A horn trio wins converts at Wellington Chamber Music recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nautilus Trio: Wilma Smith (violin), Andrew Bain (horn), Amin Farid (piano)

Mozart: Violin Sonata in A, K 305; Beethoven: Horn sonata, Op 17; Koechlin: Four Little Pieces; Brahms: Horn Trio, Op 40

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

Sunday 18 September 3pm

Wilma Smith, a former NZSO concertmaster, has been returning to New Zealand every year or so since she became co-concertmaster with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: usually with a strings and/or piano ensemble. This time, inspired by the urge to play Brahms’s Horn Trio, an appropriate trio was put together, comprising the Melbourne Orchestra’s principal horn and pianist Amir Farid.

Why Nautilus? Nautilus is a mollusc with a spiral shell divided into compartments. Is that the connection with the character of the French horn? In a subsequent exchange with Wilma, she confirmed that this was indeed the significance.

Putting together a programme for the somewhat rare combination of piano, violin and horn would not have been easy, though their encore showed other pieces do exist. They found one written for just those instruments in Koechlin’s short pieces which were attractive even if a bit insubstantial, and they didn’t do much to induce one to explore this interesting composer, some of whose other music I had met. Nevertheless, the writing for the three instruments was subtle and charming, offering the horn a very nice environment in which to work with the two stringed instruments.

The solution to fleshing out the first half was to play sonatas that used violin and horn separately. No trouble with the former, and the one they chose – Mozart’s in A, K 305 – was a good choice: neither well known, nor insignificant. Unusual in shape – two movements (as was not unusual at the time), the second, a theme and variations, rather slower than the first. The galloping rhythm of the first movement was a splendid opener while the Andante grazioso was an interesting set of variations with an unexpected modulation towards the end. It was a most successful opener, the two players demonstrating a rapport that was not just a matter of keeping perfectly together, but combining the voices of violin and piano rather beautifully.

Beethoven’s rather routine sonata (published with the reassurance that a cellist could handle it) is the sort of piece that is only played in circumstances like this. It calls for the horn to launch forth in military-sounding arpeggios in stentorian style, which does not usually bring out the horn’s most engaging sound. But as soon as lyrical passages arrived the player’s skills became more evident, unexpectedly perhaps, in accord with the piano. Individually the two players explored its character carefully, making as good a case as possible for it. By playing the second movement rather more poco than the tempo marking, poco adagio, might have indicated, they sustained its lines – and the slow breaths for the hornist – as well as exposing the somewhat vacuous musical content.

After the interval came the reason for the concert. The remarkable thing about this unique piece is the way in which you never feel that Brahms is going out of his way to write for the particular qualities of the horn. Yet nothing seems to be lie more naturally for the three instruments, either together or individually, at least from the listener’s point of view, than Brahms’s imaginative handling of the ideas; his unmistakable voice is present throughout. Most strikingly in the most passionate passages, the three instruments produced a blend that was sheer delight. Here, more than elsewhere in the recital, the horn’s lyrical qualities were conspicuous, handling the long melodies beautifully.

There is a view that the work might have been composed in response to the recent death of Brahms’s mother, and the third movement, Adagio mesto, might have endorsed this, the tones of violin and horn delivering poised, restrained music reflecting grief.

However, the second movement, Scherzo, and the Finale dispelled any real belief in the work’s general elegiac character. The Scherzo boisterous and extrovert and the Finale marked by the whoops of successive fourths that suggested well enough the activity that the horn was originally used to accompany.

A word about the pianist, Amir Farid. Throughout, his playing was marked by real individual distinction which would clearly make him a superb solo player, but his precise, carefully shaded, acutely pedaled performances in the various pieces, and his collaborative role in a richly sympathetic trio was quite admirable.

They played an encore after applause laced with bravos; it used the three instruments most happily, in an arrangement by one Ernst Naumann (I think Wilma said; he was a 19th century German musicologist/composer/arranger) of the last movement from the quintet in E flat for horn, violin, 2 violas and cello by Mozart, KV 407 (obviously written about the same time as the four horn concertos, which were for Mozart’s friend Ignaz Leutgeb) . This most convincing and delightful performance proved it a work of considerable charm which would, in this arrangement, have been an excellent companion in this concert. I suspect there could be a rush to find the piece on Amazon.com now (try Parsons first).

Dream team together on record – Trpčeski, Petrenko and Rachmaninov

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concertos 1-4 / Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini

Simon Trpčeski (piano)

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Avie Records

AV2191 (Concertos 1, 4 / Paganini Rhapsody)

AV2192 (Concertos 2, 3)

Avie Records and its NZ distributor Ode Records will have pleased Wellington concertgoers enormously with a recent pair of CD recordings (available separately) featuring pianist Simon Trpčeski and conductor Vasily Petrenko in the music of Rachmaninov – all four Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on Theme of Paganini. Of course, both Simon Trpčeski and Vasily Petrenko have been recent guest artists with the NZSO, though not performing together – Trpčeski gave us Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, and Petrenko conducted the orchestra in a recent concert featuring Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Michael Houstoun as soloist. So the CDs represent a “coming-together” of different strands of impulse from these concerts, pianist, conductor and composer. While the absolute stand-out performance of the set is that of the Fourth Concerto, these musicians bring plenty of feeling and enviable skills to each of the works on the two discs, if not quite emulating the performance-intensity levels which I enjoyed at each of the concerts I attended.

Trpčeski and Petrenko approach the First Concerto as though they’re making no allowances for its status as a relatively youthful work (Rachmaninov was 18 when the concerto was completed, in 1892, though he revised the work extensively in 1917, expressing some latter-day astonishment at the Concerto’s “youthful pretensions”). In fact Rachmaninov soon realized he couldn’t remain in Russia with the Communists in control, and therefore had to face the prospect of earning a living in exile as a virtuoso pianist – so reworking his concerto’s “youthful pretensions” gave him an extra piece to add to his projected concert repertoire.

Right from the start, Trpčeski and Petrenko stress the work’s big-boned contrasts – those boldly stated flourishes from orchestra and soloist at the beginning have real “bite”, throwing into bold relief both the liquid flow of the opening theme, and the rapid scherzando-like passages which follow. Trpčeski‘s playing has plenty of flint-like brilliance, if not as volatile and alchemic as the composer’s on his recording (but nobody else’s is!), and Petrenko conjures from his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic players gloriously Russian-sounding tones, rich and resplendent in one episode, elfin and volatile in the next, heart-rending and melancholic in a third. One senses, too, a piano-and-orchestra partnership of equals, with all of the creative interactions and tensions that such a relationship implies.

I liked Trpčeski‘s Scriabin-like fantasizing on the slow movement’s first page, the playing creating sounds borne upon the air, with Petrenko encouraging his players to evolve the sounds almost by osmosis, allowing the soloist to climb through the textures with his figurations. And scenes of Imperial Russia come to mind as the music’s rhythmic trajectories kick in with the clipped horses’ hooves, the jingling harnesses on the sleigh and the wind-flurried snow-flakes skirling as the string sing a soulful melody. Only in the finale did I feel Trpčeski‘s playing a trifle under-voltaged in places, lacking some of the electricity of Stephen Hough’s blistering fingerwork on a rival Hyperion set of the concertos (Hyperion CDA 67501/2). Petrenko’s is a darker orchestral sound for Trpčeski than Andrew Litton’s is for Hough, though the romance of the second subject group is beautifully realized on the newer recording, the canonic dialoging between instruments as tenderly lyrical as any. Finally, some whiplash-like irruptions of energy from the orchestra galvanize the soloist as the music races to its brilliant conclusion.

After the resplendent performance I heard Petrenko conduct of the Fourth Concerto with Michael Houstoun and the NZSO, I was surprised and fascinated to encounter a somewhat leaner orchestral sound from the Liverpool Orchestra as recorded by Avie – what remnants of romantic sweep Rachmaninov allowed to remain in his composer-armoury by this stage of his creative career were certainly brought out full-bloodedly in Wellington, but seem less in evidence on record. Instead, Petrenko keeps things lean and tightly-focused in Liverpool, details very much to the fore, the result being a steady steam of interactive dialoguing between orchestra and soloist, the attention on the musical thoughts and ideas rather than any guide’s exposition of it. It did make the big moments in which the soloist did dominate more telling, such as the archway of the big central climax, with its gorgeously bluesy Gershwin-like tune on the strings, though the subsequent mocking laughter of the brasses resonated all the more in such a climate of restraint. Trpčeski‘s playing throughout is of a piece with the orchestra’s, focused and flexible, taking a partnership role as often as seeking to dominate. The result is a strongly-balanced exposition of the music, the sensitivity of Trpčeski‘s dialoging with the winds in the melancholic epilogue to that big middle section a clue to the stature of this performance as a powerfully expressive partnership of equals.

Pianist, conductor and orchestra build the haunting, melancholic tread of the slow movement towards a climax whose pain and sorrow, though momentary, pierce the heart of the listener, as much for the heartbreak of the subsequent bars as for the shock of the sudden onslaught. As for the finale, again Trpčeski‘s playing may yield points to Stephen Hough’s performance in sheer vertiginous brilliance, but here it’s the interplay with Petrenko’s ever-responsive Liverpool players that catches the ear again and again. Critics who damned this music at its premiere on the grounds of Rachmaninov’s “old-fashioned” style must have made up their minds about the work before they even heard a note – for this is a composer who, despite his own distaste for the avant-garde and his omni-present inner resonances of Imperial Russia, was certainly listening to what was happening around him. Bartok, Stravinsky, Gershwin and Ravel are all there at the finale’s feast, even if the fare remains bitter to the taste, flavoured to the end with the composer’s own anguish in exile from his beloved native land. Rachmaninov’s trauma at the work’s reception by the critics was such that he cut the Concerto heavily, rewriting some passages and (ironically) lessening the work’s “new look” aspect – it’s worth tracking down either Alexander Ghindin’s or Yevgeny Sudbin’s recordings of the Concerto’s original version (respectively, on the Ondine and BIS labels) to experience the extent of the composer’s thwarted achievement.

By the time he came to write the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for piano and orchestra, Rachmaninov had, I feel, come to terms some of the way with his situation. His frequently-expressed grief at his refugee status had become less overt in his music than, perhaps by way of compensation, a delight in brilliantly sardonic, in places almost diabolical accents,  though he would still produce incomparable episodes of melancholic lyricism (his Third Symphony, completed two years after the Rhapsody, is a kind of emotional counterweight in this regard). The Rhapsody was the first work he wrote in a new home, the villa called “Senar”, on the shores of Lake Lucerne. As befits its virtuoso leanings it uses a similar theme to that used by Brahms in HIS “Paganini” Variations, albeit for solo piano. Unlike the hapless Fourth Concerto, the work was an instant success with the public, the composer’s pleasure at this tempered with the worry of having to perform it. Oddly enough, there’s a tenuous New Zealand connection with this work through the famous choreographer Michel Fokine, who wrote to the composer from Auckland in 1939 (Fokine was touring the country with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet at the time) asking permission from Rachmaninov to adapt the work for a ballet to be called “Paganini” – the composer subsequently agreed, and “Paganini” received its first performance at Covent Garden that same year.

Trpčeski and Petrenko play the score, it seems to me, with ears for its structural qualities, rather than its surface brilliances and coruscations. Up to the first appearance of the “Dies Irae” theme (Variation 7 – Meno mosso,a tempo moderato) the music treads steadily, the orchestral colours dark and weighty, the piano having more “glint” than out-and-out brilliance – something of a contrast with Stephen Hough’s more elfin volatilities, matched with a brighter, more effervescent orchestral presence from Andrew Litton and his Dallas Symphony players. Trpčeski is chunkier and earthier, and his accompanying orchestral colours to my ears more Shostakovich-like (a nicely guttural clarinet in Variation 12, having more time, at Petrenko’s tempo, to “colour” its melody). One could hazard the comment that Trpčeski and Petrenko give the music a more Russian-sounding outlook, very like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan music in the splendidly swaggering Variation 14, though Stephen Hough again finds extra sparkle in the succeeding piano-only Allegro. I like the homage Rachmaninov pays to Prokofiev in Variation 16’s Allegretto (straight out of the latter’s ballet Romeo and Juliet), Andrew Litton encouraging particularly spectral shudders from his strings, while Petrenko’s Liverpudlians are robuster, fuller-bodied phantoms. In the lead-up to the famous Eighteenth Variation, I found myself preferring Hough’s and Litton’s rather more atmospheric Allegretto, more spacious and Gothic, the sostenuto winds almost ghoul-like, not unlike Respighi’s Catacomb phantoms in his Pines of Rome, though honours are pretty even when the big tune comes around (the “Paganini” theme simply inverted and slowed down, can you believe it?).

And so it goes on – Hough and Litton bring out the glitter and volatility of the concluding sequences with more quicksilver than Trpčeski and Petrenko, whose energies have a darker, more elemental quality. But both rides to the finish are madcap ones, risk-taking ventures, with alarming accents and angularities aplenty, as well as passages whose harmonic explorations leave those of the worlds of the Second and Third Concertos far behind. At the beginning of the last variation of all, Trpčeski and Petrenko out-point their rivals in deliciousness, but as the patternings intensify, it’s simply neck-and neck at the finish. Trpčeski throws away the last phrase deadpan, like a good poker-player, while Hough etches it in with just a hint of a raised eyebrow.

Turning to the second of the Avie discs, containing the aforementioned remaining concertos, the listener enters a world filled with multitudes of ghosts of past performances, whose resonances are liable to rise up and haunt and even overwhelm all but the most intrepid and determined new interpreters. Happily Trpčeski and Petrenko are adventurers of that cut and cloth, and the opening paragraph of the C Minor Concerto (No.2) is a strongly-wrought statement of intent, couched in deep, rich tones, and propelled with striding energy. Vasily Petrenko loses no chance to support his pianist with emphatic touches from his players that stress the depth of feeling and purpose of it all – his lower strings, for instance, sing a rich counter-line to Trpčeski‘s simply-voiced second subject melody, echoed beautifully by the oboe shortly afterwards. The musicians tend to make the music’s transitions flow, rather than go for high-contrast changes of tempo and mood  – but the excitement nevertheless builds up impressively towards the movement’s “great moment”, the return of the opening theme on sweeping orchestral strings, the soloist reinforcing the music’s trajectories with a triumphal counter-melody.

The second movement opens enchantingly, strings, Trpčeski‘s piano and the winds taking turns to weave undulating patterns of finely-spun emotion, the music’s ebb and flow and brief irruption of energy easily and naturally brought into being.  After Petrenko’s terse opening to the finale the music expands with explosive energies towards climaxes, furious piano playing initiating steadily growing momentums which the strings-and-piano fugato gathers up and races towards the release of the big tune’s reappearance.The scherzando passage is galvanized by Trpčeski each time he joins the fray, culminating in a spectacular keyboard flourish and a grand and forthright final statement of the tune – glorious!

And so we come to what many people regard as the greatest of all Romantic piano concertos, the “knuckle-breaker”, as pianist Gary Graffmann used to describe it – otherwise known in the business as “Rack 3”. For a time the territory of only the boldest and most fearless of pianists (the likes of Horowitz, Janis, Gilels, Malcuzynski, Lympany and Van Cliburn, as well as New Zealand’s Richard Farrell – but, unaccountably, NOT Sviatoslav Richter), the general rise in technical piano-playing standards (though not in actual musicianship) has seen many more pianists than one could have ever imagined taking the piece on, with, alas, generally unmemorable results – given that the work still remains an enormous challenge, so that anybody who actually attempts the piece really deserves Brownie points for trying.

At first, Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s way with the music seems small-scale, their delivery of the opening episode emphasizing the first theme’s beauty while playing down its rhythmic undercurrents.  However, it’s part of the longer view – when the lower strings take up the tune, Trpčeski‘s increasingly insistent accompanying figurations awaken the music’s urgencies. And what a glorious sound Petrenko encourages from his strings, and how subtly both musicians build the music through the first appearance of the concerto’s most memorable melody, shared by the piano and the orchestra, in turn, to the grand, romantic sweep of the moment’s climax.

The central episode again relaxes the tension surrounding the opening tune’s reprise – those underlying energies are kept down by Petrenko, allowing chattering winds to interact with the pianist’s nervous utterances, and only encouraging the music’s pulses to beat with any edge and force when rising out of the ambient detail to match and contour the piano’s combatative intentions – impressive control, but lacking, I thought, that suggestion of abandonment which would have brought out the encounter’s sense of the participants risking all and plunging into the fray. Trpčeski chooses the heavier, more chordal of the two cadenzas Rachmaninov left, and builds up a splendidly majestic weight of tone and fury of purpose. Beautiful wind-playing answers the soloist’s near-exhausted ruminations, and my only real disappointment is that pianist and conductor don’t make something more “charged” of the “bells across the meadow” episode before the opening tune’s final reprise brings the movement to its expectant close.

At the slow movement’s beginning, I’m always reminded of my first recording of this concerto, Byron Janis’s with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony – still memorable for Janis’s coruscating pianism and for Munch’s fervent encouragement of his strings at this point in the work. Petrenko’s players sound just as committed, the dying fall as the strings awaken the piano one of the work’s most expressively full-blooded moments. Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s account of the dark waltz-like episode is poised and veiled, as though concealing feelings too candid to fully display, though the strings subsequently stress the underlying heartache just before the finale’s electrifying opening flourishes. Trpčeski is suitably volatile and impulsive, here, and the steady-ish pace adopted for the “galloping horse” motif allows the orchestral tutti more weight and cumulative force. I’ve heard the scherzando episode played more delicately and impishly by other pianists, but Trpčeski brings out its nocturnal aspect nicely, and the lead-in to the great moment of the first movement’s memorable second subject is as charged with emotion by the players as one would want – for me, a definite performance highlight.

Apart from what I thought sounded like a strangely “clipped” reprise of the orchestra’s “galloping horse” motive, the remainder of the concerto gets the utmost romantic treatment, with all the proverbial stops pulled out – Trpčeski‘s pianism has all the weight and brilliance required, and Petrenko draws from his players the full panoply of orchestral splendor, the sounds making handsome amends for those momentary “lean-and-hungry” equestrian impressions. In sum, though I didn’t find the music-making throughout these discs as consistently “electric” as I did in the concert-hall from this pianist and conductor, that’s as much a commentary on the nature of the “live-versus-recorded” music-listening experience. It’s one I’m glad to have had both ways with these truly splendid artists, here together playing such marvellous music.

A new element in the ‘Live in Cinemas’ phenomenon – orchestral concerts

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The following note has just been posted in the first part of our Coming Events schedule.

Both the BBC Proms and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra have this year entered the ‘Live in Cinemas’ market.

In New Zealand we got three of the Proms concert – the first and last nights, plus one from the middle of the season that featured Emanuel Ax playing Brahms’s Second Piano Concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitink – they also played Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

The Last Night of the Proms will screen from 6 October. Lang Lang will play the piano and Susan Bullock will sing; Edward Gardner conducts.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s series was of four concerts: the first, their ritual Europa Concert marking the orchestra’s founding in 1882. That took place this year in the Teatro Real (Royal Theatre) in Madrid, and included Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. The second, taken from the orchestra’s home in the Phiharmonie in Berlin, consisted of one work – Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde: with Anne Sophie von Otter and Jonas Kaufmann, conducted by Claudio Abbado.

The third to be screened, like the others, at the Penthouse in Brooklyn, on 17, 18 and 21 September, will be at the Waldbühne, the famous open air arena in forest 10 km or so west of the city. There Riccardo Chailly will conduct a lightish programme including Nino Rota’s film score, La Strada, and music by Respighi and Shostakovich.

The fourth concert will be under Japanese cnductor Yutaka Sado and includes performances of Takemitsu and of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony.

Over 60 cinemas across Europe are part of this historic live cinema event, courtesy of Rising Alternative.

Here is an excerpt from Musicweb International’s article about the Berlin Philharmonic’s venture in live transmissions in cinemas, and emergence of a phenomenon that could make a difference to the appreciation of classical music everywhere.

“…Digital cinema and satellite technology is providing cinema owners, distributors and the entertainment industry at large with new programming opportunities – the ability to show alternative content (non-movie entertainment). Cinemas are becoming vibrant entertainment centres, as well as movie houses.

“The technology is operated by Rising Alternative, a leading international distributor of special event entertainment into cinemas. Rising Alternative, based in New York, is a leading distributor/agent of special event entertainment (alternative content) for cinemas. Rising Alternative acquires, distributes and markets world-class live and pre-recorded cultural content, including opera, ballet and concerts to cinemas worldwide. The upcoming slate of events includes highly anticipated performances from La Scala, Milan; Berliner Philharmoniker; Wiener Philharmoniker, Vienna; the Salzburg Festival;  the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona;  Teatro Real, Madrid;  San Francisco Opera and the Munich Opera Festival. The company was created by Giovanni Cozzi, a co-founder of Emerging Pictures, the U.S. digital art house cinema network.”


Boris Pigovat’s Requiem – a stunning CD presentation

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REQUIEM

Works by BORIS PIGOVAT

– Requiem “The Holocaust” / Prayer for Violin and Piano / Silent Music for viola and harp / Nigun for String Quartet

Donald Maurice (viola)

Vector Wellington Orchestra / Marc Taddei

also with Richard Mapp (piano) / Carolyn Mills (harp) / Dominion String Quartet

Atoll ACD 114

This recording commemorates the first performance outside the Ukraine of Boris Pigovat’s Requiem, given by violist Donald Maurice, with the Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, on November 9th, 2008 at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington. The composer, whose grandparents and aunt were victims of the Babiy Yar tragedy in 1941, when thousands of German Jews were massacred in cold blood by the Nazis, had wanted for a number of years to write a work dedicated to the Holocaust, thinking originally of the standard Requiem format, with soloists, choir and orchestra. Then Yuri Gandelsman, the then principal violist of the Israel Philharmonic asked Pigovat to write a work for him, and the composer decided he would tackle a piece for viola and orchestra, writing in the style of a Requiem. He completed the work in 1995, but it wasn’t premiered until 2001, as Gandelsman, who intended to give the first performance, was prevented by circumstances from doing so. However, the situation was eventually resolved, most appropriately, by a concert planned in Kiev commemorating the Babiy Yar tragedy, to which Pigovat successfully offered his score for performance.

The composer regarded the cancellation of the original performances in Israel as “the will of Providence”, as it meant the work would be performed for the first time in Kiev, near the tomb of his family members who were killed at BabiyYar. Added poignancy was generated by the co-operation between the Israeli Cultural Attache in Kiev and the city’s Goethe Institute which resulted in the famous German violist, Rainer Moog, being asked to play the solo viola part. This concert took place in October 2001. Eight years later, the work was performed here in New Zealand at a “Concert of Remembrance” (commemorating the 70th anniversary of “Kristallnacht” – The Night of Broken Glass – a pogrom carried out against German and Austrian Jews in retaliation for the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young German/Polish Jew in November 1938). The concert featured, along with Pigovat’s work, a performance of Brahm’s German Requiem, and was sponsored by a number of groups, among which were the respective Embassies of the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel. As well, Boris Pigovat himself was able to attend the concert, thanks to the support of the Israeli Embassy.

Now, there’s a further chapter in what has become an ongoing story – this features the recent invitation made to violist Donald Maurice to give the work’s first-ever performance in Germany, on October 15th at the final gala concert of the International Viola Congress in Wuerzburg. The performance commemorates, in turn, the 70th anniversary of the Babiy Yar massacre, and will be given by Maurice with an orchestra from Duesseldorf.

However, before making this journey, Maurice will again perform the work on the actual day of the tragedy, September 29th, in the Wellington Town Hall with Kenneth Young and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra.  Also performing will be Israeli ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo, playing Bloch’s Schelomo. As well, John Psathas’s Luminous and Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka will give a New Zealand flavour to this commemorative program. I believe the concert is included under the umbrella of a “Rugby World Cup Event” – if so, one salutes the organizers’ enterprise!

Atoll Records deserves the heartfelt thanks of people like myself who weren’t able to attend that Wellington performance of the Requiem in 2008 for making the recording commercially available. It was at the time splendidly captured by Radio New Zealand’s David McCaw and his engineer Graham Kennedy – as one might expect, the music generated plenty of visceral impact, all of which comes across with startling force in Wayne Laird’s transfer to CD. It presents soloist Donald Maurice, with conductor Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra  working at what can only be described as white heat – the coruscations of parts of the Dies Irae movement are searing, to say the least – and the effects upon listeners in the hall must have been profoundly disturbing in their impact.

The Requiem has four movements, each of them given Latin subtitles, a ready context, despite their non-Jewish origins, for listeners accustomed to pieces which use similar kinds of headings for individual movements (works by Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and Faure for example) – the four movements are Requiem Aeternam, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa and Lux Eterna. Pigovat considered these parts the most suitable for his overall purpose in writing what he called “a tragic orchestral piece”. Despite his work being completely instrumental, some of the composer’s motifs and themes in the work are derived directly from the words of texts – for example, the first theme of the Dies Irae on trombones fits with the words of the first verse of this famous thirteenth-century Latin poem; while the Jewish Prayer, Shma Israel, Adonoi Elokeinu, Adonoi Ehad inspired a recurring theme in the work, first appearing in the epilogue of the Dies Irae, and in subsequent places, such as in the viola solo at the very end of the work.

The opening measures of Requiem Aeternam bring about vistas of space and eons of time, into the centre of which swirls an irruption of dark, threatening unease. But the solo viola takes up the chant-like line, by turns declamatory and meditative, its discourse supported by various orchestral motifs and atmospheric textures. Donald Maurice’s solo playing vividly captures the music’s gamut of supplicatory emotion, while Marc Taddei and the orchestra provide an accompaniment richly-mixed with ambiences of faith and trust, doubt and fear. From Ligeti-like string-clusters come sudden intrusions of light and energy, menacing, gutteral-throated strings and ghoulish figures on what sounds like a bass clarinet. Deep, seismic percussion ignites an outburst that galvanizes the whole orchestra, and brings the solo viola into conflict with forces of darkness. A portentous, doom-laden motif rises in the orchestra, challenged further by the viola, which is soon overwhelmed by a rising tide of pitiless-sounding, all-enveloping brutality, reinforced by crushing hammer-blows. Stoically, the viola remains steadfast, giving vent to its anguish, but still raising its voice to heaven at the close.

There are some famously apocalyptic settings by composers of the “Dies Irae” poem, and Pigovat, though not employing the actual words, certainly aligns himself with the movers and shakers of heaven and earth, such as Berlioz and Verdi. Slashing string lines introduce the “Dies Irae” movement, leading to orchestral outpourings whose force and vehemence will, later in the movement, readily suggest the imagery suggested by the term “holocaust”. After the initial maelstrom abates, the solo viola attempts to plead with the forces of darkness, but is repeatedly beaten down, its desperate energies to no avail. Pigovat was strongly influenced by a novel Life and Destiny by the Russian-Jewish writer Vasiliy Grossman, containing passages describing Jews’ last train journey from imprisonment to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Some of Shostakovich’s more harrowing motoric orchestral sequences come to mind in places, over the top of which the brass shout cruel repetitive utterances. Out of a searing, incandescent chord-cluster thrusts a beating rhythm, the composer suggesting the pulsing of a great number of human hearts, a rhythm which loses strength and dies.

Harsh, strident bells sound the beginning of Lacrimosa, the viola sharing in the pain and horror of what has just been experienced. The composer notes, most appositely, that “It is possible to shout with strong anger, or to groan powerlessly, or to go mad, and only then appear tears……” and Maurice’s virtuosic playing at this point conveys all of these feelings and more besides. A timpani-led processional begins the process of ritualizing the grief, somewhat, but underlines the bleak nihilism of the scenario, reinforced by a doom-laden tam-tam stroke. Then the orchestral strings offer consolation amid the despair, horns as well paying tribute to those destroyed as well as acknowledging those left behind. As the music slips without a break into the Lux Eterna, lights softly begin to glow amid the sound-textures, and there’s an almost lullabyic feel to the music’s trajectories.The viola speaks again, its voice dark-toned and grief-tainted, but calling for a renewal of faith in the human spirit, and a rekindling of hope for the future. The instrument re-establishes connections and interactions with various orchestral voices, their tones no longer expressing fear, hate, and cruelty, but intertwining with the soloist’s voice in search of a better, more understanding place for everybody in the world (the final exchanges between viola and dark-browed brass and percussion speak volumes, as the work closes).

The three pieces accompanying the Requiem on this disc all have connections or commonalities of some kind with the major work. The first, Prayer, for viola and piano, probably has the closest relationship with Requiem, as it was written when the composer had finished the latter’s Lacrimosa and was preparing materials for the fourth part, Lux Eterna. The music thus breathes much the same air as does the Requiem, with one of its themes actually used in the Shma Israel section of Lux Eterna. Donald Maurice again plays the viola, and, together with pianist Richard Mapp, gives an extraordinarily intense reading of the work. Its opening measures are meditative and hypnotic, the piano resembling a tolling bell at the outset, beneath the viola’s quiet song of lament. From the darkest depths of their interaction spring impulses of lyrical flow, gentle and undulating at first, then more impassioned, Maurice’s bow biting into his strings and Mapp’s monumental chords imparting an epic quality to the mood of grief and suffering. The undulations return, their tones gradually dissolving into mists of quiet resignation and fortitude – altogether, a beautiful and moving work.

Silent Music is scored for viola and harp, a felicitous combination of complementary tones and timbres, one I’d never before imagined. Written in 1997, after the Requiem, the piece commemorates the practice in Israel of people lighting candles for burning at places where there have been fatal terrorist attacks, one such occasioning this piece. The music’s beauty almost belies the composer’s sombre intent, though towards the end of the piece some repeated agglomerations of notes on Carolyn Mills’s harp grow through a disturbing crescendo towards a moment of intense pain, whose feeling resonates throughout the concluding silences.

Intensities of a different order are unashamedly displayed throughout the final work on the CD, Nigun, for String Quartet, though the piece finished far more quickly than I expected, due presumably to an error of timing recorded with the track listings (instead of a nine-minute work, the music came to an end, a tad abruptly, at 5’00”.  Boris Pigovat originally wrote this work for string orchestra, the string quartet version appearing for the first time on this CD. The composer’s intention was “to give expression to the tragic spirit which I feel in traditional Jewish music”. It’s certainly not a happy work, being, in psychological terms, assailed by anxieties at an early stage in its progress, the composer using the quartet’s antiphonal voicings to create a kind of overlying effect, as textures pile on top of, or slide beneath, other textures. Figurations and tempi intensify as the piece proceeds, the Dominion Quartet’s players “blocking” their sounds together for some marvellously massive-sounding chords, before continuing what feels like a fraught interaction, mercifully worked-out in the time-honored manner, but leaving one or two sostenuto voices to gradually expel their last reserves of breath and melt their tones into the stillness of the ending.

Not only does this recording deserve to be heard and savored, but the oncoming Town Hall concert (September 29th – see above) featuring the Requiem, should be an entry on everybody’s calendar. If something of the spirit of this recording can be replicated (albeit with a different orchestra and conductor) the occasion will be stunning, unmissably spectacular.

Delightful American songs from Megan Corby and Craig Beardsworth at the Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

American songs by Copland, Barber, Ives, and William Schuman, Richard Hundley, Paul Bowles, Richard Hageman and Jason Robert Brown

Craig Beardsworth (baritone) and Megan Corby (soprano); Hugh McMillan (piano)

St Mark’s church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 14 September, 12.15pm

It’s a few years since I heard either of these singers in a solo recital of any kind. This lunchtime concert was such an enterprising and attractive event that I felt real regret that the audience was so small, though not very different from the audiences that usually come. The real sadness is the failure of the Lower Hutt City Council to save the Laing’s Road Methodist Church where these concerts used to be held, usually attracting more people.

Introducing the concert, Craig Beardsworth sort-of apologized to those who might have expected a recital of American music to present names like Porter, Rodgers, Kern and Gershwin. But unapologetically, he made it clear that some sort of distinction was to be seen between American ‘songs’ and commercial Broadway music, just as there is between Schubert and Schumann, and the world of the West End musical and the Beatles.

By no means undervaluing the lighter varieties of music, I thought the two proved their case very well.

They took turns, generally singing songs that matched the sexes. They were well prepared, their presentations polished and accompanied by gestures that did much to bring the mini-dramas to life, as well as to entertain. Speaking of accompaniment, Hugh McMillan handled the wide variety of styles, from the country rhythms of Paul Bowles’s Lonesome Man to the complexities of Charles Ives, with skill and a distinguished facility with the style and character of each.

American accents were employed judiciously, hardly audible in many songs, but full-blown elsewhere, as in Beardsworth’s arresting performances of ‘The Dodger’, ‘Lonesome Man’ and ‘The Greatest Man’.

Megan Corby opened with an aria, ‘Laurie’s song’, from Copland’s opera The Tender Land, easing us into American song through a work with clear European sources, yet flavoured with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Richard Hundley was a name new to me; his two songs, ‘Sweet Suffolk Owl’ and ‘Come ready and see me’ revealed a composer, thanks to Corby, with an ear for notes that were just right for the words. Her Barber songs – ‘The Monk and his cat’ and ‘The Crucifixion’ – presented a composer less committed to a popular style, more in tune with the art song of France or England, yet with American contours. She sang them with real polish.

I realised from what was said about Paul Bowles that my education had been neglected (most of his life he acted as a sort of one-man American cultural out-post in Tangier by the sound of it), and the four songs, evenly shared by the two singers, richly tuneful, not the least hackneyed or sentimental, were among the most enjoyable of the concert. In ‘Sugar in the cane’ Megan, southern twang and all, showed her impatience with the constraints of her condition; while in ‘Do not go, my love’ by Richard Hageman, her anguish at her looming loss was real. Her final song, the 1996 setting by Jason Robert Brown of ‘The Flagmaker’, touching a War of Independence tragedy, was both poignant and dramatic.

Craig’s share of the partnership began strikingly with two of Copland’s familiar folk song arrangements: ‘The Dodger’ and ‘At the River’ – the first satirical and mocking, a bit outrageous, the second rotundly pious, also mocking. Perhaps his biggest challenge was with the three Ives songs, with which he used his interesting voice to great effect. The studied way he put down the score, to start in a quasi-lecturing way, to narrate his tale of ‘The Greatest Man’  was the mark of a highly accomplished performer; there and in ‘The Circus Band’, the voice and the droll, evocative gestures seem to call for him to have much more exposure.

It was a admirable recital that deserves to be enjoyed in other parts of the metropolis.

A new generation’s Lilburn, from Atoll Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DOUGLAS LILBURN – Violin and Piano Works

Elizabeth Holowell (violin)

Dean Sky-Lucas (piano)

Cameron Rhodes (speaker)

Atoll ACD 941

(….apologies for the length of this review! – PM)

If there’s ever a composer who seems to have been “rediscovered” by a fresh generation of performers, then Douglas Lilburn is the one, his music seeming to appeal as readily to today’s young players as it did to many of the composer’s similarly delighted and steadfast contemporary champions.

New recordings of many of Lilburn’s major works have appeared over the last few years, a couple of these projects containing substantial returns (Dan Poynton’s landmark survey of the composer’s piano music with Trust Records, for example). No less an important body of the composer’s work consisted of music for violin and piano, much of which recorded by the musicians for whom the works were written at the time. Now, thanks to a brilliant recently-released disc on the Atoll label featuring Australian violinist Elizabeth Holowell (currently living and working in Auckland) and her fellow-countryman, the multi-talented Dean Sky-Lucas displaying his skills as a pianist, a group of these works have been brought together on a single recording for the first time. With the help of New Zealand actor Cameron Rhodes, the musicians were able to perform Lilburn’s musical tribute to a number of New Zealand poets who were his contemporaries, Salutes to Seven Poets, in conjunction with readings of exerpts from those poems which provided the original inspiration for the composer.

Previous recordings of all of these works include violinist Ruth Pearl and pianist Margaret Nielsen’s recording for Kiwi Records of the 1950 Violin Sonata. Ruth Pearl was the work’s original dedicatee, along with pianist Frederick Page, with whom she performed the music for the first time. Unfortunately, this is but one of many landmark recordings of New Zealand music locked in the limbo that is Kiwi Pacific Records, at present, awaiting some kind of saviour – considering the unique heritage value of these historic sound-documents, I think they’re worthy of urgent attention at the highest level. The Douglas Lilburn recordings in this particular archive are but one of the many which desperately need reactivation.

Other recordings can be found among broadcast archives of this and other works, the 1950 Violin Sonata, well represented by partnerships such as Ronald Woodcock (violin) and John Wells (piano) in 1976, Peter Walls and Margaret Nielsen in 1982, David Nalden and Bryan Sayer in 1984, Tim Deighton, also with Margaret Nielsen in 1989, and Natalie Tantrum and Stephen de Pledge in 1992 (and there are probably others).  Salutes to Seven Poets has been well-championed by violinist Dean Major (see also the Waiteata Music Press listing below), broadcast performances featuring partnerships with Rae de Lisle (1989), and David Guerin (1990), while the earlier Violin Sonata in E-flat (1943) was recorded for radio by Dean Major and Rae de Lisle in 1985. Incidentally, the same artists recorded in the studio (the date isn’t listed) another of Lilburn’s Violin Sonatas, in C Major, which the composer completed in 1943 before he tackled his E-flat Sonata of the same year.

On Jack Body’s Waiteata Music Press Label (the disc’s catalogue number WTA 009), violinist Dean Major and pianist Rae de Lisle can be found performing Salutes to Seven Poets with a compelling generosity of spirit and feeling for atmosphere and colour. On this recording there are spoken commentaries by the composer, quoting but a few lines of each of the poems, as well as recording some brief impressions of the work and creative personality of each poet, unlike on the new Atoll recording, where reader Cameron Rhodes gives us part of the text of each poem.  Only some momentary less-than-ideally steady intonation in No.4, the Salute to M.K.Joseph, breaks the confidently-woven spell of Dean Major’s playing, while Rae de Lisle’s keyboard conjurings of feeling and imagery via rhythm and colour remain treasurable. The recording pronounces itself essential for the composer’s contribution alone, however more “complete” a performance concept the newer Atoll disc might present. The disc is available for a song from the Waiteata Music Press at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, or from the Centre for New Zealand Music (SOUNZ), both in Wellington.

The new Atoll disc begins with Salutes, so that the first sounds we hear are the mellifluous tones of actor Cameron Rhodes’ voice. The business of marrying speech with music on record seems in most cases I’ve heard to be problematic, the stumbling-block invariably being a lack of commonality of ambience between what’s spoken and what’s played (a particularly alienating example of this was the recent NZSO Naxos disc of Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the melodrama actors’ voices really did sound as if they had been recorded in a completely different “space” to that of the orchestra). For me, it’s important when listening to something like this to feel (however illusory, in fact) a sense of unity, of spaces being shared and contact between impulses being made – and the Atoll recording, though registering a slightly warmer “background” for the musicians, makes the connections between speaker and players as satisfyingly as anything I’ve heard. These are powerful realizations, with Rhodes’ intense readings of the poetry followed by Elizabeth Holowell’s richly-committed string tones intermeshed with Dean Sky-Lucas’s fantastic keyboard work. It all makes rather more concentrated and focused a unity than the Waiteata Music Press performance, LIlburn’s own commentaries and wider-ranging interpolations wryly leavening the intensities of Dean Major’s and Rae de Lisle’s equally committed playing. A pity the booklet-notes writer for the Atoll CD slightly fudges poet A.R.D.Fairburn’s name by interpolating his more familiar “Rex” (one or the other format would have done) – but then to apply the same treatment to an unfamiliar-sounding “Ronald A.K.Mason” borders on the pedantic.

What’s important is that a sense of the composer’s involvement with poets he knew personally is captured by the performances, the result, of course, being a kind of synthesis of such impressions formed by Lilburn’s own personality – and Holowell and Sky-Lucas are both able to command an attractive “balladic” quality about their playing which speaks both of vivid recollection of treasured interaction, and a parallel sense of time having passed on. Listening to both performances alerts one to different intensities sought by the players – Dean Major and Rae de Lisle project a focus suggesting an all-consuming immediacy (listening to the opening of the Andante tribute to Keith Sinclair, following his Although you have floated the land, one can feel how those latent intensities are brought out – searingly by Major, in places, compared to Elizabeth Holowell’s richly-toned but more dispassionate view). Following Michael Joseph’s A shepherd on a bicycle, a delicious amalgam of the ordinary and the fabulous, Holowell and Sky-Lucas concentrate on pastoral beauty rather than rustic energies, the violin-playing more secure than Dean Major’s in places, though he and Rae de Lisle conjure up a stronger rhythmic sense of a mustering, the day-to-day business of the farmer. As for the Copland-esque tribute to James K.Baxter – Upon the upland road I find myself going between Holowell’s and Sky-Lucas’s more easy-going wayfarer, who takes things pretty much as they come, in true Kiwi fashion; and Major and de Lisle’s more impulsive wanderer, given to bouts of day-dreaming and spontaneous irruptions of energy.

Most characteristic of all in a compositional sense are the repeated-note patterns with which the piano begins the Allegro commode tribute to Kendrick Smithyman. Dean Sky-Lucas fashions a beautifully pulsating piano trajectory along which the haunting repetitions flow, and over which Elizabeth Holowell’s violin can soar, sometimes spectacularly, as with her confidently-addressed octave ascent, giving rise to thoughts of other poetry – “…as a skeet’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind….” – the way Holowell’s line sweeps and soars at that point would do justice to the greatest verses. At first, I didn’t like Cameron Rhodes’ somewhat jerky, limp-rhythmic delivery of R.A.K. Mason’s Song of Allegiance, preferring in my mind’s ear an ironic vain-glorious display of goose-stepping bravado, with imaginary drums flailing as if in mockery of the poet’s presumption. But subsequent hearings have suggested other kinds of ironies, more slowly, but surely appreciated, and the musical tribute’s evocation of a kind of “man alone” aspect, suggests artistic fortitude and stoic control, and allowing only towards the end of the piece a brief display of furrowed-brow emotion.

Holowell and Sky-Lucas plot this course unerringly, again, managing to suggest whole worlds more of words and ideas, were tongues to be allowed to utter thoughts. Those who knew the struggles Lilburn experienced as a composer in a land largely unresponsive to such efforts would have recognized, in the ritualized lament of the music, the voice of one crying in the wilderness (“…toil I on, with bloody knees…”), dignity giving way only briefly to anger and despair at the very end. Dean Major and Rae de Lisle are more direct, harsher and sharper, but in a way that ironically gives the almost Mahlerian concluding cry of anguish somewhat less impact upon the whole, despite its agglomerated weight of utterance.

The final, overall “Salute” to all of the poets has a different spoken prelude in each performance. On the Waiteata disc, the composer acknowledges in a few words the overall contribution of all seven poets to his creative inspiration; while the new Atoll features Cameron Rhodes’ reading of Allen Curnow’s poem To Douglas Lilburn at Fifty. Each is perfectly in accord with its own overall performance ethos, Curnow’s poem laconically exploring the implications of a milestone in the life of a creative artist, which the music then succinctly parallels with out-of-doors tones so dear to the composer’s heart. Holowell and Sky-Lucas are lighter-footed, even airborne in places, the violin-playing a touch more elegant, somewhat less laden than Major’s “wrung” notes, though he and de Lisle, true to their overall interpretative focus, project an intensely visionary quality whose resonances aren’t easily forgotten. We listeners are enriched in having both performances to experience and enjoy.

The other works on the Atoll disc have no commercially available alternative versions, though many people will remember Ruth Pearl’s recording with Margaret Nielsen of the 1950 Violin Sonata on a Kiwi LP (SLD-32), the disc still kicking around second-hand shops, awaiting adventurous explorings by enthusiasts.  This still sounds well, the violin and piano images a bit more left-and-right than on the newer recording, but with the instrumental timbres nicely intact. Ruth Pearl was a powerful player, and her lyrical lines soar with plenty of heft, deftly supported by Margaret Nielsen’s warm, flexible piano sound – a lighter touch than Dean Sky-Lucas’, but capable of summoning up reserves of tone when needed. Pearl and Nielsen are more quixotic and volatile throughout the allegro, occasionally tightening the pace and creating whirls of energized excitement. Margaret Nielsen’s chords at the beginning of the largamente episode are glittering stalagtites of suspended sound, the mood dramatic,and the detailing ruggedly etched. There’s no release of tension with the allegro, which drives forward irresistibly in Pearl’s and Nielsen’s hands, the focus firmly fixed, the goal unequivocal, Pearl’s violin occasionally under a bit of strain, but realizing the drama and intensity of it all. Her and Nielsen make something almost sacramental out of the lyricism of the last couple of pages.

On Atoll, Dean Sky-Lucas’s opening unfurls a spacious ambience, one into which Elizabeth Holowell’s violin projects a rhapsodic and varied line, the players beautifully etching in the colour and texture changes as the music enlarges its picture. Bucolic energies bubble forth with an allegro whose inventiveness leads the ear on through a rhythmic and thematic garden of open-air delights, the playing delightfully alfresco in both its energy and its resonance – a beautiful sound. The largamente section that follows is notable for Holowell’s eloquently-realised line (so many felicitous detailings) shining like a sea-bird’s wings over the top of a deeply-hued oceanic blue-green, the line dipping and soaring, spreading widely and closing up into a fine thread, moving now towards, now with, now away from its surrounding ambient body. When the allegro returns violin and piano play a game of hide-and seek in different guises, an attractive, genial folkish element energizing the themes before sinking into a realm of repose and reflection, the piano’s hymn-like foundation drawing elegant flourishes of an almost ritualistic kind from the violin, the instruments forging a sound-discourse of nostalgia-tinted instinctive wisdom. I played both versions all again, immediately I’d finished first time through, and was moved as profoundly each time, as much by the emotional surety of the argument as its beauty and variety.

And for the rest, Holowell and Sky-Lucas have the field to themselves, at least for the moment. The biggest surprise is the Othello incidental music, accompanied by a few exerpts from the play, read with great verve and emotional variety by Cameron Rhodes. The violin-and-piano combination works well as a “dramatic” vehicle, the violin having enough bright resonance to convey fanfare-like ceremony, and the piano limitless resources of colour and ambient warmth. After Cameron Rhodes’ savagely sardonic exposition of Iago’s plans to bring about Othello’s downfall, the somewhat chiruppy Allegro risoluto seems an inappropriate response, but all is made good by the melancholy beauty of the playing of Lilburn’s remarkable Willow Song. Distinctive in a different way is the following Interlude, emotionally ambivalent and unsettled, its ruffled poise mirroring the turmoil of the tragedy about to be enacted. Rhodes puts his everything into Othello’s final speech – “….of one that loved not wisely but too well….”, a fraught moment which the Finale (andante) distils in gravely circumspect tones. Rarely do repetitions of theatrical lines wear as well as does music, however expertly delivered – and the separate tracks on the CD enable the listener to enjoy the music alone for its own sake.

Finally, another big, richly satisfying listen – Lilburn’s Sonata in E-flat for violin and piano, dating from 1943. Does the key bring out the best in composers, I wonder? – it’s certainly a sound that gets the blood flowing, as is the case here, with a juicily-voiced opening violin statement supported by rich piano undulations, the mood both heroic and rhapsodic. On first hearing I was swooping and soaring with Elizabeth Holowell’s violin in a kind of ecstasy, and therefore disappointed to hear the instrument break off its discursive flight (none too elegantly, at 2’07” – as though Orpheus had momentarily dropped his lyre…), considering the rest of the movement’s wonderfully-spun lyrical flow. But what worlds the composer subsequently takes us to – Holowell may have played the hushed stratospheric figurations leading up to the luftpause at 5’54” with more purity of tone on other occasions, but surely never with quite such “innigkeit” as here. Lilburn’s characteristic “modal” harmonies time and again disarm our sense of place, the air about us bringing, by turns Debussy-like fragrances, then surges of earthier impulse, the musicians’ generous outpourings enabling we listeners to share a richly-detailed emotional journey. Throughout this movement I had the sense of sharing the sound-world of a young composer with a great deal of both accumulated and on-going thought and emotion to let out to the world.

We exchange warmth for cool melancholy at the slow movement’s beginning, though there’s warmth welling up from the instruments’ lower reaches as the music proceeds. Holowell brings out the folksiness in places in the writing, her fiddle double-stopping and droning with flavorsome focus, then expanding and soaring over Dean Sky-Lucas’s resonantly grumbling and tintinabulating keyboard voices. The folk-lament flavour carries the music to the finale’s beginning, a call to action from the piano, Sky-Lucas’s sparking finger-work gathering up Holowell’s responsive tones in a dancing web of interactive strands (the same dancing delight Lilburn was to give to the finale of his first Symphony a half-dozen years later). But Lilburn widens the music’s scope as he proceeds, revisiting the first movement’s rhapsodic gesturings with enviable exploratory flair, string harmonics vying in places with explosive piano irruptions, the young composer revelling all the while in his kaleidoscopic shifts of harmony, the energies and impulses of the playing gathering up and carrying one’s sensibilities along quite irresistibly to the pay-off – an exhilarating listening experience.

I enjoyed such a great deal about this disc, from the quirky attractiveness of the frontispiece illustration (a painting, The Four Kings, by Auckland artist Chuck Joseph) to the wholeheartedness of actor Cameron Rhodes’ evocations of both the various New Zealand poems and the Shakespeare Othello exerpts – but my overriding feeling is gratitude to Atoll Records for capturing in true-to-life, state-of-the-art sound such an inspired partnership between two wonderful musicians, enabling a number of important works by New Zealand’s greatest composer to be heard to their inestimable advantage.

Gao Ping’s winning presentation of Debussy, New Zealand and east Asian piano music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Gao Ping – piano (Wellington Chamber Music)

Debussy: Book II of Images for piano and L’Île joyeuse; Jack Body: Five melodies for piano; Eve de Castro Robinson: And the garden was full of voices; Gao Ping: Outside the window; Takemitsu: Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

Sunday 11 September, 3pm

The first thing to remark is the unfortunate clash between this concert and that in the Michael Fowler Centre by the Vector Wellington Orchestra with pianist Diedre Irons. But in addition to that, there was a concert by the Wellington Community Choir next door, in the Town Hall main auditorium.

Though there were only two pieces, both by Debussy, that could be regarded as standard repertoire, the audience was nearly as large as at most other recent recitals, though that is rather fewer than was usual a few years ago.

There were two works by New Zealand composers.

Gao Ping introduced Jack Body’s Five Melodies for Piano by describing his first contact with the composer in Chengdu, not in person, but through a music tape that he’d left during a visit. He was moved and impressed and spoke warmly about Body, who was in the audience; it was an engaging way of putting the audience in a positive, receptive state of mind. Working the inside of the piano was novel forty years ago; now, there should be reason other than the novelty of a sound that’s distorted from its normal character. Happily, Gao Ping’s manner and his clear enjoyment of the music, its memorable riffs and motifs and drones, the muted strings produced by his left hand helped to make the pieces sound almost standard repertoire, familiar, even congenial. And, in the third piece, the stopping of partials on the piano strings to produce harmonics, and the plain comfortableness of his demeanor at the piano, as awkward as it often looks to be leaning sideways across the keyboard to do things that the instrument’s inventors never dreamed of (they might have said – why not use a harp? or lute? or theorbo? or guitar?)

Eve de Castro Robinson’s And the Garden was full of Voices is a three-part work evoking, with success, the sounds of birds in a garden inspired by a line in a Bill Manhire poem (with contribution from pianist Barry Margan). The composer still finds the need to manipulate the strings of the piano with the hands, but she also uses techniques that have become fashionable a generation after the body-contorting, piano-interior fashion: the integration of the pianist’s voice in the texture. In the second section, ‘Moon darkened by song’, the pianist resumed his seat and treated the instrument conventionally, with a prayerful gesture and two sharp claps from raised hands, bringing it to an end. Especially dramatic in the third section, ‘The ancient chants are echoes of death’, was the dark throbbing, the heavy beat, and the echoes of death evoked from the extreme ends of the keyboard. It made music that expressed both visual and unusual emotional perceptions.

Gao Ping, who seems at least a fairly permanent New Zealand resident, introduced his own piece Outside the window engagingly, recalling the childhood sense of a different – more real or more distant – world outside, and the music was now speaking in a language that offered more familiar resonances.

The first movement (of four, ‘On the way’) suggested a certain Janáček flavour (am I subject to suggestion, partly by the similar subject/title On an overgrown path?), at times touches of jazz, in its rhythms and melodic finger-prints. ‘Chorus of Fire Worms’ was a surprising avian evocation; Debussy was inevitably nearby in ‘Clouds’ (Nuages?), though I was not really reminded of clouds, unless they were of the fast-forward kind. The girls dancing on rubber bands (iv) was a flight of the imagination which Jack Body’s sound-world might have had some influence on.

Gao Ping again diverted us with a story related by Takemitsu: after the devastation and deprivation of the post-war, he had no piano and wandered the streets knocking on doors where he heard a piano, to ask whether he could play for 15 minutes; 40 years later he was greeted, at a concert, by one of his piano benefactors. The two Rain Tree Sketches are among his more popular pieces, not reflecting a particularly Japanese character but impressing with their coherent and confident musical substance and Gao’s playing seemed somehow to incarnate the composer himself, who has always seemed to me a man of warmth and deep humanity – like Gao Ping.

The three pieces of Debussy’s Images Book II, not the best known of his piano pieces, was a clever way to induct the audience into the climate and landscape of the New Zealand and East Asian music in the rest of the concert. The bells of No 1 were sounded in disembodied abstraction; another essential quality of Debussy’s piano music lay in the black-and-whiteness character that’s suggested by the second part – ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ – the coldness of the moon, static harmonies, stillness. ‘Poissons d’or’ is the most familiar of the three, quite formidable in its spirit in spite of the shimmering dance rhythm that portrays the golden fishes whose flashing movements became quite corporeal and substantial; yet all the time, firmly rooted in the black and white piano keys. Gao Ping’s unobtrusive virtuosity illuminated them all.

And so it was fitting to return to Debussy at the end with his brilliant hail of notes that bespangle the glittering and very difficult L’Ile joyeuse; Gao Ping gave it strong pulse and danced excitedly through it with an almost visceral joyousness.

The encore was what Gao Ping called a vocalizing-pianist piece, written by him to a poem, “perhaps-song of burial”, by Wen Yi-duo. Again, the role of the pianist’s voice complemented his piano-playing; it lamented the death of the poet’s daughter, sustained by a steady rhythm throughout in rolling motifs in the left hand. Whether the words expressed profound grief or a more metaphysical emotion one knew not, but the music seemed to express a calm stoicism rather than unrestrained distress; it was no doubt all the more impressive and moving as a result.

With each of these various composers, Gao Ping, demonstrated an intuitive awareness of the music’s essence, and a refinement, enlivened by virtuosity that was always at the service of the music.

Composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski (who was a guest at Victoria University a few years ago) said: “Gao Ping is one of a new generation that is breathing new life into the classical tradition. An evening with Gao Ping’s music is a true adventure!”

I couldn’t put it better. It was his music, in particular, this afternoon that seemed to me to point in a most fruitful, human, and optimistic direction for the future of ‘classical’ music that will again succeed in reaching out to the large audiences it enjoyed a century ago.

Another snippet.

He was asked in an interview posted on his website how he would define ‘interpreting’. His answer: “In terms of performing? Well, it is a vague word. I prefer ‘recreating’. Playing a Beethoven sonata is to recreate something, not really an interpretation because interpretation seems to suggest ‘explaining’, which is not what one can do with Beethoven sonatas performing it.”

Just one of many tendentious, pretentious words beloved of critics that have always made me uneasy, even though I’ve been guilty occasionally.

On The Transmigration Of Souls – 9/11 Commemoration by John Adams presented by the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Vector Wellington Orchestra’s John Adams 9/11 Commemoration

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.5 in C Minor

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.25 in C Major

ADAMS – On the Transmigration of Souls

Orpheus Choir, Wellington / Choristers of the Cathedral of St.Paul, Wellington / Wellington Girls’ College Teal Voices

Diedre Irons (piano)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday September 11th, 2011

Review adapted – not a transcript – from a radio review for Radio New Zealand Concert’s”Upbeat”, with Eva Radich)

It was unusual for the Wellington Orchestra to be performing  on a Sunday afternoon.

The 9/11 date gives a clue – and in fact it’s ten years to this very day since New York’s World Trade Centre was attacked and destroyed by two hi-jacked terrorist-controlled aircraft. American composer John Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write a piece to be performed on the first anniversary of the attack, in 2002. This performance was the New Zealand premiere of this work, which won for its composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003, and for the premiere recording in 2005 various Grammy Awards.

The orchestra usually performs in the Town Hall – but here they were in the Michael Fowler Centre on this occasion.

Acoustically, the Town Hall would have been great for the John Adams work – the music was gradually built up with many different textural strands that would have responded even more powerfully to a full, immediate and  reverberant ambience, the kind of things that performers have to work harder to get in the MFC. But there were advantages gained from performing in the bigger venue, most obviously a bigger audience, and more space in which to place the various choirs that the work requires. Having said this in comparing the two venues, I have to say that I thought the sounds were beautifully managed all the way through – the taped sounds of city activity and the various voices reading the names of people who died in the attack and written tributes to them that were displayed in various places afterwards all came across with plenty of clarity and atmosphere, as did the heartfelt efforts of the different choirs and the power and beauty of the orchestral playing.

It must have been a pretty daunting commission for any composer, to commemorate such an earth-shattering event.

John Adams himself admitted to feeling, at first, a bit overawed by the range and scope of it all – he was quoted as saying “I had great difficulty imagining anything commemorating 9/11 that would not be an embarrassment” –  but then he reckoned that any composer that was worth his salt wouldn’t shrink away from confronting something “profoundly intense” and conveying its essence by whatever means. Adams felt that this event had been so well documented and its images spread so widely, that his job as a composer wasn’t what he called “an exposition of the material” – he had no desire whatever to create any kind of narrative or description. Instead his intention was to create in sound a kind of “memory space” for human reflection, absolutely free from any statement about religion, patriotism or politics. Adams likened to the concept the feeling one gets when one visits an enormous cathedral – he cited the experience of going to Chartres Cathedral in France, saying that “you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot.”

So, how did he do it? – how did the piece begin and develop and make its impact?

Adams decided he would dispense with the usual texts composers used for commemorative works, poetry, liturgy or Scripture. Instead he decided to use words that had been scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by people searching for their missing loved ones. In this way the focus would be on the people who were left behind, on their expressions of hope mixed with gradual acceptance of the reality of loss. He began the piece with prerecorded tape sounds of a city, of people going about their everyday business, pedestrians and traffic noises. Then a voice begins repeating the word “missing” over and over, followed by the introduction of names of the dead. The choirs begin to sing, like angels singing halos of tones, the orchestra strings play soft tremolandos, the percussion begins to softly scintillate, the choirs repeat words with growing intensity, like a great tower or archway gradually lighting up all over. A solo trumpet (very American) reminiscent of Charles Ives and of Gershwin, paying homage to a kind of cultural history, suggests an on-going presence of the spirit, as the choirs continue their chanting (Orpheus Choir) and sustained tones (Choristers’ Choir) accompanied by woodwinds playing Straussian Rosenkavalier-like chords. The music grows and changes textures by osmosis, as different instruments add their timbres and colours, brasses introducing a deep,sombre aspect, the overall sounds gathering girth and variety. The heavy brasses, trombone and tubas, play the most sepulchral notes imaginable and the tape voice repeats the word “missing”, everything growing in intensity and focus until the orchestra, like some leviathan awakening, opens up its heavy batteries with brazen bell sounds, expressing anger, war, disaster and danger, before subsiding into an uneasy calm, with only the children’s voices repeating the messages of grief at first, then gradually joined by the adult choir, the voices like waves of sound, reinforced by the orchestra, canonic flurries from the strings, irruptions from brass and percussion expending tremendous energy. The choir repeats the word “Light” as the taped voices return repeating more names of the dead and the phrase “I see water and buildings” (which were the last words spoken by a flight attendant on her cell-phone) repeated, as the intensities narrow down to a few simple phrases, repeated by the taped voices, such as “my brother’, “my son” and “I love you”. And with these sounds the music gradually fades and dies.

What was the reaction of the audience at the end?

Certainly very respectful, enthusiastic, but at the same time, thoughtful, applause – obviously the “Mr Bravos” of the concert-going world weren’t going to have the chance to exercise their lungs at the end of this piece. I think the audience’s reaction was tempered by the solemnity of it all, and rightly so.

What was the effect of the piece on you? How much power did the piece have to move your emotions?

For me, the most moving section of the work was the last, reflective episode following the final altogether irruptions of sound and energy, impressive though the impact of these was. I found that, in a sense, the composer was requiring of me to “accumulate” emotion over the course of the piece, so that I felt the lump in my throat coming up when I heard the words at the end “My brother”, “my son”, and “I love you”. It’s interesting that, when I was listening to the first five minutes of the work on you-tube on the computer earlier in the day, I felt the emotion well up then, very palpably – but I think that was because the video clip I was watching contained images of the events of the tragedy, the buildings on fire, the rescue workers standing amid the rubble, the onlookers distraught, the people jumping to their deaths, the simply-written poster-messages – somehow the visual imagery worked with the music to activate my emotions far more overtly, which I didn’t experience during the actual performance in any way until those last few minutes.  And I think, as I said, that this accumulated effect was what the composer had planned, that in the end it was the simplicity of utterance of these ordinary people who had been bereaved that was so extraordinarily moving.

This work was placed last on the program – did you think that was a good idea?

Yes, I think one was able to carry out of the concert hall an abiding impression of the commemoration of the day, because of hearing the Adams work last. Of course, to then have played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wouldn’t have actually “spoiled” the Adams piece – but it would’ve lessened its raw impact on the audience, going into the aftermath of the concert. It was a contemplative, rather than an earth-shattering piece, the realization of which the composer made quite clear was his intention all along.

Perhaps it would have upstaged anything that followed it?

Actually, no – I don’t think so – and again, I think the composer intended it to be that way. Hearing the piece was for me like connecting with some kind of collective human energy for a short while, and feeling a commonality of spirit and of impulse that was comforting in its way. I think it was a boldly-conceived and sensitively-constructed work. I wondered whether some simple visual production techniques, such as appropriately ambient lighting, might have enhanced the work’s overall impact.In one or two places I did imagine that something visual could have been brought into play with no violence done to the composer’s intentions. But there again, it was obvious Adams intended nothing more than a sound-picture, and for those sounds alone to have a cumulative effect upon his audiences.

So, what about the other two items? – were they put in the shade by the Adams work?

For me, not at all – and partly because it was very much a concert of two halves, with each creating its own unique world of feeling. The first half was absolutely splendid in a completely different way, featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (arguably the most famous of all symphonies in the classical literature) and a lesser-known, but still imposing work, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25, with Diedre Irons as the soloist. I was speaking with one of the ushers whom I know, during the interval, and who told me that the first concertgoer who came out of the auditorium a few minutes before had said to her, “World class – absolutely world class!” So, people were obviously impressed by what they were hearing.

Do you think it would be difficult for any conductor and orchestra to tackle something as well-known as Beethoven’s Fifth, something that almost everybody would have heard, and with so many great performances available on recordings? I would think it would be quite daunting a prospect.

I think you’re right about that – and in the face of such circumstances, the only way to tackle such a work is to do exactly what Marc Taddei and the orchestra did – which was to play the music almost as though they’d never heard anybody else’s performance, and instead make it their own. Interestingly, I reckoned it was only the second performance of the work I’d ever heard “live” – of course I’ve heard countless versions on record – but in the concert-hall the music’s still a relatively new experience for me, so I was really looking forward to hearing the work. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Under Marc Taddei’s direction the orchestral sounds blazed forth, all departments covering themselves with glory. One of the things that thrilled me was, despite this being the Michael Fowler Centre, and not the Wellington Orchestra’s usual home, the Town Hall, the playing had enough energy and tonal weight to fill the auditorium’s spaces and get across the music’s heroic qualities with plenty of gusto. Particularly successful in this respect was the first movement – great attack, right from the outset, with urgent, rather than monumental tempi, but with the rhythms given plenty of chunky, energetic emphasis. The strings were excellent, but the support from the brass and winds and timpani was also spot-on. Other highlights – one of them in this performance for me was the way Marc Taddei challenged his string players in the scherzo to keep the tempo steady for the rushing string figurations – you remember the lower strings come in first, followed gradually by other, higher voices. The skin and hair was flying as these players bent their backs to the task and kept the momentum of the music going – absolutely thrilling! Another great moment was in the finale when Taddei brought the players in for the repeat, at which point the playing seemed to leap forward all the more eagerly and propulsively.

I did think, in one or two places that the famous “motto” theme needed a touch more rhetoric, a bit more underlining, such as for its very last, grand, first movement statement – after all, it is an intensely dramatic as well as a structural motif. More serious, for me, was the nonappearance of the goblins in the third movement, where Taddei got his strings to play so quietly their pizzicati could hardly be heard against the winds – in fact at one point I thought they’d lost their way and stopped playing, so hushed were their sounds.

And who are these goblins, you might well ask? – Well, in Chapter Five of E.M.Forster’s novel Howard’s End there’s a wonderful description of the Symphony’s third movement, made by Helen, one of the novel’s characters – “….the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures – it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world…..Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push and they began to walk in a major key instead of a minor – and then he blew with his mouth and they were scattered……..The goblins really had been there. They might return–and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things….” Alas, the pizzicati were so quiet, and the tempi so swift, we couldn’t really register the goblins’ footfalls and their uncanny progress, or feel their ominous presence. And when Beethoven briefly returned to the scherzo just before the reprise of the finale’s triumphal theme, Taddei’s tempi were so quick there was no time for goblins and their ominous footfalls whatsoever!

If you hadn’t read “Howard’s End”, what would you have thought of the performance overall?

Oh, absolutely splendid (though with a touch more drama and rhetoric required for the “Fate” theme) – but you’ll appreciate that there are some episodes in one’s favorite music that have got to be done “just so”, otherwise they don’t work as well as they ought to. This is all terribly subjective, I’m sure you must be thinking!

Tell me about the Mozart concerto with Diedre Irons.

This,alas,was the last in the series of Mozart concertos played by Diedre Irons with the orchestra – such a pity that we’re not going to go as far as the last one of all, which I would love to hear her play. Still, this one, No.25 in C major, was suitably grand and ceremonial, as befits its key, and also a counterweight to the C Minor of the Beethoven Symphony that we heard. This is a big-boned concerto, with occasional touches of the exotic – trumpets and drums speaking with what I thought was a Turkish accent during the second subject group.

After these very grand, ritualistic beginnings the soloist’s first entry is, by contrast, somewhat rhapsodic, making us “stop and listen” – Diedre Irons’s playing has such character, such purpose, so that with each phrase we experience delight in the moment and satisfaction with the whole. I liked her piano sound – it seemed to my ears a more characterful, brighter and more sharply-focused sound she was getting, compared with the instrument in the Town Hall, enabling her to do more with the music.

Has it been a good combination, Diedre Irons with Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra?

I thought this concerto in particular interestingly set the music-making styles of two different musicians together in a very interesting and creative partnership – Diedre Irons’s playing detailed and momentous, able to expand the phrases for expressive effect while maintaining the music’s larger momentum, compared with Marc Taddei’s energetic, somewhat “driven” style, given to tauter inclinations, marshalling his rhythms and driving the lyrical lines. Here, those differences worked well upon one another, and helped to bring out the concerto’s variety of mood and colour, to the extent that, if one didn’t know the music well, one wasn’t sure what was going to happen next (Mozart at his most inventive).

I believe that the first movement cadenza was the work of none other than Kenneth Young, which I didn’t know until after the performance, thinking at the time that it was a wonderful window into a composer’s soul, exploring the music’s fundamental materials in different lights and from varied angles (no cadenzas by Mozart for this work have survived). The slow movement was one of Mozart’s “operatic” realizations – it seemed that the winds’ tender descending phrase had taken us to the world of “Le Nozze di Figaro”, to the Count’s garden in the fourth act, with beautiful al fresco horns alerting us to the wonders of the evening air. Despite a few momentary spills – one or two horn blurps, and, elsewhere, some pianistic sunspots (in somewhat ruminative passages) – Irons and the orchestral winds enjoyed some delicious dialogues throughout, particularly lovely in effect towards the movement’s end. The finale’s chirpy, but somewhat plain-sounding theme, gets a good going-over when triplets turn the tune into exciting rhythmic swirling and tumblings, and later there a lovely dovetailing of pianistic triplets against long string lines as part of the rich variation Mozart brings to the music – undoubtedly some of his most inventive and colourful for piano and orchestra. Soloist, conductor and players despatched it all with the utmost élan and enjoyment, for our enormous pleasure.

Enterprising contribution to Organ Week at St Peter’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Organ Week (Wellington Organists’ Association)

Dianne Halliday, Director of Music at St Peter’s

Chorale for a New Organ, and Adagio for Strings (Barber); Partita on ‘Christus der ist mein Leben’ (Pachelbel); Prelude and fugue in A, BWV 536 (Bach0; ‘Salve regina’ – 2004 (Naji Hakim). Organ music inspired by the progressive Jewish sect: by William Buck, Hugo Chaim Adler, Ludwig Altman and Michael Horvit

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Thursday 8 September, 12.45pm

While, nationally, we have an Organ Month, in Wellington only an Organ Week has been organized. The effort required to present a month of recitals, almost every day, is very considerable, and can really be
justified only if the response by audiences is encouraging. Judging by the smallish audience at this most interesting lunchtime concert, the decision to confine it to one week is understandable. Yet when free Sunday afternoon concerts were given a couple of years ago on the Town Hall organ, the crowds were impressive. Where were all those organ lovers?

And incidentally, where have been the organ recitals on the Town Hall organ this year, once again. Is this the ‘Positively Wellington’ Convention Centre’s contribution in support of the city’s claim to be the cultural capital? Well done!

St Peter’s has got a lot of attractive features. It’s one of Wellington’s prettiest churches, in graceful and restrained gothic, with its nearly full suite of stained glass windows and the delicately sculpted wooden screen marking the division between nave and sanctuary; and the newly restored organ, its visible pipes as beautifully decorated as any in the country.

Anyone expecting an exhibition of the sort we heard from Cameron Carpenter playing an ultra flamboyant (‘vulgar’ to use Carpenter’s own word) organ toccata by Samuel Barber with the National Youth Orchestra last Friday would have been relieved at the classical restraint and modesty of this Barber piece. This Lutheran-style chorale was treated with the sort of respect that a Stanford or Parry might have offered, only occasionally coloured with modal harmonies. Dianne Halliday’s use of the organ’s resources was guided by good taste, an ear for an uncluttered range of stops.

Barber’s Adagio was similarly refined, but here, even though the organ theoretically offers a wider palette of colours than, say, a piano or string quartet, I felt that the piece did not really sustain itself and, surprisingly, seemed to need to end a couple of minutes before it did.

The Pachelbel Partita employed, again, a traditional German chorale, putting it through a conventional, and predicatable, series of variations that maintained the attention for just long enough, through the choice of a charming variety of stops. Bach’s BWV 536 came from a similar basket, though built on rather more elaborate lines, the A major character reflected in a lot of high-lying writing that conveyed an untroubled piety.

The last piece deriving from the Christian organ tradition was by eminent Franco-Lebanese composer Naji Hakim, who succeeded Messiaen at the church of the Sainte-Trinité in Paris and is current titular at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris: a ‘Salve Regina’ composed in 2004. The melodic lines of this were, like the Bach, set in generally high registers, using unusual high piccolo stops. It was attractive though becoming repetitive melodically and in its tone.

The last four pieces drew on an unusual repertoire – that of the progressive or reform Jewish tradition which the organist explained as having originated in Germany where organs became familiar in liturgical roles and subsequently in the United States.

The first of them was ‘Candle-lighting’ by English-born, New Zealand composer William Buck, who spent 14 years at the Jewish Centre in Venice, Florida. It did not suggest a strongly sacred character, expressing a
benign, meandering spirit which the organist exploited attractively.

Then came two settings of a Jewish melody: ‘Avienu Malkenu’, both by European Jews who went to the United States. Neither sounded markedly Jewish, though that probably reflects my own imperfect knowledge of much Jewish music. The second, by Ludwig Altman, was accompanied by the distinct whirring of a motor which seemed to reveal itself as driving the tremolo stop that gave the piece a somewhat blowsy quality.

The last piece offered an altogether different insight into an aspect of Jewish culture – the ability to mock or satirise their own tradition. After a sententious opening which soon subsided to a gentle tuneful phase, came an amusing shift to a Broadway-style, syncopated, synthetic, Fiddler on the Roof style Jewish, perhaps we should say Yiddish, music arrived to lighten the spirit, in a fine irreverent way.

It was a particularly well-constructed programme, admirably played.

Exotically-flavoured delights from the NZSQ and Péter Nagy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HUNGARIAN RHAPSODIES (Programme One)

The New Zealand String Quartet

with Péter Nagy (piano)

BARTÓK – String Quartet No.2 Sz.67

LIGETI – String Quartet No.1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes)

LISZT – Mephisto Waltz No. 4 (Bagatelle sans tonalité) / Csárdás in F-sharp minor / Csárdás obstinée

DOHNÁNYI – Piano Quintet No. 2 in E-flat Minor Op.26

Hunter Council Chamber,

Victoria University, Wellington

Sunday 4th September 2011

The publicity accompanying the New Zealand String Quartet’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies” set of concerts made a great thing of the “rhapsodies” designation, bringing into play synonyms such as ecstasy, rapture, bliss, enthusiasm and great joy – but upon hearing the first of the two programs I would have just as enthusiastically endorsed the “Hungarian” part of the description, especially in the context of the Quartet’s characterful and atmospheric playing. Particularly during the first half, we were, at any point, taken to worlds whose sounds, for me, were borne on a different kind of air to that which I normally breathed and listened to, something more tremulous and laden, creating expectancy and a degree of tension at the thought of whatever feelings, emotional and visceral, might be conjured up. What the group was doing, of course, was realizing some of the most interesting and absorbing chamber-music sounds ever to have been written, and bringing us as listeners into the world of those sounds.

And with the sounds came flavours and colours, those of the Bartok Second Quartet’s three movements strongly earthy and dark-hued, but here, keeping the music’s inherent lyricism close at hand. From the Quartet players came a warm, natural growth of sounds, beautifully-focused singing and shaping of the music’s contours, tones and silences alike, expressing the “soul” of the music and the earth from which it rose. Thus the folk-like singing lines over the ‘cello’s “strummed” accompaniment towards the end of the first movement made for a magical opening up of what we had already heard in “songs and snatches”, revealing the music as a kind of extended lullaby, rich and varied, both rustic and ghostly.

If song dominated the first movement, a fierce percussive energy inspired the quartet’s playing throughout  the second, marked allegro molto capriccioso. The composer’s recent travels in North Africa may have accounted for the exotic-sounding motifs, their slurrings and drummings fuelled by over-brimming peasant energies. The players nicely pointed the contrast of an angular gavotte-like trio section, before returning to the motoric energies of the opening.  We heard an almost “East-meets-West” blending of exotic patternings and relentless drive, before being taken on that spookily spectral abyss’s edge gallop towards what I thought came across as strangely reassuring folkish unisons at the movement’s end. The Lento finale resembled for me a huge slow-motion wave at the finale’s beginning, the performance creating impulsive swells that broke and arched up from the music’s undulating surfaces, before exhausting themselves and falling back into the prevailing contours via a couple of telling pizzicato notes.

Violinist Helene Pohl talked briefly about the Hungarian aspect of the program, and, helpfully, about Bartok in particular at the concert’s opening – and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten in turn spoke about Ligeti’s First String Quartet. He provided a brief but insightful overview of the music with the help of his colleagues, who demonstrated with great relish things like the composer’s “mocking” of his own themes in places, from instrument to instrument. The work was composed in 1953/54, from a time the composer was to later call “Prehistoric Ligeti”, those years before he fled Hungary as a result of the 1956 Uprising. The Bartok of the third and fourth Quartets was Ligeti’s model, here, the music at the outset colored by a lyricism, ingratiating tones set against spikiness, and delicacy against muscularity.

The composer’s four-note motto, which Rolf Gjelsten asked the players to demonstrate at the beginning, could be heard subjected to a bewildering variety of transformations, hence the “metamorphoses” of the work’s title. Memorable episodes abounded – a gig-like dotted-rhythm episode contrasted with sequences of haunted whisperings and harmonics, the dark, insidious-sounding Waltz, with its stricken pizzicati “curdling out” as arco phrasings (the poco capriccioso marking living up to its name), and the spectacularly hushed ostinati towards the work’s end set alongside the “mocking” repetitions of the motto theme. A totally engaging listening experience! – of the sort, it must be emphasized, that we’ve come to eagerly anticipate every time, from this ensemble.

Hungarian pianist Péter Nagy presented us with an all-too-brief glimpse into the world of Liszt’s late works for solo piano – I had to restrain myself from leaping to my feet when he’d finished, and proclaiming that it wasn’t enough – demanding that he play things like the Csárdás Macabre and Nuages Gris also, so that we could get a real sense of the composer as a visionary, “throwing a lance into the future”. What we heard barely scratched the surface of this somewhat bleak, atonal world of the composer’s, a true rejection of previous lives, activities, impulses and creations, in favour of what most of Liszt’s contemporaries would have certainly regarded as terra incognito. Still,in keeping with the concert’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies” title, we had to be content with those pieces linked to folk-dance, though the aforementioned Csárdás Macabre would have fitted the bill nicely, as well. The extremely chromatic Mephisto Waltz No.4 (subtitled “Bagatelle sans tonalité”) and the two Csárdás certainly gave notice of a creative sensibility looking to new worlds to explore.

Péter Nagy featured also in the concert’s final work, Ernő Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet No.2 in E-flat minor. Though it came across as much more of a drawing-room piece cheek-by-jowl with the Bartok and Ligeti Quartets, with an almost Borodin-like exoticism in places, the music still generated great sweepings of activity whose textures definitely sounded “gypsy” rather than Germanic. There was something very “fin de siécle” about those dying-fall sevenths and swooning harmonies – a touch, even, of Cesar Franck, perhaps, in some of the more fragrant harmonic modulations? Not quite what I expected – at this stage of the piece, anyway – though the playing gave the piece every chance to impress on its own terms.

The Intermezzo featured constant changes of mood between salon music, flashes of gypsy energy and formalized structuring, the players characterizing the music’s different courses with relish. Just as it was the viola’s turn to shine at this movement’s beginning, so the ‘cello took the lead in the finale, leading the other voices into a fugal working-out, which the piano further ritualized with solemn chords. However, rhapsodic feeling became paramount once again, the playing “digging in”, building the movement’s energies towards an inevitable intensification of feeling, the string lines wrapping themselves more and more tightly together, and stimulating from the piano massive sonorities. Then, at a slower tempo, the musicians regrouped their resources and brought off a fine climactic archway of romantic feeling, whose hushed coda’s strains brought a comparable sigh of audience pleasure at the very end.