Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Schubert for all

Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887

New Zealand String Quartet

St John’s Methodist Church, Tuesday 27 January

At 1pm the festival broke ground by presenting a free concert in St John’s Methodist Church and Nelson responded by filling it. It was no miscellany of pop classics: the New Zealand String quartet was determined to give the people the real thing, Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887 – his last quartet and a piece that cellist Rolf Gjelsten, in his introductory comments, placed together with Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op 131, as the greatest masterpiece in the quartet repertoire. It’s a ranking I support, in spite of the popularity of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and A minor quartets.

It was a revelatory, emotionally powerful performance of the almost hour-long work that indeed illustrated the mixture of despair, anger, resignation and joy that Gjelsten had bid the audience to listen for.

Though free concerts can send out the wrong messages to the masses about professionalism and actual the costs of presenting good music, isolated and well-judged excursions can awaken to great music those whom it has somehow bypassed.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Flights of Fancy: music by Handel, Falla, Piazolla, Persichetti, De Castro Robinson, Grenfell, Andres, Fauré, Ravel, Ibert

Flight: Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp)

Chanel Arts Centre, Motueka, Sunday 25 January

At 2pm a Family Concert entitled Animal Antics took place in the School of Music. It featured Carnival of the Animals and Poulenc’s Babar the Elephant, with accompaniment from four of New Zealand’s finest pianists – Michael Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp and Emma Sayers, and the narratives, Ogden Nash in the case of the Carnival, were spoken by Helen Moulder.

It clashed however with a concert at Motueka called Flights of Fancy, from Flight, the flute and harp duo of Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills: that’s what I chose. Reports of the Animals concert from those who’d been there made me regret being unable to spirit myself from Nelson to Motueka at 4pm.

Flights of Fancy met with a rather small audience, possibly because some people wonder if the two instruments can sustain their delight for two hours. The concert began with one of Handel’s flute sonatas, the harpsichord part nicely transferred to the harp.

The balance of the concert was slightly skewed however because an arm injury that has afflicted Carolyn Mills, stopped her playing one of the De Falla pieces, a piece by American, John Thomas, as well as Bach’s Flute Sonata in C. The rest of the programme consisted of fairly recent music, both New Zealand and foreign, plus a final set of three happy and familiar French pieces that left the audience content.

The unfamiliar pieces were chosen with a certain flair. Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Pearls of the Sea called for the novel sound of the bass flute, and for a variety of unorthodox sounds – glissandi, tapping the harp’s soundboard and the keys of the flute. Four Pooh Stories came from a second New Zealand composer, Maria Grenfell, again creating an original sound world that was often droll and perhaps trite but evocative of A A Milne.

Serenade No 10 by American composer Persichetti comprised eight very brief and very different movements that seemed to call for a visual programme of some kind. But I most enjoyed a suite of pieces by Bernard Andres called Narthex, depictions of stained glass in French churches of Cluny and Saint Lazare, with their evocation of medieval Christian imagery through clear, vivid melodies: refreshing, straightforward stuff…

Adam Chamber Music Festival,Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Pianissimo: Piano Duos by Mozart, Bizet, Barber, Rachmaninov

Michel Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp, Emma Sayers

Nelson School of Music Sunday, 25 January

The evening concert was absolutely the essential stuff of a music festival; these performances, of great music, would have excited audiences at great European festivals like Verbier or La Roque d’Anthéron.

The Nelson audience was certainly conscious that it had witnessed something momentous as they clapped and shouted at the end of Rachmaninov’s long and strenuous Suite No 2 for two pianos, Op 17. Nothing could have been less apposite that the concert’s title, Pianissimo. I have sometimes wondered whether this dense and mighty work that emerges as if from one mighty instrument, would reveal more interesting interplay if the pianos were widely separated. The performance by Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons was monumental in its energy and power and in its near perfect ensemble; that alone is a singular achievement in such a piece.

Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos, K 448, which is also one of his great masterpieces, had opened the concert; it was played by Diedre Irons and Richard Mapp with Emma Sayers and Michael Houstoun in the humble role of page-turners. If the declamatory and extrovert outer movements were witness to Mozart’s self-confidence and his powerful creativity, the mature and profound slow movement was not only impressive in its unanimity and singular ensemble, but deeply felt, suggesting long gestation on the part of the players.

The concert was given a special quality through the use of projections from above of the players at the two keyboards on to screens at the back of the stage. Without distracting attention from the music, the images seemed to provide an insight into the sensuous intimacy that the strange phenomenon of the piano duet offers.

Nowhere was this slightly intrusive insight more delightful than the performance by Mapp and Sayers of Samuel Barber’s duet, Souvenirs, Op 28, involving a great deal of overlapping of hands, one often on top of the other or chasing each other the length of the keyboard.

Perhaps the most delicious, and to many, surprising piece was Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, every bit as serious music as Mozart or Schumann. This was at the hands of Michael and Diedre at one keyboard and they revealed the uncelebrated genius of Bizet as piano composer. For Bizet’s death at 35 (the same age as Mozart) was a terrible loss not just to opera, but to piano and orchestral music, and probably chamber music too. The music itself is filled with spontaneity and rich invention, but it needs a joyous and boisterous performance such as we heard here to demonstrate just how fecund was Bizet’s melodic imagination and his sense of shape and style.

The following evening (26 January) the same pianists returned for more; this time the emphasis was on aural spectacle, some, like Mark Wilberg’s Fantasy on Themes from Carmen frankly vacuous pyrotechnics, others – Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a Theme of Beethoven (from the Trio of Sonata Op 31 No 2) and Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini of some musical worth. John Rimmer’s Hammerheads, a 2008 work commissioned for four talented young Nelson pianists, was frankly astonishing.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Saturday Clash

Concertante: Clarinet Quintet (Anthony Ritchie), String Trio (Jindrich Feld), Caligraphy (Edward Ware), Sonata for flute, viola and harp (Debussy), Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, for violin and viola, K 364 (Mozart) 

New Zealand String Quartet; Prazak Quartet; Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills (Flight); Philip Green (clarinet)

Nelson Cathedral, Saturday 24 January

The festival’s second concert was blighted by the sort of misadventure that is familiar in a big city but ought not to happen in Nelson.

A major clash.

The Sealord Opera in the Park has been a major fixture in February each year for more than a decade. This time it moved, reportedly on account of the availability of certain singers, to Saturday 24 January, and thousands filled Trafalgar Park .It must have impacted on the size of the audience in the Cathedral: a great pity, for this was an exceptional concert.

Again, it employed both string quartets as well as the three other instrumentalists, in music that is almost never played in ordinary chamber music concerts. New music of an engaging character was again prominent.

First was a Clarinet Quintet (Op 124, no less!) by Anthony Ritchie, written for Christchurch arts patron Christopher Marshall in 2006: this was its third performance. If there were few reminders of its predecessors by Mozart and Brahms, there was a comparable sense of musical inevitability, of a composition that has arisen from genuine musical impulses rather than non-musical ideas, concepts, technical considerations. It feels as if conceived in purely music terms in large bites, with a structure that suggested a strong sense of shape, giving no impression of note-spinning or routine passage-work.

Clarinettist Philip Green opened with playing that was remote, disembodied, suddenly displaced by ethereal string harmonics, and players of the New Zealand String Quartet then entered, leading without pause to an Allegro energico: sanguine, jazzy, very grounded and carrying hints of the famous Clarinet Concertino by Ritchie’s father, John. The slow movement employed a quotation from Ritchie’s opera, The God Boy, first on the clarinet, expressing anxiety according to the programme notes.

The Prazak Quartet then played, without second violinist, a String Trio by Jindrich Feld, a Czech composer who died in 2007. This work supports one’s impression that mainstream music has largely broken free of the complex, the intellectual, the disdaining of melody or delight that blighted it through the mid and late 20th century. An unpretentious piece in four pithy, engaging movements, with hints of Martinu in the second movement, motoric quavers expressing an optimistic mood in the last movement.

The third contemporary piece was Caligraphy for solo cello by Wellington-born composer Edward Ware, now living in Barcelona. This too held no terrors either for the audience or for cellist Rolf Gjelsten who gave it a compelling performance. The music’s idiom might have been of the 19th century, but by the end, there was no doubt that it was essentially closer in spirit to Bach.

The third of Debussy’s wartime sonatas, and the last to be completed, is for flute, viola and harp. Harpist Carolyn Mills confessed that it was her favourite piece for her instrument, and that was clear. I am less moved by Debussy’s big orchestral works than by his chamber and piano music and songs; and these players (Gillian Ansell was the violist) made it easy to be convinced by this sonata’s unique flavour and sonorities, its undiminished musical inspiration.

And the concert ended with a novelty: an arrangement published in 1817 for string sextet of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. No great violence was done to its character.

The sextet comprised both string quartets minus the two second violinists; the front desks were occupied by violinist Vaclav Remes and violist Josef Kluson, but they by no means dominated the solo parts. The orchestral parts are compressed to single string parts and the solo parts distributed among the other players, often the cellist instead of the violist.

Especially for anyone new to it, it sounded authentic, for the greatness of the work easily survives this sort of sympathetic treatment. My first exposure to it, aged round 20, was from a recording from the Casals Festival of 1951 at Perpignan, with soloists Isaac Stern and William Primrose. Ever since, most performances fall short. I was enchanted by this performance however, in spite of certain ensemble looseness, and had no problem with the reallocation of some of the music even though the solo passages hardly matched that ideal performance that resides in my soul.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Gala Opening Concert

Telemann: Concerto for four violins; String quartet (Michael Norris); Ravel: Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet;  Smetana: String Quartet, ‘From my life’

New Zealand String Quartet; Prazak Quartet; Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp); Philip Green (clarinet)

Nelson Cathedral, Friday 23 January

The Festival’s Gala opening concert took place, as usual, in the Nelson Cathedral, a strangely incomplete building, its primitive Gothic arches seeming to announce a much larger and more massive building; but above the arches, when money ran out, there is an incongruous ceiling, and walls of concrete blocks and an unsympathetic spire.

However, its acoustic properties are simply superb for singers and small ensembles; and the back wall of the sanctuary, painted deep blue and lit attractively, often provided an atmosphere that suited music as dusk fell on the long summer evenings. . This concert introduced both the New Zealand and the Prazak string quartets, as well as three other musicians. The result was perhaps an unusual programme but one which proved highly rewarding.

The ‘other’ musicians, from the NZSO, and the NZSQ, allowed the performance of Ravel’s enchanting Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet. Carolyn Mills took centre stage with the harp; while the piece may be a miniature harp concerto, the two wind instruments (Bridget Douglas – flute and Philip Green – clarinet), virtuosic and shrouded in subtle chiaroscuro, acted as if they were facets of the one instrument, and the strings too created sonorities that were haunting and ethereal. It was an experience that comes to you live perhaps once in a life-time.

Bridget opened the second part of the concert with a particularly seductive account of Debussy’s Syrinx. In retrospect, the opening piece, a concerto for four violins by Telemann, was incongruous. Though it opens with an enchanting, delicate Grave movement, the rest didn’t fulfill its promise, ending in a rather vapid, inconsequential Vivace.

Nothing could have been as remote from the Telemann as the premiere of a piece by Wellington composer Michael Norris. Commissioned and played by the NZSQ, his String Quartet is inspired by the treatment of death by four distinct cultures that offered scope for contrasting moods and a radical catalogue of ‘extended string techniques’.These included a first movement based entirely on harmonics and a third movement with extensive sul ponticello (bowing close to the bridge).

In Niflheim, its 3rd movement, Rolf Gjelsten’s left-hand fingers climbed so close to the cello’s bridge that one marveled that there was still space for the bow. The piece seemed to want to stop with the stark silence at the end of that movement, but as the fourth evolved it seemed to amend one’s impression of the architecture of the whole. While its structure and many of its ideas were musical, the piece suffers, like so much of today’s music, from the weight and expectations of its programme and its intellectual paraphernalia.

The centre of the concert came at the end with the Prazak playing the quartet From My Life by their compatriot Smetana. My attention passed from one player to another, each time with the feeling that here was the heart of the music. Yet the combination was so flawless and homogeneous, so richly opulent and so filled with the spirit of the composer’s life story, from joyousness to tragedy, that I felt that I had heard finally the perfect, never to be equalled performance.

OPERA AT ARATOI with Anna Pierard and Jose Aparicio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Songs, opera and zarzuela arias

Anna Pierard (mezzo-soprano) and Jose Aparicio (tenor and flute) with David Harper (piano)

Auditorium of Aratoi Art and History Museum, Masterton

Wednesday 14th January 2009

Trying to write about such a joyous affair as the first 2009 Aratoi Art and History Museum concert in Masterton seems to produce such a prosaic effect compared with the sheer pleasure savoured in the music-making of singers Anna Pierard and Jose Aparicio, and pianist David Harper on a warm January evening in the Wairarapa. For many people, myself included, this would have been the New Year’s very first concert outing, and one couldn’t imagine a more life-enhancing musical experience than what we were given by these world-class artists.

Their programme was an attractive mixture of the familiar (for example, “La donna e mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto), the darkly exotic (two Rachmaninov songs, including Oh, never sing to me, again), and the colourfully unfamiliar (Zarzuela arias by various Spanish composers), and delivered with all the engagement, skill and musicality we’ve come to expect from the trio. An unexpected but exhilarating bonus was the performance by Jose Aparicio playing the flute (his first musical instrument) of Francois Borne’s challenging Fantasie Brilliante on Carmen – no mere novelty, this, but an exhilarating display of virtuosity worthy of its place in the programme.

As with the Zarzuela programme which this trio brought to these performances something of the dramatic flavour of the stage, the singers using movement and gesture to bring a theatrical touch to the items from the opera or operetta stage. The opening duet from Bellini’s La Sonnambula, which involved the exchange of a ring between lovers, showcased the kind of teamwork these singers bring to their work together, breathing, phrasing and emoting as one. Again, in Vives’ Escuchame from Dona Francisquita, reckoned by some as the greatest of all Zarzuela works, the performers created a real “frisson” of interchange between wounded lover and coquettish sweetheart, redolent with teasing deception and inflamed jealousy, which made for great entertainment, David Harper’s responsive playing in colourful accord with the “stage” action throughout. As a bonus, we got the famous Cherry Duet from Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, whose piquant presentation most fittingly left each of us audience members with a smile to take away from the concert.

Both singers presented their solo items with theatrical gesture and movement rather than with a more formal recital platform manner, which gave their performances a bit extra thrust and colour appropriate to the occasion. Anna Pierard brought plenty of dramatic power to Rossini’s ‘Cruda sorte’ from L’Italiana in Algeri, and displayed a real feeling for Rachmaninov’s darkly throbbing realizations of youthful emotion, such as the alarmingly precocious ‘In The Silence Of The Secret Night’, written when the composer was just seventeen. Occasionally I felt the voice over-modulated in our small listening-space, as if the singer was pushing things too hard, or was finding her tones difficult to pitch evenly, as with an admittedly treacherous chromatic descent towards the end of the second Rachmaninov song ‘O Never Sing to Me Again’. But the beautifully exotic Borodin-like arabesques earlier in the song, with their melismatic vocal lines, were delivered with remarkable control and a real sense of atmosphere, which carried the day.

As much visceral intensity was in evidence with Jose Aparicio’s solo singing also, who gave us a lyrically ardent Mattinata by Leoncavallo, and an impassioned, verismo-like delivery of the insistent ‘No puede ser’ of Sorozabal which brought forth marvellously ringing, heroic tones at the end. Also, we enjoyed a properly cavalier ‘La donna e mobile’ despite a minor impromptu rearrangement of the lines in the first verse, a case of “where have we heard that before?” when the second verse came around. One of the highlights of the concert was Jose Aparicio’s rendition of Lara’s Granada, a favourite of mine, I must admit, and here realized with considerable physical élan, and pictorial immediacy.

At the concert’s beginning, Marcus Buroughs, the director of Aratoi, welcomed us most warmly to the museum and to the concert, before paying tribute to one of the patrons of the enterprise, Dr. Ian Prior, of Wellington, long-time supporter of the museum and of the careers of both Anna Pierard and Jose Aparicio. Unfortunately, Dr.Prior could not be at the concert, but he would have been thrilled by the evening’s performances and the warm reception accorded to the performers by an enthusiastic audience.

New Zealand Opera School, Wanganui

Posted on by Lindis Taylor
New Zealand Opera School, Wanganui

Grand Final Concert in Royal Wanganui Opera House. Monday 12 January

Review by Lindis Taylor

The survival of a musical organization over 16 years is no mean feat.

The New Zealand Opera School has survived that long. It is the kind of musical education institution that the State, in a more civilized country, might well provide; in fact it is not too much to expect that such a summer course might have been established by a university music department.

But the State in New Zealand has not taken many steps to make fuller and more imaginative use, of their facilities during vacations.

A summer school of singing has flourished for many more years in Hawke’s Bay and it has usually overlapped with the Wanganui school. A few years ago attempts were made to coordinate the two schools so they would not clash. But it proved impossible because both depend on overseas vocal tutors who typically have only a short time free at the beginning of January to travel to New Zealand.

But each school caters for singers at rather different levels and pursuing different singing ambitions. The National Singing School in Napier caters for jazz and music theatre and cabaret singers while the Wanganui school has confined itself to singers who have already made progress up the ladder, even having won roles in professional opera productions.

Thus the big public concerts at the end of each school has been an opportunity to hear a number of our most promising singers at an interesting stage of their training and early career.

So often it is one person who has had the energy and leadership skills to initiate and hold together valuable enterprises, inspiring others and giving them a sense of involvement and satisfaction.

That has been the gift of Donald Trott since the school began: erstwhile banker, but better known as a baritone with the Perkel Opera Company and long-serving board member of successive Auckland opera companies.

He presides over the whole enterprise, recruiting tutors and accompanists, negotiating with Wanganui Collegiate School for the use of their music facilities, but most importantly persuading potential funders that here is by far the best investment for funds that shareholders can do without.

His public face appeared on this occasion as compere and general factotum, suave, debonair, generous in his acknowledgements and encouragement, ensuring that the success of the evening brings its rewards to everyone who gives their time to it.

Guided by British vocal lecturer Paul Farringdon, several notable New Zealand voice teachers (Margaret Medlyn, Barry Mora, Richard Greager) and others such as stage director Sara Brodie and Italian coach Luca Manghi, the concert is no mere string of arias.

Several others made for the great success of this concert and the entire running of the school: most notably Donald Trott’s assistant director, Ian Campbell, his wife Sally Rosenberg and Bryan and Marion Wyness; the accompanists, a different one for each bracket: Greg Neil, Phillipa Saffey, David Kelly, Francis Cowan, Iola Shelley and Bruce Greenfield; long lists of sponsors and benefactors; and a group of friends who have managed to raise the school’s profile in the city through recitals, masterclasses, a chapel service on Sunday, during the school: Wanganui Opera Week..

Each bracket of arias or ensembles had a theme and various devices were used to move from one item to the next, so that a feeling of a tenuous story was sometimes created.

The Spoils of War opened with Frances Moore’s performance of ‘Chacun le sait’ from La fille du régiment, accompanied by a platoon comprising the whole company, bearing arms. In another scene involving guns, Jason Slade brought a nice baritonal quality to the tenor showpiece in the last act of Tosca, ‘E lucevan le stelle’. But Catherine Leining captured the false sincerity well in the usual aria from Samson et Dalila, not that it really suited her.

Each group was separated by theatrical business: here, before the group entitled The Things we do for Love, Luc Manghi suffered the first of his comic misadventures which led to Rachel Day’s effective performance in Monica’s aria from The Medium, which was enlivened with quite elaborate production elements.

Elizabeth Daley was not well advised to tackle Ilia’s role in Idomeneo – ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’, as it simply calls for more intensity than she can summon now, but is certainly within her reach. From Mozart’s last opera seria, La clemenza di Tito, Felicity Smith displayed some polish and dramatic ability with her ‘Parto, parto’.

The group bearing the name Desire Takes Flight strung together Claire Barton’s performance of ‘O mio Fernando’ from Donizetti’s La favorite and others by Granados (Anna Argyle singing the ‘The Maja – Woman – and the Nightingale’) and Bizet: Brent Read in the Flower song from Carmen.

Then Julia Booth sang an unfamiliar aria from Floyd’s Susannah, invoking tender longing in a quasi-American, near-Broadway idiom. She sang against a backdrop of a starry night sky which also served the quartet from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that showcased four of the evening’s best singers: Kristen Darragh, Barbara Graham, Daniel O’Connor and Michael Guy.

Each expressed the individuality of the lovers, waking from their dream-world of love-making, with careful fairy-like precision.

Naturally, some of the best performances came from seasoned singers like Darragh who will be remembered as Xenia in Boris Godunov: her Lucretia (Britten) was as harrowing as it was fully realised. Michael Guy also sang from an opera in English – Toni’s ‘Here I stand’ from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, combining a Shakespearean style with a sort of histrionic Sprechstimme that was one of the most complete performances of the evening.

The second half began with A Rose by any other Name which put together three arias from Shakespeare-inspired operas.

Two of them were from famous versions of Romeo and Juliet (though the Bellini draws not primarily on Shakespeare but on the 16th century Italian sources that Shakespeare took the story from). Gounod’s ‘Je veux vivre’ was sung with great vivacity by a perhaps Natalie Dessay-in-the-making, Tania Priebs. Barbara Graham sang ‘O quante volte’ from I Capuleti e i Montecchi, displaying a promising bel canto talent: agile and soulful with beautiful sustained lines.

There followed a rarity; the overture of Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Falsaff’s drinking song are well-known, but nothing else seems to escape Germany where the opera is still common enough. Alexandra Ioan gave us ‘Nun eilt herbei’, the equivalent of Mistress Ford plotting revenge, in a stylish blend of French opéra-comique and Donizetti.

Under the ‘etiquette’ From Russia with Love, most of the men on hand gave us the unusual experience of hearing arias from all three male protagonists in Eugene Onegin. Daniel O’Connor was a somewhat too unsympathetic Onegin as he declines Tatyana’s overtures, though his singing was indeed very fine; William Parry sang the unfortunate Lensky’s aria before the fateful duel, his voice accurate but not yet well grounded. Prince Gremin’s aria was sung by the splendid Hadleigh Adams, with warmth and vocal assurance.

The last group was entitled Ah! Perfidy, though Louise’s famous aria does not seem to fit into such a characterisation. It was sung prettily enough by Polly Ott. The last item was Eboli’s famous aria from Don Carlo: ‘O don fatale’ from Rachelle Pike, whose voice is big and given to too much fortissimo, though it was clear she had good dynamic control when she chose.

The entire assemblage went through entertaining stage business to perform the Papageno/Papagena duet from The Magic Flute to bring the evening to a most appropriate close.

 

 

 

 

ALFRED HILL – String Quartets Vol.2

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ALFRED HILL – String Quartets Vol.2
Quartet No. 4 in C Minor / No.6* in G Major “The Kids” / No.8 in A Major
Dominion Quartet (Yury Gezentsvey, Rosemary Harris, violins / Donald Maurice, viola / David Chickering, ‘cello) *in Quartet No.6 the second violinist is David Pucher

Naxos 8.57209

Put on Track 10 of this new Naxos CD for an irresistibly foot-tapping introduction to the three quartets by Alfred Hill you’ll find here, in characterful readings by the Dominion String Quartet. Hill was Australasia’s first “recognized” composer – though born in Melbourne, his formative years were spent in New Zealand, after which he studied in Leipzig, becoming steeped in the music of Brahms, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky.

The first volume of Hill’s Quartets on Naxos (8.570491) show these European and nationalistic influences, whereas the works on this new CD find him gradually evolving a more austere and distinctive style. Like composers of an earlier era Hill thought nothing of “borrowing” his own music for different works; and so part of the first quartet on this CD, No.4 in C Minor, was reworked as a Symphony in C Minor, entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness”. It’s all beautifully written for the quartet medium – a lovely “sighing” opening, leading into an invigorating allegro, then followed by three equally distinctive movements, the highlight of which is probably the slow movement, with its Elgarian overtones. Quartet No.6 in G Major is engagingly subtitled “The Kids” – the slight gaucherie of the title belies the work’s structural strengths and attractive lyricism (the music is dedicated to Hill’s students at the New South Wales Conservatorium, where the composer was Professor of Composition). Particularly memorable are the Beethoven-like rhythmic patternings of the scherzo’s introduction and (again) a slow movement whose lyrical intensities highlight the child-like naivety of the music’s return to its source of inspiration in the finale.

String Quartet No.8 in A Major shows Hill’s most adventurous compositional undertakings to date, the opening movement redolent of Debussy’s more “impressionist” colourings, but at the same time energizing the music’s structures with folk-like exuberances. After the thoroughly engaging scherzo (referred to at the beginning) comes a slow movement whose whole-tone hamonies and chromatic accompaniments are of breath-catching quality.

The finale recycles the work’s opening, before removing the listener’s sensibilities from such stringencies, introducing an extended melody across different time- signatures and even working a fugue into the development, before drawing all the strands together nicely in a properly festive finish. Throughout, the Dominion Quartet plays like a group with a mission, and they deliver the goods triumphantly, aided by a mellifluous and truthful-sounding recording.

RICHARD FARRELL The Complete Recordings Volume One

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

RICHARD FARRELL The Complete Recordings Volume One
Music by GRIEG, LISZT and BRAHMS
Richard Farrell (piano)
The Halle Orchestra / George Weldon

Atoll ACD 208/1-2

The exhumation of mostly long-invisible recordings by New Zealand’s greatest pianist has been a slow and laborious exercise. Richard Farrell who died aged 31 in 1958 left only a small number of commercial recordings, although there is other evidence of his career surviving in the Radio New Zealand sound archive which I hope will also soon reach the light of day. I heard Farrell play more than once though I can pin-point only one concert in 1951 when I was a 6th former at Wellington College, as I still have his signed recital programme from the Wellington Town Hall.

Atoll Records are in the process of releasing three double albums of the extant recordings. The first has just appeared and contains an interesting variety of music, and with playing that emerges as so revelatory, so commanding, so effortless yet dazzling in its virtuosity and entrancing in its musical feeling. The first disc opens with the Grieg Piano Concerto. It’s a long time since I sat and actually listened to the work, either live or on recording and I was quite beguiled both by its charm and its high level of musical inspiration. Grieg of course has fallen out of fashion for many listeners more concerned with being in tune with what is critically a la mode than to listen to music through their ears and to respond with their emotions. Words that have been used often to describe Farrell’s playing are ease, naturalness. The Grieg concerto may not be among the most challenging in technical terms but the sound, the flawless playing and the timeless quality of Farrell’s interpretation remove it from any hint of being a restored vintage recording. Interpretation is the wrong word too, for this a simply a glorious, lyrical many-coloured performance of Grieg without any sense of the pianist’s own mannerisms or ego interventions.

Next come the Brahms Ballades Op 10. Farrell plays these not-so-familiar early pieces with a simplicity and feeling for their singing qualities that we are more familiar with in the last groups of piano pieces from Op 116 onwards. No 3 in the set is particularly interesting. There is a concentration and imagination in the playing that is not common. It is a bold and somewhat dark fairy-like piece in which Farrell makes magic out of its fleeting emotions. The fourth ballade is the longest and owes more perhaps to Chopin and foreshadows the mature piano pieces; Farrell holds the attention with the poised delicacy of his playing. Given the age of the recording – in this case 1958 – the piano tone that he draws is warm and opulent and remarkably varied. The rest of the first disc is taken with the 16 Waltzes. Brahms himself adapted his original duet version for solo piano and again Farrell displays his gift for investing rather slender music with eloquence and charm if not actually grandeur. The second disc starts with Grieg again. The Ballade in G Minor, a kind of keyboard tone poem, 20 minutes long, is one of Grieg’s finest works but because of cyclical musical fashion, little known. Farrell offers a delicate and quite entrancing rendering that establishes a sympathetic disposition for the group of Popular Norwegian Melodies and Lyric Pieces that follow. From few pianists since Farrell (perhaps Emil Gilels, or Leif Ove Andsnes) have we had such profoundly sympathetic Grieg performances. These are far from trivial pieces – in sophistication, artistry and plain musical inspiration, they are in the class of comparable music by Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, music quite simply of the greatest beauty whose neglect has been a real loss to the last generation.

For me, these recordings have done far more than reawaken my huge admiration for Farrell, but have renewed my affection for Grieg, understanding why a couple of generations ago he could be classed among the great composers. The First Piano Concerto of Liszt was originally issued with the Grieg on a Pye LP and later, in stereo, on the American Mercury label. Accompanying was the Halle Orchestra conducted by George Weldon, one of Britain’s finest conductors of the post-war period, the conductor who first made the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra into a great ensemble. The concerto is a model of discretion, orchestral and piano clarity, yet it does not lack excitement and rhetoric; the contemplative character of the first section allows the subsequent dramatic passages to make greater impact. Both conductor and pianist are clearly at pains to show Liszt’s poetic and lyrical qualities, and they take time to dwell on these aspects to an unusual degree. There is a joyousness, a youthful buoyancy, clarity of detail yet dazzling virtuosity in the piano, as well as a beautifully balanced orchestral presence in this performance.
This re-issue of recordings long out of circulation, the work of Wayne Laird of Atoll Records, ought to be embraced wholeheartedly by New Zealanders, finally able to appreciate the great gifts of the one pianist of undeniable international stature that we have produced.

Alfred Hill (1869-1960) – A Birthday Celebration (139 years young)

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Alfred Hill (1869-1960)
A Birthday Celebration (139 years young)
ALFRED HILL – String Quartets: Nos. 7 and 9
The Dominion String Quartet (Yury Gezentsvey, Rosemary Harris, violins / Donald Maurice, viola / David Chickering, ‘cello)
Wadestown Presbyterian Church
16th December 2008

Introducing the music and the performers for this concert was Donald Maurice, the violist of the Dominion String Quartet, a musician and scholar who has worked tirelessly to re-establish the reputation and credentials of Alfred Hill as New Zealand’s first professional composer. He talked about the formation of the Quartet in response to the challenge of recording all seventeen of Alfred Hill’s works in this medium for the Naxos label. Longer-term, the Quartet hopes to be able to tackle other New Zealand works, including some more of the repertoire written by composers both prior to and following Douglas Lilburn.

This concert was in fact held to celebrate Alfred Hill’s birthday, in fact the composer’s 139th, an occasion further made special by the presence in the audience of the composer’s great-nephew, whom the audience appropriately acknowledged.

The Dominion Quartet has already released two CDs of Alfred Hill’s works (see the review of Vol.2 of this series elsewhere in this issue), and this concert featured two works recently recorded for the next CD which will appear during 2009. These performances of Quartets Nos. 7 and 9 were both New Zealand public premieres, and served further notice of the significance of Hill’s compositional output. Long regarded in many people’s minds merely as the writer of the charmingly dated song “Waiata Poi”, the composer whom these quartets represented came freshly before us as a vibrant and compelling creator of a memorable and enduring body of music. Quartet No.7 made an arresting beginning to the concert, with a rhythmically snappy introductory figure that was to launch a long and sinuous first subject, one whose questing energies led through a contrasting legato episode to a development where the same rhythmic “kick” stimulated exploratory harmonic shifts with chromatic agitato figures sliding from hue to hue. The pizzicato opening of the second movement set in motion a wonderful waltz whose trio section, introduced by the lower strings, had more than a hint of schmaltz in its makeup. The slow movement took us to further realms of fancy, with a Borodin-like melody whose radiance was offset by deep sostenuto strings, redolent of the Russian master’s famous “Nocturne” movement in another quartet. In conclusion, the finale’s vigorous stride brooked little interference from the occasional modulatory swerve, bringing the music homeward to the point where the quartet’s opening rhythmic flourish returned, stimulating celebratory fanfares and other vigorous gestures which concluded the work in an extremely satisfying manner.

With the following Quartet No.9 the development of a more personal and self-confident style of writing by Hill, described by Donald Maurice in his introductory talk, became even more evident, especially with the work’s slow movement, which seemed to come from nowhere after a more conventional but tightly-worked opening movement, with plenty of directly-expressed energy and focus. How profoundly everything then changed, with a strange and new world being brought to view! – intense pressure-points of sound, column- like creations whose proportions slowly evolved and reshaped like pillars of mist, a vision whose intensities were quietly resolved at the end. Then, just as disconcertingly, the scherzo, a festive dance with an engaging rhythmically ambiguous pizzicato accompaniment swept away the gloom with Dvorak- like vigour, clearing the decks for the finale. Hill took no prisoners with this strongly-etched music, biting chords at the beginning bridged with rhythmic patternings that led off into a melancholic lower- strings tune, and a central episode that looked inward as much as forwards, making the return to the opening music all the more telling. It was the work of a composer who seemed to be saying at the conclusion “This is how it is – like it or not !”. If performances weren’t absolutely note-perfect at all times throughout, the players nevertheless captured every mood of the music to a telling degree, and did its composer full justice. One can hardly wait for the recording, as much to hear the Fifth Quartet also, as to relish yet again the delights of those heard this evening in concert.

Afterwards musicians and audience were able to join together and sing “Happy Birthday” to Alfred Hill, as well as enjoy a wonderfully voluminous cake made by violinist Rosemary Harris – certainly a birthday worth remembering! (PM)