Imaginative programme of too rarely played masterpieces from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by admin

Orchestra Wellington: Marc Taddei (conductor) and Jian Liu (piano)

Haydn: Symphony No. 83 in G minor, The Hen
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G
Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Golden Cockerel

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 9 August 2014, 7:30 pm

This imaginative programme by Orchestra Wellington was an opportunity to enjoy a selection of colourful works heard all too infrequently on concert stages here. Haydn’s The Hen Symphony was performed with appropriately modest orchestral forces for which Orchestra Wellington is admirably suited. The opening Allegro Spiritoso sparkled with clean vigorous playing of exemplary precision that allowed inner voices to speak through beautifully clearly. The contrasting central episode was beautifully judged by Taddei, as were the dynamic contrasts and pauses of the following Andante, where his tempo shaped and enhanced the transparent artistry of the melodic lines.

The Minuet was undertaken at a tempo that would have been well beyond even the sprightliest pupils of any Baroque dancing master, but it bounced along with appealing grace providing one ignored its origins in the dance (a somewhat questionable approach in my view). The Finale bears the designation Vivace which is best interpreted as lively or sprightly, but the hectic tempo imposed by Taddei was such that the wonderful, brisk triplet rhythms simply could not be enunciated cleanly and effectively. It was disappointing to have such an invigorating reading of this symphony somewhat clouded in this way.

Soloist Jian Liu gave a riveting performance of Ravel’s delightful Piano Concerto in G major, and he was supported by some spectacular playing from the orchestra. In the opening movement Ravel has crafted some exquisitely balanced conversations between the pianist and various instrumentalists. The Allegramente designation means simply cheerfully, merrily, but hectic tempi in the fast sections often obscured Ravel’s remarkable skill and artistry as an orchestrator. By contrast, those episodes that call up the world of Louisiana blues were wonderfully languid and seductive, particularly in the hands of the brass and woodwind (with imaginative use of the French bassoon by Preman Tilsen.)

The soulful simplicity of the opening piano melody in the following Adagio was beautifully expressed by Liu, and was deliciously savoured by the winds as they picked it up one by one. Full breadth of tempo allowed the wandering tonalities and modal overtones of the orchestration to be genuinely explored. But sadly the signature cor anglais melody of this movement sounded strangled by nerves, whereas it deserves to ooze out with rich seductive warmth over the lacework of the piano part.

The Finale is certainly marked Presto, but as in the first movement, Taddei’s frenetic tempo unjustly obscured Ravel’s spectacular mastery of complex orchestral resources. However, no player appeared to flinch at Taddei’s demands, and Liu’s technical mastery was quite spectacular, with mind-blowing solo work from first bassoon Tilsen deserving particular mention. But in fact Ravel’s extraordinary skills were robbed of their true exposure by such a tempo, whereas he, and the audience, most surely deserved better.

Stravinsky’s symphonic poem Song of the Nightingale is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s oriental fairytale of the same name. Right from the first notes of the spectacular opening outburst the players were clearly revelling in the extraordinary colour and complexity of the writing. But the initial tempo was just too hectic to allow Stravinsky’s amazingly intricate colour palette to be properly appreciated, degenerating rather into a frantic muddied melange .

Things improved markedly in the following episodes where Taddei gave the instrumentalists a chance to show off both the vigorous and poetic qualities of the work. The somnolent and subdued sections were sensitively crafted to create a  truly evocative air of mystery and oriental fantasy, and the final retreat of Death’s threatening presence from the striken Emperor’s bed chamber left a breathless hush over the hall.

Six months before he died in 1908, Rimsky-Korsakov completed his opera score for Golden Cockerel based on Pushkin’s 1834 fairytale. It was immediately banned by the Tsar’s political censors for its satirical political overtones, and this orchestral suite was only later was compiled from his work by Glazunov and Steinberg (the composer’s son-in-law). It is an outstanding showcase for the amazing skill, colour and complexity of orchestration that Rimsky-Korsakov had exactingly honed over his lifetime.

The opening scene depicts Tsar Dodon at home in his opulent palace, followed next by his unsuccessful venture onto eastern battlefields to defeat imagined threats from a neighbouring potentate. These two movements were given a most evocative reading that did full justice to the rich colours lavished on the orchestral canvas. The potentate was in fact the Tsaritsa Shemakhan, whose seductive powers overcame Tsar Dodon in the third movement, where dancing melodic lines were artfully shaped in contrast to the energetic central section. The brass had a marvellous field day with all the pomp and ceremony of the ensuing wedding ceremonies which they tackled with great drama and intensity. And the orchestra readily transformed  the mood into the dark, sombre foreboding that presaged the Tsar’s  unfortunate demise at the hands of the triumphant magical cockerel.

The whole work gave a wonderful opportunity to appreciate not only Rimsky-Korsakov’s extraordinary powers, but the technical mastery and musicianship of Orchestra Wellington’s musicians. Full marks too to conductor and management for offering a most imaginative programme of lesser known works. Those Wellington concert goers who opted for a cosy evening at home on an inhospitable winter’s night missed out on a  real treat.

 

Masters of whole worlds: Mozart and Mahler with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Violin Concerto No.4 in D Major K.218
MAHLER – Symphony No.9 in D Major

Simone Lamsma (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 8th August, 2014

What to play at a concert along with a Mahler Symphony? It’s a question that has diverted promoters, critics and musicians themselves over the years, and the various possible solutions seem often to complicate further rather than clarify matters.

It isn’t so much the actual music that’s the problem – it’s the awkward length of Mahler’s symphonic conceptions that makes programming with other pieces something of a challenge. At least the composer’s First and Fourth Symphonies aren’t so problematical due to their shorter durations – each can easily accommodate a “normal” first half of, say, an overture followed by a concerto, within a concert.

Not so the other Mahler symphonies, all of which are that bit too lengthy to allow anything pre-interval along the lines of the above, though, apart from the longest of them, the Third Symphony, not quite of the length that normally takes up a whole concert. Having said that, two of the works – the “Resurrection” (No.2) and the “Symphony of a Thousand”(No.8) are such spectacles in themselves that on that count they’re often played “alone” – in each case the sheer “size” of the experience comes from other considerations beside the music’s time-span.

The work featured in tonight’s concert, the Ninth Symphony, though perhaps less viscerally spectacular than either of the above, has the kind of gravitas that can make it a stand-alone piece as well. The conductor of tonight’s performance, Edo de Waart, said in an interview a day or so before the concert that he usually performed the Ninth on its own, as he felt it would overshadow anything else that’s played. If something else was chosen to be performed at the same concert it would have to be “strong”.

Perhaps Mahler himself gave a kind of “guide-line” with a remark he reportedly made to Sibelius when discussing the nature of symphonic form – in response to Sibelius’s professed attraction to the form’s “severity and logic”, Mahler exclaimed that “symphony is like the world – it should embrace everything!”.  I certainly thought that on this occasion the choice of the Mozart Violin Concerto (K.218 in D Major) presented by Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma was appropriate – it seemed to me to fulfill at once that “all-embracing” aspiration valued by the composer, while presenting two uniquely characterful works with their own clearly-defined boundaries.

As it turned out, the Mozart concerto was given a delightful performance by Simone Lamsma, her bright, silvery entry banishing for the remainder of the performance a slightly wiry-sounding beginning to the work from the NZSO strings, and her energy and élan nicely countering an initial impression of petiteness. I thought her passagework most characterful, her accented notes given plenty of emphasis, bringing out a “layered” quality to the music.

The cadenza developed these perspectives further, getting very physical and gutsy playing, the sequence sounding more like Beethoven’s voice in places than Mozart’s! We then got a heavenly “andante cantabile” at the slow movement’s beginning, the soloist’s floated notes exquisite-sounding, her silvery discourse sensitively accompanied by the ensemble, and, in conclusion, capped off by a cadenza for the violin which occasionally broke into what sounded like birdsong.

Not to be outdone in effect, the finale took us through poised, gavotte-like steps by way of introduction, and then whirled us into an allegro, the exchanges between the two sequences continuing throughout the movement. And such an exuberant cadenza! – demonstrating to us the soloist’s brilliant fingerwork, and leavened in places by pure, elevated tones. After this came a lovely, “dying fall” kind of finish to the work of the “that’s all, folks!” variety, not unlike what the composer had also done in his previous violin concerto – all very piquant and charming.

And so to the Mahler – it was true, as Edo de Waart had pointed out, that this work was perfectly capable of standing alone in concert – but having the Mozart concerto first up we felt more “tuned in”, at one by this stage with the ambience of the listening-spaces, and with the throes of our day-to-day existence put well aside, ready to face Mahler’s symphonic retelling of his life’s most profound “dark night of the soul”.

The conductor had said when interviewed that “one needs a top orchestra” for this work, so I think he would have been thrilled with the NZSO’s response to his direction throughout the symphony – certainly his demeanour at the end and his ready acknowledgement of the players indicated his wholehearted appreciation of their efforts. Each of the movements here had a surety of impulse, touch and expression, the structures clearly outlined, the emotions unlocked and ready for we listeners to square up to.

Those enormously cataclysmic first-movement climaxes which characterise the composer’s despair in the face of his all-too-pressing mortal sickness and imminent destruction were here delivered directly and swiftly, growing from the musical textures rather than over-laden, or imposed from outside – obviously the “line”, the shape and coherence of the music was important to de Waart, something not achieved lightly, but integral to the flow. I felt it was more “musical” than “psychological” in the conductor’s hands, concerned less with emotional extremes and more with soundscapes, making the throes of despair more of a human than a personal problem, with its own set of resonances.

In this the conductor was supported by a plethora of superbly-wrought orchestral detail, the occasional brass “blip” like “spots on the sun” (as someone said once about the great pianist Alfred Cortot’s wrong notes!), playing whose richness and variation of colour and texture fully realised Mahler’s love for the world and his agony at the thought of having to relinquish life so peremptorily. The word “leb’wohl” (farewell) readily came to mind in tandem with the two-note theme that dominated the music.

Both middle movements were strong on “attitude”, the Landler/Waltz by turns good-naturedly bucolic and sentimental at the beginning, with the quicker waltz-music taking on an almost manic aspect in places, before everything ground almost to a halt, leaving the rustic tune to run its course, here nicely tossed about the orchestra before cheekily ending with a piccolo phrase.

Set against this drollery was the harsh Rondo-Burleske, here a tightly-coiled set of poses and  rapier-like thrusts, purposeful and almost business-like in its insistence and cruelty. Whatever savage humour could have been lurking around corners and in alcoves, de Waart’s splendidly-maintained focus gave it no chance, though the claustrophobic mood was relieved by a trio-like section featuring a nostalgic, splendidly-played trumpet solo.

The frenetic, abyss-bound final pages of the Rondo, brilliantly delivered, were succeeded by sounds which seemed wrung from tissues of pure emotion by the strings, playing at first in octaves and then generously flooding the textures with warmly-impassioned harmonies – conductor and players here made this moment work as profoundly as I’ve ever heard it presented. But even more impressive were the work’s final few minutes, here played with such rapt beauty and concentration as I’ve rarely experienced anywhere in a concert hall – string phrases and sound-impulses that suggested all too palpably a farewell to life, a leave-taking whose silences continued to sound for what seemed like ages afterwards – for all of us present, very much the stuff of legends.

This performance’s dedication, announced before the concert, to the recently-deceased Franz-Paul Decker, for many years the NZSO’s Music Director, had no more appropriate voice than that final movement of a work that had been one of Decker’s greatest interpretative achievements. The old maestro’s shade would have sighed contentedly in tandem with those beautifully-realised, seemingly-endless silences to which we were all so very privileged to be able to lend our  presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anniversaries, celebrations and NZ premieres – NZSM Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PASTORAL ELEGY
Music by Gade, Villa-Lobos, Vaughan Williams

NIELS GADE – Overture “Hamlet”
(Vincent Hardaker – conductor)
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS – ‘Cello Concerto No.2
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Symphony No.3 “Pastoral”
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Alicia Cardwgan (soprano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
NZ School of Music Orchestra

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

Wednesday, 6th August, 2014

I thought this an exceptional concert in every way! – innovative repertoire choices were thrillingly and memorably supported by skilled and strongly-focused, committed playing from all concerned.

Each piece as presented had its own world and voiced its own particular character – partly the result of stylistic and contextual differences, but also  indicative of the extent to which these musicians were determined to get to grips with things, and put across the music’s differing flavours, colours and feelings.

I’d never before encountered either the Niels Gade overture or the Villa-Lobos concerto (the performance of the latter by ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo was, in fact, the New Zealand premiere). Gade may have been thought conservative in musical outlook by his contemporaries and by subsequent posterity, but I thought his “Hamlet” Overture fully worthy of Shakespeare, as regards the music’s beauty, dignity, energy and theatricality.

Conductor Vincent Hardaker and his players deftly nailed the “cat-like tread” mood of the opening, preparing the ambiences for the intense, dramatic urgencies that grew, spectre-like, out of the textures. Though not strictly following the play’s action, the music portrayed a good deal of the drama’s significant moods and character interactions.

A telling example of this came with the strings’ very Lisztian melody depicting the beautiful but ill-fated Ophelia’s love for the Prince, and the music’s gradual disintegration as the girl’s madness and death drew near, lyricism undermined and eventually overlaid by repeated turbulence and purposeful strength. A final ‘cello solo then sounded over rich brass chordings, suggesting some kind of valediction being played out, the tragedy grimly resolved. I enjoyed it all, music and playing, immensely.

After this things were somewhat re-aligned – from Shakespearean tragedy the focus morphed into Latin American intensity and exuberance. This was accompanied by a change of conductor and the introduction of a soloist to perform Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Second ‘Cello Concerto. It was Kenneth Young who took the podium, and we also welcomed Inbal Megiddo, Head of ‘Cello Studies at the School of Music, as the concerto player.

To hear Megiddo perform this work was to experience the next best thing to a direct link with its composer, as she had studied the concerto with its first performer, Aldo Parisot, for whom Villa-Lobos actually wrote the work. Megiddo described that experience for her as “exhilarating”, and expressed the hope that she might be able to convey something of that same feeling in her performance for us, by way of dedicating her efforts to her “teacher, mentor, collleague and friend”. I can only report that she certainly made good her intention in spadefuls!

From the work’s first chord, with the music’s upper registers straightaway reaching for the stars, we in the audience were galvanised anew, as much by the playing as by the music itself – the writing seemed to possess a kind of “top echelon” quality, something of an edge which constantly tingled and thrilled. We heard marvellous exchanges between soloist and orchestra, with the former’s rhythmic verve readily communicating itself to the young orchestral players, encouraging them to take up the spirit of the music’s frequent syncopated figures and impulses dancing along the ‘cello-strings.

The folky-sounding second-movement Modinha, a Brazilian love-song genre, featured a beautiful ‘cello melody, with an intensely-laden heart-on-sleeve dance-like accompaniment. Still, the music seemed always to have a slight “edge”, an astringency which put paid to any feeling of its emotion cloying, Hollywood-style. A Scherzo, dance-like and mixing the exotic with the “folky” brought forth more exciting playing – in places intense and gutteral, at other times airborne and melismatic – from Megiddo, with conductor and orchestra splendidly responding to her energies with sharply-syncopated tutti sequences.

What the cellist herself described in the notes as a “virtuosic cadenza” was here excitingly and full-bloodedly played, with wonderful near-the-bridge timbres, triple-stopping and resonant open strings, some spectacular glissandi launching us into the world of the work’s finale. Here, ‘cellist and orchestra had a terrific time with a four-note theme that was tossed about like a straw man in a blanket to exhilarating effect, right up to the sheer abandonment of the coda, complete with its breath-snatchingly abrupt ending!

After the Villa-Lobos work’s ferment of whirlwind energies and arresting sonorities it seemed on paper entirely appropriate for the concert to feature by way of contrast a piece entitled “A Pastoral Symphony”, moreover one written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer of that quintessential English-landscape piece “The Lark Ascending”. Thinking about the juxtaposition of the two pieces made me recall a conversation some years ago with a friend who had visited London for the first time – he told me that after encountering the overwhelming grandeur and magnificence of St.Paul’s Cathedral he simply had to go back to his lodgings and lie down for a while.

True, the Villa-Lobos concerto, for all its engagingly vigorous and heartfelt qualities, wasn’t exactly grand, stupendous and cathedral-like! – but neither was the Vaughan Williams Symphony a mere exercise in English pastoral evocation (as a fellow-composer of Vaughan Williams’ dismissively remarked, concerning the work – “like a cow looking over a gate”!)  Whatever restorative qualities the symphony possessed applied to its own set of tensions and tragedies embedded within its contexts, those of its composer’s wartime service with the Medical Corps in France, a scenario fraught with death and loss. The composer, in fact referred to the work as a “War Requiem”, the Mahlerian second movement of the work with its bugle calls (played on a natural E-flat trumpet, and echoed by a natural horn) and anguished strings particularly underlining this idea.

Elsewhere, the music sang, danced and echoed with evocations of landscapes and people’s lives darkened by war and stained with blood – each movement wrought its own kind of ravaged beauty, the language and atmosphere one of lament rather than conflict and carnage. Ken Young kept the music’s pulse flowing throughout, to the work’s great advantage in this case, as tensions were made palpable by the playing’s urgency and tightly-wrought figurations. In the first movement, for example, the flowing themes were never allowed to settle, the music’s aspect having an almost haunted air, with memories of what had gone before “charging” the textures with tragedy.

The orchestral playing was, I thought, impressively focused, poised and suitably alert at all times, the textures and colours having the right mix of beauty and astringency. The winds at the beginning had tuning problems most obviously in their ensemble passages, but their individual work was outstanding throughout, with many a beautiful solo turned as the work proceeded. The brass chimed in with rich resonances when required, their ensemble capping the climaxes beautifully in places. And the work of the strings was a joy to experience, from the players’ most sensitive nuances to the most earnest and full-blooded climaxes. Conductor and players caught the ebb and flow of it all, the beauties and the sorrows.

The second movement’s nostalgic brass calls (the trumpet offstage, as indicated) came off splendidly, ably supported by contributions from the solo viola,’cello, and clarinet – but the work from the strings was again wondrous, phrases so sensitively and unerringly delivered, the players obviously right into the music’s world. Young aimed for and got a telling contrast of mood with the swiftly-delivered third movement, the tempi quicker than I’d ever heard previously – but it worked brilliantly, completely avoiding the somewhat heavy-footed quality sometimes encountered in performances of this movement. It also had the effect of sharpening the players’ responses to the movement’s elfin-textured coda, impulses striving for the greatest possible contrast with what had gone before in the bucolic scherzo.

Another off-stage “effect” in this work came with the final movement, the voice of a soprano at the very beginning and at the end. The singer’s disembodied tones have an ethereal effect, her wordless line a part-lament, part-incantation, which the strings repeat fervently at the movement’s climax – a stunning, breath-catching moment, as on this occasion. Soprano Alicia Cadwgan’s voice was ideally placed, not quite pure-toned enough at the outset of the first solo, and rushing a phrase mid-way through – but sounding far more at ease with her return at the end, floating her last few notes beautifully and hauntingly. As far as “capturing” the particular character of the movement mattered, Young’s direction and the orchestral playing was I thought, beyond reproach.

In the silence that followed we sat and allowed the resonances to fade as the tones had done, and pondered the music’s effect. I couldn’t help at that moment recalling various descriptions of the work which I’d read via my first, youthful hearings of recordings, comments which, even at that latter stage seemed to concentrate more upon the composer’s depictions of the “Corot-like landscapes” in France, and scarcely remark upon the music’s darker context of war’s grim realities. Perhaps a certain distancing wrought by time was necessary for people to re-examine the work’s and its composer’s circumstances – appropriately so, of course, as the anniversaries of that particular conflict presently loom disturbingly from out of time’s mists, carrying their warnings!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unexciting, lowpowered NZSO programme under Alexander Shelley yields riches after all

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Shelley

Shakespeare in Music

Korngold: Suite from incidental music for Much Ado and Nothing
Mendelssohn: Three pieces from the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Walton: Henry V suite (arranged by Muir Matheson)
Strauss: Symphonic Poem Macbeth

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 2 August 7:30 pm

The one programme in the NZSO’s 2014 season that looked problematic when I first scanned the offerings last year was this one. No soloist, no well-known conductor, no crowd-pulling music centre-piece.

So I was not surprised to see one of the smallest audiences for the NZSO that I can remember.

However. The music, all of it, was enjoyable and Alexander Shelley proved, as he had with the National Youth Orchestra last month, an engaging and energetic conductor. I’d heard him interviewed by Eva Radich on Upbeat during the week and was interested in his enthusiasm and ideas for engaging younger people in the enjoyment of classical music.

He spoke about each of the works on the programme, pertinently, with a wit and charm that could hardly have bothered anyone (though I often hear what I consider churlish complaints about musicians who presume to tell the audience things that they think they already know or, if they don’t know, don’t want to).

Korngold’s incidental music for Much Ado was for a Max Reinhardt production of the play in Vienna when the composer was 21, about the same time that he wrote Die tote Stadt. The claim in the programme that Korngold had won the admiration of Mahler struck me as unlikely, though I was aware of comments on the prodigy’s genius from others. After all Mahler died in 1911 when Korngold was only 13.  But the truth is more amazing, as the boy had been introduced to and played for Mahler in 1906, aged about 9!

The five pieces (out of a total of 14) gave immediate evidence of the composer’s theatrical flair and his predisposition for a Hollywood career which came in the 1930s. They were colourful, charmingly orchestrated, opening with a big chirpy tune, depicting the spunky Beatrice, and then a romantic tune more suitable to Hero and Claudio (according to the programme note). The next piece depicted the Bridal Morning, gentle and delightful with prominent flute and cello. And so it continued, each piece strongly characterised, and immediately engaging. The suite is scored for small orchestra: no basses, with single woodwinds, trumpet and trombone and just two horns, harp, piano and percussion.

The last section is Masquerade, a hornpipe, which is familiar – not what is heard in the British Sea Songs, the BBC Proms fixture on the Last Night, nor one of the Hornpipes in the Water Music. But a great little number, splendidly played. The music was a hit in post-ww1 Vienna and deserves to be heard occasionally today: in RNZ Concert’s Cadenza or their early morning programme, for example; and they now have an excellent recording thereof.

The orchestra played the Overture, the Scherzo and the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music. I’d wondered whether the normal principals – Leppänen, and the two Joyces – viola and cello, who were absent for the Korngold would reappear for the rest of the concert, but the sub-principals remained, including Donald Armstrong as Concertmaster.

The Overture danced with sparkling clarity and brilliance through the elfin-like opening bars, and the following tutti was especially enlivened by bell-like flutes, in fact the woodwinds were having a particularly fine evening, specially evident in the Scherzo; and throaty trombones restored the Wedding March from its manifold mutilations to its proper splendid celebratory character.

Though I do not usually warm to the bombast, heroics and bluster of Walton, and not Belshazzar’s Feast  either, it was either the fine orchestral playing or a sudden awakening on my part to the composer’s gifts that made me enjoy, even admire, the music he wrote for the war-time film of Henry V. The Passacaglia was especially attractive, with remote touches of Tudor music, of Gluck, of Grieg… I couldn’t really nail it. The battle scene was obviously a brilliant accompaniment to bowmen’s battles and cavalry charges. It struck me that there must have been something in the water between 1897 and 1902 (when Korngold and Walton were born) that led to such instinctive film music composers.

Finally, the least known of Strauss’s tone poems, Macbeth: I’d long thought it must have been his first as it has seemed less memorable, burdened with too much thick orchestration, and a biggish melody that tries to emerge on the strings failed to take root. In fact, both Aus Italien and Don Juan preceded it and Tod und Verklärung was written at the same time. So there’s no reason in terms of composing maturity for me to find Macbeth less arresting and interesting. But I do. It uses a normally large orchestra, with triple winds and five horns, and though this was a thoroughly lively and resonant performance it was only in the closing phase that the music showed signs of cohering and evolving in a promising and interesting way.

The concert as a whole was most enjoyable however; as I wrote above, however, there was no ‘must see/hear’ about the programme. For me, several other Shakespeare-inspired works would have suggested themselves, such as Berlioz Symphonie-dramatique, Roméo et Juliette from which around 40 minutes of beautiful excerpts could have been played. Or the Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev music for the same play might have had more pull than any one of the pieces programmed.

 

Inspiring concert by young students of Donald Armstrong

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime concert at Old Saint Paul’s

Andrew Kelly – Brahms: Violin Sonata No 3 – First movement
Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – Elgar: Violin Sonata, Op 82 – First movement
Melanie Pinkney – Bruch: Violin Concerto No 1 – First movement.  François Schubert: The Bee
The Elegiac Trio (Andrew Kelly, Josiah Pinkney – cello, Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – piano) – Rachmaninov: Trio élégiaque No 1, in G minor
Catherine McKay was the accompanying pianist for the three violinists.

Old Saint Paul’s church

Tuesday 29 July, 12:15 pm

This concert, in the regular Tuesday lunchtime series in the former Pro-cathedral, was the last appearance of The Elegiac Trio before they took part in the final stage of the Schools Chamber Music Contest, held this year in Christchurch on the coming Saturday. It proved a remarkable exhibition of young talent by the three members of the Trio as well as the 12-year-old violinist Melanie Pinkney. All three violinists are tutored by NZSO associate concert-master Donald Armstrong.

Andrew Kelly established at once what could easily be felt as the prevailing quality in the violin playing: a warm and even tone that provided the foundation for playing that was rich in dynamic subtleties; in which the central section of the Brahms sonata was so magically hushed, demonstrating the composer’s essentially romantic and emotional character, though cast within broadly classical shapes. It prepared the audience thoroughly for his role in Rachmaninov’s elegiac trio at the end of the concert.

Claudia Matthews, 16, is a little younger than Andrew, but showed greater confidence, though their playing was invested with very similar degree of painstaking care and finesse in handling the bow. Elgar’s sonata is not nearly as familiar to most people as Brahms’s three sonatas: perhaps it does not have the same immediate melodic charm and memorable character; it’s one of those works whose beauties are slower to become embedded in the mind. Claudia’s confidence, firmness and accuracy matched her ease in navigating Elgar’s particular way with the notes, bending them secretly, creating an air of remoteness and gentle drifting, speaking of a maturity that seemed well beyond her years.

Melanie Pinkney is only 12, and I imagine I was not alone in feeling that her musical gift was in the class of the musical prodigy. The Bruch concerto in G minor is a truly grown-up masterpiece; it opens with Catherine McKay’s piano, capturing the orchestra’s character hypnotically, drawing the audience mysteriously towards the memorable first theme by the violin.

Melanie planted her notes with mature assurance, giving no suggestion that it presented any difficulties, since it all lay so comfortably under her fingers. She dealt with every musical colouring and decoration as if she was improvising, yet also with beguiling musical feeling that held you spellbound.

The fine Bruch structure was followed by a little Schubert piece that I haven’t heard for many years. Yes, it IS by Franz Schubert, but he goes under the French version, François – and that’s because it’s a fellow born in 1808 in Dresden, not Vienna, and died in 1878 and though he lived more than twice as long as the eponymous Viennese musician, he didn’t gain immortality. Though The Bee, from his Bagatelles, Op 13 (No 9), named in French, L’Abeille, published in the 1850s, survives.

In any case, it offered another display of a wonderfully fluid bowing arm that produced perfect tone.

After all this precocious virtuosity, one might be surprised at nothing, and that was the case with Rachmaninov’ first piano trio – he wrote two, both called Trio Élégiaque. This first is in G minor while the second in D minor, which is much longer, was inspired by the death of Tchaikovsky.

The tremolo opening of the piece seemed to emerge mysteriously from the dim timber recesses of the church, as the arrival of each instrument each seemed in turn to pick up the same emotion and tonal character of the previous one. They seemed to have paid scrupulous attention to each other’s sound; as the violin took up the theme from the cello it seemed simply to be an extension upward of the latter’s sound, not a different instrument.

Admittedly, this is a gorgeous acoustic for chamber music, but the raw material needs to be there for it to flourish. These musicians seemed not only to have worked together to integrate their sound but also to have judged successfully how their playing needed to be adapted to the space.

Much credit is due to the teacher of the violinists, Donald Armstrong, who oversaw the concert as a whole, but also to Andrew Joyce who coaches cellist Josiah Pinkney and Claudia Tarrant-Matthews’s piano teachers.

 

A challenging conspectus of unfamiliar Nordic song, from Kapiti Chamber Choir

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Nordic Music and Myths: Songs from Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway by Alfvén, Sibelius,
Nørgård, Grieg, Sandstrøm, Sallinen, Langgaard, Rautavaara, Nielsen, Gade, Nordraak
Elgar: Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf

Kapiti Chamber Choir conducted by Eric Sidoti, with Jennifer Scarlet (piano), Sunny Amey (narrator), Pepe Becker (soprano), John Beaglehole (tenor) and Roger Wilson (baritone), Irene Lau (piano)

St. Paul’s Church, Paraparaumu

Sunday, 27 July 2014, 2.30pm

The fashion for themed concerts seems now firmly entrenched; whether it produces the best results is another matter.  This concert’s intention of covering a broad theme was perhaps its undoing.  I have attended numerous concerts by the Kapiti Chamber Choir over the years, but this one did not reach the standard of its predecessors.  Instead of trying to cover all the Nordic lands (except Iceland) and languages, it might have been better to concentrate on fewer composers, and perform more of their work, e.g. do a greater number of songs by Sibelius and perhaps of one or two of the others represented.  This would have been more cohesive, instead of the huge range we heard, some very briefly.

The only familiar item (to me) from the choir was Sibelius’s ‘Finlandia’, though sung with words (English) I had not heard before. Mellifluous tone and clear words made this a fine performance.  The other well-known piece was not sung, but played as a piano duet: Sinding’s old pot-boiler ‘Rustle of Spring’.  I don’t think this added any value in a choral concert.  A solo from Roger Wilson, Grieg’s sad song ‘A Swan’ effectively employed the baritone’s lower register.

None of the choral items in the first half was an easy sing, and most  were unaccompanied.  Good observation of dynamics was a significant feature, and the songs in English demonstrated the delightful
word-setting by the composers, particularly those by Finn Aulis Sallinen (1935-  ).

The songs in Finnish and other languages seemed to have more tuning problems, and variety of pronunciation made for a muddy sound at times. A couple of songs were sung with repetitive accompanying syllables from the lower voices, with varying success. The national anthem of Norway, by Rikard Nordraak (1842-1866) featured excellent tone and harmony – a fine performance.

Elgar’s King Olaf is little performed these days; perhaps there is a good reason for that.  It lacks the inspiration, melodic inventiveness and attractiveness of Dream of Gerontius or even The Music Makers.  Grove (Dictionary of Music and Musicians) says that it, along with other of Elgar’s choral works, ‘…suffer from poor librettos’ and ‘…here he chose texts which are sometimes muddled dramatically and often commonplace, or worse, in style.’ While Longfellow is much revered in the United States, and was in an earlier time in Britain, some of the verse Sunny Amey was required to declaim, and the soloists and choir to sing, was not far removed from doggerel, with ludicrous rhymes and conventional imagery.

The writer of the Grove article calls the first five movements memorable, but implies that the later ones are not of the same quality.  I would agree; they became tedious, until suddenly I was lit up when, almost at the end, we had the lovely song, often sung on its own, ‘As torrents in summer’.  I would call this the most inspired section, and the most beautifully sung, of the whole work.

The work comprised the second half of the over-long concert.  Spoken interventions by conductors have become a custom.  These were quite unnecessary, since much information was given in the excellent printed programme, and only served to take up time.

A difficulty for choirs is being able to provide an orchestra for works requiring one.  In this case, the piano was used instead.  However, a small upright piano in a fully carpeted church is but a poor substitute, despite the magnificent efforts of Jennifer Scarlet on this occasion.  Not only does it not give the variety of sound colours required, it does not support the choir sufficiently.
Whether frequent lapses of intonation, especially from the sopranos, can be blamed on this, I am not sure.  Much of the time the choir seemed under-rehearsed.  ‘S’ word-endings were not together, and individual voices were too prominent at times; at others, the tone sounded forced.  I think that Elgar would have written for a larger choir than this one consisting of 35 singers.

Of the soloists, John Beaglehole was the most distinguished.  His lively tenor gave some drama to his solos – he sang as if he meant what he was saying.  Pepe Becker is a wonderful singer of baroque and early music; I felt she was miscast in this late-Victorian cantata, in which Elgar adopted some of the
compositional style of Wagner.  These remarks applied also to the solos from these performers in the first half of the concert.  The style involved much use of chromatic writing – a trap for choirs, and one the choir frequently fell into, in terms of tuning.

Of course, not all was poor.  There were moments when the choir expressed the drama of the piece well, even though some of it was couched in musical and linguistic clichés.  There was some very attractive singing, especially in quiet passages.  In contrast, the loud passages sounded harsh, the voices not well supported.

It was remarkable how some of the men, particularly, managed to sing the whole work with but few glances at the conductor.

Maybe the music would serve well as background to an action film on the life and adventures of King Olaf.

I admire the conductor’s energy and innovation in producing this programme; he is musical director of the larger Kapiti Chorale, St. John’s in the City choir and the Hutt Valley Gang Show in addition to Kapiti Chamber Choir, but I have to say that this concert was a disappointment.

 

Cathedral’s festival celebrated by satanism and the supernatural in film and music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Phantom of the Opera – silent film accompanied by organ
A Cathedral Jubilee Festival Event
Barry Brinson – organ, Hannah Catrin Jones – soprano

Cathedral of Saint Paul

Saturday 26 July, 7:30 pm

How satisfying is the experience of a silent film?

As part of the Cathedral’s 50th anniversary, a famous silent film made in 1925 was screened, with a dedicated sound-track comprising a live organ performance. The inspiration for an organ accompaniment came from the theme of the film itself set in the Paris Opéra where performances of Gounod’s Faust were taking place. The film tells the tale of an organ-playing ‘Phantom’ which has taken up residence in the dungeons beneath the theatre and is doomed to remain there with his deformed face until a woman loves him.

The woman targeted is an opera singer, Christine, who is understudy to the role of Marguérite in a production of Faust. The Phantom makes it known that the prima donna, Carlotta, must stand aside so that Christine can sing the role.

Our first encounter with the opera is the ballet scene (well, two of the seven numbers in the ballet) which Gounod wrote when Faust was produced by the Paris Opéra in 1869 (it had premiered at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1859, with spoken dialogue and various other differences from the version usually performed today). The ballet was an addition to the orgiastic witches’ scene on the Brocken in the Harz mountains in central Germany, known as the Walpurgisnacht: another appropriate link with the Gothic (last year your reviewer went by steam train up to the Brocken searching for evidence of earlier heathen depravity, but was disappointed).

After the threat has been fulfilled and Carlotta is ‘sick’, we hear Christine singing Marguérite’s affecting last act aria, ‘Anges purs, anges radieux’, sung beautifully by Hannah Catrin Jones. But the next night in spite of the Phantom’s threat, Carlotta again attempts the role, and Hannah sings the Jewel Song (it would have been nice to have had surtitles for the words of these), but amid flickering lights, the mighty chandelier in the auditorium crashes on to the audience. The Phantom seizes Christine and holds her in the dungeon below the theatre.

In the second half Hannah sang ‘Il était un roi de Thule’ and the Phantom at his organ went through the motions of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor: M. Brinson did it much better, as he did with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. After the final chase leading to the disposal of the Phantom in the Seine, Brinson played one of those splendid Lefébure-Wély-type pieces with which Parisians make their exits from church.

There is no need to narrate the complex and rather contrived story after that, and its departures from the original novel as well as the changes made in the course of the film’s production; the ad hoc modifications that had to happen in the course of recovering and restoring the film, the original 35 mm version of which had been lost, are to be found on the Internet.

So: how satisfying as a theatrical and music experience was this silent movie?

The film cannot really rank as a classic of the silent film era, as there is far too much incoherent, clichéd, ‘horror’ effects, suspense, pointless chase scenes, dwelling on the Phantom’s hideous face and the satanic elements, not to mention a story that echoes, in a confused way, aspects of the ancient Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman legends, hinting at the idea of redemption through a woman’s sacrifice, as well as echoes of the Faust story itself.

Many would have been there for the music though. While Barry Brinson accompanied with imagination and frequent pointed effects, any attempts to echo the supernatural and the intended terrifying phases of the story did not quite measure up to the kinds of music such things might inspire from an imaginative composer of today, so that the dated visual devices were hardly rescued from their weaknesses by the injection of dramatic and chilling music.

Nevertheless, the presence of an organist who knew his way around this versatile instrument and managed generally to find music, some from related material such as the Andrew Lloyd Webber version of the story, with a lot of tremolo rather than much real musical evocation of scenes of ‘horror’ and suspense. Yet we heard a musician of impressive improvisatory, and well as memory skills who actually produced the kind of musical accompaniment that might have been heard in the 1920s in a movie theatre.

The novel and the film of The Phantom of the Opera fall into the broad class of Gothic fiction that arouse in the late 18th century.

The Gothic pattern involved calling up a variety of effects and situations: mysterious, supernatural, terrifying or horror-filled. There are visions, omens, shadows on walls, ghosts, ancient castles, or, in this case, a rather wondrous neo-gothic – architecturally neo-almost-everything – opera house; they often involved a woman threatened by violence from a fiendish character, accompanied by staring eyes, fainting, screaming.  The story makes great use of suspense, supernatural events, inanimate things coming to life, appearances and disappearances, a woman in danger, tyranised by a crazed or evil man.

The French origin of the film was a novel of the same name that appeared in serialised form in 1909-10. It was emphatically in the tradition of the Gothic fiction that touched poetry, drama and the novel, as well as opera and ballet and the visual arts throughout the 19th century. It was a very important sub-genre of the Romantic movement.

The movement had started with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 and novels of Ann Radcliffe such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, The Monk by Matthew Lewis (who became known as ‘Monk Lewis’), aspects of Walter Scott’s novels, the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, elements of Dickens, like Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. Later examples were Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

The genre flourished in the German Romantic movement from the time of Schiller’s Die Räuber in 1782 (which became Verdi’s I masnadieri), Kleist, Tieck and most importantly ETA Hoffmann. Jean Paul’s novels were steeped in the genre (his Titan reverberated through the 19th century, even, misleadingly, to Mahler’s First Symphony). In opera there was Weber’s Der Freischütz, with Samiel, the Satanic ‘Black Hunter’ and the magic bullets, Marschner’s Der Vampyr drawn from a story by John William Polidori, the creator of ‘Vampire literature’ – a sub-genre; and de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (a water sprite) which inspired much later writing and music, such as operas by Hoffmann himself, Lortzing and Dvorák’s Rusalka.

In Russia, Gothic elements exist in Pushkin’s Queen of Spades and Lermontov’s Demon (both of which inspired operas by, respectively, Tchaikovsky and Anton Rubinstein).

Later in the 19th century the style revived with R L Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Henry James The Turn of the Screw. And of course it could be no surprise that the cinema soon realised how brilliantly the whole assemblage of hysterical and supernatural nonsense could be exploited on the screen.

 

Echt-quartet experiences from the Doric String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
The Doric String Quartet

HAYDN – String Quartet Op.76 No.6 in E-flat
BRETT DEAN – Eclipse
SCHUBERT – String Quartet No.15 in G D.887

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 25th July, 2014

I didn’t get to see and hear the Doric String Quartet on their first New Zealand visit in 2010, but on the strength of what I heard at their recent Wellington concert I’ll be keeping an eye on their schedules and things from now on. Whatever coincidences of conditions were brought to play, they were of an order which left me in a kind of trance for days after the Quartet’s concert, with scraps of the music they presented continually sounding in my head and refusing to leave me alone.

What these players seemed to me to be able to do was generate a kind of “the ordinary and the fabulous” music-making world, to which we in the audience were all invited. From the first few phrases of the Haydn (in that gorgeous E-flat Major key) our sensibilities were taken “somewhere else” by a combination of the warmth and piquancy of the writing and what I can describe only as a kind of focused sensitivity on the part of the Quartet’s players.

It was a feeling quite at odds with the cavernous spaces of the Michael Fowler Centre, a venue which was never designed for chamber music, but which nevertheless yielded on this occasion to the blandishments of the sounds brought into being by the musicians. But in a strange and alchemic way, those vistas had a part to play in the process of creating the fabulous – the quartet’s penchant for hushed tones throughout seemed to throw down a kind of gauntlet to our listening environment, as if to say “Can these spaces unlock our secrets? – or will our tones be scattered as wildflower petals in the wilderness, lost just as if we never in the first place made these sounds?”

Well, the musicians needn’t have worried – thanks to that aforementioned “focused sensitivity” everything the players did with the music registered, from the softest whisperings to the fullest, richest declamations. But I think the combination of larger-than-usual listening-distances and the quartet’s fondness for finely-wrought, inward-sounding tones resulted in a kind of focused, concentrated interplay between music, musicians and listeners that worked a potent spell throughout the concert.

Haydn’s theme-and-variations opening movement of his Op.76 No.6 quartet beguiled us right from its opening, every phrase and contrasting impulse carrying with it both spontaneity and logic. The second, hymn-like movement seemed almost like a 3/4 version of the famous Emperor Quartet’s slow movement. I liked the “breathless with wonderment” aspect of the playing, with not a note or phrase sounding mechanical or contrived – a momentary shift into minor mode at one point called forth pauses charged with expectation, before a communion-like resolution provided the only possible response.

Deftly-wrought syncopations throughout the minuet’s opening gave way to the trio’s pealing bell-like scales, sounded by the players with great delight among the combinations, by turns droll and festive in character. Then, the finale’s almost ritualistic minuet-like aspect at the beginning occasionally released an energized, scampering figure which enlivened the textures and gave a wider context to the movement’s apparent severity – the quartet dug into some wonderful modulations and danced its way through some tricky canonic interchanges, the sequences communicating to us a great deal of creative satisfaction – as the poet Hopkins wrote about his early-morning sighting of a falcon’s flight – “the achieve of: the mastery of the thing!”

Brett Dean’s work Eclipse took us to realms as far-removed from Haydn’s finely-abstracted creations as could be imagined. This work for string quartet, in a single movement but with three distinct sections, was written by the Australian composer in response to the 2001 Tampa crisis, the name referring to a Norwegian vessel whose captain’s actions saved the lives of hundreds of Indonesian refugees on board a boat which got into difficulties while heading for Australia. Though Dean in a programme note describes the work as “first and foremost a piece of chamber music”, his initial impetus to create the work would for most listeners surely seem an inextricable part of the process of listening to and understanding the end result.  I think it was Sibelius who once said “music reflects life” – and as a political statement Dean’s work is no less musically impactful – in a completely different way – than was Finlandia.

The composer described his work as “brooding, troubled and at times aggressive”, his music describing a situation in which people found themselves “riding the cusp between life and death….and entering the realm of sheer existence”. It’s certainly a tour de force of virtuosic quartet-playing, employing techniques and effects which were exploratory to an extreme degree and positively orchestral in their impact. The work’s three sections, played without a break, described in turn the sounds and ambient contexts one might have associated with a ship drifting out at sea, the naked power and terrifying effects of an oceanic storm, and finally the ensuing calm associated with feelings of both relief and uncertainty on the part of the ship’s passengers regarding their fate.

Each section made a different kind of impact, one which tended to go beyond the composer’s actual programme and draw on deeper, more archetypal feelings concerning aspects of the “human condition”.  Thus the quartet’s opening evocations seemed to me to suggest the reality of vast spaces through which we humans carry out our small business – at the outset things were only a notch or two up from inaudibility, though things gradually built up by a kind of “growing from seed” process. It became a slow coalescence of dry, spectral impulses with variegated timbral and gestural features, such as tremolandi, and afterwards pizzicati, the spontaneous, even chaotic assemblage subsiding into order as the music proceeded.

The “storm” sequence was nightmarish to say the least – extremities of textures and dynamics, between which were “roller-coaster rides” of the utmost physicality, the players extracting from their instruments sounds that readily conveyed terror, helplessness and despair by dint of their menace and vehemence. At its climax brutal punctuations vied with awful silences which were then whipped into a frenzy by vicious tremolandi passages, whose intensities gradually dissipated, leading the way to an ambience of shattered fragments, of exhausted spirits, tremulous voices, and glimmerings of hope, a solo cello’s wraith-like traceries attempting to imbue the besieged human spirit with the will to recover and continue.

In some respects Dean’s work resembled that which concluded the concert, Schubert’s equally searing G Major Quartet D.887. Both pieces inhabited realms of physical and psychological duress, presented in each case with unequivocal visceral impact, though Schubert’s work had no programme as such, rather, abstracting its dramatic qualities via sonata form. But what power there was in those abstractions – what candour! – what tragedy!

The Doric’s way with this music was to bring out a kind of rapt inwardness to the quieter, more lyrical sections, playing with the utmost concentration and refinement of tone. This approach had the effect of making us listen all the more intently to the music-making in that vast space – having captured our sensibilities thus, the music’s more vigorous moments came across with all the more impact and character. Though not as “gutsy” as the trenchant attack adopted by some groups I’d heard in the music’s more harrowing sections, the Doric’s keen focus and intensity put across the music just as strongly and tellingly, made all the more journey-like by the observance of the first movement repeat.

Equally as memorable was the stark beauty of the ‘cello-led lament which began the second movement, the players paring all warmth from their tones so as to sharpen the intensities of contrast with the trenchant second subject – here, at once tightly-focused and vastly-flung, the ambience a-tingle with anguish and grey-hued with sorrow. But then the quartet made certain we felt the touches of warmth on our faces which came with the major-key statements of the opening towards the movement’s end, Schubert characteristically putting on a brave face through the music’s tears.

The spookily elfin scherzo kept its sotto voce mode for as long as it could, the playing hinting at something diabolical darting between the shadows, with occasional szforzandi causing a scalp-prickling effect. Set against these urgencies, the long-breathed waltz-likeTrio seemed like a kind of distant dream of dancing phantoms, the shades, perhaps, of happier memories. But even more startling was the finale’s frenetic pace, its flight more psychological than physical, the notes falling over themselves in places trying to “escape” the claustrophobic crowding of those syncopations, and the brutality of the occasional szforzandi. I’ve never heard this music take on such a sinister “ride to the abyss” aspect, its energies transformed into compulsive shudderings, everything haunted with a ghostly pallor, like a rider set on galloping towards a grim and unremitting destiny.

One could conclude from the above, quite rightly, that the concert was for me a throughly engaging and richly-wrought experience – sterling testimony to the skill and musicality of an exceptional quartet of players.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Engaging lunchtime concert by woodwind students

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Woodwind students of the New Zealand School of Music

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 23 July, 12:15 pm

Five students under head of winds Deborah Rawson at the school of music gave a delightful recital on a cold day which saw a slightly smaller audience than usual at St Andrew’s.

As usual the standard of the performances was remarkable, resulting in several revelations of unfamiliar music. The first was a movement from Saint-Saëns’s clarinet sonata, one of his last pieces, written in the year of his death. Hannah Sellars played its second movement, Allegro animato, not without slight blemishes but with interesting variety of tone and an easy fluency in the runs and other decorative elements.

A second clarinettist was Patrick Richardson, rather more confident both in his presentation and his execution; he played two pieces, the first a successful arrangement of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin, and then the Allegro from Stamitz’s 2nd clarinet concerto (while the programme had J (for Johann) Stamitz as composer, Richardson said correctly that it was by Carl, Johann’s son; Johann wrote only one clarinet concerto). The Debussy was limpid and fluid, every note entranced by the girl’s beguiling hair, the piano part only slightly diminished in its importance; the concerto movement by the son of the genius of the Mannheim school which so influenced Mozart, was a happy experience, chosen no doubt to exemplify the stylistic contrast between the classical clarinet and the late romantic. The clarity of tone, the player’s firm confidence carried him through the decorative phrases and cadenzas, with striking support by pianist Rafaela Garlick-Grice.

Harim Oh was a third clarinettist; he chose a piece that represented a very different challenge: the first movement, Lento, poco rubato, from the solo clarinet sonata by avant-garde Soviet composer Edison Denisov, born in 1929 and died in 1996. Littered with tricky pitches, micro-tones, note bending and smudged trills, this was a fine performance of a famously seminal piece, defying Soviet orthodoxy.

Two other instruments featured: Annabel Lovatt’s oboe and Peter Lamb’s bassoon. Annabel’s presentation was slightly hindered by nervousness compounded by a non-functioning microphone; however I did hear her say that the CPE Bach piece for solo oboe was originally for flute – no doubt for his patron the flute-playing Prussian king Frederick. One of the really significant revelations of recent decades has been the discovery of Bach’s oldest son’s genius, replacing the earlier view of him as a merely talented odd-ball. This piece made its way through an Adagio with an intriguing, twisting melody, short varied pauses and odd tempo changes; then the Allegro, a show-piece that was just as inventive and entertaining, punctuated by unexpected pauses, which Annabel played with considerable accomplishment. It may well have been more difficult on the oboe than on the flute.

Peter Lamb played a short suite for bassoon and piano by Alexander Tansman, who came alive for me when I visited the city museum in Lodz some years ago to find it largely dominated by Arthur Rubinstein and Tansman, both born there – Tansman 1897–1986. Since then, Tansman’s music seems to have emerged interestingly. This suite explored the instrument’s great and highly contrasted range in sunny melodies that engaged the piano (always played so splendidly by Garlick-Grice) in a real partnership. There seemed to be four movements, varied in a neo-classical manner. Not only does his music avoid modernist tendencies (in Paris in the 1920s, he declined an invitation to associate with Les Six) and certainly the serialists, but there is little to suggest any kinship with his compatriot Szymanowski, 15 years his senior. So this was an engaging, and interesting work that the two played with affection and commitment. It’s time for more serious exploration (by RNZ Concert?) of Tansman’s impressive oeuvre.

Comments later confirmed my impression of a particularly engaging concert.

Jian Liu at the piano – visionary programming, extraordinary playing

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Classical Expressions 2014 presents
Jian Liu (piano)

WILLIAM BYRD – Hugh Ashton’s Grownde (from “My Ladye Nevells Book”)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA – Chaconne
JS BACH / FERUCCIO BUSONI – Chaconne
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – 6 Variations in F Major on an Original Theme
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Variations on a theme of Paganini

Classical Expressions, Upper Hutt
The Gillies Group Theatre

Monday 21st July 2014

I missed whatever printed or spoken announcement had alerted others to the re-arrangement of the programme order – so that when Jian Liu began his Classical Expressions recital with William Byrd instead of Sofia Gubaidulina, I experienced a kind of reverse apoplexy! I had girded my loins in preparation for a Slavic onslaught of sorts, and was thus completely and disconcertingly rendered helpless by the gentle Tudor-English melancholy of Byrd’s treatment of a fellow-composer’s “ground” (a bass pattern to which melodic and harmonic variations are added).

It may have been a mere echo of my expectation of hearing Sofia Gubaidulina’s work – but in the opening theme of Byrd’s music I thought I caught more than a hint of plainchant mode, a phrase or two whose trajectory resonated like a sung phrase from an Orthodox service. Of course, as well it might have been Byrd’s own background as an English Catholic bringing out a Latin plainchant phrase or manner, however secular in intent the actual work was.

The music in this case came from a collection called My Lady Nevelles Booke, one which Byrd himself had compiled as a gift to the “lady” in question (one of his pupils). In doing so Byrd immortalized both her and (with this particular piece) his slightly older contemporary Hugh Ashton, devising wonderfully exploratory figurations and strongly-wrought harmonies and counterpoint figures to go with the older composer’s ground bass.

Jian Liu gave a predictably lucid, beautifully-voiced set of responses to the music’s different variations, though early on there were places where I thought he kept the trill-laden figurations on too tight a rein. I wanted more sense of the fantastical, more spontaneous unfolding of those trills and their laughter and sense of wonderment. Here it seemed as though the figurations were a shade too stiff in effect, and their roundings-off at times too abrupt.

It could have been that Liu was deliberately contriving this effect, feeling that the music had sufficient wonderment in itself, and needed clarity and shape, without allowing too much indulgence. As the music grew in animation and vigour, Liu’s playing seemed to relax and knit more readily with the fantastical textures, his control giving the composer’s arguments and counter-arguments great eloquence, especially in the Ninth Variation, and making the most of the welter of notes over the following two variations, and the harmonic richness of the tune’s final statement.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne gave us the greatest possible contrast with the Byrd in terms of its dynamic angularity and overall physical impact. Liu gave the opening playing of astonishing power and girth, building granite-like structures, around which circled angular counterpoints and leap-frogging figurations. Mad boogie-woogie sequences crashed to earth, the remnants picking themselves up and dashing madly hither and thither in desperately fugal pursuits. One marvelled at the composer’s seemingly endless keyboard inventions, time and again setting immovable objects against irresistible forces, as with rampant left-hand octaves terrorizing right-handed chords into cowering submission (shades of Shostakovich, here, probably cavorting in glee!).

All of these irruptions and coruscations were delivered by Liu with strength, brilliance and fearless resolve, going to the heart of each of the variations with unerring instinct. From a sequence in which the music was becalmed grew bell-sounding impulses, both tinitinabulations and “strong gongs groaning”, the bright-voiced bells building the excitement, supported by wondrously deep-throated clamoring from the turrets and towers of cathedrals.  Then, majestically, the work’s opening returned, as jagged and angular as before, but with extra, insistent octave support from the left hand, Liu beautifully controlling the textures, and allowing the silences to drift softly backwards as the voices took their leave of us.

That miracle of adaptation, Busoni’s “realization” of JS Bach’s mighty Chaconne from the Violin Partita No.2 BWV 1004, was merely one aspect of the pianist’s veneration for the older composer and his works – he also produced his own editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Partitas, and the English and French Suites. With the Chaconne, Busoni thought it possible to recreate the work from a more theatrical and Romantic perspective, thereby adding to his age’s understanding of the music. I’ve not been able to find any additional evidence for the story (which I read somewhere) of Busoni touring with the violinist Ysaye, frequently hearing him play the Chaconne as part of the Partita, and eventually producing his transcription of the work, and playing it to the stupefied violinist, after cautioning him to refrain from making any comments until he, Busoni, had finished the performance!

Busoni wrote his transcription in 1892, dedicating the work to the celebrated pianist Eugene d’Albert, who apparently was not pleased – in fact d’Albert reproached Busoni for what he called “tampering” with the original, but the latter was famously unrepentant. In fact Busoni’s reply to d’Albert deserves to be quoted – “I start from the impression that Bach’s conception of the work goes far beyond the limits and means of the violin, so that the instrument he specifies for performance is not adequate.” As was his wont, Bach had left no performance instructions – dynamic or tempo markings – on his manuscript, aside from the notes themselves. The work and its possibilities remained alive in Busoni’s thoughts for many years afterwards as he revised his transcription at least three times.

Jian Liu’s playing certainly entered into the spirit of Busoni’s “theatrical and Romantic perspective” – here, expressed through his hands, was grandeur set alongside rapt intimacy, variegated pianistic colour next to simple transparency, harmonic augmentation and single voicing. Throughout, both player and instrument sounded Bach’s music-framework in full conjunction with Busoni’s creative responses to the same. At times the virtuoso charge of it all was edge-of-the-seat stuff, as with the left hand octaves thrillingly driving the tight-handed figurations with Lisztian brilliance, or both hands harmonizing cascades of pealing bells while some of the gentler musings had whole sea-changes of mood, such as the contrast of “withdrawal” from major to minor mode three-quarters of the way through the piece.

Both the interval and the Beethoven work which followed provided relief of sorts from the overwhelming weight of concentration from both music and performance, and from the orchestral weight of sound made to emanate from the piano. “Beethoven’s “Enigma” Variations” quipped a friend, upon seeing the “On an Original Theme” subtitle to the work – though not quite as far-reaching or as enigmatic as Elgar’s, Beethoven’s variations are unusual in that each piece is in a different key. This work, from 1802, marked an intensification of creativity for the young composer, what he called a “new road”, and along which he was shortly to squarely face his life’s first major crisis, the onset of his deafness. This work, however, gives little sign of impending tragedy, the theme a brief but lovely cantabile melody, the variations discursive and imaginative.

Jian Liu brought out the character of each variation with great relish, the bagatelle-like D-major, the rumbustious B-flat-major with its contrasting high and low registering, the graceful, drawing-room-like E-flat-major, the purposeful march-like C Minor, with its Schumannesque pre-echoes, and the final adroit merging into C major and then F Major, the Mozartean flow punctuated by Beethovenian muscle at cardinal points! Liu played the flowing, rippling passagework which decorated the final Adagio beautifully, the cascadings giving way to a simple, unadorned fragment of the original theme at the end.

Rounding off this evening’s presentation of virtuosic chaconne-like works came one of the most fearsome – the Variations on a Theme of Paganini, by Brahms. This work is one of the “big three” adaptations (the other two are by Rachmaninov and Lutoslawski) of violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini’s 24th and last Caprice from his set of Caprices for solo violin. And, for the adventurous, there seem to be plenty more explorations of the same work by composers employing a bewildering range of instruments, from traditional to techno-based.

At first the combination of Brahms and Paganini would seem incongruous – here, after all, was the champion of the conservatives exploring and extending the music of one of the great romantic virtuosi. Parts of the work sound also as though they could have been written by Liszt, whose music Brahms had little time for. But the common ground here was the young pianistic wizard Carl Tausig, Liszt’s favourite pupil (“When the little one goes on the road I shall shut up shop!” Liszt was reported to have said of Tausig). Refusing to align himself exclusively with either conservative or radical elements of the age, Tausig also befriended Brahms, who wrote the Paganini Variations for him, calling them “Studies for Pianoforte”. One critic described the requirements for any interpreter of these pieces as “fingers of steel, a heart of burning lava and the courage of a lion”.

Jian Liu certainly had those prerequisites, engaging the work’s difficulties, both technical and interpretative, with strength, flair and purpose. Never over-flamboyant at the keyboard, his seemingly tireless fingers, wrists and arms channelled a bewildering amalgam of complex responses and emotions into the music’s heart, realizing its brilliance, power, charm, exhilaration and tragedy. To choose individual variations for comment would seem almost churlish, as it was Liu’s overall sweep which impressed most, in retrospect, his integration of the disparate elements, making the work seem like a true reconciliation between form, technique and emotional content. One came away from this performance with a deeper appreciation of the composer, of his music, and of the times that produced such an outpouring of creative imagination.