Distinguished guests share Nelson concert of masterpieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

‘Memories’
Mozart: String Quintet in C minor, K 406, with James Campbell in place of first violin; Shostakovich: String Quartet No 8; Schumann: Kinderszenen, Op 15; Beethoven: Sonata No 32 in C minor, Op 111

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 6 February 2011

The evening concert offered no further obeissance to the national day. Instead, it was given over to two rather contrasting parts, returning the the universal instead of the parochial. In the first part strings were in the spotlight, together with clarinettist James Campbell; in the second British pianist Martin Roscoe played.

Campbell explained his adaptation of Mozart’s String Quintet K 406, for clarinet and strings. Since there were few chamber music pieces involving the clarinet, he said, and the fact that Mozart’s string quintet had started life as one of his wind serenades, the octet K 388, he believed it gave licence for a partial revision of the quintet to include the clarinet in the place of the first violin. In principle, not a bad idea; but in the event, it was unsatisfactory. I have not studied the changes made to Mozart’s allocation of parts as he transformed eight brass parts to five strings, but it seemed to me that slightly more radical rescoring might have been needed to give the clarinet the kind of solo place more akin to a concerto. As it was, it was at once too close, and not sufficiently distinguished from  the violin or the strings as a whole.

The players in the ‘clarinet quintet’ were Campbell, Douglas Beilman playing violin, the viola players from both ensembles, and Leonid Gorokhov on the cello. Perhaps because of the way it had been arranged, the clarinet was sometimes out of balance with the strings; often, Campbell simply played too loudly. The net result was a performance that did not quite meet the expectations of an audience whose appetite had been so whetted by the Gran Partita, for another marvellous Mozart serenade-style piece. The performance as a whole however, left no doubt about Mozart’s achievement in the creation of another masterpiece in the serenade/big ensemble genre.

The second piece in the programme was Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. Interestingly, it had been played at a ‘Pro-Am’ concert in the late afternoon in Fairfield House, a charming old mansion set in spacious grounds on the hills south of the city. The Pro-Am tradition exists to give amateur players the chance to be tutored by and ultimately play alongside professionals. This time hardly any of the amateurs were young people, which was the original intent. The professionals were violinists Justine Cormack and Rebecca Struthers, violist Victoria Jaenecke and cellist Euan Murdoch and each played alongside two or three amateurs. It meant playing the quartet with four players to a part, which would not have been inappropriate, for there’s a strong orchestra arrangement of the quartet by Rudolph Barshai as a prototype. Players of limited skill delivered a very different experience but it somehow sharpened my receptivity for the extremely fine performance a couple of hours later by the New Zealand String Quartet. Here was the first chance to hear the New Zealand players on their own, in music that they have thoroughly commanded. It was a powerful, finely nuanced performance doing complete justice to Shostakovich’s biting and angry masterpiece.

The second half of the concert belonged to pianist Martin Roscoe, making his first appearance at the festival. He claimed that he was about to play two of his favourite pieces of music, Schumann’s guileless but challenging Scenes of Childhood and Beethoven’s last, spiritually complex sonata.

Most of the Schumann pieces are familiar though it is rare for them to be played together: I’m sure I’ve never heard all 13 played live before. Roscoe proved a Schumann pianist of both subtlety and strength who succeeded in linking them persuasively into a sequence that enhanced them individually. There was unaffected magic in many of the pieces, burnished with a warm piano tone; his performances were never too retiring or diffident though; occasionally the piano’s heavy bass resonance was overbearing.

Beethoven’s last sonata was another matter. Roscoe’s playing captured the quietness and repose of the lyrical and legato parts; but subtlety in the forte and fortissimo passages seemed more difficult to achieve, an effect of the piano’s characteristics and the auditorium’s lively acoustic. Nevertheless, the dramatic narrative and feeling for shape and structure emerged powerfully, with great conviction.

New Zealand wind music to mark Waitangi Day at Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waitangi Winds. ‘To be announced’ (Sketches towards imagining the musical encounter between Tasman and Maori at Golden Bay); Philip Brownlee: Te Hau o Tawhirimatea for flute; Ken Wilson: Wind Quintet; Lilburn: Wind quintet (1957); Harris: Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet (2005)

Zephyr Wind Quintet (Bridget Douglas – flute, Robert Orr – oboe, Philip Green – clarinet, Edward Allen – horn, Robert Weeks – bassoon) and Richard Nunns – nga taonga puoro)

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 6 February, 1pm

A concert to mark Waitangi Day in appropriate fashion took place at lunchtime in the Nelson School of Music. It was given over to wind instruments, driven no doubt by the decision to feature Maori instruments, taonga puoro, largely wind.

The first piece for taonga puoro had been commissioned by Richard Nunns from Martin Lodge, but illness had stopped Martin from getting past a few sketches. Recent studies by Nunns with the late Allan Thomas and others has succeeded in throwing some light on the contribution that music might have made to the tragic outcome of the arrival of Tasman on these shores. Nunns described the scene that has been recreated from what paltry documentary sources there are, ignored by all the Dutch accounts of Tasman’s voyage.

The tribe would have delivered a challenge to the ships that had appeared in their bay and he proposed the long, recorder-like instrument, the pukaea, and the putatara, a small conch-shell instrument. Tasman would have looked for some way of responding. It so happened that some time earlier, Nunns had come across an old Dutch horn known as the mid-winter horn which Ed Allen, NZSO principal French horn, volunteered to manipulate. The exchange between these two fairly primitive horns was an uneasy one, and it was not hard to understand the scope for misunderstanding: a serious challenge had been responded to by sounds that the Maori perhaps interpreted as offensive or insulting: a classic case of people speaking past each other, so that when Tasman’s men set off next morning in the boats everything went wrong.

Culture contact in its most risky form, still to be seen in the phenomena of religion-fuelled strife today. The music’s further development and performance should awaken new interest in the unhappy events of 1642. For now the music which, Nunns remarked, might remain with the name ‘To be announced’, was very incomplete, but Nunns and flutist Bridget Douglas made a brave attempt to realise what the musical exchange between ship and shore might have been.

The following piece written by Philip Brownlee, Te Hau o Tawhitimatea (the breath of the wind god), employed three further instruments; the putorino, another long, recorder-like pipe that has a variety of playing techniques and five distinct functions; the koauau, a small piece carved from a dog bone, though I suppose bones of other mammals would have been used before Europeans arrived; and lastly the small white pumotomoto, used in birth rites, and played into the baby’s fontanella. While Nunns played these, Bridget Douglas played a modern flute and a piccolo.

The rest of the concert was devoted to three wind quintets by New Zealand composers.

The earliest was Lilburn’s of 1966 which has been resurrected in recent years by Ross Harris. Its character was retiring, and suggested a certain diffidence in its musical inspiration that was reflected in tentative weaving among the instruments with musical ideas that bore the familiar LIlburn stamp in their rhythmic shapes and melodic gestures.

Ken Wilson, a former NZSO clarinettist, wrote one of the early, classic New Zealand wind quintets. His idiom is strongly influenced, to no disadvantage at all, by French early 20th century wind compositions such as Poulenc’s; this is a piece that deserves to be heard more often.

The most likable of the three wind quintets was Ross Harris’s Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet., a set of short – mostly very short – pieces that captured a variety of traditional or 1950s jazz, swing, blues, all displaying Harris’s melodic confidence and his feeling for scale and shape.

The Zephyr Quintet gave all three pieces colourful and lively readings.

Ensembles combine in magnificent Nelson concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mozart: Divertimento in E flat, K 563; Brigid Bisley: Unbound for String Quartet; Strauss: Metamorphosen for string septet

Hermitage String Trio, New Zealand String Quartet, Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass)

Nelson Cathedral, Saturday 5 February, 5pm

At several points during the festival the question what was the essence of chamber music arose through the pieces played. Given thaat the essential ingredient of chamber music is music with one player to a part, the rearranging of music from orchestral to chamber music, and vice-versa, raises interesting questions; and there’s the related question, the effect of arrangements for other instruments or for more or fewer instruments that originally conceived, either by the composer or by another.

The Saturday evening concert presented a case of the latter.

Strauss wrote his Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, surely one of the largest pieces of genuine chamber music, though we still await the instrumental equivalent of Tallis’s 40-part motet. It was later rescored for string septet by Rudolph Leopold, after Strauss’s sketches were found in 1990 showing that his original intention was for a septet. This could well have been a mistake, an artistic travesty, which is what I feel about some of the contractions of Romantic orchestral music for chamber ensembles by Schoenberg and Webern. But I was delighted by this, by the greater clarity and purity of expression produced by the seven instruments (the three members of the Hermitage Trio, and three of the New Zealand String Quartet – not Helene Pohl – plus Hiroshi Ikematsu, bass). It seemed to be a better vehicle for the expression of emotion, of grief at the destruction of so much of Germany’s cultural substance. Oddly, I have always hoped to feel a more powerful emotion listening to the usual version of the piece, and have felt that it is too dense and thickly textured for that to find its expression.

Here it was however.

Obviously some of its rich harmony has been dispensed with, but what is left struck me as achieving more effectively what I suppose Strauss had wanted. The programme notes recorded that it was Swiss music philanthropist and conductor Paul Sacher who had asked Strauss for the big ensemble.

This was one of two masterpieces played at the 5pm concert in the Cathedral.

The concert had started with another of Mozart’s pieces given names that suggest light, occasional music. Just as the big wind serenade is no doubt the most powerful and delightful piece of music in its genre, so the Divertimento in E flat stands above any formally named String Trio in existence.

Not only did we hear this all-too-rarely played work, but it was played by a trio which had invested it with enormous attention, detailed study and reflection. There are times when excessive layering of nuances and ever-changing colour and dynamics can become ridiculous. It all depends on the musical intelligence and instinct of the players; the Hermitage Trio had done all that and had sacrificed none of its compositional inventiveness, compromised none of its essential greatness. Their leaning into phrases, their subtle tempo changes – rubato, changes of colour and timbre within a note, were a matter of constant delight. It was often cellist Leonid Gorokhov who seemed to lead the most acute dynamic shifts, while violinist Denis Goldfelt relished tensile, high-lying flights; the violist, Alexander Zemtsov, sustained the centre, offering more steady dynamics and contributing to but not extending the cellist’s gestures.

The six-movement work is quite long, but this performance was such that one hoped it will never end.

Lying between these two great works was a new string quartet by New Zealand composer Brigid Ursula Bisley, called Unbound. I am not known for unbounded and uncritical enthusiasm for every new piece by our composers. This one felt like music that might have had a slow gestation, but had nevertheless derived from musical inspiration that came from within. It did not sound as if the composer had sat looking at each bar wondering what to write next. It felt as if it was there and only needed refinement and arranging.

It certainly helped that the composer spoke to us and asked the players to illustrate certain elements. And it was a relief that she concluded by saying “I hope you enjoy the music”, instead of the fatuous injunction “Enjoy!” which has become almost universal. “Thanks, but would you mind if I remain responsible for my own feelings?”

It opened quietly, each instrument contributing intriguingly to a pattern of disharmony till a melody emerged and after a while viola and cello laid down some bass support. Influences? Yes, Bartók quite distinctly, but more important was an impression of music that was beholden to no school or musical ideology, but simply sounded alive to today’s environment, whatever that means, and aimed at engaging with the listener. Lots happened; there was a beguiling, dreamy phase, a yearning spirit as Doug Beilman’s second violin cried while Helene Pohl’s first violin sang a high descant over the cello’s pedal support.

There were so many elements that appeared distinct but ultimately created a coherant musical story; and it ended without flourish or rhetoric.

Rare and wonderful Mozart opens Nelson’s festival

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival: Grand Opening: Dvořák, Halvorsen, Mozart

Nelson Cathedral

Friday 4 February 7.30pm

For those who knew their music, this was a rare treat. Dvořák’s string sextet is a rich and gorgeous piece, one of those pieces that has familiar moments but is surprisingly neglected. Is it really too hard to get the necessary six player together? The sextet gains it special sonority and interest both from the more complex textures available and the addition of two lower instruments, an extra viola and cello. The four New Zealanders were assisted by the violist and cellist from the Hermitage Trio.

The extraordinary gifts of the latter trio were further revealed as the violinist and cellist played an astonishing duo composed by Norwegian Johan Halvorson based on a tune by Handel. No mere virtuosic show-piece (though it was all that), but a sophisticated and brilliant little composition in its own right. It unleashed a storm of applause.

But the real masterpiece was Mozart’s Gran Partita, or Serenade for 13 wind instruments (though the 13th is Ikematsu’s double bass) in B flat, K 361. It had profoundly impressed those who heard it in Vienna in 1784, and it has continued to enchant audiences ever since. It is less often heard live because it’s hard to get a dozen top-class wind players together. But the NZSO Soloists helped out and the performance was deeply musical, moving, tear-inducing, enthralling. Four horns, and two each of oboes, clarinets, basset horns and bassoons, plus double bass.

It’s almost an hour long, with seven movements including two minuets, a theme and variations movement and others in rondo or sonata form. There are very few other such ensembles and none that touch it in musical inspiration and depth.

It is a ever-changing pattern of solos from the various instruments, sonorous symphonies of sound from different combinations and often the entire band. There’s too much to detail, but constantly striking was the string bass, often suggesting timpani, from Ikematsu, grounding the whole fabric. Most rapturous was the third movement, an Adagio, in which Robert Orr’s oboe provided long ecstatic cries underpinned and echoed by clarinets and one by one, all sections. The remarkable fifth movement too captured deeper responses through its exquisite melancholy alternating with a brisk march rhythm, often accompanied by a hypnotic tread or pulsating chords from bassoons and basset horns.

The concert had begun with the little heard sextet in A, Op 48, by Dvořák, again neglected on account of its configuration. It really is too bad that string quartets have come to so dominate the chamber music field that the numerous quintets, sextets and larger ensembles are little known.

The beauty of the sextet in its normal configuration is a string quartet plus additional viola and cello, which gives both a heart-warmingly greater sonic foundation as well as allowing the composer to engage in more complex harmonic paterns. Though much of the melody was folk-derived, there was nothing peasantish about the composition or its performance.

The third movement – a furiant in place of minuet or scherzo – was probably most likely to sound familiar, from kinship with Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, but the entire work is filled with melody that the composer knows how to make use of in ever-shifting ways.
While the playing was polished and opulent, there were moments, as in the dumka second movement when a little more boisterousness might have helped. In the last movement a long viola solo from Gillian Ansell caught the ear: a theme and variations, whose melody and its various guises were enchantingly played by this happy ensemble that found complete unity of spirit throughout. Someone asked Haydn why he didn’t write string quintets and he said he’d tried but could never find the fifth voice (or something to that effect); Dvořák had no such problem finding richness through six parts with which to clothe his fecund source of melody.

Chamber Music Festival under way in Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson, 3 to 12 February 2011.

The Eleventh Adam Chamber Music Festival began with a gala dinner and concert at the Woollaston Winery out of Nelson with musical contributions from all the musicians present at that point; the New Zealand String Quartet whose first violinist and violist are the festival’s artistic directors; Canadian clarinettist James Campbell joined the quartet to play Weber’s Clarinet Quintet; special treat throughout the 10-day festival, of a fast rising Russian string trio, the Hermitage Trio. Their contribution was one of Beethoven’s string trios – the Op 3. Members of both the quartet and trio contributed towards Boccherini’s String Quintet in C. Finally, the NZSO’s principal bassist, Hiroshi Ikematsu, found a slot with cellist Rolf Gjelsten to play Rossini’s hair-raising and hilarious duo for those two instruments.

It was a stylish affair, with music between each of the courses of the elaborate dinner. I was not there, but patrons were delighted at the entire presentation.

The purely musical Grand Opening however was on Friday the 4th in the Nelson Cathedral.

Audiences at the festival have grown steadily over the years, till now several concerts were either sold out or almost so. That can be explained partly by the eventual awakening of New Zealanders, and a few overseas visitors, to the phenomenon that has taken firm root in other parts of the western, and even the Asian, world: the music festival, usually in summer in a charming place – like Nelson. The other stimulus in the case of New Zealand is the steady decline in artistic standards by the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington, to the point where classical music has a minor place and the festival is dominated by events aimed to attract casual audiences of limited interest in the arts, little cultivation and knowledge of music or the other mainstream performing arts. None of the other festivals in New Zealand, least of all the one in Auckland, takes its role as an arts festival seriously either.

Esa-Pekka Salonen recently remarked that people in their thirties and forties are awakening again to real music: “You realise that your time in not unlimited, that there might be an end to all this, and that life is too short to be wasted on things that are not quality”. In most countries, a whole generation has been let down by a school of ill-educated educationalists who have impoverished school curricula and allowed what is called the relativist view of culture to banish the systematic teaching of literature, general history, and the arts.

They have discovered that they can now come to Nelson for a rich diet of great, varied and wonderful music from top international players.

This festival was compressed into 10 days in comparison typically to about 17 days in the past. There have been varied reactions to this and time will tell how a programme with more music each day, but somewhat less overall, will impact on audiences and musicians …  and the bottom line.

We will post reviews of each concert in the coming days.

Michael Houstoun’s gala welcome to the new Fazioli at Waikanae

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society: Inauguration of new piano

Bach: Italian Concerto BWV 971; Schumann: Kreisleriana, Op 17; Kapustin: Sonata No 2, Op 54; Liszt: Three Petrarch Sonnets and The Fountains of the Villa d’Este

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 30 January 2011, 2.30pm

For a long time, pianists and some of the audiences at the Waikanae Music Society’s concerts had been a little dissatisfied with the piano, given the character of the concert space, a large multi-purpose hall in which sounds could dissipate for those not close to the performers. For more than a decade the society had been accumulating funds to buy a replacement and the time came last year. The achievements of the Waikanae Music Society should be seen as a shining example to all other musical organisations.

In consultation with Michael Houstoun the society settled on a Fazioli and it arrived three days before the concert. This special gala concert, meaning somewhat higher than usual prices, drew a very large audience – almost 500. The piano seemed easily to reach to the back and many remarked on its richness of tone. (For an enchanting insight into Fazioli pianos, let me recommend a chapter in T E Carhart’s The Piano Shop on the Left Bank).

The recital consisted of one piece that Houstoun had played in the past year in at least a couple of recitals in the Wellington region – Schumann’s Kreisleriana, some pieces we’ve not heard from Houstoun, at least for quite along time, and one very singular piece: an extended four movement Sonata in the jazz idiom, by Nikolai Kapustin.

Kapustin is a Ukrainian composer whose training at the Moscow Conservatorium was orthodox enough, but quite soon he fell under the spell of jazz, and was influenced there by someone he called a great teacher, Avrelian Rubakh.

Houstoun’s performance of the second piano sonata (out of eighteen), a many-faceted piece, suggested a myriad of jazz pianists from Earl Hines, though Errol Garner, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, even Keith Jarrett – particularly Oscar Peterson, whose amazing virtuosity astonishes both classical and jazz lovers.

Houstoun has recently been exploring jazz, perhaps inspired by his association with Mike Nock, and his feel for it impressed both by its command of the often highly complex rhythms, the star-bursts of cascading notes, with whirl-wind scales and arpeggios, all played as if pouring out as improvisation both spontaneous and inspired. Nevertheless there were times when, in the more bluesy passages such as in the Largo third movement, a feeling of more total relaxation might have been missed, and some driving climaxes fell a little short of the rapturous excitement that a Garner might have created.

Perhaps it is a surprise that Kapustin had no problems pursuing jazz in the Soviet Union where Stalin had proscribed it. But Khrushchev’s reforms created a considerably more comfortable climate for jazz and Radio Free Europe allowed Russian jazz enthusiasts to hear it.

So while Kapustin’s interest was not main-stream at the Moscow Conservatory, what made it acceptable was that it involved no improvisation and its employment of classical forms with jazz influences kept it free from criticism. Kapustin said, “I was entirely free; no problems. My music wasn’t avant-garde.”

The second sonata and other music by Kapustin has been famously recorded by Marc-André Hamelin. I have not heard it but reviews are electrifying, and so evidently is his playing. But I would be surprised if it were to prove much more idiomatic and consummate that what we heard on Sunday.

Judgement about the worth of the music is of course something entirely different. For the moment, it must simply be regarded as a remarkable, highly entertaining piece, brilliantly played.

That is no doubt how Liszt was regarded in the 1830s and 40s, though there were plenty of conservative critics ready to condemn him out-of-hand (there are still some). Houstoun ended his recital with the three Petrarch Sonnets, sensitive, poetic, carefully crafted in terms of dynamics and rubato, but again, not as abandoned as some might have wished, to the romantic excesses that were the thing at the time they were written: and The Fountains at the Villa d’Este; all from the Italian book of Years of Pilgrimage. The latter, insubstantial but enchanting, and played accordingly.

In this two-hundredth anniversary of his birth I hope for some serious exploration of this somewhat neglected and misrepresented composer. Houstoun is an obvious proponent; he has made a fine start.

The recital had begun with a fine and intellectually quite severe reading of Bach’s Italian Concerto (homage to the piano); it was elegant and fluent, rhythmically firm in the first movement, gracious and thoughtful in the second, racing, but perfect in its clarity and spirit in the last movement.

Kreisleriana featured in Houstoun’s programmes last year, the Schumann bicentenary, and both Peter Mechen and I wrote reviews of the performances. Though an important and highly imaginative work, for me it doesn’t have the delight of Carnaval, Papillons, the Abegg Variations, the Symphonic Etudes, or the inspired rapture of the Fantaisie.

But a highly persuasive account of it. I will leave it at that.

Postcards From Exotic Places – NZSO’s Chinese New Year

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Postcards From Exotic Places

SHENG – Postcards / LALO – Symphonie Espagnole

BODY – 3 Arias from “Alley” / DVORAK – Symphony No.9 “From the New World”

Tianwa Yang (violin)

Jon Jackson (counter-tenor)

Perry So (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 29th January 2011

On paper, it somehow seemed a slightly gimmicky way for the NZSO to begin the year – and having two much-played works from the standard repertoire presented as “exotic places” came across as almost ingenuous. How could Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, which EVERYBODY knows, possibly create an “exotic” impression? And, as a friend of mine remarked, “Chinese New Year Concert? – well, if you regard Lalo and Dvorak as Chinese composers, I suppose!”

In the event, it all worked surprisingly well, not the least due to some remarkable performances from the musicians involved with the concert. Both of the “standard repertoire” pieces sounded newly-minted on this occasion, and the two more obviously “Chinese” items in the concert stimulated and delighted the ear, so that we in the audience were constantly drawn towards the music. The brilliant and evocative playing of the soloist, Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang, brought Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole alive for me in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible – I’d previously regarded the piece as vapid and long-winded, and was charmed to find myself so unexpectedly engaged by it all. As significant was the contribution of the young Chinese conductor, Perry So, who secured from the NZSO players plenty of energy and focus throughout, enabling one to fall in love all over again with Antonin Dvorak’s most well-known symphony, one whose familiarity might just as easily have prompted a routine, all-purpose makeover. Instead, here was a fresh, urgently-delivered sequence of responses which made the notes sound as though they really mattered, the first two movements in particular for me getting right into what sounded like the music’s pulsating heart.

One of the most interesting aspects of the concert was the performance of three of the arias from Jack Body’s opera “Alley”, first staged in 1998 in Wellington’s International Arts Festival. At a pre-concert-talk the composer himself charmingly spoke about the music and the figure behind its inspiration, China-based New Zealander Rewi Alley, an active and life-long supporter of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Revolution and its aftermath. Though problematic for a number of reasons, the production at the time received a lot of acclaim, though I felt the music had been somewhat compromised by the various on-and off-stage goings-on. Here, then, was a chance to experience without undue distraction three of the opera’s musical highlights, each of the three arias belonging to the young Rewi Alley, reflecting upon different aspects of both pre-and post-revolutionary China.

Each aria was sung by Australian counter-tenor Jon Jackson, not quite with sufficient voice in his “normal” register, but crackling with electricity in his “counter-tenor” mode, galvanizing the textures with incredibly emotive tones. The first song, Two Eyes, describing the execution of a young dissident, began with beautifully-focused “exotic” textures, readily capturing a sense of a time and place at once immediate and far away. The singing, precise and controlled at first, seemed muted, in danger of being consistently overwhelmed by the orchestral textures (less of a problem, perhaps, with the band in an opera house orchestral pit), but then hurling aside all reticence in counter-tenor mode, as the victim’s fate becomes apparent. The second aria , Men at Work, featured goosebump-making antiphonal drumming, and orchestral vocalizations, the soloist more “sprecht” than “gesang” in places, describing both the power and purpose of “ten thousand men working naked”, and the near-eroticism of the sight of a young boy cooling his body with irrigation water. Finally, Night painted a visionary, in places heartbreaking set of images of sleep, involving sleepers, whispering trees and millions of “battered, joyless children” imploring, seeking comfort and love. Body and his librettist, Geoff Chapple, used texts drawn from Alley’s own poetry.

Opening the concert, Bright Sheng’s Postcards took us on a whirlwind tour of different parts of China, the composer using folk music idioms from specific regions to help characterize a particular feeling about each one. From the Mountains took listeners to remote, widely-spaced places, the wind lines exotically “bending” their melodic pitching in places and creating a peaceful sense of drifting distance in tandem with undulating string figurations. A contrast came with From the River Valley, whose Respighi-like energies, heralded by bell-sounds, featured ear-tickling sonorities from winds and a muted trumpet set against the roar of heavy percussion at climactic points. Rather more primitive and challenging was From the Savage Lands, sounding in places like a “Stravinsky-meets Britten” amalgam of rhythms and sonorities, building up to an exciting rhythmic tattooing of percussion and shrieking winds, until muted trumpet and bass clarinet led the music away from the bacchanalian frenzies to a state of exhausted afterglow, the composer confessing that at this point in his work, the final Wish You Were Here, his homesickness for his native land became all too apparent. Sheng’s music amply demonstrated at this point that peculiarly Oriental ability to evoke whole worlds with the simplest of artistic means, the restraint of the scoring making all the more telling a concluding impression of peaceful resignation.

As for the two better-known items in the concert, what I really enjoyed was the immediacy of the playing of both the soloist and the orchestra – I thought the instrumental textures were given a bit more edge and “bite” in places than has been the case with the orchestra of late, making for an exciting and involving sound. Beside violinist Tianwa Yang’s stunning playing – expressive across a gutsy-to-sweetly-rapt continuum – many of the orchestral solos both stimulated and enchanted, none more so than the superb cor anglais playing of Michael Austin throughout the New World Symphony’s Largo, though comparable magic was wrought by the front-desk octet of strings at the close of the movement. Apart from a reading of the Scherzo of the Symphony which in places relied perhaps too much on speed instead of rhythmic pointing, I thought conductor Perry So’s approach to the music constantly fresh and invigorating. And I liked the sounds he encouraged from the players, direct and wholehearted, and serving the music well.

Dialogues des Carmélites – the sources

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

In my review of the New Zealand Opera School’s gala concert on 13 January, I mentioned that Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues des Carmélites, in the last scene of which the Carmelite sisters are guillotined and which the women singers at the opera school performed, was based on a novel by Georges Bernanos.

I erred.

It was based on a drama by that novelist, but the story’s origins go much further back.

It derives from actual events during the Terror that followed the French Revolution in 1793/94, when the sisters of the Carmelite convent at Compiègne were indeed guillotined. The story was told by one of their members, Mother Marie, who is assistant prioress in the opera and survived the massacre to live till 1836. The publication of her chronicle, Relation, led to the beatification of the sisters in 1906. The German writer Gertrude von Le Fort turned it into a novel in 1911, inventing the role of Blanche, naming her ‘de la Force’, an adaptation of her own name.

After the Second World War, the French resistance fighter Father Brückberger created a screen-play on the story, and invited Bernanos to write the dialogue. He too invested something of himself in the work; he was dying of cancer, like the Prioress, Madame de Croissy, and he even gave her his own age, 59. And he clothed the Prioress’s discourse with Blanche on theological matters and the character of their order. with his own religious obsessions and feelings.

But Bernanos’s work was regarded as unsuitable for film and it was turned into a stage play which Poulenc saw in the early 1950s. So that when his publisher, Ricordi, suggested it to Poulenc as the subject of an opera, he seized the chance at once. The opera was premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 1957, in which the role of Blanche was sung by Virginia Zeani, founding principal tutor at the Wanganui opera school.

As I wrote in the review, this ensemble was perhaps the most striking of all the performances at this year’s concert. Perhaps it will prompt an enterprising impresario or opera company to tackle the entire opera, generally considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century.

(drawn from the Grove Book of Operas)

 

Free Concert to mark the Summer School of Choral Conducting

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Choral pieces by American composers, Rossini, Brahms, Lauridsen, Helen Fisher, David Griffiths, David Childs and Anthony Ritchie

Choir of the Summer School in Choral Conducting conducted by three visiting tutors from USA with accompanist, Bronwyn Brown (Australia); Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir conducted by Karen Grylls, with Horomona Horo (taonga puoro)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill Street

Sunday, 2 January 2011

A free concert is always welcome, and Sacred Heart was nearly full for a short choral concert.

The opening bracket of songs were all by American composers, and conducted by tutors at the Summer School of Choral Conducting, the choir being made up of those being tutored: choral conductors and fledgling conductors.

Jo-Michael Scheibe conducted ‘I carry your heart with me’ by David Dickau, with words by e.e. cummings. He explained that there had only been three hours for rehearsal; whether this was for this piece alone or for all three pieces was not made clear. After a tentative start, this was a good performance, though not electrifying, despite one of the headings in the printed programme reading ‘International Summer School in Choral Conduction Inc.’ The choir of over 40 was well balanced, and featured splendid basses. This item was accompanied on the piano by Bronwyn Brown.

The second choral song was a setting of Psalm 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes’, by Nicholas Mekaig. It was conducted by Christopher Kiver, an Englishman resident in the United States. Again, the opening was a little tentative, and at one point the soprano sound turned into something of a shriek, but there was good unaccompanied singing, and a lovely balanced ending.

These were two beautiful settings, which would be worth local choirs taking up.

The last of the three was accompanied, and opened with excellent unison singing. Most of the choir sang from memory in this item: ‘True Light’ by Keith Hampton, conducted by Mary Hopper. This was a gospel-style number, with the choir eventually swaying to the beat.

The choir made a good fist of unfamiliar music. The conductors were clear in their beats and other gestures, without flamboyance, and produced good results from a group not accustomed to singing together, performing new music.

After a short break while the choirs changed places, Horomona Horo slowly led Voices New Zealand into the Cathedral, as he played taonga puoro. He switched instruments from the conch shell trumpet-like instrument to a long wooden, very loud wind instrument when the choir reached the front of the church.

For a complete contrast, the choir began with Rossini’s ‘Cantemus’, an attractive piece reminiscent of compositions of a couple of centuries earlier. Immediately we were in the presence of a very impressive choir. These are quality voices, singing very effectively with unified tone, excellent enunciation, feeling for the music, which moves forward all the time. Legato singing was graceful, and dynamics superbly graded.

Brahms’s ‘Nachtwache’ and ‘Verlorene Jugend’ from Funf Gesänge followed. Fullness of beautiful tone is what distinguishes this choir and its remarkable conductor, as well as accuracy and attention to detail. For example, all the vowels are made in the same way by every one of the 24 choir members. There is plenty of volume when required. In this piece there were one or two harsh high soprano notes, but this was an isolated occurrence. I am sure Brahms would have been thrilled with this performance.

The noted American choral composer Morten Lauridsen wrote Six Fire Songs. Three were performed, and proved to be very effective music. They were sung with force and clarity. There were difficult harmonies, all executed to perfection.

‘Pounamu’ by Helen Fisher was the only one of the Voices items accompanied: Horomona Horo played the koauau beautifully during this quite lengthy piece. The instrument contributed to a ghostly feeling, as did the long-held notes from the choir. The interval of a second occurred frequently; this was difficult music, and not something that many other choirs could readily tackle.

David Griffiths set poems of Charles Brasch in Five Landscapes, of which we heard two: ‘Oreti Beach’ and ‘On Mount Iron’. This was stark, but interesting music, and the second song particularly featured delicious choral writing. However, from where I sat it was not possible to hear most of the words.

A lovely ‘Salve Regina’ setting by David Childs was exquisitely sung. There were gorgeous harmonies, and the basses particularly were outstanding. A few fuzzy entries did not really detract from a fine rendering.

Last of all was a piece written especially for Voices New Zealand: ‘Olinda’ by Anthony Ritchie. Here, the words were clearer – it may be that the writing of a former New Zealand Youth Choir member (and present Board member of Choirs Aotearoa) lent itself to greater clarity. It was a cheerful item with which to end a memorable concert.

Christine Argyle introduced the Voices items, each of which was received with sustained and hearty applause from the audience.

The four New Zealand compositions were all more adventurous in style than the American ones. This is not to put down the latter – they were all most effective choral pieces, and certainly not without tricky harmonies and rhythms. We were treated to a programme of demanding music, magnificently sung.

Connecting with Sibelius – NZSO on Naxos

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Sibelius –  Symphony No.1 in E Minor Op.39 / Symphony No.3 in C Major Op.52

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Pietari Inkinen, conductor

(recorded in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

March 3rd-5th 2009)

Naxos 8.572305

Interesting that Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO chose to record these works before presenting them in concert – I had thought that the orchestra’s “Sibelius Festival” of September 2009 was the occasion for parallel recordings of the same repertoire, but it appears from the dates given on the disc that the First and Third Symphonies at least were set down some time before the concerts, in March of that year. Doubtless, Naxos’s “schedules” would have been the overall consideration in the done order of things, but I would have thought it best to have tried to capture on record some of the energy and impetus generated by the “live” performances. I have to say that the music-making on this new Naxos CD represents a pretty stunning achievement by conductor and players, as were the live concerts, of course. At the time I felt Inkinen’s interpretations and the orchestral playing, though beautifully and expertly realized, hung fire in places, though while listening to both works on CD I did feel that at certain flash-points the concert performances had a sharper focus, as if the music had been lived with for a while and the structural and emotional terrain even more deeply considered.

I do remember the beautifully-presented clarinet solo at the beginning of the First Symphony – in the concert the player was Patrick Barry, and there’s every reason to suppose that it’s the same musician on this recording. It couldn’t have gotten the symphony’s performance off to a more auspicious beginning, the last few whispered notes of the solo startlingly flooded with light and energy by the strings’ entry, the playing fervent and sonorous. Everything’s nicely caught, the mood-changes profound and atmospheric, but judiciously fitted into the music’s long-term contouring. We get a vivid sense of the work’s journeying through varied territories, pizzicati strings, winds and brass building up the excitement and tension with the development’s repeated falling melodic figure, leading to the glorious flowering of the strings’ big tune and the reprise of their opening material, grander and more epic this time round, on full orchestra. Is all perfect? – Here, and again at the movement’s end I find myself wanting a notch or two more bite, more fire in the music’s belly – those stern summoning brass calls near the end for me need to sound as though they REALLY mean business!

Following are rich, dark evocations at the slow movement’s beginning – expressive strings and wind against a sonorous brass sound. As the music moves from pastoral playfulness to epic resolve, Inkinen and the orchestra take on the challenge with ever-increasing intensity. The stormy episode trenchantly rumbles and threatens, only a slight rhythmic hiccup at the top of a string phrase (a rogue edit?) momentarily delaying a sense of those rhythms and impulses spilling over and flooding everything in the way, though the elephantine brass snarls and lower-string energies are wonderfully visceral! A Finlandia-like theme (a variant of the movement’s opening phrase) calms the storm, and takes up the dark tender song of the opening once again, singing the movement to its end – beautifully played.

Good to hear Laurence Reese’s timpani so well caught in places here, but especially in this scherzo, stunningly presented by all concerned – I liked the cheekiness of the canonic episode begun by the winds and bolstered by the strings via deftly-voiced dovetailing. Then, shortly afterwards, there’s that astonishing mood-change beautifully wrought by the horns at the beginning of the trio – so magical, like revealing a secret garden whose veil is, for a few minutes pulled back to breathtaking, alchemic effect, before being peremptorily hidden from view and the opening rhythmic patterning reaffirmed. Right at the end, I thought Inkinen could have encouraged his brasses to spit out the final phrases with a bit more temperament – again, emphasizing a kind of “this is what we’re here for” attitude, which would have had the effect of more tellingly focusing the music. The finale’s opening has tragic, but noble strings, with wind-and-brass exchanges preparing the way for spirited, urgent allegro sequences, the timpani’s crisp rhythmic patterning especially well-caught as the music drives towards crashing chords and tumbledown string figurations. The hymn-like string tune is sweet and warm, keeping emotion in reserve the first time round, then blossoming more readily at its reprise – even so, I feel it’s all a bit cool, beautifully played, but held at arm’s length. “Oh, for a muse of fire!” exclaims a Shakespearean character; and likewise I crave here and there in the playing a touch of proper incandescence.

Symphony Three follows on the disc, a work more overtly classical in structure and organization, but still with Nordic overtones, by turns bracing and melancholic. Inkinen’s very “poised” approach brings out the lines and structures clearly, trusting more at the outset to the steady spin of rhythms and melodic lines than to accenting and phrase-pointing (the strings at the opening seem almost casual, with clipped phrase-ends) – though as the performance takes hold, conductor and players draw the listener into the spell woven by the music’s tensile insistence, the playing finding ever-increasing nuance and colour as one episode leads into another (whole realms of wonderment at 2’46” for example, when a great stillness draws its cloak over the skies for a few precious moments). And by the time the opening motive gathers up its impulses and returns, unequivocally, on the full orchestra, we are here swept along with the music’s tide, the triumphal march making its point and disappearing, almost as quickly as it had come. Only a strangely lukewarm-sounding final “Amen” from brass and timpani momentarily disconcerts – the rest is truly heartwarming.

But it’s the slow movement in this performance that truly enchants – Inkinen and the players manage to at once let the music unfold, as if conjuring it out of the air, while bringing a richly-wrought storyteller’s focus to each and every phrase. Winds and strings take turns to sing the melody, while brasses lay down ineffably distant pedal-points of ambience, the whole interaction of sounds here making for a listener’s  memorable distillation of imaginative possibility. I like the truly forthright wind-playing in the becalmed central section, and a sense of the air being stirred and shaken by quickening impulses from strings and winds, whose brief, impish dance sparkles like a will-o-the-wisp in the gloaming. The sunlight returns at the finale’s opening (such beguiling winds), though remembrances from the slow movement soon begin to cloud the skies and drive the energies and irruptions towards the juggernaut-like martial theme that sweeps the work to its conclusion. Stirring stuff – even if at the very end I could have imagined a grander, more celebratory sense of arrival (the live performance seemed to convey this more tellingly), with brass and timpani allowed rather more “attitude”!  Still, on the strength of all of this, I for one will await the rest of the series with considerable expectation.