A piano recital at St Andrew’s deserving a full house: Beethoven’s Eroica Variations surrounded by circus variety

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts
Pianist Ya-Ting Liou

Couperin: Le rossignol en amour
Gareth Farr: The Horizon from Owhiro Bay
Beethoven: Variations and Fugue, Op 35 ‘Eroica’
Paderewski: Nocturne Op 16 No 4
Rachmaninov: andante from Cello sonata, Op 19 (transcribed by Arcadi Volodos)
Stravinsky: Circus Polka: for a young elephant

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 17 July, 12:15 pm

Her name rang a bell, but I couldn’t recall actually seeing or hearing her play. The Middle C archive revealed that my colleague, Peter Mechen had reviewed an earlier lunchtime recital by her in August 2016 when, inter alia she had played Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänz, later Rameau’s Le rappel des oiseaux. Born in Taiwan and educated mainly in the United States, she now lives in Auckland.

That sort of programming clearly appeals to her: it would have been very interesting to have heard the Rameau and the Couperin that she played today, alongside each other. And centre spot in both concerts was occupied by a major German composer: this time Beethoven’s Eroica Variations.

Couperin
She proved an exemplary baroque pianist, turning Couperin’s Le rossignol en amour, from harpsichord original into perfectly genuine piano music; slow and thoughtful, it was replete with tasteful ornaments that according to the programme note were detailed by the composer. Couperin’s evocation of elements of nature, here, a nightingale, was done very differently from the way a Debussy, let alone a Messiaen would have, yet a perfectly natural way of handling a non-human source. The challenges of Couperin’s keyboard writing were affectionately handled, with no apparent difficulty.

Gareth Farr’s impression of his view of Cook Strait from his south coast house, though three centuries later than Couperin’s evocation of a bird (Farr was born exactly 300 years after Couperin), were curiously related in creating a moment in nature, and in the employment of modest means. It was well chosen on a distinctly chilly day with a southerly breeze: a picture of the often wild coast in a mood of magical calm. Nor sure that I’d heard it before, and Liou’s beautiful performance reinforced for me the unpretentious yet extraordinarily evocative invention that Farr demonstrates. In the sort of music for which he is not so widely appreciated, but which speaks to me much more magically and inspiringly.

The Eroica Variations
I have known Beethoven’s Eroica Variations most of my life though I can’t remember my last live hearing. Dated in 1802, early in his middle period, they not to be approached with an expectation of kinship to the tremendous Diabelli Variations of his last years; nevertheless, these fifteen variations plus an imposing fugue at the end are already at some remove from those of Mozart and Haydn. Their sound and musical evolution quickly restrict composer possibilities to Beethoven alone. Unlike its classical period predecessors, its impact is impressive and I quickly realised I was in the company of a splendidly competent interpreter by nature avoiding any kind of major-work pretentiousness, yet able to bring to life the increasingly original and treatment unique to Beethoven.

The formidable fugal finale alone might have been a splendid lunchtime piece. So the entire work made this a memorable lunchtime experience.

Paderewski, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky 
Then three well-chosen shorter pieces. Apart from the famous Minuet once a standard piece in every young pianist’s album, Paderewski’s considerable output seems to have been off-limits: suffering as neither obviously great music in the tradition of Rachmaninov or Prokofiev, nor acceptably post-romantic, or atonal to compare with Stravinsky or Bartok. This Nocturne was far better than many a composition by a famous executant, mainly for his own use; it handled itself according to the dictates of the composer’s inspiration and developed melodically rather attractively. In any case it was in the hands of a pianist capable of investing anything with charm and musical conviction.

Great Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos’s hair-raising arrangement of the third movement, Andante, from Rachmaninov’s cello sonata for solo piano seems to have multiplied the numbers of notes ten-fold, and so it was a surprise that Liou began without the score on the piano (as she had safely enough till now), but within the first few bars there was a wee lapse calling for a repeat of a bar. Though probably shaken by that she soldiered on but a couple of minutes later stopped again and picked up the score to place in front of her. Volodos’s frenetic adornments might have seemed mere frenzied pyrotechnics for the sake of it – initially they did – but slowly one became accustomed to it as a sort of new ‘normal’ and especially as the main melody began to be audible through the dense undergrowth, it became rather engrossing, overwhelmingly so. Nevertheless, another part of me felt that Volodos’s journey might better have been abandoned, leaving the lovely slow movement to itself.

Stravinsky’s Circus Polka for a young elephant was not the least obscured by following the Rachmaninov (but Liou had the score in front of her again). It’s an eccentric piece and again not for any pianist short of the A-grade virtuoso class on account of rhythmic and tonal craziness, switching back and forth at the end between the polka, 2-in-a-bar, and triple time.

There was a reasonable audience, but here we had a recital of top professional quality that deserved a full house, at normal prices.

Extraordinary music-making from the 2019 Adam Troubadours

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
2019 Adam Troubadours

Claudia Tarrant-Matthews (leader), Sophia Tarrant-Matthews, violins,
Grant Baker, viola / Olivia Wilding, ‘cello

HAYDN – String Quartet in C Major Op.76, No.3 “Emperor”
GARETH FARR – Te Tai-o-Rehua (The Tasman Sea) for String Quartet (2013)
DVORAK – String Quartet in G Major Op.106

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 17th July, 2019

Behold, the 2019 Adam Troubadours! – a name that suggested something adventuresome and “here-and-now”, performers whose defining characteristics would give their music-making real distinction – and so it proved, in a concert for Chamber Music Hutt Valley that disarmed one’s listening by the act of its performers simply surpassing themselves as the evening ran its course. The above are young string musicians selected from those attending Adam Summer Schools for Chamber Music, and their coming-together led to this, a tour sponsored by Chamber Music New Zealand. All were, it seems, mentored by members of the New Zealand String Quartet, who would, I think, be extremely proud of these youngsters and what they have proved capable of doing. In fact a system which fosters performers of this quality, indicates to my mind that whatever is happening in the upper echelons of music education at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music is working splendidly!

One might say this programme was a classic kind of “string quartet concert” format – and here, thanks to a happy combination of performers and repertoire, the results were, for this listener, truly memorable. The Haydn Emperor Quartet which began the evening’s music couldn’t be described as an innovative choice (time enough for such things later!), but it demonstrated that these musicians knew what they were on about, rendering as whole-hearted a performance as I’ve ever heard.

From the beginning, the group’s sound made a bright, eager impression, each player’s line beautifully “centred”, with the various concerted passages a delight. The group strongly characterised each section, contrasting the busy-ness of the interactive development sequences with the earthier, more pesante elements, and conveying such an intensity of involvement with every phrase. The well-known second movement’s hymn-tune-cum-anthem got a rapt, heartfelt reading, with sensitive detailing woven into securely-wrought lines. By way of contrast, the sprightly Menuetto sang its first few measures and then quirkily danced the answering phrases with great gusto, the Trio surprising with a sombre minor-then-major manner, so “inward” compared with the rumbustions of the Menuetto – and such delicate pianissimi! As for the finale, the Adam Troubadours pulled no punches, the opening strident and challenging, single lines flung across the spectrum of interaction like grappling hooks, the musical argument remaining feisty and combatative amongst the players even when in accord at the work’s exciting finish!

Gareth Farr’s work for string quartet Te Tai-o-Rehua (The Tasman Sea) has been reviewed three times before by Middle C, (all different reviewers), having secured a number of performances after its commission by the Australian ensemble the Goldner Quartet  (in conjunction with CMNZ) in 2013.  Enthusiastically acclaimed on each occasion both work- and performance-wise, it gave me enormous fun simply comparing the three sets of previous impressions! – and I couldn’t help forming the opinion that Gareth Farr had here created something of an “Antipodean” classic (I’m using the adjective in a “generic” rather than strictly “literal” sense, of course). But I loved the composer’s candour in writing, in a note accompanying the music, “I intended to write a happy and joyous piece, because that’s the way I feel about my relationship with Australia and New Zealand……the music, however, came out dark, mysterious and edgy” – a case, perhaps, of more “at work” in the creative process, perhaps than meets the eye……(incidentally, Farr contributed another equally apposite comment regarding this piece, one which playfully “begs the question” of its provenance – “a really interesting dinner party for four people”…..)

Beginning the work were a number of terse figurations, initiated by the second violin and carried on by the viola, whether a kind of primitive chanting, or the undulating movement of water, remaining open to conjecture – eerie harmonic-like notes and disembodied tremolandi from the first violin and cello respectively, helped to evoke the ‘mysterious wild”, impulses which gathered focus and girth, reached a point of near-anguish, then broke off and began  (the viola leading the way) an edgy, angular “ritual of rhythm” the voices fugal-like but punctuated with sforzando-like pizzicati from the  cello – great, compulsive writing, here realised by the players with palpable physical involvement! Throughout, Farr evoked an almost Sibelius-like ambience which put me repeatedly in mind of the latter’s incidental music for “The Tempest”, the oceanic swells, the multifarious surface texturings, and the strange, half-lit ambiences of ships and seafarers “caught up” in it all…..

Having demonstrated his acute sense of detailing, leaving no depth unfathomed, no surge unsounded and no ripple unremarked on, Farr then plunged his instruments into a frenzy of concerted movement, enough to set the pulses racing and convey an entirely characteristic “exhilaration of physicality” (while adroitly avoiding the excesses of his somewhat fulsome “Great Sea Gongs”!). After gathering itself, the music rebuilt the intensities, firstly in long-breathed arched chordings and then with Stravinskian “Sacrificial Dance”-like passages (skin and hair flying everywhere!), building to a similar point of climactic excitement! The young  players completed their task by flinging the final phrase at us with a stunning sense of elemental closure that left nothing in its wake but a sense of an incredible listening and interpretative journey completed.

After the interval we were treated to an equally overwhelming performance of one of Antonin Dvořák’s finest chamber words, his Op.106 String Quartet in G Major. This turned out to be a work that demonstrated the composer’s entry into a somewhat more complex and rarified world of creative expression, a  more adventurous style of writing, using fragments of motifs instead of extended themes and with restless, volatile results. The upshot was exhilarating, if disconcerting – a “ride” through a profuse treasure-grove of  brief gestures and fragmented motives, a style Dvořák would presumably have developed further had he been granted more time on this earth.

Right from the work’s beginning we heard sounds whose harmonic explorations maintained a constancy of contrast.  The delicacy of the opening figurations, alternating with tumbling warmth, soon became the movement’s recurring pattern, presenting and developing a panoply of themes and gestures – what seemed like two “theme-groups”, the first one  seemingly more fragmentary than a second, more lyrical one. The harmonic explorations and developments were like an array of “sprung” possibilities, dazed by their own activation, and leaving us dazed in turn! I was simply blown away by the technical and musical mastery with which these young players fitted all of these detailings into a complex but still richly coherent argument – even then it all flashed past with the surest and fleetest of individual and ensembled touches!

The slow movement seemed to exist on two simultaneous planes of expression, in a minor key to begin with and then contrasting the mood with its major-key equivalent – all so rich and heartwarming. Dvořák again seemed to be opening vein after vein of possibility, the music gliding with sublime surety towards radiance, before turning on its heels and striding darkly down a parallel causeway of contrasted feeling! Not every note was sounded with consummate ease or perfect intonation by the players, but that’s because they were all striving to realise the breadth and depth of this music’s emotional reach. The music gave me a feeling not unlike a sensation of being trapped in a dream and turning the details over and over in trying to figure out how many ways it could be differently expressed and understood –  at the very end the players’ tones were so rapt, themselves seemingly entranced with it all.

The scherzo was a vigorous dance, here, both viola and cello extremely Beethoven-like in manner, trenchant and insistent, the mood more so than one usually expected from Dvořák. There was a lovely lyrical episode that one might have presumed was the trio – but the “real McCoy” came later, a lullabic, if elaborately-decorated song-episode, whose mood was constantly energised by fleet-fingered arpeggios and upwardly-soaring lines.

The finale teased our sensibilities with a tender, heart-warming introduction, before picking up its skirts and dancing away, the players alternating joy and abandonment with darker, more intense moments, the composer somehow maintaining a “lyrical” vein of feeling amidst figurations of some energy and agitation!  A peaceful, hymnlike interlude in the midst of the upheavals unreservedly captured our hearts, and an ensuing “dialogue” between recitatives and concerted replies held us in thrall even further…..then, via a string of reminiscing echoes, the players returned us to the main theme, whose energetic spirit took over the performance and danced us all, joyously and wildly, to its end. What a performance!

The Night Watch’s “Every Breath you take” a great success at the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE NIGHT WATCH presents:
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE – A Concert of Baroque Music

Works by Pachebel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Caldara, Handel, Zelenka, Buxtehude and Willaert

The Night Watch
Andrew Doyle (alto and soprano chalumeaux/baroque clarinet)
Mark Cookson (tenor chalumeau)
Lizzy Welsh (baroque violin)
The Won Kim (baroque violin)
Kamala Bain (recorders)
Imogen Granwal (viola da gamba/baroque ‘cello)
Douglas Mews (harpsichord/organ)
Pepe Becker (soprano)
Helen Acheson (alto)
Philip Collins (tenor)
David Morriss (bass)

Adam Concert Room, Te Koki, NZ School of Music, Wellington

Sunday, 14th July, 2019

2019 is turning into a “bumper” year for me as regards richly-stimulating and keenly-recalled concert experiences! As befits a place that likes to style itself as something of a cultural centre, Wellington has certainly played host to the efforts of some remarkable musicians performing some fascinating assemblages of repertoire so far this year, and with more to come, as a glance at any collection of concert schedules to hand will bear out with appropriate flourishes!

This present concert by an ensemble with the arresting name “The Night Watch” demonstrated a continuation of this  happy state of affairs with flair, expertise and energy, as with the group’s  first Wellington appearance earlier this year (which was reviewed by Rosemary Collier: https://middle-c.org/2019/02/from-the-night-watch-love-me-tender-a-baroque-style-celebration-of-loves-intangibility/ ). Each concert in its own way served to demonstrate the incredible richness of the music of the Baroque era, this second presentation having a kind of doubly unique distinction in, firstly, showcasing the qualities of the chalumeau, a single-reed wind instrument which predates the clarinet, and then presenting a New Zealand premiere of a little-known cantata by the Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka.

Beginning a concert of Baroque music with a performance of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon and Gigue might have seemed on paper an almost cliched gesture, were it not for the way the music here grew from the ambiences of instruments being tuned and fingers being “warmed up”, with sounds coming from Douglas Mews’ keyboard which spontaneously activated firstly the viola da gamba, with its ground bass, and then the violin and recorder, with their canonic figurations, whose variants seemed to pour out from the composer’s fertile imagination as gaily as water gushing from a mountain spring. The following Gigue had a vigorous, almost animal energy, what seemed like gleeful “pouncing” on the notes and almost mischievous stringendo aspect enlivening each crescendo phrase.

Part of the concert’s charm was the musicians’ direct engagement with the audience (a delicate balance between information and entertainment) which, done sensitively, despite attendant hazards, can enrich an audience’s enjoyment, especially of something unfamiliar. Thus it was for me with the musicians’ demonstration of the chalumeau, a clarinet-like single reed instrument, here presented in three sizes, soprano, alto and tenor, between two players, Andrew Doyle and Mark Cookson, the former doing the talking and most of the demonstrating. When it came to the Concerto by Georg Philipp Telemann, the alto and tenor instruments were used, the timbres mellow and slightly “grainy” compared with clarinet tones, Telemann’s opening Largo conjuring up a ritual-like sobriety, giving way to a vigorous Allegro with the solo instruments in thirds for most of the time. Soft pizzicato strings allowed first the alto then the tenor chalumeau a gentle, sensitive vocal line throughout the Adagio, before the final Vivace, with the instruments again in thirds, the impression of playful but essentially small-scale voices most engagingly sounding their grainy and occasionally guttural tones in distinctive ways.

An aria from Vivaldi’s oratorio “Veni. me sequera fida” featured alto Helen Acheson, the vocal line low and conversational, enlivened by a few moments of declamation, the voice partnered by the soprano chalumeaux in gentle collusion, every sound soft-grained and beautifully mellow in effect, the ensemble moving as one throughout the music’s gentle undulations. Antonio Caldara’s “Nel mio coro” which followed, swopped the alto and a violin for a soprano, Pepe Becker, whose true and intensely-focused tones flooded our sensibilities with the song’s piteous sorrow “hope is dying….and constancy is weeping…..” – it was a relief to turn from such raw emotion to expressions of joy and confidence via Handel’s “Eternal Source of Light Divine”, a work intended for performance in vast spaces, thus being scored for baroque trumpet – but here, in more intimate surroundings, Andrew Doyle’s baroque clarinet brought a sweetness to the ceremonial outpourings, while Pepe Becker’s mellifluous tones added warmth, glory and lustre to the proceedings.

After the interval we were treated to the New Zealand premiere – a work by the enigmatic Jan Dismas Zelenka, a Bohemian composer who worked as a composer at the Saxon court of Dresden from 1679 until his death in 1745. Recognised by both Bach and Telemann as a composer of worth during his lifetime, Zelenka’s reputation and his music virtually disappeared after his death. But whereas Bach had a Mendelssohn who “rediscovered” and generated fresh interest in his work, Zelenka had to wait until the twentieth century for his achievement as a composer to be recognised, and his music’s astonishing qualities to be rediscovered.

Zelanka’s cantata Immisit Dominus pestilentiam (spelt “Pestilarium” in the programme) dates from 1709, when it was premiered not in Dresden but in Prague, with Zelenka himself conducting, making it one of the earliest pieces of the composer’s music that has survived. Even here, his approach to word-setting and to overall structure is remarkably distinctive – central to the work are the opening accompanied recitatives with soft string suspensions, from which “grow” the subsequent arias and instrumental solos, with many a vividly-rendered passage or detail, courtesy of both singers and instrumentalists.

The opening declamation of tragedy and deep mourning – “The Lord set a pestilence upon Israel” (sung in Latin, incidentally, the programme containing an English translation) was superbly delivered by Pepe Becker, the voice pitiless in its detailing and heartfelt in its focus. Equally overwhelming was bass David Morriss’s forthright “Voice of The Lord”, proclaiming “the end of all flesh has come before me”, to suitably chilling effect. The pleading voice of the alto at “Remember Lord”,coupled with the touching tones of the chalumeaux, and additional support from the bass viol, made for a properly sombre entreaty, rising to a passionate appeal at the end. A splendidly Handelian fugue, featuring all voices and instruments, brought out the resolve to “sacrifice to our Lord”, while the soprano solo that followed “Pray for me, with tears” brought forth lovely, heartfelt and sensitive phrases from Pepe Becker, with sterling support from Kamala Bain’s recorder-playing, both lines seeming to convey the “fallibility” of sin and the dignity of suffering.

More forthright tones came from tenor Phillip Collins, with cries of “Be merciful!” ably supported by the instruments, and again very Handelian in effect. Perhaps more distinctive and individual was the following “Cry out, drops of blood”, David Morriss delivering the text with sharp focus, augmented by Helen Acheson’s more sombre tones, the lines low and mutes, the instrumentation spare, creating great tensions, as the strings’ staccato notes depict the “drops of blood”. Two choruses rounded the work off, the first, “O God”, brief and declamatory, and the second fugal, “And grant”, the singers’ lines clear and compelling, given excellent support by the instruments, and the whole ensemble blending and conveying individual strengths and detailings magnificently!

Baroque violinist Lizzy Welsh introduced the next item, a Trio Sonata (Op.2 No.5 in A Major) by Dieterich Buxtehude, the Danish-German organist and composer. Renowned as the Lübeck organist whom the young JS Bach walked 250 miles from Armstadt to meet and hear play, Buxtehude was known more for his vocal and organ music than his chamber works, though as Lizzy Walsh told us with some relish, his contribution to musical history also involved his eldest daughter, whom none of the prospective candidates (including Handel and Johann Mattheson) for Buxtehude’s position on his retirement seemed to want to marry (at the time a common ‘prerequisite” of such an appointment!)

This was , I thought, a beautiful performance – the exchanges epitomised the whole of the evening’s music-making, having an improvisatory sense, but obviously with the music well under the fingers – the third movement was passacaglia-like, a violin solo with harpsichord, while the fourth movement featured the viola da gamba as if extemporising, most expressively. Even more “concerted’ was the fifth movement Allegro, with deft exchanges between violin and da gamba, leading to a recitative-like flourishes, and in a sequence marked poco presto some brilliant concluding passagework from all the players.

The remainder of the programme consisted of three songs of Italian origin, the first, Ninna Nanna, a lament of the Virgin for her Son, here hauntingly sung by Philip Collins, the violin joining in after one verse, then with the recorder, elaborating on the melody before the singer returned, repeating the verse. Then came Antoneddu, a folkish, if somewhat exotic-sounding ballad, featuring Helen Acheson being partnered by the sultry tones of the soprano chalumeau – the singer’s line was suggestive of trouble and tragedy, the da gamba’s accompaniment a heavily-accented pizzicato, all sounding earthy and fraught with danger. The entire ensemble took the stage for the final song, Vecchie Letrose, written by Adrian Willaert (1490-1562), a lively, angular item whose sentiments definitely belonged to a more repressive and discriminatory age, but whose music could still be enjoyed. Two of the singers played tambourines to heighten the impact of it all, and the spiky vocal line added to the heavily accented satisfyingly earthy instrumental playing.

“Every Breath You Take” having been a great success for “The Night Watch”, the group is already planning another presentation, that of French music – La Vie en Rose – for November of this year, which will be, on the strength of this fine showing, eagerly awaited.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Splendid, richly satisfying NZSO concert of four strongly contrasted works played with mastery and conviction

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar with Steven Osborne (piano)

Michael Norris: Matauranga
Mozart: Piano Concerto No 12 in A, K 414
Osvaldo Golijov: Last Round
Nielsen: Symphony No 4, Op 29 (‘The Inextinguishable’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 13 July, 7:30 pm

Anniversary: Cook’s first voyage and Matauranga 
The first piece in Saturday’s concert was entitled Matauranga, which means ‘knowledge, wisdom, understanding, skill’, according to the programme note. It was in part to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage one of whose purposes was to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti in June 1769. His reaching New Zealand was timely to observe the transit of Mercury on the Coromandel Peninsula in November 1769, and the names Cook’s Beach and Mercury Bay celebrate it.

The intelligent programme note also places in perspective Cook’s voyage (voyages) as a product of The Enlightenment in Europe. The notes write: “The ideals of the Enlightenment sprang from a rejection of institutional religion, entrenched tradition and superstition in favour of rational thought, logic and the empirical, organised advancement of knowledge”.

Michael Norris’s approach to the subject was to combine taonga puoro with the orchestral strings and live electronics. Nevertheless, the score created an attractive pattern of subtle sounds, the Maori instruments having the most conspicuous role while the strings and the electronics seemed present in principle rather than in their actual impact. However, this piece offered an interesting range of sounds generated by taonga puoro, a wider range of these instruments than I think I’ve encountered before; scored with considerable sensitivity and clarity and played confidently by the versatile Alistair Fraser.

This is not the first time that I’ve rather wished that a little time had been taken in naming and sampling the sounds of each instrument, and for the programme book to have illustrated and named each one. I have the same feelings about the value of identifying with visual and sound examples the huge range of less familiar orchestral percussion instruments which, apart from timpani, are referred to merely as ‘percussion’.

The orchestra might have hoped that the inclusion of a quite approachable piece highlighting taonga pouro might have attracted a number of Maori to the concert; it didn’t. Furthermore, the concert as a whole attracted a much smaller audience that is usual for NZSO subscription concerts.

This was a surprise and a disappointment given the programming of a charming Mozart piano concerto by a particularly gifted pianist, and an arresting, strong-minded yet beautiful Nielsen symphony.

Steven Osborne in Mozart
Mozart’s piano concerto no 12 is one of the first group of three that he wrote for his own very successful subscription concerts after he moved to Vienna from Salzburg. Conductor Carlos Kalmar didn’t reduce the size of the string sections to the extent than has become common for music of the ‘Classical’ period. Instead, he concentrated on a warm, quite opulent sound that the modest-sized orchestra produced, while Steven Osborne’s piano offered quite a contrast with crisp, semi-detached playing that was nevertheless in perfect accord with the orchestra. His articulation was varied and subtle, and that modesty characterised the not especially bravura cadenza. The Andante, second movement, though at a walking pace, gave off a restful air. Here, as with the first movement, the orchestral part is very much simply a polite accompaniment, and though there’s quite an extended solo episode, it wasn’t the occasion for anything flashy.

The unostentatious character of the concerto ran through the Finale too; again, little work for the winds: just oboes and horns. Though Mozart also scored optionally for bassoons, none were audible (I couldn’t see).

This performance of this very charming concerto was, along with the other three very significant pieces, the reason for being dispirited about the size of the audience. It also prompts a comment about the failure of the NZSO to make better use of their soloists, especially ones as distinguished as Steven Osborne, in solo and other recitals in Wellington and other parts of the country. A few decades ago it was normal; now, with declining audiences for good music and their increasing unfamiliarity with what one could formerly consider standard, popular repertoire, it strikes me as even more important for concert promoters to exploit every means to get people through the doors. For many people, even one unfamiliar or New Zealand piece is a turn-off.

I would love a subscription series to be devoted to Mozart’s piano concertos, with particular attention to these earlier Viennese ones, before the much more played ones from No 20 in D minor. But does the poor audience tell us something about the general level of cultural awareness? I think it does.

Golijov and the culture of the tango
Osvaldo Golijov was born in Argentina to Romanian-Jewish parents and has quite suddenly put contemporary Latin American music on the map. Many will remember the impact made at the 2014 festival by a semi-staged performance of his opera Ainadamar (the place where Federico García Lorca was killed by Franco’s Falangist assassins in 1936).

Last Round was inspired by the sudden death in 1992 of Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla and refers also to notable Argentinian singer and composer Carlos Gardel, the most important main-stream tango musician.  We were fortunate in having this performance from the hands of a particularly vigorous and inspiring conductor whose background lends a special insight into the spirit of the music; and the orchestra responded with great enthusiasm.

Last Round is tango in character though obviously unorthodox. Symbolic conflict dominates the first movement, Movido, urgente, between the divided strings: violins, violas and cellos, half on each side with double basses in the centre, behind. The tango rhythm remains steady for long periods before accelerating and becoming agitated or violent, with characteristic sudden screeching glissandi – very bandoneon. Without an actual pause, the pulsing first movement rhythms subside and the tragic spirit of the second movement, Deaths of the Angel emerges, much slower and exhibiting less overt tango in rhythm and articulation. In the words of the programme note, the tango flavour returns as Golijov “yearningly quotes the refrain from Carlos Gomes’ ‘My beloved Buenos Aires’”.

This is no forbidding, intellectually pretentious avant-garde music: it seems to summarise aspects of contemporary music, through an Argentinian lens that injects a powerful emotional spirit in a perfectly coherent accent, perfectly accessible yet of our age.

Nielsen No 4
Nielsen is a symphonist who is in many ways the equal of Sibelius, and not just through being born in the same year and coming from the broad Scandinavian region; his six symphonies are so different in character both from any other symphonist and from each other that they are difficult to characterise. I would like to think that an enterprising Wellington orchestra might perform all six in the course of a season, but I’d have my work cut out, looking at the size of the audience here.

The fourth, the Inextinguishable, is probably his best known: particularly dramatic, coloured by the First World War, calling up words like ‘violence’, ‘intensity’, ‘headlong energy’, ‘the indomitability of life itself’. The massive brass call to attention at the start might have set the scene, but there are extended passages of beautiful, calm music, such as we are suddenly presented with from the lovely woodwinds of the NZSO in the shorter second movement and in the pensive, beautiful third movement. In all the quicksilver variety of emotion and musical character Carlos Kalmar led the orchestra with energy and rigour, yet with a sense of freedom, giving rein to all Nielsen’s detailed and instrumentally vivid orchestration.

If I had to choose, it would be the Nielsen that I found the most richly satisfying in the concert, and that’s from a field of four very successful, strongly contrasted works each of which was performed with mastery and conviction and should have pulled in all but deeply prejudiced, half-hearted concert goers.

Medlyn and Greager give rewarding and intelligent recital of early 20th century songs, plus four by Vincent O’Sullivan/Ross Harris

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Wednesday Lunchtime Concerts at St Andrew’s

Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano), Richard Greager (tenor), with David Barnard (piano)

Songs by Berg, Ross Harris, Poulenc, Strauss, Puccini and Rachmaninov

St Andrews on The Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 10 July 2019, 12;15 pm

A song recital by two internationally renowned singers based in Wellington is a significant musical event. The programme was like a snapshot of the music of the first half of the twentieth century across a wide range of countries, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, with a more recent item from New Zealand.

The concert began with Margaret Medlyn singing Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs (1907). These songs were written under the influence of Arnold Schoenberg, but also show echoes of Mahler, Wolf, Richard Strauss, and even Debussy. They were sung with understanding. Margaret Medlyn is a commanding singer with a powerful voice. Her beautiful deep register is penetrating and moving. The songs are set to texts by Carl Hauptman, Nikolaus Lenau, Theodore Storm, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johannes Schlaf, Otto Erich Hartleben, and Paul Hohenberg, a mirror of the Austrian literary world in which Berg was immersed. They reflected a great variety of emotions.

Richard Greager sang four short songs by Ross Harris, set to poems by Vincent O’Sullivan. Three of these were about father and son relationship, gentle domestic thoughts, one had a rollicking sea shanty feel. Vincent O’Sullivan and Ross Harris have a close association, and the songs were written for Richard Greager, all very Wellington, very Victoria University, but they were lovely and unpretentious.

This was followed by Poulenc’s Cinq poèmes de Paul Eluard. Poulenc moved in artistic and literary circles and had set the poems of many of his contemporaries to music. These songs are about down-and-outs, a subject that was meaningful in the Paris of the first quarter of the twentieth century. These songs are very much dialogues between voice and piano, and this was demonstrated by the sensitive piano playing of David Barnard responding to the singing of Richard Greager.

Margaret Medlyn then sang three songs by Richard Strauss. The first, ‘Befreit’, is a setting of a poem of Richard Dehmel, and one of Strauss’ most popular songs. The second, ‘Heimliche aufforderung’, the text by John Henry Mackay, was a wedding present to Strauss’s wife, the singer Pauline de Ahna. The third song, ‘Ich trage meine Minne’, ‘I bear my love /Silent with joy’ is one of the many songs that Strauss wrote for his wife. These songs appear to be simple, but they all have the hallmark of the special Richard Strauss sense of harmony and unexpected chords and twists in the melody.

Richard Greager sang three songs by Puccini. Puccini is hardly known for his songs, but he used these as sketches for arias in his operas. Richard Greager’s warm light tenor is well suited to these songs. In the second, ‘Sole e amore’, one can clearly hear ideas later used in La Boheme.

The final bracket of songs, again from Greager, consisted of three songs by Rachmaninov. These are imbued with a sense of nostalgia for the countryside. Though the setting is Russian the melodic line is often more Italian. It is the rich piano accompaniment that makes it characteristically Rachmaninov.

This was an ambitious programme and a rewarding concert. It was notable for the intelligent approach to the music, the clear phrasing and diction of the two singers. David Barnard’s piano playing, his sensitive support of the singers is worth a special mention. With teachers such as these at the New Zealand School of Music, it is not surprising that it turns out so many fine singers. Some of these singers will be performing Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi at the Hannah Playhouse next week.

 

 

“Exhibition” – a variety of brass, with Wellington bands playing host to the Chicago Brass

Posted on by Peter Mechen

EXHIBITION
Four Bands each play two major works for Brass Bands

Hutt City Brass Band (Matthew Stein, conductor)
Trust Porirua City Brass (Clynton Payne, conductor)
Wellington Brass (David Bremner, conductor)
Chicago Brass (Colin Holman, conductor)

Music by Kenneth Dowie, Marcus Venables, Clynton Payne, Edward Gregson,
Dean Goffin, Hermann Pallhuber, Eric Whitacre (arr. Sandy Smith), Thomas Doss

Salvation Army Citadel, Wellington

Monday 8th July, 2019

Having never reviewed a brass band concert before, I didn’t really know what to expect, other than hearing an evening’s-worth of splendid and varied sounds! On that score I wasn’t disappointed, with the music in every case projected with flair, sensitivity and energy, the sounds at times suitably roof-raising, while tempered by contrasts of every conceivable variety.

Being an “exhibition” concert meant that there were considerable bonuses to be had for listeners, the obvious one being the prospect of hearing no less than four bands “strutting their stuff”, one of which had come all the way from Chicago, Illinois, in the US of A, to perform! Naturally enough, the performance atmosphere was heightened by a sense of friendly competition, each band obviously out to put its “best set of feet forward” in comparison with the other three, but as much in a way that celebrated the occasion as reflected any kind of competitiveness.

Another “exhibition” aspect which I enjoyed was how each group presented itself with a brief video about who it was, where it was from and illustrating something of its “modus operandi” – which, of course varied most entertainingly from group to group in terms of presentation style and content. I liked the “tongue-in-cheek” aspect of them, allowing us to take them as seriously or light-heartedly as we wanted, while still conveying those aforementioned essentials. It did, however, underline for me just how “visual-oriented” we have become when presenting music (or any sounds, for that matter), wanting increasingly to “illustrate” what is heard, engaging the senses fully and in the process perhaps leaving less to the imagination…….

The repertoire played was new to me, except in cases where I was familiar with the melodies that inspired the pieces – thus I was able to prick up my ears with recognition for the arrangement of the “St Francis of Assisi” Hymn, a melody which I knew from a previous life as “All Creatures of Our God and King” –  and also for Hermann Pallhuber’s “Titan’s Progress”, which not altogether surprisingly took and elaborated on various motifs from Gustav Mahler’s well-known First Symphony, subtitled by its composer “The Titan”. Another resonance for me was the Hollywood-like glitziness of Marcus Venables’ “Endless Power”, which readily evoked 20thCentury Fox introductions to that film company’s productions recalled from my youthful movie-going days!

I registered and enjoyed the Benjamin-Britten-like brilliance of parts of Edward Gregson’s “Connotations”, with percussion playing a prominent part in the proceedings and, by contrast, the Brucknerian nobility of textures and long-breathed lines of Dean Goffin’s “Light of the World”. Finally,  I had great fun during the evening’s very last item, Thomas Doss’s “Trance”, teasing out the many and varied appearances of a Chorale by JS Bach as a kind of recurring motif of the work, interspersed among a fantastic array of colour, texture and rhythmic trajectory.

Each of the bands were thus presented with sufficient challenges for them to prove their worth, and all rose to the occasion to give the specific pieces just what was needed to bring out the “character” of every work in turn. We heard the “singing style” of Kenneth Dowie’s piece “The Father’s Blessing” richly maintained by all the instruments throughout, the music ebbing and flowing with oceanic surety right up to the final chord. The contrast with the razz-matazz of Marcus Venables’ piece that followed was all the more marked and effective.

Something of the same contrast of mood was expressed by the juxtapositioning of the two pieces that followed, the first “Hymn to St Francis of Assisi” lyrical and contemplative, and the second, Edward Gregson’s “Connotations”, a more consciously “symphonic” work, though avoiding any “self-conscious” display for its own sakes, musically satisfying in a more subtle way.   This pattern continued, juxtapositioning Dean Goffin’s rich and nostalgic “Light of the World” with Hermann Pallhuber’s overtly demonstrative “meditation on Mahler” , the latter piece’s tumultuous expression seeming to take the older Bohemian composer at his word when he famously declared “Symphony is like the world – it should contain everything!”

As ought to have been the case, much was made of the appearance of the North American band from Chicago, most warmly welcomed at the outset of the concert, and duly acclaimed both before and after their performances. The Chicagoans responded with equal warmth, making a presentation to the conductors of each of the NZ bands, and declaring their invitation to perform in New Zealand a singular honour. Their playing certainly “gave tongue” to their pleasure and delight at being here, and brought the evening to a suitably brilliant and satisfying conclusion.

Band aficionados would have been well pleased with this, a “taster” for the National Championships due to be held in Hamilton beginning Friday 12th July, and finishing on Sunday of that weekend – so, northwards for all, to glory!

 

Wellington Chamber Music’s fine, imaginative violin and piano recital from Beer and Watkins

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Wellington Chamber Music
Andrew Beer (violin) and Sarah Watkins (piano)

Ravel: Sonata No. 1 in A minor
Leonie Holmes: Dance of the Wintersmith
Gareth Farr’s Unforeseen Evolution
Franck: Violin Sonata

St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 7 July, 2019, 3 pm

Andrew Beer, Concert Master of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and Sarah Watkins, highly regarded chamber musician played an interesting recital in the Wellington Chamber music Sunday Concerts series. Two new New Zealand works were sandwiched in between a rarely heard sonata by Ravel and one of the most popular pieces of the violin repertoire, César Franck’s violin sonata.

Leonie Holmes is a prolific and versatile composer, teaching composition at the University of Auckland. Sarah Watkins and Andrew Beer commissioned her to write a piece for them. She happened to be reading Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith at the time and decided to take that as a subject of her composition. She found the book funny, but meaningful. She had not written program music before, but this challenge appealed to her. Her Dance of the Wintersmith opens with a long violin solo, soulful, meditative, that explores the singing quality of the instrument. The piano enters with a dialogue that seems to question the violin. In Pratchett’s story the young witch girl joins the dance of otherworldly men in the forest. In the music this is depicted with a quirky dance section that leads to the gentle melodious epilogue in which the violinist joins in humming and later whistling a tune, a huge surprise to listeners. Does one need to know the story that inspired the music or does the music stand on its own? Even if those who have not read the program notes and know nothing about Terry Pratchett would find the music haunting and beautiful. The work was one of the finalists of the SOUNZ Contemporary Awards for 2018.

The Dance of the Wintersmith was followed by Gareth Farr’s Unforeseen Evolution. This is a very different piece. Farr’s music is coloured by his studies as a percussionist and an immersion in the sounds, textures and rhythms of the Indonesian gamelan ensemble. For him the violin is not a melodic but a percussive instrument. He aimed to pit two wildly contrasting ideas against each other without transition, everything abrupt and unforeseen. The piece has rhythmic drum like elements contrasting the ethereal mysterious violin harmonics and delicate arpeggios on the piano in the first section, then violent rhythms around the entire range of the two instruments. It is a work in which rhythm and beat prevail over melody.

The concert had opened with the relatively seldom heard, Ravel’s Sonata No. 1 in A minor. It is an early student composition discovered long after the composer’s death. Written in 1897 it already has the hallmarks of impressionism. It has an aerie, mysterious quality, some of which is very difficult to bring off. This performance was a sound rendition of the work, but for this listener a touch of the inexpressible magic was missing.

The final work on the program was César Franck’s much loved Violin Sonata. It was played with passion, appropriate for this heartfelt piece. The performance was notable at times for its beautifully phrased singing quality. It had had some real magic moments.

The audience was rewarded at the end of the concert on the program with an encore, the second of Prokofiev’s Five Melodies for violin and piano.

Perhaps it was the cold weather, or the unknown New Zealand compositions that kept people away, but it is regrettable that this fine concert didn’t attract a larger audience. The Wellington Chamber Music Society is to be complemented on their imaginative programming for their concerts on Sunday afternoons.

Worlds within worlds brought to us by the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, with The Tasman Trio and Kenneth Young

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Overture to “Don Giovanni”
BEETHOVEN – Triple Concerto for Violin, ‘Cello and Piano Op.56
DELIUS – The Walk to the Paradise Garden
SCHUBERT – Symphony No. 8 in B Minor “Unfinished” D.759

The Tasman Trio:
Laura Barton (violin) / Daniel Smith (cello) / Liam Wooding (piano)

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace Church,
Wellington

Sunday 30th June, 2019

On paper, a programme for the prospective listener to savour – and this was an expectation I would guess was largely fulfilled, judging from the reception accorded the musicians’ efforts by the audience, and the feelings of satisfaction gleaned from the performers’ general aspect at the end! There was certainly a variety of colour, texture, mood and emotion to be had, with the pieces offering sufficient challenges to ensure the playing  maintained an ‘edge-of seat” quality, often something that can give amateur performance a “head-start” in terms of excitement and surprise for listeners’ edification. While too much tension can of course mar the ambience of some music, here only the Delius work seemed “vulnerable” in that respect – and it was in this music that the players created sounds of a beauty and sensitivity that for me captured the piece’s essence in a way that I’d not heard previously surpassed by this orchestra in any repertoire.

First things first, however; and this was Mozart’s Overture to his “dramma giocoso” Don Giovanni (“dramma giocoso” means, literally, “drama with jokes”). This was perfectly expressed by the music we heard, the opening taken from the work’s final act, featuring the entrance of the famous and unearthly “Stone Guest”, come to dinner ostensibly at the Don’s own invitation, but determined to secure Giovanni’s repentance for his iniquitous behaviour. The music’s “nightmarish” aspect at the Overture’s outset must have galvanised the sensibilities of those first audiences, who were plunged without warning into a “preview” of the events leading to the hero’s downfall and removal to the infernal regions, but were then whisked suddenly into the world of the work’s more comic sequences and situations. While no actual melodies from the opera itself were used, the dramatic opening chords, and eerie scale passages do recur in the final scene, accompanying the “Stone Guest’s” entrance.

Ken Young got a splendidly incisive opening to the work from his players, including some portentously “held” lower notes, supported by baleful brass – a few tuning discrepancies amongst the winds at the outset were properly sorted by the time the “infernal scales” of the opening were sounded. Then, the allegro mischievously activated the rhythms, the strings stirred, and the winds and timpani properly banished the gloom-laden textures with their sparking, forthright replies. Mozart kept hinting at the underlying darkness with the leading note of each phrase of the allegro – a heavily accented chord – but with each of these followed by impish, fleet-footed downward scamperings, and light-as-feather string phrases (a bit “squishy” at first, until the string players’ fingers warmed up!). Basically, there was great work from all concerned, throughout, even with the “cobbled-on” concert ending to the piece – in the theatre, the music slows down and goes straight into the stage action, but here, it was the conventional bang, crash and wallop, so as to make the music seem “rounded off”! (I prefer the music to just stop where the opera’s action begins, the imagination doing the rest……..)

It was then time to welcome the Tasman Trio, an Australasian ensemble formed just last year by two New Zealanders (Laura Barton and Liam Wooding) and an Australian (Daniel Smith), all of whom had been studying at ANAM (the Australian National Academy of Music) in Melbourne. Having heard, in living memory, a performance of this delicious work in St.Andrew’s from Te Koki Trio and the NZSM Orchestra (also with Kenneth Young conducting), I was anxious to re-enjoy the work at similarly close quarters, and interested in hearing a different group playing it – the soloists entered, there was a bit of “folkish-sounding” tuning, and then we were off!

The first low orchestral sounds filled us with expectation, the strings and horns doing well in their first sforzando-like entry, Young keeping the tempi steady, and allowing the triplet rhythms plenty of room. The first solo ‘cello entry was lyrical, poetic and inviting, joined by the other soloists just as sweetly, the piano adding a perkiness to the rhythm, taken up by the others in reply. The work’s frequent “running” passages were excitingly managed by all the players, and the orchestra responded with equal dexterity – the only problems (just one-or-two instances) were soloist-and-orchestra ensemble ones, the occasional rhythm either too hastily or too slowly ‘taken up” – but within a few bars all had come together again. As an ensemble the soloists dovetailed their passages perfectly, the occasional single-line moment of strain made up for with a correspondingly beautiful piece of phrasing from the same player. And I loved the beautiful “turn” by the players towards that moment of lyricism just before the first movement’s coda.

Songful rapture at the slow movement’s beginning! – lovely soft playing from ‘cello and then violin, though with the piano just a tad too heavy in response at first, I thought. Some nice support came from the horns as the soloists began their expectant arpeggiated figures leading to the finale. Having so well created a “mood”, the soloists then seemed to take a while to comfortably “settle” into the finale’s polonaise rhythm, but they grasped their concerted scampering lines firmly (tremendous triplet- playing by the trio) and set the scene for the orchestral tutti, which conductor and players seemed to relish wholeheartedly. Again the running canonic triplet passages were thrown off most excitingly – a real, visceral thrill to experience!

The characterful minor-key “dance” passages that followed wanted, I thought, just a shade more “schwung”, more naughtiness and suggestiveness from all concerned, here sounding to my ears expertly played, but a bit too regimented (I love it when in performances of this people seem to let their hair down, and really “savour” those polonaise rhythms) – still the players brought our beautifully that subsequent “Appassionata” moment (begun by the piano with portentous trills over which the others “reassembled” the main theme with growing excitement), and “dissolved” the subsequent canonic triplet rushings so teasingly, that all was forgiven in the ensuing excitements – the “running water” flow of the coda’s beginning, the more ritualised triplet lines, and the final “stately dance” of the music’s last paragraph. So – while perhaps not as majestically realised as with last year’s Te Koki Trio/NZSM performance of the work, the performance here put its own, equally spontaneous mark on the presentation, giving much pleasure and receiving well-deserved acclaim.

After the interval came a work I desperately wanted to hear “live” – Delius’s orchestral interlude “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” from his opera “A Village Romeo and Juliet”, one I’d previously only heard on record. And at the outset I should say that, even given my pleasure at being “treated” to Beethoven’s adorable Triple Concerto so expertly during the first half, this item was the concert’s highlight for me, with conducting and playing from Young and the orchestra members that utterly captivated me with its beauty and sensitivity. Every phrase, every solo, every surge of emotion, every hushed realisation of beauty was given its due, if not perhaps with quite the tonal splendour and individual  sheen commanded by professional players, certainly with sufficient loveliness of tone, confidence of phrasing and surety of ensemble so as to make Delius’s evocation of beauty laced with tragedy a truly heart-rending concert experience.

From the opening phrases, shared by bassoons, horns and cor anglais, we were immediately taken to a sound-word of enchantment, furthered by oboe, clarinet, flute and tenderly-phrased strings, each sound, whether solo or concerted, imbued with a real sense of the music’s power of evocation, a lovely overall sense of “drifting stillness” informing the quieter reflective moments, and a thrilling pulsation of feeling given full rein at the music’s climactic moments of bitter-sweet irruption. I thought it very, very powerful conducting by Ken Young and suitably no-holds-barred responses from his players, whether full-throated or finely-honed, the harp adding its singularly romantic voice to the plethora of instrumental response, everything superbly shaped and graded in aid of the music’s dying fall at the end. Delius’s first real champion, the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, once remarked on the need for the performer to interpret music such as this with “the maximum virility allied to the maximum sensitivity” – which is what sounded like was happening here (local syntax!).

No let-up in intensity was allowed us at this juncture, with what was to follow – Schubert’s much-loved “Unfinished” Symphony, two movements’ worth of pure drama and poetry, whether by accident or design wrought within two perfectly-tailored and -complementary episodes by its composer! Many have been the attempts to “finish” the work, ignoring the fact that Schubert himself completed a further symphony instead of going back and “dealing to it” himself. Might something have told him that what he’d done was enough?

The contrast with Delius’s music was profound in effect, those exquisitely-tailored lines and subtle textures of the former here replaced by sinister bass mutterings, fraught woodwind strains, and weighty, oppressive blocks of string or brass sounds. It was music which seemed haunted by its own substance; and the performance certainly conveyed a threatening, baleful quality in the first of the two movements, almost to the point of rawness from the brass in places, Young encouraging his forces, it seemed, to pull no punches! The exposition repeat sounded a shade less raw, and more rounded in those same territories, as if the players were hearing more acutely the “pitch of the hall” (as comedian Michael Flanders used to say in his and Donald Swann’s “At the Drop of a Hat” revue).

Whatever solace the music had managed to give its listeners thus far seemed then to be put to the sword by the development and its black-as-night scenarios, haunted by wraith-like figures, consoling winds beaten back by shattering brass chords, not dissimilar in effect to those in a similar place in Tchaikovsky’s ”Pathetique” Symphony– remorseless and unforgiving! The return to the opening brought some relief, but the movement’s coda again provided little consolation! Throughout this performance we got from Young and his brave players the full force of this music’s astounding emotional journey!

The second movement was, thankfully, less harrowing, its tones sunnier, and its melodic shapes more song-like, the players beautifully-dovetailing the exchanges between the strings’ striding steps and the winds’ lyrical replies. We heard some lovely wind solos, clarinet, oboe, and flute, contrasted with some sterling, black-browed sounds from trombones and timpani, but then a heart-easing “playing-out” of the tensions towards the end, lullabic phrases from strings and winds alike (including the horns) assuring us that the sounds had brought us, finally, to a safe haven…..

 

A joyful, exhilarating Barber of Seville, New Zealand Opera’s first offering of the year

Posted on by Steven Sedley

New Zealand Opera
The Barber of Seville by Rossini

Orchestra Wellington and Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus
Conductor: Wyn Davies; Director: Lindy Hume; Designer: Tracy Grant Lloyd; Assistant director: Jacqueline Coats; Lighting designer: Matthew Marshall

Cast

Count Almaviva: John Tessier
Rosina: Sandra Piques Eddy
Figaro: Morgan Pearse
Dr Bartolo: Andrew Collis
Don Basilio: Ashraf Sewailam
Berta: Morag Atchison
Fiorello/Officer;: Joel Amosa
Ambrogio: Jesse Wikiriwhi

The Opera House, Wellington

Saturday 29 July 2019, 7:30 pm

Colourful, joyful, exhilarating are the words to describe this production of the Barber of Seville. From the very beginning of the Overture, taken at a moderate steady tempo that let every phrase be clearly articulated, we know that we are in for a treat. When the action starts with the chorus, the serenaders, horsing around it is clear that this will be an entertaining show. Almaviva, John Tessier enters and sings his serenade. He is a powerful yet sensitive tenor and sets a high benchmark for the other singers. Figaro joins him and we are at home, this is Figaro the Barber whom everybody knows. Everyone is familiar with the tongue twister ‘Largo al factotum’. Morgan Pearse sang the role with energy and clarity, and with a good deal of comic touch.

We get to know Rosina, Sandra Piques Eddy, as she sings her aria, ‘Una voce poco’ fa’. She has an amazing mezzo-soprano voice, well controlled. Her deep notes were particularly noteworthy for their glorious dark timbre. She sang with meticulous attention to the text and the musical phrasing, while subjecting her aria to the demands of the dramatic action.

Dr. Bartolo, has the least rewarding role, he is a bumbling, comic character whose every endeavour ends in failure. Andrew Collis sang the part with the appropriate rich baritone, while maintaining the sense of comedy of the ridiculous personality of the doctor. Ashraf Sewailam sang the role of Don Basilio, the cunning music teacher and fair weather friend, with a rare resonant bass and an organ like quality of the low notes. Berta, Morag Atchinson had one solo song, that she sang delightfully. She was a striking presence every time she appeared on the stage. The standard of singing was universally outstanding, and this was matched by fine comic acting. If I had any reservation, it was that there was too much unnecessary clowning, situations that were already ridiculous didn’t need to be further highlighted, but the audience obviously greatly enjoyed this.

The staging and production was imaginative, vivid and colourful. There was excellent use of the stage with its many doors, which at various times was a street scene outside Dr, Bartolo’s residence and then the interior of his house. There was ingenious use of strobe lighting highlighting the action. The foils dropping in the last scene just underlined the madcap comedy.

The Barber of Seville dates from 1816, the year after Napoleon was defeated and the normality of the Ancient regime returned to Europe. Beaumarchais on whose play the opera was based had died many years before, but some of the issues explored by the play were very much alive: the power of the aristocracy, the role of the middle class and that of the rising entrepreneur. When soldiers come to arrest Count Almaviva he only had to reveal his name and rank and the soldiers withdrew. Dr. Bartolo, the middle class doctor is a mere figure of fun, wanting to marry his ward for her money. He is also nostalgic for a bygone era, the music of which he much preferred to the new-fangled modern music that Rosina chose to sing. Figaro was the entrepreneur with an eye on money, an obsession shared by Basilio and the singers who were paid to serenade Rosina. Although for Rossini, aged 24 when he wrote this opera, these social considerations were not in the forefront of his mind, the audience that took the opera to heart were probably very aware of these subtle underlying themes.

Nevertheless, the opera was great, rollicking fun. Overheard at the end of the opera, someone said that this was the most enjoyable opera he had ever seen. This impression was endorsed by the enthusiastic applause, the catcalls, the stomping and the whistles coming from the audience the like of which I had never heard before.

 

 

From murderous to beguiling – a concert of life and art from the Tudor Consort and Aurora IV

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Tudor Consort presents:
MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW
(with Aurora IV)

CARLO GESUALDO DA VENOSA (1565-1613) – Moro lasso (from Sesto libro di madrigali)
ANDREW SMITH (b.1970) – Salme 55
THOMAS WEELKES (1576-1623) – Come sirrah jack ho / Lo, country sports / Strike it up, tabor (madrigals)
WILLIAM BYRD (1543-1623) – Domine quis habitabit
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-56) – Talismane Op.141 No.4
HENRY PURCELL (1659-95) – Rejoice in the Lord Alway
WILLIAM BYRD – Kyrie / Agnus Dei (from Mass for 4 Voices)
PAUL HINDEMITH (1895-1963) – Six Chansons (1939)
NICOLAS GOMBERT (c.1495- c.1560) – Magnificat Tertii et Octavi Toni

The Tudor Consort
Michael Stewart (director)
Aurora IV
Toby Gee (countertenor), Julian Chu-Tan, Richard Taylor (tenors), Simon Christie (bass)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Saturday, 22nd June 2019

Michael Stewart and the Tudor Consort certainly got their presentation “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know” off to a properly gruesome start with the music of a composer who’s now generally known to have been a murderer, Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa – in fact, we in the audience were firstly “treated” to a fairly “no holds barred” description by Michael Stewart of the circumstances and salient details of the composer’s central role in the deadly occurrence, one which some people might have thought of as “too much information”! However, it certainly “prepared” us for the composer’s uniquely intense and agitated music in his madrigal “Moro lasso al mio duolo”, whose tones, intervals and harmonies seemed themselves to suffer in situ with the texts’ extreme angsts and tensions.

Commentators have, in relation to the composer, endlessly discussed the “association” between life and art, and the paradox exemplified by people who were creative geniuses but of dubious personal character – of particular interest in Gesualdo’s case is the extent to which one’s interest in his music is fuelled by knowledge of his life and character, and vice-versa (a 2011 New Yorker article by Alex Ross, who wrote “The Rest is Noise” is particularly thought-provoking in this respect https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/prince-of-darkness  –  The Tudor Consort’s finely-graded performance of “Moro lasso” certainly conveyed its composer’s free-wheeling flamboyance of dynamics, harmony and modulation, making for an entirely spontaneous, unpredictable and ungratified outpouring of sounds, something “rich and strange”.

With Andrew Smith’s Salme 55, performed for us by the vocal quartet Aurora IV, we found ourselves still in “Gesualdo country”, as this work was inspired by the latter’s music as well as those same events which had been outlined for us by Michael Stewart. Smith had composed a set of a capella pieces for a work called Notes for a Requiem which also included some of Gesualdo’s own motets, various spoken texts relating to events in Gesualdo’s life, and a dance, reinforcing those dramatic and tragic happenings. Tonight we got the verse sequences from that work, settings of Psalm 55, the well-known “prayer for deliverance” from both enemy and treacherous friend – the relative “sparseness” of the vocal textures following the Gesualdo work almost like the result of an archaeological exhumation of something whose bones made up in strength and purpose for what else had been pared away by the ravages of time.

While the Gesualdo work had an almost indecent freedom from inhibition of feeling, these settings by Andrew Smith used simpler, starker, more direct modes of expression, albeit framing the different sequences in almost ritualistic ways – in the opening Exaudi, (LIsten!) for example, the tenor expounded the text against evocative, echoing repetitions from the other three singers, firstly of the word “exaudi”, and then in the next section “Cor meum” (My heart), and all finally bursting out with “Timor et tremor” (Fear and trembling) in the final paragraph. The second sequence, Columba, with its famous line “Oh, for the wings of a dove!”, extended this technique to interchanging voices, the singers taking turns to deliver phrases from the text against a backdrop of repetitions of the word “Columba” (dove), and later “Festinabo” (In a hurry), the alternating voices expertly and evocatively imprinting both meaning and manner to the treatment of the text.

The lament’s full force was unleashed at Non enim inimicus (For it is not an enemy), with stinging focus, alternated by phrases voiced with great tenderness – the words’ sorrow and drama were made manifest here by the voices at places such as Veniat super eos mors (Let death take them). I was reminded of Britten’s “Rejoice in the lamb” in parts of the bass-led Extendit manum suam (He extended his hand), with its portentous outlining of treachery, a mood which was dispelled by the tenor with Tu autem Deus (But Thou, God…), the singer’s upwardly-leaping phrases conveying a frisson of faith and hope, and intoning a movingly simple habeo tui (I trust in you).

A world with a difference was evoked by three madrigals from Thomas Weelkes, whose character as outlined by Stewart, was more bad than mad, and perhaps more frustrating than “dangerous” to know! Previously I’d known only the richly-moving work “Death hath deprived me”, which Weelkes wrote at Thomas Morley’s death – by contrast these were earthy, self-indulgent tributes to simple pleasures, perhaps symptomatic of the composer’s unfortunate penchant for alcohol (although not mentioned in any of these works) which caused strife between Weelkes and his employers!

Come, Sirrah Jack, ho, dwelt on the pleasures of a pipe of tobacco (“for the blood, it is very good”), made from lovely, tumbling lines, delightfully calibrated to evoke a throng of unrepentant users making fun of the moralists at “Then those that do condemn it” with relish. Lo, Country Sports was something of a dance ritual, the group sounding the out-of-doors pleasures with ever-increasing delight as the music rolled merrily on; while Strike it up, tabor brought together the earthiness of the first madrigal with the dance-like energies of the second one. These voices properly “danced” throughout the first verse, until things ended somewhat querulously, with the comment “Fie, you dance false!”

How different again was the music we next heard, that of William Byrd, whose claim to inclusion in the programme stemmed from his ability to survive the sometimes murderous goings-on of opposing (Catholic and Protestant) regimes in English history, writing music under both kinds of strictures! Byrd maintained his position in the Chapel Royal under Elizabeth I, though his Domine , quis habitabit dates from an earlier period, a setting of the first half of Psalm 15 (Vulgate 14), set also by his near-contemporaries Thomas Tallis, William Mundy, Robert White and Robert Parsons. The text is concerned with living according to God’s commandments, and could easily have been applied to Protestants as well as Catholics, avoiding the political to-and-fro of the times.

Here the music immediately generated a sense of magnificence and purpose, something equally of its time and timeless, in effect. Stewart and the Consort’s richly-wrought voices brought out the almost celestial, music-of-the-spheres aspects of the work, the sounds describing vistas of timeless, weightless beauty, the soprano line particularly ethereal and radiant. The contrast at “Contemptus est in oculis ejus” (Contemptible in his sight….) was almost tsunami-like it its impact, before the final “Qui facet haec” returned us surely and gratefully to the eternities of the opening. Later in the programme we heard two movements of Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, a sombre, serious “Kyrie” beautifully voiced by the vocal quartet, and a more “exposed” sound at the beginning of “Agnus Dei”, more contrapuntal than harmonic at first, with all four voices involved the second time through, and increasingly “concerted” for the final repetition, the voices gaining in presence and resonance during the “Dona nobis pacem”.

A “find” for me was Robert Schumann’s Talismane, whose text, by Goethe, is a paean of praise to God as a life-giving force, sentiments that the composer exuberantly responded to at the start, the music hurling its message East and West, then more gently and resonantly encompassing “northern and southern lands” as similarly under his sway, Schumann compellingly setting exultation alongside poetic rumination. The “double choir” employed by the composer created ear-catching antiphonal exchanges and resonant echoings throughout, pushing the St.Andrews’ acoustic to extremes in places – however the poet’s “breathing” imagery of constant renewal brought forth in conclusion a moving sense of turbulent spirits “at peace” in Schumann’s writing. As tenor Richard Taylor informed us during the course of his valuable introduction to the work, whatever such “peace of mind” was enjoyed by Schumann became in later years tragically undermined by mental illness, and resulted in the composer’s confinement to an institution.

I would never have counted Henry Purcell as amongst the “carousers” in any line-up of well-known composers, before attending this concert – an indication, no doubt, of my lack of biographical knowledge regarding the composer – but legend has it that Purcell liked his ale, and was reputedly locked out of the family house by his wife for coming home late after an extended session at the “local”, at which point he caught a chill, leading to his death (the other, rather more romantic story is that he succumbed to tuberculosis)! For the concert’s purposes, conjecture ruled for the moment, the composer’s place in this concert’s lineup secured with some “bad” behaviour! – Purcell’s “Rejoice in the Lord always” was originally called “The Bell Anthem” because of the bell-imitations in the instrumental opening (played here most deliciously by Michael Stewart on the characterful St.Andrew’s chamber organ, the conducting of this piece in the capable hands of Richard Taylor). Begun by a vocal trio, the charming contrast between the single voices and the whole ensemble was one of the piece’s most engaging features, along with the bell-like organ tones.

Far more apposite regarding the programme’s intent was the contribution of Paul Hindemith, a set of “Six Chansons” that I’d never heard, and would never have guessed the composer had I encountered them unnamed! Hindemith, of course, became persona non grata to the Nazis during the 1930s (his music was officially proclaimed as “entartete” (degenerate),  Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels calling him an “atonal noisemaker”!), and left Germany to live temporarily in Turkey, before officially emigrating to Switzerland in 1938, and then to the USA in 1940.

Hindemith wrote this a capella work while in Switzerland, settings of some of the French poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who usually wrote in German. Less rigorous and more lyrical than a good deal of Hindemith’s other music, the settings are delightful and attractive, as if the composer had been able to, in a chameleon-like way, take on a Gallic kind of voice in his music – the first song, La biche (The doe), having a Ravel-like delicacy. I don’t know Hindemith’s other vocal works, apart from parts of his opera, Mathis der Maler – but it seemed, in the second song Un cygne (A swan)  the composer had the gift of word-painting in his music, the sounds expressing the imagery of the text, the actual movement of the swan upon the water. Even more amazement was conjured up with my reaction to the third song, Puisque tout passe (Since all is passing) which was, here, light, rapid and evanescent – what I would previously had said was very “un-Hindemith”! Printemps (Spring) was a hymn-like seasonal tribute, touchingly characterising the words “Quand il faudra nous taire” (When it comes time for us to fall silent) in a simple, almost parlando fashion. A severe unison began En hiver (In winter) but, despite the almost grisly aspect of the words, evoking the presence of death, the sounds had a light, lyrical character, throughout, “placing” both darkness and light in a balanced way. The final poem, Verger (Orchard) a meditation on the earth’s sustenance of the body and the spirit, interwove melody and rhythmic trajectory with the lightest of touches between upper and lower voices in the first and final verses, while intensifying their exchanges throughout the middle verse, again, the music mirroring the words, strong at ce que pese, et ce qui nourrit (sustains and nourishes us), and light and wind-blown at presque dormant en son ancient rond (almost asleep in the fountain’s circle). Everywhere the conductor’s and singers’ deftness of touch lightly and surely brought out the music’s surprisingly un-Teutonic character.

As if Gesualdo’s bloodsoaked crimes and Weelkes’ penchant for excessive drinking hadn’t sufficiently besmirched the somewhat rarefied “aura” of creativity normally associated with composers. Michael Stewart had one more subject for scrutiny almost certainly to be found wanting, in the person of Nicolas Gombert, a native of Flanders who became court composer to Emperor Charles V and music director of the Royal Chapel, and, as a priest, was the official “Master of the Boys” (Magister Pueorum) at the Chapel, but who, in 1540, was then convicted of sexual congress with a boy in his care, and sentenced to hard labour in the galleys. Freed after a number of years, Gombert never returned to the court, and indeed, faded into obscurity, his actual death date unknown, but probably occurring around 1560. Nonetheless, he was one of the most famous and influential composers in his day, his music exemplifying the fully-developed polyphonic style. Succeeding composers were to write in a more simplified manner, however, as Gombert had pushed his extremely complex  idioms as far as they could go – he influenced instrumental writing in this respect as well.

It’s possible Gombert composed the Magnificat we heard this evening as one of his “Swan Songs”, written by way of seeking a pardon for his crimes from the Emperor (he was eventually released by Charles V, on account of these efforts). One of eight Magnificat composed in each of the “Tones”, this work follows the same pattern as all the others, the odd-numbered verses in “chant” and the even -numbered ones given polyphonic treatment. The chant/polyphonic alternations as a whole gave the work we heard a contrasting vigour, and a theatricality, further exemplified by a certain agglomeration of forces as the music proceeded, as if the music’s influence was spreading throughout the world. By the time the concluding “Gloria Patri” was reached, we in the audience felt the composer had included us in the “Sicut erat” response, and part of each of us seemed to be resonating with the music!

Of course, none of the effects described above could have been achieved without the seemingly inexhaustible voices, skills, and communication capacities throughout an entire evening of the singers The Tudor Consort and their director, Michael Stewart, and the singers of Aurora IV.