of the main theme’s reprise, which all of the players almost physically threw themselves into – most exhilarating!

But then! – after a number of energetic, but elongated lead-ins to a long-awaited coda, we were instead suddenly confronted with darkness once again, agitated tremolandi on lower strings and a whimpering, frightened violin pleading with “I told you so” winds. Fortunately it was nothing more than a cloud crossing the sunshine’s path – and the players picked up the strands and held them tightly, urging the music quickly to its conclusion, frightening to experience, but marvellous to come through! What a piece and what a performance! And what a beginning to a whole weekend of the composer’s music!

Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies – resonant and moving at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on 15/03/201629/03/2016 by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Festival 2016 presents:
RELICT FURIES
Music by Gareth Farr
Libretto by Paul Horan

Strings of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)

also:
ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for Strings Op.47
SCULTHORPE – Sonata for Strings No.3 (from String Quartet No.11 “Jabiru Dreaming”) – 1. Deciso 2.Liberamente – Estatico
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,

Tuesday 15th March, 2016

This concert at the Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul all but replicated the programme of an Edinburgh Festival Concert last year, performed on the 26th August at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, and featuring the premiere of Gareth Farr’s work Relict Furies. On that occasion the Scottish Ensemble was joined by well-known mezzo soprano Sarah Connolly in the performance of Farr’s piece, to great critical acclaim: – “a heart-stabbing evocation of the First World War” proclaimed one notice, while another read “fantastic music….permeated with breathtaking orchestration….” Farr’s work was a joint commission by the Edinburgh and New Zealand International Arts Festivals.

Last night Wellington heard the New Zealand premiere of Farr’s Relict Furies, in a programme which featured the strings of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra playing (as was done in Edinburgh) music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Sculthorpe (the Scots, one noted, had cannily treated themselves to a truly resplendent bonus, that of Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra.). These works, it might be guessed by now, all feature string orchestras divided in some way, which certainly made for fascinating and ear-catching results throughout.

The programme’s centre-piece was, of course, Gareth Farr’s work – its title Relict Furies, came from the librettist Paul Horan, who attributed the reference to his mother’s influence. He remembered how she hated the use of the word “relict”, which meant “widow” – so that it seemed the word was employed here as a kind of “confrontation” of response ranged against situation, especially in the context of women’s writings of the period, and about the effects of the war.

The poetry by Paul Horan I found very moving, but no more than I did Gareth Farr’s incredibly receptive and sensitive identification with the words throughout. Right from the opening I was caught up in feelings engendered by those deep tones, still, rich and lovely. The first song “Onward” spoke of the conflict between public duty and private feelings, how the door dividing the two represented a welcome barrier between the cheering crowd and the privacy of life and love, and how that barrier was opened to allow the two worlds to fatally mingle.

Here were deep string tones redolent of the love between husband and wife, and the jarring counter-harmonies of the upper strings representing the strident tones of the cheering crowd – an impasse that was boldly negated in a spirit of adventure, but was, of course, to go horribly wrong, with jabbing accents attaching the music’s flowing lines as the beginning of the second song taking us right into the marrow of things. Those eerie string harmonies hovering about the singer’s words “Tomorrow I wear my wedding shoes to your funeral….I’ll be on display on the lip of your grave…” contained echoes of the Last Post, magical and ghostly at one and the same time, as if the tragedy of death had a kind of inevitability.

Farr’s beautiful handling of the work’s contrasts confronted us with impassioned outbursts such as – “I’ll be on my own on the lip of your grave…” leading to the bleak ostinato-led transition into the third song “Remains”, a sequence which burgeoned in feeling towards the outburst at “White, dark terror”, and then exhaustedly subsiding into a wasteland of on-going resonance of loss. I particularly loved the string-writing at the work’s very end – the woman sung about “an unpitied life, picking up where we never started”, as the two orchestral halves magically evoked both the living and the dead, and kind of wreathed them all around with contrasting tones and timbres – as if the real and “ghost” worlds were linked for a while by memory and evocation…..

In general I was enraptured by the score – I thought the writing for the two sections of the strings was outstanding – the opening division of “low” and high tomes between the two groups added to the sense of dislocation and menace and impending doom. The balance between the two was never excessive or lop-sided, so that the “layered” aspect of the experience of loss, bereavement and widowhood was characterized as profound and affecting without being over-wrought and destructive.

Margaret Medlyn, called in to sing at short notice, due to another performer’s indisposition, gave a splendidly committed and impassioned performance, movingly tempered in places by a rapt sensitivity. The ample acoustic of the cathedral made it difficult for us to follow her exact words at moments of great agitation, but the sense of anguish was palpably conveyed.

As for the other pieces, I though both the Sculthorpe and the Vaughan Williams came off most successfully. The Sculthorpe Sonata was a string orchestra version of a string quartet, made in 1994, one called “Jabiru Dreaming”, in two movements, whose titles are Deciso and Estatico. This work is an entrancing depiction of the Australian outback, and uses different string-playing techniques to recreate indigenous sounds – col legno effects that bring to mind tribalistic rituals involving stick games and ceremonial dancing, and rapid repeated glissandi in the violins to bring to mind birdsong – the string-writing had a wonderfully outdoor atmosphere that put me in mind of Sibelius’s “saga” music in places, and later on, Copland’s “new land” evocations.

The Vaughan Williams work was superbly played, especially the haunted dialogues between the two string orchestras. This was a work where the ample acoustic of the cathedral worked almost totally in the music’s favour. The lines had a glow, a halo of intensity around them and a resonance that unholstered the on-going atmospheres of the work in a timeless kind of way, so that we were able to forget ourselves and luxuriate in these sounds. Throughout this and in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for strings, the solo playing was superb, the give-and-take between the principals of the orchestra a delight.

I thought the work that came off least well was the Elgar, mainly because of the acoustic of the cathedral. Parts of the work again glowed with a refulgent beauty – the sequences which have come to be known as the “Welsh Tune” were all simply ravishingly done – but unfortunately the quicker parts of the work turned to confusion all too readily, especially the central fugue of the work. It might have been better in this context had more deliberate, more rhythmically-pointed tempo been chosen in places (I have heard such performances, and if directed with enough focus and intensity they can work brilliantly). Which leads me to state that this was the work, I think, which most missed the absence of a conductor, the guiding hand and ear which would have enabled more clarity to the textures and a bit more shape to the overall design of the performance – in places I wanted keener attention to phrasing, and less reliance on speed (inappropriate in the cathedral’s potentially treacherous acoustic)…….

But it’s for the Farr work that this concert will be most readily remembered – one that I’m sure we won’t have heard the last of. I for one would welcome the chance to hear it again and enjoy those moments of wide-ranging intensity in the context of a beautifully-constructed whole.

Fire, flamenco and folksong ‘cello style, from Ramón Jaffé

Posted on 01/03/201607/04/2016 by Peter Mechen

Ramón Jaffé (‘cello)
Catherine McKay (piano)

CHOPIN – Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante
BEETHOVEN – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano in C Major Op.102 No.1
JAFFÉ – flamenco improvisation
BRAGATO – Graziela y Buenos Aires
DVORAK – Piano Trio No.4 in E Minor “Dumky” (with Carolyn van Leuven – violin)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Tuesday 1st March 2016

The title given to this concert by the artists rolled off the tongue colourfully and evocatively enough – however, I confess that I found myself involuntarily drawn into slightly circumspect mode over the word “fire”, having over the years grown somewhat weary of being assailed by regular barrages of hype from major arts organization by way of advertising their oncoming productions.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried, as what followed during the actual concert was precisely what the title suggested. In fact, “fire” in its threatening, smoldering form aptly characterized the playing of ‘cellist Ramón Jaffé throughout a good deal of the proceedings, especially when he tackled those pieces related directly to a Latin American tradition of music-making, such as flamenco.

What the programme in fact described as “a flamenco ‘cello treat” was just that, when Jaffé played for us a piece which he had written in honour of flamenco guitarist, Pedro Bacán, with whom he had closely worked, and who had since died in a tragic accident in 1997. Jaffé described how he had to “begin again” as a ‘cellist when taking up the flamenco style, putting aside his classical training and learning new techniques and responses to the music, and reaching a point where he could play and improvise as if he were a folk musician.

I wrote down what I remembered Jaffé called his piece (the name wasn’t written down in the programme), which was something like Canta de Passion (in translation, Passion Sings, or Song of Passion). It was a detail which didn’t seem important at the time, so arresting were the sounds the player was drawing from his instrument. His bow danced suggestively upon the strings, the rhythms allowing pizzicati from both bowing and “fretting” hands to generate an ever-burgeoning excitement which broke off into a kind of a kind of recitative and then developed into something almost hymnal, free and sonorous.

Rhythmic impulses reasserted themselves in the form of percussive gesturing, Jaffé knocking and slapping the ‘cello’s body and tapping his feet to the music’s pulsating, using the dancing bow on the strings once again and working things up to an intensity which carried through to the piece’s end. In both song- and dance-like sequences the music generated a good deal of impassioned feeling.

Jaffé then joined forces with pianist Catherine Mckay in a work, Graziela y Buenos Aires, by one José Bragato, an Italian-born Argentinian composer who celebrated his hundredth birthday in October last year. ‘Cellists who play tangos more often choose the works of Astor Piazolla, (most often a piece called Le Grande Tango) but Jaffé told me after the concert that he preferred to play Bragato’s work.

Loaded with sultriness and dark-toned suggestiveness, the music began with the ‘cello following the piano’s mood-jazz lower-register evocations, occasionally giving the trajectories a “lilt” to enliven the languid atmospheres. Solos from each instrument alternated with racy, interlocked Latin-American dance rhythms, driving the music along with ear-catching timbres and hues, as when the ‘cellist played over the bridge of his instrument amid droll piano glissandi.

The piece’s concluding sequence memorably took in a long and sinuous ‘cello melody, tenderly and delicately partnered by the piano, the pair of instruments breath-holding and trance-like in their murmurings towards the music’s end.

Before either of these exotic pieces were performed, ‘cellist and pianist had given us two more conventionally “classical” works, beginning with an early work by Chopin, Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante. A lilting Andante-like beginning featured plenty of give-and-take between the instruments, though with the piano more typically forthright and decorative than the cello’s more song-like lines, after which both players launched into the Polonaise section with great gusto.

In places I was reminded of the piano writing in Chopin’s concertos, giving the player a real work-out in places, leaving the cellist to impress us with aristocratic poise and gorgeous tones. Catherine McKay balanced the virtuoso element beautifully with the poetic moments, the give-and-take between both musicians giving a strong and positive impression as to the music’s worth. Beethoven, of course, received similar advocacy in his Op.102 No.1 C Major Sonata which followed, the music’s improvisatory manner in places drawing forth finely-drawn tones from both players.

Particularly delightful were the “cat-and-mouse” sequences between the instruments in the work’s second movement, the cello’s “open fifths” and the piano’s teasing gestures subsumed into the playful allegro vivace with terrific élan, leading to the throwaway payoff.

Concluding the concert was Dvorak’s well-known “Dumky” Trio, for which Ramon Jaffé and Catherine McKay were joined by violinist Carolyn van Leuven. From what I’d heard ‘cellist and pianist do earlier in the concert, I anticipated that they would bring out this music’s expressive qualities to a point of deep satisfaction – and I wasn’t disappointed. From the tragic, lamenting opening, through to the inhibited gaiety and energy of the quicker sections of the movement, the players seemed fully engaged with the sounds and their purposes, thus conveying to us plenty of that “Bohemian lament” character for which the composer’s work was and is justly renowned.

Of course, ‘cellist and pianist were already “on fire” with the conflagrations of the concert’s first half, so that it took a little while for violinist van Leuven to find her richest voice to contribute to the textures, though her rhythmic sense instantly “kicked in” with the ensemble. The poco adagio second movement drew us in from the beginning, the violinist responding to the cellist’s eloquence with atmospheric “squeeze-box” tones, so very nostalgic and moving! Even more so was the andante moderato which followed, the music having a “heartbroken” quality, a great longing which subsequent episodes of energy and dogged strength didn’t entirely banish.

Such moments came thick and fast during the finale, with its volatile shifts between tragedy, introspection and gaiety, the motto theme tossed almost recklessly between the instruments and spontaneously inflected as to express a bewildering variety of moods, with no holds barred – that last-named quality a defining characteristic of the concert’s overall music-making. Each of the musicians played a part in serving up this feast of creative re-enactment for our delight – we did our best to mirror their efforts with appropriately enthusiastic appreciation.

Welllington Chamber Orchestra – significant, important, moving……

Posted on 20/09/201523/09/2015 by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
LILBURN AND VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

LILBURN – A Song of Islands / Symphony No.1 (1949)
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Concerto for Tuba in F Minor / Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1

Naomi Christensen (tuba)
Ian Ridgewell (conductor)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

St Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 20th September, 2015

A significant, important and moving concert. Significant? – with two works by Douglas Lilburn included, the orchestra splendidly commemorated the composer’s 100th birthday year. Important? – the concert included in the programme Lilburn’s First Symphony, one that ought to be in our main-centre orchestras’ regular concert repertoire, but is hardly ever played – see “Stop Press” below, however. Moving? – the concert was dedicated by the orchestra to the memory of one of its members who had recently died, the well-known luthier and ‘cellist, Ian Lyons.

Besides the actual concert, two of Ian Lyons’ close friends, Chris and Anna Van Der Zee, together with the NZSO’s Alan Molina and former principal ‘cellist of the same orchestra, David Chickering, played, at the beginning of the second half, the slow movement from Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major Op.20 No.4. – a beautiful and appropriate gesture.

Conducting the orchestra for the concert proper was Ian Ridgewell, English-born with a background in tuba-playing, composition (he studied with with Sir Malcolm Arnold) and conducting, both of brass bands and symphony orchestras, currently living and working in the Wellington region as a teacher of music. And, to add to the concert’s interest, one of the items was none other than a Tuba Concerto by Vaughan Williams, played by Naomi Christensen, who was awarded “Brass Player of the Year” for 2014 at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music here in Wellington. We were told, in a brief biographical note in the program, that her “journey with the Tuba” began at aged ten, “from atop a pile of ‘phone books (allowing her to reach the mouthpiece)” – presumably not just the telephone’s, judging by the skill and ease with which she handled her instrument.

For the orchestra it seemed no easy task to tackle not merely one, but TWO challenging pieces by Lilburn. Though the Symphony is the later work, it seemed to me that the “Song” was in some ways just as difficult a nut to crack, both technically (it contained some extremely difficult string-writing) and interpretatively (needing a strong and secure “overview”, without which the music would have simply wandered and become shapeless and confused). To both the players’ and the conductor’s credit these things were well-attended to, the playing focused and detailed, the overall view purposeful and clearly laid out as the piece progressed.

The music opened strongly and emphatically, given enough space to allow the rolling phrases plenty of room and the brass plenty of time to expand. I enjoyed the prominence given to the finely-crafted appearances of those warm, golden harmonies which seemed to impart a glow over the vast oceanic spaces and the ruggedness of the terrain. Importantly the conductor maintained tight rhythmic control, designed to keep the music’s underlying pulses alive, while capturing detailings like the oceanic swells and the contours of the freshly-discovered landscapes.

Throughout the strings and winds had a somewhat volatile interaction, each having a turn at being either thematic or rhythmic – in some places the debt by Lilburn to Sibelius was palpably demonstrated, but invariably with a South Seas accent. These exchanges were punctuated by moments of great splendour on the brasses, sounding the composer’s “song” while the rest of the orchestral textures kaleidoscopically energized and interacted with great volatility. The ecstasy of fulfillment at the end as strings and then brass “humanized” the orchestral textures brought out some great playing from all concerned.

Something completely different was the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto, a work which has provoked divided responses among listeners and critics ever since its composition in 1954, but which has steadily increased its following and popularity, having since been recorded over a dozen times. It’s a fine, jovial work, rumbustious in the outer movements and surprisingly expressive in the central Romanza movement. What a performance here from this young musician! With on-the-spot support from conductor and orchestra, Naomi Christensen and her alter ego of an instrument brought out all of the music’s character, to begin with bluff good humour, and then plenty of swagger and wry rhythmic agility both in the second subject section, and throughout the jaw-dropping cadenza.

That legendary tuba-playing raconteur Gerard Hoffnung would have , I’m sure, enjoyed her playing immensely, both here, and in the nostalgia-tinted central movement, where the soloist “partnered” the string melodies at the outset, later adding occasional piquant touches, rather like what an observer would do while walking through the midst of a glorious landscape. As for the last movement, the solo instrument was hardly silent, leading the bucolic romp with great élan, the orchestra allowed only a tiny moment of self-contained glory just before the final cadenza – again, masterly playing from the soloist, wryly-expressed rhetorical gestures with wonderful trills, and a cataclysmic “all fall down” finish. Glorious and memorable!

And what a lovely contrast the same composer’s Norfolk Rhapsody No.1 made in the concerto’s wake – At first the single lines of the opening (oboe and strings) sounded a little raw, but with the clarinet’s entry and the string harmonies warming the textures, the sound sweetened and began to glow – the principal viola, Stephanie van Dyk, deservedly singled out afterwards for a beautiful bit of solo playing, with the clarinet closely in support. I thought the ambient vistas were captured most effectively by the winds, both solos and concerted work with the strings, the oboe especially coming into its own here and delivering some lovely lines. An almost Delian sweep was achieved, the tutti delivering the rhapsodic aspect of the music splendidly and richly.

The maritime-like tunes which launched the allegro section came together after a slightly ragged start, establishing a characteristic gait and building, with brass and percussion, to a stirring climax, before the sounds began taking their leave of us, gradually returning to the solitary ambiences of the opening, winds giving us a valedictory version of the opening melody and the brasses softly chiming in with a slower haunting reminiscence of the central dance. At the end the oboe and strings, now thoroughly acclimatised, gently and sensitively sounded those opening strains as if it had all been a dream.

After the interval it was to the business of the Lilburn Symphony that we all turned. It began most promisingly, a bright, breezy trumpet call activated the echoes and ambiences, allowing a lovely Copland-esque feeling (I had, I confess, the previous evening, heard the NZSO play the Four Rodeo Dance Episodes!), with the dancing rhythms kept steadily on the rails. There’s such great brass writing in this work and the players here did so well, even if the St.Andrew’s ambience made them sound too uncomfortably close in places. The movement abounded in tricky dovetailings which conductor Ian Ridgewell and his players brought off so well, some sticky moments apart. The brass and winds were mostly right “on”, the wind lines in particular very tangy and earthy, while the strings strove mightily, recreating those characteristic tightly-knit tensions that make up the Lilburn sound.

So I was disappointed that, after maintaining such strong and secure trajectories for his players throughout and up to this point, the conductor then, I thought, pushed the slow movement along too quickly – the players seemed unable to settle, to properly hook into that obsessive rhythmic pattern, with the slight lack of synchronization producing a somewhat raucous result in places. Fortunately, once the brass were given their heads the rhythm seemed to steady – the horns were particularly steadfast, here, and things seemed to come together – how bleak at its centre some of this music is! And why don’t our orchestras play it more often?

The finale excitingly and abruptly unfurled, like a vast curtain being thrown suddenly open! – dark, almost Tapiola-like statements from the strings created a brooding, expectant atmosphere, the winds and brass soundinging particular “northern”, with moments of sunlight breaking through the clouds and just as quickly disappearing. When the rhythmic explosion suddenly drove detail into a frenzy, with warning shouts from the wind and brass, I was afraid that, again, the tempi would be too quick for these players – and indeed, some of the articulation was a blur at this speed – but mixed with the scrambling aspect was a certain edge-of-seat excitement, which saw the music through. Everything was excitingly capped by the brass and timpani, even if I felt the strings in particular were put under a lot of pressure in places.

The music’s sudden plunge back into the void of the movement’s opening was splendidly done – strings were angsting and winds were skirling in fine style – and those great building-blocks of sound which grew out of the built-up energies were here most satisfyingly sounded by the brass and timpani, a mighty and well-deserved sense of arrival, one which we in the audience truly relished. So, in all, warmest congratulations to conductor Ian Ridgewelll and his band of sterling musicians!

STOP PRESS: I’ve beaten my breast a couple of times in this review as to the relative neglect of this music over the years, but am equally excited to report that the Te Tōkī NZSM Orchestra’s planned Lilburn concert on Thursday October 1st at the Basilica in Hill Street, ALSO features this same First Symphony (as well, incidentally, as – you’ve guessed it! – Vaughan Williams’ Norfolk Rhapsody No.1!) So, as a change from famine conditions, it’s good to be able to enjoy, in the case of this remarkable symphony, a feast!

Popular for the best reason – the NZSO’s Classical Hits Concert

Posted on 19/09/201504/11/2015 by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
CLASSICAL HITS

Music by ROSSINI, COPLAND, OFFENBACH, J.STRAUSS Jnr.
TCHAIKOVSKY, ELGAR and WAGNER

James Judd (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 19th September, 2015

Appropriately enough from my point of view, this concert began with the very same music that enthralled me almost fifty years ago, at the beginning of my very first concert-going experience in Palmerston North’s Opera House. I still recall, at the start of the “William Tell” Overture, the beauty of those two NZBC Symphony Orchestra solo ‘cellos (played by Wilf Simenauer and Farquhar Wilkinson), and the thrill of the orchestra “opening up” for the ensuing storm, before the cor anglais (I can’t remember the player’s name) and Richard Giese’s flute flooded us with sunlight and dried us out in time for the excitement of the concluding march. No better introduction to the capabilities of a symphony orchestra could have been devised by anybody, I thought, and especially when the conducting was to my youthful ears as exciting and volatile as was Piero Gamba’s on that occasion.

So, almost as much fond memory was activated as was “here-and-now” sensation and stimuli when Saturday evening’s “Classical Hits” concert got under way in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre with that very same overture, conducted on this occasion by James Judd – Andrew Joyce’s opening ‘cello solo and his duetting with section colleague Ken Ichinose did full justice to the example set by those aforementioned illustrious predecessors – and the rest of the overture literally went like a train, taking time out in between excitements for the pastoral pleasures of shepherd’s pipes and birdsong. Michael Austin and Kirstin Eade most beguilingly did the honours as shepherd and songbird respectively, causing me to fall in love with the music all over again. The rest (not forgetting the Lone Ranger!) is, as they say, history!

A pity that the opportunity wasn’t taken to insert a home-grown classical hit in such a programme – any of David Farquhar’s Ring Round the Moon dances surely qualify with flying colours by now – but at least European hegemony was challenged by Aaron Copland’s exuberant, so out-of-doors Rodeo (well, even rugby stadiums are practically indoors, now!), four foot-tapping “dance episodes” whose “Hoedown” concluding number brought forth at one stage a full blooded “YEE-HA!” from an audience member simply doing what his conductor had told him to do! Incidentally, I thought James Judd’s spoken comments welcoming us all to the concert and explaining aspects of each of the pieces throughout were just right – there was nothing patronizing nor over-modulated about what he said, but simply the conveyance of a message inviting us all to have lots of fun, with both listening and in one or two instances getting physically involved with the music-making!

In the light of such invitations from the conductor, I was half-expecting at least one or two adventurous souls to leap to their feet in the aisles during Offenbach’s famous “Can-can” from the Orpheus in the Underworld Overture – but perhaps Judd’s tempi were a shade too quick for comfort – a bit more weight and “point” to the rhythmic trajectories and textures might have otherwise tempted those who could have felt rushed off their feet at the music’s frenetic pace. However, no-one could complain regarding the delicious rhythmic subtleties wrought by the conductor and players during Johann Strauss Jnr’s Blue Danube Waltz – right from the pianissimo magic of its opening on the strings, over which sounded those so-familiar horn calls, one was simply entranced – and each episode of the dance, here, had its own particular brand of beguilement, the music’s “character” allowed plenty of variety throughout.

Mirroring Copland’s “Rodeo” Dances before the interval, the second half also included a more extended work, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture. Beloved of concert audiences world-wide because of its instant appeal, the piece still doesn’t “play itself” – and James Judd certainly didn’t allow a single moment of anything but committed, characterful and sharply-focused music-making, right from the opening wind chords (so rich, grainy and redolent of “once upon a time in a place called Verona”) to the full-throated passion of the string-saturated utterances at the piece’s climax. Along the way, we heard the most beautifully-shaped phrasings from both strings and winds in the piece’s first section, and plenty of sound and fury from brass and percussion throughout the conflict sequences. And the voicing of the “big tune” by the violas in unison with the cor anglais produced a sound to die for, as did the answering phrases from the other strings, sounded here with such breath-bated tenderness.

I loved the idea of introducing the often-played “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations with the piece that precedes it in the complete work, the lovely “W.N.” (the initials of Winifred Norbury) – Elgar, though happily married, obviously enjoyed the company and friendship of a number of women, some of whom are “enigmatically” represented in this set of variations. So we got the graceful G Major portrait of Winifred and her sister Florence in their beautiful eighteenth-century house, before the music magically modulated down into a rich and noble E-flat, the key of “Nimrod”, a word-play on the German surname of Elgar’s publisher and friend August Jaeger, and supposedly enshrining discussions between the composer and his friend on the slow movements of Beethoven. As in the complete work, the grace and charm of “W.N.” became the perfect foil for the profundity of the noble “Nimrod”.

After this Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries was a near-perfect choice, even if I always feel somewhat cheated in the concert-hall when the “Hoyotoho! Hoyotoho!” isn’t there, though for people not familiar with the music in an operatic context it obviously doesn’t matter. I did wonder whether there might have been a spontaneous irruption of Valkyrie-like shouts from some off-duty Valkyrie in the audience carried away by the excitement of the moment! Had I been the concert organizer I would have been tempted to try and “plant” a few such people (dramatic sopranos in mufti!) in antiphonal places in the gallery, just for the sheer fun of it! This was a swift and lightish performance throughout, James Judd keeping his forces “airborne” right to the end, unlike some of the weightier realizations of famous Wagnerians like Hans Knappertsbusch, whose concert performances on record of the last few bars of the work have to he heard to be believed!

And so we came to the orchestra’s final programmed offering, a spirited rendition of the younger Johann Strauss’s Polka “Thunder and Lightning”, Judd positively exhorting his audience to “make a noise”, which we did, albeit a little inhibitedly. It did the trick, however, as conductor and players rewarded our efforts with one of the classic encores from the famous Viennese “New Year’s Day” concerts, the elder Johann Strauss’s most famous work, the Radetsky March, during which, to everybody’s delight, the conductor “directed” the audience’s clapping, taking particular care to secure the correct dynamic levels for each sequence! The item brought a most successful concert to a bubbling and exuberant conclusion, an antidote for a blessed couple of hours to the dreadful weather which we encountered when making our way home. One wonders which of the tunes we heard during the evening would have made “top of the pops” amongst the satisfied patrons! Thank you, James Judd and the NZSO!

Going for it at St.Andrew’s – Te Kōkī Trio

Posted on 06/09/201520/09/2015 by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Te Kōkī Trio

Music by BEETHOVEN, CLARA SCHUMANN and RAVEL

Martin Riseley (violin)
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Jian Liu (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace,

Sunday, 6th September

This was a mighty concert experience – here were three musicians bent upon drawing all that they could out of the music and of themselves, resulting in performances of great excitement and intensity. The thrills and spills that inevitably came with such an approach simply added to the visceral nature of the experience, so that, at the end, we all felt we’d seen and heard something alive and real.

In making these opening remarks I’ve no wish to draw any comparisons with any other concerts I’d recently been to, all of which had their own particular qualities and delights. It’s just that, right from the opening measures of the Beethoven Trio with which the Te Kōkī Trio began their concert we were engaged, cheek-by-jowl, with the intensity of it all, right from that first, forceful opening chord. And while Jian Liu’s piano playing was spectacular in its adroitness and velocity, my ear was caught in particular by the detail of the varied dynamic observations and interactions between the players, all patently “listening” to one another, delighting in the observance of the first-movement repeat, and plunging us into a development featuring both dynamic irruptions and lovely harmonic explorations, beautiful colours glowing through the sounds.

The slow movement’s opening brought to mind a number of like themes from the composer’s piano sonatas, a beautifully languid contrasting episode begun by the ‘cello and joined by the violin working its continued magic before the piano took over the reins once more – a subsequent minor-key variation became very orchestral in these players’ hands, after which the piano returned with a more decorative recap of the opening, before a lovely pizzicato-quiet chordal ending. These players then truly relished the scherzo’s high spirits, with its skipping rhythms and strong accents, the performance generating incredible momentum in places (almost a precursor of the Op.135 String Quartet’s near-manic scherzo), tempered by occasional “drone” effects, and a brief, but attractively lyrical “swaying” trio.

That Haydnesque leaping piano figure at the beginning of the finale set the tone for what was to follow – energy, great good humour and lots of surprises (even a suggesting of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody at a couple of points!). The development section involved even more skin and hair flying in places, tempered by more sostenuto string passages – just for a bit of a breather! As for the surprise modulation towards the end – one can imagine the contemporary astonishment this would have caused (“Fit for the madhouse!” exclaimed Carl Maria Von Weber, at one of Beethoven’s similar symphonic divergences), this was tossed off with such easeful nonchalance, that it was the return to the home key which brought forth from us the grins and knowing winks – with the players’ hands and fingers flying over keyboards and fingerboards alike, the music roared to its joyous conclusion.

Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio seemed at the outset very much modelled upon her husband Robert’s manner, the work’s opening theme sombre and tense in true “Schumannesque” style. But thereafter it was Mendelssohn I kept on being reminded of throughout the opening movement, albeit with rather more adventurous modulations – the performers responded to the assured string-writing with strength and focus, the ‘cello often taking the lead, and the piano part never over-dominant (as one might have thought would be the case, from a composer regarded as one of the finest pianists in Europe). A wistful, piquant Scherzo followed, the rhythm rather like a dotted-note waltz with a Scotch snap, somewhat “teashop” in manner – I liked the group’s way with the Trio’s hesitant angularities, and how the string lines were floated so gracefully overhead.

Again, the finale’s sombre, somewhat anxious opening melody recalled Robert, the cello playing counterpointing the violin’s and piano’s presentation of the theme, before the piano picked up the tonal weight of the music and launched into a fugal passage, most convincingly “grown” from what had come before – the players really dug into the textures, before the piano again took the lead, returning to the opening, catching once again the music’s sobriety, but allowing a second subject some Mendelssonian grace and charm. These musicians also knew how to generate physical excitement, throughout a coda which gathered together and built up a mood of defiant certainty and even triumph at the end – a most attractive work, as presented here.

Rarely has one composer so openly acknowledged another’s influence on a specific work as Ravel did of Saint-Saens regarding his Piano Trio. The younger composer greatly admired his older compatriot’s resourceful use of the differing qualities of each individual instrument, and strove to emulate his example. Unlike many of his contemporaries such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok and Prokofiev, all of whom found the Piano Trio medium posed too many difficulties, Ravel was determined to tackle its challenges. He planned the work well in advance, and at one stage told a friend that he had “finished the Trio, except for its themes”! – which meant that he had worked out the piece’s architecture and structure before focusing on the actual content.

Right from the beginning there could be no doubt as to the identity of the composer – such a distinctive sound-world, however in thrall the latter might have been to anybody else’s example! Jian Liu’s magical playing of the “Basque” theme straightaway evoked Ravel’s characteristic other-worldliness, the strings in octaves adding strands of atmosphere to the ambience while keeping the textures tightly-focused. Even the tumble-down agitations had a light, feathery quality, as did the beautifully floated second subject, begun by the violin and limpidly accompanied by the other instruments – so lullaby-like, ethereal and tender. The players brought out the music’s ritualistic beauty, a dream-like ceremony, underlined by magical arpeggiations from the piano – gestures of transformation by wonderment! And, the movement’s end was pure enchantment, with sostenuto strings singing over softly chiming piano notes – the music here almost bewitching itself.

A playful, piquant scherzo movement alternated between surging impulses and more-or-less even-keeled trajectories throughout, the title Pantoum, somewhat obliquely referring to a type of Malayan poetry used by Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, rendered by Ravel in terms of musical structure (too hard to grasp for a bear of little brain such as I!) But the sounds! – by turns colourful flecks and scraps of phrases, and then exuberantly sweeping dance-steps in 3/4 time, followed a wonderful central section where firstly the piano, then the strings fitted themselves into the same rhythmic pattern with a graceful 4/2 chorale-like melody. What freedom! – what colour! – and what abandonment in the performance!

And what a contrast with the following Passacaille, Jian Liu’s deep-throated piano-only opening building gradually to a rich and ritualistic outpouring of dignified emotion from all three instrumentalists, before the two string-players were left to take the music back to the depths from whence it came, handing the sombre lines back to the piano for a kind of return-to-the-source conclusion.

This having been buried deeply the finale straightaway found its antithesis in light and air, a wonderful kaleidoscope of impressions at the beginning, filled with those characteristic Ravelian impulses of colours and distinctive ambiences. From these beginnings the musicians drove the sounds unerringly through episodes of confluence and contrast – in places, tremendous attack from both Martin Riseley and Inbal Megiddo, along with great and forthright playing from Jian Liu. We thrilled, for instance, to those ringing mid-movement declamations from the keyboard, and were nonchalantly disarmed by the most beautifully murmured string trills, their dovetailing building up once again to some tumultuous tumblings of energy and well-being that carried us along in a Rimbaud-like “savage parade”.

At the end we were overwhelmed by a sense of these three musicians having risked all to bring about the music’s fruition, and triumphed – a great experience!

Aural (and visual) feast from Stroma at the Wellington City Gallery

Posted on 30/08/201517/09/2015 by Peter Mechen

Stroma, Wellington’s contemporary music ensemble, presents
INTERIORS

Music by Alison Isadora, Michael Norris, Jeroen Speak and Jack Body

Stroma
Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Wellington City Gallery,
Civic Square, Wellington

Sunday 30th August, 2015

Contemporary music ensemble Stroma performed at the Wellington City Gallery, in a space flanked on three sides by images created by photographer Fiona Pardington, whose exhibition “A Beautiful Hesitation”, brought an additional resonant and interactive context to the “sounded out” work of the composers. As the images suspended objects in time for us to register our thoughts and feelings about them, so too did the music seek to impinge its sound-impulses upon our sensibilities and memories – each a process of entrapment, display, re-evaluation and judgement, fascinatingly juxtaposed.

Stroma’s artistic director Michael Norris might well have been making reference to the visual exhibition as much as to his own work in the concert, when he wrote in his programme note regarding music and human memory, and how it depends on “both the long-and short-term storage and recall of “aural echoes” of past events which might have occurred in the recent ….or distant past….”. It’s a view of the process that accords with Fiona Pardington’s idea of photography’s power “to suspend time and interrogate our memories”.

On the programme was a world premiere – Jeroen Speak’s Eratosthene’s Sieve, written last year (2014) while the composer was the Creative New Zealand/Jack C.Richards Composer-in-Residence at Te Koko New ZEaland School of Music – and two other relatively recent works, Alison Isadora’s 2014 Point of Departure, and Michael Norris’s 2012 Time Dance. The fourth work was written by Jack Body, his 1987 piece called Interiors, which, as can be seen, gave its name to the concert.

Alison Isadora’s Point of Departure eponymously deserved its poll position in the concert, the music creating an “exotic” feeling of scene-setting for the listener’s delight and pleasure, with a string quartet’s distinctive timbres augmented by gong strokes and muffled drum-beats. The composer included lines from a work “Falling” by a Dutch Poet, Remco Campert, which I found singularly evocative:

In memory’s long fall
I seek the essential moment.
Above becomes beneath
and the earth comes swinging up.

She also pinpointed in her notes the “ferris wheel” idea, which, in the music is expressed as a feeling of ascending and then falling back, with throbbing pulsations underlining the sustained tones. So we got the occasional frisson of impulsive energy amid sostenuto likes, quite Debussy-like in effect, hence the slightly Oriental atmospheres generated, and an accompanying philosophic feeling that things are constantly in a kind of change, but return to their origins and begin, perhaps differently, all over again.

Amid the layerings and the explorations of these worlds in between, Alison Isadora’s disclosure of the circumstance of a colleague’s accidental death and how it coloured the piece’s second half added a whole new strata of response to the sounds for us, and deepening the ritualistic sense of it all – the percussive effects (snare-like drum beats and wood-block sounds were stinging, disruptive phrase-end punctuations which played their part in what the composer called the process of moving from anger to acceptance.

Michael Norris’s Time Dance, which followed evoked a markedly different kind of response from me, intrigued as I was by the prospect of the composer’s “deconstruction” of one of my favorite pieces of Baroque music, JS Bach’s Second Orchestral Suite (the one featuring the solo flute). The transformation was indeed a radical one – we were duly warned in the programme note as to the “subliminal” nature of our experience of the original piece’s essence!

This was a condensed concert version for piano quartet, presumably taken from Norris’s score for a 40-minute film “Time Dance”, a collaboration between the composer, choreographer/filmmaker Daniel Belton, and Good Company Arts. So we had four movements from the Suite, beginning with the Sarabande, followed by the Polonaise, Menuet and finally the Bandinerie. The Sarabande featured delicate piano figurations at the beginning, which strings turned into obstinate, enlivening the textures with pizzicati, the music resembling a mechanical device performing idiosyncratically, in places reverting to a “teashop” manner, with gestures resembling quasi-Viennese swooning.

Sustained arpeggiated notes from the piano began the Polonaise, the strings eagerly overlapping their figurations, the piano beautifully colouring each phrase’s flourish – the music’s phrases looped around, strung along, echoed and drew out, going into the stratospheric regions, giving us a sense of something suspended for all time. A contrasting response to this was provided by the Menuetto, the music busy, burrowing and motoric in the bass beneath sustained upper harmonies, the piano kaleidoscopically changing its chord-colours, and the phrases ending with upward-thrusting exclamations. The ‘cello kept the main rhythm going, but even its strength waned at the end as the music drooped and lay still.

The solo violin roused everybody in time for the Bandinerie with a cadenza-like sequence, everybody else joining in the ambient fun, the piano’s phrases and the strings’ tremolandi passages giving us a “lift” with their emphatic phrase-endings, and leading our sensibilities into and out of the thickets with their wonderfully unpredictable harmonic changes, everybody playing at their instruments’ extremities – as unpredictably, the music broke off into “other realms”, with harmonics and tremolandi from the strings, and curtain-opening-and-closing arpeggios from the piano. Bach may have been there subliminally, but I was too caught up in the here-and-now of it all to notice him!

Jereon Speak’s work Eratosthene’s Sieve was the evening’s world premiere, performed by an assorted ensemble of strings, flute, harp, accordion and percussion. The composer’s starting-point was the Greek philosopher Eratosthene’s “Sieve”, a device by which any prime number could be easily recognized, the music representing an attempt by its composer to similarly “sieve” his musical creations and constructions, and in the process discovering hitherto uncovered presences within this existing material.

Such a splendid array of instruments! – and how tellingly it all began, with breath (no tones) given by the accordion as a “gift of life” to the rest of the ensemble, whose initial pointillistic touches gradually became more animated with each succeeding wave of sound, the marimba, harp and vibraphone resonating magically. The music seemed to me to resemble an organic process at work (and, of course, maths, like music, is digitally, or step-wise organic), the coalescings seeking cues from their shared ambiences, and thus generating a definite sense of mutual expressiveness which informed each gesture.

Some Archimedian excitement then irrupted between ‘cello and percussion, stimulating what seemed like random, isolated responses from other instruments at first, all generating great excitement. The flute seemed to have a role of peacemaker towards the end of this sequence, as the energies dissipated, and a kind of “melting-down” of tones and their timbres, a “draining away” of energies, with the harp’s sustaining notes lengthening the shadows. Only the occasional flute scampering remained towards the end as a final act of impulse, the accordion’s breath evoking a dried leaf blowing across desolate desert sands at the piece’s end.

I was interested in the significance of the title Interiors given by Jack Body to his piece – he made many transcriptions of pieces of music from exotic places such as different regions of China, wanting in particular to capture some of the music from ethnic minority groups. These were undertakings that involved the making of “in situ” field recordings, and devising various instrumental “backdrops” to these recordings, to enhance the listener’s appreciation of the original music’s “interior”. The work we heard tonight involved three separate recordings of ethnic performances, two instrumental and one vocal. The largest instrumental group of the evening was on hand to contribute various augmentations of these sounds.

First was that of a long-ge, a Sichuan version of a Jew’s harp, the recorded instrument’s easy, loping rhythm reinforced by clarinet and flute and joined by violin and ‘cello, with the piano adding its own excitement to the mix. Then, in contrast with the dance rhythms, the pianist “activated” the piano’s interior, the percussionist “bowed” the vibraphone and various scintillations held time and its passing in abeyance, leaving long exhalations of melody to drift lazily away. A lovely contrast to this was afforded by a recording of three women from Guizhou singing a forthright melody, the instrumentalists supporting and colouring their singing lines with lovely, long-held notes, and continuing to play over the spoken exchanges between the singers recorded on the tape in between verses.

Something of this “anecdotal” re-enactment technique also coloured the final recording, that of an ensemble, no less, of lusheng, the instrument a six-pipe bamboo mouth-organ common in the south of China, and throughout South-East Asian in various forms. A plastic westernized version of one of these was used by one of the ensemble, as the other instrumentalists supplied various counterpoints to the mouth-organ ensemble, and occasional hand-clapping, adding to the festive character of the piece – and we in the audience enjoyed (and joined in with) a delicious and spontaneous-sounding bout of giggling on the tape after the music finished! What a concert!

Cathedrals and landscapes – delight and awe with the NZSO

Posted on 28/08/201502/09/2015 by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
CATHEDRAL OF SOUND
Sibelius and Bruckner

SIBELIUS – Violin Concerto in D Minor Op.47
BRUCKNER – Symphony No.8 in C Minor (original version)

Baiba Skride (violin)
Simone Young AM (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 28th August, 2015

Sibelius and Bruckner on the same programme? – bracing cocktails of icy spring water, followed by restorative draughts of schnapps, or, perhaps, aromatic coffee? (that is, to say, their musical equivalents!)……..an intriguing prospect, one that didn’t arise the last time Simone Young was in New Zealand to conduct Bruckner with the NZSO. Paired with his mighty Fifth Symphony on that occasion was the music of Mozart, Bruckner’s fellow-countryman. The choice of the two composers seemed impeccable, logical and simple.

This time the works were Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and Bruckner’s even more imposing Eighth Symphony – and what was more, Simone Young was to present the original version of the Bruckner, the first time it had been given in this country. Interestingly enough, each of the two works, for all their inherent differences, had birthing difficulties, both undergoing extensive revisions at the hands of their respective composers, though under vastly different circumstances.

Sibelius’s original work was performed, none too successfully, and then withdrawn by the composer, who altered the work greatly, in particular simplifying the difficulties of the solo part. A year later, the work was freshly performed, and was received with enthusiasm, this revised score being the one which is used by performers to this day. (Incidentally, the original version – fascinating to listen to – has been recorded on the BIS label.)

In Bruckner’s case, the composer’s agony began even before his new work was performed – after finishing the symphony in 1887 he was downcast at the response to the score from the same conductor, Hermann Levi, who had achieved such a success with the composer’s Seventh Symphony. Declaring in a note to the composer that he found the music “impossible”, Levi suggested “a reworking” of the piece, and Bruckner, ever willing to comply, spent until 1890 revising the work, which, however, had to wait a further two years before its first performance in Vienna, in 1892.

If never the popular success that was its predecessor, the Eighth Symphony in its revised form is today frequently performed, though a handful of conductors (Young is one of them) have insisted on championing the original version. The differences are too numerous to discuss in a review of this size, though there are instantly noticeable features which demarcate the two editions – the ending of the first movement (blazing in the original, but deathly hushed in the revised version), the trio section of the scherzo (no harps in the original version, and with whole sections of the music recomposed in the revision), and the slow movement’s great climax (six cymbal crashes in the original version, reduced to a single stroke in the revision) – and so on.

Asked in interview why she preferred Bruckner’s original versions of his symphonies (she has recorded them all with her Hamburg Orchestra, to great acclaim), Young talked about these first attempts as “honest visions of a complex and very introverted man, whose first versions of the works were monumental structures, which some musicians of the time felt were impossible to cope with.” She also recounted the response of present-day players in different places to these original works, their enthusiasm and excitement regarding the challenges of being pushed out to extremes, particularly in this symphony, taking the opportunity to praise the NZSO’s work in rehearsal in these respects as well.

So we were set to witness great things, not the least when violinist Baiba Skride stepped out onto the platform to play the Sibelius with Simone Young, in front of the NZSO. I had heard the violinist a few years before, playing Tchaikovsky with the orchestra, and remembered a distinctive “way” she had with the concerto on that occasion – and so it was, in a different manner, with the Sibelius. She began the work in a rapt, inward way, her tone incredibly sweet and magically ‘floated”, her line with little of the nervous intensities or throbbing anxieties that we usually hear – instead, this seemed to be the voice of a soul communing with nature. A brief double-stopping intonation “edge” apart, her playing was free and pure, the touch as light as air, and the orchestral support (a lovely viola solo) properly restrained, dark and richly detailed.

Throughout the movement soloist and orchestra “played off” one another most engagingly, from moments of supporting songful utterances, to exhilarating hide-and-seek impulses, the violin dancing like a wood-sprite through the orchestral tree-trunks, laughter sounding amid the occasional baleful snarlings from darker places. The slow movement beautifully poeticized these soundscapes at the outset, except I found the horns became too insistent in places, the conductor’s bringing-out of the “middle textures” too much of a good thing, submerging the soloist’s heartfelt lines and overbalancing the textures. Still, the violinist was able to recapture the serenity of the music over the final pages, which were beautifully sounded.

More appropriate was conductor Young’s bringing out of those same middle voices in the polonaise-like finale, including the timpani, whose crisply-articulated figures added to the music’s exuberance – the soloist also really “dug in” here, giving the music a kind of “dancing on an ice-floe” character, while the orchestra’s nature-sounds literally buzzed and rumbled all about her – I loved the muted horns’ feisty “buzzings”, in particular! And what great blazing-up of orchestral weight there was mid-movement! – as if all nature was joining in the dance! I particularly enjoyed Baiba Skride’s crystalline upward runs, the final note of each ascending impulse “pinged” with such exuberance and joy!

While Skride didn’t perhaps “command” her instrument with the absolute totality of a Janine Jansen (whom we had heard earlier in the year), I thought her performance no less committed to the music and as fully attuned to its particular character in a pleasingly individual way. The music and playing certainly cleared our musical sinuses in preparation for the copious draughts of symphonic argument that were to follow, courtesy of Anton Bruckner and his greatest symphony.

Having lived for some time with Simone Young’s Hamburg recording of this piece in its original form, I knew something of what to expect from her – she had spoken in her interview of a previous era of Bruckner interpretations featuring “heavier, more laden performances”, and how she had worked to energize and lighten those textures in her own readings. Such was the case here – with every phrase, one sensed the music moving in a purposeful, far-sighted, and clearly-focused manner, intently set upon goals which would take the time they needed to be achieved, and no more. One noticed throughout the first movement the perfectly-graded dynamics, the ebb and flow of impulse and the sense of some vast scheme unfolding as it should.

And what a splendid sound the orchestra made! If Simone Young was right, then the NZSO’s recent excursions into Wagner’s music with the recently-departed Music Director Pietari Inkinen were here paying off most satisfyingly. Though not producing quite as “rounded” a sound-fabric as one might hear on recordings from Vienna or Berlin or Amsterdam from the great resident orchestras in those places, the players seemed to be committing every fibre of their being to delivering what their conductor wanted – a warm, rich, but always transparent sound, through which plethora of tones all the instruments could “speak”. In any performance of any Bruckner symphony the brass need to be out-and-out heroes – and so it was here, with two full rows of players (including a group playing those beautiful instruments we know as “Wagner-tubas”) making sounds which brought all the magnificence of Bruckner’s scoring to glorious life for our wide-eared and open-mouthed pleasure.

So it was that the first movement mightily ran its course, Young never making overmuch of any great upheaval, nor lingering too fulsomely upon any contrastingly lyrical sequence, but keeping the underlying pulse of the giant organism throbbing (despite dropping her baton at one point in the excitement!) – in this way, the sudden outburst at the movement’s end (which Bruckner later excised, and over which circumstance the otherwise excellent programme note was misleading) seemed like a naturally-expressed on-going expression of defiance, a “serving of intent” for what was to follow. Of course, straight away, this was the scherzo, perhaps Bruckner’s mightiest among other titanic utterances, a true “gods at play” display of divine exuberance. This was the movement which “led me into” the work in my student days, and which never fails to stir the blood most satisfying.

Bruckner later thought better of some of his bolder harmonic shifts in his rewriting, and of the exuberant extent of his hammering ostinati patterns, some of which he cut from the scherzo’s main body. But he also reworked most of the trio section (I heretically confess to a sneaking preference for the harps the composer added to the later version of this sequence – first loves are not easily let go! – though I appreciate that the use of those celestial tones at this point detracts from their heart-easing impact upon the slow movement’s yearnings….) which here represented a kind of unveiling of a statue of great beauty, its impact far-reaching and profoundly moving in an austere, even visionary way, amid the madness of the cosmic dance. Afterwards, what joy and abandonment there was, when the dance returned, with brass and timpani hurling their tones back and forth among the mountaintops.

But this was mere play compared with what followed – the symphony’s slow movement, the composer’s most heartfelt utterance to date in his creative career, more so, even, than his lament at Richard Wagner’s passing in the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony. Bruckner’s original conception has his own sensibilities on the rack in places, aspiring, hesitating, crying out, falling back and beseeching, before finally risking all and bringing his very being’s fibre into prominence in the grandest possible way (underlined by six mighty cymbal crashes!). Though his revision of the movement is tidier and less discursive, its spontaneously-wrought essence isn’t by comparison nearly as flavorsome, its relatively cumulative course more abstract than truly heartfelt – though, undoubtedly (as with all great music) there’s a “take from it what you will” dynamic very much for the picking of any listener.

Here, with Simone Young and the intrepid band, the music’s course unfolded as organically as any set of common impulses harnessed to a purpose – I was lost in admiration of the brass’s playing, and absolutely in thrall to the composer’s juxtaposing of the horns with the Wagner tubas, having it laid out before my eyes, so to speak – and with the rest of the orchestra as eager participants in the ritual of sound, creating the “cathedral” alluded to in the concert’s publicity. From Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s occasional solo violin strands, through individual and ensembles wind utterances, richly-wrought string passages and noble brass chorales to tumultuous tutti passages with everybody playing their hearts out, the performance made its way to the music’s summit, before basking in the afterglow of the journey’s achievement, during which a trio of horns (and later the Wagner tubas) exchanged long-breathed phrases by way of bringing forth one of the most sublime codas known to symphonic music of any era – such a privilege to be able to sit in the hall with those musicians during that special moment in time and listen to this music being realized so beautifully.

However, this wasn’t an “unfinished” symphony – and the finale burst in, carrying all before it, the timpani sounding off like gunshots in response to the opening brass fanfares. In many ways this is the most demanding movement of the symphony as it’s so discursive and wide-ranging – heroic, romantic, pastoral, anguished, tender, ruminative, in fact every mood jostling for a place in the scheme of things. Simone Young gave the different strands enough leeway to be able to express their concerns while keeping the music’s momentum firmly set upon the symphony’s great concluding peroration, asking for and receiving full-blooded responses from the players right through to the work’s final shouts of homecoming and fulfillment. At the end the audience’s reception accorded conductor and orchestra whole-hearted and richly-deserved acclaim and appreciation.

The NZSO is repeatedly proving itself as an orchestra which delivers what’s required for such big occasions – and now that Young has left Hamburg to pursue a freelance conducting career, we wish her continued success, while hoping that she includes this country as a regular port of call, particularly as there are several more Bruckner Symphonies whose first editions await their premieres in this particular part of the world. She and the NZSO would on Friday evening have certainly put a girdle around the earth along which the composer’s shade, from his resting-place in Austria, would have danced in joy.