Cantoris takes on The Armed Man

Posted on by Julia Wells

Cantoris Choir: The Armed Man

Karl Jenkins: The Armed Man – A Mass for Peace

Cantoris Choir, Ensemble and Karakia

Director: Brian O’Regan

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

Friday, 26th April, 2013

Cantoris are to be congratulated on a very good performance of Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man, as is their new director, Brian O’Regan, and accompanying musicians. As soon as the first drum tattoo echoed through St Andrews, I was glad to be there. The choir made a wonderful start as well, producing a rich and full sound that filled the church. Indeed, it was the warmth and depth of the choir that most stood out for me, carrying the performance through what were occasionally rather banal words (ring out the old, ring in the new/ ring happy bells across the snow). Reading through the programme beforehand, I had wondered how they were going to pull off some of the lyrics, particularly those of the last section, ‘Better is Peace’. The performance stood as a testament to how music can elevate less than astounding words.

The second section, traditionally an islamic call to prayer, was replaced by a karakia, beautifully performed by Wairemana Campbell. The substitution worked well, making this a distinctively New Zealand performance, something that was particularly fitting the day following Anzac Day. The next section, the Kyrie, again showcased the choir’s rich sounds. This part also contained a haunting cello solo by Margaret Guldborg.

The section that was the most striking, however, was section five, the Sanctus. It began quietly, with the underlying menace of the percussion (wonderfully played by Thomas Guldborg and Hazel Leader) belying the sweetness and serenity of the choir. When they reached the Hosanna the audience was rocked by an overwhelming and climactic wall of sound. In a way this made it difficult for the choir in the Charge section, which should logically be the climax of the mass. So much sound and energy had already peaked during the Sanctus that the music struggled to gain enough for the Charge. Although they rallied in the end, for me it lacked the drama of the Sanctus.

After the Charge came the unremitting grimness of the Angry Flames and Torches. It was a relief when the Agnus Dei arrived and the piece began to move away from the horrors described in the middle sections. The choir was particularly soft and sweet during the Benedictus, which also featured some lovely work from the ensemble, although the background organ was perhaps a little overbearing. In the final section, Better is Peace, the choir captured the hope and excitement of the ending, bringing the piece to a spectacular finish.

Stroma’s second Mirror of Time – a “Rogues’ Gallery” of Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – THE MIRROR OF TIME – 2

Music by: Michael Norris, Jean-Féry Rebel, Thomas Adès,  Anthonello de Caserta, Heinrich Biber,

Louis Andriessen, Carlo Gesualdo, Philip Brownlee, Josquin des Prez, Arvo Pärt,

Thomas Preston, Erik Satie, Matteo da Perugia, Mieko Shiomi, Anon (14th C.)

(all arrangements by Michael Norris)

Stroma: Vesa-Matti Leppänen, Rebecca Struthers (violins) / Andrew Thomson (viola) / Rowan Prior (‘cello)

Kamala Bain (recorder(s) / Rowena Simpson (soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Artistic Director: Michael Norris

St.Mary of the Angels, Wellington

Friday 26th April, 2013

With some surprise I read in the Stroma program booklet that this was in fact the SECOND “Mirror of Time” Concert presented by the Ensemble, following on from an occasion in 2012 – had I recently awakened from a kind of “Rip Van Winkel” sleep, or something? I had been to and reviewed a couple of Stroma concerts that year, but I couldn’t remember a “Mirror of Time” title, or a similar theme, even thought the expression dégustations rang a bell. Furthermore, if the first of these explorations of short but visionary, ground-breaking compositions from the Middle Ages to the present day had been as entertainingly assembled and characterfully performed as this present one, then I had indeed missed something special, while in my “sleepwalking” mode.

Having the beautiful and old-worldly church of St.Mary of the Angels available for music performance is invariably a kind of “added value” for performers and audiences alike – and so it proved on this occasion. From out of the ambience of this most atmospheric venue came the first notes of this concert’s music, the quartet of performers antiphonally placed for maximum effect, playing a twelfth-century plainchant theme “O igneous Spiritus”, written by Hildegarde of Bingen, and arranged here by Michael Norris.

Each player gave us his or her own particular variation of the plainchant tune, the effect being an awakening a kind of “music of the spheres” fancy, or, in Hildegarde’s own, if differently-contexted words, sounds “on the breath of God”. The playing, too, had a kind of other-worldly quality, heightened by drawn-out harmonics and occasionally tempered by exotic, vocal-like slides between the notes. I liked Michael Norris’ likening of the effect to “stained-glass” encapsulations of past echoes, preserved for all time. As the musicians finished playing, each one came up to the platform in front of the audience – a nice, ritualistic touch.

From then it was delight following upon delight, really, though one was never sure exactly what shape or form the delight would be presented in (which are the most exciting kinds of delights – as everybody knows!). Having properly gotten an ecclesiastical version of Michael Flanders’ famous “pitch of the hall” (from his and Donald Swann’s show “At the Drop of a Hat”), the musicians (strings joined by a recorder – well, two recorders, more of which in a moment) then proceeded to “let ‘er rip” with a shocking discord made up of a tone cluster, written two hundred years ahead of the likes of Henry Cowell and Penderecki. This came from the pen of French Baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel, whose dates (1666-1747) make him a near-contemporary of JS Bach, though the former’s innovative experiments with rhythm and harmony put some of his music light-years apart.

As Michael Norris pointed out in the program, this and many of the pieces in the evening’s concert were arrangements of originals, rather than being “authentic” realizations, the intention being to emphasize for listeners the music’s more innovative content. Rebel’s work “Le Cahos” comes from his ballet “Les Élemens”, the full score of which has been lost in any case, leaving a “performing edition” put together by the composer for amateur use at home – so tonight’s performance was perfectly in scale with the composer’s intentions. Strings were partnered by a recorder, firstly a sopranino, whose piercing tones could be heard through the discordant opening, and then a treble instrument taken up as the music increasingly featured solo lines – it was all a bit like a rather more elemental manifestation of Vivaldi.

Leaping forward in time to the music of Thomas Adès from such radical expression suddenly didn’t feel so big a deal in this context, though in other ways Adès’ work “Lethe” made a marked contrast to Jean-Féry Rebel’s chaotic seismic irruptions. Here, Rowan Prior’s beautiful solo cello suggested the Lethe River, interwoven with eerie harmonics from the other strings, the effect not unlike a slowly revolving kinetic sculpture, or else movements from an age-old windmill out of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”. Such antiquities used by a contemporary composer helped bridge the gap to the music of one of the concert’s earliest featured composers, Anthonello de Caserta, a 14th century song “Dame d’onour en qui” featuring the soprano voice of Rowena Simpson. De Caserta’s rhythmic configurations were a delight and a tease for the ear in this sparkling performance.

Heinrich Biber’s music is better-known, of course, and we enjoyed his “Mars”, an exerpt from Battalia à 10, with the ‘cello using a sheet of paper inserted between the strings for a “snare” effect. A different kind of unorthodox instrument use was employed by the Dutch contemporary composer Louis Andriessen in his “Ende”, requiring the player to use two recorders simultaneously, Kamala Bain rising spectacularly to the occasion, tossing the pitches between instruments and giving us an exciting acccelerando at the end.

The work of another contemporary composer, Wellington-based Philip Brownlee, followed that of Carlo Gesualdo, the latter’s music employing chromatic shifts to wonderfully haunting effect, in the madrigal “Io puri respiro in cosi gran dolor”, some sequences having an almost Gothic feel to them. Rowena Simpson’s bell-like voice both enriched and wrestled with the parallel string lines throughout, voice and instruments then “finding” one another at the end of the piece’s dying fall. Not Gesualdo, however, but Giovanni Gabrieli provided the Kiwi composer with his starting-point for “Canzona per sonare: Degraded Echoes” (a world premiere), the opening tones “summoned” as it seemed from faraway places, a sombre medieval sound made of long-held lines from strings and recorder, the lines and harmonies vying with the actual timbres, giving we listeners the opportunity to think spatially, or else indulge our preoccupations. An agitated middle section, aleatoric in effect, underlined rhythmic and pitching gestures, encompassed by piercing tones from the recorder, and took us at the end to edges of known territories, where wonderment begins.

Josquin Des Prez’s brief but beautiful “Agnus Dei” from his “Missa l’homme arm super voces musicales” threw some light upon Arvo Pärt’s following Da Pacem Domine, the latter inspired by medieval plainchant, and saturating our sensibilities with its wonderful drawn-out timelessness of utterance. And to draw us briefly from these and following enchantments came a brief soupcon from the little-known 16th-century English composer Thomas Preston, an organ piece with a strangely bitonal bass-line, strings and recorder simultaneously following separate harmonic pathways, and creating lines whose relationship sounded oddly and ear-catchingly ambivalent.

Ambivalence of various sorts certainly hovers about many of the works created by the uniquely fascinating Erik Satie. We heard an arrangement of the Prelude to his incidental music to a play “Le Fils des Étoiles”, one whose use of an offstage soprano voice and muted strings underlined the general exotic mysticism of the music and its context. Throughout I kept on thinking of Shakespeare’s “Tempest” – soundscapes of air and water created from those disembodied tones were added to Satie’s preoccupation with harmonies based on the interval of a fourth. All of it made for ambiences “rich and strange”, and had a utterly captivating aspect.

The rest brought us back to solid earth with plenty of sheerly visceral fun, Italian composer Matteo da Peruglia’s fifteenth-century 3-part canon given the “treatment”with two more parts added and the original tempo given a turbocharged “take two”, and an arrangement of the anonymous 14th-century song “Cuncti Simus Concanentes”, an energetic homage to the Virgin Mary with bells and hand-clapping thrown into the festive mix. This was after the string-players had picked up and rearranged their music on the stands from which they had been ignominiously blown by a hand-held hair-dryer, Kamala Bain employing a different kind of wind instrument to disruptive effect in Japanese composer Mieko Shiomi’s “Wind Music”. Of course, had it been Stockhausen’s music, helicopters might have arrived, and there would have been an awful din – so we were grateful that the turbulence created here, though annoying for the musicians trying to make sense of their written parts, was more-or-less containable.

All in all, a terrific assemblage of inventiveness on the part of artistic director Michael Norris, and of performance skills from the members of Stroma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANZAC affords occasion for an arresting New Zealand and a moving Australian work from NZSO

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

On ANZAC Eve

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tecwyn Evans with baritone James Eggelstone and narrator Peter Elliott

Reading from letter from Private Roy Denning, WWI; Ross Edwards: Symphony No 1, Da pacem Domine
Reading from John A Lee’s ‘Civilian into Soldier’; Christopher Blake: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Elgar: Enigma Variations 

Michael Fowler Centre

Wednesday 24 April, 6.30pm

Musical recognition of ANZAC Day (apart from ritualised hymns) has not been a common thing, as far as I can remember. And looking back over the record of reviews in Middle C, I can find no significant concerts, at least since 2008, that attempted to mark the day. The last with any sort of connection was a small chamber music concert that accompanied an exhibition of Gallipoli paintings by artist Bob Kerr, at Pataka Museum in Porirua in 2010; they in turn were inspired by Kerr’s coming across a diary of soldier at Gallipoli, in the Turnbull Library; in addition the words of a Turkish soldier offered what has become a common way of expressing today’s attitude to war: the soldiers of neither side as other than tragic victims of mindless rulers.

Thus it struck me that, if the first two works were by a New Zealander and an Australian, the second half might interestingly have included a piece by a contemporary Turkish composer.

Instead Elgar’s Enigma Variations ended the concert. It was hard to perceive the relevance of a piece written fifteen years before Gallipoli in a country whose leaders were among those who might have stopped the mad slide into the war itself and were responsible for the monumental blunder of the ill-planned and wretchedly equipped landing on Turkish soil in 1915. 

The variations include moments of sadness and some kind of mourning, but so do scores of compositions by composers in every country, though before the 20th century, war was more glorified than deplored.

But that aside, this was a very human, sympathetic performance that seemed to focus on feelings of affection, sometimes wry, sometimes amused, sometimes simply expressing the depth of Elgar’s feeling for his friends, his wife, and perhaps a former, even unforgotten, love.

My earliest memory of Elgar was hearing this work, in the fifth form, on 78s, played by our music master; I particularly remembered his saying that Elgar was one of the greatest orchestrators. Whenever I hear the Enigma it is still the facility with a symphony orchestra, of a largely self-taught composer that strikes me. And conductor Tecwyn Evans exploited the NZSO’s riches of opulent string choruses, scintillating woodwind passages, the dynamic, argumentative timpani in Troyte, the trembling grandeur of the brass in Nimrod and the delicious woodwind and viola solo that describes Dorabella.  

Evans left the audience in no doubt that this remains a masterpiece and that the orchestra has more than enough resources to demonstrate all its colour and emotion.

We are assured that Christopher Blake’s Till Human Voices Wake Us had been scheduled before his appointment as the orchestra’s chief executive. Whatever, it was a very appropriate choice for the occasion, though the title has little enough to do with the tragedy of war apart from its use as the title of Ian Hamilton’s book of the same name about the treatment of a pacifist during World War II.

But it’s the last line of TS Eliot’s early poem, The Love-song of J Alfred Prufrock, a poem full of phrases that have entered the language almost invisibly and, judging by the absence of reference to its source in the programme note, unknown to the programme writer. (“Let us go then, you and I, /When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table”, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo”, “Is it perfume from a dress/That makes me so digress?”, “Should I say, ‘ That is not what I meant at all/That is not ir at all’”,  “I grow old … I grow old … /I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”, and the last lines: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea … /Till human voices wake us and we drown”.)

The piece was commissioned for broadcast by the NZSO on New Zealand Music Day in 1986; Blake linked it too to the International Year for Peace, and used an invocation derived from Philippians 4:7, in both French and English to connect with the recent Rainbow Warrior bombing by the French secret service.

Thus there are extra-musical meanings, which can easily get in the way of the music and its impact on the listener; but it does not. Though I don’t recall hearing it when originally broadcast in 1986, I have the seminal 1995 double-CD on the Continuum label (NZSO under Kenneth Young, with Christopher Doig singing the words of the Blake piece; so this present performance was offered in Doig’s memory) containing a number of significant New Zealand orchestral works; I have always felt that Blake’s piece was one of the most arresting and important works on that compilation.

The performance was introduced again with a reading by Peter Elliott of an extract from Archibald Baxter’s memoir of his terrible treatment as a conscientious objector in the first World War. The work itself contains settings of two Dreams from Baxter’s book, sung by Australian tenor James Egglestone; he sang all three texts with conviction. For me, it was the orchestra that spoke with greatest power and meaning, in scoring that was epochal; sudden explosions from brass and timpani, then trumpets crying out in martial fifths. He scoring, though relatively light on percussion apart from conspicuous timpani and later, an insistent side drum, might sound fairly dense in places by today’s standards.

But regardless whether one can find evidence of Prufrock or of musical connotations of the title, this was a highly persuasive performance of a well-crafted work that could well have come from a respectable central European composer of the past few decades.

Finally, Ross Edwards’ Symphony, subtitled Da Pacem Domine. Edwards is one of Australia’s most approachable composers; many will be familiar with his hauntingly beautiful violin concerto, Maninyas, recorded by the Sydney Symphony under Stuart Challender; it appears on the same ABC Classics CD as this symphony, there conducted by David Porcelijn after Challender, its dedicatee, had died.

It’s a disc I got in Sydney in the mid 1990s and treasure.

Not far into the elegiac symphony one is strongly reminded of Gorecki’s Third Symphony; again, it is scrupulously, delicately scored, the evocative monothematic substance endlessly repeated in subtly, ever-changing forms, with occasional full-blooded tuttis, moments of sunlight breaking through pervading darkness and clouds. .

Edwards is quoted in the CD booklet, describing his work as “a massive orchestral chant of quiet intensity into which my subjective feelings of grief and foreboding about some of the great threats to humanity: war, pestilence and environmental devastation, have been subsumed into the broader context of the ritual”.

It is refreshing to hear music that has its origin in important issues, which transmutes the matter into artistic forms that are moving and beautiful rather than portraying the topic in a determinedly brutal, literal way.

It is likely that Edwards had heard the Gorecki symphony when he composed his work, and that its patterns lingered in his head as they did with almost all who heard it after it hit the charts in Dawn Upshaw’s momentous recording in 1993. For me, that vitiates it as little as does the kinship between Brahms’s first symphony and Beethoven’s ninth.

I found it powerful and moving and it prompted me to delve into my quite big collection of recordings of Australian music which I have always felt deserves much more attention in New Zealand for perfectly objective reasons.

So, though another hearing of the Enigma is never likely to be a problem, the other two works in the programme held my attention and moved me far more.

 

 

 

Delightful concert by guitar quartet at Lower Hutt

Posted on by admin

New Zealand Guitar Quartet (Chris Hill, Jane Curry, Tim Watanabe, Owen Moriarty)
Chamber Music Hutt Valley
Music by Paulo Bellinati, J S Bach, Craig Utting, De Falla, Carlos Rafael Rivera, Leo Brouwer, Rimsky-Korsakov

St Mark’s Church, Woburn Road

Wednesday 24 April, 7.30pm

St. Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt, was a venue perfectly suited to a delightful concert by an ensemble such as the New Zealand Guitar Quartet. The warm, yet clear, acoustics showcased the players’ complete technical mastery of their instruments, and enhanced the musical sensitivity of the recital. The relatively intimate scale of the space supported the informal rapport with the audience that the players developed by their commentary on the various works.

They selected a varied and colourful repertoire for the event: the South American, Cuban and Spanish works were all played with a brilliance that conveyed the passion of their folk-music origins, while still exploiting a wide dynamic range that could drop to the most evocative pianissimo of a single raindrop (Cuban Landscape with Rain). Rivera’s colourful Cumba-Quin highlighted the guitars in percussive mode, imitating such instruments as claves, palitos and conga drums, in Rumba forms played with great gusto.

The New Zealand work by Craig Utting was a perfect gem, where two beautifully played melodic outer sections contrasted with a strident middle one. If this movement is typical of the composer’s output he is sadly under-represented in the usual concert repertoire, and it is to the Quartet’s credit that they are giving it some exposure.

In Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol the composer asked various instruments to imitate the guitar in some sections of the work. This would suggest that the suite is ideally suited to transcription for four guitars, yet it proved less than satisfactory, simply because guitars alone cannot capture the amazing range of colours tailored to each instrument in the original. The composer was annoyed by the narrow critical focus on the “quasi guitara” marking, and fired back a lengthy riposte including the comment that “The Capriccio is a brilliant composition for the orchestra. The change of timbres, the felicitous choice of melodic designs and figuration patterns, exactly suiting each kind of instrument, brief virtuoso cadenzas for instruments solo, the rhythm of the percussion instruments, etc., constitute here the very essence of the composition”.

The Bach Brandenburg no.3 was originally written for three each of violins, violas and cellos, with basso continuo. It proved, however, to be the least satisfactory item in this outstanding recital, for two reasons. Firstly, guitar timbres simply cannot offer the same range and complexity as the original string ensemble version. Secondly, the tempi selected were frankly a disservice to an opus which is widely regarded as among the finest musical compositions of the Baroque era.

The hectic gallop of the first movement was upped to breakneck speed in a frantic finale. This ensemble does not need to prove its technical competence and mastery. It could have allowed the intricate Bach polyphony to speak as it should at appropriate tempi. In a less clean acoustic than St. Marks the result would have been a distressing muddle of indistinguishable lines.

These drawbacks, however, did not dim the audience’s enthusiasm and appreciation. At the finish they applauded till they were granted a fiery Tarentella encore, composed by an exiled Chilean group after the Pinochet coup. It was a fitting end to a wonderful evening’s music making by and ensemble that is a huge asset to the Kiwi music scene.

Admirable performances of Fauré requiem and other French music from Kapiti Chamber Choir

Posted on by Mary Singleton

The Romantics presented by the Kapiti Chamber Choir
Director: Eric Sidoti; organist: Janet Gibbs
Fauré: Requiem, Cantique de Jean Racine and Les Djinns;
Four motets by Bruckner: Locus Iste, Virga Jesse, Christus Factus Est and Afferentur Regi
Saint-Säens: Calme des Nuits; Rhapsodie I and Rhapsodie II for organ, Opus 7

St Paul’s Anglican Church, Paraparaumu,

Sunday 21 April, 2.30pm

The members of that musical gem of the Kapiti Coast, the Kapiti Chamber Choir, have reason to be well pleased with their new conductor Eric Sidoti. His debut concert with them at St Paul’s church in Paraparaumu on Sunday, April 21 had everybody, singers and audience, smiling. They presented a well chosen and balanced programme entitled The Romantics, a pleasing mix of the familiar and the unknown. The delightful first half consisted of relatively short pieces contrasted with the dramatic Fauré Requiem of  the second half. Opening with Calme des Nuits by Saint-Säens was a brave move but an enchanting one in which Sidoti introduced himself as a master of the atmospheric. Shimmering sounds and beautiful dynamic shaping of phrases were established and continued throughout the programme. A little uncertainty in the sopranos did not last long and they went on to really distinguish themselves. Two short motets by Anton Bruckner followed, Locus Iste and Virga Jesse, where we first heard a really big sound from the choir and where the baseline came through very strongly. Gabriel Fauré ‘s contribution to the first half, Cantique de Jean Racine, is beautifully melodic, rich in sounds and showed how suitable the French language is to this type of romanticism. Two more Bruckner numbers followed, Christus Factus  Est and Afferentur Regi. In the first of these the lack of male tenors showed up. Three of the five tenors in the choir are women, all of whom sing very well  but the sound is not as robust as it should be. In the second the choir seemed less secure than in the rest of the programme.

Slotted in between these were organ solos presented by Janet Gibbs. Janet has been in Melbournefor 10 years and it is a real delight to have her back. It was great to hear really good and hitherto unknown organ music so capably performed. Rhapsodie I and Rhapsodie II for organ, Opus 7, by Saint-Säens contained beautiful single line melodies, a well voiced fugal section and rich organ harmonies.

The first half ended with a piece that surprised and delighted both the choir and the audience.. Les Djinns by Fauré is an eerily dramatic depiction of the Djinns of Islam: full of fear, infernal cries, ghostly sounds and terror. It begins spookily, quietly, rises to a crescendo of fear and dies away to the faintest of sounds. The accompaniment to this was very ably played on the piano by Janet Gibbs and it is a pity that the piano tone did not do justice to her performance.

Mark Sidoti gave brief, interesting, informative and audible introductions to some of the music in a manner which established good rapport with the audience.

The Fauré Requiem is a gentler requiem than many others. It has been called “a lullaby of death” with death as a rest and deliverance rather than pain. Fauré said of it:
“…perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what was thought right and proper after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.”

This is an elegant and subtle Requiem, possibly the most widely loved of all and Sidoti with the Chamber Choir did it full justice. A particular feature of Sidoti’s work was the use of dynamic contrasts and in particular the attention paid to crescendi and diminuendi. He had changed the placing of the choir for the Requiem and this resulted in a rich and more homogeneous sound. The two  soloists were taken from the choir. This was an excellent decision on the part of the soprano, Shirley Gullery, who gave the well-known Pie Jesu all it requires in sweetness of sound whereas baritone Stuart Grant sang musically but lacked tonal quality. Both the soprano and the alto sections of the choir really distinguished themselves in this work with the chorus of angels ending the work most beautifully.

Janet Gibbs handled the organ reduction of the orchestral score with great sensitivity and musicality.

With Eric Sidoti the Kapiti Chamber Choir looks set to continue the high standard of performance established by its founder Peter Godfrey.

 

Homage to Britten from the Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

AROHA STRING QUARTET

with CATHERINE McKAY (piano)

BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat Op.18 No.6

BRITTEN – String Quartet No.3 Op.94

SCHUMANN – Piano Quintet in E-flat Op.44

Aroha Quartet: – Haihong Liu, Blythe Press (violins), Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

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

Sunday 21st April, 2013

For some reason I hadn’t really registered before this concert just how big a space at St.Andrew’s Church a small ensemble has to fill with sound, both behind the musicians and above them. It seemed to my ears when the Aroha Quartet began their Beethoven which opened the concert that everything was set back, as opposed to “being in one’s face”, and that the instrumental timbres were more than usually “terraced’. Once my ears got used to this, I enjoyed the extra spaciousness of it all, even if some of the solo lines sounded a bit removed, and some of the ambiences in the more rapid concerted passages were as rushing winds, having a slightly disembodied effect.

Probably the reason my ears were receiving these sounds in this way was that I had been listening to some chamber-music recordings that morning which had been given the “full-blooded” treatment, the instruments closely recorded, and with what sounded like plenty of reverberation – all a little too much, in my opinion, as if the ensemble (the Amadeus Quartet, recorded by Decca) had swelled into chamber-orchestra proportions in certain places.

Once my listening-palette had been re-aligned, I was able to appreciate the lean, lithe and joyously physical energies of the performance of the Beethoven work. These players always generate plenty of  élan in such music, and this quartet’s first movement positively bristled in places. Though intonation wasn’t absolutely perfect, the spirit of the composer leapt at us from the notes. In the second movement I loved the different voicing from first and second violins, the first silvery, the other golden-toned, both displaying heart-warming teamwork. What beautifully-tailored dynamics throughout the hushed central part of the movement – those awed, withdrawn tones! – and what light-as-feather playing throughout the lead back to the opening’s reprise!

I enjoyed the players’ joie de vivre in the scherzo, the syncopations encouraging wonderful stresses and parallel energies. The trio carried the momentums onwards, with the violin skipping among the notes out at a great rate and galvanizing the ensemble’s return to the mainstream. The finale’s introduction, “La malinconia” brought down upon the sound-world a properly sobering and despondent air before swinging into an elegant round-dance, the quartet rounding off the music’s curves with relish. We got the merest foretaste of the “Muss es Sein” of Op.135 with an exploratory interlude, before the players adroitly steered the lines back to the rounds, slowing things romantically and wistfully, before exploding with exuberance and drive over the last few bars – great stuff!

How often does one get to enjoy a Britten String Quartet live? – and if not this year, will there ever be more chances? We’re in debt to the Quartet for not only playing the work at all (à la Dr.Johnson and his “dog on its hind legs” analogy) but for giving it such a cracking performance. Here, it was nicely prepared before a note was played, with ‘cellist Robert Ibell telling us about, among other things, the links between the work and the composer’s opera “Death in Venice”. The work, cast in five movements, opened with a sequence called “Duets” reflecting the writing in pairs of instruments throughout, often haunting, ambient-toned writing creating plenty of “atmosphere” through resonating, overlapping tones, and undulating lines.

The second “Ostinato” movement had a more abrupt, machine-like character, derived from definite, energetic movements – at one point an evocative “road music” sequence forwarded the argument through unfamiliar territories, until skittering cross-rhythms from the violins contrived to bring things to a stuttering stop. Then, the succeeding movement “Solo” featured a gently-singing violin counterpointed delicately by the other instruments. Beautiful soaring lines suggested in places the violin itself in ecstasy, underpinned by atmospheric pizzicato and glissandi from the other instruments, giving a haunting kind of Aeolian Harp effect. After this, what a contrast with the earthy, vigorous “Burlesque”! – its angular effect was readily captured and confidently delivered by the players, the music in places reminiscent of the more quirky parts of the ballet “The Prince of the Pagodas”.

Britten concluded the work with a Recitative and Passacaglia, the instruments in the introductory measures quoting themes from “Death in Venice”. We heard spare, stepwise pizzicati and oscillating violin lines leading to an eloquent ‘cello solo, and thence to strangely compelling twilight-world explorations culminating in the instrumental unison “I love you” cry of the opera’s central character Aschenbach. The players then took us strongly and surely on the passacaglia’s journey, during which the ensemble seemed to me to glow increasingly with lyrical fire, as the music developed thematic material from the Recitative over a ground bass. I felt we were being presented with a world of creative sensibility which here seemed to gradually drain away with the sounds, as if it was all part of the natural order of things.

Still more treasure came with the performance of Schumann’s well-known Piano Quintet after the interval, for which the Quartet was joined by pianist Catherine McKay. I had previously heard her perform both a concerto and some chamber music with other ensembles, finding her always a positive and responsive player. Here, I wondered whether the piano was too recessed in relation to the quartet, whose members seemed “bunched together” right in front – irrespective of the sound quality, the visual effect was of a supporting instrument rather than an equal player, the latter needing to be the case in this work.

Pianos can certainly be awkward things to set among ensembles, and the situation varies from venue to venue – I would have thought a slightly more antiphonal arrangement feasible, either with the piano to the left and turned slightly backward, which would have instigated a kind of half-circle that the quartet-members could have completed, or with the quartet slightly “parted’ in the middle and the piano brought slightly forward, and “into the loop”. Further forward on the St.Andrew’s platform, such an arrangement would have been possible.

Either layout would, I think, have better integrated the sound, and possibly the performance. My ears occasionally imagined a kind of “delayed” interaction between piano and strings in some of the exchanges – this was especially noticeable in both middle movements in places. During the second movement’s central agitations, when the gothic mystery and drama of the ambience is suddenly hurled to one side, and the piano takes the lead with a number of accented entries to which the strings respond, I wanted more incisiveness from the piano, and more “schwung” in the cross-talk between the players. The same went for the roller-coaster flourishes in the third movement (Mendelssohn could have written the piano part in places!) – they were excitingly played as such, but I wanted more piano, more presence and bite given to the syncopations!

With more even balances, the performance would have, I though, really taken wing, as there were so many felicities in any case – though the first movement was more tightly-conceived in general than my excessive romantic sensibilities usually crave, I thought the players still gave plenty of heartfelt voice to the composer’s uniquely poetic outpourings. There was sensitive duetting between violin and ‘cello and some lovely, yielding, liquid tones from the piano, contrasting nicely with those swirling undercurrents of the more agitated sections. And the slow movement’s somewhat sinister footfalls made both the lyrical yearnings and the irruptions of the middle section all the more telling.

Both muscularity and delicacy were made ours to relish throughout the finale, the strings digging into the part-writing with gusto, and the piano incapable of giving us a mechanical or unfeeling phrase – in fact, such were the mid-movement excitements generated that a fire-engine turned up in the street outside to see what was going on! I especially liked how the ensemble’s full-blooded playing made the composer’s rather engagingly gauche way of reintroducing the opening theme of the Quintet work so well at the end. Despite my few reservations regarding the balances, full credit to the musicians for giving us an experience which for me underlined what live music-making is all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Konstanze Eickhorst – recital from Vienna

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand School of Music

Mozart: Sonata in A minor, K.310 (allegro maestoso; andante cantabile con espressione; presto

Schubert: Fantasy in C, Op.15 (D.760) “Wanderer” (allegro con fuoco; adagio; presto; allegro, played without a break)

Mozart: Fantasia in C minor, K.475

Schubert: Sonata in C minor, D.958 (allegro; adagio; menuetto: allegro; allegro)

Konstanze Eickhorst

Adam Concert Room

Thursday, 18 April 2013 at 7.30pm

Recitals by visiting instrumentalists are not nearly as frequent as they were when the old Concert Section of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation promoted recitals by artists who were here to play concertos with the Symphony Orchestra.  So it is gratifying that the New Zealand School of  Music has taken up some of the slack in Wellington by bringing overseas musicians to conduct master classes for the students and perform for the public.

Konstanze Eickhorst was here in Wellington both to give a master class and to perform a recital (and she has a cellist sister here), but her principal occupation will be to play in the New Zealand International Piano Festival, in Auckland.

Her all-Viennese programme was different from the typical piano recital programme that begins with Bach and ends with a contemporary composition.

The Adam Concert Room was virtually full.  A pleasing feature was that the lights were left on, so that it was easy for audience members to read the notes and check the tempo designations for the movements.  Other promoters, please note!  It is a strange New Zealand aberration to lower the lights at concerts, so that the programme the punter has just bought cannot be read in the auditorium.  A recital, particularly, is not a stage spectacle, so there is no need for the lights to be lowered.

The opening Mozart sonata began with a bold attack.  I noted what very flexible fingers, hands, wrists and elbows Eickhorst possesses.  Of course, the differing kind of concert dress worn by male versus female artists makes this easier to observe in the case of the latter.

I would have liked a slightly gentler approach to Mozart, remembering the pianos of his period.  The treble of the piano had my ears ringing at times.   However, the pianist did vary the tone and touch of her playing.  The problem is the small size of the venue and the bright, reflective, varnished wooden floor; performers need to take this into account.  The brittle, hard-edged sound was commented (without any remark from me) by my neighbour at the concert.

The programme notes spoke of the suspensions ‘that wail unhappily throughout’ in the first movement; indeed they were most apparent.  This sonata has much depth, and although a relatively early one, shows emotional and musical profundity not always true of the later ones.

The slow movement featured a singing melody, and the playing truly lived up to the composer’s designation for it.  Phrasing was superb and there were appropriate rubatos.  The third movement was almost playful the speed demonstrated Eickhorst’s sturdy technique.

Of all Schubert’s compositions for piano, the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy is one of the longest and most demanding technically.  As the programme note said “[it] is Schubert’s most challenging and flamboyant composition for the piano.”  Following the busy opening movement, we were straight into the slow movement, which is based on Schubert’s song of the same name.  The movement proceeds as variations on the song’s theme.  The opening was very telling, pensive, inward, and expressive.  The slightly ominous undertone and a furious middle section rounded out a highly varied and interesting movement.

What a complete change of mood there was for the scherzo!  The emphasis here was on rhythm.  The pianist exhibited fantastic finger-work in the fast figures.  There were some wonderful sonorities in the final movement and the pianissimo passage was played with great feeling, while the last section was sheer bravura.

I found the first movement somewhat over-pedalled at times, and some chords hit a little too hard for this small, very resonant auditorium.  Nevertheless, this was a tour de force indeed.  It was a virtuosic performance of this showpiece, by a formidable pianist.  A little memory lapse here and one in the Mozart hardly mattered in the midst of such prodigious feats as these.

Back to Mozart after the interval, and one of his three Fantasias.  It is notable that there were only two composers represented in the recital, yet we were treated to a great variety of music.

A slightly curious comment in the notes implied that this work and the composer’s C minor sonata, published together with the same opus number, had also the same Köchel number, but this piece is K.475 while the sonata is K.457.

This is a quite gorgeous piece of music, and I found the playing more to my taste than that of the Schubert Fantasy.  There was lovely variation of touch and subtle changes of dynamics; in my view, more true resonance is obtained from the piano, as opposed to getting it from the room, when the playing is not too loud.  Not that this was a gentle, relaxing piece; it, like the other works on the programme had changes of character, and stormy passages.  Again, the character was not such that one normally associates with Mozart’s piano music.

Schubert’s sonata in C minor, another lengthy work, was striking in its shifting keys and switches between lyrical passages and more dynamic, declamatory ones.  The prestidigitation required to obtain these dramatic contrasts of tone and texture was remarkable.

In the adagio, the lines were sometimes muddled a little by the pedal again.  Elsewhere there was considerable clarity and weight.  The third movement was unusual for a minuet, with its interruptions.  The finale was again a technically demanding movement; it returned to the lyrical before the end, in episodes.

Although the programme was by well-known composers, the music played was not ‘run-of-the-mill’, and did not conform to what one might think of as typical of these composers.  This made it interesting, and despite my quibbles, it was superb recital of relatively little-heard music of great brilliance, drama and passion, played by a pianist with formidable skills.  Apart from anything else, the recital demanded great stamina on the part of the pianist.

It was refreshing to find that Eickhorst did not feel it necessary to sweeten the programme with some lighter works or encores.

Agreeable recital of music for flute, cello and piano from the US

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

American portraits with music by Copland, Schocker, Still and Martinů

Ingrid Culliford – flute, Kris `Zuelicke – piano, Rhiannon Thomas – cello

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 17 April, 12.15pm

The music of theUnited States, in the common perception, is so dominated by jazz, spirituals and various other kinds of popular music, that I have to confess to a degree of surprise to encounter music that might have been written in Europe. And that, in spite of my perfectly decent familiarity with a lot of the classical music of theUnited States.

The first two pieces were for flute and piano. Copland’s Duo had a spacious character and the sounds of Appalachia were not hard to pick up. Its movement titles were appropriate: the first marked ‘Flowing’, was slow and peaceful, both instruments in sympathy. But it became more animated, in triple time, as the piano provided a syncopated rhythm which gave rise to some curiosity about the nature of the substance that was flowing. The second movement was described as mournful though its mood, for me, was not too tragic.

If Copland was here writing carefully to provide a piece that would be easily grasped by an audience and enjoyed by players, he discovered the right recipe. The last movement was an even more conspicuous off-spring of his Appalachia ballet, with a hoe-down rhythm, which got increasingly complex and seemed to be employing more than merely two instruments. The two players did an excellent job producing sounds that were happily idiomatic – Kris Zuelicke was born in the US after all.

Gary Schocker was born in 1959 and is a flutist – a pupil of James Galway. His piece for flute and piano, American Suite, in four movements, was a sequence of impressions; the first was a meditative ‘Incantation’ in which the flute suggested something of the spirit of the shepherd of ancient Greece, though there seemed little sign of an object of prayer; then came a ‘Spirit Dance’ that was not especially ethereal. The third section depicted a ‘Hidden Spring’ which revealed itself rather brazenly to find itself at the fourth section, ‘Harvest Time’, where a familiar folk song was successfully introduced. It was a well written piece for the instruments, played with enthusiasm.

William Grant Still, born in 1895, is believed to have been the first African American to become a successful composer in the classical genre. Flute and piano were now joined by cellist Rhiannon Thomas in two of five Miniatures by Still. The cello alone opened the piece, in attractive and tasteful playing with discreet touches of vibrato and expressive gestures. When the flute entered, in a folk song that was famailiar, though I could not claim to know it, the music found a very agreeable instrumental blend. In the fifth part of the suite, the cello again took the lead; though it was attractive enough, the music seemed to call for a little more energy and abandon, even, than the players delivered.

The most substantial piece in the programme was the Martinů trio for these instruments, a piece that I suspect might have been the rationale for their getting together. Martinů has melodic and harmonic fingerprints that are almost immediately recognisable and not many notes had been played before they came to the surface. I have long been somewhat devoted to the composer and this performance, even though short of the ultimate degree of delight and elegance, carried me along very happily. My only reservation derived from the balance between the instruments. Particularly in the last movement, I became aware of the flute’s dominance, rather at the expense of its partners both of which were making interesting and engaging contributions.

Though it had been the Martinů that drew me particularly to this concert, and which gave me the most delight, the supporting programme, though uneven, was definitely worth listening to.

 

 

Michael Houstoun – Beethoven Revisited

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:

Michael Houstoun (piano) – Beethoven ReCycle 2013  (Programme Three)

Sonata No.5 in C Minor Op.10 No.1 / Sonata No.10 Op.14 No.2

Sonata No.22 in F Major Op.54 / Sonata No.106 “Hammerklavier” in B flat Op.106

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Monday 15th April 2013

One of the highest accolades a musician can receive is to have his or her name indelibly associated in people’s minds with that of a particular composer’s music – and more than any other pianist in this part of the world, Michael Houstoun’s name has become practically synonymous with Beethoven.

It’s not been an association lightly or casually wrought – it’s grown and developed over a span of time and through the pianist’s Herculean efforts involving preparation and performance of all of the composer’s significant keyboard works. Both the passing of time and life-changing events have made their own contribution to the association, so that Houstoun is presently a different musician to what he was twenty years ago, around the time of his first Beethoven voyage through the sonatas. He himself delineates aspects of the change in his musical outlook in the excellent program booklet, an account that makes absorbing reading.

Many concertgoers attending the present series would have been there last time round, and able to remember well the impact of that first cycle, momentous in so many ways. If the present series seems not quite such a “charged” occurrence, it still generates its own storehouse of interest from the point of view of Houstoun’s own growth and development as a major artist, and the broadening and deepening of his views about the music.

I found having to choose one of three recitals from Houstoun’s first “round” of his Beethoven Re-cycle a costly experience, as there was so much to lose as well as to gain – but I finally plumped for the third programme, which had the mighty “Hammerklavier” as a kind of finale to three earlier (and briefer!) works.

Over the years I’ve worked hard at NOT becoming a total “Hammerklavier-junkie”, though it’s sometimes been a near thing – every great performance I hear of the work has the effect of pushing me close to that edge over which the way back to sanity would be a torturous process. This was such a performance, but one with a difference to some of the more “addictive” experiences I’ve gone through – it was more of a “cleansing” experience here, rather than an immersion in or partaking of something rich and strange.

Until relatively recently I’ve found Michael Houstoun’s playing of Beethoven somewhat enigmatic  –  I would sit and listen to live performances and recordings of various things and admire the playing’s obvious mastery, its strength, purpose, clear vision and command of both structure and detail. One of Houstoun’s most pronounced qualities – a kind of “greatness”, I believe – is the ability to convince the listener of the validity of his approach to any piece of music he plays at the time, however much one might find oneself holding different views in retrospect.

Of course, any musician ought to be able to similarly persuade listeners to accept the “truths” of what he or she plays, but in Houstoun’s case the force of his “in-situ” persuasion is quite remarkable. Nevertheless, I remember thinking repeatedly in those days how strange it was that the pianist’s playing, despite its obvious qualities, hadn’t really ever moved or touched me –  it was music-making I admired, but didn’t love.

After Houstoun’s debilitating encounter in the year 2000 with, and eventual recovery (2005) from focal dystonia (a process documented clearly and movingly in an article on the pianist’s web-site, found at www.michaelhoustoun.co.nz), I began to feel a kind of “thawing-out” in his playing – especially memorable for me were recitals featuring Schumann’s Kreisleriana (August 2010) and Schubert’s B-flat Sonata D.960 (July 2011), both works getting magnificent, expressive readings. My reviews, to my surprise, were punctuated with many comments referring to the pianist’s poetic sensibilities and evocation of free and open spaces – “beautifully and sensitively weighted, equivocally poised between worlds of foreboding and resignation” was some of my purpler prose.

Houstoun mentioned in his account of the FD saga his “rediscovery of a happiness in simply playing the piano” as part of his healing process – and for me that rediscovery is manifest in what sounds to me like a greater warmth and freedom in his playing. I noticed, for example, during the recent Beethoven recital how beautifully differentiated the three first-half sonatas were, each offering very different aspects of the composer’s musical personality – the “Hammerklavier” of course, was something else again!

Simply the selection of keys across the three first half works gave the listener interest and pleasure – plunging into a stormy C Minor to begin with, the recital moved to a good-humored G Major for the second work, and a brief though richly-plaintive immersion into F major for the diminutive Op.54 Sonata. At first, from the beginning of Op.10 No.1, with its terse ascending figurations hurling out a challenge to the world, I thought the Ilott Theatre acoustic would prove too dry and dull for the music to properly “speak” – but as the work progressed I realized that the sounds were bringing out both player and instrument beautifully, without need of much help from the hall at all.

Houstoun relished the operatic character of the second movement, energizing the dramatic, baroque-like flourishes that contrasted with the lyrical lines, and bringing out the playful countervoice dancing over the top of things, before the richly beautiful concluding descent. Having sufficiently expressed his ardour, the young virtuoso composer applied his pianistic spurs once again and galloped off and into an incident-packed third movement, rich with variety. The pianist took us adroitly through all of this towards the somewhat Haydnesque harmonic cul-de-sac which brought the journey to a whimsical halt, then laughingly turned us around and pushed us in the right direction to the final cadence.

The opening of Op.14 No.2 had, by contrast, a feline grace, in Houstoun’s hands, with the music’s contours finely sculptured, but with some easing at the phrase-ends, just as a singer would breathe. The middle section clouded over and giddily whirled us through various agitations to a wonderful release-point nicely held by the pianist before returning to the gentle warmth of the opening – I thought Houstoun’s tones positively glowed in places towards the end, with a kind of burnished quality. The andante stepped out with attitude, Houstoun terracing the dynamics finely and without exaggeration – I had never noticed a kind of kinship of utterance between places in this movement and the variation movement of No.30 (Op.109) before hearing this performance.

Regarding the finale, it was “and now for something completely different….” on the composer’s part. Houstoun brought out the music’s skittishness, in places as much lightly brushing-over as playing the notes – as another pianist once said to me, having just played the work, “It’s all slightly mad, isn’t it?” – and splendidly delivered Beethoven’s gorgeous growl of impulsive drollery right at the end. And from this we were taken to a world of grander, more ceremonial and ritualized fun-and-games, the enigmatic two-movement Sonata No.22 (Op.54).

Comparing this performance with Houstoun’s Trust recording of the work, made in 1994, I noted the more open and varied touch throughout the first movement’s exuberant octave hammerings. I also felt a stronger sense of narrative throughout – here, the introductory minuet-like dance was beautifully augmented on each of its appearances with grace-notes and other accoutrements, and thus transformed into a wondrously-adorned processional. The pianist allowed it a moment of glory before gracefully delivering a succession of plaintive, fading chords, and letting it all go.

As for the moto perpetuo-like second movement, Houstoun has always played this music superbly, as here. From the beginning there was a finely-controlled but burgeoning excitement, Houstoun bringing out Kreisleriana-like voices from the occasional held notes, and varying the tones and intensities throughout different episodes. I enjoyed the wonderful “lurches” into different ambiences, before the pianist refocused the music’s bearings, girded its loins for a final reprise, and made an all-out dash for the finish line, to exhilarating effect.

So – we were now “primed” as it were for that Everest of the pianistic literature – the “Hammerklavier”. The music was hurled across the firmament for us at the very start, Houstoun’s hands leaping excitingly through voids of time and space. His fingers didn’t quite encompass every note cleanly in the subsequent figurations, but the hint of strain suggested a no-holds-barred commitment, and the titanic nature of the effort required to bring those sounds into being for us. The energies generated and subsequently released throughout the whole movement in places suggested to me dancing star-clusters, forming and breaking apart, the pianist’s strength and vision of the whole keeping the ebb and flow of things together. The  fugal sequence had both vigour and weight, suggesting a human mind attempting to come to grips with something elemental and for the ages. A tremendous achievement.

The scherzo was kept “tight”, and the dynamics contained, though circumspection was thrown aside as the madly scampering trio section brilliantly touched off the volcanic climax, the sounds skyrocketting upwards and all over in a brilliant display of surging pianistic exuberance. A few obsessively-repeated chords and a throwaway ending, and we were suddenly in another world of vast spaces and far-flung thoughts, as the slow movement was begun.

When reviewing Houstoun’s recording of this work, I felt that the pianist demonstrated that he was a skilled, committed and thoughtful architect and builder, from the opening notes of this movement shaping the music into a magnificent structure, exquisitely proportioned and finely detailed in all of its parts. His grasp of the different dimensions suggested by the music made for profound contrasts of space, light, meaning and feeling which I felt readily opened themselves to the listener. It was a telling journey through these different vistas, with seemingly endless explorations in and around the music’s structures, upwards and outwards, though I didn’t ever feel I was invited or encouraged by the playing to stop and experience the depths of the stillness at the heart of it all.

Seventeen years on I felt Houstoun’s approach to this music had moved closer to this stillness, though he seemed as disinclined to take that last step into the vortex of allowing the music to direct him, of surrendering to the ineffable and feeling the full depth of the silences between some of those notes. Rather, the music was, I thought, kept on the continuum of a living pulse, with everything admirably weighted and sensitively detailed. Beethoven’s use of a slow waltz-rhythm throughout suggested in its way a kind of life-dance, whose ebb and flow underwent profound transformation, and Houstoun’s invitation to us to share in that dance pared our existence to the music’s essentials for its duration. And though this music was supposed to represent the well of the world’s sorrow, here on the opposite side of its tragic aspect was an antithesis, a kind of cleansing of the spirit and a refreshing of the indomitable will. It was on this plane that I thought the pianist’s achievement in this music was truly memorable.

On a prosaically functional level, a truly transcendental performance of the slow movement can leave one in a kind of emotion-suffused daze, creating the unforgivable solecism of wanting to turn the work into a kind of “Unfinished Sonata” by breaking off one’s listening at that point. Perhaps Beethoven sensed such a possibility, responding with a finale whose opening easeful, recitative-like gestures suddenly plunge the listener into a seething cauldron of fugal interaction, one which largely dominates the movement. Houstoun’s strength and energy really came into its own, here, and his playing vividly delineated the music’s fugal form as a wonderfully jagged cliff-face, whose relief outlines displayed things such as augmentation, retrograde and inversion (as all good fugues ought). With him we climbed that cliff-face, experiencing the stature, grandeur and beauty of the journey, and braving things like suspensions, overhangs and false steps, and pausing for breath at a certain point to take in the full extent of the terrain thus far covered, savour its beauties and terrors, and then plunge upwards and onwards.

Having gone within hailing distance of the goal, the music then intensified the order of its going, requiring the pianist to interweave some of the elements thus far encountered, before finishing with a part-defiant, part-exultant ascent of the B-flat major scale of tenths and trills to the final tonic-dominant cadences of the work’s summit. Resisting the temptation to employ Sir Edmund Hillary’s famously reported description of his and Tensing’s ascent of Everest at this point, I might instead say that Houstoun thus came, saw and on this occasion conquered. His traversal of all four sonatas (but especially the last!) justly drew forth a rapturous response from a near-filled Ilott Theatre, people almost without exception on their feet wholeheartedly acclaiming a stellar achievement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Houstoun’s second triumphant Beethoven sonata recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Michael Houstoun – BEETHOVEN reCYCLE 

Piano Sonatas:
G minor, Op 49 No 1;
F major, Op 10 No2;
B flat major,  Op 22;
D minor, Op 31 No 2 (Tempest);
A major, Op 101

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 14 April, 5pm

Each of the seven concerts in which Michael Houstoun plays all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas is high-lighted by one of the famous ‘name’ sonatas.  It is a device with far more value than mere marketability.

The order of the sonatas
Many in the audience will have wondered whether Houstoun had a theme or some sort of musical pattern in mind in his choice of what to put in each programme: whether these titles found echoes in the other pieces chosen for that particular concert or was there some other common mood or spirit to be heard in each concert, to what extent was there a chronological pattern. 

In his interview with Tim Dodd on RNZ Concert Houstoun said he followed the order he used in the 1993 programmes. The programme booklet reminded us of how they were arrived at. In marginal quotes, Houstoun drew attention to key relationships, some rather recondite, especially when the adjacent pieces were separated by the interval.

Other than that, Houstoun seemed to be guided simply by an instinct about pieces that might fit together or offer suggestive contrasts. Marked contrast seemed to be an important aim; so the three earliest pieces (Op 2) and the last three (Opp 109, 110, 111) are all in the last three recitals in November; while all three of Op 10 and both of the Op 14 sonatas were in the first three programmes. Otherwise, the programmes were nicely varied between early, middle and late works.  

Though I am reviewing only Programme 2, I heard all three in the first weekend and hope to hear all other four recitals. So far a general impression is of somewhat more impassioned performances than those of 20 years ago; tempi often a little faster in quick movements, though similar, perhaps sometimes even slower, in the adagios and andantes.  But more strikingly, an older Houstoun has had the confidence to exploit extremes of dynamics, daringly juxtaposed, to make the most of tempo changes, of playful or portentous passages, prolonged pauses that almost suggesting a mock memory lapse on the part of pianist or a radical change of mind on the part of the composer.

Op 49 No 1, in G minor
The first piece on Sunday evening (Op 49 No 1) hardly lent itself to displays of wit or mockery. Along with its major key companion, this is probably the young pianist’s first taste of Beethoven sonatas, and Houstoun simply played it with elegance and affection, unaffectedly, with rich bass sonorities, discreet rubato and staccato phrases that enlivened the rhythms. 

Op 10 No 2, in F
That atypical piece out of the way, the real young Beethoven arrived with the second sonata of Op 10; written in the mid 1790s when the composer was about 25 and enjoying a spectacular career as a piano virtuoso. This is no work for the Grade 5 piano student; it demands confident rhythmic acrobatics and fast, elaborate ornaments. It also calls for the pianist to find the wit and originality that a young Beethoven was determined to astonish the Viennese public with. There’s really no slow movement as the second, marked Allegretto, is in brisk triple time. The third movement, with its fugal touches, was driven with unremitting, staccato energy, with a conscious wit with a straight face, which had its effect on the audience if not perceptibly on the pianist.

Op 22, in B flat
The next sonata, Op 22 in B flat, as if aware of Houstoun’s interest in related tonalities, created a sense of regression, moving down a fifth (or up a fourth) from the previous sonata in F major. As with all the slightly less familiar pieces, it was strikingly arresting with its Allegro, very con brio, its flying semiquavers whose technical risks Houstoun succeeds in drawing attention to, rather than making them seem easy as do some pianists, not necessarily better ones. But at least, in the second movement, we could be comforted with the calm and beautiful 9/8 Adagio, with a piquant modulation in the middle.  

Beethoven tends to defy facile characterisations. The Minuet has its sweet and untroubled phases, lilting staccato, while at the same time revealing a satanic mask, which is especially explored in the dark Trio section. Houstoun understands and seems to relish these contrasts and states of unease.  A happy tune colours the Finale, a Rondo, which relaxes tensions and might have left the feeling of its being somewhat facile, if this pianist was virtually incapable of playing even the simplest piece without  a certain dignity and profundity.

The Tempest, Op 31 No 2, in D minor
Houstoun played the Tempest Sonata, the second of the three in Op 31, not as the last in the concert, but straight after the interval. It was followed by the one unfamous late sonata, Op 101; some might have felt it as an anti-climax.

However, to plunge straight into The Tempest after the interval was exhilarating; rather more so than the Op 26 which opened the second half before the Waldstein on the Friday evening. The large gestures of this highly dramatic performance that lent credibility to its title ‘Tempest’ (which was not Beethoven’s) alternating between calm and storm.  Beethoven’s early biographer Anton Schindler believed it to be inspired by Shakespeare’s play, while the programme notes offer the now more common idea that it describes Beethoven’s despair at the realisation of his irreversible deafness.

Its key of D minor which had been the vehicle for darkness, grief and satanic characterisation for Mozart (vide Don Giovanni and the Requiem), was bound to call up such emotions in both composer and those of the audience sensitive to tonality.  Mood and tempo changes create a sense of spiritual confusion, and Houstoun’s powerful playing lent weight to such a theory.  

Though the Adagio movement begins without much ado, not many bars pass before darkness descends, a deep thoughtfulness touched with increasing mystery; acceptance of his fate. There’s no Minuet; the last movement is marked innocently, Allegretto, but here is the storm, portrayed with unflagging passion and staccato-driven, motoric rhythms.

Op 101, in A major
I’d expected the follow-on by the Sonata in A of 1816 to offer something of an ambiguous transition, and the beginning was certainly true to its key’s traditional character: light-hearted, untroubled. I always have the feeling, undisguised in Houstoun’s hands, that the first few notes of the opening theme are missing and his playing seemed dramatise the feeling that we had gate-crashed into the middle of something that was a little bit private.  But nothing much does happen in the short first movement except to put us at rest.

The more usual Beethoven emerges in the next movement. The tempo markings are interesting: the first movement is Etwas lebhaft – ‘somewhat fast’, while the second is simply Lebhaft, adding ‘marschmässig’ – march-like; but the difference between them is far more than that, especially in Houstoun’s hands, a springing, frantic, staccato-driven, march.

Another short Adagio (Langsam) precedes the fourth movement (though the way the programme note is set out suggests the two are one movement; and incidentally, what a splendid programme booklet Chamber Music New Zealand has produced, worth every cent!). Houstoun seemed to be feeling his way into this slow and beautiful movement, preparing secretly for the arpeggios that accelerate into the last movement, marked ‘Geschwind’ (‘swift’, a wonderful word that has no comparable feel in English; for me it always calls up the last stanza of Goethe/Schubert’s Erlkönig: “Dem Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind”).

In this movement all the pent-up energy, now joyous, come to a climax and is released, though controlled through a certain amount of fugal writing. In spite of its enigmatic earlier aspects, the sonata ends on a note of high excitement, even if there remains a touch of cosmic doubt.

Coda
It proved a wonderful conclusion to a great concert, another exposure to a Beethoven pianist with something more to say than mere technical virtuosity and a high level of sensitive musicality.  Do we understand that we are host to a Beethoven interpreter of international stature, who has made a profound exploration of some of the greatest works of art of all time;  who brings a sense of drama to the music, unafraid to reach to the extremes of expression, at which the composer himself would surely have given a gruff sign of approbation? And a  pianist who has continued to explore and discover, who has determinedly pursued his individual perceptions that brings to every episode, every movement, new awakenings and revelations?

For the second time, the overwhelmed audience came to its feet with long applause.