Middle C – Page 154 – Classical Music Reviews, Wellington, New Zealand

New Zealand String Quartet continues Beethoven cycle with magnificent pair from Op 59

Posted on 03/05/201226/05/2012 by Lindis Taylor

‘Beethoven Revolution’: The second phase of a complete cycle of the string quartets

Op 59 Nos 2 & 1 (of the Razumovsky Quartets)

Wellington Town Hall

Thursday 3 May, 7.30pm

The programme listed the pieces to be played in this first of two concerts devoted to the ‘middle’ period of the quartets, from the three Razumovsky quartets, the ‘Harp’ (Op 74) and Op 95, showing the two at this concert as Op 59 Nos 1 and 2 in that order. Gillian Ansell spoke at the beginning and evidently told us that they would be played in reverse order, but the sound system (or my sound system?) was not good enough for me to hear that.

(By the way, though the common English spelling is ‘Rasumovsky’, the name in Russian is spelled with a ‘z’ in the first syllable – Разумовский; it’s transliterated in German with ‘s’ since ‘s’ is pronounced ‘z’ when between two vowels. Thus, since he was not a German, it should be represented in English by the equivalent letter – ‘z’).

I had not looked at the programme and when, in the second half, I opened it to check on the markings of the movements that I realised that the programme had the two quartets in the wrong order.

It made excellent sense, for the E minor quartet (No 2) is more powerful, sombre and dramatic than No 1, and thus made an arresting start. And incidentally, I noticed that my old set of LPs by the Gabrieli String Quartet also arranges them 2, 1 and 3.

The first two movements of No 2 in E minor are the longest of any of the Razumovsky set, and their placing at the concert’s start made a resolute and arresting opening to the concert

But the players did not allow those moments of particular force to dominate, and for the most part there was an airy, open feeling in the music, varied with the most tender pianissimo that grew entrancingly in slow crescendi.

The second movement, Molto adagio, with the added injunction to play it ‘con molto di sentimento’, is a remarkable piece of music which sounds prescient of the quartets of 15 years later, so unusual in its otherworldliness even though it breaks into the tonic major key, from the E minor of the quartet as a whole. The performance, particularly Helene Pohl’s high-soaring violin, was deeply affecting; and one cannot help but think of the interest Beethoven is said to have taken in Kant’s early Theory of the Heavens written half a century before.

The third movement was captured by it spirit as a haunting, disembodied dance, with important contributions by Gillian Ansell’s viola soon echoed in an uncanny stillness from Doug Beilman’s violin. The entire movement reflected a masterly distillation of feeling.

The F major quartet is not of the transcendental character of the preceding one. F major, which is heard by Beethoven, and others as a sanguine and human scale key, is the key of two other major works of the middle period: the Pastoral Symphony and the Op 54 piano sonata,. Yet it still sets a new benchmark; in contrast to the Op 18 set each of which lasts less than half an hour, both these are around 40 minutes in length and speak in a different language, that is spacious, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes soul-searching, routinely profound.

Here it was Rolf Gjelsten’s cello that made the first statement over a staccato accompaniment with a tremolo quality. Startling phantom chords lead to a rather grand melody, all making plain the distance the composer has come in just a few years.

The Scherzo – or scherzando in this case – second movement was wittily handled with a droll tune in a mocking dance rhythm, each instrument taking its turn in a staccato passage, then a very contrasted second subject that soon emerges as a surprising fit with what has gone before.

The slow movement was played for all its poignant, elegiac feeling, each instrument making the most of every individual phrase, emotional but never cloying. That runs straight into the finale – Allegro which is famously built on a Russian folk tune, a gesture to Count Razumovsky. Though the music follows sonata form, the strength of the tune which has the feel of a rhetorical ending, repeated many times, seems to me like a study in ‘coda-as-substantive movement’, a series of admittedly quite elaborate and fugally-rich perorations that resume after a moment’s pause. The quartet might well have exhausted Beethoven’s disposition ever to write a rhetorical coda again.

The quartet is at present at the very top of their game – well, they’ve been there for quite a while – and I look forward to the next concert, containing the third of the Op 59 as well as Opus 74 and 95, which, oddly, will not be performed in Wellington – but at Upper Hutt on 11 June and Waikanae on 17 June.

Especially, the profound insight, the maturity and the ability to illuminate the infinite variety of Beethoven’s invention that the players have displayed so far makes the performances of the late quartets in September a more than ordinarily exciting prospect.

Diverting wind trio in delightful programme at St Andrew’s

Posted on 02/05/201207/05/2012 by Rosemary Collier

Rameau: Gavotte et Doubles
Françaix: Divertissement
Beethoven: Variations on a theme ‘La ci darem la mano’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni
Schulhoff: Three movements from Divertissement for oboe, clarinet and bassoon

Wild Reeds: Calvin Scott (oboe), Mary Scott clarinet), Alex Chan (bassoon)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 2 May 2012, 12.15pm

The playing of the ‘Wild Reeds’ was wonderfully uplifting right from the start of their programme. It may have been a wild wind with rain outside, but this ensemble, far from being wild, was precise and euphonious.

The Rameau work was delightful in its several contrasting movements that contained solos, with mainly harmony on the other instruments. The pieces were an arrangement of a Rameau keyboard work.

The printed programme had excellent notes on the works, and on the history of this combination of instruments. The Trio des anches de Paris was evidently formed in 1927 by a bassoonist; he and his colleagues believed that the flute and horn did not blend well with reed instruments. It was good, too, to have the dates of composition of the works.

The Françaix piece featured tricky timing in places, especially in the second movement, but these players were always together; their expertise as performers was not in question at any point.

This was quite unconventional and quirky music, reminding me of the writing for woodwind of Françaix’s fellow-countryman and near contemporary, Poulenc, not to mention the slightly earlier Ravel and Satie.

The third movement, Élégie, of this four-movement work was not as peaceful as one might expect a work having this title to be. The Scherzo could have been depicting birds having a squabble, at the start. Then they make up, yet there was still the odd disagreement before they went their separate ways and did their own thing, stopping just to say a spiky ‘good-bye’.

Beethoven’s Variations reveal masterly treatment of this great melody from Mozart. The first variation gave the solo writing to the oboe, the second to the bassoon – who would have imagined that this instrument could be so rapidly talkative?

The third was slow and harmonic, while the fourth provided rapid passages for all three instruments at first, followed by some that were mainly for oboe. The fifth was a contrast, being in a minor key, while the sixth had the clarinet leading the variation. Variation seven had the lower tones on the clarinet playing along with the bassoon, which had solo sections, while rapid passages were played by the clarinet. Finally, we had a slow, languid ending restating the theme.

The last item on the programme consisted of three movements (Charleston, Florida and Rondino) from the Schulhoff Divertissement. The lively Charleston had the instruments sometimes almost seeming to be at one another’s throats! Florida was a more lyrical piece, with a surprise ending, and Rondino was fast – a sort of perpetuum mobile, with a few stopping places along the way, and a sudden ending.

This programme seemed slightly short, but the players obliged with an encore: a trio that follows a soprano solo in J.S. Bach’s Cantata no.68. The original instrumentation was violin, oboe and bassoon. The instrumentation of Wild Reeds sounded quite spiky, but very effective.

The delight the audience obviously had in this highly skilled group’s performance demands that St. Andrew’s must schedule them again. Its programme selection was interesting, and the combination of instruments refreshing; the players were expert musicians indeed.

Halida Dinova – Russian Soul from Tatarstan

Posted on 02/05/201216/05/2012 by Peter Mechen

HALIDA DINOVA – Piano Recital

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

Music by JS BACH, LISZT, DEBUSSY, MENDELSSOHN, SCRIABIN, RACHMANINOV, BALAKIREV, SCHUBERT and CHOPIN

Little Theatre,Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 2nd May 2012

It seemed as if I had barely recovered my poise and equilibrium in the wake of Sofya Gulyak’s stupendous recital at the NZSM’s Adam Concert Room in Wellington not a week beforehand, before encountering another wonderful pianist from the Russian Federation.

This was Halida Dinova, originally from Tatarstan, and currently living and teaching in Cleveland, USA, where she studied at the Institute of Music. From these somewhat far-flung worlds she had come here, and was giving a recital under the auspices of Chamber Music Hutt Valley at the Little Theatre in Lower Hutt.

I neither understand, nor wish to question whatever constellations in the firmament whose movements shape and influence our musical lives conspired to bring such an overwhelming juxtaposition of pianistic talent within our spheres. But all I know is that, within the space of a few days we had been presented with two opportunities of directly experiencing a “grand manner” of piano-playing one can normally only read about or experience second-hand through recordings.

So, at this point in my review, I propose to declare my intention to write about Halida Dinova’s playing as a “stand-alone” experience, and not get bogged down in a morass of comparisons between her and her compatriot, Sofya Gulyak – suffice to say that, as with Gulyak, Dinova had only to play a phrase for the listener to fairly guess that she had been brought up in a pianistic environment which favored a distinct style of playing and attitude towards interpretation.

This was playing in that “grand manner” I spoke about earlier – playing which demonstrated whole paradoxes of intensity and imagination, focus and colour, sharply-drawn edges whose parameters took in what seemed like limitless possibilities of fancy. Dinova’s sound seemed at once to speak to us directly, and yet suggest much more than what we heard – as if the music she made was presented as sound and then turned into poetry.

Her opening measures of the Bach/Busoni transcription of the Adagio from the C Major Toccata and Fugue BWV 564 which began the recital said it all, really – big, resonant, long-breathed playing, both disciplined and romantic, superbly coloured and finely nuanced.

Dinova’s own transcription and playing of the well-known Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 was what the French call a “tour de force” – I scribbled in my notes “Stokowski on the piano!”, so orchestral and impactful was her playing. For some reason she omitted Bach’s notorious “horror arpeggio” on both of its scheduled appearances in the introduction, but her playing was of an order that swept away any such incidental considerations in a torrent of sound-impulse which broke over the listener like oceanic waves. Her playing of the fugue stupendously achieved with two hands and the pedal what organists normally need their two feet for as well!

After these musical avalanches, it was somewhat ironic that we found in the music of Liszt some lighter contrast – though Dinova’s birdsong at the opening of the first of Liszt’s Two Legends, during which we heard St. Francis of Assisi preaching to an avian audience, was more than usually forthright – obviously there were skeptics in the feathered ranks, needing all the Saint’s powers of eloquence and persuasion to put across his message of love and salvation for all creatures.

For a piano supposedly on its last musical legs, as we were told by Chamber Music committee member Mike Rudge in his welcoming speech, the instrument was nevertheless made by Dinova to tingle with whatever life its strings, mechanism and frame still possessed. In fact, after the recital, she told me that she thought the society ought to get the piano reconditioned, rather than purchase a new instrument, as she really liked what it did for her!

To reproduce all the notes I scribbled while listening to Dinova play would be to try readers’ patience – enough to say that she brought to a wide-ranging program this distinctive “way” with piano-playing alluded to earlier, while realizing all and more of what one thought of the possibilities suggested by the names of these pieces and their composers.

Only during the bracket of Debussy that she played did she seriously part company with my feelings about the music – her performance of the admittedly difficult “Poisson d’or” from Book Two of Images I found oddly “rubbery” and unatmospheric, as though she was suddenly a child playing with toy fish in a bath. Doubly odd, because she had just given us a “Reflects dans l’eau” from Book One which was purely magical evocation, as watery a texture as could be imagined, but with plenty of glint and sparkle in the flourishes, a wonderfully iridescent sound-picture, at once warm and transparent. And I have never heard anybody lavish so much love and care on the salon-like Waltz La Plus que Lente, enough to transform it into something that sounded like a masterpiece (as well, Dinova was completely unfazed by a door noisily opening and shutting at one point in the proceedings!).

Dinova gave us a sharply-etched, glint-eyed Mendelssohn E Minor Scherzo, the music tripping deftly between faery and demonic mode, the pianist surviving a ‘splash” at the end of one of her runs which occasioned a wry, self-deprecating look at the keyboard from the pianist at the end of the piece, something which mattered not a whit in the context of such amazing overall dexterity. By contrast, the Scriabin left-hand Nocturne conjured up whole worlds of enchantment, the playing without smudging or clouding, but resonating beautifully throughout.

One expects, not unreasonably, to hear Rachmaninov from a Russian pianist, and Dinova’s way with two of the Op.23 Preludes reminded me of the composer’s own sharply-etched playing on his recordings. In reverse order to the programme’s listing she played the well-known G Minor with plenty of impulsive thrust, spiking the rhythms with accented notes in a way that added an element of menace to the momentums. And (bless her!) she played the throwaway ending, instead of the loud concluding chord that the composer unaccountably put into a later edition of the score! The E-flat Major she adroitly wove into a seamless surge, the central climax melting into delicacy at the end, the line, as always, both intensely-focused and pliable.

As for Balakirev’s notoriously challenging Islamey, which closed the first half, Dinova engaged with the piece on all fronts, relishing the rapid-fire toccata-like passages, whirling figurations, fistfuls of chords and sudden changes of rhythm, texture and dynamics than make this work one of the showcases for virtuoso pianists strutting their stuff. But nowhere did Dinova make us feel she was simply displaying her pianistic wares – she was too intent on bringing out the character of the different parts of the music, my favorite moment in her performance being the reprise of the toccata-like rhythms after the more lyrical central episode, where her out-and-out keyboard physicality took both music and listeners for an exhilarating bucking bronco ride – a breathtaking experience!

Being a sucker for Liszt’s Schubert Transcriptions, I enjoyed Dinova’s playing of them unreservedly, the beautiful Auf dem Wasser zu singen contrasting most tellingly with the spooky Erlkönig. In the context of this recital they made a fitting introduction to the remainder of the second half, which was taken up with Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op.28.

Pianist and pedagogue Hans Von Bulow (whom history unfortunately remembers most readily as the man whose wife Wagner stole) famously wrote a “program note” for every single one of these preludes, some of which are fanciful to the point of surrealism. His actions,of course, reflected the desire of musicians of his age to characterize the music that they played, for the benefit of their listeners. To my delight, Dinova’s programme printed Bulow’s titles for each of the Preludes.

One wasn’t aware of a specific program as such while listening to Dinova’s playing of these pieces, but such was the power of her musical “imaging” one could without too much trouble bring to mind pictures or words or both in response to what she was doing and how. They weren’t, I felt, offered by the pianist as abstracted pieces, though one could undoubtedly treat them as such if one wanted to, and resist the blandishments of the extremely vivid playing. As with nearly everything she gave us throughout the recital Dinova’s identification with Chopin’s sound world seemed at the time entirely appropriate as a synthesis of mind and heart, intellect and feeling.

Throughout the recital, but especially throughout the second half, Dinova proclaimed her allegiance to an older, more traditional manner of playing by consistently allowing her left hand to rhythmically anticipate the right, as many of the generation of pianists who made the earliest recordings known did as a matter of course. Also, from the outset the depth of tone and sense of “communing” with each of the Preludes added to a sense of their integral power – here they seemed more than usually “knitted together”, each one greater for the company of its fellows. Having said this it seems hypocritical of me to single out any for special comment – but I particularly loved her light, airy, out-of-doors way with the Lisztian No.23, which Bulow called “A Pleasure-Boat”, here, sounding like something out of the first Book of Liszt’s “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage).

As if she hadn’t done enough to satisfy, Dinova generously gave us both Scriabin and Rachmaninov as encores, setting the seal on what was a recital to remember. And, as with Sofya Gulyak, let’s sincerely hope we in New Zealand haven’t seen the last of her.

An overwhelming Missa Solemnis from the Orpheus

Posted on 29/04/201207/05/2012 by Peter Mechen

PSATHAS – Luminous

BEETHOVEN – Missa Solemnis

Emma Fraser (soprano) / Bianca Andrew (mezzo-soprano)

Cameron Barclay (tenor) / Kieran Rayner (baritone)

Orpheus Choir

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Welliington Town Hall

Sunday, 29th April 2012

Along with his last symphony, which he finished at about the same time, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, completed in 1824, is justly reckoned to be the finest and grandest of his public utterances as a composer. One commentator went so far as to term the work a “sacred symphony, one whose secular counterpart (the Ninth Symphony) followed shortly afterwards”.

The composer called the Mass “my greatest work”, which perhaps explains in part the somewhat bewildering duplicity with which he arranged to receive advances for the work from at least six publishers before settling on a seventh, as well as privately selling ten prepublished copies to various royal patrons. Obviously Beethoven wished that what he held so dear ought to be similarly regarded by the outside world, more especially so as his financial circumstances at the time of writing the Mass were even worse than usual.

Financial considerations aside, Beethoven’s intention, according to letters written to his patron, the Archduke Rudolf, was “to awaken lasting religious feelings both in the singers and in the audience…..there is nothing loftier than to come nearer the Deity than others and, and from here to distribute the heavenly rays among Mankind….”. With these sentiments firmly in mind, the words “Mit Andacht” (With devotion), found written over the opening of the score, is the overriding instruction for the performers.

Which is all well and good, except that those same performers are confronted with a work bristling with difficulties, one whose composer demonstrated little concern at various places throughout the score for ordinary human capabilities. At almost any stage in the work’s performing history, it seems as though its challenges have been emphasized almost to the exclusion of its actual content – thus the Musical Times of 1882 pronounced in no uncertain terms that “The work is impossible. No human lungs can withstand the strain imposed by it.” And despite today’s orchestral and choral standards being of the level of technical excellence hitherto undreamed of, critics and listeners continue to report performance woes and mishaps – this from a review of a recent London performance, for example:

“Time and time again could be heard many of the soprano singers striving to meet Beethoven’s very severe demands on them, only to be undermined by a substantial number of their colleagues merely screaming at the note and missing. The tenors too were often wild, with individual voices coming through. That Beethoven’s demands are severe should not mean that listeners have to make allowances……”

Of course, Beethoven’s score for the Missa Solemnis has long been cited, along with various of his “late” works as embodying the idea that the composer refused to compromise his artistic vision to the limitations of instruments and musicians of his era – – hence his oft-quoted reply to a violinist who complained that a passage in one of his last quartets was virtually unplayable: – “Do you think I care about your miserable violin when the Spirit speaks to me?” – in other words, the idea counted far more than its execution.

All of which gives the impression to the uninitiated listener that the Missa Solemnis is a kind of intractable musical monster, created by a somewhat deranged creative spirit – certainly some of Beethoven’s contemporaries were shocked by what they actually heard of it, particularly the militaristic interpolations towards the end of the work’s final movement, the “Agnus Dei” – a hapless critic lamented “what these strange trumpet-fanfares, the mixing in of recitative, the fugued instrumental section, which only destroys the flow of ideas…..what the hollow, unrhythmical bizarre timpani strokes are intended to mean, only dear Heaven knows…”. Of course, succeeding generations of music-lovers have more readily accepted Beethoven’s revolutionary attitudes to traditional form and expression – writing as early as 1861 the acerbic critic Eduard Hanslick, after hearing a performance, wrote about the work’s “sublime ideas” and admired its creator’s “double majesty of genius and adversity”. In this sense the composer was correct when he remarked to a friend “my music is not for this, but for a later time”.

Even in our time the work has the power to startle and surprise listeners unprepared for its boldness and daring. And these were precisely the qualities which were brought to the fore by the Orpheus Choir, the Vector Wellington Orchestra and four radiantly-voiced soloists under Marc Taddei in the Wellington Town Hall on Sunday afternoon. The concert actually featured another, shorter work as a kind of prelude, John Psathas’s fanfare Luminous, one whose intensities, though very different to those of the Missa Solemnis activated both our sensibilities and the sound-vistas of the hall, and put us in a “tingling” frame of mind, ready for the coruscations of the Beethoven work. I thought that, in this respect, it was good programming, even if I for one would have been happy with having the Mass as a “stand alone” experience.

Throughout the whole of the first part of the work, the Kyrie, Gloria and Credo, Beethoven is in his grandest, most imposing mode, with energy and drama to the fore, and frequent contrasts between fast and slow, loud and soft, music with “attitude writ large”. By contrast, the two following movements, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, are generally more intimate and personal-sounding, apart from a few irruptions of energy (at the words “Pleni sunt coeli in terra” during the Sanctus, for example, and during the latter part of the Agnus Dei, when the composer reminds his listeners all too palpably of the horrors of war).

I would doubt that there’s another work in the standard repertoire that puts a choir through its paces to the extent that this one does – throughout these first three movements the energy levels of the singers are taxed to an incredible extent. Very wisely, Marc Taddei called for a “tuning-break” between the Gloria and the Credo, one which I appreciated as well, as one is otherwise literally bounced by the composer from one alpine peak to another, between the two sections. But in general, I could have wept for joy at the strength, power and beauty of the Orpheus Choir’s singing throughout. Such a great deal is required by the composer of his singers, and I thought the choir’s stirring commitment to the task was as much a tribute to its Music Director Mark Dorrell as to the other “Marc” who directed the performance with such inspirational élan and all-encompassing energy.

As for two or three places where the choir was pushed fractionally beyond its limits by the conductor, such as the fugal conclusion of the Credo and the aforementioned “Pleni sun coeli” in the Sanctus, the momentary ensemble imprecisions proclaimed a certain spirit of risk-taking, of going to extremes entirely appropriate for such a work in performance – a case, perhaps, for the idea that the pursuit of perfection is in itself a greater undertaking than its actual achievement. Conductor Marc Taddei certainly seemed like a man possessed throughout, inspiring his musicians to put themselves on the line and give it all they had. At the same time, his sense of the work’s overall structure remained admirably clear-sighted, so that, in his hands the work sounded every bit like the masterpiece that it’s reputed to be.

Heroes of equal standing were the orchestral players, every section covering itself with glory, realizing all of the work’s demands throughout – the brass I thought were outstanding, the horns in particular – and of course they all had a fine old time during the Agnus Dei, putting across Beethoven’s militarist evocations of the perils and sufferings of war. What an extraordinary sequence this made, the raw force of the composer’s message here given plenty of power and intensity by singers and players alike, right up to the work’s somewhat abrupt ending.

Pivotal in this scheme of things were the four young soloists (all of whom, in a context of such awe-inspiring grandeur of expression, looked excessively youthful!). As it turned out, Emma Fraser, Bianca Andrew, Cameron Barclay and Kieran Rayner made a veritable dream team of voices. They were placed at the back of the orchestra and in front of the choir, as though they were singing in an integrated space, rather than “out the front” – and this worked well because their voices had the heft to be clearly heard. Baritone Kieran Rayner had a little difficulty in this regard because of the lowness of some of his notes, although higher in his range the voice “told” with no impediment. All made a beautifully blended sound as well as handling their individual lines with great aplomb. Especially affecting was their singing in the Sanctus and Benedictus, sounded in tandem with the orchestra’s concertmaster Matthew Ross, whose violin solo triumphed over a couple of uncertain moments to contribute to the work’s most sublimely beautiful passages.

This was a performance that I’m sure will be talked about for a long time to come – all credit to conductor, choir, orchestra and soloists for their part in creating our very own and much-cherished version of the stuff musical legends are made of.

Sofya Gulyak – pianist extraordinaire

Posted on 28/04/201210/05/2012 by Peter Mechen

Piano Recital by Sofya Gulyak

New Zealand School Of Music,

in association with the NZ (Auckland) International Piano Festival

RACHMANINOV – Three Pieces for Piano Op.3 / Etude Tableau in E-flat Minor Op.39

Variations on a Theme of Corelli Op.42

SCRIABIN – Two Poemes Op.32 / SHOSTAKOVICH – Prelude and Fugue in D-flat Op.87 No.15

PROKOFIEV – Piano Sonata No.6 in A Op.82

Adam Concert Room, NZSM, Victoria University of Wellington

Saturday 28th April

Former Professor of Piano at Auckland University Tamas Vesmas instigated in 2005 the Auckland International Piano Festival, an event which for the following couple of years attracted numerous world class pianists to give recitals, concerts and masterclasses. In 2008, Vesmas returned to Europe to live, and the Festival’s organization was taken over by John Eady, of Lewis Eady Ltd, the New Zealand agents for Steinway pianos. Tamas Vesmas was able to maintain an interest in the Festival as Artistic Director, which continued successfully under John Eady’s stewardship, a process which eventually saw the Festival drop the “Auckland” from its title and become the New Zealand International Piano Festival. This year, the prestigious line-up included none other than the 2009 Winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition, Sofya Gulyak. It was Wellington’s great good fortune that she was able to include a visit to the capital in her schedule, and perform her Festival program here as well.

Gulyak’s success at Leeds was historic in the sense that she was the first woman to win the top prize in the competition (Mitsuko Uchida went close in 1975, but was edged out by Dmitri Alexeev, and the talented Noriko Ogawa was placed third in 1987, though she beat the highly-regarded Russian Boris Berezovsky into fourth place). At Leeds Gulyak played the Brahms D Minor Concerto with Mark Elder and the Halle to take the honours, and her performance was praised for its “measured intensity” and its “combination of tonal weight and dark lyricism”. Her success wasn’t entirely unquestioned, as often happens in these competitions, with each of the runners-up preferred by some commentators as the more deserving of the highest award – but Gulyak was able to impress enough of the right people sufficiently to carry the day.

She was certainly able to impress her Wellington audience as well, though not with Brahms – her programme, which she had also played in Auckland, at the Festival, consisted entirely of Russian works. It was a well-chosen assemblage of pieces designed to demonstrate unequivocally those characteristics we’ve generally come to associate with music from that particular part of the world. Added to this was a style of playing which, thanks largely to recordings of other pianists, could readily be identified as belonging to the “Russian School”, and which Gulyak seemed to me to proclaim practically from her first note of the recital, at the beginning of Rachmaninov’s Elegie from the set of Pieces, Op.3. Her depth of tone, and evocation of both a deep stillness and a wonderfully oceanic surge caught us up in her sound-world within seconds, one which rose and fell at will throughout the music’s journeyings.

The Op.3 Pieces of course contain THE Prelude, which Rachmaninov the concert pianist grew to hate, as he was simply beleaguered with requests for its performance – “I know my duty – I will play it!” he would wearily say to his stage manager, in response to his audience’s clamouring at the end of each concert. There was nothing weary about Gulyak’s performance, which was very “chiaroscuro” throughout the sharply-delineated opening, but then brought out the variants of colour and tone, with the left hand held in check, allowing the sounds of those tolling bells plenty of space and atmosphere. A quicksilver middle section proclaimed her amazing technical facility, with cascades of sounds pealing in all directions, and then the most magical tonal diminutions of the final chords opened up the music’s vistas and merged sounds with memory.

Despite the programme’s boldly-proclaimed “Five Pieces for Piano Op.3”, Gulyak played only three of them, concluding the group with the Polichinelle, Rachmaninov’s scintillating portrayal of the well-known Pulcinello, from the Italian commedia del’ arte theatre – impish brilliance at the outset, followed by one of those rolling Russian melodies that the composer simply couldn’t help writing, and concluding with a reprise of the opening, working up to an even more brilliant conclusion. The grandly obsessive Etude-Tableau in E-flat minor from the wonderful Op.39 set of these pieces followed, its Lisztian sweep and rhetoric making the perfect foil for what was to follow – the composer’s last piece written for solo piano, the Corelli Variations.

Though the theme Rachmaninov used is not really by Corelli at all (it’s an ancient Portugese dance-tune called “La Folia”) it was used by the latter in one of his Op.5 Violin Sonatas, as well as by other Baroque composers. By this stage in his career Rachmaninov was favouring a leaner, sharper-edged style in his composing, following on from his Fourth Piano Concerto and his “Paganini” Rhapsody. Sofya Gulyak fills out the spaces contained by these clear edges with dark, rich colours, vividly characterizing each variation (a cricket’s song in Variation Two, for example), and for me making each vignette at once modern-sounding and fantastically Schumannesque. At first I thought her playing in the finale a shade unyielding, but orchestral colours kept burgeoning up out of the textures and the rhythms acquired a real schwung from one keyboard extreme to another – exciting and extremely musical pianism! And the epilogue was brought about with such a sense of “being there”, Gulyak scattering a few roses about the devastation, her playing of the theme at the end a quiet, deep-toned tribute to the journey and its remaining memories.

Scriabin’s “Two Poemes” were played for contrasts, the first Andante Cantabile very beautiful, limpid and watery, the second more “impetuoso” than its actual marking “con eleganza”. Though seeming like whole worlds apart, Gulyak moved from these worlds of over-wrought sensibility to the sharp, acerbic intensities of Shostakovich with complete ease, flinging the composer’s angularities at us with gusto at the beginning of the Prelude, and switching to playfulness for the child-like middle section, innocent and artless but for the occasional “wrong-note” contouring! And what a wicked, chromatically torturous fugue! Gulyak relished its motoric impulses and its spiky, “in-your-face” concluding cadences, whose ironic, matter-of-fact aspect brought a huge appreciative response from her audience.

Though the Shostakovich work had a modicum of grit, it was left to Prokofiev to provide the evening’s truly coruscating moments. His Sixth Sonata was numbered as the first of what the composer called three “War Sonatas”, begun in 1939 and written throughout the duration. Amazingly, the composer began work on all ten movements of the three sonatas at the same time, in order to be able to switch to a different movement’s mode if he felt any kind of creative “block” with what he was currently grappling with. It’s small wonder that these sonatas have things in common, but an even greater miracle that each does have its own specific thematic and schematic world.

Sofya Gulyak threw herself and all of us into the ferment with a vengeance, giving the Sonata’s opening major-minor fanfare its full clangour and spadefuls of energy, drawing us into the darkly-lit lyricism of the central section, before re-energizing things, the fanfare returning in harsher, more mocking guise. Her playing hurled the sounds across the spaces, transfixing our sensibilities and rending the fabric of things. The Allegretto movement provided a little respite, though Gulyak pointed its its angularities in-and-out of our comfort-zones, unsettling us with sudden accents and dark shadows. I also loved Gulyak’s way with the slow-waltz lentissimo, again, taking us from warm reassurance to cool unease across single measures, rather like moonlight suddenly obscured by cloud and leaving things enveloped momentarily in darkness. Her voicings throughout were beautifully modulated, her control of animation and stasis that of a master, the concluding cadences playing delicacy against darkness most effectively.

The finale here drove between bristling energies and diabolical impulses – we felt a sense of dark pursuit that gave way to a slowly-descending vortex dominated by the work’s opening fanfare-motif. Gulyak’s impulsive reawakening of the textures were the sounds of fireflies in the gloom, the energies spreading to open conflagration, and overwhelming us with explosive force – her delivery of the final “pay-off” phrase had an electric thrill whose shock momentarily knocked our receptive powers sideways, though we recovered to give her the ovation and recalls she so richly deserved. Her encore, appropriately, restored calm and order to our sensibilities – a Bach transcription of part of a Marcello Oboe Concerto, after what we had just experienced, the musical epitome of equilibrium and well-being! Bravo, Sofya Gulyak!

Memorable concert by visiting expatriate musicians

Posted on 22/04/201228/04/2012 by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Music

Milhaud: Suite for violin, clarinet and piano, Op.157b; Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120; Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

Akoka Quartet (Simeon Broom, violin; Rachel Church, piano; Victoria Simonsen, cello; Sarah Masters, clarinet)

Ilott Theatre

Sunday, 22 April 2012, 3.00pm

These young New Zealanders have all studied in the United Kingdom, and are currently playing professionally there. Simonsen and Masters are no strangers to the Messiaen work, having jointly won the Granada Chamber Music Competition in the UK, performing this music. They have considerable experience playing in chamber ensembles, orchestras, and solo, in New Zealand, UK, and Europe.

Their all-French programme revealed how unlike French composers can be from one another, and it was a very satisfying collection of works, surprisingly, all written within a 20-year span.

Having in the distant past played the Milhaud work with friends (one of whom was present at this concert), I was delighted to hear it live.

The clarinet particularly was pleasing in the first movement ‘Ouverture’. Humour, jazz and off-beat rhythms are all features of this movement. Later, the piano and violin came into their own more. The ‘Divertissement’ slow movement is marked by lovely interlocking parts, while the ‘Jeu’ third movement, for violin and clarinet only, is bright, lively and dance-like, with a contemplative middle section. The ‘Introduction et final’ that ends the work is bouncy with great melodies, and ends deliciously, with a cheerful ‘good-night’.

The work was played with panache and expression; some hesitancy in the violin early on disappeared, and the joyous nature of Milhaud’s writing found full flowering.

Each item was introduced by a different member of the quartet, the information filling out what was in the programme notes. I find this an interesting feature, becoming more common in chamber music concerts. It helps to give a flavour to each of the players and they become not only musicians but also communicators.

The Fauré trio is very different from the previous work. After a very ardent opening on the cello, the strings continued with mellifluous, singing quality, ably supported by a delectable piano part.

The andantino slow movement had classical interplay of melody between cello and violin, with serene supporting chords from the piano. The music gradually became impassioned.

The final movement is somewhat idiosyncratic, and there are more nods to the twentieth century in its writing. It is quirky at times, but very rhythmic. The harmonic language is more varied than that of the first two movements. It was given an admirable performance.

Before the concert, I felt it was rather soon to have another performance of Messiaen’s work, after Ensemble Liaison and Wilma Smith played it so memorably in the Wellington Town Hall less than six months ago (the concert was broadcast on RNZ Concert only about a week ago). There was also a performance at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson in February last year.

However, these players were well up to the task. Being in a smaller, more intimate space than was the October concert made the work sound less grand and monumental; on the whole I preferred the larger acoustic space.

Nevertheless, the themes of faith and spirit, and apocalypse as outlined by Simeon Broom in his introduction to the work, were amply conveyed.

The word ‘time’ has another meaning music – was this the end of time in music? Messiaen’s modal, even plain-chant, continuous melody in much of the work has no obvious consistent time signatures, and a lack of apparent unity (see Peter Mechen’s review of the earlier concert, on this website: 29 October 2011) was somewhat overcome for me by hearing it a second time.

The character of the music is forecast in the titles of the eight movements, many of them coming from the last book of the Bible: Revelation. Despite the lofty and dramatic themes there, this music begins with an ethereal opening of bird sounds, most notable in the high harmonic glissandi on the cello. This first movement (Liturgy of crystal) is followed by crashingly apocalyptic sounds in the second movement (Vocalise for the angel who announces the end of time). It moves into smooth piano and string chords seemingly arriving from profound depths, played with muted strings, before a return to the apocalypse.

The ‘Abyss of the birds’ third movement is for solo clarinet, and was originally written separately for the clarinettist the composer met at a temporary prison camp in France, before they were both transported to a Stalag at Görlitz in Germany, in 1942. The quiet introduction is powerful in its muted simplicity. Beautifully played, it nevertheless had less impact on me than the previous hearing, with its soloist standing on a large stage at the Wellington Town Hall. The piece calls for a huge range of the clarinet’s notes and dynamics, all superbly rendered by Sarah Masters.

The ‘Interlude’ fourth movement is for violin, cello and clarinet. A great array of techniques is called for; the music makes almost ecstatic pronouncements.

Movement five (In praise of the eternity of Jesus) is for cello and piano only. A strong, serene melody on the cello has simple piano chords underpinning it. The mood is of faith and fervour, and hope. Again, the music depicts ecstasy and confidence, yet is sometimes poignant. However, hope triumphs at the end.

The sixth movement (Furious dance for the seven trumpets) returns the full quartet, and is a complete contrast to what has preceded it. Furious it may be, but it is not sheer noise. It is played almost entirely in unison, generating a most unusual mysterious atmosphere and mood.

‘Tangle of rainbows for the angel who announces the end of time’ is the title of the seventh movement. After a placid opening, there are violent discords, then a return to the placid mood. The violin playing in this was very fine; beauty and simplicity characterised the music. A renewal of chaos followed, and then there are birds, the music emerging to perhaps a preview of the end of time.

Finally, the contemplative last movement (In praise of the immortality of Jesus), for violin and piano only, is calm and peaceful in the violin part (marred by a few moments of poor tone and suspect intonation), supported by chords on the piano.

Altogether, it was a memorable concert, and the clarinet playing of Sarah Masters was particularly outstanding, but all the players acquitted themselves well, and gave first-class performances severally and together.

The Full Monte – Baroque Voices let ‘er rip for us

Posted on 22/04/201213/05/2012 by Peter Mechen

THE FULL MONTE (Concert Two)

Claudio MONTEVERDI – Madrigals (Books 2 and 9 – exerpts)

Baroque Voices, directed by Pepe Becker

Continuo: Douglas Mews (harpsichord) / Robert Oliver (bass viol)

Stephen Pickett (theorbo / baroque guitar)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

Sunday 22nd April, 2012

Trying to analyze either truth or beauty brings one to despair at the inadequacy of one’s own command of language. And faced with the truth and beauty of a body of music such as Claudio Monteverdi’s madrigals, I’m conscious that any words I might try to muster up to connect with, describe or explain any aspect of such glorious sounds are not going to match that selfsame glory. The exercise makes one realize anew just why it is that music is regarded as conveying so much more than words ever could.

I’m forced to accept the realization that the best way of telling other people about Monteverdi’s music is to encourage them to experience some of it for themselves. And happily, this is what that wondrous group of musicians and associates, Wellington’s Baroque Voices, led by Pepe Becker, have decided to make possible for us regarding those justly famous collections of madrigals by the Italian composer, no less than nine books of them, written over a period of more than fifty years, a virtual compositional lifetime.

The group’s aim is to present the entire collection of these works in concert, over a period of four years. The first in this series of concerts was performed almost a year ago last May, one that I attended and afterwards reviewed on RNZ Concert (as a footnote to this present review, I offer my notes from that radio interview, not a word-for-word transcript, but something which contains the essence of what was discussed on air).

Now the group has undertaken a second concert, true to its word, for our delight and pleasure. As they did with the first “The Full Monte” presentation, Baroque Voices aren’t intending to slavishly follow the composer’s chronological order, but aim for some variety by setting groups of works from different eras in juxtaposition with one another. So it was that this concert alternated madrigals either singly or in pairings from Book Two and individually from Book Nine throughout the afternoon – which meant that we were being constantly confronted by what sounded like music from two different composers.

We had the youthful (1590) more traditionally-influenced composer following the rules of what he called “Prima Pratica” (the older, more conservative way of composition), his works unaccompanied, according to Renaissance tradition, alternated with works from the Ninth Book (published posthumously in 1651), music from a different century, of course, it must be remembered – these madrigals are instrument-accompanied, and the vocal writing is far freer, less predictable, band more varied, including canzonette (trios) and two-part works whose immediacy of expression are in some cases practically operatic in feeling and in inclination.

As much as I’d like to take credit for what I thought was a perceptive comment regarding Monteverdi’s writing style, I have to confess that the following came from a commentator surveying a number of recordings of these works, and writing about what he thought as the best way for the listener to approach this music. He said, “Trying to understand Monteverdi by working backwards from Handel and Bach doesn’t work, because Monteverdi’s music is the culmination of the Renaissance style, one which looked to express the meaning behind every word of text. He took the “poetry of sound” to its highest level of expression, and in the process, created something which strikes our ears today in places as fiercely modern.”

Between the two concerts the personnel of the group changed a little. Tenor Peter de Blois was replaced by Phillip Collins, joining the other tenor, Oliver Sewell, and bass Benjamin Caukwell took the place of David Morriss. Otherwise, the voices that had delighted us throughout the first concert were there again for the second, and continuing to do so. Pepe Becker’s and Jayne Tankersley’s angelic soprano tones ensured that our sensibilities were kept more-or-less constantly airborne – though very different in individual timbres (very likely an advantage) their blending of their individual lines in places created both mellifluous and startling results! Christopher Warwick’s reliable counter-tenor again wove strong interconnecting lines and enriched those middle vistas with enlivened tones.

Throughout, the blending and contrasting of vocal tones was a constant delight to the listener’s ear – right from the opening “Non si levava ancor”, from Book Two, in which the textures opened like those of a flower, contrasted the mood with a certain mercurial energy, then took up the longer lines once more.I enjoyed those instances of marvellously “attenuated” lines in which a second singer would add to an already existing held note, making for an incredibly intense effect. The song’s totality seemed like some kind of perfection of realization, beginning with impulse, then generating tension, and finally – fruition.

The second item, “E dice l’una sospirand’ allora”, also from Book Two, reminded me of Thomas Tallis in places, with “modal” sounding progressions. As the work progressed the performers excitingly widened and intensified its range of expression, up to the vehement and very dramatic ending, with the “addio” repeated, the words living and breathing. From Book Nine then came a dialogue “Bel pastor, dal cui bel sguardo” between a shepherdess and her lover, Pepe Becker and tenor Phillip Collins played nicely into each other’s and the music’s hands, with delightfully capricious phrasings and figurations, exciting coloratura and winsome echoing of some of the florid passages – most entertaining!

Among the many other highlights was the energetic “Se vittorie si belle” from Book Nine, in which the instrumental ensemble sprang to energetic life, the small baroque guitar displaying real “attitude”, as the instrumentalists matching the singers’ rapid-fire exchanges, the words combatative and flailing about in all directions. Another was the Book Two “Tutte le bocche belle”, with its sublimely stratospheric soprano parts, creating a feeling all around of ecstasy on the wing with the bell-like tones. And the two sopranos gave us another palpable thrill a few minutes later, with the superbly-wrought “Quando dentro al tuo seno” (Book Nine), concluding with a palpably searing clash of seconds from Pepe Becker and Jayne Tankersley which was then brilliantly and fantastically resolved on the phrase’s final note. Sensational stuff!

This ought to have been a literal show-stopper, but we in the audience were perhaps too stunned by the power of the music and virtuosity of the singing to respond immediately! – and so we waited until the more playful and light-hearted “S’andasse Amor a caccia” (Book Two) brought with its ending the interval. In fact, my only criticism of the concert was that we spectators felt the pressing need to applaud more often, but were stymied by a mixture of inhibition and reluctance to disturb the “spell” of the music-making. We needed, I think, at least one opportunity, midway through each half, to let off a bit of steam and give vent to our appreciation.

I could go on through the second half of the concert highlighting various other “highlights”, the “terraced” beauties of the very first song in the second half, “Mentre io miravo fiso” from Book Two, with its solid underlying harmonic progressions; or the overt, Barbara Strozzi-like emotionalism and volatility of Book Nine’s extraordinary “O sia tranquillo il mare”, the singers having more than ample temperament, sensibility and sustaining power to do these works full justice. Nor was emotive power the exclusive property of the Book Nine madrigals, as we discovered with the performance of the beautiful but intensely dramatic “Dolcemente dormiva la mia Clori” from Book Two, with its lovely, elaborately-turned final cadential measures.

I did think the group right at the end could have chosen a fuller-ensembled madrigal with which to finish, rather than slavishly pursuing the numerical order of the Book Two set which concluded with the single-sopranoed “Cantai un tempo…” – as with the concert’s first half, it was the penultimate madrigal which I thought would have made a better and more concerted “finish” here, the Book Two “Ti sponto l’ali, Amor, la donna mia” with its roulades of intense, rolling sound and fearlessly-attacked high notes (soprano Jayne Tankersley in particular in spectacular form). But this, like the very few other criticisms I’ve dredged up, was a minor matter, as smoke compared with Pepe Becker’s and Baroque Voices’ stunning achievement in this music. Even more so than I felt at the conclusion of the first concert of “The Full Monte” in 2011, I now await with impatience the group’s third instalment of these remarkable works.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Appendix

2011 Review: The Full Monte (Concert One)

Baroque Voices’ performances of music from the entire collection of nine Books of Madrigals

by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)

Baroque Voices: Pepe Becker (soprano) / Jayne Tankersley (soprano) / Christopher Warwick (countertenor)

Peter de Blois (tenor) / Oliver Sewell (tenor) / David Morriss (bass)

Continuo players: Douglas Mews (harpsichord) / Robert Oliver (bass viol)

Il Primo Libro de Madrigali (for five voices) 1587 (complete)

Madrigali e canzonette (for two and three voices) from Libro Nono 1651

Concert 1 Sunday 1st May 2011, Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

(from a review by Peter Mechen for “Upbeat” with Eva Radich)

PLAY MUSIC : Filli car e amata (Phyllis, my dear beloved) – Poi che del mio dolor (Since you enjoy feeding on my sufferings) (from Il Primo Libro)

“The Full Monte” – the title suggests revealing something or stripping something off, as in the film of the same name. So, what was done to or with Monteverdi?

Baroque Voices in this concert began what’s intended to be a complete survey of the Madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi wrote nine books of Madrigals, and gradually evolved his own style of expression. So the early books are in the grand polyphonic tradition of the Renaissance, although one can hear distinctive voices striving for deeper and more overt expression every now and then. And by the time the composer came to write his later books he had ushered in a new style of vocal writing, much freer and more overtly expressive than the old. Baroque Voices performed the entire Book one of the madrigals and interspersed groups of them with selections from Book Nine, music that came almost a whole lifetime later, in fact.……..

How did the idea work, of alternating works by a composer from both the beginning and the end of his creative life?

It worked well – it was a situation where different ways of presenting the music would have made for an equally fascinating, but different, result. Part of the reason everything worked is that the music is so good, so instantly combustible to the ear, so that it became a case of registering differences rather than improvements. The early Monteverdi wasn’t at all shamed or cast low by what we heard of the later works. What was fascinating was how one often heard pre-echoes of the composer’s later style, so that the experience was more organic than one might have thought it would be..……..

So what are the differences between early Monteverdi and late Monteverdi in his madrigal writing?

When Monteverdi was young he wrote madrigals in the old-fashioned sense of the word -that is, following the rules of Renaissance Polyphony……….. These early works were unaccompanied five-part madrigals, and the rules consisted of things like having equal voice parts, preparing the listener for dissonances, certain prescribed chordal progressions were used, and the work’s musical structure was paramount. By contrast, the later Monteverdi deals in bold dissonances, sudden tempo changes, radical harmonic shifts, chromaticism, florid vocal ornamentation – a generally more volatile and spontaneous attitude towards realizing the meaning of the poetic settings.……….We’ll hear two of these early madrigals: “Amor per tua merce” (Cupid, take pity on me), followed by “Baci soave e cari” (Sweet, dear kisses).

So, what do we expect the group to be doing in this group of two madrigals?

It’s music that’s very light on its feet, with the lyrical sections having a lovely soaring quality. Listen for the lovely voice-blend in both works, and in the second madrigal the soprano’s unflinching attack on the high notes, even if the intonation isn’t absolutely true all the time. There’s a lovely blend achieved by the group here, and the ebb and flow of the work is beautifully controlled.…….

PLAY: Monteverdi “Amor per tua merce” (Cupid, take pity on me”) and “Baci soave e carry” (Sweet, dear kisses) from Book One of Monteverdi’s Madrigals for five voices (1587).

The music sounds amazing – what is it that you think gives it that compelling quality, that instant connection?

In this case, definitely a combination of the music and its performance. The music itself is extraordinary – last year with the performance of the Vespers by the same singers we got a tremendous demonstration of how vivid and communicative Monteverdi’s music can be – and even without that array of wonderful instruments these madrigals still have the power to engage. You can hear, especially in the later works but even occasionally in the earlier works, how, with such expressivity it was easy for this music to become operatic. Monteverdi’s concern with his vocal works was to give the words and their meaning pre-eminence over musical structures and harmonic progressions – he insisted that it was a case of “Prima le parole, poi la musica….” (first the words, then the music). HIs First Book of Madrigals, though it generally follows the traditional styles of the late Renaissance, occasionally gives an indication of the composer’s desire to pursue more modern styles of writing – he considered “the words are the mistress of harmony, not the servant”. Monteverdi had been criticized by at least one of his contemporaries for what were called “crudities” and “license” in his music, and his response was to coin the name “Seconda Pratica” (Second Practice), aligning himself with other composers who preferred the innovative style, and serving himself and his work apart from what he called the “Prima Practica” (First Practice) of the more traditional composers.

The performances sound terrific! – what was it like being there and feeling the force of it all?

Like all performing groups worth their salt, this group invites total immersion on the part of the listener. It was an incredibly involving experience, of course very much an art that conceals art, because this degree of involvement by the performers in this music which washed over and all around us was of course possible through skills and techniques that enabled the singers to put the message across so tellingly. If one was looking for faults, there were moments of raw tone, and of one or two not-quite on the note unexposed entries, and a couple of instances of not-quite-matching figurations with singers in duet but these were so few and far between, and often what might have seemed a rawness, a slightly off-pitched note, a momentary inequality of vocal figuration in duet, also created expressive effects of their own. Now music-making can only do that if it’s generally on an exalted level – like Alfred Cortot’s wrong notes on his recordings – “spots on the sun” I think one commentator called them.And the music-making by this group was of such brilliance, power and depth, that occasional minor lapses took on that “spots on the sun” quality. All in all, I thought the concert was an outstanding achievement.

So, we’re going to hear one of the later madrigals, from Book Nine, in fact – what does one listen for?

Well, it’s a wonderful example of how Monteverdi took his style along further – a very dramatic and theatrical setting of the words, with frequent irruptions of feeling inspired by the text’s meaning – you can hear and feel the surge of emotion and the graphic realization of the words “to cry for help to end my terrible torment”, for example – and then, at the end, the throwaway line “for she causes the words to break on my lips”. Remarkable.

Here’s Pepe Becker and Jane Tankersley, accompanied by Douglas Mews harpsichord and Robert Oliver bass viol.

PLAY: Monteverdi “Ardo e scoprir” (I burn) from Book Nine of Monteverdi’s Madrigals for two and three voices (1651)

Pepe Becker and Jayne Tankersley, sopranos, with Douglas Mews and Robert Oliver bass viol.

It does move the whole scenario that much closer to opera, doesn’t it?

Well, of course Monteverdi had by now written his famous operas, which were among the first ever written. His earliest surviving opera, L’Orfeo, was first performed in 1607. One of the things that make these works really zing is the quality of the poetry – Monteverdi was using verses by some of the most famous poets of the time, Tasso, Guarini and Rinuccini, people whose use of emotive, sensuous imagery was unparalleled.

Even in the earlier madrigals which are more conventional and perhaps “reined in” emotionally compared with the later ones, the writing is of an order that Monteverdi was fully able to explore and push out the boundaries of what could be expressed – the poetry simply went with him – or, maybe, he simply went with the poetry.

To finish, here’s a couple of shorter madrigals from the First Book, in which you can hear the young composer already responding to the ebb and flow of the very emotional poetry. We’re going to hear the ensemble of Baroque Voices singing firstly “Questa ordi il laccio” (She it was who wove the snare”, followed by a look at a kind of Little Bo Peep of Monteverdi’s time, “La Vaga Shepherdess”.

PLAY TO FINISH: Monteverdi “Questa ordì il laccio”(She it was who wove the snare) and “La vaga pastorella” (The lovely shepherdess) (from Il Primo Libro 1587)

NZSO and Pietari Inkinen all at sea

Posted on 20/04/201228/04/2012 by Peter Mechen

SIBELIUS – The Oceanides / BRITTEN – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”

CHAUSSON – Poème de l’amour et de la mer / DEBUSSY – La Mer

Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano)

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 20th April 2012

Having rather too cleverly used the expression “all at sea” in this review’s heading, I needs must hasten to add that the words weren’t meant in a pejorative sense – but rather as a compliment to conductor and orchestra regarding their powers of evocation!

Compiling a complete list of musical works inspired by the sea would, I think, result in several closely-worked pages being filled. Of the pieces for orchestra, Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO surely gave us four of the greatest, with the help of mezzo Sasha Cook, who followed her heartfelt performance of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer of a week ago with a mellifluous rendering of Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer.

I thought three of the pieces received splendidly characterful performances, the one disappointment for me being the opening item on the program, Sibelius’s The Oceanides. As a friend said to me during the interval, it wasn’t very Mediterranean – we missed the glint of sunlight on the water and the play of light on the waves, a scenario which would have rendered the “big wave” when it came, an even more impressive demonstration of nature’s power. Here, it instead seemed all very Baltic, and somewhat more subaqueous than Sibelius might have intended – a point of view, but one that played down the Homeric inspiration commented on by the composer: – “It (the Oceanides) derives from the mythology of Homer and not from the Kalevala.”

I wondered whether the good ole’ MFC acoustic played its part in swallowing up some of the music’s airiness – in particular the winds seemed scarcely to speak throughout to my ears in the place where I was sitting, though I suspect it was more the conductor’s “through a glass darkly” way with the music. The passage for glockenspiel, harp and clarinet containing the hitherto “embedded” string theme hardly at all registered, and there were similar places whose evocations of air and light (ironically the program note spoke of the music’s “bright warmth”) were made subservient to the string-dominated soundscapes depicting the ebb and flow of watery expanses. Perhaps in venues like the Auckland Town Hall, the winds will get more of a chance to establish a better sense of the play of sun and wind upon the waves.

Having in previous articles commented upon Pietari Inkinen’s seeming reluctance to explore and bring out the “darker” sides of Sibelius’s music, I now may justly be accused of inconsistency at complaining when he does so! Still, Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes” responded marvellously to the same kind of trenchant treatment, though here I thought all sections of the orchestra were encouraged to “speak” and convey their distinctive colours and accents. The playing of the opening Dawn allowed us to sense the vast and lonely beauty of the sea itself, as well as conveying its darker, more threatening power. This was in complete contrast to the gaiety and human bustle of Sunday Morning with its insistent backdrop of church bells – how wonderfully “precarious” those syncopated cross-rhythms of strings and winds always sound, played here as well as any other performance I’ve heard!

More sharply-etched contrasts came with Moonlight, here dark and dour, unresonant and unromantic and filled with foreboding, followed immediately by the physical assault of Storm with Inkinen really encouraging his players to rattle, roar and rend the air with tumultuous sounds. It was all very exciting, with particularly wonderful brass-playing (the tuba roaring like a kraken from the baleful deep), the performance capturing the “frightened shadows” aspect at the end, with properly spectral strings and winds, before the final free-falling orchestral tumult resounded into the silences.

After the interval, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke added her lovely voice to some gorgeously-wrought orchestral textures throughout the opening pages of Chausson’s seductive Poème de l’amour et de la mer. One of a number of stunningly beautiful works for female voice and orchestra written at about this time (such as Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Ravel’s Scheherazade), Chausson’s “endless melody” style of writing enabled the singer to demonstrate her finely-tuned dramatic instincts, in the first part, The Flower of the Waters (La Fleur des eaux) now hushed and expectant at “O ciel qui de sees jeux dois porter la couleur”, now radiant-toned (at “Faites-moi voir ma bien aimee”, and then later at “Et du ciel extrovert pleuvaient sur nous des roses”), the music evoking roses raining from the sky.

Here, and throughout both interlude and the second vocal episode, The Death of Love (La Mort de l’Amour) conductor and players supported and matched their soloist’s outpourings with a range of tones, by turns refulgent, flowing, spectral and halting. How the music darkens at the words “Le vent roulait des feuille mortes”! – with Chausson’s debt to Wagner, and in particular “Parsifal” evident in those sombre harmonic progressions for orchestra alone, and underpinning the despair of the words “Comme des fronts de morts”.

As for the most quintessential sea-piece of them all, Debussy’s La Mer, Inkinen and the orchestra brought out plenty of crisp detail and strongly-contoured lines – this was no impressionist wallow, but a beautifully-judged delineation of detail whose impulses activated a bigger picture with a widely-flung spectrum of variation. While here I didn’t feel quite as consistently the elemental undercurrents that made Inkinen’s reading of The Firebird of the previous week such a powerful listening experience, Debussy’s seascapes were allowed sufficient power in places to “tell”, again with instruments like the timpani encouraged to sound out (a couple of pistol-shot thwacks in the finale from Laurence Reese certainly added to the excitement!), and the lower strings and brass bringing appropriate weight and darkness to some of that same movement’s climaxes. While we’re on this movement, full marks to the trumpet-player (whom I couldn’t see properly – was it Michael Kirgan?) whose brief but cruelly-exposed solo shone out truly amid the darkness.

In all, an exciting, and richly-varied concert, each of these last two orchestral outings making a refreshing change from the usual “overture-concerto-symphony” format, with, for me, equally satisfying results. Maybe there’s hope for things such as Janacek’s Taras Bulba and Elgar’s In The South yet!

Pianist Nicola Melville returns to give memorable recital at St Andrew’s

Posted on 18/04/201220/04/2012 by Lindis Taylor

Images, Book I: Reflets dans l’eau, Hommage à Rameau, Mouvement (Debussy); Jettatura (Psathas); Nocturne in B, Op 62 No 1 (Chopin); Three Piano Rags by William Albright

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 18 April, 12.15pm

Nicola Melville holds an assistant professorship at a university in Minnesota and is on the summer faculty of the Chautauqua Music Festival in up-state New York (south of Buffalo, close to Lake Erie). She was educated in Tawa schools and at Victoria University (where she was one of Judith Clark’s many talented students) and at the Eastman School of Music in New York State. Since then, in the United States, she has had important competition successes, and won prestigious grants, has performed at music festivals and recorded standard repertoire as well as works commissioned by her.

Her programme was very well gauged for a free lunchtime concert, with pieces both familiar and fairly new.

The three pieces that comprise Debussy’s Images Book I for piano opened the recital, played with remarkable fluency and sensitivity. Reflets dans l’eau shimmered with velvety sound, suggesting not perfect calm but water rippling after the three notes are dropped into it, and regains its reflective character towards the end. Hommage à Rameau is not really ‘in the style of’ but simply a less impressionistic piece, bearing a certain formality and basically traditional harmonies that Debussy stretches and colours: in tone more like the suite Pour le piano, and perhaps kinship with Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. Melville seemed to find the essence of each – so different – characterising them with clarity and precision, stamping each with the composer’s unmistakable musical personality; Mouvement suggested a very different scene, of a trapped insect or fast-spinning machine, created by throbbing, motoric figures that do not go anywhere but move in a confined space, demanding not just speed but the creation of shapely phrasing and dynamics all of which flowed effortlessly from her hands.

Nicola described the origin of John Psathas’s Jettatura (she remarked that she had been Psathas’s contemporary at the School of Music), reading the composer’s own notes prefaced to the score about the significance of the name and the misfortunes and bad luck that have attended his visits to his family homeland, led his family to attribute to an ‘evil eye’ or jettatura (in Italian).

He wrote: ‘The belief is that a person can harm you, your children, your livestock, merely by looking at them with envy and praising them…”. On a visit in 1998 bad luck struck his wife and son and his sister consulted a village soothsayer who checked John’s aura by long-distance telephone. “The soothsayer gasped, went silent, and declared I was so heavily and completely hexed that my halo was utterly opaque.”

His talisman to defend himself against the jettatura, is this little composition.

It called for hard-hitting, impassioned fingering, and the creation of a sense of defiance and ferocity, almost out of control. Both hands are fully occupied in entirely different activities, the left hand hammering a string of ostinatos while the right hand tumbled in an apparently reckless way over the keys, reaching to the top of the keyboard. A brilliant composition that perhaps found its ideal interpreter in this brilliant expatriate pianist.

Then back to Chopin with one of the less familiar of his 21 Nocturnes. Op 62 No 2 is the last of the nocturnes published in his lifetime (there are three without opus number, two early, one late). They are not as much played in concert as the scherzi and ballades and impromptus, many of the waltzes and mazurkas but, as Roger Woodward writes, “[The nocturnes] are the key to Chopin. They represent the high art of Romanticism and a great way to begin to understand how to play melody well.”

This one has not the quite beguiling ease of the early ones of Op 9, the F sharp major, or the entrancing melody of the nocturnes of Opp 32 and 37, the F minor, or the posthumous C sharp minor.

However, some consider the two nocturnes of Op 62 the most interesting, the most contrapuntally complex, and though the shift from Psathas to Chopin might have seemed a retreat into a simpler world, Nicola’s presentation of its modest, restrained artistry had the effect of cleansing the air, with the subtlest rubato, discreet pedalling and velvety articulation.

Finally, to animate a quite different part of the brain, three Piano Rags by William Albright, pieces that had their roots in Scott Joplin Nicola has become an Albright specialist, with many recorded on CD, as you will find if you Google ‘William Albright rags’.

The first thing you notice is the flood of notes, and a greater complexity and variety of rhythm and harmony, of dynamics and modulation than you find in the early 20th century precursors. On the other hand, there was no less feeling of an idiomatic performance from the pianist.

The frequent and unusual key changes would have surprised Jelly Roll Morton or Fats Waller. We strike the unexpected at every turn, and it struck me that the rags may have been chosen to match aspects of the character of Jettatura (or more likely the other way round). The second, Sleepwalker’s Shuffle, began softly swinging, in a relaxed spirit, which is suddenly broken by a fortissimo phase in stride style that would have woken the sleepwalker with a nightmare. The Queen of Sheba rather defied interpretation, toyed with chromaticism, pauses, surprises, her left heel tapping the floor, a presto molto burst where traditional harmonies were spiced with dissonances.

They are enormous fun, and enormously challenging, and there is no possibility that they could have been written before the late 20th century. I cannot imaging a more enthusiastic and accomplished advocate of this infectious music than Nicola Melville.

Singing for Children: Young Angel Voices at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on 15/04/2012 by Lindis Taylor

An invitation from Robert Oliver

We’re looking for children aged between 8 and 12 years old, who are looking for a group to sing in.

Young Angel Voices started a year ago, and is always welcoming new members.

It’s open to all comers, there is no audition.

The only qualification is the desire to sing.

Children learn all sorts of songs: folk songs, rounds, gospel songs, part-songs, some accompanied, some unaccompanied. They learn to read, and how to produce their voices from one of New Zealand’s most experienced singers and conductors.