Cantoris – opera that’s tuneful, rhythmic, magical, exotic, funny, murderous, tragic, pompous, escapist, real – what more could you want?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CANTORIS – A Night at the Opera

Cantoris Choir
Soloists: Barbara Paterson (soprano), William McElwee (baritone)
Music Director: Ingrid Schoenfeld
Piano: Heather Easting

Ruggero LEONCAVALLO – Bell Chorus from I Pagliacci
Giuseppe VERDI – Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore
George Frideric HANDEL – Chorus of Enchanted Islanders from Alcina
Giacomo PUCCINI – Humming Chorus from Madama Butterfly
Georges BIZET – Habanera, with Chorus from Carmen
Toreador Song, with Chorus, from Carmen
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART – “Heil sei euch Geweihten” from The
Magic Flute
Christoph Willibald GLUCK – “Quel est l’audacieux” from Orphée et
Eurydice
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART – Voyagers’ Chorus from Idomeneo
George Frideric HANDEL – “How Strange their Ends” from Theodora
Henry PURCELL – Dido’s Lament and “With Drooping Wings”
from Dido and Aeneas
Giuseppe VERDI – Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco
Brindisi (Drinking Song and Chorus) from La
Traviata
Carl ORFF – Chorus “O Fortuna”  from Carmina Burana

St.Peter’s-on-Willis-Street, Te Aro, Wellington
Saturday, 10th May 2025

What a splendid blockbuster of a way for a choir to begin a season! – and with so many wonderful moments that have actually transcended their “high art” origins and are now “in the culture!” – and none the worse for it! So often certain pieces of music are deemed well-known to the point of cliché, and are therefore passed over, in favour of something more “interesting”. But! – as I fondly remember from my own formative years, it was often one of these very pieces, which would have been regarded by others as “hackneyed”, whose first hearing hit me like a ton of bricks, and to the extent that life was never the same again afterwards!

At school, in the Fourth Form, I had the good fortune to have a teacher who was himself an opera fan – so he would play to us pieces from a recording (of which I now have a prized copy!) of “Opera Choruses”, ALL of which I simply fell in love with on first hearing! – it was partly the way he introduced them to his class of rough-diamond, mostly rugby-playing and pop-music-loving boys who probably didn’t at that stage know Wagner from a Weet-Bix packet, but who listened, spell-bound as he described scenarios to go with the choruses, such as how a rich man, sitting miserably in his house surrounded by his wealth, suddenly heard a crowd of pilgrims passing in the street outside, singing “Alleluiah” at the tops of their voices as they went by the man’s window – and how the man was galvanised by what he heard, and, leaving his house and possessions behind, rushed down the road to join them! – and then, of course, our teacher played us the actual recording of the chorus, and we were “there”, listening to these voices, and imagining how we would have been filled with wonderment at the sounds and jumped up at the end to follow the voices ourselves. This particular chorus (the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Wagner’s “Tannhauser”) wasn’t among Cantoris’s presentations, but the others had an effect this same evening that vividly brought back that memory to me, of my sensibilities being unexpectedly “ignited” by something whose appeal was direct and enduring!

What was especially wonderful at the Cantoris concert was how the choir, with the barest minimum of forces (no orchestra, and no elaborate stage or theatrical trappings with which to fill out the scenarios), was able to generate from their music-making something of this excitement of both discovery and rediscovery amongst their audience. For this they could thank in addition an inspirational music director, Ingrid Schoenfeld, a brilliant pianist, Heather Easting, and two solo singers, soprano Barbara Paterson and baritone William McElwee who threw themselves wholeheartedly into their characterisations of various roles associated with certain of the choruses. Audience reaction to each and every one of the items (even those whose unexpectedly abrupt endings might have taken by surprise people who were just beginning to “groove along” with things – however, opera, as any enthusiast knows, thrives on the unexpected!) was enthusiastic and wholehearted, and the programming with its variety of settings, situations and characterisations meant that one’s interest never flagged.

Within this variety were placed a number of sure-fire favourites with tunes that everybody seems to have heard somewhere or other, those “part of the soundscape” melodies which seem to have always been there – such were two of the Verdi choruses (the “Anvil” Chorus from “Il Trovatore”, and the “Hebrew Slaves” Chorus from “Nabucco”), Bizet’s perennial favourite “Habanera” (solo-and-chorus) from “Carmen”, and the more recent “classic” from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, that’s made up for lost time on various television advertisements, “O Fortuna!” Each one had plenty of impact of satisfyingly varying kinds, even if in the “Il Trovatore” excerpt the anvils sounded more “Janissary-like” than whole and ringing, and the gypsy men fudged their first “All’opra! all’opra!”, probably through thinking too much about the gypsy women! Such a distraction wasn’t a problem with Barbara Paterson’s alluringly three-dimensional  portrayal of Carmen in the “Habanera” (the singer using the church’s central aisle to palpable dramatic effect!) – and though baritone William McElwee couldn’t quite match her range of vocal colour and impulse, his confident “presence” as Escamillo in the Toreador’s Song, did ample justice to the bullfighter’s swaggering character, both singers backed to the hilt by the choir’s support and the unfailingly buoyant trajectories of Heather Easting’s accompaniments!

On a different emotional plane were two other solo-and-chorus presentations which resounded afterwards in the memory, firstly Gluck’s chilling “Quel est L’Audacieux” from Orphée et Eurydice, featuring the choir of Furies guarding the Underworld with tones fearsome and implaccable  – and the baritone a tremulous but staunch and persistent supplicant, driven desperately by his love for Eurydice to bring her back from the land of the Dead – the atmosphere generated by the confrontation was properly chilling, with the choir’s tones dark and malevolent before being moved to pity by McElwee’s plaintive pleas – a memorable evocation. Though not cheek-by jowl on the programme, fortunately, we still couldn’t help but register the contrasts in almost every way between the Gluck scenario and Henry Purcell’s famous “Dido’s Lament”, one of opera’s most heart-rending scenes, and given all the space needed for both impulse and stillness to work a powerful spell – Paterson’s singing was beautifully-poised, purer of tone on her second-time-round ascent at “reMEMBER ME” and thoroughly affecting altogether, as was the choir’s following “With Drooping Wings” chorus, its sombre tones and heartbeat-like phrasings seeming to put all of us closer to our tenuous grasp upon life than we might have otherwise wanted.

I don’t intend to scroll through the entire programme in this review, but would like to register some more specific enjoyments, such as the opening “Bell Chorus” from Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci”, which gave us plenty of bright, vibrant bell-sounds and ear-catching dynamic variation. Another was the chorus from Handel’s “Alcina”, well-remembered from an enterprising production I attended some years ago at Day’s’ Bay Opera, and bringing back some lovely evocations of that time. In fact the programme as such had a number of lesser-known choruses from works such as from another Handel work, an oratorio “Theodora” (again, adventurously performed, and heard by me, at Day’s Bay, incidentally, as an opera!). Any memory of the work had by this time gone, so it seemed like a new and wondrous experience for me, a solemn, processional-like journey sustained partly by long-held notes, and at other times closely-worked phrases that seemed to gestate from these same lines like a plant coming into flower, the whole suiting the passage of thought and expression of wonderment – for me, a delightful rediscovery!.

Another came from Mozart, this time his “Idomeneo” (one which gave Barbara Paterson another chance to shine as Elettra, one of the characters in the opera’s story, here expressing hopes with some trepidation for a calm voyage to her homeland with the person she loves) – a kind of Mozartean “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” work, here given with flowing, undulating tones from the choir, taking the treacherous upward leap towards the end in their stride!

Comments in general? These are mere opinions and can be regarded as such – but I have to confess to wishing that the trajectories of just a couple of the items had been allowed to flow more easily and dreamily – Puccini’s “Humming Chorus”, for instance, I prefer to hear sounded as if it’s almost “breathed” rather than sung and that we listeners are eavesdropping on something really private and close to the heart! To an extent I thought also that the “Va, pensiero” Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves could also have been taken as if in a dream at the start, making the “outburst” in the middle more of a kind of the captives’ “awakening” a demonstration of despair and grief at their predicament – “O harp, why do you hang so silently?…rekindle the memories in our hearts!”

Enough! – reviewers of concerts should talk about what and how things were done, played and sung, rather than compile wish-lists of such things as “could-have-beens!”! It will be obvious that I got such a lot of pleasure from out of the concert, a good deal of which was reinforced by the enjoyment of those sitting close to me and of other people I talked with afterwards. Congratulations and thanks are due to all concerned for their part in such a warm-hearted enterprise!

Wellington Youth Orchestra – revels ceremonial and fantastical

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra –  Conductor Mark Carter  congratulates WYO leader Alan Kao at the conclusion of the “Fanfare and Fantasy” concert on Saturday May 3rd, 2025

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Symphony No. 100 in G Major “Military”
MODEST MUSORGSKY (ed. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY – Capriccio Italien

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 3rd May 2025

Wellington Youth Orchestra’s engagingly-presented opening “salvo” of 2025 appropriately began with one of the most agreeably demonstrative pieces of ceremonial music from the classical era, Josef Haydn’s by turns genial and uproarious “Military” Symphony. This was no less than the composer’s hundredth work in a form he himself had practically reinvented and made his own, setting a remarkable benchmark for future attempts by his successors at reconciling the competing requirements of form and content in symphonic music.

Such was Haydn’s fecundity he had come up with all kinds of different ideas over the years to attract and maintain his audience’s interest. Prior to his final years, during which he had become largely a free-lance composer, he had been employed by the Hungarian Esterhazy family at their Eisenstadt residence on the Austro-Hungarian border, and  – as Haydn himself once famously remarked – had the freedom to be “original”. An example of this was a work called the “Farewell” Symphony, which has a final movement where all the players gradually leave the stage one by one, blowing out their candles as they go – Haydn wanted to give his Prince the message that he and his players badly needed a holiday!

By the time he came to write Symphony No 100 in G Major in 1793 (one of a number which became no less than twelve “London” Symphonies), his old employer had died, and Haydn was enjoying new-found freedom, making two trips to London at the invitation of impresario, Johann Peter Salomon (after whom the set of “London” Symphonies are often named), meeting King George III, and being feted by both the court and high society. Despite such blandishments he preferred Vienna, returning permanently at the end of his second trip in 1795, and becoming music director for his new, more austere Esterhazy Prince who preferred sacred to secular music.

The G Major Symphony we know as the “Military” gets its character partly for the instrumentation Haydn uses – the work makes use of Turkish features known to the Viennese through their various conflicts with the Turkish military over years of conflict – known as “Janissary”, these exotic percussive effects (cymbal, triangle, rute, bass drum) had achieved great popularity, which composers naturally wanted to emulate (both Mozart and Beethoven were to use similar effects in some of their own music.).

Here at St.Andrew’s the cheek-by-jowl relationship of orchestra and audience practically enveloped our sensibilities with the Symphony’s marvellous rhythmic and colouristic effects, though it wasn’t all bang, crash, rumble and tinkle, Haydn cannily reserving his “Janissary” forces for the second and fourth movements. The rest brought enchantment of another kind right from the work’s beginning, with the adagio opening ravishingly awakened by the string-tones, and the supporting winds giving great character to the contrasting minor-key colours. An ensuing allegro added to our delight with the winds cheekily taking up the dance and inviting the rest of the orchestra to join in. It was playing from all which brought out the sheer “joy” of exchange, and the “giving” nature of Haydn’s musical instincts in general, conductor Mark Carter underlining our pleasure with the first-movement repeat!

Deceptively charming and relaxed at its beginning, with lovely al fresco colourings from strings and winds, the Allegretto second movement lurched  suddenly into minor-key drama and conflict with its battery of “Janissary” instruments joining the fray, the bass drummer adroitly compounding the instrument’s window-rattling seismic quality with the use of the rute, a bunch of rods loosely bound, and when striking a surface giving a dry, macabre bone-rattling effect! – with triangle, and “Nefer” crash cymbals and the timpani and brass underlining the overall impact, the general impression was more-than-satisfyingly combatative! A brief return to the major-key opening gave us some brief respite, but the famous passage introduced by the bugle call signalled an ‘all-in” sequence whose  impact gave rise to the well-known story of the premiere causing listeners of the time some angst, described by one reviewer as “the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, and what may be described as the hellish roar of war increase(d) to a climax of hellish sublimity” (perhaps, alas, not so far from contemporary realities in our planet’s war-torn spots!).

The Minuet took us to a different world, a return to order and semblance of the same after battle, the tempi giving a livelier-than-usual effect – I wanted the wind’s somewhat plaintive “turns” in places to be brought out a bit more! – but the musicians’ graceful curving trajectories of the Trio were a delight, effectively contrasted by the “kick” the players achieved in the minor-key bits!

And so to the finale, bubbling with anticipation at its beginning, Mark Carter’s direction bringing out the players enjoyment of  the dynamics’ interplay, in particular their wry, po-faced insouciance at the “crushed phrase” sequence – and having been brought up on Sir Thomas Beecham’s delightful (if in such places inauthentic) recorded version of the symphony I was also enjoyably startled by the timpanist’s full-on entry with his “let ’er rip” gesture, instead of the crescendo I’d long become accustomed to! Wonderful!

There’s a lot of inspired to-ing and fro-ing elsewhere in this finale (at one point one is even tempted into thinking a fugue might be on the cards!) but Haydn’s judgement at reserving his overtly “martial” forces for certain moments in the work pays off with a vengeance!  Apart from a couple of brief last-minute forays for separate strings and winds, it’s the war machine that returns at the end, this time in triumph! It seems ironic that it’s actually the Janissary which is here sounding the victory, but of course by that time the Turks had been defeated and driven out of Austria, so they were obviously no longer regarded as a threat!

From this point we were taken into a new century, as well as northwards to Russia (though, admittedly, then on holiday with a second Russian composer to Italy!) – life can never be said to be straightforward!  Of these two forays under inspection it might be said that the most startling quantum leap was into the creative world of one Modest Musorgsky (different spellings of the surname abound!). Russian-born, he was tragically short-lived, all the more so for being regarded in some circles as the most naturally gifted of a group of composers (known as “The Mighty Handful”) who had emerged from the land of the Tsars amid the tumult of national feeling that had spread all over Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Steeping himself in his country’s folklore Musorgsky made several attempts at setting to music an old Russian legend whose original title was St.John’s Eve on Bald Mountain which he completed in June 1867. Unfortunately his colleagues, especially his mentor and fellow-composer Mily Balakirev, regarded the work as crude, and lacking in proper technical “finish”. As well, neither of the reworked versions of the story which Musorgsky subsequently attempted, the operas Mlada and Sorochintsy Fair were properly completed. In 1886, five years after the composer’s death from the effects of alcoholism, another of his colleagues, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, decided to “rescue” what could be saved of Musorgsky’s original “Bald Mountain” idea and reworked the piece, using parts of the original material and an instrumental arrangement of an excerpt from the opera Sorochintsy Fair as a kind of “epilogue” to the original tone-poem. This became the version that was used in Walt Disney’s famous “Fantasia” film, and which continues to be played today. Musorgsky’s original 1867 tone-poem composition was forgotten until the 1920s when it was rediscovered (a convoluted story!),  finally published in 1968 and given its first public performance and subsently recorded Whether it will ever become as popular as Rimsky-Korsakov’s revision is a matter of conjecture, though it’s certainly worth a watching listen (see below)…..

First to consider, though, was the performance we heard at St.Andrew’s, taken at a less-than-usual headlong tempo by Mark Carter and his players, and giving the music a more earthy and elemental character, but with the playing’s precision still capturing that “hallucinatory” quality generated by the music. The steady tempo throughout kept the macabre elements bubbling to the fore, with the “mad dance” sequences creating their own excitement, as did the “chattering winds” of the witches’ cackling dialogues, The brass fanfares were spot-on at all times, and especially when returning us to the opening, played with more “bite” than ever as the revelry intensified.

The last onslaught began, slowly on the bassoon and building up to an unnerving pace, gathering up detail in its sweep such as stuttering brass, squealing winds and screeching strings as the brass intoned its final call – with the crash of the tam-tam everything fell silent  except for the tolling bell and the hubbub’s dying reverberation, “warmed” beautifully by the harp, and the lovely string playing (great clarinet and flute solos, as well!)

Here’s the original Musorgsky version –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu1no7hOlSs

And so to the concluding item, ancient and nostalgic listening history for me, as Tchaikovsky’s  Capriccio Italien was on one of the first sets of 78 rpm discs I owned when a student (part of a whole bunch of 78 rpm discs I found in a charity shop! – things like Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony on six discs!). Anyway, I played and played the Capriccio until I accidentally and carelessly cracked one of the two discs! (I think I have the performance on CD, somewhere, now!) But I hadn’t played the work for a while, and the performance this afternoon made me fall in love with the music all over again!

What a sensationally-delivered trumpet solo at the beginning! – obviously inspiring the rest of the brass’s majestic and sonorous efforts! The strings, suitably awe-struck in reply, at first, gripped the attention just as steadily, as the exchanges continued. The oboe entered a shade jerkily but soon recovered, building the ambiences with the strings in support until the brass re-entered, the percussion a tad rushed at first but settling down again. We had a breath-catching transition to the waltz-theme –  the oboes and flutes so beautiful and Italianate-sounding with clarinets and bassoons having their turn as well, before the glorious brass-playing completed the sound-picture, with whirling strings adding to the excitement, and percussion snow-capping the climaxes!

Tchaikovsky doesn’t let up with the melodies (I remember already “knowing” both of the “famous” ones here before I ever encountering this work, as they’d obviously been “pinched” by popular music beforehand!) – the second one nicely introduced by the strings and the horn, and then later by the other brasses in turn (how was this Russian composer able to write such Mediterranean-sounding music?). Gorgeously done, with the horns adding an elegant postlude, before the strings reiterated their mock-serious “opening” with the stuttering brass not missing a beat. A well-managed accelerando later, the tarantella was dancing away from the gloom, and  playing “catch-me-if-you-can” with the instruments in its wake, including the tambourine (what a day for the percussion it had been!). But there was further excitement in store for us which came with the return of the Waltz-tune, with the strings and brass on fire and the tambourine-player in seventh heaven for a few scintillating measures – and if that wasn’t enough I had this feeling the conductor was suddenly daring his players  to imagine they were plunging into something elemental like the coda to the composer’s Fourth Symphony’s finale, a “now or never” moment to which everybody seemed to respond without hesitation and bring off with enormous elan! – a burst of youthful energies and dare-devil execution  which I thought appropriately summed up the  enthusiasm and at times brilliance of the afternoon’s music-making – but also, for this listener a great joy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Trio of International Consequence

Posted on by Anne French

NZ Trio – Magnifique

Schubert – Notturno in E flat major (D897)
Pēteris Vasks – Episodi e canto perpetuo (1985)
Linda Dallimore – Self-portrait (2024)
Saint-Saens – Piano trio No 2 in E minor (Op. 92)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace,
Friday 2 May, 7.30 pm

The night of the concert was cold and wet. The big southerly storm that hit on Wednesday was still in force, so the small audience in St Andrew’s was disappointing but not surprising. This review is dedicated to everyone who let the weather keep them away from a stunning concert. Let me tell you what you missed!

After several years of change, NZ Trio has now reached its new form. Ashley Brown retired from the Trio in February, the last of the founding members to leave. Matthias Balzat was billed as ‘guest cellist’, but the exciting news – announced during the concert – is that he will be taking the position permanently from 2026.

Matthias Balzat is a phenomenal cellist. I first heard him perform as a soloist with Wellington Youth Orchestra when he was 17, just about to head to Germany for advanced study in cello, already with a bachelor’s degree from Waikato and a swag of awards to his name. He was already a commanding musical presence with dazzling technique. Since graduating from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, where he was taught by Pieter Wispelwey, he has been freelancing in Germany. The NZ Trio gig, he told us, gives him an opportunity to return home.

How would he fit in to the Trio? Any fears I may have had were dispelled as soon as the Schubert began. The Nocturne is a familiar work, an exquisite piece that Schubert may have intended as the slow movement for his first piano trio.  The tempo was slow, but never too slow. The effect was of an unfurling of beauty, played with high seriousness. It was as though this was the most important music Schubert ever wrote, and the most poignant. He finished it only months before he died, and never heard it performed. I feel certain he would have loved this performance.

The next work on the programme was a piece by the Latvian composer, Pēteris Vasks, written in 1985. This was its New Zealand première. Vasks trained as a violinist at the Riga Conservatory and played double bass in various Latvian orchestras before moving to Lithuania to study composition with Valentin Utkin. As the son of a Baptist pastor, he wasn’t permitted to do this in Latvia, because Baptists were repressed by the Soviets.

He began to compose after hearing a piano arrangement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, thanks to his piano teacher at the Vilnius Conservatory. His response was immediate: ‘It was like a lightning flash to me – that music can be like this!’ But his works were unknown outside the Baltics until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when fellow Latvian Gidon Kremer started touring his violin concertos in the West.

The Episodi e canto perpetuo is dedicated to Olivier Messiaen. That provided some kind of emotional preparation. This is a powerful and inventive work. The programme notes suggested a battle between light and dark, but that doesn’t do it justice. It requires virtuosic playing from all three instruments, with two frenzied ‘burlesques’ separated by a ‘monologue’. The whole work is a kind of journey from a dark and scary opening movement, with a bleak wash of sound from the strings, moving higher and higher into a kind of frenzy. The Misterioso that followed uses prepared piano and light glissandi on the strings to suggest a ghostly calm. The Unisono began with strong piano chords and a cantabile theme from the strings, building to confidence, then aggression. The effect is loud and humourless, with frightening crescendi. Vasks described the first Burlesque as ‘ironic, almost grotesque’. I thought he must have been listening to Shostakovich, so sardonic was it – or perhaps that was life under the Soviets. The second burlesque, even more frenzied, Vasks called ‘the black culmination of the opus. Road to nowhere.’

After all the terror, in the seventh movement, the first violin sang like a nightingale in a ruin, trilling over blackened stones and empty spaces. Could there be a resolution, my notes asked? The cello, high and sustained, said yes, the plangent violin whispered that there was hope. A shift to the major, like a shaft of sunlight, high and sweet.

This is an important work. If it is his response to Quartet for the End of Time, the man is a genius, because he has transcended it. But there is more. Over the last 40 years Vasks has written three symphonies, other works for orchestra, concerti for violin, viola, cello, and flute, half a dozen string quartets, many choral and chamber works, and several works for violin, cello, and piano. I very much hope that NZ Trio programmes a couple of those. Soon, please.

After the interval, a small, introspective work by New Zealander Linda Dallimore (‘an award-winning composer, flutist, and teacher’) currently based in Los Angeles, where she is completing a DMA at the University of Southern California. It’s a pleasant enough work, ‘inspired by the composer’s first months in LA’, short and rather slight, but full of interesting effects. Unfortunately, coming after the emotional complexity of the Vasks piece, even separated by the interval, it sounded a bit self-absorbed, clever but trivial.

The last work in the programme showed off all three players to good effect, but especially the glorious Somi Kim. Saint-Saens was a remarkable pianist, a prodigy who performed the complete Beethoven sonatas from memory by the age of 10. He wrote this work as a holiday project, in the spring of 1892, 30 years after his first piano trio, to show what the piano is capable of. It is a masterpiece. Somi Kim was in her element, showing us delicacy and powerful pianism, as required. Saint-Saens’ piano writing is demanding and virtuosic, and Kim played like an angel.

The NZ Trio has been regarded as a national treasure for some time now. I have always enjoyed its programming. With Balzat joining the superb Kim and Hall, it has turned into a trio of international consequence. As well as being intellectually adventurous and musically fearless, the players together have the most glorious sound, warm and perfectly unified.  I am truly sorry that their first concert was heard by an audience of only a hundred or so. But take my word for it: you won’t want to miss the other concerts in their 2025 season.  Now would be a good time to book.

Delicious, profound and adventurous – an irresistible orchestral feast from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen


WELLINGTON CITY ORCHESTRA
Justus Rozemond (conductor
with Sophia Acheson (viola )

Nicolai –  Overture “The Merry Wives of Windsor”
Rachmaninov – Tone-Poem “Isle of the Dead”
Berlioz – “Harold in Italy” – Symphony with Viola obbligato

St,Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 5th April 2025

Concert viewed via video – thanks to Nick Baldwin (camera)
and Angus Webb (editing)

Thanks also to Rowena Cullen (Wellington CO President)

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

I’d seen this programme by the Wellington City Orchestra advertised, and was instantly drawn to its boldness, variety and colour, with three works owing nothing to one another but irresistibly drawn together by their very singularity and vividly-wrought panoply of contrasting human emotion. It’s the kind of programming to which orchestras that have a variety of music-directors can bring enterprise and exploration in the form of each maestro’s particular enthusiasms, and whose audiences benefit from such wide-ranging presentations.

So when circumstances conspired against my attending the concert I was delighted to be able to “catch up” with what took place via the kind auspices of Rowena Cullen, the Orchestra committee’s President, through a video of the concert made by Nick Baldwin and Angus Webb, from which I could write a “report” of the proceedings (as I was able to for the orchestra’s final 2024 concert under similar kinds of circumstances). In each case, what I’ve really liked about the results I’ve seen and heard is that along with the judiciously-balanced sound quality the film replicates a single audience member’s view of the concert, rather than the usual “from all-angles” viewpoints, so that one feels like a “bona fide” concertgoer rather than some kind of “voyeur” hovering about the ranks of the players, closely watching them activating their mouthpieces and fingerboards!

Where Otto Nicolai’s exuberant Overture to his opera “The Merry Wives of Windsor” brings together a veritable farrago of characters with engaging personalities and conflicting intentions making for a “spice-of-life” variety of interaction, Sergei Rachmaninov’s darkly-brooding, phantasmagorical tone-poem “Isle of the Dead” presents a bleak scenario of a solitary life’s journey reaching its inevitable conclusion at a forbidding and ultimately pitiless place of interment. No two cheek-by-jowl  presentation scenarios could have been more profoundly different!

In some ways, Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” is even more visionary in its uniqueness – a work for solo viola and orchestra which brings together both compositional ingenuity and idiosyncrasy with little more than quasi-Byronic characterisations by way of portraying the “adventures” of the music’s ostensible hero. In fact the Childe Harold of Byron is largely absent from Berlioz’s depictions of the chief protagonist, the latter being drawn largely from the composer’s own Italian experiences, however much he might have identified with the general traits of the poet’s title character. The work is a collection of scenes through which the traveller passes, bring to each his own, by turns, exuberant, poetic, introspective and downcast set of moods, with Berlioz’s firebrand inspiration setting even the touches of banality in the story alight! -are those indefatigable brigands, for example, perhaps having one round of carousing too many?

Whatever the conjectures regarding any aspect of these presentations, it seemed expectations were simmering when conductor Justus Rozemond stepped up to the rostrum to begin the afternoon’s concert with Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. And what a beginning! – such a gorgeous opening paragraph to a work! – here were the first notes so magically “sounded” by the violins, the theme fulsomely so by the lower strings, and all repeated by the violins, staunchly but gently supported by the winds and the horns! It  brought the first signs of mischief afoot, with a perky theme tossed back and forward between the strings and the winds –  a couple of loose notes quickly tucked out of sight! – and then the fun began, with the gossipy exchanges between winds and strings building up a real head of steam – “He wrote what? – Look, it says so here! – the old rogue!” as the two  “Merry Wives” read the fat knight Sir John Falstaff’s fawning letters and resolve to plot his downfall! Some smartly brought-off quick-fire exchanges between instruments – “Are you ready? Here he comes! Quick, hide!” and the famous melody sings out, nicely “nudged” at its top note by the strings, and given plenty of sensuous “sway” by conductor Rozemond. The excitement knew no bounds as brass and percussion joined in, anticipating the fat knight’s downfall – and his entry was delicious, the music suddenly acquiring great girth and pomposity from the heavy brass (though I wish they’d kept those heavy accents going through all the unfortunate miscreant’s music!) as the object of the deception fled in shame when he realised his ruse had been thwarted – the music then repeated the sequences almost as before, though reintroducing the “big tune” (one of the world’s charmers, in my opinion) earlier, and with the brasses and percussion helping to celebrate the triumph of goodness and modesty over self-importance and connivance. All in all, It made a splendid opening for the concert.

To grimmer business, then, with Rachmaninov’s “Isle of the Dead”, his sombre evocation of a painting depicting the carrying of a body over water to its resting-place, the music a dark-toned barcarolle whose “wandering” 5/8 time suggests the steady rowing of the oarsman as the boat with its coffin and robed white figure neared a kind of “burial island”. This was an image which the composer first saw in a black-and-white reproduction in Paris in 1907, composing his “tone poem” two years later.  Rachmaninov himself conducted the work’s premiere in Moscow in 1909, and subsequently recorded the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra in America in 1930. Incidentally, the artist, Arnold Böcklin, actually made several versions of the work, all slightly differently detailed – and it’s fascinating to learn that Rachmaninov, on subsequently viewing one of the original colour copies of the picture, remarked that he would not have composed the work if he had seen the painting in colour!

I thought the performance by the orchestra a remarkably fine achievement – the opening sounds were steadily and remorselessly brought into play, Rozemond and his musicians conveying a proper “heaviness of spirit” and a sense of lamentation, steadily and patiently maintained. What the winds and strings were doing so well, the brass sturdily continued, helping to build up to the first of the work’s vantage-points, where the music briefly paused, muttered, sighed and exclaimed (lovely work by all concerned, strings, wind and brass, with the latter using their mutes superbly) before resignedly accepting that the journey ought to continue.

And so the lower strings rebegan their steady 5/8 rhythms with even more energy and purpose, building the columns of sound up steadily and impressively, with the brasses sturdily holding the top lines. The winds elaborated on the  repeated motifs, the brass moaned, and the strings had a short-lived moment of warmth before the “Dies Irae” melody made a sombre appearance on the cellos, sparking a response through the whole orchestra, the players putting all their energies into the theme, driving it upwards and outwards like an avenging spirit, and propelling the cortege to what seemed like its resting-place on or near the shores of the forbidding island.

The brass sounded the theme (superbly played), weighing down upon us with a kind of finality – but out of sheer desperation came a beseeching strain, a different, more human-sounding plea, led by the strings but coloured by wind and brass, one seeking solace and perhaps salvation from a certain quarter. Such was not to be, as the brass and wind tones rose from out of the orchestral panoply and brutally mocked any such supplications. This brought fabulously full-blooded playing from the strings, and was augmented at the climax by the winds and brass as the harsher realities of death delivered their judgement – one from which it seemed there could be no escape.

Perhaps the most telling sequence in the whole work was the aftermath of this crushing utterance  – a steady pizzicato from the strings, repeating the Dies Irae theme, various solo instruments sounding variants of the theme, and the entry of the solo violin playing an agitated tremolando version before ascending to join the winds – oboe and clarinet then linked to the brass, who sounded a kind of “Requiem” (so reminiscent of the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony here!) – before the strings again took up the “rowing” 5/8 rhythm, decorated by descending winds, and with the lower strings playing a fuller version of the Dies Irae theme, locking its strains in our memory for all time, and leaving its last few notes floating in the fading ambiences of the scene – amazing!

After such an experience one imagined that the actual concert needed an interval for its audience to be properly revived!  Everybody having used the space accordingly, the concert’s second half could proceed…..at this point I need to confess to taking a while as a youthful listener to properly “get” Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy”, the last work on the programme. My first reaction to the work was somewhat akin to Schumann’s famous opinion of Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata, whose movements he described as “four of Chopin’s maddest children”. But a beautiful recording by violist Nobuko Imai with Colin Davis drew me afresh into the work’s magical realm – and so it was here with the playing of the soloist, Sophia Acheson, whose gorgeous tones encompassed sounds ranging from a beautifully-wrought self-communing meditation to places requiring full-throated energy and lyricism. However, the great violinist Paganini’s complaint about the work Berlioz had written for him – that there was too little for the soloist to do – certainly bears scrutiny, especially in the light of other concertante works that appeared at around this time, though the composer had never intended to (and never did) write a concerto in a conventional sense!

The work’s sombre opening found the conductor and orchestral players gently coaxing the music out of the void and into some kind of coalescence, introducing a minor-key variant of the melody in the winds that would come to dominate much of the work , with the lower instruments shepherding the lighter ones (the winds and upper strings) into being from their places, patiently and gradually painting a Mediterranean-like ambience into which the character of the wanderer could be introduced. It all came when the music’s key turned to the major, prompting solo viola and harp to speak together, with violist Sophia Acheson responding poetically to her harpist Anne-Gaele Ausseil’s beatific tones, and drawing out further responses from the orchestra, a sunnily-wrought statement of the theme expressed in heartfelt terms. The music took a quixotic turn, with the orchestra sounding fragments of the allegro theme which would dominate the first movement, and the soloist, hesitatingly at first, taking the same music up, and instigating a fascinating interplay between viola and orchestra – the theme was tossed between the participants with glee and gusto, the players handling Berlioz’s capricious demands with skill and perseverance, and bringing real elan to the build-up of excitement and culmination at the movement’s end.Sophia Acheson, Viola

Of the four movements my out-and-out favourite has always been the second, the “March of the Pilgrims”, music which so impressed Berlioz’s friend Franz Liszt he made a solo piano transcription of this movement alone to perform at his recitals, besides transcribing the whole work for viola and piano! It’s a wondrous soundscape of a kind of processional pilgrimage moving though all kinds of natural and man-made vistas – Berlioz wrote in his memoirs of observing “returning gleaners from fields singing soft litanies to the accompaniment of the sad tinkling of the distant convent bell”, which ties in with the music’s progress here being continually drawn onward by a bell-like sound (in a different key to the music that both the orchestra and the viola are playing – so magical and memorable an effect!). Over this evocative and varied wall of sound the soloist played her first movement melody, and other variants, including a sul ponticello (the bow on the strings close to the bridge) sequence of arpeggiated chords (Berlioz apparently liked to strum his guitar on his mountain walks!), all adding to the overall atmosphere. I would have liked the tempi a notch or two slower and dreamier in this movement, but this pacing brought a kind of “fervour” to the proceedings, which the ending beautifully dissipated as the repeated orchestral notes echoed and re-echoed the bell-like sounds after the pilgrims had disappeared, leaving the viola to make a final arpeggiated comment by way of a farewell.

After this the peasant revelries swung into earshot with the third movement, the winds attractively rustic-sounding at the beginning, with the cor anglais leading the way for the “serenade” section, matched by the oboe’s plaintive tones, as well as the horns, giving golden support.  The winds beautifully framed the soloist’s entry, and continued to decorate her figurations with all kinds of felicitous gestures – though the horns missed their footing momentarily, they made amends a few moments later with a similar passage sonorously negotiated. The dance resuming, a particularly beautifully flute solo towards the end of the movement, left the strings to usher the dancers off (the orchestral violas having a brief moment of quiet glory!), leaving the soloist pondering as to whether it was all a dream.

The finale began with a crash! – the music veered between gloom and frantic excitement as the soloist reprised some of the themes from the previous movements. The orchestra “caressed“ some of these fragments in partnership with the viola as if in a dream-like state (a particularly lovely sequence largely with the clarinets), but seemed unable to escape the “allure” of the brigands’ carousings (and driving the soloist from the platform as they did so!), keeping the incisive whiplash rhythms coming splendidly! It seemed everybody was caught in a kind of vortex of brigandish euphoria and largesse! – musically, everybody covered themselves with glory in embracing these bacchanale-like excesses, and especially during the over-the-top repeated passage for strings against snarling brass –  fabulous stuff!

Just when the brigands’ excesses had begun to boil over for a third time a deathly hush suddenly overtook the scenario – in the distance could be heard a reminiscence of the Pilgrim’s March (two offstage players) and at the back of the orchestra reappeared the viola soloist, appearing to join in with these sounds, but gradually overcome by the orchestra’s somewhat rogue inclination to rejoin the brigands!  Which they did, to brilliant and conclusive effect, the players giving out as if their lives depended on the outcome!

Kudos aplenty to all those people who played a part in both performing and bringing this concert into being – even on film I found it a totally involving and astonishment-provoking experience!  The thrill of witnessing a group of musicians literally playing their hearts out in tandem with one another has been a pleasure and, indeed, something of a privilege to witness. Again, congrats to the conductor and the players, to the sterling group of organisers and enablers, and, of course, the supporters, who gave well-deserved acclaim to these performances – by turns, delicious, profound and adventurous!

 

Shostakovich and Mozart – different kinds of intensities and delights at Roseneath’s Long Hall in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH AND MOZART

Helene Pohl and Anna van der Zee (violins), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicholas Hancox (viola) play Shostakovich

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets – No. 11 in F Minor Op,122
No. 13 in B-flat minor Op,138
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593

The Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble

Helene Pohl, Anna van der Zee (violins)
Nicholas Hancox, Julia Joyce (violas)
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

SHOSTAKOVICH -String Quartet No. 11 (1966) – in memory of Vasily Pyotrovich Shririnsky
Introduction, Scherzo, Recitative, Etude, Humoresque, Elegy, Finale

String Quartet No. 13 (1970) – dedicated to Vadim Vasilievitch Borisovsky
(Quartet in One Movement)
Adagio, Doppio movimento, Adagio

MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593  (with Julia Joyce – viola)

The Long Hall,
Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday 19th April, 2025

This was the second 2025 “Comfy Concert’ at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”, part of a benefit series to assist various charities, on this occasion spotlighting the inspirational Arohanui Strings (of which violinist Helene Pohl is the Patron), a visionary Sistema-inspired music-teaching organisation and registered charity based in Lower Hutt. Founded in 2010 by professional musician and El Sistema advocate Alison Eldridge in the belief that all children have a right to a music education, this programme has offered musical instruction to more than 4000 children in some of Wellington and Hutt Valley’s most economically challenged communities.

Though the concert may have been relatively short in performance-time, it surely made amends for any brevity-related aspersions in terms of “moments per minute”. Each of the three works displayed a distinctively wrought sound-world whose singular qualities nonetheless found common cause in their surety of utterance and burgeoning character. And what we heard throughout the afternoon was an “every note counts” quality for which musicians such as Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten have earned unstinted renown over their quartet-playing careers to date, and which their colleagues, Anna van der Zee, Nicholas Hancox and Julia Joyce were readily able to replicate in partnership over the concert’s duration.

In an earlier “Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble” presentation in this same venue a month previously, we’d heard another Shostakovich String Quartet, the Ninth, along with a new work by Chinese composer Gao Ping which was dedicated to Shostakovich’s memory to mark this 50th anniversary year of his death. On that occasion, the second violinist was Monique Lapins, and the violist Chris van der Zee. Given the remarkable variety of the quartets given thus far in this survey, it might be that Helene’s and Rolf’s necessarily pragmatic choices of colleagues for each occasion could arguably add to the music’s appeal, piquantly suiting the “living dangerously” aura around Shostakovich’s own creative efforts in general. Of course, by the time he had come to writing quartets the composer had ostensibly survived his most hazardous brush with the tyrannical Soviet leader Josef Stalin (specifically over the latter’s reaction to the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”), and had since embarked on a series of works which he hoped would give rise to less scrutiny than his more “public” works.

By the time he came to write the aforementioned Ninth Quartet it was 1964, and the composer had appeared to have largely “broken free” from the constraints of a system that had told its creative artists how they should make their art. A Tenth Quartet was written in the same year, and the Eleventh was begun the following year. The latter was the first of a group named the “Quartet of Quartets”, and written for  the violinist Vasili Pyotrovich Shirinsky, a member of the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble  to whom the composer came to entrust the premieres of all of these works right up to the Fourteenth Quartet. Shirinsky actually died before the work’s completion and the remaining players had seriously considered disbanding the quartet – however Shostakovich had argued for the group to continue, as he maintained the group had “acquired the status of a national institution”.

Rolf Gjelsten introduced this work, commenting most tellingly that it was “great string quartet music which created powerful effects”. The work consisted of seven closely-connected (all marked attacca) miniature movements, beginning Andantino with a short, rhapsodic violin solo, here, beautifully-focused throughout all its appearances by Helene Pohl – answered and echoed by her colleagues, largely expressing a kind of calm acceptance, briefly spliced by a “wrench of agitation” but returning to an integrated kind of poise. The first violin moved things along with the Scherzo – a repeated-note theme, played more legato than pointed and playful, followed by the viola and ‘cello, “dug in”, and with occasional stinging upward glissandi! Together, the violins gave the motif a sinister element by beginning the phrases in fourths, “worrying” the notes insistently – after this all died away, the players suddenly “attacked” the Recitative, with stinging opening sounds, and dissonant resoundings, briefly playing some uncannily ambient “Vaughan Williams-like” contrasting harmonies before returning to the opening, though letting the “stinging” attacks gradually disperse.

Again, the mood suddenly changed with the “Etude”, the solo violin embarking on a sinuous whirling-dervish episode, to which the other players reacted  almost dreamily at first, but then almost grotesquely as the solo violin intensified its flailing attack, the others enacting a kind of drunken sailors’ dance, before anarchy broke out, with the ‘cello joining the fray, as if possessed of its own accord! Out of nowhere, it almost seemed, came  the Humoresque, with an urgent, warning-like two-note ostinato-like figure from Anna van der Zee’s violin, to which both violin and viola took fright (Nicholas Hancox’s viola matching Helene Pohl’s violin in sheer ghoulishness of tone) – such transfixing sonorities made it seem as if we had taken a brief but scarifying turn into a Little Shop of Horrors!).

The Elegy brought sense and feeling to the proceedings in spadefuls – ‘cello and viola first dark and sombre, but still sonorous  and affecting, then the second and afterwards the first violin returning us to daylight, their sounds emoting like prisoners from dark places espying light. And so the Finale was on us, with the players teasing out by turns the work’s past themes, the process filled with conflicting emotions as the memories returned on the various instruments, and ending with Helene Pohl’s violin reaching the work’s final high C with a variously pre-constituted sense of fulfilment….

Aptly chosen as a companion-work for this concert was the similar-but-different Thirteenth Quartet, of roughly an approximate length though differently constituted, having a single movement, albeit with contrasting episodes – an ABA structure similar to Bartok’s Third Quartet. It’s dedicated to the Beethoven Quartet’s violist Vadim Vasilyevich Borisovsky, who had just retired, leaving his replacement Fyodor Druzhinin to take part in the premiere in December 1970. Shostakovich was by then a sick man, having suffered a heart attack shortly after the Eleventh Quartet’s premiere in 1966, and was receiving treatment throughout 1970 at an orthopaedic clinic – the new work’s largely pessimistic outlook stems from his awareness of approaching his life’s end. It’s reinforced here by a late inclusion in the outer movements of some of the composer’s music for Grigori Kozintsev’s film “King Lear”, originally conceived as “Lamentations” for a string quartet.

In introducing the work Helene Pohl made mention of the remarkable “jazzy” elements in the second part, quoting the composer as saying  to somebody “I’ve written a short little quartet – with a “joke” middle!” – a sequence which another commentator had, I read, characterised as “a jam session from Hell”, and which came across as a grim “dance of death”, the composer joining forces with his great predecessor, Musorgsky, in regard to the latter’s “Songs and Dances of Death”.

Appropriately, it was the viola which began the work, a sorrowful solo with others joining in– bare, astringent sounds  with occasional dissonant note combinations. The players took their time, with the violin taking the lead working up to a “crying  out” sequence with the second violin, and encouraging the viola and ‘cello to join in. When the meditative tone resumed I caught a further reminder of a bleak “Vaughan Williams” voice in the harmony, along with the unsettling half-tone dissonances.

Helene had demonstrated to us the repeated-note phrase that began the more volatile middle section, emphasising for us its mournful rather than playful character with more legato-like phrasing. The murmuring lines from the others developed into harsh, stabbing chords set against an angular descending seventh figure from Nicholas Hancox’s viola – which in turn lead into a wonderful, once-repeated “augmenting” chord, the instruments joining in stepwise, punctuated by the repeated-note figure, and the viola’s falling-seventh declamations!  – jaw-dropping stuff!

What developed next seemed to me almost Dada-like! – a viola tremolando, pizzicato figures from the others, and rapid-fire exchanges of the same activated the ‘cello with Rolf Gjelsten giving us a “grooving-along” kind of running jazz pizzicato, prompting the violins into a “cool” dotted- rhythmed note pattern to which the players occasionally beat the wood of their instruments with their bows in syncopated strokes! – these jazzy, syncopated rhythms proceeded to “fight” against mournful, downwardly-sighing  lines from the viola, which grew to resembling a kind of all-out aerial attack on the scurrying inhabitants below! – all so visceral and palpable!

Violin pizzicati provoked a full-blooded response from the cello, whose  mournful lines eventually prevailed against the jazzy rhythms,  with murmuring lines gathering to subdue the ground zero activities and establish an uneasy, ghostly, tremolando-like calm – a couple of  bleak pizzicato repeated-note whimperings from the violin stimulated another startling, though short-lived  outbreak of the repeated note pattern before it too gave up the ghost. All of this was thrill-a-minute stuff, brought into being with an immediacy that, especially in such unprepossessing settings, simply took the listener’s breath away!

Out of the thicket emerged sighing violin lines and trenchant ‘cello responses, with the violin ascending heavenwards in search of some form of redemption/oblivion, its companions resonating in support, the exchanges again briefly sounding that distinctive “Vaughan Williams” ambience that brought to my mind the latter’s Sixth Symphony – most affecting! Then came the viola’s solo, augmented by cadaverous tappings from the second violin – after which the viola continued, joined by the first and second violins in an extended B-flat which slowly burgeoned towards a piercing climax.

Julia Joyce (viola) and the Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble play Mozart

The intrinsic greatness of Mozart’s music would, of course, have easily survived a cheek-by-jowl placement with these twentieth-century goings-on intact, but the interval break was nevertheless appreciated at that point! It did give one the chance to ponder what we had heard in relative isolation, and especially apposite given the cultural “head start”  enjoyed by an eighteenth-century classic work when pitted against a later “arrival”. I had enjoyed my own particular “first encounter” with Mozart’s K.593 many years ago, courtesy of a fellow bus-driver I befriended during my “mis-spent youth” period of exploration! This particular individual was a Rastafarian-like figure, complete with dreadlocks! – one who completely belied his appearance by frequently conversing with me about art, literature and music, and ultimately making a present for me of a recording of two of the Mozart Quintets in question, one of which was K.593 (and which he himself adored!).

It was a “head-start” of sorts for me with this work, of course, which I grew to love all the more – and on a later, box-set pressing of the same recording (the stereo Amadeus with Cecil Aronowitz)  I also got to know the “alternate version” of the finale’s opening, the phrase written chromatically, rather than in stepwise fashion, and which is now recognised as the “authentic” opening – Helene Pohl pointed this out, playing both versions for our delight, though stopping short of proposing an “audience vote” on the matter!

It was one of a number of delights associated with this performance, another being Rolf Gjelsten’s engagingly individual way with the ‘cello phrase that began the work, repeated in different keys in ways that made the player on my Amadeus recording sound relatively po-faced and non-commital! Also, I’d never before properly “connected” this episode with the music of Haydn, despite owning recordings of things like the “Drum Roll” and “London” Symphonies for years and years, works with similar kinds of slow introductions, and with the same returning at the end of the opening movements! And finally, the presence of the NZSO’s principal violist, Julia Joyce, in the ensemble gave the performance a wonderfully “burnished” glory of exchange, particularly evident in the slow movement, with its frequent conversational violin/viola passages – all very theatrical, as well, I thought, with the tuttis bursting almost to full with expression.

A quickly-flowing Menuetto followed, less about “beats” and more about emotion ”flowing like oil”, as the composer would have said, and, with the Trio, a showcase of ascending arpeggios, a veritable welter of them on at least two occasions, both collegial and celebratory. As, of course, were the wry interlockings of the finale’s workings, where the sheer contrapuntal elan of the writing becomes an “Anything you can do” kind of musical feast with an “Of course!” series of  rejoinings, the exhilaration of matching knife-edged impulses and resplendent tones a glorious display, and one for all of us to savour and remember for a long while to come.

Good Friday 2025 – music of sorrow and resolve, from the Tudor Consort

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MEDIA VITA – Music by BYRD, GIBBONS, SHEPPARD, TALLIS and WEELKES
The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

                                                                                                                                                                                               Michael Steward and the Tudor Consort at Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul  (photo: Cassandra Wang)

ORLANDO GIBBONS – O Lord, in Thy wrath
THOMAS WEELKES – Laboravi in gemitu meo
THOMAS TALLIS – Lamentations of Jeremiah I & II
WILLIAM BYRD – Plorans plorabit
JOHN SHEPPARD – Media vita in morte sumus

The Tudor Consort
Sopranos:  Geneviève Gates-Panneton, Lydia Joyce, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Rebecca Stanton,
Chelsea Whitfield
Altos:  Christine Argyle, Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page, Kassandra Wang,
Alex Woodhouse-Appleby
Tenors:  Joshua Long, Philip Roderick, Richard Taylor, Axel Tie
Basses:  Brian Hesketh, Joshua Jamieson, Frazer MacDiarmid, Matthew Painter, Keith Small,
Thomas Whaley

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Molesworth Street
Friday 18th April (Good Friday) 2025

What a joy to experience in the here-and-now music written hundreds of years previously with spacious acoustics and worshipful ambiences in mind as spectacularly presented by Wellington’s Cathedral of St. Paul, in Molesworth Street! In fact, the capital boasts a number of churches whose qualities would present a similar-but-different interplay between atmosphere and clarity of sound to that which we enjoyed on this occasion – but for sheer ambient beauty, the sounds made on this occasion by the Tudor Consort voices here in Wellington Cathedral would be hard to beat.

Tudor Consort Music Director Michael Stewart welcomed us to what he obviously considered something of a time-honoured ritual for all concerned, an Easter Concert, with repertoire chosen from the incredible storehouse of music written over the centuries for this particular occasion in the liturgical year – a tradition begun by a previous Consort Music Director, Alastair Carey in 2002, and continued by Stewart since his appointment in the role in 2007.

The two “flagship” works in the concert, Thomas Tallis’s two-part Lamentations of Jeremiah, and John Sheppard’s Media vita in morte sumus obviously gave each of the “halves” a singular kind of distinction and dominance through their sheer physical scale. Though the accompanying works by Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd were obviously of more modest dimensions their qualities unerringly took us into the ambient performance arena and suitably honed our receptivities for dealing with the more extended and complex works that followed.

Orlando Gibbons’ anthem “O Lord in thy wrath” opened the programme exquisitely, the tones beautifully balanced and the lines effortlessly shaped, with telling layerings in places like “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am weak”, and “My soul is also sore troubled”. The final two lines further illustrate the singers’ control of emphases, the line “how long wilt thou punish me?” insistent, and the following “O save me for thy mercy’s sake” expiating the tones with heartfelt sensitivity. By comparison, Thomas Weelkes’ setting of different words from the same Psalm 6 seemed more insistent in its sorrowful reflection on the human condition. It seemed like a lament without solace, tapestried with constant lamentings, snow-capped by a gorgeous but insistent soprano line which drew others upwards to empathise and fall back again, the undulations wrapping around one another, simpatico, and taking some comfort in blending together and sharing sorrows in this vale of tears.

I’d heard both of the following pieces by Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard on recordings beforehand so I knew something of what to expect, taking particular comfort in the visceral collegiality of voices expressing (particularly in the Tallis work) remarkably apposite observations and feelings in a world that’s presently echoing in so many places and ways the strife and accompanying distress of the prophet’s visions. And of course, amid the consolations afforded by music of such beauty in places comes the agonising thought of the suffering being more present-day than prophetic, and the extent to which we can sublimate in art such agonies while people in places like Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine most ostensibly have no such recourse. The horrors of history are difficult enough to bear without having to witness and cope with wilful re-enactments of the same taunting and defiling any such attempts to stimulate awareness, resolve and resistance to such forces through art’s most heartfelt efforts.

Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah are in two parts, and demonstrate with disarming directness an extraordinary range of contrasts of mood and feeling, the settings incorporating titles and headings of different verses of the texts, the latter using the Hebraic names for letters and weaving these names into the otherwise Latin text. So we hear the Hebrew letters “Aleph” and “Beth” in Part One, each given an ornate but emotionally neutral ambience before “easing” or else “plunging” into the actual texts, releasing the listener from the intensities of each verse setting with whole breaths of relative space and re-alignment.

As with the transition from the overall tranquility of the “Aleph” settings to the obvious surge of tone from the tenors at Quomodo sedet sola civitas,  these progressions into text can happen seamlessly, or be underlined by pauses, such as that separating the following “Beth” from Plorans ploravit in nocte.  Amidst the beauty of the singing I wondered whether phrases such as Omnes amici ejus spreverunt eam (all her friends have dealt treacherously with her), here delivered more in sorrow than in anger, were as forceful as what Tallis might have intended – certainly, the concluding Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum (Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God) expressed here to numbing perfection a quietly beseeching tone!

I was struck all over again by the sheer storytelling capacities of the sounds created by the ensemble when Part II of the Lamentations began – having completed two “chapters” of the text we were about to be regaled with no less than three more, with the beauty of utterance putting a listener like myself in mind of a further “unlocking” of a precious casket of treasures. After the splendid “Ghimel” opening, there seemed more insistence and urgency in the interlocking parts, the sopranos arching their phrases heavenwards with plenty of expressive purpose (and especially in the final nec invenit requiem.) The brief “Daleth” introduction to the central verses brings the ear-catching variant of fewer voices for the opening Omnes persecutores emus which builds into an impressive ensemble; and in the following “Omnes porta eius destructae” follows an even more dire scenario with repetitions of the words oppressa amaritudine (bitter anguish) at the end.

The exquisitely architectural “Heth”  preluded the grimmest of the prophet’s foretellings, the tenors forthright with the opening Facti sunt hostes ejus in capite (Her foes have become her masters) and the other voices following suit, obsessively so with the words multitudinem iniquitatum ejus (the multitude of her transgressions). And how affecting did the voices make, firstly, the phrase Parvuli ejus ducti sunt (The children were led away), and then the final, quietly and almost desperately penitential murmurings of the same “Jerusalem” entreaty which had concluded Part I, and here returning with deeper finality.

A smaller ensemble tackled William Byrd’s Plorans plorabit, (incidentally, extending the phenomenon of political subversion in music) with its sombre message to the King of the time (James 1) that the “crown of (your) glory” was under threat! Otherwise its relatively tighter and more integrated sound-picture was to make all the more stimulating and telling a contrast with what followed afterwards. In fact Michael Stewart could scarcely contain his excitement at the prospect of performing this, the concert’s “signature” work – John Sheppard’s antiphon Media Vita in Morte Sumus, regarded as “supreme” in the composer’s output by scholars and performers.

A good deal of discussion has accompanied the work’s more recent history, which Stewart made a passing reference to before leaving it up to us to make our own researches due to the complexities of different editions and attitudes towards the work, though commenting that its impact and magnificence would be self-evident for the listener.

For the work’s certainly become something of an icon in its own singular world of choral music as a result of several factors – its unclear raison d’etre (thought by some to be a memorial for the composer’s first wife), its equally mysterious genesis (no copy exists of the composer’s own score, its survival due to the partbooks used to reconstruct the original in the late 1570s), and its inordinate length in early versions which sought to perform all the polyphonic repeats, a practice which certain newer editions have sought to modify, not by shedding any actual music but limiting the number of repeats of material in performance, as well as changing the order of some of the sections – the place of the canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, for example.  Applying such an approach to extremes would halve the time  some earlier performances might have taken, though Stewart had suggested to us in his pre-concert talk that the Consort’s approach would not be of such a radical order.

At a tempo which readily suggested the celestial movement of unearthly bodies orbiting some distant star, this music’s performance, with its breathtakingly stratospheric soprano line, transported our sensibilities to realms of awareness and imagination far removed from our accustomed realms of being, contemplating an eternal vision which inspires as much fear as longing – Media vita in morte sumus – (In the midst of life we be in death) and contemplating our helplessness at such a prospect at Amarae morti ne tradas nos (- the bitter pains of eternal death) – how readily, to my ears, amid the melismatic Sancte Deus and Sancte fortis, did the soprano lines evoke a distant echo of the yet-to-be-composed Miserere of Grigorio Allegri!

Into this void came the plainchant, given the theatrical treatment of alternating one voice, one section of the voices for the first part of the chant, and then including in the response at the Gloria Patri, the whole choir – if a “time stood still” moment was what was required, then the timing, tonings and placement of the voices was well-nigh perfect in its effect. The resuming of the antiphon maintained the darkness and solemnity of the Nunc Dimittis throughout the following Ne projicias nos (Do not cast us away), during which the radiance of the sopranos was absent with telling sombre effect, and having all the more radiance and candlepower on their return with a repetition of the Sancte Deus/Sancte fortis sequences.

Again the sopranos withdrew at Noli claudere aures tuas (Do not close your ears), with the earthier tones of the lower voices stressing the penitential tones of the suppliants – the more celestial tones take up the text Sancte et misericordis Salvator (O holy and most merciful Saviour) – but even more enchanting was the beautiful, Qui cognoscis occulta corda (You who know the secrets of the heart)  begun by those wonderful stratospheric voices which had given the work so much of its essential character – and together with the altos were what my ears seemed to tell me were the men joining in towards the piece’s end. By this time my sensibilities were drunk with the beauties and intensities of what I’d heard and my notes had begun to resembled mere scribblings of transported emotion, well-nigh indecipherable, as all transported emotion should be! Thankfully, wherever I’d been taken by this piece I did manage to reconstitute my senses sufficiently to get home, since which time it’s all been playing in my head demanding a semblance of order and continuity which has taken time to fall into a kind of coherence! Apart from the supercharged transcendentalism of the ending, I can vouch for my presence of mind during some of it. and thus hope enough of my reminiscing  of the journey makes sense!

 

 

Dazzlehands – a book that dances – from RNZ Ballet

Posted on by Jennifer Shennan

 

    Dazzlehands                                                                                                                                                                                 
    Royal New Zealand Ballet
    St.James Theatre, Wellington
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Photo credits: Stephen A’Court

It’s school holidays, so take the book Dazzlehands by local children’s writer Sacha Cotter and illustrator Josh Morgan then adapt it for performance. The protagonist is a dancing pig, so you’re halfway there already.

Choreography by RNZB company dancer, Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson,is cheeky and his use of repeated action motifs cleverly echoes the rhythms in the text. The sassy dancers at RNZB step up to develop the characters in the farmyard and they relish the chance to play the silly card. Most of the animals conform to expectations, but Pig is the exception.

The work is set to music by local composer William Philipson, with narration stitched in. Costumes designed by Victoria Gridley are up and over the top. Fill the theatre with little ones and their older significant  others, and you can’t really go wrong.

In saying that it’s worth acknowledging how much work goes into theadaptation of any work from one genre to another, then co-ordinating all the elements of such a project in a way that still honours the original. Just because the book is for children doesn’t mean it’s childish work. The theatre can work for all ages but you have to know how to play that.

There are sold out seasons of Dazzlehands in various venues, with a te reo narration, a deaf-signed and relaxed performances included. Huia are the country’s leading publishers of bi-lingual books for children, and both editions of this work, in English, Dazzlehands and in te reo, Ringakõrero — are on sale in the foyer.

The story and moral of Dazzlehands allows a non-conformist character to play it his way. The farmer wants Pig to behave normally, like all the other animals do — Sheep goes Baa-aa, Cow goes Moo-oo, Hen goes Cluck and Flamingo makes a remarkable sound (a surprise to meet a flamingo on a farm anyway but why not?) The lady farmer grows increasingly frustrated when Pig keeps producing glitzy gloves and turning to disco dancing instead of obliging with an “Oink” as requested.

We’re reminded of the free-thinking family’s mantra – “Sit down wheneveryone else is standing up, stand up when everyone else is sitting down”.

Anthropomorphism is the spine of so many animal tales for children of all ages, from Aesop’s Fables, Three Little Pigs, Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, Alison Uttley … not to mention the crazy romp of Norwegian rock group Ylvis in What Does the Fox Say? and the closer-to-home works by Margaret Mahy (The Lion in the Meadow would be a bobby-dazzler of a ballet), and Paul Jenden who choreographed Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary tribe. It’s just two more bookshelves away to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the metaphors at work when those farm animals unite to fight off oppression and find freedom. (Note itspublication date 1945).

All the Dazzlehands animals come to want a bit of the glitz so they learn the jazzy dancing — but Pig doesn’t really want to be like anyone else, so as they come across to follow his lead, Pig scores the last line in the play, just one word, and you don’t need me to tell you what that word is. Cotter and Morgan have produced a number of children’s book titles with Huia, including the award-winning The Bomb (that’s the swimming pool variety). It’s worth a few moments to listen to the online version of that being read and accompanied by Claire Cowan’s luminous composition for members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

There’s also a fabulous lineage of children’s story ballets within the history of RNZB’s own repertoire, all of them worth re-visiting at some stage. Russell Kerr’s productions of Carnival of the Animals, Peter and the Wolf, Alice in Wonderland and his fabulous Peter Pan are all classics. But then who could forget works Kerr made from tales by New Zealand’s stellar children’s book illustrator, Gavin Bishop. Te Maia and the Sea Devil called for a wonderful underwater setting — but at the top table is the legendary Terrible Tom which thrilled so many audiences of children who lifted the roof with delight.

I recently watched a video of this winner from 1980s, with music by Philip Norman, and was thrilled to see my memory had not exaggerated the genius of Russell Kerr, choreographer. Usually it’s a book that then becomes a ballet, but in this instance it would be a ballet that became a book. Now wouldn’t that be fun?

Come to the Cabaret! – with Stephanie Acraman and Liam Wooding

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE COMPLETE CABARET SONGS OF WILLIAM BOLCOM

 

Stephanie Acraman (voice)
Liam Wooding (piano)

RATTLE RAT D140-2023

Producer: Kenneth Young
Recorded by John Kim and Steve Garden
at the Gallagher Theatre, Waikato University

I imagined I could at first almost hear the beguiling tones of Joan Morris floating around the edges of Stephanie Acraman’s voice as the latter made her svelt, seductive way through the opening song “Over the Piano” of this well-nigh irresistible collection of American composer William Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs, which Steve Garden’s enterprising Rattle Records has captured and released for our delight!

I couldn’t help myself, really – because Joan Morris is the wife of the composer, William Bolcom, of these songs, and the singer for whom they were originally written – and over thirty years ago I remember sitting spellbound in London’s Wigmore Hall listening to Morris and Bolcom weave their magic through an evening of American Song, one featuring names and tunes of composers and music I both knew and didn’t know, but didn’t at all care, the discoveries throughout the evening being as delightful as the familiar songs were enfolding, wrap-around-pleasures!

Not that Stephanie Acraman doesn’t quickly make these songs very much her own –  by the time she and her pianist Liam Wooding had teased my sensibilities with that first number, I found myself falling hook, line and sinker for more!  And I straightaway loved the Ira Gershwin-like word-pairings in the second song “Fur (Murray the Furrier)”, with the matching “worrier” and “hurrier” creating consonances that seemed to spontaneously sprout from the very ground along which the song ambled,  Bolcom’s musical fancies  so readily and adroitly  tickled by his songwriter Arnold Weinstein’s impish wit and word-verve.

Some history – alongside his studies with both Darius Milhaud at Mills College, California, and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, the young William Bolcom was balancing an interest in the works of Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio with a desire to develop his own stylistic links to popular music. This brought him into contact with Arnold Weinstein who was the librettist of a 1964 anti-war satire Dynamite Tonite for which Bolcom had been asked to write the music. Their resulting collaboration went on to produce operas, song-cycles and books of madrigals, besides a number of “single” works over the years, and of course, these “Cabaret Songs”, which appeared in separate “books”, the first completed in 1977 and with Book Four finally appearing in 1996.  These songs embody the concept of “cabaret” as a “theatre of life”, presenting vignettes illustrating all kinds of people in different life-situations, their range and variety here done captivating justice in this particular recording by these two performers.

As the songs pass through one’s consciousness one gasps in places at the abyss-like gulf between portrayals of different human sensibilities, as, for instance, when one breaks off from the antics of the well-practised philanderer of the fourth song, “He tipped the waiter”, in Book One, and straightaway enters the endless but patiently-endured world of longing  of the singer in “Waitin’”, a touching, almost hymn-like paean to hope, voiced by a disarmingly unpretentious soul. Then, there’s the life-enhancing, wing-spreading optimism and oxygenating energies of the free-spirited vocalist (with a suitably jaunty piano accompaniment!) in “Places to Live” (the word “live” perhaps Freudianly misprinted as “love” in a couple of places), and which then somewhat mordantly curdles into the fraught domesticities of “Toothbrush Time”

Besides these (and other) ill-fated couplings airing their dreams and disappointments practically in tandem with one another,  there are the ones that “stand-alone”, the songs which live amidst either a bubbling effervescence of both words and music, or are woven all about the voice’s suggestive curve of tremulous warmth with the piano’s like connivance,  echoing in the memory as worlds of their own long after the sounds have outwardly ceased. These can tell their own story, as with the “Song of Black Max (as told by the de Kooning Boys” – Weinstein’s deliciously macabre ode to a legendary fate-like figure of the Dutch underworld) – or paint a no-holds-barred character picture, like that of “Radical Sally”, a bluesy ballade of a nemesis-like female omnipresence who, in the poet’s words “still looks at you like a long-lost cause” – singer and pianist totally inhabiting both persona and ambient world.

Acraman and Wooding throughout the disc make every sliver of Bolcom’s and Weinstein’s characterisation and flavour count, even the pithy “Thius, King of Orf”, whose elliptic utterance and sudden discharge couldn’t help but remind me of the “la-la-land” life-slices of American cartoonist B.Kliban (“Cynthia is mistakenly crowned King of Norway”, for instance)……as recounted above they do it breathtakingly so, and draw a masterly contrast that follows with the gentle, Blake-like world of “sweet and small” satisfaction of the eponymously-titled portrait of a bee who “sits a second on a rose, sips a bit and goes….”

Turn to anything in these “books”, in fact, and listeners may well find themselves variously amused or disconcerted, charmed or concerned, grounded or transported  – Acraman and Wooding  present without apology a collected means of awakening a whole gamut of responses to these portrayals of the human condition, and which I, for one, couldn’t resist playing right through again, just to revisit what I considered the fun of it! And a second hearing uncovered still more in the “stand-alone” areas that Bolcom and Weinstein give voice and tones to that I caught on my first, fine, careless traversal…..

I found myself going back to the resonances that clung to my memory of Volume One’s “Waitin”, with its “hope-against-hope” loneliness, to Volume Two’s “The Actor” who repeatedly “dies for a living”, along with “George” whose “difference” to others cost him his life (as it did a Puccini heroine in a different context, but hinted at by the same music), to Volume Three’s “Miracle Song” (which pays tribute to Jerry Lieber’s and Mike Stoller’s  “Is that all there is?” but with rather more grotesque imagery (ev’ry third friend you meet – “Hello, so what else is dead?”),  a song leaving us like possuums trapped in car headlights!…and then the final Volume’s vulnerabilities of love, firstly teased in “Can’t Sleep” and then trashed in the following “At the Last Lousy Moments of Love”.  How tellingly Acraman and Wooding give and take with each other throughout these vignettes of human feeling,  with many a vocal impulse proposed, shared and countered by a pianistic rejoiner, and vice versa.

A third  “listen”? – it won’t be the last time, I’m certain, but this traversal had me looking for the ones I might have not given enough time to, and allowed to pass me by in a generalised kind of mind-set – but as with all great music parts of it are loaded to register at later and still more later hearings! So I’m now writing this with the initially-thought trite but charming “Love in the Thirties” from Volume Three suddenly having properly “sprung” its spell (with my own parenthood times poignantly played like a private movie in my head throughout the song!), and finally (appropriately?) the last song “Blue”, tantalisingly ambivalent in its intent for me (a song for someone else or for the self? – I vary, depending on my mood (need?) when listening) …….but those words which I’ve finally paid proper attention to are Wordsworthian in their impact, like distant daffodils! – “behind the eyes, behind the mind you’ll find the sweetest brilliance and a stillness of such blue…..” I’m finding they now leave me weak with their realisation……

I’m left saying that I can’t recommend this recording  enthusiastically enough! – whatever genre of music is one’s “thing”, this for me has transcended such considerations! I wish for it every success – it does proud  everybody involved in its becoming and actual being.

Tutus on Tour – a “symbiosis of two arts”

Posted on by Jennifer Shennan

Tutus on Tour –
The Royal New Zealand Ballet presents Tutus On Tour 2025.
Photo credits: Stephen A’Court.


Limerence   (Anneliese Macdonald) – Above, Principal Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson and Soloist Katherine Minor

Grand Pas Classique – chor. Gsovsky, music Auber
Limerence – Anneliese Macdonald, music Schubert piano trios
Coppelia – Saint-Léon,  music Delibes
The Way Alone – Stephen Baynes, music Tchaikovsky piano & chamber works
Royal New Zealand Ballet
Te Raukura, Kapiti
21 February 2025

If you live in Denmark and want to see ballet you go to Copenhagen, the company does not come to you. It’s the same in most countries but Tutus on Tour sees Royal New Zealand Ballet, reputedly the most ready-to-tour of all world ballet companies, taking a programme of shorter works to many smaller centres around the country. In that, they are retracing part of the original itineraries in 1950s, when the founding director Poul Gnatt took his dancers out on the highways and byways, picked up hitch-hikers, chatted with the locals, employed dancers who doubled as truck drivers, lighting riggers, wardrobe and stage hands, so they could show the country that ballet is not an esoteric art that fell out of the courts of Europe, but a loved art form that found and kept its place in the hearts of many New Zealanders. Ballet belongs here as much as anywhere — it inspires, amuses and consoles, as dancers use their exquisitely trained bodies to move to music, so that we in turn might be moved. As indeed we were.

The venue Te Raukura, in Kapiti College grounds, is in itself impressive — drama facilities for students by day, and a fine and accessible theatre by night, with a smaller box theatre in the complex named for Jon Trimmer, so it feels like family already.

Nga mihi to a refreshing new tone in the programme notes, connecting present with past, and details of the music recordings are appreciated. We sense a mindful quality emanating from the overall performance – the opposite of the old bravura and virtuosity for its own sake, that  interrupts with applause and cheers from audience as they go. Not so with Ty King-Wall I think, the company’s new artistic director who is bringing a sense of measure and proportion to the programme. In four works there is contrast of old and new, but each of them offers a mood we recognise, from celebratory to introspective to serene. The dancers are not performing at us, but dancing for us, with us.

The opening Grand Pas Classique, to music by Daniel-Francois Auber, is a pas de deux that sparkles with Parisian glamour, (and it’s a captivating image to read that Poul Gnatt might have watched this work from the wings when it was premiered in 1949 by Ballets des Champs Elysées where he was a dancer at the time).

Elegantly danced by Jemma Scott and Zacharie Dunn, their technique is clean and grows in assurance, unfolding like unwrapping a gift, and then, six minutes in, the music dies. It’s a moment of held breath for everyone. Will the curtain come down, will the plane pull up and abort the landing, who’s in charge, pilot or control tower?  The dancers dance on in the silence, like good nurses they know not to panic, they have the rhythm and tempi by heart anyway, but this is like having to drive blind, in the sudden dissection of cause and effect between dance and music. The pair arrive at a silent cadence then exit the stage, as though they were always meant to do so.  Stage Manager checks in and assures us the glitch will soon be fixed, which it is … the performance continues, and then, pull up, pull up, it all happens again. That the dancers continue to keep their calm, holding balances while masking any uncertainty, is testament to the tight team that is running this show.  It’s not when things go wrong but what you do next that counts, and of course planes will land safely in Wellington. Again the couple continues, more defiantly now, to a triumphant finish. They are in the palm of our hands and the applause lets them know that.

Limerence, a new word for me, meaning a strong attraction to someone yet with haunting thoughts of another from the past, proves the perfect title for this striking choreography by Anneliese Macdonald. To Schubert piano trios, it’s an enigmatic but compelling piece in which the magnetic central role is danced by Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson. The woman he is with is aware of the distractions, though there’s no specific narrative that cuts into the drama of a man and his thoughts, his present and his past, memories, ghosts. “Let it go” she would say if asked, but she isn’t asked. There’s a cast of four on stage but with a layering that hints they are perhaps not all in the same place at the same time. Jackets on, jackets off — what’s public, what’s private, what’s a dream, what’s for real? The two women — Ana Gallardo Lobaina and Katherine Minor are not identical in offstage appearance, yet by some curious alchemy and inspired lighting they seem to slowly become each other as the work unfolds.  It is focused, introspective, melancholic — beyond words maybe, but with imagery that shows us what’s inside a head and heart. It’s a tight and striking little masterwork from a gifted choreographer, and one imagines it would also translate into a fine cameo film.

The Wedding pas de deux from Coppélia, to Delibes. A happy bridal couple are very well cast –  Catarina Estèvez-Collins is splendidly secure in the very considerable technical demands, and Dane Hood dances with unbounded joy. They share real rapport and invest their dance with enthusiasm and sassy style. You can believe the father of the bride spent $10,000 on the best champagne for these wedding festivities.

After the interval, a longer and larger group work –  The Way Alone, choreographed by Stephen Baynes, originally for Hong  Kong Ballet in 2008, is here developed for Royal New Zealand Ballet, and will be seen again in a further season soon.

The Way Alone – Stephen Baynes

Tchaikovsky is probably the best known composer for full length and large scale ballets in the world repertoire, but here Baynes has chosen from his lesser known choral and chamber works with sacred or spiritual connotations.  Each section segues from lyrical to meditative, and serene atmospheres. There are solo moments, as well as small and larger group passages well designed for the theme that everyone is essentially alone while still a member within a group or community.   Rose Xu moves with a beautifully serene quality, and Katherine Minor is notable for the way her torso seems to cause the sequential movement of limbs. An aura of poem or prayer emerges from this beautiful group work which meets the music throughout.

I went by myself to the performance but made new friends. You just have to point out someone’s missed the programmes available in the foyer and fetch one for them … you do that again, and again — for a couple from England who visit family each year and always time that to coincide with an RNZB season, for a local businessman who’s never been to the ballet before, for a little old lady steadying herself in the aisle afterwards  “Well that was a lyrical endpiece” I say to her – to which she replies, punching the air,  “Nah – I’m really into the contemporary work — that Limerence got to me … so layered and interesting…oo I loved it.”  I’m with you, Ma’am.

… so I made five new friends — whose names I don’t know and we’ll never meet again, but we won’t forget our night at the ballet… and they now have programmes to check details of all the music they heard – in the symbiosis of two arts.

 

 

Wellington’s Youth Orchestras show the way through is together!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

“SYMPHONIC FUSION”
Wellington Youth Orchestra and Wellington Youth Sinfonietta
Mark Carter (WYO) and Christiaan van der Zee (WYS) – conductors
Xavier Ngaro (violin)

SUPPE – Overture “Poet and Peasant”
BRUCH – Violin Concerto No. 1 Op.26
WALTON – Suite from “Henry V”
PONCHIELLI – “Dance of the Hours” (from “La Gioconda”)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Waltz No. 2 (from “Jazz Suite”)
BIZET – “L’Arlesienne – Suite No. 2”

Alan Gibbs Centre, Wellington College, Dufferin St., Wellington

Saturday, 19th October, 2024

At a time that could be regarded as reaching an apex of dissatisfaction in a turbulent year for the capital, Wellington’s youthful orchestral musicians who make up both the Wellington Youth Orchestra and the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta came together triumphantly for a concert on Saturday afternoon at Wellington College’s Alan Gibbs Centre. The young players and their music directors demonstrated the kind of unity, strength and brilliance of purpose and achievement that comes with close co-operation and mutual understanding  –  a kind of example well worth emulating for those in public life! The  efforts of these young musicians at once highlighted and freely gave quantities of joy and motivation and fulfilment, to the enjoyment of all present.

Wellington Youth Orchestra is the major orchestra in the region for young musicians of Grade Eight and above status, the players working with Music Director Mark Carter on a number of projects each year including a concerto award for an orchestra member who excels at a particular instrument – this year the Concerto Award was won by Xavier Ngaro, who today performed the Bruch First Violin Concerto. The orchestra’s membership is “fed” by players whose training takes place with the “other” youth ensemble in the capital, the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, whose members have achieved a Grade Five-plus level of proficiency, and whose conductor is Christiaan Van der Zee. Both groups encourage opportunities for soloists and composers and would-be conductors to develop their skills, with the Sinfonietta occasionally collaborating with other youth ensembles from other regions in valuable combined training weekends.

A “manifestation” of all of this was Saturday’s concert, a concentrated youth-fest of artistic expression during which the musicians’ committed energies and efforts seemed to thrill its audience to pieces! – a gathering which, what was more, included people like myself who were there for the music alone, and not “connected” through any ostensible on-stage representation – in fact after the concert I walked down to the road to my car alongside a young man whom I happened to ask “how he had enjoyed the concert and whether a family member was participating” to which he replied that he had no such connection with the event but merely an interest in the programme that was being played, which, he told me, he had seen advertised, and had, upon attending, enjoyed immensely!

The older “Youth Orchestra” under Mark Carter’s direction took the stage for the first half, which opened with an item promising plenty of excitement and variety – the colourful evergreen favourite by Franz von Suppé, the Overture “Poet and Peasant”. Such a beautifully-nuanced, velvet-like brass sound at the music’s very beginning, we got here! – and answered with gorgeously-hushed strings. The orchestral tutti, as was the case all through the concert, sounded somewhat muffled due to the stage’s curtained surroundings, but it didn’t lessen the excitement of the playing, and allowed the beauty of the cello-and-harp passage which followed to make its effect,  with the winds adding a gracefully-shaped melody along the way, the cellist’s awkward ascending phrase midway a shade unconfident-sounding but still resolute and determined! And what a great start there was to the allegro, with furiously buzzing strings and thunderous brass and percussion, and plenty of “snap” to the brass chording – Carter didn’t rush the players through the orchestral turmoil, but allowed it all plenty of weight and tremendous momentum, after which the famous waltz-theme glided in most beguilingly, with properly winsome textures, and with the phrasings allowing the “Viennese” charm of the music its proper effect. The closing passages of the work were no less impressively done, the strings’ “swirling figurations” leading to a scalp-tingling acceleration into the coda, and a “bringing the house down” effect at the end – great stuff!

A space then had to be cleared on the platform for a soloist for today’s concerto, which was Max Bruch’s G Minor Violin Concerto No. 1, here performed by the winner of the orchestra’s 2024 Concerto Competition, 17 year-old Xavier Ngaro from Lower Hutt, Wellington, an orchestra member and a pupil of ex-NZSQ violinist Douglas Beilman. The work is, of course one of the most popular works in the violin concerto repertoire, and (judging by the number of performances I’ve heard from young violinists over the years) obviously a popular choice for budding virtuosi wishing to demonstrate their skills, Xavier Ngaro on this showing certainly being no exception.

The work’s famous “laden” opening atmosphere properly set the scene for the violinist’s first entry – Ngaro’s opening notes were richly sounded and filled with properly burgeoning intent, inspiring a full-blooded response from the orchestra, and a forceful series of further “challenges” from the soloist. The latter sounded completely in command of his passagework before dropping into a beautiful cantabile tone for the second subject material, all sensitively and resolutely accompanied, as were the feathery sinuous solo passages which followed, leading up to a great and vigorous orchestra “tutti” with the conductor getting trenchant playing from his strings, the stuff romantic concerti are made of!

The soloist’s cadenza-like flourishes which followed then led to the orchestra’s great and luxurious announcement of the slow movement’s introduction (beautiful playing!), which the violinist joined via both hushed and forthright passages, a performance which here had plenty of emotional give-and-take (I could imagine the young man over time finding even more “heartbreak” in this music, more “hushed” tones than we got here – but these will doubtless develop naturally in due course…) Though his tone was “swallowed up” by the orchestra’s counter-themes in the movement’s climax, where there appeared some awkwardness when trying to reassert his lines, his re-entry just after the ‘tutti” was suitably big-hearted – and he managed a wonderful “soft-to-loud” transition passage which brought the movement to a close.

A well-rounded tutti was built up at the finale’s beginning, with Ngaro’s solo passages nimble and confident, if perhaps needing to develop a surer touch on the once-repeated three-note ascent of the opening theme, which seemed very slightly “skipped” (an interpretative choice, perhaps?) – elsewhere, there was confidently-essayed passagework leading up to the “big tune” of the movement, gloriously played by the orchestra and nicely “varied” by the soloist on repetition. He then confidently attacked the reprise of the finale’s opening, though I thought perhaps a degree of fatigue at this stage might have momentarily slowed his responses to some of the trenchant passagework which followed – however, towards the end I thought he pulled off that treacherous double stopped ascending hand-position that precedes the final orchestral tutti really well, which then in turn led to the coda – soloist, conductor and players gave these final bars plenty of excitement, earning everybody concerned a great ovation! It was appropriate that the young soloist was then presented with the Tom Gott Cup by none other than the award’s donor, in honour of the player’s Concerto Competition success – a memorable occasion!

An occasion of a different kind then followed – a performance of William Walton’s Suite for the film Henry V, with each of the movements preceded by speakers/actors reading lines from the play associated with the music. Two speakers were used, both giving their readings plenty of pleasing “oomph”, though I preferred having their faces and expressions visible at the front of the hall instead of (as one did) having them wandering down the aisle out of sight and to an extent out of earshot! But the added theatricality of it all was splendid, and certainly added to the impact of the music!

The famous “Prologue”, the “O for a muse of fire….” set the scene, paving the way for the music’s evocative beginning with gorgeous strings and a ravishing flute solo, followed by suitably ceremonial gesturings from brass and percussion, and stirringly martial expressions of intent. These were followed by a description of the death of Falstaff, King Henry’s spurned friend, the words in the play spoken by Mistress Quickly, but here by the second speaker regarding the Knight’s demise – “…all was cold as stone” – the music, a Passacaglia, touchingly capturing the mood of the scene.

Next came Henry’s “Once more into the breach, dear friends!….” from the first speaker, then augmented by the second with “On, on, you noble English!…..”, and concluding with the famous statement, “Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!”. Walton’s music was here wonderfully “pregnant” with foreboding and portent, the players capturing the scene’s growing excitement as the warlike gestures grew in intensity before breaking into action, the brass signalling the charge and the orchestra building the trajectories towards a grand tattoo of drums – fantastic playing from all concerned!

A subsidence to a contrasting sweetness was ushered in by lovely wind-playing, leading to a quote by Walton from Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne”, the lovely Bailiero melody – perhaps a third female actor/reader was again needed as the object of Pistol’s Act 2 Scene 3 farewell to his wife, Mistress Quickly “My love, give me thy lips…..” (its generality here provoked some amusement!), and his comrade Nym’s abashed refusal to do the same, with  “I cannot kiss – but that’s the humour of’t!…..Adieu!” – however, these words were the prelude to some of the score’s most beautiful music “Touch her sweet lips and part”, with the envoy-like strains most poignantly sounded by the players.

The work concluded with perhaps the most rousing of all of Shakespeare’s speeches, the famous “St.Crispin’s Day” exhortation made by Henry V at Agincourt to his soldiers, here  rather more thoughtfully proclaimed by the speaker than was perhaps usual, though still with its own resounding effect! Great ceremonial roulades then surrounded and threaded through the melody, all very festive and redolent of celebrations with accompanying  bell-like cascades of bells, brought off with true splendour by Carter and his musicians! This performance was actually my introduction to this music, due to my long-misplaced lack of regard for film music in general – and the occasion certainly shook my prejudices from off their foundations in this case, thanks largely to the playing’s vitality and atmosphere.

The interval saw the stage almost transmorgrified with the appearance of a different orchestra and conductor – this was the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, with their director, Christiaan van der Zee, a group exuding a similar “aura” of animated anticipation of a kind that one relishes so readily with youth performers! The group’s programme featured two “Sinfonietta-only” items, and a combined performance with the older orchestra to conclude the concert, a most enticing prospect for all concerned.

First came Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli’s justly famous “Dance of the Hours”, an orchestral interlude from his one-operatic-hit stage-work “La Gioconda”, something of a concert-hall classic, and made popularly famous some years ago when its principal melody was parodied by American comedian Allan Sherman in a hit song “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda” – one that has seemed to have, these days, mercifully sunk almost without a trace! this was a slightly “smoothed out” arrangement of the one I knew from the opera, missing out a whole middle section but finishing with the original’s fast-and-furious galop! Despite the simplifications it still all caught the original piquancy of the opening and the hell-for-leather excitement of the chase in the finale! After this, it was a great idea to feature Shostakovich’s wonderfully tongue-in-cheek “Waltz” from his “Jazz Suite No. 2” – I didn’t know the piece well enough to compare the performance with an “original”, but it all sounded “echt-Shostakovich” to my ears, with a sense of lurking unease, something almost sinister, about it – and, of course, the ironies of these “sweet young things” playing such music were almost palpable!

Came the finale of the concert – and we were warmly enjoined to “bear with us” by the organisers as they undertook the task of fitting two complete orchestras onto the concert platform (there was some inevitable “spillage” onto the auditorium floor in front, which neither mattered nor deterred the palpable excitement of it all!)  Christian van der Zee took the podium when all was ready, and the players plunged into the opening movement of Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne Suite No.2”. This set had become a sequel to the composer’s own selection of pieces from his incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet after the original production was a failure. Bizet’s first “Suite” of pieces proved entirely successful, but the composer died before he could make a second selection from the music – his friend Ernest Giuraud chose three more movements and added a Minuet from other music Bizet had composed, making a four-movement “L’Arlesienne – Suite No. 2”.

The opening Pastorale began grandly and somewhat unexpectedly, given its rustic title! – a big, rolling ball of orchestral texture, relieved somewhat by a charming  wind version of the opening and piquant changes between the winds and a saxophone – the two orchestras together made a splendid sound at the opening’s reprise – again the music detoured to more pastoral realms with a trio-like dance for winds  over “chugging” string rhythms almost resembling a polonaise, before the music modulated imposingly back to the opening!

The second movement sounded no less formidable at its a solemn full-orchestra unison beginning, eventually giving way to a lilting melody for the saxophone (a relatively “new” instrument to orchestras at that time), all very “nostalgic-sounding” in a slightly disturbing way, and even more so when the great orchestral “unison” reappeared! The young players, however, sailed through the piece’s emotional ambivalences, giving it all they had! The beautiful Minuet which followed featured the harp and flute, both enchantingly sounded, and then joined by the ubiquitous saxophone. As for the final riotous Farandole, introduced by an excerpt from the composer’s own Prelude from the First L’Arlesienne Suite, it began quietly, gathered inexorable momentum throughout the sequences and finally burst out with both the Prelude and Farandole themes combined, to prodigiously festive effect! Such was its impact that at the conclusion the players spontaneously took up their instruments and repeated the piece, creating a “second wave” of energy and exuberance that rocked the auditorium with delight at its conclusion. A better advertisement for the general, all-round efficacy of youthful music-making could never have been devised!