Nota Bene – A Snow-Free Christmas

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Nota Bene – A Snow-Free Christmas
Nota Bene Choir
Guest Conductor: Peter Walls
Carolyn Mills (harp)
Frances Moore(soprano)
Peter Barber (viola)
Fiona McCabe (piano)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St.,Wellington

Saturday 6 December 2008

A couple of nights after being mightily impressed by the singing of the Tudor Consort at a recent “Messiah” I must confess to being even more taken with the performances by Christine Argyle’s wonderful choir “Nota Bene” at the group’s recent concert “A Snow- Free Christmas”, conducted by Peter Walls, and given at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Wellington on Saturday night (December 6th).

The Hill Street Cathedral has the double virtue of intimate audience/performer proximity within a relatively voluminous space, and we audience members certainly reaped the benefits of both of these characteristics throughout the concert. This sense of involvement in an occasion was underlined at the beginning and end of the opening work, Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols”, which featured the entrance and exit of the all-female choir singing the traditional Christmas Motet “Hodie” – such a scalp-tingling effect at the start, those distant voices drawing nearer and nearer, bringing with them all the excitement and expectation of something festive, rich and satisfying.

Britten’s work was just one of the evening’s “Christmas” offerings, but it was among the most significant – and its performance, I thought, did the music full justice. The women’s voices of Nota Bene may have lacked the sheer animal vitality of some of the boys’ choirs whose performances I’ve heard of this piece on recordings, but the beauty and purity of their singing for conductor Peter Walls made for some breath-catching moments in places. Aided by some of the most atmospheric and diaphanously-woven harp- playing in this piece which I’ve ever heard, from Carolyn Mills, the choir encompassed every aspect of Britten’s wonderfully variegated settings, moving easily and tellingly from the vigour of “Wolcum Yole!” to the rapt beauty of “There is No Rose”, and beautifully integrating the use of solo voices with the contrasting amplitude of the larger group in numbers such as “Balulalow”. In the previous setting for solo voice and harp, “The Yonge Child” I was struck during this performance by how Britten manages to conjure up sounds that are at one and the same time so new and yet so old, speaking to our time, yet perfectly in accord with the medieval texts favoured by the composer.

Perhaps the choir’s singing of “As Dew in Aprille” might have had a touch more “swing” in its melodic trajectory at the climax to achieve absolute rapture, but amends were made with the tumbling energies of “This Little Babe”, and later a fine sense of almost pagan abandonment in those cries of “Deo gracias” that concluded “Adam Lay I-Bounden” most satisfactorily. Carolyn Mills’s incomparably sensitive realisation of the solo harp interlude was followed by a setting which could be described as the work’s dark heart, “In Freezing Winter Night”, with the choir’s anguished insistence on a repeated high-lying phrase heightened as the music moved up half-a-tone at the climax towards even colder and more forsaken realms, the emotional “squeeze” expertly managed by all.

Solace came with lovely duetting in the “Spring Carol” and a joyous feeling of homecoming in the excitable “Adam Lay I-Bounden”, before the performers took their leave as they had come. After the interval, we were treated to some attractive, intriguingly inter-connected Christmas music manifestations – firstly, listening to Michael Praetorius’s seventeenth-century arrangement of “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”, and then a twentieth-century “take” of the same carol, arranged by Jan Sandström (the “Motorcycle Concerto” man, as Peter Walls gleefully pointed out to us, reminding us of the NZSO’s recent performance of this work with trombonist Christian Lindberg). Untutored, one would be hard put to associate the latter music and composer with the sounds we heard here – the melody and words were exquisitely “floated” by a quartet of voices antiphonally placed in the choir loft over the top of rich choral humming vocalisations from below – an amazingly timeless effect, brought off most beautifully.

Another set of inter-related musical strands were woven by the performers with a performance of the 14th-Century carol “Resonet in laudibus” (some evocative bare fourths and fifths raising antiquarian goosebumps), then relating the melody to the 17th- Century Lutheran Chorale “Joseph Lieber, Joseph mein”, both carols associated with the medieval practice of “rocking” a cradle during services. As Brahms used this same melody in the instrumental parts of his “Geistliches Wiegenlied”, soprano Frances Moore, violist Peter Barber and pianist Fiona McCabe then performed this song with sensitive teamwork and winning and nostalgic atmosphere.

Francis Poulenc’s attractive “Quatre motets de Noel” challenged the choir in all departments, and enabled them to shine – the opening “O Magnum Mysterium” demonstrated the voices’ flexibility over a wide dynamic range, and a capacity to deliver exquisite detailing; while the dialogues between shepherds and their questioners engendered a compelling story-sense in musical terms. Only the cruelly high soprano writing in “Videntes stellam” seemed to bring out the merest hint of strain, though the poise of the singing was unimpaired, with the evocative shifting harmonies of the concluding “Hodie” making for a rich and satisfying conclusion to the work’s performance.

Next were three traditional carols from France, Italy and Latvia – first, the enchanting French “Il est nè le divin enfant” captured our sensibilities with its lovely, droll rhythmic carriage, rather like dancing bagpipes or musettes in partnership with voices. Then came a different connection with another recent Wellington concert – the Italian carol “Quando nascette Ninno” shared the same tune as Handel’s “He shall feed his flock” from “Messiah”, this lovely performance gently scintillated by a jig-like tambourine accompaniment. Most distinctive of the three, however, was the Latvian carol “Dedziet skalu, putiet guni”, whose bell- sonorities and mesmeric rhythms built throughout agglomerations of groups of voices towards an enticing episode of filigree decoration from the sopranos that resonated within a bell-like finish – very nicely brought off! To conclude the concert we were treated to a New Zealand bracket of carols, featuring the work of Carol Shortis, Andrew Baldwin and Douglas Mews Senior. Carol Shortis, a Philip Neill Memorial prize-winner, is currently studying composition at the New Zealand School of Music, and Andrew Baldwin is composer- in-residence at Wellington’s Cathedral of St Paul. Both Shortis’ “I saw a Fair Maiden” and Baldwin’s “O Magnum Mysterium” demonstrated their composers’ skill and experience in writing for voices; while the older, and in some ways more adventurous and confident-sounding work of Douglas Mews Senior, “Snow-free Carols”, gave us three nicely differentiated Christmas settings from this collection, a Pohutukawa Carol with a tripping 6/8 rhythm, a meditative setting for two soloists and choir of Eileen Duggan’s poem “An Imprint of His Little Feet”, and a vigorous, coda- like call to action “Christmas Come In”.

An unscheduled, but wholly appropriate encore to the concert was a performance of the original setting of Franz Gruber’s “Stille Nacht” with guitar accompaniment, the old tune as moving and as evocative as ever, but made even more magically so as the culmination of Nota Bene’s seasonal feast of truly lovely singing. (PM)

Handel – MESSIAH – The Tudor Consort

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Handel – MESSIAH – The Tudor Consort
Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Nicola Hooper (alto)
Edmund Hintz (tenor)
Hadleigh Adams (bass)
Tudor Consort
Vector Wellington Orchestra
Conductor: Michael Stewart
Wellington Town Hall
Thursday 4th December 2008

This was a “Messiah” performance that obviously caught the public’s imagination before a note had even been sounded in public, judging by the palpable buzz of excitement in and around the Town Hall beforehand, with queues of people waiting to be admitted a few minutes before starting-time. The Tudor Consort has always publicised its concerts cannily, and perhaps the presence of Madeleine Pierard as a rising young soprano star was also a drawcard – whatever the case, the choir, as well as the Wellington Orchestra people, must have been gratified by the near-full Hall.

Reading conductor Michael Stewart’s note in the programme beforehand, regarding the work’s history and different performance practices over the years, alerted one to the idea that this was going to be a performance of Messiah with its own distinction. In practice, this was very much the case – Stewart had obviously thought long and hard about the work and recent scholarship into performance style, so that this would definitely be something of a fresh look at a much-presented classic, far removed from a mere reproduction of the last hundred or so Town Hall performances over the years.

Obviously with the superb voices of the Tudor Consort at hand, the conductor had the singers able to fill out his conception of the music with real sounds, along with an orchestra at his disposal that has in the past proved a flexible, willing and highly skilled band capable of rising to the most demanding of challenges. The result was an energetic and totally committed performance from all concerned, that earned for the performers a sizeable ovation at the end from an extremely satisfied audience. Whatever criticism one might be inclined to make regarding this and that detail, the overall conception of the work had a conviction and overall sweep which couldn’t help but impress.

The over-riding impression one carried away from the evening’s performance was the obvious extent to which everybody – conductor, soloists, choir and orchestral players – gave of themselves to the music. Thus the story of the oratorio was put across with a considerable amount of energy and skill, atmosphere and colour, an upshot of the very physical way that all of the musicians seemed to engage with the business in hand. All of the four soloists had particular qualities to offer, even if only one of them, soprano Madeleine Pierard, possessed the technical and interpretative means to bring off triumphantly almost everything she wanted to do within her part. Each of the others began strongly, and had their notable moments – Edmund Hintz truly consoled our sensibilities with a lovely “Comfort Ye!” right at the beginning, Nicola Hooper similarly charmed with a nicely-turned “He shall feed his flock”, and bass Hadleigh Adams pinned our ears back with his blood-and-thunder “Thus Saith The Lord”, as well as negotiating “The People Who Walk in Darkness” with a growing sense of passing from a state of gloom and despair into one of hope and gladness.

Despite the difficulties encountered by tenor, alto and bass at various other moments, each had the ability to sustain the mood of the music and the sense of what was wanted, so that the musical argument was sufficiently maintained. By contrast, Madeleine Pierard’s singing was a joy throughout, an artist whose work came across with the confidence, élan and sparkling projection that informed whatever she sang – a truly class act. It was possible to feel just a touch of astringent tone in one or two places, particularly noticeable when she followed Nicola Hooper’s opening “He Shall Feed His Flock” – but by the time she had reached “I know that My Redeemer Liveth” her voice had all the focus, warmth and colour to do the music full justice.

Director of the Tudor Consort Michael Stewart controlled his forces expertly throughout, and secured an extremely vital and energetic performance. He got absolutely splendid playing from the Vector Wellington Orchestra, who weren’t spared by an insistence on fleet-fingered tempi and incisive rhythms whenever the score called for them. Yet the playing had an attractive gravitas in places as well – a fine performance, with lovely brass work in items such as “The Trumpet shall sound” and of course “Halleluiah”.

Which brings me to the Tudor Consort Voices themselves, who covered themselves in vocal glory, despite in places being asked by their director to negotiate the music at what I occasionally felt were speeds that reduced the music’s coherence. I felt that Stewart’s desire to “blow away the cobwebs” resulted in the quicker music being given an edge that was too insistent, to the point that some of the structure’s paintwork was blistered as well as the surfaces freshly cleaned. It was as though he was relying too much on speed rather than rhythmic pointing to generate momentum and excitement, at which times I felt cheated at not being able to experience the delight of listening to those strands interlocking together to produce an amazing and articulate musical structure.

For me the approach emphasised the energy and vigour of Handel’s writing at the expense of some of its grandeur – there were places where I thought the music under- characterised, as in “For Unto Us A Child Is Born”, where the cries of “Wonderful’ and “Counsellor” hardly “told” so as to provide a contrast with the delicious contrapuntal matrix of the opening.  The wonder is that the choir enunciated their lines as clearly as they did, but despite their skill I felt that some of the music was passing me as if in a blur. “And He Shall Purify” reminded me of high-speed trains crossing a network of lines in a complex operation that gave me more anxiety than pleasure – in some of the choruses (such as “He Trusted in God” and “Let Us Break Their Bonds”) a valid emotional response, but surely not as an all-purpose treatment of quick movements and numbers.

The famous “Halleluiah!” made its mark, though, partly because of the focused singing and playing, and partly because almost everybody in the hall stood up – “that hoary old tradition!” was one friend of mine’s reaction – but I loved jumping to my feet with everybody, because doing so heightened for me the whole evening’s sense of occasion, of ritual, even of participation in the performance instead of listening passively. Of course, long before the performance had reached this point, Michael Stewart, with his soloists, the Tudor Consort and the Wellington Orchestra had already swept all of us up in the ferment of music- making; so this was a kind of “word made flesh” moment of audience involvement, which was almost unanimously relished. In its way it was a spontaneous tribute to the performance as a whole, with Stewart’s “fresh perspective on a favourite work” receiving its proper, well-deserved due. (PM)

St. Andrews Shines and Celebrates

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St. Andrews Shines and Celebrates….
Piano and Strings Benefit Concert for the Saving St.Andrews Restoration Project
Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons (piano, four hands)
MENDELSSOHN – Andante and Variations Op.83a
RAVEL – Rapsodie Espagnole
Amazon Trio (Peter Barber, viola, Robert Ibell, ‘cello, Victoria Jones, double-bass)
MICHAEL HAYDN – Divertimento in E-flat
ROSS HARRIS – Klezmer Trio
Pieces by BACH, TCHAIKOVSKY,and VERDI
St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Wellington, Friday 14th November 2008

The church of St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace is a significant focal point for music performance in Wellington, hosting regular lunchtime concerts since the 1980s and providing an attractive and sonorous venue for many afternoon and evening concerts presented by recitalists and ensembles of all kinds. Major refurbishment has been recently completed involving the church’s interior and exterior, improving both heating and seating arrangements, restoring both interior and exterior plasterwork, as well as roof replacement and earthquake strengthening. This concert celebrated the completion of Stage One of the entire restoration project, which will now move towards refurbishing the church’s adjoining facilities, such as the hall, Green Room, meeting rooms and offices, allowing the church to function fully as a viable community centre for arts performance and expression of spirituality.

For the evening’s concert, the musicians involved generously donated their services, in recognition of the contribution that St Andrews has made over the years to music in the capital. To have two of the country’s leading pianists performing under those circumstances, along with an ensemble featuring three star string players from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was “luxury casting” indeed, and reflected something of the esteem in which Wellington’s musicians hold the church as a performing arts venue. Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons have a long- standing musical partnership in the four-hands and two-piano-repertoire; and their playing of both the Mendelssohn and Ravel works reflected that sense of a “layered rapport” which enable things to happen between performers on all kinds of levels. Both works were strongly structured and carefully shaped, with a wealth of meticulous detail beautifully dovetailed together, a particularly noticeable feature of the Ravel work, with its myriad flecks of light and colour delighting the listener’s sense of atmosphere. But treasurable were those moments when one sensed the music taking over the performers and infusing the playing with the glow of spontaneous interactive chemistry. The Mendelssohn work seemed especially volatile in this respect, the contrasting characters of the variations requiring both control and energy, Irons and Houstoun responding to the work’s challenges with plenty of both careful structuring and recreative interplay that ignited the music’s parameters in a wholly satisfying way.

If the Amazon Trio’s second-half programme didn’t quite produce the same combustible results, it was partly because of the repertoire – the opening work, a Divertimento by Michael Haydn, may have been fun for the musicians to play, but the result was too consistently sombre, even a bit dreary, with three lower string instruments engaged in rather too much “underground mining” for the spirits to be sufficiently lifted. One longed for a lighter voice in the textures such as that of a violin’s, even if Peter Barber’s viola did occasionally flash upwards from the gloom. Things lightened as the work progressed towards the finale’s lively romp, via the “dancing elephants” mode of the minuet, but the overall impression remained of something earthbound and intractable.

Matters improved remarkably with Ross Harris’s “Klezmer” Trio, a work in which these darker-voiced instruments seemed more at one with the sinuous rhythms and bitter-sweet melodies one associates with this kind of music. The players encompassed with ease and fluidity the music’s variety of styles and techniques – by turns the instruments spoke with concert, church, ethnic and cultural accents and resonances, enabling the different episodes to distinctively make their point. The work’s last few pages clinched one’s enjoyment of the whole, as the trio excitingly drew these disparate elements together in a kind of stretto, whose throwaway ending stimulated an enthusiastic audience response. The group’s selection of “Short Pieces by J.S.Bach and Tchaikovsky” included an arrangement of the B Minor Prelude from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” which sounded thoroughly idiomatic, the players catching the music’s mesmeric rise and fall with telling effect. A “Song Without Words” by Tchaikovsky” allowed Peter Barber’s solo viola playing to shine once again; while an arrangement of Verdi’s music for the overture “La Forza del Destino” ended the concert on a sweet-toned, lyrical note. Overall, a heartfelt and sonorous tribute from all concerned to one of the capital’s major music venues. Long may it continue as such to give joy and delight. (PM)

Wanganui Spring Music Festival September 2008

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wanganui Spring Music Festival
Five concerts by Jenny Wollerman (soprano) Murray Khouri (clarinet) Simone Roggen (violin) Edith Salzmann (cello) Petya Mihlova and Phillip Shovk (piano)
Royal Wanganui Opera House, Wanganui
12th-14th September 2008

This review may be belated but because a rather important initiative was largely ignored by the main media – my own paper, for instance, declined to print this review – here are my impressions of the inaugural Wanganui Spring Music Festival in September. It took place in one of New Zealand’s most charming old opera houses, a wooden building dating from 1899. Though its interior has been somewhat modified in an art deco style, the exterior and the lobbies are original; a recent refurbishment has reduced the seating capacity from around 1000 to some 850, an ideal size for opera as well as for more intimate music. Music festivals are a growth industry in the northern hemisphere where musicians of all kinds have found a fruitful way of occupying the summer months (and sometimes other times of the year) and tens of thousands head to picturesque towns that have found a pretext for a festival in order to overcome the lack of good live music during the dry season.

Festivals have started to flourish in Australia, but New Zealanders have been slow to catch on. Nelson, with its wonderful Adam Chamber Music Festival, has been New Zealand’ top classical music festival town since 1992. Next to Nelson as a festival candidate is Wanganui, with its history; its river, a good museum, and one of the country’ best art galleries: it was spared the worst impacts of 1980s growth with many century-old buildings remaining (though too many are still being lost); and of course there’s the 1899 opera theatre.

Wellington clarinetist Murray Khouri has been running a small, successful chamber music festival in Bowra, a small town south west of Sydney, with a population of alternative life-stylers, artists and affluent refugees from the big city. A year or so ago Murray decided to try a similar festival in a comparable New Zealand town. Wanganui seemed to have the necessary attributes, not too close to or too far from a couple of major cities. It’s the sort of town that, in the northern hemisphere at least, appeals to festival crowds. Though this first one failed to attract the crowds it deserved, particularly from the city itself, perseverance should pay off.

The festival ended with a famous piece of 20th century chamber music that exploited both the music’s character and its performance setting: Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was a coup-de-theatre. A quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it has eight unique movements; at the end of the second, the lights went out and a half minute later a single spot fell on clarinettist Murray Khouri (doubling as festival artistic director), as he played the bird-song-inspired contemplation of sorrow and light. The performance was enhanced by other lighting and scenic elements. It brought the curtain down on the festival . There were five concerts over the weekend, the first of which was entitled Music in Miniature, offering an introduction to all the players through a series of small, attractive, sometime unfamiliar pieces such as Milhaud’s Jeux and Pierné’s Canzonetta. The players were three New Zealanders, an Australian, a Bulgarian and a German resident in New Zealand; Every concert held something special. There was a lot of Mozart, including two piano trios (K 502 and K 548); also Brahms’ second piano trio, with violinist Simone Roggen and cellist Edith Salzmann.

Two concerts were devoted to solo performers. Wellington soprano Jenny Wollerman is too little heard in her home town – many of the songs that she sang, by Mozart and Schubert, were familiar but the experience of hearing them sung with such intelligence and charm, and so delicately accompanied by young Bulgarian Petya Mihneva was like hearing them for the first time. As well as sharing the playing of several of the chamber pieces with rare subtlety, Australian pianist Phillip Shovk gave an entrancing recital: of what is probably Mozart’ best-loved sonata – in A, K 331 and the four Impromptus, Op 90, by Schubert, all overflowing with melody and spiritual profundity. If that were not enough, ten of Rachmaninov’ preludes from both Opp. 23 and 32 filled the second half. Though this first festival could have been better supported, it will surprise me if Wanganui’s attractions and the chance to hear top rate musicians in great and beautiful music does not bring much bigger audiences in future. Make a diary note for next year’ festival! (LT)