Scrupulous and spirited choral concert from Netherlands Chamber Choir

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival of the Arts
Netherlands Chamber Choir conducted by Peter Dijkstra

Programme 1:
Brahms: Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen? Op 74 No 1
Three songs for a six-voice choir Op 42 (setting of poems by Brentano, Müller and Herder)
Bach Motet, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied,
Poulenc: Un sior de neige
Martin: Mass for Double Choir

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 7 March, 7:30 pm

The Netherlands Chamber Choir has a fine reputation in the more sophisticated realms of international choirs.

Brahms motet
I have to confess, as a lover of Brahms’s orchestral, piano and chamber music, that neither his Lieder nor his choral works have appealed to me greatly: especially the a cappella pieces.  Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen? (‘Why has light been given to the weary soul?’) is one of a pair of motets published in 1878 about the time of the second symphony and the second piano concerto: it should be capable of touching me more.

After its emphatic opening, the first line drops to piano and in its gloomy and slightly tortuous explorations of the emotions that surround death, it wends its way through sopranos, mezzos and so on, in canon, returning to the pleading ‘Warum?’ The rest of the stanza elaborates on the thought that those near death might actually rejoice.

The MFC might not have been the best space for it, as my feelings about its lack of gusto and animation might have been attributable to absence of any echo.

The later verses do offer more cheerful feelings: the third ‘Siehe wir preisen selig…’, is almost cheerful while the last stanza, drawn, I read, from the Epistle of James (5:11), offering consolation – at least to the deserving through their obedience to God.

It ends with a Bach-like chorale of Luther, which strikes a more compassionate note.

Brahms Lieder a cappella
A second group of songs, Op 46, Three songs for a six-voice choir shifted the tone to the more familiar realm of German Romantic poetry, to the world of Schubert and Schumann, and the choir captured their simplicity and unpretentiousness. The three poems were by Brentano (‘Abendständchen’), Müller (the poet of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise: ‘Vineta’) and Herder (‘Darthulas Grabesgesang’ – burial song). The material of Vineta rang bells, a gentle Lied in triple-time that celebrated the sounds of bells from a sunken city in the ocean depths; Debussy’s Cathédrale engloutie?; but unlike Gareth Farr’s From the Depths sound the great sea gongs, the tone was pure lyricism; no attempt to imitate bells.

The Herder poem, ‘Darthulas Grabesgesang’, was based on a poem in a collection called The Works of Ossian by the (in)famous Scottish writer James Macpherson. In 1760 he began to publish what he claimed were translations from the original Gaelic of folk poems and epics narrated by Ossian that he had collected. Darthulas is the subject of one of the extended poems in the collection. (“In my day” one heard about Macpherson from good English teachers in the 6th or upper 6th form, and of course at university).

The collection caught the imagination of the pre-Romantic age and was admired by poets and writers throughout Europe, including Voltaire and Diderot, Klopstock and Goethe and Herder. French composer Lesueur wrote an opera called Ossian, ou les bardes which had huge success in the Paris Opéra in 1804. Napoleon was a fan of Ossian too. The main character of the collection was Ossian’s father Fingal (yes, Mendelssohn had like most of his contemporaries, swallowed the wildly Romantic poetic compilation). While it was increasingly dismissed as a hoax it happened to match the early Romantic mood of the late 18th century – in Germany, Sturm und Drang – it’s only fair to say that Macpherson’s work is still not universally considered as plagiarism in its entirety.

A Bach motet  
One of Bach’s great motets followed: ‘Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied’.  It was scrupulously, beautifully sung, but again, somewhat too carefully articulated, with what I felt was uncalled for dynamic and rhythmic subtleties. Yet such is the joyousness of Bach’s setting that it’s impossible not to be delighted simply to hear such a polished performance. I should add that my discovery of Bach’s motets was through their performance by The Tudor Consort under Simon Ravens in the late 1980s, when that choir opened hundreds of Wellington ears to much great choral music that till then had not been well known. The choir which still has a leading place in Wellington’s choral scene, could then easily fill the Anglican Cathedral.

Poulenc’s Un soir de neige
After the Interval the choir sang Poulenc’s Un soir de neige (‘a snowy evening’); its words by Paul Éluard. I didn’t know it, but given my serious love for Poulenc’s music, I enjoyed hearing this careful account. Though its imagery links the death and regrowth of the natural world with that of humans, I didn’t think quite such a sacred tone was called for. Nevertheless, both words and music were rich in poetry and symbolism and I’ve enjoyed re-reading the poem, as well as seeking performances of the setting on YouTube. (Naturally, one uses YouTube to gain familiarity with a work one doesn’t know, and it’s often rewarding to return to it after a performance.)

Martin’s Mass for Double Choir
Finally, the work I’d particularly looked forward to: Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir. The Kyrie struck me as unduly prolonged as a result of its painstaking singing, its rather too studied rise and fall in dynamics, and I confess, embarrassedly, that it didn’t hold my attention till its end.

But the other movements were wholly satisfying, raising a curiosity over its handling of the words and their religious significance. For one thing, there’s the interest in observing Martin’s handling of his two choirs, a tour de force that demands constant admiration and delight. The Credo might be the most difficult for the non-believer to deal with, and here the setting handles it as fairly plain narrative, that one can take or leave.

After the unseasonal applause the Sanctus comes as an interesting contrast between the first verse and the ‘Pleni sunt coeli et terra…’ which injects a lively, refreshing feeling, alternating between common and triple time. It would have been nice if silence had followed the Sanctus for a calm descends with the Agnus Dei and there’s a new spirit of plain piety, wishing for forgiveness of sins (for those who have qualified).

The Mass for Double Choir was sung in Wellington by The Tudor Consort in November last year to a reasonably large audience in the Anglican cathedral. While the cathedral is far from perfect for some music, for a work that’s mostly slow and meditative it is probably the best in Wellington.

At the Tudor Consort’s concert there was no outbreak of clapping after both the Credo and the Sanctus as there was here. That is not really a matter to deplore; rather, it’s a sign that a ‘festival’ attracts people who are not regular concert goers and people who are there because of the element of occasion generated by something called a ‘Festival’.

I enjoyed this performance hugely, but I still felt that for this, especially, a space with a cathedral-like acoustic would have carried its message and its spirit more sympathetically. But that is not a criticism of the performance itself, which, in spite of the few reservations that I mention, was admirably studied and executed with scrupulous attention to the composers’ intentions.

As an encore the choir sang their arrangement of Pokarekareana to noisy delight.

Splendid piano-four-hands recital crowned by the Schubert Fantasie in F minor: Emma Sayers and Rachel Thomson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Piano Duo: Emma Sayers and Rachel Thomson

Arensky: Six Children’s Pieces, Op 34
David Hamilton: Five New Zealand Characters
Schubert: Fantasie in F minor, Op 103

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 4 March, 12:15 pm

Here was a charming and admirable lunchtime recital: the ideal recipe for cleansing your emotions and mind of the wild, eccentric experiences of this year’s Festival: in my case a Kopernikus and a Mad King in close proximity.

Piano duets can be edgy affairs as they demand a perfection of ensemble that’s called for from hardly any other musicians who play together. Apart from the Schubert, this was not heavy-weight material, but the demands in both the Arensky and the Hamilton were no less great.

Arensky for Children??
Arensky’s Six Children’s Pieces might be somewhat modelled on Schumann’s Op 15, pretending to evoke things that children respond to; but if you look at YouTube you’ll see that Arensky really did have children in mind as performers – not any children, mind you. But most of Schumann’s are not very manageable by children.

The first, Fairy Tale (simply Conte in the original French edition), was a very engaging piece, in three – shall we call them phases? – that started quietly, became a little more bold, and ended boisterously. Charmingly articulated. There was a recognisable, amusing and talented cuckoo, followed by tears (Les larmes) that was gently meditative rather than grief-stricken; I couldn’t stop being impressed by the sequences of big four-handed chords that were so perfectly together. It ended with an unresolved cadence.

The charming Waltz would have been rather more delightful for children to listen to than to play. Then Berceuse – cradle song – that was not particularly hushed, but interestingly varied between the four hands; and finally the Fugue on a Russian Theme, which as you’d expect, introduced the child to the mysteries and sophistication of a fugue. Rachel Thomson spoke about it at the end but I missed much of what she said as the microphone was either not working or set too low.

David Hamilton’s Five New Zealand Characters were comparably charming pieces, quite approachable. Their titles hinted, more or less, at what the music depicted, though I will risk attack from some quarters by doubting the success of music that attempts to conjure the song of the tuatara or the long-tailed bat: neither is particularly audible. However, the defence will be that the pieces don’t pretend to imitate sounds, but rather, an individual’s musical feeling contemplating such creatures. The other three: kiwi, fantail and yellow-eyed penguin (perhaps), conjure sounds. However, the pieces are all individual and perfectly attractive, and though they have the virtue of not employing avant-garde characteristics, they sound distinctly of our own time. One of their charming features was the evocation of Scott Joplinesque sounds to depict the penguin.

Schubert Fantasie in F minor
The major work was probably Schubert’s posthumous Fantasie in F minor which really takes its place among his last three sonatas.  It’s really so comparable to the sonatas, apart from things like the return of the first theme of the opening movement at the start of the last. There are four contrasted movements lasting in total about 18 minutes, of musical substance and inspiration that places it among Schubert’s masterpieces of his last year and probably among the greatest of all works for piano four hands.

This was certainly the reason I didn’t dare miss it and, I like to believe, for the slightly bigger than average audience. It began with the first theme lovingly played by Emma, soon joined in the bass by Rachel, re-handling the first theme. Not only was their playing so careful, so perfect in its thoroughly rehearsed ensemble details, but also in the way it moved into the second movement, Largo. Almost the depth of Beethoven, though Schubert’s ineffable lyricism infuses the whole work so perfectly, that there can be no hint of comparison with Beethoven that might suggest Schubert’s inferiority. The triple time third movement, Allegro vivace, is so happy and so spirited that it’s impossible to believe that the inevitability of death within a few months must have been constantly in Schubert’s mind.

The one very distinct break, a total change of mood, from the sanguinity of the ‘scherzo’ to the seriousness and occasional drama of the last, Allegro molto moderato. I wonder if that puzzles pianists: does ‘molto’ qualify ‘allegro’ or ‘moderato’? Does it mean ‘Molto allegro’, but a bit of moderation, or an ‘Allegro’ tempered by a marked moderation.

In any case, what I really wanted at its end, more than a coffee, was a repeat of the whole thing. I can’t remember when I last heard it live, and wondered whether if the gods brought my fingers back to life, I could be partner in a performance of this divine music.

A wonderful start (for me, as I’ve missed the first two or three) to the year of great lunchtime music from St Andrew’s.  

 

Letter from Hon Kris Faafoi: a turn-around on RNZ Concert?

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

After a couple of weeks silence from the Government and Radio NZ itself, this letter seemed to bring us the result that we’d hoped for. Or has it really?

Though the Prime Minister had announced earlier that an unused FM frequency was in fact available, which meant that Concert could continue to use its existing frequencies, while the proposed youth network would use the till-now unused ones, many other important aspects of the service that have been eroded over the past year or so, still look at risk.

What of the plans to fire all 18 existing Concert presenters and other support staff, to turn it into a juke-box broadcaster with no human being announcing the music; and the presumed disappearance of live broadcasts from our orchestras, and other musicians, of talks and documentaries, which have largely disappeared already? Will funding be restored to the level of, say, 10 years ago to allow the service to behave as such broadcasters do in all other civilised countries? And will we see the restoration of a less ‘personalised’, commercial-aping style with its endless, repetitive promotions of programmes whose ‘character’ is artificially generated as if each was competing for your personal attention. And the dominance by the playing of single movements of multi-movement music, as if Concert listeners had suddenly become unlettered, shallow simpletons with a very limited attention span.

The rather perfunctory comment covering these latter questions leaves us in doubt about the Government’s real commitment to a properly staffed, adequately funded and decently presented classical radio network.

This is the only reference in the letter to the above shortcomings:

“As you will be aware, RNZ has now withdrawn its proposal for changes to RNZ Concert. We are pleased that RNZ is taking this approach…”

If that suggests that the ultimate handling of these critically important issues simply remains in the hands of RNZ’s management, what then is the point of a Minister of Broadcasting at all?

The following is the Minister’s reply, presumably sent to all who wrote to him:

“Thank you for your correspondence about RNZ’s proposed changes to RNZ Concert.

I want to assure you that we are aware of the significance of RNZ Concert to New Zealand’s music sector and to its listeners. It is clear that this service plays an important role in the lives of a great many New Zealanders and has a loyal and committed following.

One of the key purposes of public media and a core Government priority for the arts is helping overcome barriers to access, and this is something RNZ Concert does very well for many New Zealanders. It has also been particularly heartening to hear from a diverse range of Kiwi musicians, composers and others in the industry about what RNZ Concert means to them.

At the Cabinet meeting on 10 February 2020, Government agreed it did not want RNZ Concert to lose its FM platform and agreed to explore what would be involved in allocating the currently unutilised 102FM frequency to RNZ’s proposed youth-focussed service. RNZ has publicly welcomed this step.

We support RNZ in seeking to increase its reach to more New Zealand youth and are happy that it now has the opportunity to pursue two goals – to continue broadcasting RNZ Concert on FM radio, while also looking to establish a new service targeted to audiences in the 18 to 34-year-old age range.

As you will be aware, RNZ has now withdrawn its proposal for changes to RNZ Concert. We are pleased that RNZ is taking this approach, and have asked our officials to stay in touch with RNZ on these matters.

Once again, thank you for writing and for taking the time to share your views. Please be assured that you have been heard.

Ngā mihi

Hon Kris Faafoi”

 

NZ Opera’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King” a brilliant, Janus-faced experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZ Opera presents
EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING

Music by Peter Maxwell Davies
Texts by Randolph Stow and George III

The King: Robert Tucker

The Musicians: Stroma New Music Ensemble
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Rachel Fuller (keyboard/s)
Luca Manghi (flute)
Mark Cookson/Patrick Barry (clarinets)
Yuka Eguchi (violin)
Heather Lewis/Robert Ibell (‘cellos)
Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion)

Director – Thomas de Mallet Burgess
Production Designer – Robin Rawstorne
Assistant Conductor – Timothy Carpenter
Repetiteur – Rachel Fuller

RNZB Dance Centre, Wellington

Monday 2nd March 2020

Firstly, some background for the curious – the “King” of this concert’s title is King George III of England, who suffered from mental illness throughout his adult life, eventually being removed from his throne and kept under lock and key in Windsor Castle. Over his final decade he lost his eyesight and hearing, and fell prey to frequent manic episodes, by all accounts babbling endlessly as he slid into dementia, and eventually dying in 1820 at the age of eighty-one. The King owned a number of caged bullfinches, and during his confinement became obsessed with teaching his birds how to sing tunes played by a mechanical organ or music-box. This instrument, along with a note identifying its provenance as owned and used by the unfortunate Monarch, came to the notice, almost two hundred years afterwards, of Australian author and poet Randolph Stow, who was inspired to create a series of poems, parts of which were drawn from recollections of witnesses to the King’s outpourings, and directly illustrated his pitiable condition. British avant-garde composer Peter Maxwell Davies set these poems to music, writing with the vocal talents of one Roy Hart in mind, a virtuoso South African singer who had become interested in exploring the range and limits of the human voice.

At the time of the work’s premiere, in April 1969, Davies fully expected “Eight Songs” to remain a “one-off” for Hart, never imagining anybody else being able or even wanting to perform the piece. He was therefore surprised and delighted at how the work soon took on a life of its own, becoming a classic example of a new “music-theatre” genre, which redeployed (and often subverted) existing performance conventions. Davies himself recorded the work with his own virtuoso avant-garde music-group, “The Fires of London”, though sadly for posterity, not with Roy Hart, the creator of the  role – fortunately the soloist on the 1971 Unicorn recording, Julius Eastman, was a worthy successor.

In his notes accompanying the recording, the composer stated that his intention was “to leave open the question – is the persecuted protagonist “Mad George III” or someone who thinks he is George?”. Naturally the work will forever be associated with the monarch in question, given that the song texts contain numerous actual quotations of the King’s words – the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney was Queen Charlotte’s lady-in-waiting for five years, and during that time she recorded both events and utterances in which the King was central (as an example, the whole of the text of the sixth song, “The Counterfeit” is transcribed by Randolph Stow from Burney’s diary). But the suggestion that the character of the King might also represent any such deluded individual straightaway lifts the work out of its singular and historical confines and into the realm of general human experience, of which mental illness seems in our time to be an increasingly common affliction. Davies reminded us in his notes that until relatively recent times, “madness” was something to ridicule, and in more severe cases isolate, often in the most inhumane and nightmarish conditions; and while treatments and care-environments are nowadays less primitive, the stresses and inbalances that, if ignored, can lead to mental illness are still very much with us.

New Zealand Opera’s innovative production of the work gives audiences not one but two separate and different views of the terrain in all senses of the word – the mindscape of an extremely disturbed individual, firstly (as happened in my particular case) from the “outside” 0f the performance space, visible from the outside through windows, and audible by means of headsets for each audience member. So, first time round, we were seated in the open air, cannily underneath a tarpaulin in a space next to the building in which the opera was being performed – and through the windows we could glimpse the singer performing his on-stage peregrinations, and via the excellent headphones we clearly heard his cocktail mix of song, sprechgesang and random, wide-ranging vocalisings, along with the constant instrumental collaborations from the ensemble – the whole thing was an “outsider’s view”, a process that was observed, but without direct involvement, something that one could easily distance oneself from at a moment’s notice if one felt so inclined.

What a difference after one was ushered inside for the second performance (each took about thirty minutes), to sit right next to the stage (which was a kind of “catwalk” extending the whole width of the audience-space, and with seating on both sides)! Here, we straightaway felt “drawn in” by the immediacies, the sometimes startling proximities , and the “sharing-the-space” phenomenon that can make great theatre (and music-making, of course!). Singer Robert Tucker, looking none the worse for wear after having already given one performance of the piece appeared in close-up somewhat disconcertingly (a) youthful, and (b) dapper, not quite in accordance with my preconceived “image” of a deranged George III, but nevertheless exuding a kind of “authority” from the outset, entering quietly but portentously, and sitting at one end of the catwalk activating a “Newton’s Cradle”, waiting for the first of the instrumental explosions whose force and violence punctuate the music-drama.

In some performances the instrumentalists are positioned in separate giant birdcages, each player representing one of the King’s bullfinches he attempted to teach to sing – here the players weren’t thus confined, but sat as an ensemble at one end of the platform, the singer alternating his attentions between them, his audience(s) and wherever his mind’s fancy took him. And the “double audience” added a dimension to the singer’s confusions, his awareness of interiors and exteriors pathetically expressed amidst his tirades by glances through the windows at an “outside world”. Despite the close physical proximities, the venue’s largely empty spaces behind where we sat and its ample acoustic seemed to me to underline the essential solitude of the King’s existence. His interactions with his musicians and the audience, despite their sometimes startlingly visceral nature seemed all fantasy. “I am weary of this fate – I am alone” sang the character at the conclusion of one of the songs.

The performance in every way was astonishing – Robert Tucker as the King “owned” his character in a way that explored a gamut of human emotion, engaging our sympathies at his “plight” as readily as activating our discomfiture with his volatility. The demands of the role pushed the concept of “singing” into realms of expression which transcended the idea of the voice as a musical instrument as we might generally accept it through what the composer aptly termed “terrifying virtuosity”. But in appearing not as any kind of caricatured asylum-bound lunatic, whose tirades were neither extreme, nor “onslaught-like” as were some of the performers in the role I’ve witnessed on film, Tucker’s delineation of the character always seemed intensely human, in places touchingly bringing out the tendernesses of some of his utterances (as observed by Fanny Burney in her diary), if at times squeamish-inducing (as throughout his “close-up-and-personal” interactions with a hapless flutist, during “The Lady-in-Waiting”, brilliantly carried off by both singer and player). His anger, too, spectacularly vented at one infamous moment in the piece, mirrored a kind of reality of frustration, an impulse in tragic accord with human behaviour gone awry. This “one-of-us” aspect suggested  by the production brought home , to my mind, the “for whom the bell tolls” aspect of our human existence, so that our “relief” at the King’s eventual departure was singed with spots of pity and sorrow and even horror at the finality of the concluding percussive juggernaut, which consigned his heart-rending cries to oblivion.

Conductor Hamish McKeich led the Stroma Ensemble unerringly through a veritable thicket of coruscations, appearing to never miss a beat, shirk an uproar, or delineate a disorder! – and in parallel to these subversions the players sounded the lyrical moments, the dance-tunes and the whimsical parodies (a gorgeous two-step take-off of Handel’s music at one point) with delicious elan, as well as bringing to bear their array of bird-song devices in a veritable “chaos of delight” (alas, Charles Darwin’s words, not mine!). The accordance of theatrical movement with the music was exemplary throughout, the jaunty introduction to “To be sung on the Water” followed by beautiful ‘cello solos evoking a boat-ride down the river, one of a number of enduring memories of the performance.

Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess would have been well-pleased with both the powerful overall impact and the finely-crafted detailed focus his musicians brought to this production. Its dual-performance aspect gives it a singular kind of appeal, no matter in what order one experiences the “outside/inside” presentation, be it a savouring of expectation beforehand, or food for thought afterwards! – It plays again tonight (Wednesday 4th March) at 8:30pm, and then at the same time on both the 5th and 7th later this week at the RNZB Dance Centre next to the MFC in Wakefield St., Wellington.

 

 

 

 

Festival stages remarkable, eccentric opera by Canadian, Claude Vivier

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival of the Arts
Kopernikus: Opéra – rituel de mort by Claude Vivier

Directed by Peter Sellars and curated by Lemi Ponifasio
Singers: Roomful of Teeth
Instrumentalists: Ensemble l’instant donné

Opera House, Wellington

Sunday 1 March, 7 pm

It hasn’t been hard to have missed references in the international musical press to a very unusual opera by an unorthodox, fairly obscure composer.

Think again if you imagined you would be presented with a kind of operatic biography of the great astronomer, for he is merely one of a number of disparate historical and fictional figures that feature in Canadian composer Claude Vivier’s work. A work that that is dominated by the contemplation of death, subtitled: the Ritual of Death.

It was composed in 1978/79 and premiered on 9 May 1980 at the University of Montreal where it has had several subsequent productions. Vivier was killed, apparently in a homosexual encounter in Paris in 1983.

Peter Sellars directed its first United States production in 2016 at the Ojay Music Festival in California, in the production that has since been seen in various places including Bilbao, New York, Paris … and finally in Wellington. The work seems not to have been much revived, if at all, through the 1990s apart from in Canada, but has more recently seen several productions, which I enlarge on in an Appendix. One of the co-production names, apart from the Paris Autumn Festival at the Théâtre de la ville, is the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, in Hanover.

The richest variety of reactions have emerged from critics and the general audience, about Kopernikus. It’s been described as a transition from life to death, transcendental, mystical, disorientating, atmospheric, ethereally beautiful, immersive, stirring, mesmerizing, evocative.

Were he alive, Vivier would claim that complaints about the obscurity and the disorientating impact of the work miss the point. It is not perhaps incoherent; but to take a sympathetic view of it, very unusual in its context, its style and language. Its subject matter which can be felt as philosophically and intellectually pretentious, suggest the sort of creation that a gifted undergraduate might produce to show a wide-ranging though recent familiarity with disparate eras and aspects of philosophical, religious notions; a juxtaposition of science, orthodox philosophical ideas laced with varieties of mysticism such as in the role of Agni, the Vedic god of fire.

The words and the music 
One unusual, though plain element arises with Copernicus whose then-revolutionary findings about the movement of the planets and the sun is delivered in normal speech. Vivier suggests that “as he transformed understanding of the universe, death changes our understanding of our lives”.

Similarly pertinent, are later brief references to major philosophers, from Thales and Plato, through Averroes in the 12th century, to Copernicus himself.

We are not confronted however, by music that is problematic. There is nothing wildly dissonant and incoherent such as was favoured by the avant-garde through the latter years of the century. The character of the vocal and instrumental music is unusual, original, even bizarre, yet it has an emotional impact that marks it as genuinely imaginative. It arouses curiosity and much of it can be listened to with simple pleasure. Harmonies are usually conventional though employed in strange ways.

One review from Canada described it as ‘…a surreal experience for the audience’. And continued: ‘The work’s intimate power, manifest weirdness, sublimely sonic harmonies, meditative incandescence and above all, ritualistic remembrance of all universes past and future’.
Yes.

The ‘staging’ was a curious matter; need it really have been in an opera house? For it didn’t use the pit, and the disposition of players and singers was simply functional, influenced by whoever was performing from time to time. Players mingled with singers, and they all moved about, not in a way that suggested a plot or actual events, but simply to position themselves for their next individual offering. That casualness contributed to the agreeable impression that the entire performance generated.

And there’s a dead man lying on a slab in the centre of the stage; at one point he is spoken to directly, “Eternity comes to speak to us and we must listen; sublime revelation is the voice of time…”    He rises miraculously at the beginning of the second part. It wasn’t clear to me whether he then took a particular part or even spoke or sang at all.

Singers and instrumentalists
Both singers and instrumentalists have worked with Sellars elsewhere. All are dressed in white and are together on a partially raised stage with no sets other than chairs and a bed on which a dead man lies.

The seven singers, Roomful of Teeth, cover the full range from coloratura soprano to bass; they each have conspicuous roles and displayed remarkable sympathy with the music, both its coherence and its incoherence. For the most part they sing individually, but there are occasional ensembles that reveal interesting, engaging harmonies, which might technically be dissonances, but they are so beautifully used that they are heard as good examples of intelligent dissonance with genuine artistic purpose. The singers take roles: Copernicus himself and his mother, Lewis Carroll, Merlin, a witch, Mozart and the Queen of the Night, Tristan and Isolde, and a central character: Agni. But the programme notes spell out a great number of subsidiary roles taken by each singer, drawn from Vivier.

Much of the singing is in Vivier’s made-up language and most of the rest is in French and surtitles covered the latter. But it was rarely possible in a single hearing, to identify singers of individual roles, nor is there a story line to create any semblance of a normal opera.

The seven orchestral players the Ensemble l’instant donné comprise a violin, 3 clarinets – – one doubled on a bass clarinet, an oboe, trumpet – not usually visible, and trombone, and there’s a collection of percussion. It was a lively, always energising performance by these seven musicians, conspiring brilliantly with the singers throughout.

Also included in a well balanced programme book, is an excellent, short essay by Clarissa Dunn (of ‘Concert FM’, at least for the moment).

A New York Times review commented: “The best Vivier performances capture his delirious, jewelled grandeur but also his modesty — the earnest intensity of his desire to communicate, even through nonsense syllables.”

 

Appendix
Earlier productions
After its initial performances in Montreal it has been revived there in 1985, 1986, 1988 and 1989; in London in 1985 at the Almeida Festival, in Paris in 1989, and in Vancouver in 1990.

It’s remarkable that it had taken 41 years for it to be heard in New York, and 38 years for the United States generally (at the Ojai Music Festival in California in 2016); but does that say something about relations between the US and Canada, and even more with Quebec: not least about the cultural condition of a country where opera, and classical music generally, are in the hands of the private sector rather than of enlightened state institutions.

It’s fared better in Europe. In Amsterdam in 2014; in 2018 it was performed in the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse; at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin, in January 2019. And as remarked above, this production was shared with KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, in Hanover. While it’s now, perhaps as a result of its espousal by a director as famous as Sellars, being seen more widely, it has clearly not been eagerly taken up by any of the major opera houses. Its first appearance in New York, last year, was at a minor Brooklyn theatre, the production have been premiered in a planetarium in Buenos Aires; in Paris it was at the normally non-music Théâtre de la ville, which is opposite the major operatic, Châtelet theatre.

A review of a 2001 performance in Montreal in London’s Opera magazine commented that Kopernikus had become Canada’s most frequently performed opera. And it remarked that the performance seen in Montreal came at the end of a cross-country run of performances by Toronto’s Autumn Leaf Productions.

It was that production that ran in Huddersfield in 2000, and was reviewed by Opera magazine’s editor John Allison in February 2001. His very measured review included this observation: “It could easily irritate even the mildest of sceptics, and the compelling grip of this performance was thanks in part to the simple and poetic staging by the Toronto-based Autumn Leaf Performance company”.

It was the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the Sellars’ production in Wellington that moderated the degree of scepticism that I too felt about the ‘story’ aspect of the work.

And I found myself somewhat, by no means entirely, in sympathy with critic Robert Markow’s remark in Opera magazine about the Toronto performance:
“Kopernikus is rich in potential, yet the opera is maddeningly unfulfilling. Beyond the score’s obviously imaginative and original instrumental sound-world, a giant leap of faith is required to connect with Vivier’s autobiographical display of self-indulgence masquerading as a universal initiation myth.”

And I do not share a peremptory dismissal such as this: “Yet within three minutes of the 70-minute ‘opera-ritual of death’, it was evident that Mr. Vivier’s inspiration came from a senseless jumble of eclectic paraphernalia.”

By the way, the name has become an EU issue. There has been a move to change the spelling of the name to the German version, which is as spelt in Vivier’s opera (though in French it’s Copernic). Poland has protested; it is Kopernik in Polish. Copernicus was born Torun which is now in Poland but which over the centuries has been in either Poland or Prussia. One Polish authority has recommended a compromise using the Latin spelling which is Copernicus, which if course has long been the international name.

 

Barbara Paterson’s moving operatic portrayal of love in crisis in Poulenc’s monodrama

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Human Voice (La voix humaine) by Françis Poulenc based on the play by Jean Cocteau. Translated by Johana Arnold and Barbara Paterson

Barbara Paterson (soprano) with Gabriela Glapska (piano)
Tabitha Arthur – director; Meredith Dooley – costumier; Isadora Lao – lighting designer and operator

Gallery of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Queen’s Wharf

Friday 27 February 6 pm

My colleague Peter Mechen reviewed what might have been considered the preview performance of Poulenc’s monodrama La voix humaine, on 31 January.

But being a huge fan of Poulenc I felt that Paterson’s performance in the Festival itself deserved attention.

La voix humaine is one of the most remarkable operatic pieces: not merely of the 20th century; not merely on account of the music which is a tremblingly vivid evocation of Elle’s mental fragility; but also in the way it deals so illuminatingly with her behaviour, her dependence on and interaction with a lover who has evidently decided to quit.

Sometimes the substitution of an orchestra by a piano seems to be a serious loss, with its more limited ability to interpret emotions and to provide rewarding support. Here the piano, with the shrill ringing of the telephone right at the beginning, hurled us straight into her emotional turmoil; it seemed just as chilling as the original score’s xylophone.

In addition, I am usually a strong advocate for the use of the original language in song and opera, but here, the singer’s total immersion in Elle’s mind and emotional state overcame any such feelings, even any feeling that English was not the original language. Johana Arnold’s translation was a perfect fit, though I couldn’t prevent a certain curiosity about how a performance in French might have intensified the impact in certain ways. (I have heard it, not live I think, in the original).

The performance opened with what sounded like a rifle shot: I wasn’t sure whether it was an external coincidence or a hint of the ultimate possibility of suicide.

The phone rings chillingly on the piano, and she picks it up but there’s no connection; it rings again, but now it’s a call for someone else, and there are several further rings before finally, it’s her lover. And now Paterson’s virtuosic performance immediately finds expression for her desperation and panic, alternating with attempts to sound rational, with the knowledge or at least fear that he wants to break it up, or even that he has done that.

Not all words were clear, smothered often by her uncontrolled outbursts, but her condition and her behaviour remained so conspicuous to the audience that we didn’t need to catch every word.

She grasps at straws: “You are so sweet … I am calm!” And the piano comments on or reveals the constant, overwhelming state of despair and grief that the break-up inflicts on her. It’s common to remark on the fact that an orchestral or other accompaniment is playing a major role in the drama, but there have been few occasions when I’ve felt as strongly about the vital role of the piano as I did here.

The telephone’s role
The drama continues with a succession of broken connections, whether by her former lover or through an operator’s mistake, we don’t know. The telephone itself and the omnipresent operator are significant players. I can remember in my childhood the sometimes obtrusive operator and the common ‘party line’ (my family had one), shared with three or four other subscribers, all of which the operator could listen to: the operator was thus privy to most of the scandal in the community. But this was a dimension that was not likely to have been in Poulenc’s mind, when local calls were not monitored by the operator, though Cocteau’s original play was written in 1928, 30 years before Poulenc’s setting.

Often it’s intentionally unclear whether the ‘disconnection’ is by the operator or the lover or whether it’s just something in Elle’s mind that brings about panic, a scream or mad laugh.

Paterson’s repertory of voices and screams allowed what was an overwhelming emotional condition to express to her lover her attempts to appear rational and in control, but exposing herself with the almost terrifying laugh, half-way to wild panic.

About half-way, she uttered a particularly wild scream, quickly suppressed, which led to one of the few beautiful lyrical episodes.

Gabriela Glapska’s piano was almost always the perfect partner, but very occasionally it became so passionately involved that it almost got in the way. Though that could well be attributed to the fact that the piano, like the telephone itself, was an important player.

Patterson’s performance was so comprehensively satisfying, so perfectly attuned to the words and the emotions and the music at every point that one could well have imagined that no histrionic direction was needed, But that becomes the crowning achievement of a sensitive director, merely to refine and enhance a singer’s own instincts so that the result seems to flow entirely from the performer’s own impulses. That was Tabitha Arthur’s achievement, that had her climbing one of two step-ladders at various times; symbolic of Elle’s compulsion to achieve security in an essentially insecure world. And in the lighting, Isadora Lao was similarly unobtrusive but, given the entirely natural feel of the atmosphere, was another case or art concealing art. And Meredith Dooley created Peterson’s wispy, pastel-shaded costume that also spoke of her fragility and insecurity.

There was a smallish audience; but here was a moving, very credible performance that deserved a much larger crowd.

 

Jonathan Lemalu and Virtuoso Strings blaze forth in Porirua’s Te Ata Festival

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Virtuoso Strings  – O Matou Malaga (Our Voyage), with Jonathan Lemalu

Jonathan Lemalu (bass)
Nina Noble (trumpet) / Elijah Futi (piano) / Martin Riseley (violin)
Kitty Sneyd-Utting/Jillian Tupuse (violin, vocals) /Toloa Faraimo (concertmaster)
Rochelle Pese Akerise (violin) Benjamin Sneyd-Utting (‘cello)
Glenview School Choir and friends
Virtuoso Strings, Sinfonia for Hope
Andrew Atkins (conductor)

Te Rauparaha Arena, Porirua

Saturday, 22nd February 2020

Though the two events weren’t directly related, this heart-warming, youth-driven classical music event in Porirua involving Jonathan Lemalu and the Virtuoso Strings flew in the most appropriate and timely way right in the face of attitudes and rationales voiced by certain forces who had recently proposed the closure of RNZ Concert, the public network’s classical music station. Though on the face of things driven by demographic concerns (RNZ Concert’s replacement station, we were told, represented “a new music “brand” to reach a wider, younger audience”) the proposed change sadly reflects a world-wide trend involving governments in the process of defunding these “creative” activities regarded by official bean-counters as “non-profitable”, with art- music everywhere having to fight to justify its existence. Because a lot of people these days simply aren’t exposed to any classical music the latter is regarded as elitist and the preserve of “old white people”, although the “cheap-shot” by a certain commentator characterising RNZ Concert-listeners as “privileged cardigan-wearers” does seem to have backfired of late! A spirited demonstration in the grounds of Parliament on Monday 24thmade the reactions of the classical station’s loyal listeners to the proposals absolutely clear to the Government  – “Set up your new “Youth Station” by all means, but don’t cannibalise our RNZ Concert in the process!”

The perfect answer to the spurious claim of lack of significant youth involvement in classical music was provided by both performers and their audience at the Te Rauparaha Arena, Porirua’s “O Matou Malaga – Our Voyage” event, a concert featuring the artists listed above in the opening presentation of Te Ata, an “interactive cultural festival for young people in Porirua”, one sponsored by the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts. Virtuoso Strings, based in Cannons Creek, Porirua, is a charitable trust which provides free music tuition and instruments to students at low decile schools in Porirua East, involving over 300 Porirua East students over the past year alone, and establishing a youth and community orchestra which has performed in many community events. Last year the orchestra toured Northland giving concerts in various centres; and a String Octet from the group  performed in Auckland during August at the National Chamber Music finals in the Town Hall, capturing the People’s Cholce Award in doing so (playing the “Goodnight Kiwi” piece by composer Craig Utting referred to below).

Grammy Award-winning bass Jonathan Lemalu is the Patron of the Virtuoso Strings Orchestra, intent on fostering the talents of the young performers, and helping individuals learn from the skills of making music, and in doing so, enrich their own lives and that of their families and community. The orchestra’s founders, Elizabeth Sneyd and Craig Utting, began the group in 2013, and have, with the help of the Virtuoso Strings Charitable Trust, former Board member Siang Lim and current members James Faraimo, Paul Setefano and Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban built a successful and flourishing music scheme which today is an integral part of the Porirua Community. The centrepiece of the concert’s first half on this occasion was in fact a work originally written (and arranged especially for this ensemble) by Craig Utting, a beautiful piece called “Goodnight Kiwi”, which I’d heard performed before, and here was presented as an orchestral work, with the original Octet “wrapped” in extra orchestral ambience, an attractive and atmospheric “variant” on what I’d encountered and enjoyed so much last year.

Before the concert Sir Roderick Deane welcomed us and introduced the performers, after which Jonathan Lemalu took the stage, announcing, after a few introductory remarks, that “In the beginning there was just one piano” – which was the signal for the pianist Elijah Futi to hurl forth, firstly, a keyboard version of the well-known 20thCentury-Fox signature-tune, and then gradually morph through some Gershwin-type rhythm-‘n-blues impulses (apparently excerpts from the theme music to the TV show “The Simpsons”!) and into the Grieg Piano Concerto’s first movement, accompanied gorgeously by the strings! From this grew a sequence devised and composed by Craig Utting, running the entire length of the concert’s first half, and whose sounds were accompanied by images assembled and presented by Moses Viliamu and Kitty Sneyd-Utting.  Jonathan Lemalu’s commentary  words stressing “solace” and “companionship” accompanied some Vaughan Williams-like “Greensleeves” fragments, the poignantly-phrased solo cello (Benjamin Sneyd-Utting) joined by violins sweetly descanting a counterpoint.

Then, at the announcement “Virtuoso Strings was born”, it seemed almost as if Shostakovich had come amongst the tumult, and gone “pasifika”,  with drums excitedly roaring forth as first, but the strings then underpinned the rhythm with swaying single notes, and calmed the excitement, allowing an ethereal atmosphere to settle over the ambience, with Kitty Sneyd-Utting’s wordless voice a stratospheric strand in the mix. It led seamlessly to an invocation of “Travelling” together and on individual journeys, characterising the players’ both touring with the orchestra and developing their individual skills, Lemalu singing a text written by Adrienne Jansen, asking the question “What shall I give you to take on this journey?”

Te Rangirua o Toiri was a forceful outpouring from acoustic and electric strings, piano and percussuion, in accordance with Lemalu’s words: – Te galu afi mua vaka! Oi Aue! Te lakilua! (“The first wave of fire!”), the music originally written by Utting for the Black Grace Dance Company to perform accompanied by inexperienced orchestra players needing plenty of electric and percussive support!  After this, the song Lota Nu’u, referred to by various people as Samoa’s second Nationa Anthem, was lullabic in effect, well chosen in this case by Gillian Deane, the music’s mood heightened by the singer’s suddenly raising the song’s emotional temperature with a single-toned upward modulation – a place where the request at the concert’s beginning for no applause before the interval was severely tested!

“Moving “with confidence to their own beat”, the players took Lemalu’s enjoiner to heart, the string-players augmenting the percussive outpourings with energetic angularity, the tumult assuming a kind of “thorn between two roses” character as it turned out, the speaker signalling the final homecoming with the words “The sound of our kiwis were heard”, and the leading strings standing to play Utting’s haunting “Goodnight Kiwi” set of variations. This was most engaging – we relished a remarkably free-ranging exploration by the players of tone, texture and rhythm, setting cosy nostalgia against zany humour, and rhythmic abandonment against semi-macabre disintegrations, the lump-in-throat “Hine e hine” melody flitting between the gaps at first, then sustained by the haunting voice of Jillian Tupuse, allowing her tones a variety of colourings and giving the music a “sliding”, Salvador Dali-like “do I wake or sleep?” aspect! –  all backdropped most poignantly by the original “Goodnight Kiwi “footage from TV One’s original close-down ritual – so very moving!

The programme’s second half was just as rich in a more variegated way, consisting of instrumental, orchestral, vocal and choral pieces designed to sound and celebrate the skills, both technical and musical, of players connected with the Virtuoso Strings. Introduced by the Trust’s chairman, James Faraimo,  the music of the half began with Handel’s The Trumpet Shall Sound, sung, of course by Lemalu (in excellent voice), and featuring the trumpet-playing of Nina Noble from Christchurch, a Deane Endowment scholar who will be attending the NZSM this year in Wellington – splendid playing from her, and a great and giving partnership between trumpet and voice, given that the  two are not normally positioned close together when the piece is performed as part of “Messiah”. Singers from Glenview School in Porirua East then performed a work by Christopher Tin, Kia Hora Te Marino, (Let Peace be widespread) with the added assistance from Isaac Stone and Tawa College’s Blue Notes Choir, making up a group of all ages, a full-blooded affirmation of positive feeling, the message punched out in no uncertain terms by an enthusiastic percussion section.

Came the Sinfonia for Hope’s appearance, the group consisting of musicians from various Wellington groups coming together to make music to raise funds for various humanitarian causes, and appearing on this occasion to support the Te Ata Festival’s celebration of youthful creativity. They firstly accompanied Lemalu in two characterful operatic arias, the subversive “La Calumnia” from Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”, and the boastful “O wie will ich Triumphiren” sung by the odious Osmin in Mozart’s “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail”, each one allowing the singer ample scope for vivid characterisation, which was achieved here with considerable elan. Then the group’s concertmaster, Martin Riseley, gave us a virtuoso performance of the last movement of Vivaldi’s “Summer” Concerto from “The Four Seasons”  with stirring support from the Sinfonia’s players.

After this was the Virtuoso Strings’ turn to accompany their patron, in two items I recalled from the previous year’s “Some Enchanted Evening” concert at the Wellington Opera House – here Lemalu seemed to me in better voice, negotiating the demands of “Ole Man River” from Jerome Kern’s “Showboat” with sonorous ease, and bringing a deep nostalgic feeling to Richard Rogers’ “Some Enchanted Evening from “South Pacific”, the singer again, I thought, freer and more detailed than in that previous performance.

Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban, the current Pasifika Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University of Wellington, and a recently-appointed trustee of Virtuoso Strings Charitable Trust made the most of a brief opportunity to speak to us, conveying her congratulations to the concert’s organisers and performers, before both orchestras came on stage for the final item This was Danzón No.2 by Arturo Márquez, a work from Mexico that has nevertheless gained currency as a “signature tune” for the Venezuelan Simon Bolivar Orchestra – Craig Utting rearranged the work’s scoring to include double string orchestra and piano to make up for the original’s lavish wind-and-brass parts. It all worked brilliantly under the leadership of conductor Andrew Atkins, from the sultry danzón  beginning of the piece, through the interplay between instrumental solos and tutti passages, right to the spirited pay-off at the end. The reception accorded the musicians by the audience at the concert’s conclusion capped off the excitement and enjoyment of the music-making evident throughout – altogether a heart-warming demonstration of youthful skills and energies brought out by the power of music!

NZSO, Gorecki and Ponifasio/MAU share singularly successful juxtaposing of utterly disparate creations, of profound common human vulnerabilities

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival of the Arts

“Chosen and Beloved”: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kristjan Järvi with MAU Wahine
Created by Lemi Ponifasio

Performers: MAU Wāhine
In white: Kahumako Rameka and Ria Te Uira Paki
In black: Rosie Te Rauawhea Belvie, Kasina Campbell, Terri Crawford, Rangipo Ihakara-Wallace, Anitopapa Kopua, Taiahotea Paki-Hill

Gorecki: Symphony No 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), with soprano Racha Tizk

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 21 February, 7:30 pm

It might have been slightly unusual to open a festival with a work (two works?) whose subject was the nature of woman, childbirth, even death, and dealing indirectly with one of the most terrible episodes in history.

However, it drew attention to the way in which this festival has been created and conceived. Substantially put together by three leading figures in the performing arts, ‘Guest Curators’, carefully chosen with attention to racial and cultural balance, and sheer imaginative and creative genius.

This concert was the inspiration of Lemi Ponifasio, ‘director and choreographer’. Though not a name very familiar to music audiences in New Zealand, he’s been involved for many years in performance activities that don’t match ordinary categories at international arts festivals, for example, at festivals at Avignon, Marseille, the Theater Der Welt and the Ruhr Triennale in Germany, at the Venice Biennale, for the opening of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi; in Noumea, and Sydney; and even an appearance at the 2012 festival in Wellington (which I didn’t see).

[You may be interested (I was) in the surprising history of MAU’s activities around the world: I copy an article in an appendix at the end.]

The Maori ‘ceremony’ from MAU Wahine
When the audience was allowed into the auditorium at 7:15 it was greeted at once with the performance, though there were no sounds. The stage itself delivered an immediate message: the entire back wall and choir stalls was shrouded by black curtains and a white sheet covered a four metre, or so, width of the stage extending from side to side in front of the empty orchestra seats. An array of rocks was scattered over it.

A woman in white, with long black hair (Kahumako Rameka), was walking very slowly from side to side, and she began to deliver a long lamenting whaikorero (a Karakia – about protection), about her origins, the different stages of birth and re-birth.

Soon two black-clad women appeared at the foot of aisles on either side of the balcony; they intoned first one then the other, though amplification made it difficult to tell who was singing, especially after five others appeared on the stage – that didn’t matter, but amplification removes that important aspect. However, the voices created a transcendent, ethereal effect that sought to avoid literal or precise understanding.

These were MAU Wahine, Ponifasio’s dance theatre company (‘Mau’ is the Samoan word meaning ‘the declaration of the truth’). For some time it bothered me that I could not understand their words, or at least their drift, but eventually I concluded that the women and a child in the arms was simply a reflection, or an anticipation, of the Gorecki composition, perhaps encompassing the experience of the loss of a child in awful circumstances. Gorecki said that his symphony was an evocation of the ties between mother and child, and I sensed that that might also have been the best way of interpreting the Mau ‘ceremony’ that had preceded it.

These were my own surmises, but I found myself taking it all very seriously, and I decided it would be useful to me as well as others if I could elaborate the meaning of what was happening.

So I contacted the Festival, asking whether members of the company could help my understanding (I could do this, not having a tight dead-line to adhere to). Very helpful information reached me later on Monday. I’m indebted to MAU Wahine for responding to my request.

I continue, with the benefit of their help.

When eventually a second white-clad woman appeared (Ria Te Uira Paki) with a baby in her arms, the message, expressed through their lamentations at the suffering and exploitation of women, chimed with the essential message of Gorecki’s music.

Ria Te Uira Paki delivered “a Pātere (chant), specifically Māreikura, perhaps the embodiment of the female essence. The word Māreikura can be translated or described as in all of its forms. The Pātere recites the genealogical connection to seven pro-dominant female entities within Māoridom and how they imbued their qualities within wāhine Māori. It talks of their journeys and connections being interwoven into our own feminine beings. It is a reminder of the feminine essence of Papatuanuku our terrestrial mother and the unbroken connection of the umbilical cord that  bonds us all the cosmic divine. A power, a strength and the beauty that we all hold and can conjure from within.”

My only uncertain criticism might have been of the length of this creation, with its quite protracted expanses of chant that ninety percent of the audience could not understand, even though its likely significance could be guessed at. Was it so different from the wordless 80 minutes of a Bruckner symphony or an extended liturgical work in Latin whose literal text is not understood in detail? In the end I dismissed this thought as a reasonable criticism.

The Gorecki Symphony
The words ‘Chosen and Beloved’ are taken from the first line of the first poem used in the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

But first, some of Ponifasio’s words:
“In the ceremony of Chosen and Beloved, we greet and embrace those who have gone before us, and prepare to welcome those who are about to join us. We acknowledge the difficulties of the past, share our sufferings and hopes, and with deep empathy begin to construct together the world we wish for ourselves, and for the new generation.”

Gorecki is recorded as not wanting to write a symphony ‘about war’, dealing with the horrors of war; and so in no way does he display in this work, bitterness or hatred of the perpetrators of the three events that inspire the symphony’s three movements. He wanted his work to be heard as three independent laments, and not really like a symphony at all.

The famous words of the second movement were found on the wall of a Gestapo prison at Zakopane in southern Poland. The words used in the two other movements also had their origin in poems that touched, not on the horrors of war or the Holocaust, but on mothers’ grief for the loss of a son, probably in the Silesian Uprisings in 1919-21, and for the third movement, words from a folk song in which Mary speaks to Jesus dying on the cross.

Reading about the reactions to its original performances in the late 70s and even after the huge success of the famous Dawn Upshaw recording in 1991, the critical nastiness that was uttered comes as a surprise now, when devotion to the sterility of the avant-garde, dissonance, and serialism has largely disappeared. I recall the anger vented on some of the reviews I wrote at that time, unappreciative as I was of the slavishly disagreeable music composition students were expected to write then.

Gorecki himself had rejected the dictates of the avant-garde Inquisition; and it’s almost a surprise to observe how, in many ways there’s been  a return to the idea that music needs to engage audiences.

There’s much to be fascinated and moved by in the work: first, though the orchestra is quite large, with quadruple flutes, clarinets and bassoons, horns and trombones the range of instruments is limited: no oboes or trumpets, no timpani or percussion. Each string section is in two parts and often operate separately. One’s attention is drawn to that at the beginning as the first almost inaudible sound is from the double basses, taking about 15 minutes to move through all the strings and a sequence of keys each in a different mode. That sequence was followed in reverse before the soprano entered.

Racha Rizk is a Syrian with an attractive, ethereal soprano voice, that was beautifully suited to the lamenting quality of Gorecki’s music which in turn reflected the emotions of each of the verses.

She sang in a sort of isolation from the front of the balconies nearest the stage: first on the right, then on the left, and for the third movement, from a high, obscure platform in the middle of the black curtain that covered the entire wall behind the orchestra. That separation of voice from the orchestra meant that the balance between the two varied with each movement and according to ones’ seat in the auditorium. That is no criticism: merely an observation.

What might have been a bother for some was the array of fluorescent tubes suspended above the front and rear of the stage which probably affected the visibility of the stage for those in the centre of the balcony.

I was interested to read about Rizk’s background: Syrian classical music performers do not flood the concert halls and opera houses. The programme note included this (to me) interesting item:

After her exile in France due to the war in Syria, Racha is continuing her concerts in Europe with orchestras including the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra and ORNINA Orchestra, performing Syrian symphonic compositions in concert halls including the Berliner Konzerthaus, Bremen’s Die Glucke, Berlin Philharmonie and Athens Megaron.

In the hands of Kristjan Järvi the orchestra was electrifying in the extraordinarily restrained and spiritual passages (and there are really no other kinds of music in it). There’s a full hour of music, and it cast a spell over the audience, so that at the end when the entire back wall turned into a vivid cascade, the audience remained subdued.

The audience, uncertain about the end, clapped before the water ceased to flow and the lights came up, breaking off as they sensed that it was emotionally unfinished. So they clapped again when the real ending was signalled and the conductor rested his baton.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Lemi Ponifasio / ‘MAU Jerusalem Inside Us’

From the programme booklet for the Jerusalem concert on the following evening, which was more complete than the notes for Chosen and Beloved.

Lemi Ponifasio founded MAU in 1995 working with diverse cultures and communities around the world. His collaborators are people from all walks of life, performing in factories, remote villages, opera houses, schools, marae, castles, galleries and stadiums. Mau is the Samoan word meaning the declaration of the truth.

Lemi Ponifasio is acclaimed internationally for his radical work as a choreographer, stage director and designer, and for his collaborations with many communities.

The projects have included fully staged operas, theatre, dance, exhibitions, community forums and festivals in more than 30 countries.

He has presented his creations with MAU in many places including Festival d’Avignon, Lincoln Center New York, BAM New York, Ruhrtriennale, LIFT Festival London, Edinburgh International Festival, Theater der Welt, Festival de Marseille, Theatre de la Ville Paris, Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, Holland Festival, Luminato Festival Toronto, Vienna Festival, Santiago a Mil Chile, the Venice Biennale and in the Pacific region.

His recent works include Love To Death (2020) with MAU Mapuche, Santiago Chile; KANAKA (2019) with Theatre Du Kanaky, New Caledonia; Mausina with MAU Wāhine for 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand (2018) and Standing In Time (2017) with MAU Wāhine; Die Gabe Der Kinder (2017) with children and community of Hamburg; Ceremony of Memories (2016 and 2017) with MAU Mapuche of Chile; Recompose (2016) with MAU Wāhine and Syrian women for Festival Herrenhausen, Hanover; Lagimoana Installation (2015) for the Venice Biennale 56th Visual Arts Exhibition; Apocalypsis, Toronto (2015); I AM: Mapuche, Chile (2015) and I AM for the 100th Anniversary of WW1 (2014), which premiered at Festival d’Avignon.

Other major international performance tours by Lemi Ponifasio and MAU include The Crimson House (2014), Stones In Her Mouth (2013), the opera Prometheus by Carl Orff (2012), Le Savali: Berlin (2011), Birds With Skymirrors (2010), Tempest: Without A Body (2008), Requiem (2006) and Paradise (2005).

 

Appendix 2

From The New Zealand Herald

From an interview with Lemi Ponifasio before the performance at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2012

Birds With Skymirrors …..

“Some people think I am God, some people think I am the devil,” says choreographer Lemi Ponifasio, whose Birds With Skymirrors will cast his usual controversial spell, this time over Wellington’s St James Theatre for two nights of the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Ponifasio and his dance theatre company Mau – which he prefers to speak of in terms of “community”, just as he repels the label of “performance” for his work – are far more feted in Europe than in New Zealand. Mau is a regular highlight of all the great arts festivals, biennales, triennales and “festspieles” of Europe, but it will be his first time at the New Zealand festival.

“Well, well,” he says, with the sly, characteristic smile than might mean amusement, cynicism – or pain.

The title Birds With Skymirrors was inspired by the apocalyptic sight of frigate birds flying over the ocean off Tarawa Island, in the Pacific, carrying glittering pieces of black plastic waste in their beaks, the ripped plastic looking like liquid mirrors.

The momentous issue of climate change, and the global discussions and negotiations about the future of the planet, were already on Ponifasio’s mind, and a subject he wanted to work with. “The frigate birds provided the symbolic image,” he says. “Birds have long been attached to our desire to be free.”

The resulting work, a powerful reflection on our connection with our environment, expressed through dance, poetry, ceremony, chant and oratory, premiered in Europe in 2010.

Formerly based at the Corban Estate in West Auckland, where he also regularly held the extraordinary Mau Forums, Ponifasio declares himself a failure in that he no longer has a home in New Zealand, the Pacific heart-spring and source of inspiration for all he does. “I have had to go international to survive,” he says.

Ponifasio is back in New Zealand briefly, between extensive European engagements, to find a new base, probably in South Auckland. The constant travelling between New Zealand and Europe is difficult for his immediate family and for his Mau family. And expensive.

“I am working on it, it will come,” he says. “The nature of current work in New Zealand has been that of a production line that I don’t fit. Europe has a bigger capacity to take on something provocative, something more than just arts and crafts and the entertainment industry.”

Born and raised in Samoa until he was 15, he came to New Zealand to complete his formal education, living in a Catholic priory until he was 21. But it is the experience of living in the natural world far more than human-made cultures and religious ideologies that inform Ponifasio’s unique voice. It is a voice that reflects the primal drama of the rhythms of the earth, the cycles of light and dark, life and death, rain and sun, the moon, the cosmos and mankind’s vulnerability, struggles, rituals, strange ceremonies and surrender within.

“To negotiate this exchange in life, Samoan parents tell their children the most important motto: to teu le va – to tender the space, to reverence the space, to be the space, to beautify the space, to embellish the space,” he says. “This is relational space, consciousness, a cosmological relationship with all existence. We call this ‘va’.”

Mau Forum 2010 took place at Schloss Charlottenberg, a historic palace in Berlin, and illustrates Ponifasio’s va in action.

“Not long ago, not far from this place, the people of Berlin exhibited Samoan people, like animals, in their zoo,” Ponifasio said on that occasion, “and not long ago, the people of Berlin came all the way down to Samoa and dominated and colonised the Samoan people.

“So it is very important that today we welcome and host the people of Berlin with respect, ceremony, theatre and art and share a meal, to allow for the clearing of space and the harmonising of spirit – so the work can begin.”

Ponifasio aims, he says, for “transformation”, which is equal parts prayer and political activism.

His work Tempest: Without a Body featured New Zealand’s own “face of terror” Tama Iti and terrorist suspect (since exonerated) Ahmed Zaoui.

“I make work for those who love this kind of work,” he says, “and for those who don’t like it, it is something to talk about. Art is not enough. I don’t want to make myself an artist. It has to be the path of love, the path of activism and its origins have to be in the community.”

Mau’s most recent work, Le Savali: Berlin, prompted French newspaper Le Figaro to propose Lemi Ponifasio as “the new miracle” on the choreographic landscape.

Ponifasio returns to Germany this year to produce his first opera, Carl Orff’s Prometheus, for the Ruhr Triennial 2012.

 

Is the Government paralysed by timidity? An update on the RNZ Concert crisis and a mass protest concert at Parliament

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

An update on the RNZ Concert crisis

A protest concert on Parliament’s steps
News website Scoop has published details of a concert involving hundreds of musicians performing in Parliament Grounds to voice their opposition to plans to axe RNZ Concert, the country’s only classical and jazz music station.

A massed choir and orchestra, conducted by Wellington’s Brent Stewart, have chosen RNZ Concert’s 87th birthday, Monday 24th February, to voice their support, with a performance of the classical hit Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.

The protest concert will be on the steps of Parliament at 4 pm on Monday 24 February
See: http://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=125655

Government appears paralysed on RNZ crisis 
You won’t be surprised that I am more than a little agitated, dismayed, even angry about this attack on RNZ Concert. While it looks as if they’ve found a spare FM frequency, so allowing them to persist with their misguided intention of creating a new radio channel ‘catering for’ young audiences, many other destructive things could still happen.

Starting from the top, Thompson must be removed along with the board who have been unbelievably complicit in and ignorant in their promoting plans virtually to wipe Concert out.

Bearing in mind that the Government has in the past abolished statutory bodies such as regional councils and school boards, only a little courage is needed to remove a wrong-headed, incompetent CEO of Radio New Zealand, and perhaps its entire board.

The issues are far from resolved, yet they are extremely serious  
Will all existing staff be retained and given secure positions? Or is the unspoken intention still to turn it into an anonymous station, like the present midnight to 6am broadcasts, playing endless, unidentified music, as in some web media?

And will RNZ Concert abandon its tedious practice of endlessly self-promoting various ‘programmes’, promoting personalities and individual announcers’ sessions, in the style of TV presenters? And will the ‘popularising’ policy cease, that seeks to generate an intimacy through the presenters’ language, encouraging them to decorate their words with personal anecdotes, gushings about the rapturous or wonderful music about to be played?

Yes, it’s nice to sound friendly and interested (and all current presenters do that), but we also want them to treat us like grown-ups, and not patronised with adolescent speech and affectations.

Will RNZ Concert be more adequately funded (drastically reduced over the past decade and more) so that more live performances can be recorded for rebroadcast, and their ability restored to commission talks and documentaries about music and the other arts, such as there were up to 20 or so years ago? Being increasingly constrained in the quid-pro-quo of exchanging programmes with European and American networks, I gather we are now being treated as a charity case; a shameful situation that should embarrass the Government.

And will it reverse the shabby practice of playing single movements instead of entire works? About 80% of broadcasts of symphonies, sonatas, chamber and other multi-movement pieces are confined to single movements that leave you hanging, or longing to have heard the earlier movements. It’s very unprofessional.

Thompson must go and board cleaned out
Unless Thompson goes life will continue to be horrible for Concert staff as he will be able to continue to act, in a more obscure, less overt manner perhaps, to dumb down the channel. We must have a chief executive who understands and believes unreservedly in the importance of a classical music channel and energetically restores its essential character; someone who will recover its freedom to use its huge resources of recorded music most of which is locked in the basement.

Somehow, RNZ must be convinced that the success of public radio is not measured by its level of appeal to a particular age or any other group, in the same way as might apply to commercial radio. Very few young people listen to radio, PERIOD! And those that do occasionally, listen to commercial stations that broadcast the sort of music that RNZ plans to broadcast over its new channel.

It would be an irresponsible waste of money to set up a youth-oriented network, unless there was a clear intention to sue it to awaken interest in good music, classical music, music that has stood the test of time. It is not the job of public radio to attract any of those who do not in effect invite themselves.

RNZ’s job is comparable to that of a national library or art museum that devotes itself to storing and exhibiting and promoting works of art or literature of proven importance. Things that might not be looked at every day but which are a vital element in a civilised country. The success of such bodies is not to be measured solely by listener numbers but rather, by the responses of those whose background or long devotion to good music equips them to assess its qualities and its ability to stimulate interest in all those with any sort of curiosity about classical music. That’s not just popular music, though the best of contemporary popular music certainly finds a place.

Nevertheless, it has also been shown by a survey in the UK that the NZ Concert Program has, in terms of audience percentages, the largest listening numbers of all classical music stations in the world.

Silence and passing time makes Minister look indecisive 
It is becoming increasingly disturbing that no decisive action has yet been taken by the Minister, primarily on the need to terminate Thompson’s employment. The more time that passes, the more the Government will appear indecisive and timid, and it will also be plain for all to see that it either isn’t conscious of or doesn’t care about the implications, both domestic and international, of allowing the neglect and indifference of the previous Government to persist. This is an extremely important aspect of New Zealand’s cultural reputation.

Get to Parliament 4pm on Monday 24 February.
Here are links to relevant websites:

There is a Give a Little campaign set up to raise $10,000 to help with costs of this concert in Parliament Grounds.

https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/savernzconcert?fbclid=IwAR2ockucLc4bswu4LaTe2cyqTCkCpXOkUZ0e2IuxyCm4oKARMBSfPQjWzhQ

SOUNZ (Centre for New Zealand Music) media release on the need to keep full presentation, scheduling and recording:

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU2002/S00089/the-fight-is-not-over-to-save-rnz-concert-securing-fm-frequencies-is-just-the-beginning.htm

 

Revealing background from former Concert manager

A former manager of RNZ Concert, Miles Rogers, contributed an article in The Dominion Post last week, revealing important background information that illuminates the troubles of RNZ Concert, going back many years.

RNZ Concert from the inside

As a former manager of RNZ Concert, I’m aware that this network has been progressively side-lined and marginalised.

Until the late 1990s a defined funding split operated between National and Concert – c.78% to 22%.  A decision was then taken to apply funding where “most needed” and from that point Concert began to lose ground. By 2003, there was no longer a budget to purchase broadcasting rights to the numerous recorded performances from our professional musical bodies and the various international soloists and ensembles that tour – from that time these rights have generously been given gratis. And since an internal restructuring in late 2014, this stream – a whole RNZ network – has had no direct report to the CEO and therefore no appropriate representation.

Further, the vast library of classical CDs was removed from RNZ House, Wellington in 2017.  This repository is Concert’s bread-and-butter for maintaining variety and scope in its daily schedule.  In recent times, presumably in a directive to appeal to and gain greater listenership, and in part through ever decreasing funding and staffing levels, the output has been reduced to something like a “top 500”, with popular classics often occurring every couple of days, alongside a predominance of single movements. Compounding this, continuity music programming is selected by computer, rather than by musical minds. These factors severely limit programmers’ choice and listeners’ experience. The threat of presenters now facing redundancies continues the present trend that Concert is already automated for most of weekend transmissions and was for a period on weekday evenings – ie no warm body behind the microphone at these times.

Though most listeners would value RNZ Concert for its range of classical music, Concert exists and is funded particularly for the nurturing, recording and dissemination of our musicians and composers… think NZSO, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Chamber Music NZ, New Zealand String Quartet, pianists Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons, Dames Kiri Te Kanawa and Malvina Major, Douglas Lilburn, John Psathas, – names at the peak of our indigenous talent.  Yet Concert’s work for emerging talent extends to secondary schools’ level through annual recordings of such as the NZCT Chamber Music Contest and The Big Sing.  There must surely be listeners too at Epsom Girl’s Grammar, who successfully hijacked 2019’s “Settling the Score”. Decreased funding has made such recording more and more difficult to carry out. I can only applaud the dedication of remaining staff, the lengths they go to in maintaining a professional product that still retains agreed quotas of NZ performance and composition within the overall schedule.

There’s a defined, finite audience for every music brand. That classical music has a smaller audience than popular brands should not diminish its value. RNZ Concert covers the broad range of classical, jazz, popular, film and World musics – much as then Director General, John Schroder envisaged when introducing the original YC stations c.1950. As our country’s population ages, more probably migrate from the commercial radio world for the sanity non-commercial radio affords. In truth, RNZ Concert needs a shot in the arm – increased funding – to enhance and regain its former prestige. Of RNZ’s funding from Government in Year 2018/19 totalling $43.4 million, I wonder what percentage was apportioned to RNZ Concert?  Throughout the 1980s RNZ’s technical and music staffs built a country-wide FM transmission network for fine music. To relegate this stream to much lesser quality AM transmission would be a retrograde step.

Section 175 of the Radiocommunications Act 1989: Conditions of licences relating to the FM Concert Programme and National Radio” includes the following: “that the first priority for the use of the frequency to which the licence relates shall be the broadcasting of (1) in the case of a licence that relates to the service known as the FM Concert Programme”. Does this not guarantee FM transmission for RNZ Concert?

Miles Rogers

And write to Minister of Broadcasting Kris Faafoi  (k.faafoi@ministers.govt.nz) and the Prime Minister (j.ardern@ministers.govt.nz).

Those at work, get an hour off to attend this important concert, and think about making a donation through Give-a-little to the large cost of staging a performance like this.

Send this to your friends.

Lindis Taylor

Startup industry expertise in accounting and CFO services

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

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