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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – THE MIRROR OF TIME 3

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

Sacred Heart Basilica, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 26th June, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gamut of emotions – Orchestra Wellington’s second 2014 concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
WHAT LOVE TELLS ME

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

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

Opera House, Wellington,

Sunday, 22nd June, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

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

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

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 June, 7:30 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday, 17th June 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Choral Symphony in a triumphant end to NZSO’s monumental Beethoven symphony cycle

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Orpheus Choir, conducted by Pietari Inkinen
Soloists: Tiffany Speight, Anneley Peebo, Simon O’Neill, Peter Coleman-Wright

Beethoven: Symphonies No 8 in F and No 9 in D minor (Choral)

Michael Fowler Centre

Sunday 15 June, 3 pm

In the NZSO’s Beethoven cycle of 1995, the Choral Symphony was accompanied by Symphony No 1, an arrangement just as interesting as linking it with No 8. Each is similar in length, and both represent Beethoven writing in a style more traditional than some of those he would write or had written.

These juxtapositions, that have illuminated each concert, have been as rewarding as the performances themselves; probably none has looked as dramatic as this one. To begin, No 9 is nearly three times the length of No 8: I’d guess it clocked in at a bit over 70 minutes, and it breaks conventions by setting a famous poem as its last movement.

Unlike any of the earlier ‘classical’ examples, there is no slow introduction; instead it hits the ground running. It’s in the same key as the Pastoral and though its first movement is faster than that of the Pastoral, it’s also in triple time and there is a distinctly similar tone, that suggests the flavor of the Ländler of the countryside.  Yet neither at its first performance nor in the centuries since (and this year in the two hundredth anniversary of its first performance) has it become a popular work.

I guess it was pure chance that it was the first complete symphony that I bought – 78s of the pre-WW2 Weingartner performance with the Vienna Philharmonic, for 18 shillings and sixpence – at the age of about 19. It’s generally slower than Inkinen’s and most modern performances.  The records are still enjoyable: I have a soft spot for it.

The second movement, Allegro scherzando, led by a bright tune in the strings, is in common rather than triple time and so it’s a cross between traditional slow movement and a bright dance-like episode. The orchestra seemed to relish the abrupt ending.

To add confusion for the traditionalists, the third movement is Tempo di menuetto with a slower, more convincing minuet character than the minuets in either Symphonies 1 or 4. However, the bassoon lent it a kind of comic, peasant character that might reinforce a link with the Ländler rather than the genteel minuet.

If speed had given me a bit of trouble elsewhere, that of the last movement, Allegro vivace, seemed entirely justified: speed was of the essence, even though my Weingartner benchmark hardly supports it. What I enjoyed about the whole performance was a kind of serious-minded joyfulness.

Perhaps it was hardly fair to have it play the part of a light-weight curtain-raiser to the main event.

When we came back after the interval the empty choir stalls were full of singers in black and white, ranged from sopranos on the left to basses on the right, opposite to the orchestra where cellos and basses were arrayed on the left behind the first violins. Was there some arcane intent here?

The Ninth Symphony broke all sorts of conventions, the most obvious of which are the inclusion of a choral element with soloists in the fourth movement, and its length, which can take between around 65 and 75 minutes. I didn’t time this, but it was brisk and I’d guess would have been nearer 65 minutes, about 25 of which are taken by the last movement.

Though it is more common to dwell on the character of orchestration in the music of the later 19th century as more instruments, particularly percussion were incorporated and wind instruments became more varied and numerous; and technical improvements made them more versatile and in theory a bit easier to play. But in the hands of a Mozart or a Beethoven the imaginative employment of what was normally available in orchestras of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was often very beautiful, rich in nuances and arresting effects.

Beethoven’s increasing deafness mattered (especially to him), but his years of good hearing had filled his memory and he could obviously hear in his mind what his imagination created and could write down a good representation of it. So the very talented body of wind players in the NZSO could take full advantage of his colouful use of wind instruments in these two symphonies. Beethoven’s dramatic use of timpani was a relatively new phenomenon as was the introduction of trombones, in the last movements of the 5th, 6th and 9th, and four horns in the Choral. In the 9th he also uses a bass drum (tucked under the wall on the right side), cymbals and triangle. Thus one could well enjoy the diverting instrumental effects that Beethoven created, especially if one felt, for example, that the metronomic games in the Molto vivace (Scherzo in all but name) were a bit prolonged.

So a little more flexibility with the tempo might have better held attention. The fact is, however, that variety consists in the rallentandos that Beethoven marks at structural junctures in each movement, and in the dynamic changes that Inkinen marked vividly. It’s also true that the dramatic turning points deliver so much more power and impact if relative calm has preceded them, and Inkinen’s management achieved that most effectively. It was the slow (third) movement that seemed to lose its way; beautiful as it is and regardless of the care and subtleties of the playing, I lost concentration during the repeated episodes, though tiredness may have been to blame.

Everything that can be said about the fourth movement has been said: there are so many ways in which its structure can seem problematic or awkward, and commentaries these days often dwell on those. However, the unassailable aspects of Sunday’s performance were the orchestral playing: painstakingly careful dynamics, well balanced against choir and soloists, bluster set against ethereal moments, as the famous choral theme arrives, pianissimo, before chaos interrupts, and the violent fortissimi at climaxes that might be heard as ‘cheap’ effects but are usually wonderful.

The splendid chorus (rehearsed with obvious rigour and insight by Mark Dorrell, whose work hardly gets noticed in the programme) that filled the auditorium with clearly articulated German words was almost too vivid, exposing the (wash-your-mouth-out!) bombastic poetry, all in honour of something called “JOY”. Surely poetry of such passion and high-mindedness is about something of greater, more profound significance, even given that “joy” doesn’t seem to represent such a universal emotion as “Freude”! The substituted word “Freiheit” (freedom), which has often been suggested as what Schiller actually expected to be inferred from “Freude”, was in fact used at the famous 1989 concert under Bernstein at the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the smashing of the Berlin Wall.

The soloists are a special problem. Here, we had Peter Coleman-Wright in the bass part, launching the singing with the mighty exhortation to warring parties, “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne…”.  But surely “joy” is not the medicine for the chaos that prompts this mighty command; the word the chorus is looking for in response is surely “Freiheit”. Coleman-Wright’s name is familiar both in Australia and Europe; I’ve heard him several times in principal baritone roles for Opera Australia. In addition, at Covent Garden for example among many major opera companies, he has sung Dandini, Billy Budd, Papageno, Marcello, Gunther and Donner as well as Beckmesser.

It’s cruelly exposed, and he made a strong impact even if the sound, slightly uneven in production, was not a perfect fit for the job. Soprano Tiffany Speight (Australian) and mezzo Annely Peebo (Estonian) had a well projected duet of good clarity, and both displayed, as far as the roles allowed, attractive and theatrical voices. Simon O’Neill was the only New Zealander to make the cut (really! – surely we could have done better! On the other hand it’s important for us to hear top class overseas singers); he clearly relished his big solo moment, with commanding vocal incisiveness and physical stature – he looked as if he enjoyed singing this part, back home. When tenor and baritone reopened a soloists’ episode at Allegro ma non tanto, with “Freude, Töchter aus Elysium…” the low-pitched line didn’t allow their voices to emerge so well; otherwise the following quartet was glorious.

The great final peroration with the orchestra and choir in sublime and ecstatic accord leaves the soloists standing helplessly, contributing only with their faces in a semblance of engagement. But O’Neill could be detected participating, mouthing the words, quietly, with every appearance of involvement in the music and its message.

This time there was no hesitation from the audience. All able-bodied members of the audience sprang to their feet, clapping, shouting and whistling. A triumphant conclusion to a landmark symphonic cycle.

 

In the marvellous heartland of Beethoven’s symphonies: concert No 3

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen

Beethoven: Symphonies No 6 (Pastoral) and 7 in F and A, respectively

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 14 June, 6:30 pm

On Friday, after posting my Thursday review, I was reminded that this was not the first Beethoven cycle that the NZSO has undertaken – a fact that I should have remembered for I reviewed them for The Evening Post, in November 1995.  Then, the symphonies, conducted in the Town Hall (give it back to us!) by Janos Fürst who died in 2007, were spread over five concerts over three weeks, from 1 to 18 November; the performance of the Pastoral was accompanied by the 5th (Emperor) Piano Concerto, with Michael Houstoun, and the other pairings were: 2 and 3, 4 and 5, 7 and 8, 1 and 9.

On Saturday evening we heard the 6th and 7th symphonies. The dynamics were rather different from the first two concerts: the Pastoral is the second longest of them; it is a departure from the normal classical four movements, has a pictorial programme, and is one of the most loved of them all. Though the evening was becoming cloudy, the sun shone in the Michael Fowler Centre and the air danced.

Sitting centre stalls, one hears things in perfect balance and the large orchestra delivered a sound that was opulent, clear and balanced both spatially and between sections. As in the earlier performances one’s ears became attuned particularly to the ten cellos and eight basses, as large and as beautifully played as in the most famous orchestras: bass weight and sonority are fundamental to an emotionally satisfying performance.

This lent the first movement, ‘cheerful feelings aroused on arriving in the countryside’, glowing warmth and colour, the colour mainly from the woodwinds and horns, though they tended to be a bit covered by the strings, the writing for which must be held partly to blame.

The second movement, a ‘scene by the brook’, is slower but the playing was no less resolute, holding the attention in the gentle embrace of a languid summer’s day. Inkinen’s guiding of the third movement was characterized not only by playing that portrayed an unsophisticated gaiety, a sort of rhythmic stiffness, but also in playing that was, at one point presumably deliberate, a little wayward in articulation, simulating amateurs. Though I could see little of the wind players, I did glimpse Peter Dykes playing the lovely oboe solo here.

The storm was most effective with a sudden calm and a shocking return of the thunder which leads to the rapturous finale, cellos seeming to lead the choir in singing a sort of hymn of thanksgiving to end a wonderfully varied and beautiful performance.

The seventh symphony, after the astonishment and excitement of its discovery when I was about 19, has not really held its place in my heart. It has its moments, such as the inviting though remarkably long introductory passages, but there has always seemed to me too much unadorned thematic repetition, too little plain beauty. The exception is the slow movement, merely an allegretto, but which is a refuge for a few minutes with a heart-warming melody; it was performed here with sufficient rhythmic flexibility to overcome the constant pulse that, to me, imposes a shade too much rhythm to perform the role of bringer of repose in the midst of wildness and ecstasy.

The symphony, nevertheless, makes big demands on an orchestra, and Inkinen took every advantage of abrupt dynamic changes, of opportunities for grand or exciting tuttis, long stretches of molto vivace figures and passage-work, to showcase solos, such as the frequent ethereal or sparkling flute passages from Bridget Douglas.

I suppose it is the third movement, Scherzo in all but name, that seems to repeat once too often.

The Finale which is marked as a modest Allegro con brio – not Molto allegro or Prestissimo, or some such – is usually played as fast as possible and was here. Merely very fast doesn’t work, and I think this performance verged on using speed rather than intensity and emotional integrity as its driver. Nevertheless, Inkinen set the audience by the ears as he changed gears, aborting a third repeat of the Presto. The compulsive theme that Weber thought proof of Beethoven’s madness took hold of the auditorium and there was a sense of mesmerized astonishment as it drove forward with a sustained momentum to a climactic ending.

There was shouting and long applause and many of the audience came to their feet (though not as many as those who stood at the end of No 5 the night before) through a sense of exhilaration as the music seems to express some kind of triumph shared by all mankind, foreshadowing the mood of the Choral Symphony we are to hear on Sunday afternoon.

 

Beethoven from Inkinen and the NZSO – the excitement continued…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BEETHOVEN – Symphonies 4 and 5

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 13th June, 2014

This was the second concert in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven symphony traversal with conductor Pietari Inkinen. Putting the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies in the same programme brought listeners face-to face – perhaps cheek-to-jowl would be a more apt expression – with one of the most cherished cornerstones of critical appraisal of these works. This is the long-established idea of a dichotomy that separates the composer’s odd- and even-numbered symphonies.

Well, perhaps the exception to the rule is the First – it’s demonstrably not of the range and scope of grandeur and tragic expression of the “Eroica”, or the Fifth, and doesn’t have the Dionysian energies of the Seventh, much less the cosmic reach of the Ninth. Even so, in its own way the work could be honorably counted among the composer’s symphonic “movers and shakers”, setting its first listeners on their ears with its very opening dissonant chord, and later in the work rumbustiously re-defining the concept of a “dance movement” in a classical symphony!

But as for the other odd-numbered works, it’s true that they’re invariable made of sterner stuff than their immediate neighbours in the canon – though closer examination hardly bears out some of the descriptions these “happier” latter works have garnered from well-meaning commentators over the years. In particular, the Fourth Symphony has  been both misrepresented with faint praise and castigated roundly, to the point where it became for a while a kind of “Cinderella” work, especially set against either of its two illustrious and more overtly “grunty” neighbours.

That usually perceptive and erudite critic Robert Schumann really did the work few favours by famously describing it as “a slender Grecian maiden between two Norse Giants”, unless he had some kind of Hellenic tomboy idea at the back of his mind, certainly romantic and dreamy in some moods, but mischievous, angular  and energetic in others. What’s surprising is the polarity of comment that the work has inspired in other quarters – Berlioz waxed lyrical about it, writing of the crescendo in the development section of the first movement as “one of the happiest inspirations we know in music”, and that the second movement Adagio “defies analysis….. so pure are the forms, so angelic the expression of the melody….one is gripped by emotion which by the end has reached an unbearable pitch of intensity…”

Contrast this with the reaction of the composer of “Der Freischütz”, Carl Maria von Weber, who, in a stylized critique set within the framework of a nightmare, had characters variously describe Beethoven’s work as “a musical monstrosity, revolting alike to the nature of the instruments and the expression of thought, and with no intention whatever but that of a mere show-off…” and the slow movement in particular “full of short, disjointed, unconnected ideas, at the rate of three or four notes per quarter of an hour…”. Evidently, in the realms of music appreciation, as in life, there’s “nowt sae queer as folk!”

Be it fulsome appreciation or savage criticism, it does put this so-called “Grecian maiden” of a work in a new light when encountering these responses. And it’s in that spirit that I offer these “contemporary” takes on a work that’s since been somewhat put in a “lesser” kind of category by its companions on either side – in my view, most unfairly. To my delight the NZSO’s performance of the music this evening demonstrated that Pietari Inkinen and his musicians thought so as well.

We were taken right from the first chord at the outset into a mysterious twilit world – somewhere, I’ve read someone’s description of the ambience created by this introduction as that of 4am, which I rather like! – one from which the steady tread of time led towards a sudden burst of light and energy from the whole orchestra, here superbly delivered, and followed by a number of whiplash chords which joyously launched the allegro, the playing replete with energetic, exuberant spirits.

Pietari Inkinen’s policy of employing (so far in the series) all the first movement repeats allowed us extra pleasure here, after which the players purposefully dug into the music’s development sequence, shaping the impulses towards the beginning of that amazing crescendo so vividly described by Berlioz in his analysis of the work. Alongside sterling work by the strings, the performance featured some magical wind-playing throughout, as well as on-the-spot support from brass and timpani.

The winds particularly came into their own in the dreamy, rhapsodic slow movement (what starry stillnesses were evoked at times!), as well as in the dynamically-driven finale – in the latter, both bassoon and clarinet literally threw themselves at their insanely manic solos and brought them off spectacularly!

In these performances it was the finales of both symphonies which capped off the pleasure for me – while I thought the Fourth’s Scherzo a shade bland in effect, wanting more rhythmic “point” and greater dynamic variation, the finale was a great success. In Inkinen’s hands, it took on the aspect of a whirling dervish, a molto perpetuum, exhilarating and positively vertiginous in its impact.

If the Fourth Symphony delighted the audience, the eponymous Fifth had an overwhelming impact, and especially so the finale – here, an unbridled victory celebration, at once exhausting and life-enhancing! So prodigious was the effect of it all that, in fact, conductor and orchestra received a well-nigh standing ovation at its end, one justly merited in direct relation to the excitement and sense of involvement with the music that was generated and communicated to listeners.

Conductor Inkinen made clear his intentions right from the outset, no sooner returning to the podium and acknowledging our applause than turning and instantly signalling his players to hurl those opening notes upwards and outwards, to galvanizing effect. Allowing only touches of rhetorical broadening with each appearance of the famous motto theme, he kept the music’s urgency and thrust well to the fore throughout the movement.  After this had run its course, the Andante movement which followed might have initially seemed unremarkable in its sweetness, but in fact it became for us a miracle of dramatic contrast, the orchestral playing by turns lyrical, rapturous and majestic in the music’s service.

Then, with the scherzo and trio, we were returned to dark, C Minor business with louring ‘cellos and basses and vigorous, forcible and heroic figures from the horns. The orchestral basses had already impressed with their sonorous playing of parts of the Funeral March of the “Eroica” on the previous evening, and here they demonstrated tremendous power and agility with the Trio’s rapid fugato-like lines, before finally giving way to the upper strings and the winds, who ushered in the work’s most mysterious and eerie passages.

These, of course, inspired one of writer E.M.Forster’s characters in the novel “Howard’s End” to imbue the music with the idea of a “great goblin walking across the world” – and the music’s stealthy, treading aspect was evocatively conveyed by winds and arco/pizzicato strings. It was here my only, very slight disappointment throughout the whole performance occurred, with that brief but potent strings and timpani transition passage from scherzo to finale.  I wanted to feel those sounds even more “cut adrift” amid the darkness and mystery, as if for a few pivotal moments the music and its performers and listeners had abandoned all sense and reason to a process of elemental coalescence!

Still, even if chaos seemed to me less-than-fully engaged, the goal, once achieved, burst about us all with unbridled exultation!  Here, Beethoven’s finale was a proper life-affirmation, moments of pure joy climbed towards and fiercely grasped again and again by a composer expressing the purpose for which he was put in this world – and we loved him for it and revelled in these musicians’ wholehearted and briilliantly-played celebrations of those moments and of the journeying towards them. The acclaim which greeted conductor and players at the end was richly deserved.

 

 

 

 

 

Great start to NZSO’s Beethoven festival with the first three symphonies

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen

Beethoven: Symphonies No 1, 2 and 3, in C, D and E flat respectively

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 12 June, 6:30 pm

Here is the third in Pietari Inkinen’s great symphonic cycles, following Sibelius and Brahms. This time, of course, the greatest such creations in the whole history of symphonic music.

It was interesting to hear Inkinen’s conversation with Eva Radich on RNZ Concert in which, as far as I know, not having caught all of it, neither remarked that simply to tackle this music is to make a statement about the world-class character of the orchestra, as well as to suggest something about the conductor’s feeling about his own readiness to undertake such a grand and formidable project.

Even in the decades immediately after Beethoven’s, it has pleased many critics to dismiss the first and second symphonies, in comparison with the later masterpieces. To so judge them is to overlook the fact that by 1800 when the second was composed, no existing symphony could come anywhere near them, apart perhaps from Mozart’s last three. How ridiculous it is to compare a composer’s relatively early works with more complex and profound music that might have emerged later.

To play these three in the same evening was in fact to allow us to hear the clear kinship that they share. The stately and confident character of the opening of the C major symphony announced at once that Beethoven had absorbed and surpassed, at least in adventurousness, the models of Haydn and Mozart.  Though one must be careful not to confuse those elements that might represent ‘progress’ (a dangerous notion) with inspiration and creativity involving the expression of profound human truth.

The latter exists in roughly equal measure in Josquin, Tallis, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Handel and Bach, Haydn and Mozart, Schubert and Berlioz, Verdi and Wagner, Bruckner and Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy…

Inkinen’s input could be heard in the careful energy that he projects, civilised by discretion and precision, but given dramatic character by the vivid dynamic shifts, readiness to allow flexible rhythms and to make arresting changes of tempo.  The slow movement, in triple time, opens with attentive fugal treatment of the unpretentious theme and it’s a sudden pianissimo that enlivens it. The Menuetto, indicated ‘allegro molto e vivace’ seems like a contradiction: it must be one of the fastest ever – I’d hate to try dancing to it; it’s really a scherzo in disguise.

The true heart of the symphony is the last movement, starting with the repeated, playful attempts to play a scale; here Inkinen gave the orchestra licence to burst the seams, very fast, employing quite simple material adventurously and without too much attention to orchestral proprieties.

The second symphony, in D, set alongside the first, reveals a confidence and discursiveness in the longish Adagio introduction which seems to merge more organically into the Allegro.

The performance seemed to relish the chances to disappear into pianissimi occasionally, suddenly to burst out afresh. There are repeated conversations between strings and winds – clarinet, then bassoon, flute, horn… Here, and often in this and in the Eroica, Inkinen seemed to cherish beautifully executed wind playing. And in the Scherzo, one felt a scarcely contained impulse to flippancy. But it’s the finale where it was possible to sense the emergence of a more versatile and dynamic composer, the music taken at some speed almost as if pushing players beyond their limit.

There seemed a much shorter distance between No 2 and the great Eroica than is suggested by many commentators.

Two commanding chords take the place of the Adagios that introduced the two earlier symphonies. I might have hoped for a slightly more fearsome impact but these were a good enough announcement of a composer for a revolutionary era.

You could have argued that the full-sized orchestra used in Nos 1 and 2 was larger than is kosher for essentially classical works (strings were 16, 14, 12, 10, 8), but the numbers were right for the Eroica.  Though scored for three horns, compared with two for Nos 1 and 2, we had four offering more flexibility; otherwise the orchestra was of the same size.

Here, as in the earlier pair, Inkinen’s stamp consisted, rather than through any radical interpretative revelations, in paying striking attention to dynamic and tempo markings which were sufficient to hold the audience in a semblance of trance throughout. For example the emphatic, thudding wind accompaniment to the lyrical strings; but more than anything, there was constant delight in the many solo wind phrases or passages from flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and of course horns and trumpets. Though this orchestra’s strings are incomparable, it’s the clarity and beauty of the winds (horns have recovered their form) that lends any performance special piquancy, and these are all available.

No Eroica can survive without a Marche funèbre (again, nearly 20minutes long like the first movement) that is masterly and profound. This performance had weight from the great body of cellos and basses, as well as transparency, emotional impact, slow, treading tempi and a knack of subsiding into anguished pianissimi from which it seemed almost impossible to recover.

The justification for four horns became clear in the Scherzo: joyous, sanguine, life-affirming, and then the Finale filled the auditorium with energy, achieved through fugal writing, high-lighted by sudden breaks, sustaining an expectancy and excitement that built to the grandeur and triumph of the Coda. That, I am loath to confess, sounded just a little less thrilling than my hopes had been (certain performances, early in life, sometimes raise expectations that are impossible to erase). Nevertheless, in all, this first concert exceeded reasonable hopes, and confirmed both the orchestra’s excellence and the conductor’s vision, sense of structure and his awareness of the importance of refinement and detailing, not to mention pure excitement.

The next three evenings are bound to be among the year’s most memorable.

 

 

 

Tawa’s orchestra tackles substantial programme under lively young conductor

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Tawa Community Orchestra conducted by Andrew Atkins and Laura Barton (violin)

Mozart: Symphony No 25 in G minor – first movement: Allegro con brio
Wieniawski: Violin Concerto No 2 in D minor, Op 22
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture

Tawa College Hall

Sunday 8 June, 2 pm

There are several community, amateur orchestras around Greater Wellington; their major role is probably to enable local musicians to get orchestral experience; not to lay any claim to offering dazzling musical revelations. Most of the audience no doubt comprised friends and family members. Many of those have a genuine interest in music of the classical kind, and no matter the level of accomplishment, it is always interesting, sometimes pleasantly surprising, to be at such concerts.

My connection was as family member, but I was more than a little interested to hear how the players would cope with pieces that were one hundred percent solid classical repertoire.

The first movement of Mozart’s ‘Little G minor symphony’, No 25 (distinguishing it from the other one, No 40) would have resonated with many, as the urgent music, with arresting syncopation, that opened the film Amadeus. While the opening bars were an interesting exhibition of the meaning of ‘balance’, demonstrating the challenge of getting an integrated sound from the varied instruments of the orchestra, which are by nature so incompatible. More striking however was the energy that the young conductor, Andrew Atkins, a graduate student at the New Zealand School of Music, brought to the job. He imposed a professional tempo and sense of momentum on the performance that to a good extent masked any weaknesses of ensemble and technical competence in the players. Nevertheless, the real Mozart showed through, the spirit and the melodic genius.

It was the next piece that had me intrigued. While the Mozart employed a fairly limited orchestra – horns the only brass instruments – Wieniawski, writing about a century later, called for the full Romantic orchestra, double woodwinds, horns and trumpets, three trombones and timpani.

Here too the presence of several guest players, including many from the School of Music, strengthened strings and brass, in particular.

Though I knew both Wieniawski’s violin concertos, I cannot recall hearing either played live, though it would be surprising if the Michael Hill Violin Competition had not thrown one of them up at some stage. The concertos of instrumental virtuosos tend to be denigrated or ignored, though Paganini’s, Vieuxtemps’s and Wieniawksi’s remain in the repertory. However, this one is well-wrought, melodic, interesting; but it would hardly have survived an amateur performance without a pretty competent soloist.

Violinist Laura Barton is a student at the New Zealand School of Music.  After getting through the formal and not uninteresting orchestral introduction, with a certain tentativeness, Barton’s first phrases sounded as if she was feeling her way, but she very quickly hit her stride, playing without the score in front of her, though there remained, very understandably, a degree of tenseness. But if the audience still had to be convinced of her credentials, the first movement cadenza demonstrated an accomplishment that banished any doubts.

The gentle second movement, Romance, demonstrated an unsentimental lyricism and true musicality in the violinist. While Barton despatched the last movement, with its exciting gypsy rhythms, with an aplomb that not only confirmed a fine violinist in the making, but an orchestra that did not disgrace the performance.

The last work was even more of a challenge, written about the same time as the concerto, a product of Tchaikovsky’s early years, it is a colourful and vivid symphonic poem after the manner of Liszt, depicting three episodes of Shakespeare’s play.  No one could have expected a particularly polished performance from the orchestra, yet the energy and zest that young maestro Atkins drew from it, the poignant, lyrical music of the love scene, produced a performance that was quite engaging. There was a palpable feeling that the entire orchestra was giving more than they might have believed possible, and they as well as the audience were being rewarded accordingly.

 

Requiems and delights à la Francaise – Duruflé and Fauré

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand Trust presents:

DURUFLÉ – Requiem
Bianca Andrew (mezzo-soprano) / Christopher Hillier (baritone)
Michael Stewart (organ) / Jane Young (‘cello)
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Karen Grylls (conductor)

FAURÉ – Requiem
Jayne Tankersley (soprano) / Christopher Hillier (baritone)
Michael Stewart (organ) / Matthew Ross (violin)
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Orchestra Wellington
Karen Grylls (conductor)

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul, Molesworth St.

Saturday, 7th June, 2014

Big and ungainly though it can seem, the Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul is a remarkable music-making space for the “right” kind of repertoire. It’s repeating something of a truism to suggest that most of this would be church or sacred music, though Wellingtonians were fortunate enough to experience, two weekends previously, a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony featuring an impressively-augmented Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei. It was music that resonated most positively with the acoustic, which more than made up for a small loss of clarity with oceans of sheer tonal splendour.

Even more “hand-in-glove” a match of music with the venue was provided by the present concert, featuring two of the most beautiful choral works in the repertoire. On paper the idea of having two Requiem Masses butted up against one another in the same concert might appear too much of a good (!) thing – but each of these works, though having certain things in common with the other, makes a markedly individual impression on the listener.

Though both French-born there was little other direct connection as such between the two composers of these Requiems – Fauré wrote the first version of his work in 1887, one which was first performed the following year (other versions appeared in 1893 and 1900); whereas the much younger Duruflé, whose student years centered around Rouen, and the Gregorian plainchant tradition fostered at the cathedral school, completed his Requiem in 1947. Duruflé, like Fauré, produced a number of versions of his work, one for orchestral accompaniment (the composer’s favorite), followed by a version with organ and ad lib. solo ‘cello, and then a “reduced-orchestra” version.

Duruflé undoubtedly based his Requiem on the older composer’s in terms of structure – the text is largely the same as Fauré used, with the “Dies irae” sequence (used by Mozart, Berlioz and Verdi) all but completely omitted. The younger composer’s work is similarly non-apocalyptic, though both occasionally allow moments of anxiety and fear to darken and dramatize the textures, albeit briefly (Duruflé’s “moments” are a tad more explicit than those of Fauré’s).

Where the composers part company is with their compositional style – though Fauré drew inspiration from Gregorian plainchant in the Mass’s recitative-like moments, his work is late-Romantic in its expression of melody and harmony – for instance, I love the unashamed tribute made to the Wagner of Die Walkure at the beginning of the Lux aeterna, following the Agnus Dei.

Duruflé, on the other hand, drew his inspiration from his early studies of plainchant, incorporating into each section of his work corresponding chant-like sequences from the sung Latin Mass for the Dead, and building on these figurations with harmonies and extended melismas, though nothing too florid or wide-ranging. The work to my ears sounded paradoxically at once more modern and yet older than Fauré’s – and as such, the two pieces made well-nigh perfect and complementary companions.

For the performance of Duruflé’s work conductor Karen Grylls judiciously opted for the organ-accompanied version (with ad.lib.’cello obbligato during the Pie Jesu movement). Presented alongside Fauré’s particular version of HIS work which featured an ensemble with strings and brass as well as organ, I thought the contrast between the two sound-worlds was stunning, and worked entirely in favour of each piece’s distinctive character.

From the outset of the Duruflé, the superb focus of the Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir was evident, their tones set off to perfection by the brilliant playing of organist Michael Stewart. But it seemed the opening Requiem was more floated by the choir than sung, an impression which in various places throughout the work returned, shining and glistening like silver-tapestried thread.

After a radiant Kyrie, the music darkened, and the vocal lines beseeched, calmly at first, but then with great urgency and impassioned attack, the organ excitingly joining the fray – “Libera eas de ore leonis!” (Save them from the lion’s jaws!), with the baritone soloist, Christopher Hillier, sonorously raising his voice for the “Hostias” by way of offering sacrifice and prayer for the sake of the departed souls – wonderful, heart-stopping moments!

I loved the rippling organ and the angelic tones of the opening of the Sanctus, relishing all the more the gloriously contrasting irruptions of energy for the “Hosannas”, and then savoring to the full the rapt, devotional ardor of the Pie Jesu which followed, mezzo-soprano Bianca Andrew and ‘cellist Jane Young singing and playing like angels to Michael Stewart’s beautifully-sculptured accompaniment.

How beautifully the choir managed the wordless accompaniments to the melodic lines in Lux aeterna – the singing and playing quite superbly setting off the sudden angst brought about by the organ’s clarion call, followed by the choir’s and the baritone soloist’s strongly-projected agitations. Though brief, the appearance of “Dies illa, dies irae” caused further choral combustion, culminating in one of the few Fauré-like moments in Duruflé’s work, the heart-easing, melodic unison reiteration by the choir of the “Libera Me”.

And what a wondrously rarefied, even austere world is that of the In Paradisum  sequence! – such a marked contrast to the older composer’s setting! – something that here evoked the “unknown” so potently that we sat in the midst of its wonderment for a long time afterwards before marking our appreciation of the performance with rapturous applause.

I confess to experiencing some anxious moments myself during the interval, arising from sudden doubts and fears regarding the Fauré work’s pending performance. By this time I’d noticed that the printed programme, through some vagary or other, had omitted the names of several of the orchestral musicians, including those of the horn players! My relief was great when, in due course, the instruments in question made their appearance – the thing was, the two previous performances of the work I’d heard recently were both with organ-only accompaniment, and….. yes, I expect organists will possibly sniff and smart at my none-too-subtle inflections surrounding that “organ-only” usage – but anyhow, I’ll further explain below…..

Karen Grylls chose the 1893 version of the work to perform, here – the composer’s original 1887 version featured only five movements (no Offertory and no Libera Me),  later adding the extra movements and a baritone soloist. There has over the years been a degree of “creative agglomeration” practiced upon this work in performance, the situation due partly to the later, 1900 edition of the score which featured an extended orchestration entrusted by Fauré to one of his pupils, and which, according to choral-conducting doyen John Rutter, is filled with both printers’ and editorial errors.

But here we were, about to hear an authentic performing edition which called for a goodly number of instrumentalists on the performing platform – including horns, and also a solo violinist! – along with the choir, soloists and conductor, and the organist ready in the loft. The opening was spaciously and dramatically sounded, with the silences “surging softly backwards” after each cadential pause. At first I though the orchestral tones too fulsome for the voices – the tenors had a lovely plangency which seemed, however, in danger of being submerged within the acoustic in places, but things seemed to refocus with the great cries of “Exaudi” and “Orationem” – and thereafter it seemed as if I could hear everything.

Gorgeous string tones introduced the tenors and altos duetting at “O Domine”, making a lovely sound and building each repetition of the opening words upwards and towards the string modulations which prepared the way for the baritone’s entry with “Hostias”. Christopher Hillier here wasn’t particularly honeyed in tone, but his voice was perhaps instead more appropriately textured with vibrant strands of supplication. And the choir’s reprise of “O Domine” would, I swear, have melted hearts of stone with such celestial ascending lines.

Came the Sanctus, and with it, for me, one of the work’s great moments, but to my ears invariably and frustratingly muted whenever the performance is simply organ-accompanied – yes, you’ve guessed it! – those great horn fanfares which introduce and reaffirm the “Hosannas”! Well I have to register some disappointment mingled in with my delight, here, as I thought Karen Grylls didn’t encourage the horn-players to sufficiently roar out their notes with truly joyous exuberance! The singing was splendid, though, short of an “Anything you can do I can do better” kind of scenario, I simply wanted ALL of the sounds to ring out through those vast spaces, just for a few seconds! I should mention the solo violin playing as well, Matthew Ross’s instrument making a suitably sweet-toned sound, the intonation not entirely blemish-free, but certainly creating the desired cherubic effect.

Another truly memorable sequence was the Pie Jesu (so different an effect to that of Duruflé’s setting!) – of course, nothing less than the voice of an angel was needed, and soprano Jayne Tankersley touched many of those tingling stratospheric places with some beautifully-floated sounds. Though perhaps not ideally serene, not as uniformly pure of tone as I expected, she nevertheless inflected the words with real feeling – but I did wonder, having enjoyed her vibrant, engaging (and invariably spectacular) singing of Monteverdi’s music so much over the years, whether her voice as naturally took to this music’s cooler, far less-inflected lines of relatively chaste expression.

The Agnus Dei and the Libera Me have the work’s darkest moments – Karen Grylls got a particularly wonderful “floating” response from her voices for the Lux aeterna  sequence, though I would have liked the horns once again to have interjected in more baleful tones just before the reprise of the opening Requiem aeternam. Christopher Hillier’s lean, forceful tones had an almost operatic intensity when delivering his Libera me, one which conductor and singers took up with ferment and gusto at the words “Dies illa, dies irae”, and carried over to the reprise of “Libera Me”, horns beautifully darkening the voices’ beseeching phrase-ends, before allowing the baritone to join in with a final, exhausted plea for deliverance.

Having done with anxieties and fears, voices, solo violin and organ then turned their attentions, most affectingly, towards the prospect of eternal bliss, with the beautiful In Paradisum – and though I wanted organist Michael Stewart’s arpeggiated accompanying figurations to oscillate rather more brightly and forthrightly, the singing was appropriately angelic, and the soaring solo violin line a delight. The sounds of the voices blended with the instrumental tones towards the end and then with the eternal silences…….as with the Duruflé’s conclusion, we registered the gradual disappearance of those affecting sounds before showing our appreciation of the music and performers’ efforts – including those of Michael Stewart, who was somehow stranded on one side of the platform at the end, away from all of the others!

But very, very great credit to conductor Karen Grylls and to her soloists, instrumentalists and singers, for a splendid  and long-to-be-remembered pair of performances!