More on Wells’s “brilliant” (Dom Post) doco on the NZSO tour

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

But the New Zealand Herald didn’t see eye to eye with the Dominion Post’s Linda Burgess who reviewed it as television on Monday 1 August.

See William Dart’s admirable, clear-sighted comment in today’s paper: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/movies/news/article.cfm?c_id=200&objectid=10743356

Subsequent to this post, we’ve been told that the Herald is being pressured to remove Dart’s review.
In case that happens, here it is:

Jeremy Wells’s doco on the NZSO tour

by William Dart

Saturday 6 August 2011 – New Zealand Herald

Last October, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was proud that Jeremy Wells would front a documentary about its upcoming world tour. And Wells, fresh from his rather clever Birdland series, responded that “it was time to align myself with something a little more cultured than birds or half-baked local celebrities. The NZSO was an obvious choice”.

I shuddered at this cruel put-down of the delightful, idiosyncratic characters who made Birdland a success. If this casual insult occasioned shudders, then the completed documentary, The Grand Tour, which screened on Prime TV last Sunday, was rage-inducing.

Shuffling around the concert halls of China and Europe, Wells, the eternal slacker, patched together a script of snide swipes and innuendo. China was the home of Sars and, looking to porn for inspiration, Wells described Garry Smith, the NZSO operations manager, as a fluffer.

Wells’ feeble attempts at in-depth interview had harpist Carolyn Mills valiantly fielding his banter about playing in the nude; trombonist David Bremner was reduced to a giggling school boy when Wells likened his trombone playing to a sex act, or confronted him with scatological humour more familiar in shows like Back of the Y.

We hardly had time to marvel at some of the glorious venues before Wells chirped in with the observation that classical music is woven into German culture like automotive engineering and barebacking. The American soloist Hilary Hahn was asked whether she had tried solvent abuse as a teenager, masseuse Bronwen Ackerman was drawn out on the subjects of “happy endings” and conductor’s erections. Shamefully, Wells teased a German doctor to the point of harassment with a discussion of a surreal testicle injury.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa quite rightly showed little patience with Wells’ interview tactics. When she did respond, she was cut off mid-sentence.

Clearly The Grand Tour was more about Jeremy Wells cracking out a good spit in Shanghai or, for two long minutes, attempting to introduce Lucerne against traffic noise.

There were glimmers of thoughtful commentary here and there but there should have been much more on the rare occasion of classical music making it to prime time. Those who care about New Zealand music have reason to worry about its obvious marginalisation in this film; Ross Harris and his specially commissioned orchestral pieces were neither heard nor discussed.

And what does the orchestra itself think of this travesty, this deeply philistine mockery of indubitably great culture? Most organisations would insist on quality control and final approvals; if this documentary got a tick from the NZSO, then our classical music culture is indeed in a sorry state.


Musicologist Robin Maconie posted a comment on Scoop.

But it’s no use referring you to that because Scoop removed it from their website rather abruptly.

Maconie writes: “This article went global and within a day was pulled from the Scoop website, with no reason given. Scoop is supposed to be an independent news medium. Robin Maconie has refused to allow the article to be reinstated in edited form.”

So here it is:


After the NZSO:

Jeremy Wells plays with his Wiener experience

OPINION PIECE BY ROBIN MACONIE

Like a convict facing the hangman’s noose, a cornered rat turns, bares its teeth, hisses and fouls itself.

Step forward Jeremy Wells, poster boy for a sinking New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Except the NZSO is not sinking. At least, not yet. The rats will eventually leave and the orchestra will survive. It is a good orchestra. It has high standards and a serviceable reputation in the wider world of serious music and musicians. It has still to expose, let alone properly exploit, the cultural  resources of a gifted conductor and hardworking team of musicians. The orchestra recently toured a number of distinguished and not so distinguished concert halls in Europe. A cut-price effort fuelled by desperation and putting considerable strain on the players, organized by a management team behaving as though a symphony orchestra were the equivalent of a national rugby team in drag.

The tour was three years in preparation. While the world economy crumbled around them and the money began to run out, as Wellington bureaucrats do the tour organizers doggedly stuck to their original plan. There was no Plan B. The tour finally took place at the worst possible time for a New Zealand shaken by the first of several major earthquake disasters in Christchurch, then Pike River Mine. The orchestra was accompanied by a photographer and a television crew, but no independent musically competent reporters. A surprising omission, since New Zealand has at least two music journalists of good standing in regular employment, but a decision that may have something to do with the fact that both are based in Auckland, home of the rival Auckland Philharmonia. The only way the New Zealand public was able to follow the NZSO’s tour of fortune in the court of European public opinion – the New Zealand public whose declining subscriber base the entire exercise was arguably intended to recover – was through the intermittent blog of an amiable but not terribly literate brass player and a succession of all too brief and nervously managed press releases of doubtful credibility.

Following the muted triumph of the orchestra’s return home at a time of national mourning the NZSO marketing gurus, crass and insensitive as ever, began loudly complaining that their achievement had not been taken seriously enough by the government or the public.

It was their own fault. A tour planned and staged as a marketing gesture for home consumption – just like a Silver Ferns tour – took place in conditions of almost total media blackout. Apparently it is not the done thing in the world of art music to keep your existing or potential customers informed.  No explanation in the national media as to why the tour was necessary in the first place, leaving readers to suspect that the whole exercise was no more than a promotional quid pro quo to massage the vanity of one or two people at the top.

The frankly obscene idea that inflatable toyboy Wells should front a potentially vote-winning television documentary, and its disastrous consequences, speaks volumes. Wellington, the city of culture? Of course you must be joking. It is what happens when empty heads prevail and responsibility for a national orchestra and national radio part company. The orchestra loses all sense of connection with its national constituency and retreats into a conservative and toxic backwater in desperation to retain its national, tax funded position of advantage. In abandoning the original BBC inspired formula, our national radio no longer sees itself as having a stake in NZSO success at home or abroad, as promotional, educational, and service wing of the orchestra.

Promoting the NZSO among the wider population in New Zealand is further hindered by serious broadcast reception difficulties, compared to countries in Europe. The problem affects listener satisfaction in all media: radio, television, and broadband. When the Rolling Stones come to play, they bring their own crew. Rock music is not the same game, is much easier to control, compared to classical music at its best. So ask yourself, if listeners cannot receive a decent uncluttered signal at home or on the road, how can they be expected to develop an empathy for music of high quality of any culture, not just western symphonic and opera. Classical music, whether live or prerecorded, is technically the most demanding of all acoustic signals to deliver to an audience. New Zealand has the engineering and digital skills, but not the smarts nor the will, to address the problem. Appreciation of the NZSO will only improve once our institutions of higher learning take delivery of relevant teaching expertise and introduce suitable training and production skills programmes.

Can the NZ Symphony Orchestra survive the brutalizing attentions of media mouthpiece Jeremy Wells? Certainly it can; the question is whether it deserves to survive under its present regime. The documentary material can certainly be re-edited to present the NZSO in a more flattering light to an international public. All that has to be done is for the television footage to be edited to leave Wells’s contribution on the cutting room floor,  and for it to be gathered up and burned.

It is only too obvious, both from the way the 2010 European tour was sold, and from the series of blunders that led to Wells tagging along and then actually fronting the souvenir documentary aired on Prime last Sunday, that the NZSO marketing people were only interested in impressing the folks back home.

This was a shame. A properly researched international tour would have unearthed real opportunities to present the orchestra and our national culture distinctively and proudly, in a way designed to impress the orchestra’s European audiences and media, rather than leave them feeling perplexed, blindsided and somewhat taken aback.

A tour of Austria and Germany was a wasted opportunity to remind New Zealanders just how much our concert life and traditions are indebted to European refugees seeking a better life in this country who brought classical music with them as part of a precious old world heritage. Think just for a moment of  the cultural commitment of the people of Nelson who, back in 1890,  at the suggestion of visiting string virtuoso Michael Balling, an associate of Wagner and Brahms, willingly subscribed to a scheme to build a School of Music on the European model, and to hire a succession of German-trained specialists to direct it. Today the building survives, mothballed, a neglected relic of cultural heroism in the midst of an indecently prosperous wine community that has lost its soul.

The NZSO might well have taken a very real message back to Europe about our contribution as a remote Polynesian nation to the history and development of European artistic consciousness. But in order to do so one would have to understand more exactly who we are and what we have to offer. New Zealand Maori’s history of contact with European civilization goes back to the time of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. A century in advance of the first All Black tour, European art and music was already reverberating to the exotic sounds and rhythms of plaintive karakia and the violently confrontational haka recorded in widely-published chronicles of visiting eighteenth-century explorers.

New Zealand music can no more repudiate our connection with European culture than we can erase the memory of those Austrian and German explorers and scientists whose skills and patient discipline laid the foundations of our current reputation in conservation and the natural sciences. Or ignore the image of a Nowhere Land described by  nineteenth-century English visitor Samuel Butler, writing letters and commentaries on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species for the Christchurch Press by day, and by night playing Beethoven sonatas on an upright piano in his isolated sheep station in the Canterbury hinterland.

Who would know that Christchurch was once the home of the Dresden Piano Company, and Begg’s, piano manufacturers and music retailers to the New Zealand settler community from the time of sailing ships? Who among NZSO management cherishes – or even remembers – the young teenage violinist Alfred Hill, sent off to Leipzig by enthusiastic public subscription in 1887 to train as a professional and return to serve his people, only to be insulted and repudiated by the local community after World War I for the double offence of association with the enemy, and for fraternising with Maori. Not forgetting more recent arrivals like the Francis Rosners, the Marie Vanderwarts, the Fred Turnovskys, and the Michael Wiecks, seeking relief from religious persecution in Vienna and elsewhere before and during the era of Nazi persecution.

What publicity value is served, I wonder, either here in New Zealand or anywhere else in the western world where culture is prized, by the shameful spectacle of an ignorant prick  insulting a woman, his senior, and an artist of the quality and international status of Dame Kiri, not only by his words but even by  his blank, shovel-faced presence?

Aided by a compliant and nepotistic administration New Zealand’s cultural life has over the years been infiltrated, not to say contaminated, by a steady stream of articulate and rebarbartive middle-class refugees of conservative taste, mediocre talent, and restricted vision, decision makers and opinion formers who have no idea or interest in New Zealand’s unique history or its place in the greater pattern of world events. They are vain, cruel, cunning, vastly overpaid, and indifferent to the significant damage they inflict on New Zealand’s image abroad as well as what hurt they effect on morale at home.

Why, I wonder, should the NZSO be courting the attentions of such people. And why should the public be content to put up with, let alone pay for, the insult of a Paul Henry style makeover? Such errors of judgement are hugely counter-productive. They risk alienating commercial supporters among media sensitive national industries such as Air New Zealand, as well as international brands such as Siemens and BMW. They only serve to draw attention to national standards of ignorance and vandalism that, as well as being irritating to the local public and calculatedly offensive to members of the orchestra, would be incomprehensible to media watchers in any other part of the civilized world, including Murdoch’s Australia.

Let’s face it. The NZSO management just don’t have a clue. They have to go. For much too long our cultural life has been infected by glib and alienated mediocrities with the gift of the gab but no grasp of New Zealand history or cultural values, empty vessels with a sense of entitlement to badmouth the very values they came to New Zealand in order to escape.

Petrenko’s convincing rehabilitation of two great Russian works

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko with Michael Houstoun (piano)

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 4 and Shostakovich: Symphony No 7 ‘Leningrad’

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 5 August, 6.30pm

There was a near-full house for this concert that featured a conductor who’s achieved much real distinction, a relatively unfamiliar concerto by a well-loved composer and a symphony that had won fame even before it was first performed.

Petrenko and the young conductors
Vasily Petrenko follows in the footsteps of several young conductors who have been given the direction of orchestras that were not at that point, particularly renowned. He took charge of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in 2007 aged 31, rather as Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1978, at 26, or Simon Rattle who took over the City of Birmingham Symphony in 1980 at 25.

Our own Pietari Inkinen took over the NZSO at the age of 27 in 2007, and he has made it a highly polished ensemble capable of responding to another young conductor like Petrenko, not only with finesse and refinement, but also with huge energy.

There is irony in the widespread feeling that not enough young people are coming to concerts, while orchestral players and soloists as well conductors seem to be getting ever younger. (*See below for more on young conductors)

It goes without saying that the demographic of pianists and violinists is, and always has been, very young, given the world’s propensity for wonder at spectacular performance by highly gifted Wunderkinder who have to make it by 20 if they are to make the grade at all.

That brings us to Michael Houstoun who was of course one of them, winning prizes in the Van Cliburn and Leeds competitions at about that age.

Rachmaninov’s Fourth
Rachmaninov’s last piano concerto is considered the hardest of the four to bring off, for the whole score presents problems on account of orchestral writing that is often rather dense, many-layered and so profoundly integrated with the piano.

Petrenko led the orchestra by encouraging the feverish series of rising brass-led chords, that promises both grandeur and emotional depths. Perhaps I was initially worried at Houstoun’s ability to assert the piano’s role in the face of the orchestra’s authority; but he quickly established and maintained a steady pace and authority of his own that was never splashy or egotistical and he quite matched the orchestra at telling moments with powerful and reciprocating statements and elaborations,

The common criticism of denseness really relates to very few moments, and they are no more conspicuous than in most concertos. More to the point was the poetry and glittering bursts of bravura scales and ornate arpeggios that Houstoun enriched his performance with: occasionally purely decorative, but generally with an eye steadily on the organic purpose.

The new element in Rachmaninov’s writing that everyone notes is his digestion of the influence of Gershwin and the jazz that he was hearing in America at the time, and its harmonies do at times suggest the indeterminate blues sounds that sometimes render big-band jazz sounds murky and rootless. These are only moments for Rachmaninov and he maintains attention through rising and falling dynamics and emotional intensity.

As for the riot of colour and speed of the piano, Houstoun’s playing, clean and finely focused, kept it taut and relevant.

The concerto’s problem, its lesser popularity, is due quite simply to the shortage of rapturous and memorable melody such as guarantees the hold of the second and third concertos; and that in spite of the pretty little tune in the slow movement that echoes a popular music-hall song published in the 1880s. ‘Two lovely black eyes’ which was a parody of ‘My Nellie’s blue eyes’. I have never read speculation as to how this came to be planted in Rachmaninov’s subconscious.

But perhaps it was this that prompted a contemporary critic, after the premiere in 1927, to write of the work: “…now weepily sentimental, now of an elfin prettiness, now swelling toward bombast in a fluent orotundity. It is neither futuristic music nor music of the future. Its past was a present in Continental capitals half a century ago. Taken by and large—and it is even longer than it is large—this work could fittingly be described as super-salon music. Mme Cécile Chaminade might safely have perpetrated it on her third glass of vodka.”

Whatever the connection of that tune, it does seem to be resistant to much interesting development; the music does rather fail to develop, apart from the unexpected, threatening episode about four minutes into it.

There are areas of the Michael Fowler Centre where the sound is not clearly represented or becomes muddied or unbalanced as between certain instrumental sections. I was in one of them, near centre stalls, and while my ears allowed me to hear the energy and the emotional force of the performance, the louder passages were too dense and sounded more muddied than I’m sure was experienced elsewhere. It left me, nevertheless,  in no doubt that the fourth is a much finer composition than its current popularity would suggest.

The truth about the Seventh
While the concerto was a big enough draw-card for a full house (which we had) the famous symphony was probably an even greater attraction. It is still rather belittled by the more severe critics and those who tend automatically to denigrate 20th century music with tunes, so running the risk of popularity. But now the seventh’s remarkable origins and its hundreds of performances during the war has been endorsed by the revival of interest in the past three decades (a seminal recording was Haitink’s with the LPO in 1980). Friday’s performance inspired me to dust off others on record, only to have the unsurprising result of persuading me that the years of ignore were driven not by sensitive musical ears but by dogma, pedantry and, especially among the musical critical fraternity, scorn for music containing tunes that made a big impact on thousands of people: that just had to be proof of vacuity and worthlessness.

Ian MacDonald (The New Shostakovich) puts the stimulus for its revival down to the publication of Volkov’s Testimony in 1979, where Shostakovich is quoted as saying the symphony was “not about Leningrad under siege; it’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off”. Such revelations were widely resisted when Testimony was first published and Volkov was dismissed as a plagiarist who’d made it all up. But later events conspired to validate Volkov’s memoir.

Volkov notes that the Seventh had been planned before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and could thus have nothing to do with the Nazi invasion; that the ‘Invasion’ theme had nothing to do with the attack; “it had to do with other enemies of humanity … not only German Fascism … Hitler is a criminal, that’s clear, but so is Stalin”, Volkov quotes Shostakovich saying.

It was this symphony in which Shostakovich found his true voice after the terrible years of repression in the late 30s. The war, engendering a sense of patriotism and shared perils, brought a halt to Stalin’s murders and removed the danger of writing music that came from the heart and allowed the composer to express something of the plight of the Soviet people faced with Stalinist terror, which could be now be disguised as something else.

That is the way the performance of the central part of the first movement unfolded, with its mighty outburst of determination to confront evil. Yet the ambiguity threads its way throughout the movement; nothing could be as heart-easing, superficially at least, as the peaceful tune towards the end, but it’s quietly overtaken by the recurrence of the ominous earlier tones; MacDonald describes “a strange glassy smile and the banality of the things it says”.

Nevertheless, the latter account leaves a question-mark over the significance of the trite little ‘Invasion theme’, echoing The Merry Widow aria, ‘Da geh ich zu Maxim’. MacDonald notes however that a version of the tune also existed in Russia, and was jokingly sung in the Shostakovich household to the composer’s son, whose name, of course, was Maxim.

The message?
This performance perhaps risked obscuring the overall message of submission and despair through the sudden shifts between varied moods and styles, the oppressive opening fanfares, the simple tunes, the ambiguities that make credible either its Soviet interpretation or the post-Volkov understanding.

Similar alternations of calm, perhaps self-deluding, and unease, fear, evil, permeate the other three movements and conductor and orchestra drove their way through its epic portrayals with tireless determination.

At the end, applause was prolonged and a (for Wellington) rare standing ovation revealed the extent of the work’s power to move a generation in which only the oldest (myself included) have clear memories of the course of the war, particularly on the eastern front, by far the most important in scale and in human and material destruction.

As an eight-year-old in the worst war years, I remember studying with intense interest the map of Europe on my grandfather’s wall, on which he shifted scores of pins day by day, following the progress of the allied armies that were closing in on Nazi Germany from all sides; his then commonly-held pro-communist feelings naturally left a deep impression on me, not really dispelled till the revelations after the death of Stalin in my first year at university. So this great performance did much more than tell the tale of a remote bit of history that I was, even at the time, very alert to: a great musical composition by a composer alert to international political realities, as virtually none had been before, had arrived. He was spurred by a regime that sought to control the political colour of its arts; ironically, the political awareness it stimulated was very different from what the Party intended.

This was a great concert that presented us with the most convincing performances of two masterpieces that have for different reasons been looked at askance by critics, or the public, or both, for many decades. Both works are surely fully rehabilitated now.

*Other conductors who made waves in their early years include Claudio Abbado at La Scala aged 35, Barenboim the Orchestre de Paris at 33, Seiji Ozawa at San Francisco aged 33, Bernstein debuted with the New York Philharmonic at 25 and became music director of the Toscanini-founded orchestra, the New York City Symphony aged 27, Gergiev was a mature 35 when he took over at the Maryinski Theatre in (then) Leningrad; the young Latvian Mariss Jansons began his triumphant years with the Oslo Philharmonic in 1979 aged 36; while his compatriot Andris Nelsons took over the Birmingham orchestra in 2008 when he was 29.

A recent issue of Gramophone celebrated 10 of a new generation of rising stars (not counting Dudamel who, at 30, is regarded as well-established now). One of them is Petrenko, while on the cover was Yannick Nézet-Séguin who conducted our National Youth Orchestra a few years ago. Interestingly, an accompanying article noted the continued absence of women conductors. It looks as if the advent of such fine conductors as Jane Glover, Simone Young, Marin Alsop, Julia Jones, Xian Zhang, JoAnn Falletta, Odaline de la Martinez (not forgetting Herbertina von Karajan or Georgina Solti) has not really created a well-marked career path for women.

Two former schools chamber music contest winners return in international roles

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Chamber Music New Zealand

Alwyn Westbrooke: “?”, or: Why Gryphons Shouldn’t Dance
Ravel: Trio in A minor
Schubert: Piano Trio no.2 in E flat, Op.100, D929

Saguaro Trio (John Chen, piano, Luanne Homzy, violin, Peter Myers, cello)

Wellington Town Hall

Wednesday, 3 August 2011, 7.30pm

It cannot be too often that two young people who both played in the Schools Chamber Music Contest in the same year appear on the same top-flight CMNZ tour merely ten years later, one as pianist and the other as composer.

Yet that was the case in this CMNZ programme in Wellington, part of a tour of ten centres in New Zealand, to be followed by a five-city tour in Australia. In the local tour, the Saguaro Trio will perform in both the Taranaki and the Christchurch Music Festivals (good on Christchurch for going ahead with their Festival!)

The Trio has had great success since it formed in 2007, the very next year winning competitions in Japan, and in the USA, where all three were then based, and an important competition in Hamburg, where all three now live, in 2009. (The photograph in the CMNZ subscription brochure for this year shows a different cellist.)

In the Hamburg contest, eight different trios were required to be played – a very demanding programme. On this tour, six different works are being performed.

The work by Alwyn Westbrooke, who was a student at Burnside High School in Christchurch when he had success as both composer and performer in the Contest, and uniquely won both the performance first prize (as a violinist with his quartet) and the composition prize, was a commission by CMNZ. Its composer heard it for the first time at the beginning of this tour, in Invercargill.

His work opened the programme. It came over as an experiment in sounds, but with coherence. The word ‘beauty’ does not come to mind, however. Various unusual techniques were applied to the string instruments. I thought ‘There must be some plucking of the piano strings soon’, and sure enough! It seems to be obligatory these days. There was extraordinary playing from all three performers, but especially from John Chen. However, I did not find the work engaging.

The Ravel trio has a very gentle, vague opening, evoking thoughts of ‘Where are we? What key are we in?’ It received strong yet subtle playing. The delicious reverie, particularly in the piano part, summons idyllic thoughts and images. This movement calls on Basque folk dance, and evokes a mysterious atmosphere. As the programme note put it “…a wistful movement… dominated by rhythmic fluctuations and hypnotically shifting harmonies.”

The second movement was quite lively and exotic, yet enchanting. Then came the more contemplative Passacaille third. It was played with fluidity, fluency and finesse. It even became solemn, with use of the lower register of the piano. The final movement gradually livened up – but this is predominantly a mellow, graceful work.

These performers demonstrated first-class balance and blend. Their ensemble was near-perfect in timing, intonation, dynamics, expression and interpretation. Only a couple of times towards the end of the final work did I hear a couple of rum notes.

In the Ravel work the strings tend to work as a pair. The Canadian violinist was a semi-finalist in the Michael Hill Violin Competition in New Zealand last year; both she and the American cellist had thorough techniques and grasp of the music, but both were undemonstrative performers. The deft, accomplished playing of the whole trio made it clear why they had won in Hamburg – and why there was no second place-getter to rival their achievement.

However, the pianist has probably the greater say in the Ravel trio, and John Chen’s playing had assurance yet sensitivity.

Like all of Schubert’s major works the Trio in E flat is quite long – and quite delightful. It is full of fertile melodies and lovely harmonies. Its mood is happy, sombre and exultant by turns.

Listening to the Saguaro Trio, one would think that they had been playing this music together for years, and it reminded me of hearing the great Beaux Arts Trio play it in Wellington years ago; it left a permanent impression. (Menahem Pressler, the pianist in that group, was chair of the judging panel at the Hamburg competition that the Saguaro Trio won.)

A fiery, passionate, yet at times romantic allegro opens the work. ‘…Schubert managed to achieve balance between the instruments, never allowing the piano part to dominate’ as the writer of the programme note said; the performers achieved this equality.

The andante second movement opens with a sombre cello them which is then taken up by the piano; here and elsewhere in the movement the pianissimos were gorgeous. The vigorous scherzo is partnered by a chorale-like trio, of much heavier mood and expression, then the cheerful, extravert finale arrives, thoughtful as well as animated. It returns to the melody of the second movement, played lyrically with rich, sonorous tone by Peter Myers.

The Saguaro Trio is a consummate ensemble; a combination of superb musicians in complete accord. I will be most surprised if they don’t hit the ‘big time’ quite soon.

There was a reasonably good house, but I thought there would be more people come to hear well-known New Zealander John Chen play, and to experience the interesting programme. It was pleasing to see a considerable proportion of young people attending; appropriate, since the players themselves are all young.

A night to savour – Britten’s “Dream” enchants at NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BRITTEN – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (opera in 3 acts)

The New Zealand School of Music, Wellington

Director: Sara Brodie

Cast:  The Fairies – Joe Baxter (Puck) / Bianca Andrew (Oberon) / Bridget Costello (Tytania) / Angelique MacDonald (Cobweb) / Amelia Ryman (Peaseblossom) / Daniela Young (Mustardseed) / (Christina Orgias (Moth)  Mitchell Chin (Indian Boy)

The Lovers – Imogen Thirwall (Hermia) / Thomas Atkins (Lysander) / Bryony Williams (Helena) / Kieran Rayner (Demetrius)

The Mechanicals – Simon Harnden (Peter Quince) / Thomas O’Brien (Flute) / Christian Thurston (Snug) / Fredi Jones (Starveling) / William McElwee (Snout) / Thomas Barker (Bottom)

The Royals – Robert Gray (Theseus) / Emily Simcox (Hippolyta)

Chorus: Awhina Waimotu / Rebekah Giesbers / Esther Leefe / Isabella Moore / Tess Robinson

New Zealand School Of Music Opera Orchestra (Leader: Arna Shaw)

Conductor: Michael Vinten

Memorial Theatre,Victoria University of Wellington

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Performances to come: Saturday 6th (sold out) / Tuesday 9th August

Enchanting! – put simply, a “must-see!” production – so all-pervading was the atmosphere emanating from the stage of the Memorial Theatre I found myself enjoying a child’s delight at the magical evocations of sight and sound, the production taking me to what felt like the beating heart of a creative fusion of words, movement and music. I did have wits about me enough to scribble a few things in the dark along the way, mostly hardly intelligible afterwards – but I had little need of these skeletal hieroglyphics, as only part of me was awakened at the end, leaving other parts even now still dreaming the wood outside Athens and the shadowy epilogues of the “most lamentable comedy” performed by the Mechanicals in the house of Duke Theseus.

Bearing in mind what I’d heard concerning the almost perversion-ridden and voyeuristic slants taken by some recent overseas productions of this opera, I read beforehand with some relief in director Sara Brodie’s notes her avowed desire to “celebrate and balance the scales in favour of revealing the lighter side of Britten’s genius”, thus holding at arm’s length the current, somewhat pathological urge on the part of opera directors to imbue established works with spurious, and often, at the most, peripheral up-datings and psycho-analytical re-workings. Brodie’s significant comment regarding directorial alternatives for this production – “such journeying…I suspect, would have led to darkness” is evidently well borne out elsewhere in the operatic world, and, one would think in some cases, to everybody’s cost in the long run. The power of mere suggestion was, by contrast, here amply brought into play by the Mozartean ambivalence (hang on, but who came first, da Ponte or Shakespeare?) of the lovers towards one another at the conclusion (well, maybe) of their confused and dream-like re-partnerings (echoes of another opera, Cosi fan tutte, indeed…perhaps I meant Britten – or Mozart!).

Britten’s genius was, I think, expressed in completely entering the Shakespearean world of “reality versus dream” that runs almost seamlessly through the latter’s works, with merely Lysander’s line “compelling thee to marry with Demetrius” being the sole, explanatory non-Shakespeare original utterance in the opera. Writing as someone who’s acted in the original play, I’m at every hearing struck freshly dumb at Britten’s imaginative response to words and dramatic situations I imagined I already knew, but realize how much more there is still to know. Far more than merely re-activating that process for me, this production stimulated wonder that Britten hadn’t subsequently turned to that most operatic of Shakespearean plays, “The Tempest”, one which might have, I suspect, as strongly fired his creative sensibilities (alas, my wish the stuff of different kinds of dreams, I fear.)

That chink of curtained magic and mystery which parted to the touch of the sweetly-pyjama-ed “Indian Boy” at the beginning drew us inexorably into the world of Faery, the orchestral playing darkly- and diaphonously-woven under conductor Michael Vinten’s direction (the orchestra on the stage), and the fairies of marvellously unearthly substance, singing with haunting tones, and galvanized by Puck’s equally fantastical but more visceral and volatile appearance, brilliantly realized throughout by Joe Baxter. Our audience-space was magically enveloped by the warring monarchs of Fairyland, Oberon and Tytania, hurling their opening disputations across the auditorium’s vistas, drawing us into the conflict over the “Indian Boy”. As Oberon, Bianca Andrew’s richly-wrought tones brilliantly and easefully negotiated music the composer originally conceived for a counter-tenor (the renowned Alfred Deller was the role’s creator), and her haughty deportment and piercingly-focused gaze powerfully informed her scenes with the equally implacable Tytania of Bridget Costello (who made a drop-dead stunning appearance upon the auditorium’s stairs). Though the latter’s singing wanted a shade more vocal allure in places (during her love-potion-induced reaction to the bemused ass-headed Bottom, for instance) she looked wonderful, and made something lasting of “Oh, how I love thee – how I dote on thee!”

Both fairy monarchs are slightly undone, Oberon by Puck’s injurious approximations with the flower’s love-juices, and Tytania by being, of course, temporarily “enamor’d of an ass”. Oberon’s thwarted desires brought out nicely-accented tantalizing touches of androgynously-coloured eroticism in his dealings with the hapless Puck, though I felt Tytania’s parallel journeyings through her dream-experience didn’t seem greatly to infuse her subsequent character (she’s somewhat inert and “unconnecting” with Oberon in the dance sequence when he sings “Now thou and I are new in amity”, thus failing to suggest that the experience of her “sleep” has actually touched her in any way). This certainly wasn’t the case with the lovers, whose experiences in the Athens wood (so rich a symbol of what outwardly conceals the inner fecundity and revelatory power of the mind’s explorations) were depicted as having changed them forever, in terms of both the world and their inner selves – their subconsciously-driven partner-exchange dance after their final awakening an insightful representation, I thought, of the deeply equivocal nature of things, akin to an “elective affinities” scenario, with which the story leaves us.

As much as the excellence of most of the singing I was struck by the security and confidence of the acting of the couples – they LOOKED so right, for one, and throughout their marriage of movement and gesture to their vocal declamations had a rightness that I felt faltered only during parts of the confrontation scene between Hermia and Helena, when for me the musical and dramatic focus was blurred with too much stage movement – we lost some of the poignancy of Helena’s grief at Hermia’s apparent rending of “our ancient love asunder”, much of which was sacrificed to excessive hurly-burly. This impression apart, I found so much to admire in each performance, securely sung and characterfully acted. I liked the differentiation between them – Thomas Atkins’ Lysander very boyish, overcoming some initial inertia and producing some beautiful singing of some of his later phrases, and Kieran Rayner’s more worldly Demetrius, the voice ever-sonorous and expressive as to word-values. The women were similarly contrasted, Imogen Thirwell’s demure aspect and beautifully modulated utterances as Hermia a perfect foil for Bryony Williams’ wonderfully uninhibited Helena, vocally and dramatically risking composure in search of the appropriate expression, and engaging our sympathy throughout.

Against these “real” people, the cardboard cut-out figures of Duke Theseus and his Queen Hippolyta were always going to struggle; and Robert Gray and Emily Simcox did their best with ungrateful parts, singing their phrases clearly and directly (dressed thus, I feel sure I also would have had trouble with Theseus’s words “Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword and won thy love, doing thee injuries”….perhaps a notch or two more dramatic stylization of their characters might have helped overlay the occasional chinks of discomfort evinced by people with, in reality, very little to do – the “idle rich” personified, no doubt). However, there was definitely not a shred of doubt regarding the status of the renowned “Mechanicals”, the group of common workmen desirous of performing a play for the nuptial celebrations of their Master, the Duke. Their representation on stage was, here, simply a delight from beginning to end. The plum of the parts is, of course, Bottom, played and sung here with terrific energy and enviable dramatic skill by Thomas Barker – one imagines his skills would be as successfully applied to spoken theatre as to opera, though the latter would be the poorer if such a circumstance were to take him in the other direction. His command of the stage in places was unequivocal, though such was the strength of the production’s dramatic instincts for balance, his rustic collaborators were by no means overshadowed.

While Bottom more-or-less superimposes his own personality upon his part of the hero, Pyramus, in the play, the others, apart from the group’s nominal leader, Peter Quince, have “double-personae” with whom to engage. Firstly, William McElwee’s Snout diverted us greatly with his Wall and chink, while, together with Bottom as Pyramus, Thomas O’Brien’s Flute won our hearts against all good judgement with his tremulous portrayal of Thisbe, Pyramus’s would-be sweetheart. Christian Thurston’s Snug the joiner awakened our sympathies for the underdog before assuming the Lion in the play to wrathful effect; while Fredi Jones’s Starveling marvellously delineated his own discomfiture on stage as Moonshine, and his annoyance at being constantly interrupted! And finally, in the first utterances of the group’s nominal leader, Peter Quince, we enjoyed the sonorous tones of Simon Harnden, whose rich bass-baritone I would anticipate hearing more of, in years to come.

This was a stunningly-dressed production – there simply wasn’t a costume that I thought didn’t do its job nicely, a tribute to the expertise of designer Diane Brodie. The colours and configurations of these shone truly and satisfyingly throughout, apart from one or two upstage moments (generally avoided by the director, and with good reason) where people emerged from relative gloom into the full atmospheric splendor of Tony Rabbit’s fluidly-applied lighting scheme. Incidentally, the proscenium arch also seemed to my ears a barrier to vocal quality and volume, though again, Sara Brodie cannily kept things well to the fore as often as she could.

No praise can be too high for conductor Michael Vinten, and for his committed, hard-working musicians, whose realization of Britten’s score had, at their best by turns moments of such evocative mystery, gossamer loveliness, and bright, unequivocal gaiety as to take one’s breath away in many places. True, there were a couple of moments, especially towards the end, where the string tone faltered and some orchestral poise had to be regained. But my over-riding impression was one of kaleidoscopic beauty and infectious energy, with many and varied contributions (special mention must be made of trumpeter Raynor Martin, dragged around and about the stage on a leash by the mischievous Puck during one of the former’s fiendish first-act trumpet solos, yet managing to accurately hit nearly all of his notes in a spirited fashion!) Added to this was singing from the chorus that also made many moments unforgettable, none more so than the lump-in-the-throat conclusion to Act Two, when the assembled fairy group sings the unearthly “On the ground, sleep sound” to the exhausted and totally confused lovers. It was a moment that for me seemed to sum up the achievement of director Sara Brodie and all others concerned with this beautiful production – a New Zealand premiere of the work, incidentally; and one of which the same people (and opera-lovers in general in this country) can be justly proud.

Crude narcissism smothers TV doco on NZSO tour

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The NZSO on tour – documentary on Prime television

Sunday evening, 31 July

I found the TV film on the NZSO’s 2010 Europe tour a total embarrassment.

Some may think that the only way to make a watchable documentary is to lace it with
sex and crudeness. I differ.

Today’s permissive climate, when it isn’t cool to harbour behaviour standards known in
former times as decent, cultivated or civilized, makes it hard for anyone to say something is offensive, tasteless and inappropriate; but here goes.

As producer and front man, Jeremy Wells (I reveal my avoidance of television: I’d never heard of him) exhibited the worst kind of ‘Kiwi’ arrogance-cum-inferiority complex, all made the more offensive by his narcissism, his inability to keep his own discreet distance from his subjects, keeping the focus on them in a courteous way.

Instead, he insisted on being centre stage.

The whole project struck me as misguided. An attempt to engage the ‘masses’ through dumbing down, not just by avoiding too much talk about the music or avoiding letting musicians (other than a nice chat with Hilary Hahn) speak with any substance about their trade, but by stooping to the grubby depths of incessant sexual references and questions.

I do not believe that such behaviour wins friends from any quarter: it repels the ordinary music lover and probably somewhat surprises and leaves bemused those who don’t know or care anyway.

Wells’s attempt to talk to Dame Kiri epitomized his egotism, his self-centred unsuitability, even incompetence in the role of interviewer. After managing to offend her by his rudely casual, impertinent, ill-prepared questions, he displayed his over-weening ego by leaving in the edited film the clear signs of her astonishment at being addressed in such an inappropriate manner by a young, inexperienced, ill-informed, smart-alec adolescent who was more intent on keeping himself in the frame (aurally speaking) than asking her thoughtful questions that might elicit interesting replies.

She had no choice other than to bat questions away on things she could not comment on. She attempted to open a subject on which she might talk: classical music’s and the NZSO’s invisibility on New Zealand television as one of the reasons for declining knowledge of and interest in classical music, but the interview was rudely broken off – by him or by her was not clear. His self-absorption then allowed him to tell us that she had it wrong and that it was the result of the recession.

I have never seen such an inappropriate, rude interview of a person who is one of the most famous New Zealanders internationally. Was Kiri’s clear discomfort any surprise, given Wells’s appalling behaviour? The scope to elicit interesting comment was huge; just one: the importance of a tour like this for the orchestra’s standing back home, and asking her to recall her singing with the orchestra at the Seville EXPO in 1992.

The man exhibited an adolescent obsession with sex and scatological matters that were mesmerizing in their offensiveness and clumsiness. And he seemed oblivious to the clear discomfort, of his subject’s sense of the irrelevance and stupidity of his approach.

He asked harpist Carolyn Mills whether she’d thought about staging a naked harpist routine; he discomfitted trombonist David Bremner by linking the practising of music at speed with performing sexual activites fast or slow. He was childishly curious about the musicians’ bladder and bowel behaviour during performances, his camera hovering in the precincts of the toilets as players came in and out.

He astonished the in-house doctor at one of the concert halls by asking how she would handle an accident that involved a violinist severing his testicle.

He asked the orchestra’s physiotherapist whether she got propositions from players to
engage in sexual style massage.

He asked about injunctions from management about sexual activities before concerts, as rumour suggests applies to sports-people.

It all seemed directed at an audience of smutty-minded defectives, poos-and-wees infants, the ignorant and stupid.

In line with his obsession with keeping attention on himself, he staged a stupid episode on the lake front at Lucerne, starting a comment about the city’s history which was repeatedly interrupted by traffic and street noise: not three times, not four times, but more like six or eight times. But he offered almost no commentary otherwise on places visited.

The Shanghai episode, however, showing Chinese camera-culture and the unusual behaviour of the concert audience was telling and amusing.

He failed to engage any of the players in normal, friendly discussion that might have given any viewers without great interest in classical music, a sympathetic insight into their training, their work, and in the way they felt about music.

In Vienna’s Musikverein he spoke cursorily to one of the few players from Germany itself, Norbert Heuser, without any attempt to elicit comment about the German musical scene; for example, about the huge numbers of orchestras and opera companies, all heavily supported by central, provincial or local government.

His entire performance was summed up as he took upon himself the role of the conductor, leaving his dressing room, preening himself before all the many mirrors that lined the walls through passageways to the stage. It seemed to be far more an enactment of his own narcissistic nature than that of the quietly unassuming Pietari Inkinen.

Though Wells managed to pronounce foreign words and names well enough and didn’t show undue ignorance of music, his whole demeanour seemed to speak of insecurity, of an attempt to impose his own big personality over those of the players, to belittle them: people whose lives revolve round ‘classical music for god’s sake’; and to invite his TV audience to share in his own slightly scornful manner in dealing with people whose skills and knowledge in a major artistic sphere far exceeded his own.

Yes, there were interesting shots of concert halls, inside and out but there was little attempt to flesh out the experience with background on the cities and their history in a few lines, other than the ridiculous stunt at Lucerne: he’d have done better to mention the famous Cultural Centre at Lucerne designed by Jean Nouvel, where the concert was held.  Though he did allow the backgound of Geneva’s Victoria Hall (because of the British connection I suppose).

Generally, the camera work seemed listless and unimaginative, lacking much zest
or curiosity.

Assuming that the orchestra management had little indication before the tour began of the way producer Jeremy Wells planned to operate, I find it extraordinary that once the man had started, and engaged in these scabrous, prurient, unworthy interviews with orchestra members, a decision wasn’t taken to send him home.

New Zealand Trio in beautiful Upper Hutt recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Brahms: Piano Trio No 2 in C, Op 87; Chris Adams: Jekyl Rat; Kenji Bunch: Swing
Shift; Schubert: Piano Trio No 1 in B flat, D 898

New Zealand Trio (Justine Cormack – violin, Ashley Brown – cello, Sarah Watkins –
piano)

Expressions Arts Centre, Upper Hutt

Thursday 28 July, 8pm

I have been sorry to miss the first two concerts in this year’s Classical Expressions series at Upper Hutt’s so agreeable arts centre.

Unfortunately, neither of my colleagues had been able to get to them either.

For the record the earlier concerts were by the Amici Ensemble, which comprises leading players from the NZSO, who played, inter alia, clarinet quintets by Brahms and Anthony Ritchie; and the violin and piano of Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons, whose recital included Schubert’s Fantasie in C (D 934 presumably) and Strauss’s Violin Sonata.

It was a calm and cool (not cold) evening and I’d have expected a big turn-out on account of the trio’s programming of two of the most glorious piano trios, by Brahms and Schubert. But the auditorium was little more than half filled; though one has to recognize that these concerts are a little more expensive than comparable concerts elsewhere.

Brahms
That didn’t lead to performances of any less warmth and richness however. Helped very significantly by the luxurious tone of the piano, this was music, from the very opening unison chords, in the high Romantic tradition, revealing all the emotion and profundity of spirit that Brahms had at his command: the players sounded fully in sympathy and  captured all its opulence and grandeur.

What intrigues me about the slow movement is Brahms’s rhythmic ambiguity which, if not handled with an unerring instinct, can sound uncertain and irregular, but the trio unraveled it all while not losing sight of Brahms’s pleasure in posing little enigmas throughout the course of the several variations which comprise the Andante. Ambiguity is one of the essentials of a work of art.

I was often struck by the happy blending of tone and spirit by violin and cello, and Sarah Watkins’s piano playing was the very essence of the chamber music style, both supportive and illuminating.

Naturally, there is some falling-off of profundity in a scherzo movement, and though the players threw themselves vigorously into it, the music becomes a bit routine (but in a sense that is strictly relative only to Schubert’s finest compositions); the more soulful trio section of the Scherzo, between outer tremolando passages, was played with particular relish. A deep contemplative spirit is replaced in the Finale by something Brahms does well –a certain daemonic flippancy, alternating light and shade, the full-bodied and the ghostly.

Schubert
Schubert’s B flat trio ended the concert. In this, more than in the Brahms, I felt, the players, while never faltering in their ensemble, found ways to differentiate their parts that made you pay particular attention to them as individual players. Though it is a remarkably balanced group in terms of musical skill and interpretive faculty, I found my attention drawn very often to Ashley Brown’s cello (perhaps through being a cellist of the 5th class myself); for example in the slow, emotionally strong crescendo bowings in the Allegro.

Schubert’s slow movements are usually at the heart of his music, and the impression is easy to conjure up in the late works, in this case, suffering advancing illness, just a year before his death. it seemed to dramatise the lyrical, the emphatic, the meditative, the
despairing even, with special force.

Again in the Scherzo I sense a certain striving for jollity that, on an uncharitable day, might seem a bit false, and I felt the players did hint at a little of that in the playing. The middle Trio section was allowed to be more soulful.

Music as politics
In between these two masterpieces were two contemporary pieces that reflected places and people in a very particular way, a way which might have raised eyebrows in earlier periods when music was expected to be mainly abstract, translating stories or characters through means that were formally and primarily musical. There seems to be no widespread disapproval of ‘programme’ music these days, and a great deal of music is conspicuously inspired by and intended to evoke extra-musical ideas, images, narratives.

Chris Adams’s Jekyll Rat, in spite of Ashley Brown’s elaborate avoidance of naming the MP hidden in the score, was pretty transparent, especially in the second section, Sycophant’s Dance, a sort of Tango in which one could easily conjure the deputé in a TV show dropping his partner on the floor.

It’s curious that so few composers of the past have felt inspired to represent political issues in music; some opera composers did, certainly – Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner in particular – but how many chamber music composers did?. One gets no impression of the political views of Bach, Haydn, Mozart or Schumann…

Having remarked on the ‘programmatic’ nature of the piece, one must observe the clear
marks of a careful and imaginative musical structure, with rather recognizable musical signposts. It was in three parts: ‘Me ne frego’ – ‘I don’t give a damn’; ‘Sycophant’s Dance’; and ‘Insanity represented by Mustard Yellow’ (a remarkably clear clue). The wit lay in the musical invention, as much as in the non-musical aspect: in the scoring for the three instruments, during which I was often conscious of a smile on my face. It led the listener along unexpected paths, to surprising conjunctions of ideas, and it concluded in a diminuendo, disappearing in a puff of smoke or, if you like, up the subject’s hidden orifice.

For all its splendidly overt political message, I felt it also stood on its own feet as a quite extensive piece of music.

Night Flight in New York
The other contemporary piece was by Kenji Bunch, an Oregon-born composer, said in the notes to have emerged as one of America’s most prominent composers of his generation (he’s in his late 30s), but this puzzled me as I could find no website devoted to him and only very odd references to his music: none at all to Swing Shift, which turns out to be the name of a 1984 film, an American big band, an album by an Australian pop group, and so on. No mention of Bunch.

However, the players have supplied interesting background. Sarah sent me Bunch’s website (don’t be led to think Google or Wikipedia are exhaustive reference sources). He’s written a symphony, a great variety of music for large and small forces, been commissioned, inter alia, by the English Chamber Orchestra, St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, the Naumburg Foundation, and has been broadcast on the BBC and NHK, Japan.

The trio played one movement, Night Flight, the second of the six-movement suite, Swing Shift, comprising three lively and three calmer movements, by Kenji Bunch. Last year they played the sixth movement, Grooveboxes, at Paekakariki. This year the trio are playing movements from Swing Shift at their Auckland Museum concerts this year and Justine says they might play the entire suite some time. Both the movements played so far have been feisty, jazzy and strongly rhythmic. Night Flight is written in a reasonably conventional idiom, strong four-in-a-bar rhythms, with stretches of piano arpeggios and ostinato-like motifs.

The piece was personable, lively and colourful and suggests that the opinions recorded about Bunch are just.

I can imagine a performance of the whole work in a venue like a museum. It’s a pity that none of Wellington’s museums appear to be aware of the common world-wide practice of presenting good music. Sure there is music, but very little evidence of its selection by people with cultivated musical taste or knowledge of the all-important classical repertoire.

A chamber ensemble’s environment
The NZ Trio is among the most accomplished full-time professional chamber groups in New Zealand. While there is a large repertoire for piano trio, much of the 18th century is domestic or salon music, even that of Haydn and Mozart; almost all the relatively few great works are of the 19th century. Thus a piano trio is right to devote a lot of effort to exploring contemporary repertoire, and particularly to commission New Zealand music.

All these things the NZ Trio does splendidly, and it’s to be hoped that the unhappy political and economic environment will not affect the survival of the group. The fresh decision by Radio New Zealand Concert to cease paying fees (forced by frozen funding from New Zealand on Air) to concert promoters for broadcasting rights will have a serious impact on most chamber music groups. However, in the meantime, it will not stop the recording and broadcasting of concerts, though reductions in their numbers might be imposed in due course, as political ill-will towards state-funding of the arts is like a cancer.

NZSO Soloists – becoming as sounding brass

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BRASS SPLENDOUR from the NZSO Soloists

ELGAR (arr. Wick) – Severn Suite Op.87 / GRIEG (arr. Emerson) – Funeral March in memory of Rikard Nordraak

HANDEL (arr.Maunder) – Music for the Royal Fireworks / GABRIELI – Sacrae Symphoniae: Canzon 10

BRUCKNER (arr.Rose) – 2 Motets / R.STRAUSS (arr. Maunder)- Festmusik der Stadt Wien

NZSO players:

Michael Kirgan, Cheryl Hollinger, Mark Carter, Thomas Moyer (trumpets)

Peter Sharman, David Moonan (horns)  / David Bremner, Peter Maunder (trombones)

Andrew Jarvis (tuba) / Bruce McKinnon, Leonard Sakofsky, Thomas Guldborg (percussion) / Laurence Reese (timpani)

Guest players:

Andrew Bain (horn, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) / Elizabeth Simpson (horn, Ottawa National Arts Centre Orchestra)

Tom Coyle (trombone, Queensland Symphony Orchestra) / Scott Kinmont (trombone, Sydney Symphony Orchestra)

Town Hall, Wellington

Thursday 28th July, 2011

The irony of former Principal Horn Ed Allen’s retirement from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra virtually on the eve of the Orchestral Brass Soloists’ Tour wasn’t lost on the writer of a section of the concert program, the part entitled “Musical Chairs”. Replacing Ed Allen for the four-concert tour was Andrew Bain, (sporting the title “Guest Principal Horn”), in fact Principal Horn of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. But there’s more – compounding the musical “exchange rate” were three other “guest musicians” featured on the “Brass Splendour” tour – the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s Tom Doyle sat in for NZSO Principal Bass Trombone Graeme Browne (on leave), while Canadian Elizabeth Simpson (from the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa) swapped places with NZSO Sub-Principal Horn Heather Thompson, who’s enjoying a Canadian summer playing Fourth Horn with the Ottawa NACO. As well, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Associate Principal Trombone Scott Kinmont was invited to join the tour. I’m put in mind of what comedian and raconteur Michael Flanders once said, introducing a performance of his and Donald Swann’s show “At The Drop of A Hat” – “Right! – double bookings sorted out, are they?” However, despite these changes having been rung, the ensemble looked and sounded confident and stylish as its members filed onto the Wellington Town Hall stage and began the concert.

Elgar’s Severn Suite was first up, an arrangement for brass ensemble by Dennis Wick. The original brass band version, sketched out by Elgar and orchestrated by one Henry Geehl (over which result there was trouble between arranger and composer) was dedicated to George Bernard Shaw, who declared that the music “would ensure my immortality when all my plays are dead and damned and forgotten”. Amusingly, Shaw suggested to Elgar that he ought to use bandsmen’s language in the score instead of the usual Italian: – “For instance, remember that a Minuet is a dance and not a bloody hymn; or, steady up for artillery attack; or now – like Hell!” Shaw claimed his suggestions would help some of the modest beginner players.

Perhaps this ensemble’s members had read Shaw’s advice to Elgar as well – because they tore into the opening “Worcester Castle” almost unceremoniously, leaving behind any notions of Elgarian “nobilmente” in favor of urgency and energy – too much so, for me, though plenty of others would have found it exciting. I thought the lack of pomp and grandeur at the beginning made an insufficient tempo contrast with the following “Tournament” which was where the true excitement needed to happen. As it was, the drum-taps beginning the “Tournament” episode didn’t have the sense of pent-up expectation they ought to have generated, largely because a lot of rhythmic impetus had already been spent by the playing throughout the opening. I wondered whether this was a factor in the noticeable proportion of mis-hit notes we heard early on, the players certainly taking some time to “warm up”. As well, I wondered whether for this particular work the ensemble actually needed the guiding hand of a conductor, someone who could have helped bring out the “swagger” of the off-beat rhythms, so difficult for an undirected group to bring off. In fact, at one point during the “Minuet”, I did notice trombonist David Bremner (I think it was) making conducting gestures, lending the group a pre-arranged hand, no doubt. By the time the opening music had returned (still a shade too fast for me – Elgar’s music has to have, I think, a certain “stride” in which both energy and solid girth have a part to play, with every footfall cogently advancing the argument in its own way) the playing had settled and the attack and intonation were more secure.

Things came together wonderfully for the players’ heartfelt rendition of a Grieg rarity, Funeral March in Memory of Rikard Nordraak. (Nordraak and Grieg were fellow-composers, the former inspiring the latter to make as his life’s work the cause of Norwegian music). Giving the music time for the tones to amply fill both physical and temporal spaces, the ensemble literally rose to the occasion in delivering a full-blooded,percussion-supported climax to a sequence that began with such wonderfully hushed, expectant melancholy at the outset. The players brought out the different instruments’ timbres, in particular making much of the contrasts in softer passages between trumpets and horns, and enjoyed the major key change in the “Trio” section of the music, Grieg interrupting the more cheerful, if piquant mood with a great horn outburst at the music’s heart, extremely forthright, but both brazen and noble by turns. This being a new work for me, I was impressed at the range, depth and darkness of emotion wrought by the composer, and thrilled and moved by the performance.

Trombonist Peter Maunder certainly had been busy for this concert, rearranging a lot of music for this particular ensemble, including Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks (the programme’s playing order said Richard Strauss’s Festmusik der Stadt Wien would follow the Grieg, but the Strauss and Handel items were swapped around). So it was Handel in Peter Maunder’s skilful realization, the playing here seeming to me influenced in style and sharp focus by the “authentic” school of Baroque performance – admirable in terms of clean, lean lines and sharply-defined rhythms, but somehow lacking a real sense of “occasion”. It’ll be considered heresy of me to say so, but I’ve always loved Hamilton Harty’s full-orchestra arrangements of this music, simply because they always sound so grand and ceremonial. On the other hand, I’ve also dearly loved for years my old Pye recording of Charles Mackerras’ “ultra-authentic” recreation of one of those first London performances of this music, with every available wind player in London at the time seemingly brought into the fray. Neither of these examples have much to do on paper with what we heard in concert, except that, expert though the playing was, I simply wanted, I think, more out-and-out performance flair and panache (again, a conductor might have helped) – more grandeur in places, and energy in others, more abandonment on the part of the percussion, more space in and around the music (almost anything goes with Baroque realizations, judging by how readily the composers borrowed their own and each others’ music for whatever purpose which suited).

As if putting my thoughts and feelings into “demonstration mode” the first item after the interval provided all the “frisson” of spectacle one associates with ceremonial brass, one of Giovanni Garbrieli’s joyous Sacrae Symphoniae, the Canzon 10. With the players exploiting the antiphonal potentialities of the playing-space by standing in two rows at the top of each half of the “organ gallery”, the Hall was, literally, saturated with resplendently produced sounds, readily evoking old-world ritual and sensibility – we in the audience loved it (because of my relative unfamiliarity with much of Gabrieli’s music I felt at one with those caught up by Sir Thomas Beecham’s well-known remark pertaining to English audiences, who “don’t know much about music, but like the noise it makes”). More unfamiliar music of a beguiling aspect was to follow, unscheduled as per program, but readily welcomed by an intrigued audience – two of Anton Bruckner’s Motets, played by four trombones – in a way, the antithesis of the Gabrieli we had just heard, but at the same time the beautiful solemnity of the sounds (gorgeous playing) presenting the perfect foil for the Italian’s fulsome brilliance.

Exuberance and excitability marked the opening of Richard Strauss’s Festmusik der Stadt Wien (another splendid arrangement for the ensemble by Peter Maunder), the music then characteristically going on to a more nostalgic vein, with evocative modulations (nice trumpet work in thirds and sixths – definitely the former, the latter being a keen listener’s guess!) the sound of an “Imperial Vienna” provenance. With the players really hitting their straps by this stage of the evening, there was page after page of “on-to-it” music-making, the whole casting a refulgent glow, leading up to a grand Straussian build-up and a vigorous coda, filled with virtuoso writing for the instrumental combinations, before the music touched our hearts with parting-shot nostalgic promptings of imaginings of a world forever disappeared. What we expected to have been a rousing finish to an evening was then delightfully augmented by “something completely different” – firstly, the spectacle of Lenny Sakofsky being pushed to centre-stage, sitting amidst a drum-kit configuration of “splendiferous magnitude” (in fact it seemed as though he might at any moment have kick-started the monster with a roar and a cloud of blue smoke and disappeared up the aisle and out the Town Hall doors!), and then the mellifluous strains of Duke Ellington’s Do nothing’ till you hear from me, the players “swinging” with what seemed to me like total identification with the idiom.

Delightful lunchtime recital from violin and guitar

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Unfamiliar music for violin and guitar works charms

Music by Almer Imamovic, Anthony Ritchie, Ciprian Porumbescu, and Ian Krouse

Duo Tapas (Rupa Maitra – violin; Owen Moriarty – guitar)

Old Saint Paul’s, Mulgrave Street

Tuesday 26 July, 12.15pm

A concert like this usually offers a variety of surprises: there’s the unexpected delight from particularly charming pieces of music, and there were several such instances; the experience of an unusual instrumental combination and the way music originally for others has adapted so well; and the realization that the world has never been so overflowing with beautiful, rewarding music – most of it, naturally, to be broadly labeled as ‘classical’.

The uncovering of hundreds of gifted composers of earlier times, who have come to be overshadowed by a handful of geniuses with names like Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, has given classical music a very different look over the past half century, with the realization that many of them sometimes produced better music than the ‘great’ ones did, on their off-days.

And in our age, there are so many talented composers in every country that no one could even claim familiarity with the names of many of the best of them.

Almer Imamovic is a good example: a guitarist and composer from Bosnia whom Owen Moriarty came to know when both were studying in Wales.

The pieces by Imamovic were originally written for flute and guitar, but the violin seemed the perfectly natural voice for the melodic lines. The Song for Marcus opened in up-beat style, bearing more sign of Turkish origin than of the Balkans, though of course most of the region was part of the Ottoman Empire for many centuries and there is a sizable Muslim minority in Bosnia. Based on two related tunes in the energetic opening section, then passing to a calmer middle section, the two instruments were in perfect balance and made one oblivious to the quite other character of the timbered gothic church where we sat.

Their final offerings were Theme for Caroline and Tapkalica, clearly from a similar source, the first a charming, simple melody which evolved very interestingly to subtly syncopated rhythms. In the second, the guitar began alone, with rhapsodic cadenzas which came to be a fine show-piece for the lovely musicality of violinist and the fleet-fingered guitarist.

The only piece from a dead composer, who came from the same part of the world, was that of Cyprian Porumbescu (from Romania: 1853-83). His Balada was filled with a Balkan nostalgia, exquisitely soulful but in music that found an equally captivating way to express quiet passion.

Ian Krouse is a Californian composer for guitar and other instruments (Wikipedia reveals an opera on Garcia Lorca); evidently eclectic, as his Air had an Irish tang in the lie of its melody; this too had its origin for flute and guitar and was more than comfortable in this perfectly idiomatic and charming account for violin and guitar.

Pieces by Anthony Ritchie occupied the rest of the programme. There are five parts to his Pas de deux, Op 51a, originally scored for two guitars; they chose Au revoir, evidently inspired by the end of a relationship which it described in lamenting but not lugubrious terms, using quite simple means to create an elegiac spirit; again, like the Balada, with a degree of suppressed passion.

It was not always easy to hear the remarks by the performers and I’m not sure whether it was pointed out that the Three Songs were a transcription of Ritchie’s Op 118 (Three pieces for viola and guitar). The title as given in the programme does not appear in his list of works.

Never mind.

Ritchie is one of those happy composers with sufficient self-confidence to allow tunes to appear in their music on a regular basis, and Au revoir and the Three Songs for Violin and Guitar (‘Song – Stone woman: a sculpture in Ilam Road, Christchurch’; ‘Tomahawk Sonnet’ and ‘Lovesong’) were so blessed. I had awaited a touch of Maori ferocity in the Tomahawk piece, but was later told it was the name of Ocean Grove, a suburb of Dunedin on the south coast of the Peninsula. It suggested a peaceful day. And the same went for Lovesong in which Ritchie seemed to be showing evidence of a heart repaired from the grief of Au revoir.

I’d heard none of this music before and the whole recital proved a delight, thanks to composers who knew their business and players who absolutely knew theirs.

An Angel Released – music by Eve de Castro-Robinson

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eve de Castro-Robinson – RELEASING THE ANGEL

with: David Chickering (‘cello) / Tzenka Dianova (piano)

Vesa-Matti Leppānen (violin)

Lyrica Choir of Kelburn Normal School, Wellington (director: Nicola Edgecumbe)

Blade / Trilogy (kinetic sculptures by Len Lye)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra / Conductor: Kenneth Young

Atoll ACD 141

(recorded in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington)

Listening to the very opening of Releasing the Angel, the first music track on composer Eve de Castro-Robinson’s new, eponymously-titled CD from Atoll Records, leaves me “on-the-spot smitten” by the music’s attractive tactile quality. How readily those shimmering orchestral sounds fly towards and wrap themselves around and about my ears! – and how, just as tantalizingly, they fall away, leaving the voice of a solo ‘cello floating in those same spaces. This is, of course, the voice of the “Angel”, a personification inspired by a quote from the great Michelangelo, whose words “First it was stone, and then I released an angel” could be regarded as a metaphor for any kind of creative artistic activity.

In the case of the present recording, the ‘cello is that of the work’s dedicatee, David Chickering, associate principal ‘cellist of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. These artists premiered the piece in 2005, at a concert which I attended, being at the time similarly enthralled by the inspirations of both the work and its performance. Interestingly, I thought the orchestral resonances surrounding the ‘cello just as “charged”, the fashioning of the angel happily breathing life into its context. These “enfolding” ambiences give tongue according to their own lights, at first rhapsodizing, and then becoming more dynamic and rhythmic in their gradually-energised spaces, developing a kind of ritualistic processional,with exotic-sounding themes and instrumentation. After some excited tremolandi the ‘cello indicates it wishes to perform the act of final release, with the help of a few orchestral ecstasies, and a repeatedly whistled motif from the soloist. Suddenly, but timelessly, there’s peace with the then and now, and for the ages. As what happens when one reads Huckleberry Finn, one leaves the spell of this music  with similar regret.

A significant aspect of this new release of Eve de Castro-Robinson’s work is the compositional ground it covers for the composer, the oldest work dating from 1987 – Peregrinations, for piano and orchestra, actually written as part of the composer’s doctorate, though revised by De Castro-Robinson in 1990. Despite it being what she calls “an old work” she values its representation of “signature sounds and compositional predilections”. I was fortunate enough to hear this work, played by Dan Poynton with the NZSO in 2006 – but for now, the pianist on the new recording is the superb Bulgarian-born Tzenka Dianova, whose energy and focus gives the writing that wonderful sense of spontaneous re-creation which accords brilliantly with the work’s overall raison d’être.

The work’s got a Ravelian beginning, growing out of what seems primordial material, impulses striving upwards towards the light, then stimulating an incredibly toccata-like frenzy in the orchestra which spawns all kinds of energies – there’s a kind of spontaneous impishness at work, here, in line with what the composer calls her “musical journey….a setting out on an expedition whose destination may not be clearly defined.” So, alongside the pre-planned musical landmarks, there’s an omnipresent sense of things wanting to go in unexpected directions. Out of a becalmed episode comes a violin solo (Vesa-Matti Leppānen), which in turn inspires a flowing cantilena from the strings, opening up the vistas of the orchestra and allowing space for an imposing tremolando to spread across the orchestral landscape. What’s remarkable about de Castro-Robinson’s writing is its transitional skill, an almost osmotic ability to move organically to and from extremes of colour, texture and rhythm. The result is a journey through the landscapes of the mind that sets a momentous feeling in places, against a quixotic and volatile spirit. Right to the end of the piece the “expect the unexpected” principle both keeps our interest and leaves us wanting more from each episode, thanks in part to the total identification with the work demonstrated by pianist, conductor and orchestra.

De Castro-Robinson’s music takes on a polemical edge with Other echoes, the one work on this CD previously recorded commercially, in this case by the Auckland Philharmonia and Nicholas Braithwaite, as part of the orchestra’s “Fanfares for the New Millennium” project of 1999. The music, featuring the imagined calls of the extinct huia as well as the threatened kokako, highlights the dangers for wildlife species posed by human activity; and continues to exert its power to disturb and awaken feelings regarding the issue. Its counterweight on this CD is the heartwarming These arms to hold you, written in 2007 for the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society on the occasion of its 100th birthday, and featuring a collaboration between the composer and poet Bill Manhire. De Castro-Robinson felt a special affinity with Plunket because of her involvement with the organization at the time of the birth of her son, Cyprian, to whom the work is dedicated. It was the first collaboration of hers with the poet, and the first music she’d written for a children’s choir, here, the Lyrica Choir of Kelburn Normal School in Wellington, directed by Nicola Edgecumbe. I’m quoting (without permission) from the composer’s own words, here, from a message she very kindly sent to me regarding the making of this CD………

“A lot of emails to’d and fro’d between Bill and me, and I grew to love his economical approach to the texts which included phrases drawn from a selection of his friends’ Plunket books: fit and well, bonny babe, two teeth, four teeth, crawling now, motions normal, on the move, etc which was delightful to set for the kids in a chantlike style.  Bill’s Lullaby, “Here is the world in which you sing, here is your sleepy cry, here is your sleepy mother, here the sleepy sky…Here is the wind in branches, here is the magpie’s cry…here are these arms to hold you, for a while” was particularly inspirational. Every time I hear my setting of the phrase ‘here are these arms to hold you’, I get a great lump in my throat. That’s what originally told me to use that phrase as the work’s title, and Bill agreed…it was the emotional heart of the text.”

Whosever idea it was to bring in the children’s choir from the distance, as it were,the voices running, laughing, chattering and bubbling with joy at being children, as it were, deserves a special mention in despatches. It makes for the most heartwarming introduction to the music, which is already infused with the magic of a child’s first sensations, and carries readily over into the motoric chanting of “It’s a boy – it’s a girl”, complete with hand-clapping, the music then gravitating, with de Castro-Robinson’s accustomed skill to a lullaby mode, the tones open and spacious, not unlike Elgar’s in parts of his “Sea Pictures”. There are instrumental quotes from nursery-rhyme tunes, and more chantings, this time from comments out of those Plunket Books, phrases that would have resounded in the memories of parents who had such records kept of their babies’ progress throughout those early years.

Concluding the disc with what, in fact, sounds practically like a hiss and a roar, is Eve de Castro-Robinson’s orchestral tribute to Len Lye, the New Zealand-born kinetic artist, sculptor and film-maker. The composer aptly describes the work Len Dances as “quite a romp, lots of dance tunes and so on…” Written in 2002, parts of this work will reappear in de Castro-Robinson’s opera LEN LYE, which will premiere in September next year at the Maidment Theatre. A feature of the work I really like is the use of the sound of some of Lye’s actual kinetic sculptures – Blade, the great twanging blade and cork ball most people associate with him, and Trilogy.

The opening of the work is all motoric and metallic impulse, awakening something that resembles a human pulse – gradually rhythms coalesce and settle into popular dance-forms – the Charleston leads the way, followed by something from Latin America – wonderfully sleazy work from solo clarinet and lower brass, and a gloriously vulgar trumpet. But the clarinet isn’t finished, and sparks off further energies, the percussion taking over and providing a rhythmic framework for the glorious sounds made by some of Lye’s sculptures, in particular, Blade and Trilogy, whose reverberations and resonances have the last word.

I’m certain that the enormous amounts of energy, spirit and technical skill emanating from this production come from the scenario generated by what de Castro-Robinson describes as “three days of intensive, dedicated recording by the magnificent sound-machine that is the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – a composer’s dream!”. Obviously everything came together, musicians and technicians producing a notable sound-document of which everybody involved with can be justly proud. My only complaint – a small but reasonably significant one – is the lack of documentation in the production regarding recording dates and venue (uncharacteristic for Atoll). In every other respect (including the wonderful frontispiece illustration taken from a painting, Birds, by Peter Madden) this is a disc that proclaims a standard for contemporary music’s presentation. Everybody should hear it, and especially those who think they don’t much care for contemporary New Zealand music – there’s an angel waiting to be released in each one of them as well!

Michael Endres – pianist, plays Schubert’s D 959, Farr, Carnaval and Godowski

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Schubert: Piano sonata in A, D 959; Gareth Farr: Sepuluh Jari; Schumann: Carnaval, Op 9; Godowski: Concert Paraphrase on Strauss’s ‘Wine, women and song’

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 24 July 2011, 3pm

The middle of the second movement of Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata should not really come as a surprise if you have listened openly to the very opening of the first movement.  Not perhaps from just any pianist, but certainly from Michael Endres whose view is clear at once through the heavy, threatening, plain loud chords of the opening phase.  Alternating shafts of sun with heavy threatening storm clouds: fortissimo and pianissimo; Schubert has absorbed all Beethoven’s awakening to the potential of the iron framed piano, and he quickly understood its ability to express visceral excitement and fear as well as man’s compulsion to seek peace and happiness. Endres imbued the sonata with drama and menace. His fleet and light descending arpeggios are not the airy flights that I’ve heard from some players, but warn us of what lies ahead.

I have to admit to finding some of Schubert’s major works overlong, burdened by too many repeats of themes, too little modified, and repeats of entire sections which have fulfilled their purpose through a single playing, but such was the impact of Endres’s dramatic gift that there seemed not a moment too long in the quarter-hour first movement.

So we have been warned of the likely character of the next movement even though the first ends in a singular air of content. From its very opening, Endres somehow invests the Andantino which he played a little quicker that some pianists do, with a feeling of unease. Nevertheless, the rhapsodic middle part though it begins pianissimo soon became more violent and tempestuous, more like an improvisation inspired by terror, more unrestrained than I can remember hearing it before. The opening mood returns but calm has not come, rather it’s despair, not just for the composer’s own plight but perhaps for the world.

It made the Scherzo so much harder to accommodate though, for it is hard to hear this a anything more than a typically dance-inspired interlude. How have we deserved this after the terrors of the Andantino?

Something of the answer lies in the Rondo which begins as rondo finales do, but in the middle again there’s a stormy passage that recalls the terrors of the second movement. But both the third and fourth movements are filled with such glorious melody and inspired by such intense vitality and courage that we can be persuaded that life is good and that Schubert will live into old age.

Endres has been professor of piano at Canterbury University for over a year and has taken an interest in New Zealand music.

Gareth Farr’s 1996 piano piece has established itself in the repertoire, and with justification. The roots of the opening phase, in the 19th century, are a comforting element, for one soon loses the way with music that strives for ‘originality’ at all costs. There’s a Brahmsian density, there are Russian emotional depths, and there’s also, as it goes along, Farr’s own voice, a voice that has somehow made the gamelan his own, and has found an authentic way to recreate it at the piano.

Most importantly, there’s more than a trace of melody or motif which is the vital recognition element that attracts further listenings.

Endres tackled it (this one with the score before him) with a gusto and bravura that perhaps turned it into a Lisztian travelogue. His playing persuaded me of its legitimacy.

Carnaval might well be Schumann’s most popular piece. It’s certainly one that I discovered early and whose technical impossibilities I have struggled with over the years. Was the opening of the Préambule too loud? Not to me; double forte means pretty loud, and the whole of this section is marked ff with nothing but crescendo marks until the third page when p and pp are to be found. The contrasts as Endres forged them were very rewarding and they sounded right to me. The emphatic forte chords in Pierrot were robustly planted into its otherwise calm promenade.

Carnaval is simply a brilliant sequence of infectious tunes in highly contrasted sketches and portraits of the unique creations that Schumann evoked from many aspects of his life and imaginings: in part from Italian commedia dell’arte, in part from creatures of German Romanticism, in part Schumann’s friends, loves and objects of admiration (Estrella, Chiarina, Chopin, Paganini), and his own inventions like Eusebius and Florestan, and the Davidsbund. And Papillons are recalled from his own similar suite of pieces, Op 2.  As with much music that has some kind of programme or reference, the riddle is interesting but the solution is unimportant.

They all came off the page in vivid colours, filled with wit and boisterousness, with moments – some quite prolonged – of sentimentality-with-a-backbone (Eusebius), or mock grandeur. Rhythms were totally infectious and I felt that here was a German who felt a real affinity with Schumann (though Endres comes from southern Bavaria while Schumann was a Saxon).

The last item was one of those exercises in flamboyance and OTT virtuosity that actually surpasses the expectations even of the severest pedants. Most of the wonderful dances by Johann Strauss and many of those by his father and brothers are such that life might seem incomprehensible if they didn’t exist, like all great masterpieces. Wein,Weib und Gesang is one of the best Strauss waltzes; there are about eight great melodies which Godowski had great delight with, embellishing them impetuously, extravagantly, combining them into canons or counterpoints. Wonder if Godowski himself had anything of a melodic gift. If one doesn’t, what he did is the next best thing, and it would surprise me if Johann, in his Viennese grave, would have been anything but hugely delighted at the outrageous liberties taken, and he’d have loved Endres’s performance.

As if that wasn’t enough, we got an encore of more of the world’s irrepressible tunes from Gershwin’s Songbook.

In all it was a splendid recital that would have offered something to most classical music tastes.