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.

Felix the Quartet’s inspiring concert at Waikanae

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

‘Beethoven Inspirations’:
Beethoven: String Quartet in C minor, Op.18 no.4
John Psathas: A Cool Wind
Beethoven: String Quartet in F, Op.59 no.1

Waikanae Music Society: Felix the Quartet: Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Rebecca Struthers (violin), Andrew Thomson (viola), Rowan Prior (cello)

Waikanae Memorial Hall

24 July 2011, 2.30pm

The usual substantial audience defied the weather, and came to hear Felix the Quartet, made up of prominent members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. There was a change to the programme: the music for the work by Esa-Pekka Salonen is somehow lost in transit, Leppänen explained, and so John Psathas’s piece was substituted. It and the Beethoven Op 59 no.1 Quartet were played recently by the Felix players in Wellington Chamber Music’s Sunday afternoon series; I refer you to Lindis Taylor’s review of that concert of 26 June, on this website.

Right from the dark opening of the Op.18 quartet, it was striking how beautifully balanced the Felix players were. No one instrument dominated; all were in perfect ensemble. However, it was interesting to note the difference in tone between the first and second violins. Every nicety of dynamics and ornamentation was observed, but this was lively playing that was constantly forward-moving.

The purposeful and optimistic first movement was followed by a scherzo which consisted of plenty of conversation between the instruments, as did the next movement. Though using a classical form, Beethoven’s minuet and trio are unlike anything Haydn or Mozart would have written; besides the chromaticism (which Mozart might well have employed) there is frequent use of syncopation.

‘A Cool Wind’ was inspired, the composer says, by the Armenian instrument: the duduk. Described as nasal (among other features), it appealed to Psathas as a voice-like instrument. This quality was present, although there was not a particularly nasal sound in the quartet. There was, however, much close harmony – and disharmony. Considerable use is made of modal tonalities. The piece included effective solos for all the instruments, the others providing a drone, or to harmonise – often with piquant effect.

The piece has an elegiac sound, but is not deeply mournful. It maintains tension, due to the harmonies and intervals used. The piece ends on a sad little melody on the second violin.

There is no doubt that the pièce de resistance in the concert was the Beethoven Op. 59 no.1 quartet – and I heard numbers of people around me expressing the same opinion. It seems streets ahead of the Op. 18 quartets in its themes, depth of feeling, musical language, and variety of expression.

Its opening with a lovely cello solo is innovative, to be followed by the first violin’s repetition of the theme. The contemplative mood is sustained through much of the spacious grandeur of the movement. As it develops, melodies are woven and twisted, exchanged and multiplied.

The scherzo second movement, unlike any preceding scherzo, involves much conversation between the instruments. It is tuneful, enormously varied, stimulating, exciting and innovative.

The third movement opens with a great chorale, played with sweetness, subtlety and perfect ensemble. This adagio movement has considerable intensity, contrast, and emotional impact.

The lively and varied finale on a Russian theme, carries on from the previous movement without a break, and ends with a very extended coda; typically, Beethoven seems to be about to bring things to a conclusion when another idea occurs, and off we go again.

The playing of this magnificent work was wonderfully vibrant, yet mellow. Perhaps it was sometimes a little restrained, not plumbing the emotional heights or depths, but this may have been due, at least in part, to the acoustics of the hall.

This was an inspiring and satisfying concert, appreciated by an enthusiastic audience.

Keyboard magic from Jun Bouterey-Ishido

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Jun Bouterey-Ishido (piano)

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

JS BACH – English Suite No.1 in A BWV 806 / RAVEL – Le Tombeau de Couperin

BARTOK – Out Of Doors Suite (1926) / BRAHMS – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel Op.24

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Sunday 24th July 2011

If you haven’t already done so, find a space on which to write down the name Jun Bouterey-Ishido, a space you’ll remember and can refer back to when the rest of the world catches up with this young pianist’s remarkable talent. Evidence was amply provided by this recital, filled with good things, and even more praiseworthy in that the pianist was able to make a fairly inertly-voiced instrument “sound” with plenty of the different music’s varied characters.

Jun Bouterey-Ishido sprang to pianistic prominence in 2008 when he won the Kerikeri National Piano Competition, impressing the judge, Australian virtuoso pianist and composer Ian Munro, with artistic maturity and potential far beyond his years. Born in Christchurch, Jun had studied previously with Diedre Irons, and then Peter Nagy, Gao Ping and Judith Clark, before being admitted to the Masters Programme at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he’s presently continuing his studies with Peter Nagy.

I was fortunate enough to have heard him play in the final round at Kerikeri, remembering in particular an exciting rendition of Ravel’s Alborado del Gracioso, and a powerfully taut reading of Schubert’s A minor Sonata D.784. Experiencing his playing again almost three years later, what freshly struck me was his engaging physical fluidity at the keyboard – if anything, even freer than before, the gestural choreography more expressive, but still in a way that focused entirely on what the music was doing. And although his aspect and mien remained remarkably boyish (most evident when acknowledging applause, his slight diffidence with that process at odds with his ease and command at the keyboard), there was a deeper, more profound effect about his playing that immediately linked his listeners’ sensibilities with the world of the music, transcending time and place, youth and experience.

It was this immediate connection which I found particularly memorable, especially throughout the recital’s first half – the pianist had evidently been thinking over his program, because he announced a change of order before he began, reversing the positions of Bartok’s Suite Out of Doors, and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, more a case of relating these works to their other companions, I think, than to each other, and with better results. So, after a richly-hued Bach English Suite we were able to enjoy a twentieth-century refraction of further classical elegance in the form of Ravel’s parallel tributes to friends killed in the Great War, as well as to his illustrious countryman, Couperin. I couldn’t imagine a more winning amalgam of freedom and elegance, clarity and colour as we got from Bouterey-Ishido in the  Bach work. Right from the beginning the playing had that timeless quality of sculptured marble, but with the life within awakened and activated. Perhaps for some tastes his playing might have been thought too plastic, too freely-conceived (but I would urge the doubters to consider the word “Baroque” with all of its connotations!) – for me he had the gift of being able to express the “inner life” of his phrasing with, in places, the liquidity of something by Debussy, yet convert the whole into a solid, enduring structure.

Playing like Bouterey-Ishido’s I find hard to “explain”, except to use generic phrases like “infectious” and “spontaneous” – his command of rhythmic gait seemed to have an entirely natural kind of impulsive motivation, a symbiotic process of music and performer creatively interacting. In fact this Bach-playing  gave me so much pleasure, i now find it hard to tear myself away from thinking and writing about it. Fortunately, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin inhabits a world of similar poise and elegance, partly through its ostensible connections with earlier times, and partly due to the fastidiousness of the work’s creator. Here I noticed from the outset how, more than with his Bach-playing, the pianist’s decorative impulses were somehow tighter, their “filigree whiplashings” reminding me of the playing of Rachmaninov’s in his recordings – the notes are all there, but they’re delivered with the swiftest and deftest of touches! Bouterey-Ishido has the technique to generate larger-scaled vortices of impulse, whirlpools of sound that can clear like torrents of water cascading over rocks and turning to spray, an exhilarating effect at the conclusion of the Prelude to the Suite. A beautifully-modulated Fugue was followed by the perennially bitter-sweet Forlane, the rhythms kept beautifully steady, allowing the sounds to “flesh out” the available spaces and suggest plenty of orchestral colour in places.  And the Rigadoun was, here, a joyous irruption of energies set against moments of introspection, different states of being rubbing shoulders with one another.

But the emotional heart of this suite is the Menuet, delicately begun by Bouterey-Ishido with finely-poised tones, inexorably moved along in processional mode and expanded into a grand archway of feeling – from these big, rolling sounds the emotion was nicely gathered in, the mask of feeling re-adjusted and the delicacy of the opening re-established, concluding with a wistful, almost other-worldly tremolando figure. By contrast the brilliant Toccata carried both rhythmic drive and rhapsodic asymmetry along its exuberant course, well captured by the pianist, revelling in the opportunities for orchestral weight and brilliance.

After this, the “earthiness” of Bartok’s Out of Doors Suite came as a bit of an aural shock, albeit an exhilarating one. No aural quarter was given by Bouterey-Ishido throughout the opening “With Drums and Pipes”, the succeeding “Barcarolla” seeming almost to creep out from behind the shelters after the opening onslaught, establishing uneasy undulations and dark-browed, short-breathed melodies. The pianist resolutely took to the insistent patterning of the “Musettes” – a strangely claustrophobic evocation for an out-of-doors piece. By contrast the dark of night’s spaces was all-enveloping in Bouterey-Ishido’s hands throughout “Musiques nocturnes”, the loneliness exacerbated by snatches of folk-melody wandering throughout the dark. All the stops were pulled out for the concluding “Chase”, the pianist’s reserves of strength and energy put to overwhelming, almost cataclysmic use.

The interval gave us all a chance to properly digest the already meaty substance of the first half’s fare, before tackling what had seemed on paper like the recital’s main course, Brahms’ magnificent Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. If not the Everest of the romantic piano literature, the work belongs among the highest of the pianistic Alps; and it requires a robust amalgam of virtuoso bravura, visionary zeal and poetic sensibility to bring off. One of the work’s difficulties for the performer is judging the extent to which each variation ought to be characterized according to its own intrinsic nature while making certain of the overall continuity, the inexorable progress towards the imposing fugue that snow-caps the structure’s magnificence. How much virtuoso bravura, classical clarity, or poetic feeling is needed at any given point, and with watt effect upon the overall structure? Happily for the performer, the “greater than ever can be played” rule applies to this work with a vengeance – its possibilities and potentialities for different expression are immense.

Had I been blindfolded and taken to this recital I might not have guessed the pianist’s age throughout the first half of the concert; but throughout the Brahms piece I found myself thinking, “A young man’s performance….” Everything was very direct, presented surely and unequivocally, an approach which brought out a certain purposeful unity to the variations, even if it sacrificed some of the subtleties and depth of expression of some of the pieces. The very opening, played with bright, forthright insouciance, had an extrovert quality that reflects a youthful view of the world, and the variations were entered upon with that same spirit of joie de vivre, knitting the theme and variation together, and completely eschewing the “motorcycle kick-start” launching of that first variation (a flash of virtuoso delight in rhetorical gesture which bubbles to the surface now and then in some performances). Bouterey-Ishido commanded the big guns necessary to deal commandingly with the octaves of Variation 4, though I thought he rushed No.7, smudging and losing a bit of detail. Here, and in the delicious Variation 10 a touch of impatience indicated that perhaps not every note of this work has quite gotten under his “skin”. The second of two deep bell-tolling variations was splendid, however, with the pianist again “snapping” his decorative figurations excitedly and urgently.

Against the occasional moments where I felt the music propelled a shade over-impetuously (the “hunting horn” Variation (No.14) had an almost manic, rather than an heroic, aspect) were the episodes, such as the Sicilienne-like No.18, Mediterranean in impulse, but with a lovely warm Germanic feeling brought to the playing; and the beautifully elusive, rather Schumannesque No.21, whose performances inhabited the music’s spaces with the conviction of complete ownership. Bouterey-Ishido fearlessly plunged into the waters of the final three variations, taking them in a single breath, perhaps sacrificing some of the music’s cumulative power to momentary excitement, but certainly with exhilarating results, the occasional splashiness part of the process. And his playing of the fugue was splendid, nicely arched towards the moment when the cascading bells break forth and flood the sound-vistas with a wonderful sense of arrival and fulfillment.

There’ll come a time when Jun Bouterey-Ishido’s playing of this work will fuse even more deeply with the music – but equally to be cherished is the here-and-now of his youthful whole-heartedness and remarkable physical and technical ease at the keyboard – I know of no other pianist who looks more “at home” with himself and his world when playing. The recital was rounded, in Shakespeare-like fashion, by “a little sleep” – a short but beautiful and dreamy piece by Kodaly whose title I missed hearing, thanks to rain which had begun to fall heavily onto the church’s roof.

The 16th century fashion for the 40-part motet: Tudor Consort sing Striggio and Tallis

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

 

The 40-part motets of Striggio and Tallis and other liturgical music by Tallis

The Tudor Consort conducted by Michael Stewart, with Peter Maunder (sackbut) and Douglas Mews (chamber organ)

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill Street

Saturday 23 July, 7.30pm

Tallis imitates Striggio
On Saturday’s Classical Chart, broadcast on Radio New Zealand Concert, presenter David Morriss took special pains to introduce the CD sitting at No 1; it was a 16th century motet by Italian composer Alessandro Striggio. The piece, sung on the top-ranked CD by I Fagiolini, was written to be sung by 40 distinct voices, each with his and her own part: ‘Ecce beatam lucem’.Striggio was court composer to the Medicis in Florence and the motet was written for the wedding of a Medici to the daughter of an Austrian noble family, so the music was appropriately composed by an Italian to words by a Viennese court poet (in Latin, naturally).

Morriss departed from custom by telling us that he was a member of The Tudor Consort which was to sing the piece in Wellington’s Catholic Cathedral that very evening, and suggesting that this live performance would be even better than that of I Fagiolini. Enough Wellingtonians (and perhaps others) heard the message to pour into the city on a cold, wet evening, making parking difficult in all the Thorndon streets in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral.

The basilica was packed and the unusual step was taken of opening the organ gallery for the overflowing crowd.

The Consort’s history with the Tallis motet
Now this was a special occasion for The Tudor Consort: 2011 is the choir’s 25th anniversary; at their 20th anniversary, for which founding director Simon Ravens had came out from Britain to conduct one of the concerts that celebrated the occasion. It was the one that included the 40-part motet, ‘Spem in alium’, by one Thomas Tallis; it was in St Mary of the Angel’s church (the first and rather spectacular concert of the mini-festival had been in The Great Hall of the former National Museum – now the school of arts of Massey University).

The Tallis motet had been among the works sung by the choir in its early years – it was conducted during a return visit by Simon Ravens in the International Festival of the Arts in March 1992 – when their concerts routinely filled whatever space they inhabited. I was at that performance, the first ever in Wellington and perhaps in New Zealand. Even more astonishing was the encore – a repetition of the whole motet.

Even without Ravens’ electrifying pre-concert talks, which were similarly packed out, the Tudor Consort’s renown was making a widespread impact.

A peak in Wellington’s musical life
 It was just one of several things, however, that generated a high level of activity and excitement that pervaded Wellington’s musical scene at that time, which was bringing large numbers into choral and other concerts.

There were several contributing developments in the mid-1980s: the inauguration of the marvellous (at least in its first decade) international arts festival; the emergence of a vigorous Wellington opera company; the proliferation of chamber music; the increasing contribution to the city’s music by the two separate tertiary music schools through concerts and an annual opera production by each school; the determined growth and energizing of the Wellington orchestra; and the blossoming of new and the reinvigoration of many existing choirs, stimulated in part by Simon Ravens’s brilliant success with The Tudor Consort.

I might also add that the fact that The Evening Post allowed me, from 1987 to the end, and several assistant reviewers, to cover a great deal of the music, is likely to have been of real importance. Typically we contributed around a dozen music reviews each month.

The 40-part motets
Recent research has shown that it was probably the visit of Striggio to London in 1566/67 to sparked Tallis’s interest in writing something comparable.

At this concert the two motets were sung: the Striggio at the beginning and the Tallis at the end.The Striggio was accompanied by sackbut (Peter Maunder on the trombone) and organ (Douglas Mews); it began interestingly, with certain men’s voices penetrating over others, and it was this character that made the experience rather unique in choral performance. I suspect that conductor Michael Stewart’s concerns were with individual detail and not with a conductor’s normal concern: the blending of voices, and it was the very variety of timbres and voice qualities that were audible throughout both the 40-part motets. So the varying size and grain of voices were free from the usual discipline of uniformity. It added enormously to the delight of the whole performances.

During the Striggio all forty singers were arrayed across the front of the sanctuary, but for the Tallis, only 10 were in the front and the rest were spread along the side aisles so that the conductor spent his time turning from front to rear, from side to side, signaling the bewildering entries accurately.

Stewart in the front of his choir presents a lively image. Not given to overly fussy gestures, it is the raised arms that seem to be carry the music to the place where the composers may have imagined their music was directed. His demeanour reminded me of cartoons of Berlioz on the podium, clearly drawn by an artist filled with admiration for the music he was inspiring. Stewart’s gestures seemed to have a similar inspiring effect on his singers.

The Striggio motet was quite short, perhaps six or seven minutes (I didn’t time it) and, compared with the Tallis, with fewer extended passages in which one could sense the full complexity of all those individual voices. The earlier piece seemed to allow more concessions to the style of the usual polyphonic choral setting with far fewer parts apparent.

While the longer more confident lines of interweaving counterpoint of Tallis create an air of greater permanence and moment because there is a denser feeling in his writing.

The other Tallis pieces
Only about half of the 40-strong choir remained to perform the shorter ecclesiastical pieces by Tallis that occupied the rest of the concert.

One could have thought the various short liturgical pieces were merely fillers between the two motets that had surely attracted the crowd. But all those who came because they genuinely loved Renaissance polyphonic choral music would have enjoyed the variety of music that this one composer could bend his talent to: the more complex music for the Catholic ritual compared with the more straight-forward, vertical harmonies, of the pieces for the Anglican rite. The English words of the ‘Magnificat’ and ‘Nunc dimittis’, are set to music that is conscious of the congregation’s comprehension of the words. The organ accompaniment was significant, even in tempo, though not constant as with a traditional hymn; the ‘Nunc dimittis’ ended with a curiously unusual final cadence.

Being conscious of the difference between the Anglican and Catholic (and both Tallis and Byrd had to tread carefully through the switch-back, lethal, religious ferocity that punctuated their lives) threw a new light on the Latin settings of responsories and antiphons where the spiritual impact was sought more through purely musical characteristics – sonority, flowing contrapuntal lines, the pitting of high voices against a bed of men’s more earthbound voices. The two settings of ‘Salvator mundi’, offered an interesting contrast within the traditions of the Catholic liturgy, the second appearing more sonorous and enjoying the warmth of its polyphony, with perhaps a little more attention to the blending of voices – just to show they could do it.

The ‘Loquebantur variis linguis’ caught the attention through its carefully discordant setting of those words, suggesting the polyglot talents of the apostles. ‘Candidi facti sunt’ seemed to play with the listener by starting successively in three different manners, eventually giving space for the tenors’ central plainchant performance.

‘O sacrum convivium’ used the current styles of polyphony in more orthodox manner, and it allowed the audience to enjoy, if it had escaped them before, the chance to hear harmonies involving more sustained contrapuntal passages.

The last motet, ‘Te lucis ante terminum’, more like a hymn in three distinct stanzas, was set as plainsong in the outer two stanzas and polyphony in the second. These examples of Tallis’s music demonstrated further, both the composer’s versatility as he navigated the reefs in religious storms, and the continued, constantly renewal of the choir’s talented singers and their series of imaginative and enterprising directors.

We await a performance of Striggio’s ‘Ecco si beato giorno’, reported to be the mass for 40 to 60 voices from which motet was evidently drawn.


Wellington Orchestra’s unfinished business

Posted on by Peter Mechen

UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES – Schubert, Mozart, Berio

SCHUBERT – Symphony No.8 in B Minor D.759 “Unfinished”

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.24 in C Minor K.491

MOZART – Concert Aria “Ch’io mi scordi di te….Non temer, amato bene” K.505

BERIO – Rendering (1989)

Vector Wellington Orchestra / Marc Taddei (conductor)

with: Diedre Irons (piano) and Margaret Medlyn (soprano)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 23rd July 2011

This concert both played the game and bended the rules in the most interesting possible way – we had what’s become a common orchestral concert format of introductory work, concerto and symphony, but most interestingly constituted and creatively “placed”, so that the feeling of “the same old formula” was nicely avoided.

Basically, it was a Schubert/Mozart evening, but with a major contribution from a more-or-less contemporary voice. This was the Italian composer Luciano Berio, who in 1989 produced an orchestral work, Rendering, one which took the fragments of Schubert’s uncompleted work on a Tenth Symphony as the basis for a three-movement work. “Not a completion or a reconstruction” of the Symphony, declared Berio, but a “restoration” – and the work gave an uncanny feeling of two intensely creative impulses separated by two hundred years coming together for a kind of reawakening.

Instead of an overture beginning the concert we had an intensely dramatic performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which, together with Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto K.491, suggested a preponderance of seriousness throughout the concert’s first half, a state of things which didn’t eventuate to the expected degree, I thought, more of which anon. The second half was similarly innovative, beginning with Mozart’s best-known Concert Aria for soprano, Ch’io mi scordi di te…Non temer, amato bene K.505, and concluding with Berio’s Rendering.

So, our expectations were nicely-tempered by these prospects; and the concert got off to the best possible beginning with a performance of the eponymous “Unfinished” Symphony which seemed akin to giving an old masterpiece a restoration job of its own – Marc Taddei encouraged his orchestra to play out in all departments, less of a rounded “Germanic” sound and more a thrustful, characterfully Viennese texture, lean and detailed, the brass occasionally risking obtrusiveness but generally making their presence refreshingly felt. With several on-the-spot contributions from timpanist Stephen Bremner, and wonderfully soulful playing from the winds (magnificent individually and as a group throughout the concert), the work here “spoke” with a directness and candour which too many routine performances over the years in concert and on record have sadly blunted. I ought to mention the strings, too, characteristically playing well above their weight (those “slashing” off-beat chords just before the second subject had such ear-catching focus and determination), pulsating the first movement with energy and life throughout. And I’ve never experienced a sense of the abyss opening up so ominously at the beginning of the development section as in this performance – those lower strings evoked such darkly disturbing realms as to bring home in no uncertain terms the tragic subtext beneath the music’s surface energies.

Those energies enabled the musicians to make more of the contrasts between the movements, with the opening of the Andante measured, mellow and easeful. Apart from a slight hiccup with the final note of her “big tune”, Moira Hurst’s clarinet playing sounded as beautifully heartfelt as we’d come to expect, the phrases echoed as memorably by the other winds, before being savagely pirated by baleful brass,whose forceful chordings over the string figurations were a striking feature of this performance. Near the end of the movement Taddei conjured from his players some gorgeously-coloured modulations (what Schumann called “other realms”) before the music resignedly returned to its destiny. If a couple of pairs of applauding hands in the auditorium broke the spell at the work’s end somewhat abruptly, the impulses were sound and their intrusion forgivable – I thought this was, through-and-through, a magnificent performance.

Mozart’s C Minor Concerto K.491 promised more storms and stresses, though it was largely the orchestra that agitated the musical argument, Diedre Irons’ piano playing taking a more stoic, in places relatively circumspect manner and aspect. Though the tensions weren’t repeatedly screwed to their utmost by such an approach, there were compensations in Irons’ detailed and rhapsodic exposition of the music, alive to every nuance of sensitive expression, apart from a measure or two towards the end of the movement where a brief moment of piano-and-orchestra hesitancy seemed to slightly blur the lines of the argument for a couple of seconds. In certain places, Irons, Taddei and the players superbly realized the music’s power, those dark coruscations of interchange at the heart of the development dug into with a will, while elsewhere, such as in the orchestral lead-up to the first movement cadenza, there was drama and thrust aplenty, soloist and orchestra each taking it in turns to galvanize the other.

Pianist and conductor played each of the concerto’s movements more-or-less attacca, which worked well, and emphasized the symphonic character of the work’s overall mood. The slow movement stole upon us almost out of nowhere, Irons’s playing allowing the melody to speak directly and simply to the heart, adding the occasional decoration to phrase-ends when the melody is repeated. The orchestral winds really showed their mettle in this movement, Taddei encouraging plenty of urgency and dynamic variation from the players to contrast with the piano’s simplicity, making for some glorious, chamber-music-like moments of lyrical interaction. After this, the “coiled spring” opening of the finale was like an awakening from a dream, the urgencies taking different shapes and forms, until the winds adroitly turned the argument towards open spaces and festive activity for a few measures, valiantly but vainly attempting to elude the demons that continued to stalk the music right to the end, through the piano’s chromatic scamperings and the orchestra’s desperate concluding flourish. I could have imagined sterner, bigger-boned piano playing in this work, but Irons’ approach brought a degree of vulnerability to the musical discourse, one that could be readily applied to human experience.

After the interval more Mozart, but with a difference – the adorable Concert Aria written for one of the composer’s favorite singers, Nancy Storace (there’s conjecture as to whether she and Mozart were lovers for a brief period, though the supposition is based on conjecture rather than proof – Mozart wrote in his dedication of the work, “…for Mme Storace and me…”). The Aria, Ch’io mi scordi di te…Non temer, amato bene K.505 is notable not only for its intense operatic expression, but for its beautiful piano obbligato, which, in a real sense, is a “second voice”. Margaret Medlyn told us in a program note of her early involvement with the work, an experience which she says has never left her. There was no doubt as to her intense involvement with the emotional range and depth of the aria – Medlyn is always extremely satisfying as a performer on that score – and if the tessitura at the very end sounded a bit of an ungainly stretch (rather like an ocean liner trying to negotiate a treacherous piece of water) the visceral effect of the singer’s total involvement was thrilling. Diedre Irons, Marc Taddei and the players gave Medlyn all the support she needed, making for an uncommonly involving vignette of intense listening and feeling.

And so to Luciano Berio’s Rendering, which would, I think, have been an intriguing prospect for most listeners, myself included. I liked the concept (explained by Marc Taddei before the work began, using the analogy of paint that had fallen off an original work) of a “restoration” of Schubert’s original sketches for an unfinished – yes, ANOTHER one! – symphony (there are also piano sonatas…..but we won’t go into that). Berio himself explained that his work was like modern restorations of medieval paintings, such as frescoes, which aim at reviving the old colours within, but without trying to disguise the wear-and-tear of time – meaning that gaps would inevitably be left in the original (as with the famous Giotto frescoes in Assisi). Berio, however, interpolated other material into these gaps (bits of “other” Schubert and bits of Berio himself), colouring the sounds with that of a celeste (of the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” fame), the delicate, rather disembodied effect imparting a somewhat “other-worldly” ambience to these passages, as if the composer’s shade was sifting through the assembled material, muttering his thoughts to himself.

The original material is very recognizably Schubert – the composer left a considerable amount of material (which was, for whatever reason, made public as recently as 1978 in Vienna, the date being the 150th anniversary of Schubert’s death). I scribbled down many impressions of the music, noting the reminiscences of works I knew – after the fanfare-like opening, near the beginning, there’s a lovely clarinet solo, reminiscent of the Third Symphony, for example – a bit later, the ‘cellos have a melody like that in the “other” Unfinished, to quote another example. But interspersed with these things, and the ghostly, celeste-led interludes, the music was quite forthright, even swashbuckling in places, and hardly, one would think, the utterances of somebody preparing for an early death.

The second movement, Andante, made a more sober impression, the oboe and bassoon playing adding plangent tones to the argument, the mood ennobled by a theme on the full orchestra, then suddenly taken to that “other world”, in this movement the sequences seeming to me in places to combine Schubert’s actual melodies with a counterpoint of Berio’s “renderings”, more so than in other parts of the work. A pizzicato chord sparking off furious activity suggested the finale’s beginning, featuring a tune with what sounded like a Scottish snap, and orchestral energies building up to the kind of joyous rhythmic repetition found in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. The “ghost music” and the composer’s more forthright original material vie for attention throughout, before the work ends with a big, muscular forte orchestral statement – emotional health in the midst of worldly privation!

What can one say to all of this, except Bravo! to Marc Taddei and the Vector Wellington Orchestra!

NZSM’s Baroque Workshop at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music by Monteverdi, Jacob van Eyck, Dario Castello, Georg Böhm, Telemann, Bach

Amelia Ryman (soprano), Brendan O’Donnell (recorder), Oscar Laven (bassoon), Tom Gaynor (harpsichord and organ)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 20 July, 12.15pm

The Baroque Workshop took over, at relatively short notice I imagine, from other advertised performers; they revealed no evidence of being caught with little preparation time.

Baroque here stretched as far back as Monteverdi to as recent as Bach.

The Monteverdi was a quite short song written for one voice with harpsichord accompaniment from a set called Scherzi Musicali, of 1632. Amelia Ryman, with Thomas Gaynor at the harpsichord, tackled it with a pretty extensive array of ornaments which tended to tax her at times, affecting her ability to control dynamics and articulation; and she needs to watch her vibrato. But the general delivery was most attractive.

The concert opened with a solo piece for recorder by Jacob van Eyck who was born in 1590. It was played in a most accomplished way with careful and subtle dynamics and admirable agility by Brendan O’Donnell. It was so attractive that it struck me as a piece that might well be taken up by flute players looking for an alternative solo piece to Syrinx.

The variations from a Chorale Partita by Georg Böhm, an important early influence on Bach, was played on the church’s chamber organ by Gaynor. Though it proved a typically formal set of variations (only some of them), the varied registrations, shifts between common and triple time and enough flexibility of rhythm, lent them considerable interest. The distinct tempi of each variation indeed suggested the dance movements of a suite: hence the title ‘Partita’ seemed justified.

The next piece drew all three instruments together: recorder, bassoon and organ, in a ‘Sonata seconda à sopran solo’ by Dario Castello, born the same year as Van Eyck. The combination of the organ’s lower register and the bassoon created a warm, rich sound, and subtle rubato helped enliven its interesting, occasionally contrapuntal character.

If there were moments in the Castello when Oscar Laven’s bassoon seemed to be struggling, the reality became clearer in the Telemann Sonatina in A minor (two movements); the baroque instrument, with limited recourse to the use of keys, is clearly difficult to play and to produce even and comfortably articulated sounds. Laven did well, but I had to ask myself whether there are some cases where the pleasure of hearing authentic sounds from a very challenging early instrument is really worth the trouble.

The rest of the concert was Bach. Three short items: two arias from cantatas and a Duet from the Third Clavierübung, which contains a large collection of organ pieces. The other three Clavierübungen are for harpsichord (the first for example contains the six Partitas BWV 825-30). The third volume is known sometimes as the German Organ Mass; it opens with the famous ‘Saint Anne’ Prelude and Triple Fugue, BWV 552 and contains many chorale preludes – all those between BWV 669 and 689; and then four duets (two-part inventions), two of which (BWV 802 and 804) Gaynor played here. His performance might not have been immaculate but on this small organ they emerged with admirable clarity, with all their ‘art that conceals art’ as evident as possible (without lapsing into oxymoron). It occurred to me that I don’t hear the chamber organ, purchased through the enterprise of the former minister John Murray and organist Roy Tankersley at least 20 years ago, often enough.

The cantata arias were ‘Höchster, mache deine Güte’ from No 51 and ‘Höchster, was ich habe’, from No 39. Amelia sounded more at ease in these than in Monteverdi; the flowing lines with less call for florid decoration.

Both were quite short, but expressive of a sanguine optimism not always the stuff of Bach’s sacred music, and they balanced the purely instrumental pieces very happily; and the second aria, with its charming recorder obbligato, brought the concert to its end and stimulated a particularly warm audience response.

A popular lunchtime miscellany from three sopranos at Old St Paul’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Janet van Polanen, Hannah Catrin Jones and Lydia McDonnell –
sopranos

Love Songs: traditional and popular, and opera arias

Old St Paul’s, Mulgrave Street

Tuesday 19 July 12.15pm

Three sopranos whose taste and dispositions span the song repertoire from classical through the musical and film hits to old-fashioned ballads and folk songs took their turn at Old St Paul’s regular Tuesday lunchtime concerts.

The early part of the concert included a few opera arias.
None of the three singers would lay claim to polished operatic voices that would meet the expectations of the professional world of opera, though all have studied professionally, but they were nicely placed in a concert of this kind.

Lydia McDonnell sang Cherubino’s aria, ‘Voi che sapete’ from The Marriage of Figaro, charming, though it might not quite have caught the tone of that randy adolescent boy; later she sang most agreeably, Schubert’s Serenade (from his final song cycle, Swan Song).

Hannah Catrin Jones also sang a Mozart aria, Zerlina’s comforting song to Masetto, ‘Vedrai carino’, from Don Giovanni, offering him balm for the injuries the Don has inflicted, with a degree of the coy suggestiveness that the words make plain. Hannah’s second aria was from La Bohème – Musetta’s ‘Waltz Song’ – ‘Quando me’n vo’ which she sang nicely though she took it rather slowly and it was arch rather than simply flighty and self-admiring.

Janet van Polanen’s classical song was the evergreen 18th century aria, ‘Se tu m’ami’ by Alessandro Parisotti (which was one of the many pieces published under the more famous name Giovanni Pergolesi). Though her brief précis of the song was delivered too quietly for most of the audience to hear (the church’s acoustic is not generous for most speaking voices) she caught its sentiment very well.

Janet had opened the recital with a song that was more the predominant style – a charming and still popular song ‘Where do I begin?’, from a classic film of its kind – Love Story – with its soundtrack composed by Francis Lai: it was slightly uneasy, as an opening piece often is, but idiomatic. Later, Janet sang other songs in similar vein: ‘Out of my dreams’ from Oklahoma and Max Steiner’s ‘My own true love’ that became and remains a favourite after appearing in Gone with the Wind.

Hannah Catrin Jones opened her own contributions with Vaughan Williams’s setting of D G Rossetti’s ‘Silent Noon’ from his song cycle The House of Life. She at once displayed an attractive voice, confidently, though the acoustic again made her words a bit indistinct and a mishap with a page of music would have unsettled her.

In a charming, unaffected way Hannah sang At Dawning (‘I love you’), a song by Charles Cadman that became famous in the 1920s; Cadman’s early reputation derived from his interest in and promotion of American Indian music. And later, reflecting her Welsh ancestry, Hannah sang Joseph Parry’s ‘Myfanwy’, with her father Conrad McDonnell accompanying on the guitar: well done. All the other songs were sympathetically accompanied by David Trott at the piano.

After her Mozart and Schubert songs Lydia McDonnell’s later songs included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Love changes everything’, the best known number from his musical Aspects of Love, a sort of narrative song that she handled rather nicely. And then unaccompanied she sang with touching conviction her last solo – the traditional Irish song ‘My Lagan Love’ dating from the time of harsh English repression.

Together, the three gave the audience an agreeable, rather different experience, with the three voices blending interestingly: ‘Love can build a bridge’, a somewhat sentimental country ballad that had its hour of fame in the early 90s; then ‘Cockles and Mussels’ and finally ‘Pokarekare Ana’, which brought a well-planned and charmingly executed recital to an appropriate end.

Cello and piano at Jewish Community Centre

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Bach: Sonata in G, BWV 1027;
Kodaly: Sonatina for cello and piano;
Bloch: From Jewish Life and Méditation Hébraïque;
Debussy: Sonata for cello and piano;
Martinu: Sonata no.2 for cello and piano;
Piazzolla: Libertango

Paul Mitchell (cello), Richard Mapp (piano)

Myers Hall, Jewish Community Centre, Webb Street

Sunday, 17 July 2011, 3pm

Myers Hall was a new venue to many of us at the concert on Sunday; it proved to be of a good size for a chamber music concert, and with its wooden parquet floor and high ceiling, its acoustics were very satisfactory.

However, if it were to be used more regularly for concerts, a better piano would be required. At times I thought the elderly Marshall and Rose baby grand to be out of tune, but it may just have been its age that made it sound oddly at times, particularly in the Bach. Richard Mapp played with appropriate style and technique for the baroque music (the instrument often almost sounding like a harpsichord), in contrast to his full-bodied playing of the other works, but the former manner of playing seemed to emphasise the piano’s difficulties.

Having just heard a radio talk about recorded Bach works, that made a comparison between performances that were ‘straight’ and those where the performer(s) introduced some individuality to the interpretation, I was delighted to hear the nuances, especially of dynamics, that these musicians brought to their performance of the Bach composition. It was a very satisfying performance; after the third movement’s logical, peaceful nature, the allegro finale was played with great panache. In my head I hear my pianist/organist mother saying (as she does on a private recording I have) ‘The piano does not bring out the notes of the tune as does the organ or the clavichord’. Mapp defied this dictum pretty successfully.

Apart from the Debussy sonata, the remaining works on the programme were not familiar to me. It was a pleasure and interesting to hear so much music that is seldom played, not least the Kodaly sonatina. After a lovely piano introduction, there was much lyrical music, and strong playing from both musicians, providing a complete contrast with the Bach work.

Bloch’s From Jewish Life is in three sections. The first, ‘Prayer’, was very beautiful. The piano starts by just playing chords while the cello plays melody, then a different piano theme that echoes and balances the cello one enters. In the second part, ‘Supplication’, one could almost hear the cello uttering words, since the melody followed very much the inflections and rhythms of language. Finally, ‘Jewish Song’ had a very spare and Middle-Eastern-sounding tonality. There was a plaintive quality to it, and it was very sensitively played. Again, it was a great contrast with the Bach sonata. This was passionate music. The full tone from the cello was very fine.

Paul Mitchell gave spoken introductions some of the items. He said that he thought that the Debussy sonata was more Spanish than French in character. Certainly the first movement has a very rhythmic piano part, which is dominant, then the cello reasserts itself. Then there are passages of great delicacy, played with feeling and finesse.

The second movement (Serenade) features lots of pizzicato on the cello and staccato on piano. It is full of character – and it was given characterful playing. The finale, which follows without a break, had the instruments swapping notes and dynamics with each other, followed by a strong, assertive ending. As the programme notes stated, it was more spirited, and had elements of folk-song. This was a thoroughly convincing performance.

The Méditation Hébraïque of Ernest Bloch starts quietly and lyrically, with a repeated bass note on the piano. The central section, especially passionate on the cello, embroiders a pentatonic theme, and then the music dies away quite dramatically.

The most substantial work on the programme was Martinu’s sonata. A fiery allegro with difficult passage work admirably executed by both performers began this 1941 composition. There was a long section for piano only, as there was in the second movement (largo) also. This movement ended very calmly, with a sad undertone.

The allegro commodo (comfortable) finale was very fast, with repetitive figures on the piano which would have pleased the minimalists. Both cello and piano parts were very energetic and spirited. A cello cadenza was complex and demanding, to end this dynamic and exciting work.

The Piazzolla ‘free tango’ was fast, but good-tempered. There was much upper fingerboard work for the cellist, and off-beat rhythms abounded.

A good-sized audience heard two performers who played with superb technique and musical sensitivity – and Mapp was blessed with a skilful page-turner.

Schubert from Houstoun at Paekakariki – Matching Poesies

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in G Major D.894 / Piano Sonata in B-flat D.960

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Mulled Wine Concert Series / Memorial Hall, Paekakariki

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

Waiting outside the Memorial Hall in a July afternoon’s wintry sunshine at Paekakariki was for me a kind of poetry in itself, colored partly by the expectation of hearing live performances of two of Schubert’s greatest piano sonatas, but also by the ambience of the open spaces, rugged hills to the east, and the beach and distantly lovely Kapiti Island to the west. I’ll doubtless be accused of “event-dropping” here, but I was reminded by all of this of my visit to the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk (too many years previously that I care to number!), where one finds a similar “homely” aspect to many of the concert venues, and the same rural outdoor “far-from-the-big-city” atmosphere that gives to the whole enterprise such distinction.

Inside the hall at Paekakariki, the excitement-buzz was palpable, the sense of an occasion somehow made more manifest by the community-hall nature of the venue – a kind of “music is where you find it” spirit that, as I’ve said, heightens the special nature of the event. I was not aware of Michael Houstoun having any previous significant association with the solo piano music of Schubert, and so this for me seemed to add to the concert’s specialness. Naturally, I knew Houstoun had recently performed with tenor Keith Lewis the great “Winterreise” song-cycle, as well as the “Trout” Quintet as part of Chamber Music New Zealand’s “Schubertiade” – so I found myself keenly anticipating the pianist bringing his own unique qualities as a performer to music I’ve loved for much of my listening life.

First up, and I think rightly so, was the G Major Sonata D.894. Like its recital companion, the B-flat Sonata, it’s a work whose first movement alone, when played with the repeat can dwarf in sheer size and scope the movements which follow, especially in the hands of an interpreter who emphasizes the music’s potential for what Robert Schumann famously called its “heavenly length”. Perhaps taking its cue from Schumann’s observation, there’s a school of interpretation that advocates the most spacious of tempi over certain of Schubert’s movements, more pronounced, I think, than with any other classical composer. But as with all great music, there are diametrically opposed notions regarding how it should be played, ranging from those rooted in abstraction and severity of symphonic form, to ideas which advance the feeling that Schubert’s work should all be thought of as subservient to song, since (following this line of thinking) he was a lyricist, and not symphonic in outlook, and that his structures should be regarded as little more than somewhat naively-extended melodies.

Michael Houstoun’s playing of the sonata’s opening suggested a course that took into account both structural awareness and lyrical impulse on the composer’s part. We heard at the outset phrases given plenty of air and space, richly-toned and with leading lines sung out, along with strong, well-focused chordings and clearly-etched melodic patterns, suggesting that the pianist took the idea of Schubert the long-term symphonic thinker seriously, though without, it must be said, going to the extremes of profundity attempted by the likes of pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Houstoun, to my ears, sought from within the movement a judicious balance between profundity and momentum that found the best of both the intellectual and emotional worlds of the music. Throughout the introductory paragraphs he differentiated the different voices with considerable sensitivity, withdrawing his tone for the minor-key utterance, and warming it with slightly more body for its repetition in the major mode – as well, he beautifully energized the music at the point where it consciously begins to pulsate, the melody subtly detailed (a slight finger-slip in the filigree right-handed runs possibly the result of the phrasing being, I felt, a shade too “stiff”, more an etched pattern than a dance), the rhythm given sufficient girth to remain relatively light upon its feet. I thought Houstoun’s observation of the repeat just that wee bit more exploratory and expansive – if, this time round, the filigree runs in the right hand seemed freer and more dance-like, there was also an added hymn-like quality to some of the more chordal utterances, very much a feeling, one could say, of a “song of the earth”.

The rest of the movement was as fine in Houstoun’s hands, with only a touch of “bluntness” at some of the phrase-ends suggesting that there were still a couple of corners of the work he hadn’t yet negotiated with complete ease. Largely his approach to the darker, stormier development was lean and forward-looking, more agitated than tragic in feeling, building up the chordal sequences impressively, but playing with translucent tones that never threatened to crush the music under its own weight. The lead-back to the opening was nicely “breathed”, as was the coda, the music’s “homecoming” aspect given plenty of songful feeling. The slow movement’s first few phrases energized the stasis of the first movement’s conclusion, almost too much so, I thought at first, thinking that those wonderful phrases weren’t being encouraged to “flower” with sufficient poetry – but as the music progressed, so did I warm more to the playing, thanks to the flexibility and subtlety of the pianist’s rubato. The music’s key-change brought a big-boned contrast, but also some beautifully pliant phrasings in the gentler responses – Houstoun actually surprised me with his readiness to yield in places, getting a lot out of the music with his beautifully nuanced contourings.

I liked the Scherzo’s characterful dancings, the pianist bringing out the music’s lilting qualities and playing the grace-notes that punctuate the line with great “point” and care. He illuminated the melodic line of the Trio with nicely-stressed harmonies and counter-lines, enjoying the music’s contrasts as the scherzo’s chords lurched back into the soundscape. As for the finale, the playing had all the rhythmic buoyancy one could have wished for (was there a touch of hesitancy over the transition into the “running” sequence?), with everything nicely pointed and dovetailed; and then, during the stormier minor-key sequences, plenty of invigorating “schwung” to muscle up the interplay and keep the momentum going right through to the opening’s return. After these exertions, the coda was like balm for the senses, a hugely satisfied exhalation which Schubert (and Houstoun) seemed to invite all of us to join in with. At the end of all of this there was general pleasure in demonstrating our appreciation of the performance, though I have to say that Houstoun’s playing of the sonata divided opinion in my party, a situation which always invigorates discussion and sharpens all kinds of critical evaluations, both in the process and its conclusions. A friend whose opinion I respect thought the playing up to this point “all head and no heart”. But I couldn’t agree, as witness what I’ve written so far; and, for myself, I thought it was a truly praiseworthy performance.

Having said this, I had to admit, at the conclusion of the concert’s second half, that the B-flat Sonata demonstrated Houstoun’s interpretative depth and identification with the music to an extent that the G Major’s performance, good though it was, didn’t quite achieve. From first note to last, Schubert’s final and greatest piano sonata brought out what I felt was a powerful and comprehensive understanding on the pianist’s part. Even when I wanted parts of the music played a slightly different way (softer, more yielding paragraphs in one or two places), Houstoun’s conviction regarding what he was doing was such at the time that his interpretation carried all before it, the result being an entirely convincing and marvellously played performance.

Right from the beginning, the music seemed to carry whole worlds of inward feeling, Houstoun’s treatment of the chordal melody sounding and feeling almost Brucknerian in its weighty expansiveness, the vistas opening up to accommodate the tones generated by those big repeated chords which grow beneath the melody’s repetition. Not as nuanced as, and much more insistent than the music for the G major Sonata, these were more direct and forthright sounds, dealing, as Houstoun himself would probably say, in fundamental material – and no more so than at the repeat, where it might seem to the uninitiated listener as though the basic fabric of the music is being threatened by some kind of “horror from the deep” – a critical episode in the work’s discourse, here brought off by the pianist with suitably awe-inspiring power and concentration. The development brought layer upon layer of intensification, leading to what I’ve always regarded as the “stricken” passage, repeated chords sounded underneath a minor-key melody, before the opening theme returns, stalked by its trill ominously rumbling away in the bass. By the time the opening was properly reconstituted, the work had truly become “road music”, the vistas opened right out in Houstoun’s hands, the momentum kept up, the soul inexorably continuing upon its journey, bequeathing us those richly voiced chords at the movement’s end.

What a lovely colour Houstoun gave the opening of the slow movement! – its tolling bell aspect was beautifully and sensitively weighted, equivocally poised between worlds of foreboding and resignation. The music carried easefully into the major-key episode, the pianist’s rhythmic trajectories both focused and flexible throughout. Contrasting with this was the scherzo’s lightness of touch, set around and about an angular trio with Houstoun bringing out some startlingly effective bass-line accents. The playful and propulsive finale also harboured contrasting energies, the explosive mid-stream outbursts very much in keeping with the movement’s volatile character, as were the angular polyphonics leading up to the final energy-gathering pauses, and the torrents of abandonment which concluded the work. And my friend’s reaction to Houstoun’s playing of the B-flat Sonata? – words to the effect of “Well, he really nailed that one!”…..and when all’s said and done, I can’t really sum it up better than that!