Exhilarating and musicianly recital by senior NZSM students

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St. Andrews Lunchtime Concert Series

Duo Cecilia – Lucy Gijsbers (cello), Andrew Atkins (piano)

Camille Saint-Saëns: Sonata for cello and piano in C minor (1st movement)
Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996): Sonata for cello and piano No. 2, Op. 68 (movements 1 and 2)
Claude Debussy:  L’Isle Joyeuse for solo piano
Astor Piazzolla: Le Grand Tango for cello and piano

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 9 April, 12:15 pm

Duo Cecilia plunged into the opening Saint-Saëns sonata of this concert with a riveting fortissimo
attacca that immediately had everyone sitting up in their seats. This impassioned Latin fire blazed through the initial section with unrelenting fervour, then was beautifully contrasted by the following calmer piano episode, where the melodic writing for the lower cello register saw Lucy Gijsbers’ rich, sweet tone sing through with wonderful artistry. The two musicians clearly shared a common vision for
the movmeent and its many moods, and mostly moved as one. But in the most energetic fortissimo sections, even Gijsbers’ impressive power could not speak through the volume that Atkins produced from a concert grand piano open on full stick. This was a balance problem that continued to recur from time to time throughout the programme, particularly in fortissimo passages.

A careful preliminary sound check in the St. Andrew’s space could have taken care of this, and should not have been overlooked. These younger musicians will have to perform in all manner of spaces throughout their careers, and it is an important issue to come to grips with right from the start.

Weinberg was a Soviet composer of Polish-Jewish origin. From 1939 he lived in the Soviet Union and Russia and lost most of his family in the Holocaust.

Andrew Atkins explained that the composer was interned in a concentration camp until he was released after Stalin’s death, and that this was the first New Zealand performance of Sonata no.2. The movements played, while not specifically programmatic, were full of the moods and idioms that one associates with a life of loss, repression and persecution.  The soulful, poetic opening, with its unsettled tonalities, moved into more anguished dissonance as the movement progressed, but eventually resolved into fading resignation ……….

The second movement opened with a beautifully shaped cello melody voicing the pathetic despair of a soul without hope, yet one still able somehow to discern a faint glimmer of light on the horizon. The following repetitive pizzicato phrase sounded like a finger tapping helplessly on the door to freedom, but it was taken up by the more passionate and demanding voice of the dissonant piano that eventually passed it back to resolve in a few final fading pizzicati. The writing was extraordinarily evocative throughout, and was given a highly moving and sensitive interpretation by Duo Cecilia. I hope they will in due course be able to perform the work as a whole, and perhaps also give voice to more of this composer’s work.

Andrew Atkins explained that the next piece came from one of the happiest periods in Debussy’s life, and that L’Isle Joyeuse was written on the honeymoon of his second marriage. It opens with scurrying handfuls of notes that sweep across the keyboard like glittering reflections over rippling waters. There is a lovely melodic line traced through all the shimmering texture, but unfortunately Atkins opted for a tempo that simply swallowed this up, playing at a speed well ahead of the French or French Canadian recordings I’ve heard. But the contrasting gentle interludes fared better and conveyed a deep contentment. The vigorous, animated conclusion rounded out a reading that was, overall, very well executed.

The Piazzolla work, though named Le Grand Tango, has to my ear only a rather cerebral connection with the familiar idioms of the dance floor. The opening bustle of notes from both instruments does lead into a more melodic piano section, and more recognisable tango dance rhythms are discernible through the handfuls of pianist’s notes. But then a gentler more melodic central section captures an almost soulful mood of intimate courtship which was beautifully expressed by the duo. Finally a sudden shift takes us into sharply angular dance rhythms and dissonant tonalities which they attacked with suitable vigour, racing headlong into the frankly noisy closing section where rampant lust is clearly let loose!

It was an exhilarating finish to a most accomplished and musicianly recital from two very competent players. It is a pity it was so poorly attended, though the sudden descent of Wellington’s long Indian Summer into miserable drizzle and low cloud could well have had a lot to do with that.

 

Jeffrey Grice – “interprète extraordinaire” at the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music presents:
Piano recital by Jeffrey Grice

Gounod / Liszt – Hymne à Sainte Cécile
Lucien Johnson – To the sea (Shimmer – Scuttle – Still)
Debussy – Estampes
Jenny McLeod – Tone Clock Piece no 5 (Vive Messiaen)
Lilburn – Sonatina No.2 / Ravel – Sonatine
Chopin – 24 Preludes Op. 28

Jeffrey Grice (piano)

Adam Concert Room, NZ School of Music,

Kelburn, Wellington

 Monday 7th April, 2014

Christchurch-born Jeffrey Grice studied with Janetta McStay and Brian Sayer at Auckland University, before winning a bursary in 1976 to study in France with Yvonne Loriod and Germaine Mounier. Since that time he has mostly lived in or been closely associated with France, though he’s kept his antipodean connections humming with regular advocacy of new works by both Australian and New Zealand composers.

Grice’s recent Adam Concert Room recital demonstrated those sympathies amply, with performances of two works which had in the past been premiered by the pianist – Lucien Johnson’s To the Sea, and Jenny McLeod’s Tone-Clock No.5 (Vive Messiaen) – as well as a more “established” piece by a New Zealand composer, Douglas Lilburn’s Sonatina No.2.

Well might this recital have been called “Living Echoes” with such things in mind – but the remainder of the programme’s items took on much the same qualities of freshness and immediacy throughout what I considered to be an evening’s remarkable music-making. One had an almost palpable sense of the pianist spontaneously reliving each of the composers’ actual creative processes, so that the music leapt, burst, burgeoned, floated, trickled or resounded from the sometimes metaphorical music-pages as if for the first time.

I imagined that what we listeners experienced was akin to the kind of playing that would have proliferated in an earlier age which more readily accepted, and, indeed, expected Beethoven’s famous attributed dictum – “the idea counts more than its execution” – to be observed in performance. Not that Grice’s actual execution of the notes was in any way deficient or insufficient in quality to realize the music – in fact, the reverse was the case, with technical gestures and processes seemingly wrought by the music at every stage, rather than simply “applied” from without. It was playing which repeatedly made one ask “why?” and “why not?”, instead of “how?”

Sensing that words are beginning to fail me, here, I shall move quickly onto the content of the actual program, some of which has already been touched upon. Whether by accident, instinct or design, Grice’s first item brought us face-to-face with a composer whose skill as a performer was regarded by many as that of one of the greatest of recreative artists of all time, Franz Liszt.

Perhaps one’s initial reaction to the latter’s “arrangement” of Charles Gounod’s violin-and-piano piece Hymne à Sainte Cécile might well be along the somewhat reproving lines of “Gounod, hi-jacked by Liszt!” – but as the energies and intensities of Liszt’s elaborations upon Gounod’s music expanded and flourished, a kind of radiance began to cast its glow over the sounds and associated resonances, a veritable beatification of the rather plain original, proclaiming the process to be the work of a genius.

I thought Grice’s playing all-encompassing in its range of expression generated not only on the saint’s, but on the composers’ behalf, from the “charged” softly-brushed fingerwork of the prayerful opening, to the orchestral grandeur of the concluding declamations. Gounod himself may have never heard the work in its Lisztian form, but he would surely have approved of its new-found expansiveness and enlargement of expression.

A marvellous contrast of mood came with New Zealand -born, sometimes French-domiciled jazz composer Lucien Johnson’s three-part work from 2007 To the Sea, with its three subtitled parts Shimmer, Scuttle, Still. The opening brought both distant and more immediate kinds of sonorities between the hands, trills and repeated notes in the treble and shifting shadow-chords in the bass, the whole enlivened occasionally by scintillations of light and energy,

Scuttle was more insistent, its agitations expressed through tremolandi and ostinati-like figurations, the patternings further energizing the harmonies and and textures, with a particularly volatile, free-wheeling right hand bringing plenty of surface excitement to the soundscape. Dramatic then, indeed, was the change to Still, everything at once cut adrift amid cool, spacious chords and occasional widely-spaced leaps, rather like fish suddenly jumping from still waters – the delicious cluster-chords amid the ambient spaces gently coloured the music’s evocations of timelessness.

One could go on enumerating the manifold delights of the recital’s remaining performances and finish up with a lengthy treatise somewhat beyond this review’s scope, one perhaps taking longer to read than the pianist took to play the music! With the exception of Grice’s revelatory presentation of the Chopin Op.28 Preludes, over which I need to hover and ponder and wonder anew at the recreative daring of it all, I can content myself, however regretfully, with snatches of impressions of the Debussy, Jenny McLeod, Lilburn and Ravel items.

Debussy’s Estampes was a miracle of different evocations, the first of the three parts, “Pagodes”, delivered rapidly and mistily, seeming almost overpedalled in effect at first, but making its point all too clearly by comparison with the arresting surge of focused tone from what one imagined to be the largest of the gamelan instruments the piano was imitating. In “La Soirée dans Grenade”, the “Habanera rhythm carried all before it, but with the utmost flexibility of line and while maintaining a sultry, hypnotic atmosphere – Grice managed the mutterings and impetuous scamperings of the ad.lib. guitar passages with perfect ease and fluidity. Finally, with “Jardins sous la Pluie”, the playing resembled an impressionistic blur, the lightest of touches producing an almost alchemic effect, with pianistic detail brushed in amid the fantastic flourishes – exhilarating!

Jenny McLeod’s “Messiaenic” tribute from the fifth piece of her Tone Clock series had an engaging “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” aspect, the piece coming almost straight out of the French composer’s “Catalogue d’ Oiseaux”, and having a wonderful clamour alternating with sequences evoking nicely “charged ” silences. There were connections echoing connections when Grice played a piece by Douglas Lilburn, McLeod’s composition teacher, to follow –  this was Lilburn’s Sonatina No.2, a work whose exquisitely-voiced evocations readily bore out the pianist’s contention that Lilburn subliminally echoed impulses found in Ravel’s Sonatine – Grice played for us a particular figuration which Lilburn seemed to have uncannily “copied” from Ravel, in spirit if not exactly in letter.

In Grice’s characteristically fleet-of-finger performance of the French work, I confess to missing, in the first movement, that vein of melancholy which peers out as do eyes from behind a glittering mask, in much of Ravel’s music. The remaining two movements were, however, beautifully paced, the pianist again favouring a very “ambient” keyboard texture, whose focus cleared for the more forceful animations, with magnificently cascading passages (Grice had a second “go” at the opening of the final headlong plunge, which meant that, in the frisson of this moment we unexpectedly got double the pleasure!)…..

As for the Chopin Preludes, it took only a few seconds of the opening to indicate that the pianist was to give us something special and distinctive, his shaping of the piece’s dynamics alive with possibilities, and the upward-thrusting arpeggiated rhythms so impulsively and freely figured. Both Hans von Bülow and Alfred Cortot somewhat notoriously “named” each of the Preludes, doing literally what interpreters of this music worth their salt would do anyway, however subjectively or otherwise – draw from each piece a poetic, theatrical or dramatic idea which fuses performance and interpreter with these representations of the music’s essence.

It seemed to me that Grice took absolutely nothing for granted, neither notes nor pauses between, as if he was freshly rediscovering the pieces and expressing his delight in the process of engagement with them. Resisting the temptation to revisit my pleasure at every single one of his individual explorations, I’ll regretfully content myself with a handful of instances, remarking firstly, however, on the spontaneously-wrought fusion of many of the pieces, progressions which seemed perfectly organic and natural as they occurred.

To be absolutely truthful, singling out individual Preludes for comment from this performance feels akin to creating a Chopinesque equivalent of Wagner’s “bleeding chunks” from his operas, so organic was Grice’s thinking throughout the work. Still, I can’t abide the thought of not sharing my delight in moments such as the “dying fall” of the repeated chords in the well-known No.7 in A Major – Grice obviously siding with Cortot’s description of the music involving “memories floating like perfumes”, rather than Bülow’s “Polish dancer”. And the drama of contrast created by the following agitato suggests also Cortot’s description of an “internalized” tempest, something quite raw and gut-wrenching.

Grice brought to every piece a similar kind of “edge”, suggesting some kind of lurking fear or disturbed awareness of chaos or oblivion – even the relatively placid Preludes seemed “haunted” by either where the music had been, or what was to follow. By the time we came to the final trio of pieces we were “well-tenderised” by the somewhat fraught nature of the various exchanges, with darkness either predominating or framing the more lucid episodes. So the G Minor No.22’s sombre, agitated angularities seemed “relieved” by the following F Major’s gently-flowing fluidity, the mood reminiscent of parts of Liszt’s “Suisse” book from his “Années de Pèlerinage”.

However, repose was banished by the set’s finale, appropriately marrying the Allegro appassionato marking with the key of D Minor, and with Grice’s total involvement in the “ordered chaos” of it all underlined by the rhythmic counterpointing of his feet on the floor in front of the pedals. A great downward cascade of notes at the piece’s end and a dark, brutal sounding of the note D brought the piece, the set and the recital to a properly sobering finish….after we gobsmacked folk in the audience had taken a few moments to draw breath once again, we were able to justly acclaim the achievement of both performer and composer – truly and deeply memorable!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Impressive performances of Brahms choral works, including the German Requiem from Kapiti Chamber Choir

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Brahms: Nänie, Op.82
Alto Rhapsody, Op 53
A German Requiem, Op 45

Kapiti Chamber Choir and orchestra, conducted by Eric Sidoti, with Ellen Barrett (contralto), Janey MacKenzie (soprano), Roger Wilson (baritone)

St. Paul’s Church, Paraparaumu

Sunday, 6 April 2014, 2.30pm

A full church greeted choir, soloists and orchestra for a very rewarding concert of Brahms’s choral music.  It was a very warm afternoon (Paraparaumu reached 24deg.) which was hard on the performers.  Nevertheless, they responded magnificently.

The first work was new to me, a piece written in memory of a friend of Brahms.  The title means ‘song of mourning’.  It had an appealing orchestral introduction, in which an oboe melody was particularly notable.  The choir sopranos then entered quietly; it seemed to take them a few moments to settle in. A gradual crescendo emphasised the words of the poem by Friedrich Schiller – all of the German pronounced exceedingly well and clearly by the choir.  There were tricky chromatic passages to be negotiated, on the whole successfully.  The men’s tone was smooth, but lacked character much of the time.  However, in the main the attractive work was tastefully and carefully performed.

Having had Schiller, we now turned to the other great German poet, Goethe.  The setting for contralto, male chorus, and orchestra is a moving, even heart-rending piece.  The arresting orchestral opening sends shivers down the spine, while the striking alto solo and the sombre orchestral accompaniment are richly Romantic, in the best sense of the word.

Throughout this and the following work, the flutes and oboe were particularly outstanding, but all the players and singers performed well. Ellen Barrett’s singing was beautifully controlled and impeccably phrased, although she employed a little too much portamento for my taste – but I daresay it was authentic for Brahms’s time.

The entry of the men was very well done; the rich harmonies and mellow yet soft tone were most satisfying.  The gorgeous ending on the words ‘sein Herz’ (his heart) left a feeling of nostalgia, yet completeness.

Ambitious it was for the choir to tackle Brahms’s Requiem, which is one of the major works in the choral repertoire, though not one of the really large ones.

The deliberate opening tempo was appropriate for the theme, and it was immediately apparent that great attention had been given to detail.  Words were excellent, tone mainly fine, and generally, intonation was good, although the occasional top note here and in the earlier works was not quite reached. Dynamics were well observed.

The choir had complicated fugues to sing in at least two of the movements, and in the 6th movement, ‘For here we have no continuing city’, the choir is in eight parts.

The choristers were obviously well-trained and secure; the orchestral horns were not so, but then they had a great deal to do, and I doubt it was easy playing.  All the orchestra worked hard, not least young trumpeter, Sarah Henderson.

The third movement, ‘Lord, make me to know mine end’ comprised  mainly a solo for baritone Roger Wilson.  Roger has sung this work many times; the printed programme reported that he first sang it in the Durham St. Methodist Church in Christchurch, and he dedicated his performance to the memory of the three organ builders who were killed in that building in the February 2011 earthquake.  I found I was sitting on the ‘wrong’ side of the church to hear him to the best effect; the space required for the orchestra meant that the soloists for this work were very much to one side.  However, any deficiency was not due to lack of clarity or tone from the singer.

The fugue for the choir at the end of that movement, ‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God’ is a very taxing sing, as I know from experience.  Of the various entries the clearest was from the sopranos – but the acoustic could not really cope with the complexities.

The beautiful chorus usually known in English as ‘How lovely are thy dwellings’ was captivating; the beautiful suspensions in the orchestral part were splendid, the cellos being particularly important. The men’s entry and accompanying part were sung with sensitivity and grace.

‘And ye now therefore have sorrow’ featured Janey MacKenzie singing strongly, and with great clarity of diction. A little more soft singing would have made her performance even more memorable.  The choir’s part in this movement, sung seated, was very grateful on the ear.  The beauty of Brahms’s writing on the words ‘As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you’ I always find very moving.

The sixth movement, ‘For here have we no continuing city’ (Roger, and Christchurch again?) features choir as well as the soloist.
Here, as elsewhere, the pizzicato from the cellos was very telling, having both accuracy and tone.  The choir excelled itself in the varying moods of both text and music.  There was plenty for the young trumpeter to do, and she did it well.  The words ‘O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory?’ were sung as detached notes, giving emphasis to the meaning.

The seventh movement, ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord’ had the woodwind giving a thrilling edge to the climaxes.  The soaring, rising melody on the words ‘their works do follow them’ (denn ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach) was supremely beautiful and peaceful, leaving the audience with a blessed experience indeed.

I learned that Helen Griffiths, violist, was responsible for getting together the 22-piece orchestra, as she has on many previous occasions.  The choir must be very grateful for her efforts, contacts and not least her persuasive powers.

The printed programme was well set out, and in case of the Requiem, it was very helpful to have not only have full translations but also the Biblical reference for each passage.  It was a nice touch to use Gothic script for the titles of the movements; the script would have been the norm in Brahms’s day.

I find that in reviewing last November’s concert by the choir I said: ‘It struck me that it was high time a district with the population of the Kapiti Coast had a proper performing venue; many towns and districts of smaller size have such a facility, e.g. Martinborough with its Town Hall.  Here, choral concerts are held in a church with an airfield opposite, while chamber music concerts are in a large hall designed primarily for indoor sports, where the audience have to sit on plastic chairs!’

I would reiterate that even more firmly now; a work of the size and complexity of the Brahms Requiem, incorporating an orchestra, deserves a much larger venue, with more spacious acoustics than St. Paul’s Church can offer.  I was told that this venue may not be available for much longer.  In that case, it emphasises the need for a proper performing venue in the district. Not only Martinborough, but Ngaio and Khandallah have their own Town Halls, the former having been built by Wellington City Council, not by a now-defunct local authority.  Upper Hutt has a splendid performance venue.

College halls are a possibility, but are unlikely to have comfortable chairs comparable to those in the church.  However, they would not be likely to have aeroplane noises or flapping blinds, either.

The abiding thoughts on the concert must not be about these factors, but about such wonderful invention on Brahms’s part, and such variety of composition, realised in an impressive performance from all concerned.

 

Eugene Gienger – Dakota Pianist – more feeling than fireworks…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eugene Gienger – Dakota pianist

Piano recital at St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace

BEETHOVEN – 32 Variations in C Minor / SOLER – 3 Sonatas

SCHUBERT – Fantasy in C Major (“Wanderer”)  / William WIELAND (b.1964) – Orpheus and Eurydice

LISZT – Après une lecture du Dante – Fantasia quasi Sonata (from Années de pèlerinage)

SOUSA (arr. Horowitz) – The Stars and Stripes Forever

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

Sunday, April 6th 2014

Eugene Gienger, an engagingly self-styled “Dakota Pianist” originally hails from Streeter, North Dakota, USA. According to his accompanying publicity he is the only pianist of renown to have emerged from the Dakota region, and can therefore be counted as a kind of “local boy made good”. An international performer, he has given recitals and concerto performances in the United States, Canada, Russia and Australia. He’s currently in New Zealand, running a “piano academy” in Karori, Wellington, for pre-school children, as well as (perhaps on a less formal basis) providing tuition and guidance for older students about to study the instrument at a tertiary level.

His traversal of a number of pieces reckoned to be among the most difficult in the romantic keyboard repertoire certainly gave ample opportunity for listeners at St. Andrew’s Church in Wellington to gauge the extent of his prowess as a pianist. It was, as the saying goes in pianistic circles, a “knuckle-breaker” of a programme, with things such as Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia cheek-by-jowl with Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata and Vladimir Horowitz’s celebrated pianistic “circus-act”, his transcription for keyboard of Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” March.

As well, not much respite was given by Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor, and a work receiving its New Zealand premiere, Orpheus and Eurydice, written by one William Wieland, a contemporary American composer. Amongst these more strenuous musical realizations, three charming jewel-like sonatas from the pen of Father Antonio Soler (a contemporary of Domenico Scarlatti) provided some decibel and figurative relief, for contrast’s sakes, obviously.

I came away from the recital appreciative of Mr.Gienger’s keyboard facility, but ultimately wishing he had chosen a larger proportion of repertoire for the concert which relied rather less insistently on sheer prestidigitation and more on philosophical content. There was no doubting that the pianist could actually “play” the notes throughout, though parts of both the Schubert, the Liszt, and the Horowitz Sousa arrangement needed to my ears a more transcendentally-driven approach for the music to really ignite around its edges and properly conflagrate. I’ve previously heard both the Liszt Dante Sonata and the Schubert Fantasia (also during the same recital), as well as, on a different occasion, the Sousa-Horowitz “live” in Wellington from pianists who could REALLY stoke the virtuoso fires – and as with the Schubert Fantasia, that kind of technical response is needed to unlock certain integral essences in this super-charged music.

Make no mistake,  I enjoyed Mr. Gienger’s playing immensely, but thought that some of the claims for his playing published in material available at the concert had a rather less exalted basis on this recital’s showing – for example, to quote a review saying of his Liszt-playing in another recital that “these interpretations stand side-by-side with the most acclaimed versions of the greatest pianists” didn’t for me accord with the performance of the “Dante” Sonata that we heard. Yes, the notes were there, and the more reflective moments of the work I thought had real poetry and seemed to convey a true sense of the ethos of renaissance conceptions concerning the afterlife – but the “hollow ring” of those tritones and dissonant harmonies throughout the introduction, the implied terror and despair at the thought of eternal damnation, was under-characterised, as was the frenetic nature of the chromatic theme representing the souls in hell.

In fact Gienger’s conception of the music seemed more wrought from immutable marble and stone than from fire and brimstone and volatile feelings – in its way a valid representation, a kind of abstraction (as is every realization of a score, of course) which in this case stood slightly apart from the in-one’s face coruscations associated with the piece. I still think a certain amount of “visceral devilment” needs to emanate from the music’s figurations and textures, some Lisztian bravura of the kind that Jian Liu’s playing of the work in a 2012 recital at the Ilott Theatre presented in abundance. In that performance, pianist, instrument and music seemed all to be “possessed”, whereas here, Gienger remained our “guide”, his playing seeming to me recounting (albeit with plenty of energy and commitment) rather than actually reliving Liszt’s remarkable Dante-esque visions.

I thought the pianist more successfully carried and maintained the virtuoso physicalities of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia – again, it wasn’t a barnstorming, sulphurously-lit performance (the composer famously and despairingly invoking the devil’s own assistance at a public performance of the work, which, alas, wasn’t forthcoming at the time!), but at least one of music certainly requiring a certain trajectory of energy in places. This force and girth Gienger was able to supply, even if he seemed to me to be taxed to his technical limits in places during the fugal finale – which circumstance in itself certainly seemed to give a kind of tension, a performing edge to the listening experience.

Earlier he’d nicely delineated the first movement’s terraced dynamics, giving the famous opening rhythmic figurations plenty of variety of voice, and summoning up a cumulative drive in places which had plenty of feeling of engagement with the music. He managed the magical transition to the “Der Wanderer” quotation with rapt wonderment, ushering in all of the writing’s entrancement and rapt, almost religious feeling. When the music’s texture fragmented in to what seemed like many voices, the pianist gave us lovely filigree work, realizing the toccata-like sequences and the reprise of the melody over a tremolando bass with equal aplomb.

With the scherzo that followed Gienger emphasized its somewhat angular charm, gradually working up a sufficient head of steam with which to launch those first portentous fugal statements that came to dominate the final section. Again, though I felt the playing throughout didn’t have the gleam and glint of truly infernal devilry, it generated its own trajectories and momentums towards a rousing finish. Earlier in the half we’d “warmed up” with Beethoven’s fascinating set of Variations in C Minor, which the pianist described as a set of etudes – an interesting way of regarding the music – and, after that, three enchanting sonatas by Father Antonio Soler, most winningly realized as examples of possibly very early music for the then-new forte-piano.

A kind of companion-piece to the Frank Stemper Sonata, which was played the previous week by Korean pianist Junghwa Lee, was another New Zealand premiere of a contemporary American work for piano – William Wieland’s six-part meditation upon the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The work seemed to divide opinion among the audience members I spoke with afterwards, but I thought the whole piece most interesting in conception and delivery – six vignette-like scenes which represented each part of the story. Mr Gienger was a most persuasive advocate of the music both as a speaker and as a player (the latter role befitting the dedicatee, of course!) and it wasn’t any fault of his that in a couple of places I found the story-sequences rather too abstracted, as opposed to other moments which were very obviously representational in intent. I wanted some of the events to receive more of their due from the music at certain points, rather as individual arias in opera suspend the action in order to enrich moments of high emotion or more vividly describe a scenario.

Nevertheless, there were marvellous evocations to enjoy, even if some of them passed all too quickly – I particularly liked the opening celebratory music depicting the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice (entitled “Bliss”), with its festive figurations and rustic dance impulses, and thought the sudden shift into a state of shock, horror and loss when Eurydice suddenly dies of a snake-bite extremely effective. The pianist’s fingers had to conjure up three different strands of feeling – a right-hand lament, a left-hand whose deep tones suggested the Underworld, and the toll of a bell in the middle of the keyboard suggesting the inevitability of fate.

A similar kind of transition occurred after Orpheus had played his lyre to win back Eurydice from Death’s clutches, but then lost her irrevocably during the ascent by turning and looking back at her. At that point the music suddenly shed its Lisztian radiance and snatches of renewed bliss, and plunged the soundscape into darkness with harsh, bitter tones, resolving at the end with the return of fate’s tolling bell. So, a vivid and characterful retelling of the ancient story, then, even if I did want certain sections to linger more and allow more expansiveness of response and feeling.

I do hope Mr Gienger will give us another recital some time, and that he concerns himself more with music of greater poetic and philosophic substance and manner – every piano-fancier will have her/his little list of “favourite things”, including, probably, Mr Gienger.  It will be interesting to see what he inclines towards after this……conjuring a name and an associated body of work from the air, I would suggest, say, Schumann?

Festival Singers under Berkahn explore baroque byways, a romantic Stabat Mater and a modern, jazz cantata

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Festival Singers conducted by Jonathan Berkahn

A Rising Tide – Easter Music, by Buxtehude, Bach, Lachner, Rheinberger, Ireland and Jonathan Berkahn

St Peter’s Church, Willis Street

Sunday 6 April, 2:30 pm

The concert was advertised as performing two works: a Stabat Mater by minor German composer, Josef Rheinberger, contemporary of Brahms and Bruch, and The Third Day by the conductor.

The works that accompanied the Stabat Mater in the first half were of a similar kind: organ and vocal pieces by Buxtehude, Bach, Lachner, and religious songs by John Ireland and Berkahn.

Lachner’s name probably rings faint bells as Franz was one of a Bavarian musical family, contemporary with Schubert and Schumann. This Introduction and Fugue for organ sounded as if he was a pupil of J S Bach, rather than a composer 30 years Beethoven’s junior.  Its virtue was a bold and plain opening, using the 16 foot stops, that switched abruptly to light flutes on the choir manual. The fugue subject was of the most elementary character which might well have served as an exercise for a beginning composition student to explore the mysteries of fugue, but it was followed by a more imposing sequence of cadences that announced its conclusion.

A setting by Berkahn of a religious poem by Wordsworth contemporary James Montgomery followed; in an attractive bass voice, Jamie Henare handled the hymnal melody graciously; though the accompaniment (by the composer) was at a somewhat primitive sounding electronic keyboard.

I’m familiar with some of Rheinberger’s organ music and a few choral pieces but was unaware of a Stabat Mater. I’m afraid this exposure seemed to reaffirm the judgment of history; it recalled nothing of Alessandro Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Pergolesi or Haydn, and certainly nothing of his 19th century colleagues like Rossini, Dvořák or Verdi (it is one of his Four Sacred Pieces). (I recall this choir singing Rossini’s version in 2009; in my review then, I thought the choir displayed a closer sympathy with the Catholic than the Protestant style of religious music).

This was sung in English, to a translation different from that in our programme leaflets. The translation did serve to remind the audience of the Church’s strange obsession with the most ghoulish details of the Christ story; though it was never formally a part of the Catholic liturgy, the Stabat Mater maintained its prominent place in the pattern of worship from the time of the poem’s composition in the 13th century, through its numerous musical settings down the ages.

So if verbal clarity might not have been a major concern in the choir’s rehearsal, other matters had careful attention: ensemble, intonation and style. Here, more than elsewhere, the small numbers of male singers was rather conspicuous in some lack of confidence. Nevertheless, there were several interesting features that the choir navigated well; one was a fugal section which lent the work greater variety and a certain dramatic impact.

Two organ pieces followed. Rafaella Garlick-Grice played Buxtehude’s ‘Ach Gott und Herr’ using stops with discretion, though I wondered whether her tremolo passages were appropriate. Then Berkahn played Bach’s ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden’, here making good use of the organ’s range, its striking contrasts between the Great and Choir manuals, the music, probably dating from Bach’s early years at Arnstadt, rather showing up, in contrast, the relatively limited inventiveness of Lachner and even of Buxtehude.

With Rafaella again at the organ the choir sang a setting by Ireland of ‘Greater love hath no man’, using solo voices from the choir, charming if a bit taxing in the higher register.

There was a ten minute pause as amplification equipment was set up for the accompaniment to The Third Day, which was introduced with an engaging Irish interlude led by flutist/guitarist Bernard Wells.

The Third Day, the text presumably compiled by the composer, deals with happenings before and on Easter Sunday, including Christ’s descent from the Cross and the reflections by Judas and Thomas on the implications of their actions.

Berkahn conducted from the keyboard, in this instance the keyboard of the accordion suspended from his shoulders (he pointed out that before the rise of the dubious profession of the full-time celebrity maestro, music was directed from the keyboard; sometimes it was by the principal violinist or concert master).

The other members of the jazz ensemble were guitarist Andrew James, bass guitarist Adam Meers and pianist Ruth James.

The music is in a delightful post-religious-rock-opera style, that no longer (I imagine) sounds blasphemous in the ears of believers; it uses the choir, soloists and the band in an easy, varied manner, and at a couple of points bass Jamie Henare made the most engaging entries. In the final exultatory section, in triple time, the world was put to rights with the cry ‘Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!’

The concert might have seemed very disparate in style and musical character, but the effect of this very contemporary, and singularly attractive cantata was to lighten the spirits of the audience, and to give perspective to the more sombre music of the first half, perhaps to enhance it in the memory.

 

Audience gives enthusiastic reception to splendid NZSO concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

‘Visions of Happiness’

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pietari Inkinen, with Mikhail Ovrutsky (violin)

Wagner: Siegfried Idyll, Op. 103
Korngold: Violin Concerto in D, Op.35
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no.4 in F minor, Op.36

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 5 April 2014, 7.30pm

What better composer to open the programme than Wagner, with conductor Pietari Inkinen fresh from conducting Wagner in Europe and Australia!  However, this was very different Wagner.  The Idyll was written as a birthday present for his wife, Cosima, in 1870.  (She wrote about it in her dairy, according to the printed programme!)  Not that a full symphony orchestra performed it for her to wake up to on the day; the composer wrote it for a group of 15 musicians, and gave it a full orchestration much later.

The lines were carefully delineated in this performance of the lush, romantic music.  The delicious woodwind writing was particularly notable.  All began in a calm, unhurried manner, horns and bassoons making a marvellous foundation for the strings, as did the pizzicato double basses.

Idyllic, indeed.  The exquisite first climax led to long, quiet passages before the major climax, with its lovely horn and woodwind solo melodies.  After a little more excitement the horns first and then the strings shimmered.  Stillness returned after the opening tune was reprised.   Just before the end, the horn and flute returned; all is then peace and tranquility.

This was a wonderful rendition, even if a little slow for my taste.  All the subtleties of the writing emerged, including the typically Wagnerian chromaticism, and some gorgeous suspensions.

Erich Korngold is a composer probably more associated with film music than with symphonic music, but as well as the latter, he wrote operas.  The orchestra was slightly smaller in the string sections for the concerto, but many more brass players were added, along with percussion.  This work, along with its predecessor and successor in the programme was dedicated to a woman, we were told in the excellent pre-concert talk from Roger Smith, of Radio New Zealand Concert.  The programme notes gave the titles of films in which some of the themes were used, but stated that it is not clear if they were written first for the movies or for the concerto.

The first movement (moderato nobile) began with a romantic melody from the violin, enhanced by the beautiful tone the soloist maintained throughout the concerto.  Despite the movement’s description, I found it more colourful and romantic than noble.  There were certainly times when symptoms of film music were present. An unusual feature of the entire work was the extensive use of the celeste, played by Kirsten Simpson.  I can’t think of another composition that features the little keyboard bells so much.  Famous for its use by Tchaikovsky in his Nutcracker ballet, it makes few other major appearances.

Ovrutsky has a passionate style and great technical prowess on his instrument, but musical integrity always came first.  His mastery was exhibited frequently, especially in the first movement cadenza.

The second movement (romance – andante) gave further opportunities for the celeste, and also for the harp, accompanying another romantic melody from the soloist.  This was played with plenty of nuance, fine phrasing and subtle colouring.  Korngold gave the violinist plenty of scope – rather more than he gave to the orchestra, though the latter nevertheless had many rich colours.

The Finale was marked ‘allegro assai vivace’, and fast it certainly was.  Here was a change of character, demanding furious violin-playing, and an episode where the orchestra strings played with the wood of their bows.  A magnificent theme began with the harp and lower strings only accompanying the soloist, then the violins were added; a most effective device.  Yet more prominent celeste added to what became a cheerful and bouncy movement, with a suitably climactic ending.

What is the response to my colleague’s aphorism – more corn than gold, or more gold than corn?  Equal measures, I’d say.  However, the negative element in the remark is no reflection on the evening’s superb soloist.

As an encore, Ovrutsky played with the orchestra Massenet’s justly popular ‘Méditation’ from his opera Thaïs, most sensitively and with subtle variety.

Tchaikovsky’s splendid Fourth Symphony was indeed substantially a vision of happiness, though some of it did not realise the vision. The supreme orchestrator gave the audience much joy, even if he did not always achieve it himself.  The immense
invention in this symphony is astonishing.

The absent string players were back, and the grand opening fanfare (the fate motif) sounded out.  Unfortunately the were a few false notes from the five horns (as there had been in previous items) this first time, so that it lost some of its impact. Following the fanfare (andante sostenuto) the moderato con anima was indeed just that – very energetic. Wonderful woodwind solos, especially from the clarinet, were a major feature.  You could dance a ballet to this movement.  There is no doubt that this is the composer of Swan Lake.  Conjecture: somewhere in the Russian woods, there emerge sprites looking for some fun. But they are met by witches, who chase them away, and call up thunder and lightning to scare the little ones… Fate issues its warning again, but soon everything is peaceful, because everyone has left the scene.

It was magical to hear the woodwind interjections from different sides of the platform.  It emphasised how much better it is to hear a live performance than a recording, even given the best of Dolby stereo.  The movement’s ending was thrilling and dramatic.

The andantino second movement opens with a beautiful folk melody played on the oboe, repeated by the cellos.  It is followed by a benign and soulful string melody, that nevertheless has lighter touches.  The orchestration is full of colour, not least from the bassoon, here.

The scherzo begins entirely with pizzicato, giving a thoroughly playful mood to the music. Tchaikovsky described the movement as having the effect ‘…when one has had a little wine and feels the first glow of intoxication’.  Oboes, then flutes and piccolo end the flight of fancy with one of their own.  Horns and clarinets contribute – those sprites from the first movement must be
back.  Pizzicato returns, and all works up to a jolly ending, then bang!

Straight into the allegro con fuoco Finale, that also has a Russian folk song as a main theme.  Brass and percussion have a field day, and multiple conversations run alongside the grand theme.  There is a huge build-up of excitement – then the fate theme emerges again.

Pietari Inkinen had everything (well, almost everything!) under control.  He used no huge gestures; just a slight nod to bring in each section for its entry. This was powerful music splendidly played.  There was an ecstatic response from the usually phlegmatic Wellington audience; the conductor called on individual woodwind players to stand and acknowledge the applause.

There were numbers of guest players, including Moky Gibson-Lane, here from overseas, playing sub-principal cello.  However, there were far too many empty seats for a concert of spirited, well-played music by mighty composers.

 

Bach Choir of Wellington – Faure and other delights

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir of Wellington presents:
Music for Easter

The Bach Choir of Wellington
Douglas Mews (organ)
Stephen Rowley (conductor)

St.Peter’s on Willis, Wellington

Saturday, 5th April 2014

Despite the “music for Easter” title of the Bach Choir’s recent programme, I would imagine that most people would have been drawn to the concert by the prospect of hearing a performance in a proper church setting of Faure’s supremely beautiful and perennially fresh (as it proved here) Requiem.

Quelling an element of impatience lurking within the recesses of my being at having a “first half” to get through before the “real” business of the late afternoon, I found a pew within a reasonable proximity, and awaited the appearance of the choir, organist Douglas Mews and conductor Stephen Rowley.

By the time the concert began, St Peter’s-on-Willis had worked its usual pre-crepuscular spell on the church’s performing-space, with sunlight streaming through the large window at the back of the choir loft, to suitably beatific effect – well, anyway for we in the audience, but probably not for the choir, having to “front up” to the full-on radiance without the benefit of sunglasses!  The thought did occur to me that had the concert’s main item been Italian instead of French, the latter course could have been adopted by the singers – possibly, to somewhat startling, Mafia-like effect!

All such fancies aside, much of the ambient glow had dissipated by the time the concert’s second half had begun, though that initial impression of “Heavenly radiance” remained throughout.  Appropriately, too, because the choir’s performances of most of the items, including the Requiem, had a similar lucid and beatific quality, making for an enjoyable listening experience.

It’s a common phenomenon for performers to “settle in” to the business of establishing a relationship with both the performing space and the audience via the opening item on a program – what Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame used to call “getting the pitch of the hall” – and so it proved here, with a cautiously worthy opening performance of Orlando Gibbons’ Hosanna to the Son of David. Once the choir had negotiated that hurdle, and Stephen Rowley had welcomed us to the concert, everything, including audience responses, seemed to focus upon things more comfortably and surely.

Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord, a setting of just two lines of Psalm 102, caught in its opening tones a lovely solemn atmosphere, the choir holding its lines at a challengingly slow tempo and making a good job of things – a short, but intensely-focused experience of sound and feeling.  Darker in tone and somewhat more complex in its unfolding was Venetian-born Antonio Lott’s Crucifixus, the opening measures rising from the darkness to a starkly-lit cadence. The voices nicely conveyed surges of urgency and anguish with “‘passus” (suffered), and then tapered into long, beautifully-held lines for “et sepultus est” (and was buried).

However, the revelation (so to speak) of the first half for me was encountering the twentieth-century English composer John Sanders’ Reproaches, a work which eschewed avant-garde harmonies and drew instead on traditional modes of antiphonal settings for these texts, mixing plainsong with harmonized sequences. We heard haunting, long-breathed lines of “reproachful” utterances, varied in character and spontaneous in effect, interspersed with more assertive men-only recitatives – a marvellously theatrical, but at the same time, sublimely “spiritual” result. The final exchange was marked, at the end, by eerie modulations and a far-flung, almost cosmic effect of words sounded over endless spaces of time and distance.

It may be heretical of me to say so, but after this John Cameron’s setting of Elgar’s “Nimrod” from the latter’s orchestral Enigma Variations seemed to my ears rather cosy and sentimental – and though the choir’s sopranos made brave efforts to reach their cruelly stratospheric highest notes, the outcome in places was more uncomfortable than uplifting. Of course one perhaps ought to try these things, but I would rather have gone into the interval with the sounds of any one of the other performances of the first half in my ears. However, ’twas but a minor blip on what was a generally mellifluous soundscape.

As for the Faure Requiem, despite the performance being a “streamlined” one (no soprano or baritone, and no orchestra – which meant, alas, no horns!) the results were well-nigh enchanting throughout. Apart from having what seemed a reluctance to let his instrument resplendently roar out that wonderful horn-call in the “Sanctus”, organist Douglas Mews did the instrumental music proud, beguilingly keeping those plangent “French” textures to the fore and thrilling us in certain places with some awe-inspiring seismic pedal-points.  One soon adapted to the organ’s refracted orchestral tones, and enjoyed without reservations what the voices were doing.

Stephen Rowley’s conducting enabled the work to unfold with a kind of natural outpouring of expression, as almost nothing seemed forced or too sharply-etched – only an unexpected intensification of tempo and tension at the words “Lux aeterna luceat eis” which came to a dramatic head at “quia pius est” gave me a start for a few seconds, until I realized that what he was doing at that point was actually working. In place of each of the baritone solos, the men’s voices in the choir provided well-focused tones which kept the line steady and true; and similarly in the “Pie Jesu” the sopranos sang beautifully, in lieu of a soloist, managing the awkward moment of the melody’s reprise with ease, and allowing the final “sempiternam requiem” ample space and rapt concentration.

A mere couple of details wanted slightly firmer treatment – a slightly ahead-of-the-beat “Exaudi” in the first part, a hesitant beginning to the “Sanctus” over the tricky, syncopated accompanying figures, and a too-eager reprise of the “Agnus Dei” by the men – but these were moments of natural attrition, in their way part and parcel of the perils of live performance, and as treasurable for their purposeful intent as were other moments for their accuracy and expressive power.

Perhaps the performance highlight in the Requiem was, for me, the “Libera Me”, begun by the men’s voices, with nice shaping from the conductor, and taken further by the women, sweet-toned at “Tremens factus sum ergo” and building towards a full-throated “Dies Illa, dies ire”, startling in its impact. A thudding organ accompaniment brought back a fearful “Libera Me” reprise from the full choir, after which the piece concluded with a slightly more hopeful rounding-off from the men. Everything was kept in proportion, and the sequences vividly characterized – its spirit represented well the performance as a whole, one which the Bach Choir and Stephen Rowley ought to be proud of.

Sparkling playing of Bach for flute and organ at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

‘Bach for Lunch’

Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 846 (Book One)
Sonata E, BWV 1035 for flute and basso continuo
Prelude and Fugue in F minor BWV 881 (Book Two)
From Suite in B minor BWV 1067 for flute and strings
Douglas Mews (organ), Penelope Evison (baroque flute)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 2 April 2014, 12.15pm

A third player in the recital was the fine acoustic of St. Andrew’s Church, allowing all the nuances of sound from the instruments to be clearly heard, even the quietest ones.

The programme opened with organ only, playing perhaps the most familiar of Bach’s Preludes from The Well-Tempered Clavier (or Keyboard, in this translation), which unfortunately I missed, due to parking problems. However, I heard the fugue, delightfully played on a lovely high flute registration.  This being baroque music, the small baroque organ was used, pulled forward and towards the centre of the platform – it was good to see it being played.

Douglas Mews introduced the next item by saying that the pitch of the time of the sonata’s composition was fully a tone lower than that used today, and this was the pitch of Penelope Evison’s instrument.  Fortunately for him, the music copy he was using was printed in that pitch, i.e. D major, and not in the modern E major.

He used a registration that contrasted sufficiently with the tone of the baroque flute, without overpowering it.  Very much a continuo part, it provided few flights of fancy for the organ.  In the second movement, allegro, Mews employed plenty of lift in his part, making for a charming and lively performance from both players.  The third movement was a sleepy siciliano; the final one, allegro assai, featured tricky rhythms – the players were not always totally together.

The next Prelude and Fugue from the organ I am particularly fond of, and I enjoyed hearing them on the organ.  There was good contrast between the legato passages and those with more lift.  A brighter registration was used for the fugue.

The Suite was entire, apart from the opening Ouverture, which was absent.  Like all the Suites, this is a lovely work.  Its opening Rondeau was crisp and lively; the second dance (Sarabande) contrasts well, being slow.  The two Bourrées are quick and sparkling, though as played here, they were perhaps a little too fast to dance.  Contrast came again, with the stately Polonaise.  The Menuet is also slow, but features beautiful melodies, while the final Badinerie is utterly delightful.

Despite only two instruments being used, sometimes only one, the concert revealed something of Bach’s great variety, and certainly much of the vast experience and expertise of these two musicians.

 

Memorable, varied programme from singers and instrumentaists of Note Bene

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Bold as Brass: works for choir and brass

Dufay, Croce, Gabrieli, Bruckner, Brahms, David Hamilton

Nota Bene, conducted by Peter Walls, with Ingrid Bauer (harp), Matthew Allison, David Bremner and Tim Sutton (trombones), Carsten Williams and Heather Thompson (horns), Douglas Mews (organ and piano)

Sacred Heart Cathedral

Saturday, 29 March 2014, 7.30pm

Nota Bene chamber choir appeared to be a little larger than it has sometimes been, but not all singers sang in all items.  Once again it grabbed the attention and held it, with a varied programme incorporating diverse instruments as well as the voices, sometimes women’s only.

Again, Peter Walls was guest conductor, and his vigorous yet sensitive conducting bore out a comment in his biography in the printed programme, from Classics Today: “Peter Walls understands the overall period style and he obviously cares a lot about ensemble balance and uniformity of tone and colour.”  He spoke before each sung bracket, giving a little information about the composers and pieces.

Despite beginning with the fifteenth century and ending with the twentieth, the choir was always in good voice, and adapted tonal production and word emphases to the items appropriately.  No English language appeared this time; the David Hamilton piece titled ‘The Moon is Silently Singing’ is a setting of a Spanish poem, despite the English title.

The opening ‘Gloria ad modum tubae’ by Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) began with a cantor, and the choir women arranged round the perimeter of the church. They then processed very slowly forward, while the trombones lived up to the title, intoning single fifths on their instruments.  The intertwining voices were most effective, sounding across the building’s fine acoustic.  When the singers came together at the front, the blend was magical.

Giovanni Croce was a contemporary of Gabrieli, and like him was a composer at St. Mark’s in Venice in the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth.  The former’s setting of Psalm 81 was a complex piece of polyphony, sung joyfully, with tone and words well projected.  Gabrieli is well-known for his wonderful settings for choir (and brass) placed in different parts of the vast Venice church.  Here, we had the trombones in the left ambulatory of the church, and also soloist Peter de Blois
(tenor), in ‘O magnum mysterium’.  The performance was very fine, with all the contrapuntal lines beautifully drawn.  However, I felt that the sound from the soloist would have been better if he had been standing further forward into the church, away from the brass, and not in the ambulatory.

A drastic change followed, to the nineteenth century; the women sang Brahms’s Four Songs Op.17.  With themes of lost love and the (male) lover’s death, they were sure ground for romantic settings.  What was unusual was their accompaniment by horn and harp.  The first song’s words invoked the harp; the effect of the two instruments, superbly played, plus the voices, was gorgeous.  The second song was a German translation of Shakespeare’s well-known ‘Come away, come away death’ (more familiar in settings by Gerald Finzi, Roger Quilter and others). There was great attention to dynamics, and wondrously unanimous phrasing and pronunciation.  The last song, ‘Gesang aus Fingal’ displayed vitality and uniformity of tone.  Its folksy rhythm was well maintained.

‘Christus Factus Est’ is a Biblical setting by Bruckner.
Splendid tone and beautifully managed chromatic passages featured, although there was a little harshness from the tenors on some high notes.  A secular song by the same composer, more familiar in Schumann’s setting, ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ was, like the previous one, unaccompanied.

‘Ecce Sacerdos’ was a complete contrast, employing organ and brass in its grand statements.  It was sung with contrasting subtlety and the grandeur of great fortissimo sounds – and a few flaws in phrasing, that hardly detracted from the splendour.

We were in for a surprise after the interval.
Following unaccompanied settings by Bruckner: ‘Afferentur regi’ and ‘Os justi’ (Psalm 37), the latter a most exciting and exultant composition full of imaginative writing and treated with loving care by the choir, the familiar ‘Locus iste’ was not sung, but played by the trombones and one horn!  At first I wanted the choir, and thought it sounded a little grotesque, but by the end I was converted. The trombones followed with the same composer’s Aequalis I & II, striking and effective pieces.

We returned to Brahms for Four Quartets Op.92, sung with piano.  The first, ‘O schöne Nacht’ was very romantic, even sentimental. The words translated as ‘the moon gleams magically’ evoked gorgeous setting by the composer – and linked with the Hamilton work at the end of the programme.

More complex part-writing featured in ‘Spätherbst’; Brahms’s chromatic writing in ‘Abendlied’ didn’t make it easy for the singers – the pitch wandered a little at the opening.  This song was very affecting in its understated romantic fervour.  After ‘Warum’ we came to David Hamilton’s ‘The Moon is Silently Singing’.  The two horns – one in the gallery and one in front of the choir gave ethereal echo effects, and were superbly played.  The double choir’s performance incorporated whispering as well as singing – this is a complex and difficult work. It would have been interesting to have had the poet (Miguel de Unamuno, 18864-1936) acknowledged.

By way of critical remarks, I could point out that it is not difficult to find out the dates of composers’ births and deaths; printing them after their names helps the audience to orient themselves to the music.  Another matter was proof-reading; while most of the printed programme, consisting mainly of translations, was beyond complaint, the translation of the Dufay ‘Gloria’ appeared to have been typed by someone who did not know the archaic words ‘thee’ and ‘thy’; certainly they did not appear correctly, nor did some other words here and elsewhere.
It was a pity that brackets and a footnote for the first line of Shakespeare’s ‘Come away…’ were reproduced from the internet entry.

This was a memorable evening’s music-making.  There was variety, heart-stopping drama and emotion, and commitment and excellence from the performers.

 

NZSO with Farr’s first piano concerto plus Respighi celebrating Rome

Posted on by admin

LA DOLCE VITA

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra:  Pietari Inkinen (conductor) with Tony Lee (piano)

Respighi:
Feste Romane (Roman Festivals)
Fontane di Roma (Fountains of Rome)
Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome)
Farr:  Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 28 March, 6:30 pm

The huge Respighi tone poems in this concert were works that exhibited the fullest orchestral resources of the NZSO, expanding it beyond 100 with guest players, not to mention the further addition of the Wellington Brass Band for the finale of the Pines of Rome.  The opening Roman Festivals suite immediately opened the doors to Respighi’s wonderfully inventive orchestration, which here covers the whole gamut of colourful and dynamic possibilities. In the four movements of Circus Games, The Jubilee, October Festival and The Epiphany, Inkinen directed the orchestra with a sure hand and clear sense of control that explored the full range of the most sensitive muted strings and hushed soulful wind solos, the exhausted ecstasy of pilgrims as they finally sighted the Holy City, the wild rage of beasts in the arena punctuated by the haunting hymn of the condemned martyrs, through to the wonderful contrasting dance styles in The Epiphany. There were numerous special moments of superb playing, particularly from wind soloists, but the fading echoes of the hunting horn hovering evocatively in the night air of the October Festival particularly highlighted the most extraordinary control and musicianship of horn principal David Evans.

Gareth Farr’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra  used much more modest orchestral resources, and was a new commission for which he provided some enlightening programme notes. “I’ve wanted to write a Piano Concerto since I was 17 – so it’s been gestating in my head for nearly 30 years……Piano Concertos have long been stereotyped as romantic, sweeping and epic. I’ve taken a hint of that on board, but for the most part I’ve focused on darker symphonic explorations. There is an ominous urgency to much of the first and third movements, while the second has an almost machine like atmosphere…..” Yet there were also many poetic moments throughout the work, starting with the shimmering pianissimo strings of the opening, and continuing through delicately shaped single lines of piano melody in the first movement, as Inkinen superbly controlled the build-up of rhythmic
complexity and orchestral texture to culminate in the “wild and diabolically virtuosic ride in 5/4”.

The second movement opened playfully with “an interlocking duet between the highest note of the piano and the highest note of the xylophone…..I certainly had a smile on my face when I wrote it” (Farr). As the repeated-note motifs passed from instrument to instrument, they were punctuated with more soulful episodes from the piano. The finale was a moto perpetuo, even more technically demanding than the first movement, with the piano part leaping all over the keyboard, and soloist and orchestra tussling in a maelstrom of highly complex syncopated and irregular rhythms. There was only a brief interlude of calm before the “long gradual build to a victorious ending”.

Throughout the work, the tonalities were approachable and seemed to grow naturally from the idioms of the writing. Percussive elements played a huge part in the creative whole, yet they were largely confined to the percussion section itself and did not threaten to dominate the effective interplay between piano and orchestral forces. This was never a solo-plus-accompaniment approach, but rather a tightly constructed dialogue between two equal voices, pianist and orchestra. The technical demands of the writing and its rhythmic complexities were nothing short of phenomenal for all players, yet there was never an instant where one felt the slightest weakening of resolution and control. The technical prowess of young Australian pianist Tony Lee, only recently graduated B.Mus. from Sydney Conservatorium, were frankly mind blowing. Gareth Farr obviously had complete confidence that every note of his vision would be impeccably realised by both soloist and NZSO, and his trust was richly rewarded. The excitement of the performance was infectious, and Farr looked overjoyed as he took stage accolades at the end and accepted bouquets from both audience and orchestra.

The second half of the concert comprised Fountains of Rome  and Pines of Rome. Again I was struck by the clarity and control of Inkinen’s direction, and the way the NZSO responded to the musical and technical demands of Respighi’s wonderfully creative and colourful orchestration. It was a thrilling moment in the finale when the lights came up on Wellington Brass in the choir stalls, and the huge resources of orchestra and band combined as “the army of the Consul bursts forth in the grandeur of the newly risen sun toward the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph the Capitoline Hill” (Respighi).

Wellington is extraordinarily privileged to be able to enjoy performances of such outstanding quality from its resident orchestra and the exceptionally skilled individuals who make their careers in it. This programme was a huge night’s play, yet their vitality and commitment was unflinching right through to the final downbeat.

Bravo!