Third of NZSO’s Shed series delivers some hits, some misses, and a couple of real successes

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: Shed Series, Concert III
Conductor: Hamish McKeich

Piazzolla: Sinfonietta
Eve de Castro-Robinson: Cyprian’s Dance
Mozart: Symphony No 32 in G, K 318
Piazzolla: Histoire du tango  – III Nightclub 1960
Bach/Webern: A Musical Offering – Ricercare
Webern: Symphony, Op 21
John Adams: Chamber Symphony

Shed 6, Wellington Waterfront

Friday 9 August 7:30 pm

The NZSO’s Shed series is one of the orchestra’s gestures that seeks to attract new audiences. You stay out of conventional venues, you avoid any of the trappings of a forbidding classical music concert which finds the entire audience in white tie and tails and ball gowns; there are no rows of comfortable seats. Instead, just a few dozen seats with backs, a lot of padded benches scattered around, high bar tables with a few stools round them and lots of room on the floor on which to sprawl comfortably. At the last concert, 15 minutes before curtain rise, I was lucky to find a last seat against a wall. This time I was uncommonly early and so, comfortably seated.

The emulation of a rock concert involved no printed programme. We have evidently reverted to the age of oral as distinct from literate culture. A couple of friends expressed puzzlement to one of the roving ‘ushers’ at the neglect of the art of reading, and had a pleasant, smiling response. However, there are a few notes on the concert on the NZSO website which computer-literate audience members would have accessed.

Another of the friendly touches was a scattering of musicians at their desks (yes they were allowed the scores), playing their way round tricky passages; but I saw no audience members chatting to them.

While I’m at it, I could say I was surprised to find bar charges about 25% higher than in the MFC: perhaps they’d misread the nature of the concert, expecting a well-heeled audience in a wharf shed?

Fortunately, Hamish McKeich is the ideal conductor/compere: congenial, light-spirited, casual and mildly droll. However, I wondered if his remarks about composers and the pieces revealed a depth of knowledge that might have discomforted or offended the more narrowly focused rock-concert addict. His introducing the music and its composers was admirably clear and offered sufficient information, generally placing it in its historical context.

Piazzolla made a good opener for a concert like this.
It was a relief to be offered something other than the much played Four Seasons of Buenos Aires; his less familiar Sinfonietta successfully straddled the intellectual character of good classical music and the essence, refined, of its tango origins. It’s in three movements: 1. Dramatico. Allegro marcato, un poco pesante; 2. Sobrio. Andantino – Poco più mosso – Tempo I; 3. Jubiloso. Vivace).

The piano began by repeating a six-note phrase, then low strings and xylophone join, uttering staccato gestures in sombre mood. The second movement adopts an even more subdued feeling, at a similar pace, seeming to subtly disguise its tango roots, so unassertive were its sounds. The third movement finally takes off as a more recognisable, energetic and sophisticated tango. If Piazzolla’s purpose was to assert his legitimacy in the classical mainstream, recognising that Western music has absorbed the ambient music of its environment throughout its history, he succeeded here.  There was a satisfying feeling of genuine invention and formal mastery of the broad classical tradition, successfully integrated with a prevailing tango flavour. The result combined clarity with colourful orchestration.

Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Cyprian’s Dance was accompanied by a change in the lighting to an unusual rose, playing against interesting wall patterns. Hints of a tango rhythm suggested themselves to me; but the prevailing tone was of high register strings, long glissandi, a disturbed feeling of a brittle, highly-strung creation. There was also a fleeting Mozart quotation from Eine kleine Nachtmusik whose connection with its surroundings escaped me. The piece rather lacked warmth and lyricism, and its reception was luke-warm.

Mozart’s Symphony No 32 is a bit of an oddity: only about eight minutes long, in three unelaborated movements. The early pages were typically and charming Mozartian, setting off as if it would become a conventional symphonic work, by means of repetition, development and the introduction of contrasting themes. But each movement ended too soon, rather leaving one hanging, expecting more. It could probably have been managed in a way that made its abbreviated length sound deliberate, but it just seemed incomplete; I didn’t feel that the orchestra’s heart was in it.

Piazzolla: Histoire du tango
It was followed, unprogrammed, by the Nightclub 1960 movement of Piazzolla’s four-part Histoire du tango, this time arranged for flute and xylophone; one of his most familiar pieces and so a touchstone that eased the return to our own age.

Webern appeals to rather small number of ordinary classical listeners; programming it here was obviously with the hope that a less ‘prejudiced’, young and uncommitted audience would be more open-minded, may have been a good try. Perhaps it was felt that linking Webern with a piece by Bach, even a relatively unfamiliar piece like the Ricercare from A Musical Offering might break the ice and perhaps its character was a little less dense and impenetrable than Webern’s not well-known Symphony that followed.

The Symphony is scored for two violins, viola, and cello, and clarinet, bass clarinet, two horns, harp. But accepting that where I was seated didn’t allow a well-balanced aural picture, it was probably unreasonable to expect a successful performance in this environment.  I was left with the feeling that it needed a more seriously lyrical approach, to tease out its improbable beauties. I’ve certainly heard it so played on recordings.

The choice of John Adams’s Chamber Symphony was more successful; Though it may well have been chosen because it was for a smaller ‘chamber’ orchestra for four strings, a dozen winds, piano and percussion, it, along with Piazzolla’s Sinfonietta, was the most immediately accessible (and therefore successful) work of the evening (apart naturally, for the Mozart). The orchestration is certainly unorthodox but not the least alienating. It’s in three movements; multitudinous, eclectic (just look at the names Adams gives its movements – “Mongrel Airs”; “Aria with Walking Bass” and “Roadrunner”) with moderately avant-garde elements. Some of rthe sounds in its first movement reminded me of Stravinsky in L’histoire du soldat.

Adams wrote that it’s partly influenced by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony (1907, long before his twelve tone era), but also by his young son watching old cartoons. Adams writes: “Sam was in the adjacent room watching cartoons (good cartoons, old ones from the ’50’s). The hyperactive, insistently aggressive and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic and not a little aggressive”.

So the pulsating, exciting third movement was a splendid way to end the concert. Probably as a result of the seating (everyone’s aural experience would have been different because the audience was spread around three, perhaps four, sides of the orchestra), the sound was less than ideal, not balanced properly; it would be good to hear it in a conventional auditorium.

Is this the way forward?
While the orchestra’s aims are admirable, the performances first rate, and there was a reasonable, though by no means capacity audience of more young people that are found at the normal concerts, I’m not sure about the whole package. Is the creation of some sort of pseudo-rock concert environment, aping an utterly different musical genre, the way to attract new audiences to the music that is at the heart of the symphony orchestral world? After all, most of this music is far from central to the huge body of wonderful music that has stood the test of time for up to half a millennium (at least).

A traditional venue such as the Town Hall, where seating was on a flat floor, flexible, and with the orchestra at that level, might be a better venue: a half-way house between the genres. My mind goes back to the much lamented ‘Promenade Concerts’ that flourished in the 1950s: informal, relaxed, where the audience sat and lay on rugs and cushions on the floor and there was food and drinks available inside the stalls, at the back. The music was not like this of course, but it did was music that was accessible and beautiful and it did attract hundreds of young people like me, getting to know great music that helped form criteria that cultivated taste and the ability to distinguish the good from the rubbish. Another reason for longing for some faster action on the Town Hall.

Camerata continues exploring Haydn with an aside to Mozart: charm and surprises

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Camerata chamber orchestra. Leader: Anne Loeser

Haydn: Overture to La Fedelta Premiata
Haydn: Symphony no. 9
Mozart: Divertimento in D, K. 136,
Haydn: Symphony no. 5

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Thursday 8 August, 6 pm

Looking back on Middle C’s reviews of Camerata, I see they have been a peripatetic ensemble, having been in St Mary of the Angels, the Wesley Church, Taranaki Street and the Adam Concert Room in the university school of music, but most often at St Peter’s.

St Peter’s may not be such a prolific provider of concerts as St Andrew’s, but it always shows its virtues when musicians choose to perform there. Its timber structure offers a slightly more mellow quality to the sound and its greater antiquity along, I suppose, with a richness of religious decoration, imagery and memorials, which has not been subjected to doctrinal austerity; it creates a warm and interesting environment, in a less bright light.

Their main sphere has been the Baroque/Classical era, though there have been departures from Haydn, Mozart and their contemporaries: like Dvořák, Pierné, Elgar and Mendelssohn. This time there was no departure from their dedicated field.

Overture to La Fedelta Premiata
Haydn dominated, with two early symphonies and an opera overture. The overture was for an opera of 1781, twenty years after he began his service at the court of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy. Few of his operas survived a few performances at Esterháza (or Eszterháza, in Hungarian spelling) and opinion of the time and even today has not really left us with a collection of seriously undervalued masterpieces. The overture contains a prominent hunting theme, which gave it a special character leading Haydn to use it as the finale to Symphony No 73, named ‘La Chasse’.

It opens with a jolly, rhythmic hunting tune that taxed the brass players (trumpets and horns), making a fine impact as the concert’s opener.

A Ninth Symphony
It was too early in the history of the symphony for a Symphony No 9 to be a guaranteed masterpiece, and in truth, though I write this with a degree of trepidation, its performance hardly presaged the sort of fame that Haydn achieved through the 1780s. Yet there was plenty of melodic invention, it was animated and well-paced and there were clear signs of the richer musical gifts that emerged more vividly over the years and employing flutes, oboes, horns and a bassoon. The Andante, second movement, using only flutes and strings, was charming and the Finale, in the shape of a minuet, brought horns back, enjoyed a lovely oboe solo over delicate string accompaniment; not flawless but it created a confident, genial spirit. The main handicap here might have been a lack of string numbers that restrained a truly lyrical and shapely performance.

Mozart divertimento/symphony/string quartet
Between the two Haydn symphonies came an early work by Mozart, written ten years after Haydn’s No 9. While Haydn was 29, Mozart was only 16 when he wrote this. It’s for strings only, sometimes called a string quartet, sometimes known as the first of the three ‘Salzburg Symphonies’. It’s much admired, for it’s a fully formed, accomplished and elegant work that has always held its own, and set in this context, it displayed rather more urbane confidence than Haydn did at twice his age. The third and last movement, marked Presto, was evidence of that confidence, taken at maximum speed, even through the accomplished little fugue found in the middle.

The Fifth Symphony
I wondered whether the selection of Haydn’s symphonies 5 and 9, signalling two of the greatest symphonies ever, by another composer, was a deliberate bit of playfulness. Also noted was that these two symphonies straddled the fairly familiar numbers 6, 7 and 8 (Morning, Noon and Night symphonies, but no relation to the Suppé Overture).

The Fifth was the only four-movement work in the programme, though not written according to the later symphonic recipe (fast, slow, minuet, presto-finale); but rather in the ‘church sonata’ form (slow, fast, dance – as usual a minuet – and fast). It was probably written aged 26 (Wikipedia thinks after 1760, aged more like 28), before Haydn was engaged by the Esterhazy family.

As the programme notes point out, the opening movement has real gravitas; I heard, rather than ’gravitas’, an interesting sensitivity which made one realise that Prince Nicolaus did have an acute ear for the work of a slow-maturing genius.

The programme note again, hints that the second movement, Allegro, gives a pre-taste of the spirit of Sturm und Drang (the German pre-Romantic phase, which didn’t really emerge till the 1770s); and the speeds and agility it demanded, and the high horn parts, didn’t sound easy. It was in triple time which rather reduced the contrast normally found between the second movement and the Minuet which was also played at a rather similar pace. But one could sense its underlying delicacy which tended to be forgotten as the typical Minuet movement later became more boisterous, eventually turning into a Scherzo with Beethoven.

The Finale was indeed, Presto, and one had hardly noted the couple of tunes that it uses, and the high horn parts, before it was over. A model overlooked by Bruckner and Mahler.

This admirable project by Anne Loeser and the Camerata orchestra, that is slowly exploring Haydn’s early symphonies, puts me in mind of a wonderful series of concerts, perhaps a couple of decades ago, covering all Mozart’s symphonies in a day-by-day festival, employing all Wellington’s orchestras, even some from amateurs. No one could sensibly suggest such an undertaking for Haydn, but there’s more than enough evidence in these concerts, that such an enterprise, selecting 20 or 30 symphonies might capture attention; and I don’t forget Orchestra Wellington’s series of Haydn’s Paris symphonies in 2014.

 

Jennifer Stumm and Te Koki Trio share honours at Wellington’s MFC

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
JENNIFER STUMM AND TE KOKI TRIO

Music by Michael Williams, György Kurtág, Schumann, and Brahms

MICHAEL WILLIAMS – Spirit flies Sun Rises
GYÖRGY KURTÁG – Three Pieces for Viola Solo (from “Signs, Games and Messages”)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Märchenbilder  (Fairytale Pictures)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Scherzo in C Minor from FAE Sonata  / Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor Op.60 “Werther”

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday, 8th August, 2019

What an excellent idea it was of Chamber Music New Zealand’s to invite viola virtuoso Jennifer Stumm here to perform with Wellington’s Te Koki Trio! – her presence enabled a richly varied programme to be performed with a unique distinction in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre, a programme that’s currently on tour throughout the country.

Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Stumm currently holds Professorships of viola studies in institutions both in Vienna and London, and teaches and gives concerts about the globe, with a particular interest in supporting young musicians from developing countries, being the founder and co-director of Ilumina, a São-Paulo-based chamber music collective and social initiative whose activities foster rising talent from Latin America at the Iuumina Festival and on tour around the world.

She’s been an advocate for her instrument ever since taking up the viola at the age of eight, calling it “the imperfect instrument” in the sense of having something uniquely expressive to offer to music listeners and performers, winning “firsts” in performance prizes for the viola in various international competitions, making acclaimed recordings, and working with some of the world’s most prestigious and legendary musicians , such as the Beaux Arts Trio and the Alban Berg Quartet.

In this concert she was heard as a soloist (all too briefly) in György Kurtág’s Three pieces for Viola Solo, and then as a duettist with pianist Jian Liu in Schuman’s Märchenbilder  (Fairytale Pictures) and Brahms’ Scherzo from the “F-A-E” Sonata. Finally, she joined Te Koki Trio in a heartfelt performance of Brahms’ Third Piano Trio in C Minor, to which the subtitle  “Werther” is often added, due to the composer’s own insistence that the music is about the fate of the character in Goethe’s eponymous novel. Throughout her performances the printed programme’s “Washington Post” quotation – “an opal-like beauty” – from a review of Stumm’s playing, repeatedly came to my mind.

Before Stumm made her appearance in the concert it was Te Koki Trio’s task to open the concert with a CMNZ-commissioned work from Hamilton composer Michael Williams for a Piano Trio, one titled Spirit Flies Sun Rises. In an eloquent programme note the composer indicated that his initial motivation for the work was an image in his mind of the scattering of the ashes of an uncle by the wind at Raglan, imparting a sense of something like “a bird in flight or perhaps a leaping deer”, a spirit becoming part of “the great all”, while for those living the world still turns and the sun rises.

The unexpected death of the composer’s younger brother just as the work was being freshly addressed after a break gave rise to an “enormously cathartic and unforgettable” experience of re-evaluation of what Williams wanted the work to say, further intensifying the idea of a spirit leaving the earth and being freed. The end result as heard in the Michael Fowler Centre on Thursday evening was something as ethereal and “liberated” in sound as were the spirits of the departed in substance – the work set long-breathed, soulful tones, perhaps of quiet mourning or remembrance, against scintillations of gossamer-like freedom.

It seemed like a kind of nature-ritual, with earthly things both letting go and reclaiming impulses of energy whose time had come to move elsewhere, or perhaps to “return”. What the musicians did seemed to transcend normal manifestations of feeling and energy – Martin Riseley’s violin and Inbal Meggido’s ‘cello intoned what felt like uplifted, trance-like responses to the happenings, while Jian Liu‘s piano created endless and enduring shafts of illumination and whole ambiences of warmth. I thought the understating of it all was ultimately the most powerful and moving aspect of the work and its performance.

It was appropriate, I felt, that the sounds we heard next were those of a single instrument, marked by the appearance of Jennifer Stumm, the illustrious violist here accorded a warm welcome.I had not heard these pieces by Hungarian composer György Kurtág previously  – all three come from a sequence of 24 such pieces for solo viola, “Signs, Games and Messages”, and represent a compositional form and  method characteristic of the composer. His music has been described as “reducing his material to the level of the fragment, or the moment….”, with the individual pieces in this collection ranging in length from three or four minutes to mere handfuls of seconds.

The first piece sounded folksy, a recitative-like piece whose near-claustrophobic “seconds” were piquantly resolved, Stumm producing an amazingly rich and “earthy” sound. The second sounded like a wailing, weeping lament, very “Jewish-sounding” in character, creating the extraordinary effect of a stringed instrument actually “sounding” like a human voice, the notes having a curiously “over-the-top” vibrato, suggesting raw emotion! – Lastly was a kind of dance (the composer inspired, Stumm told us, by an English girl), with both timbres and colours of the sounds changing constantly and the rhythms varying from measure to measure.

Stumm then demonstrated her art in partnership with pianist Jian Liu, beginning with Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder  (Fairytale Pictures), written in 1851. The composer described them as “childish pranks” to the work’s first performer of the viola part (they were written for either violin or viola, Schumann preferring the latter), and he didn’t specify any sources for his inspiration, leaving performers and listeners alike to “create” their own scenarios.  The violist introduced each of the pieces most charmingly, the first having a gentle, flowing opening with both instruments in perfect accord and dove-tailing the melodic lines most exquisitely, Stumm’s wonderful elasticity of tone enabling her to”load” the expression of every bar with variation and flexible nuance.

The march which followed featured viola fanfares at its beginning, the figures turning to song as the music developed, Jian Liu’s nimble playing seeming to entice the viola from the path and into the woods, the sounds playing canonic games amongst the trees, until the wistful strains of the opening theme call the instruments back to their more heroic initial purpose. A dark urgency gripped the music of the third piece, the figurations agitated, viola and piano nimbly alternating the triplet rhythms, before allowing the appearance of a contrasting, more languishing and nostalgic sequence which seemed to yearn for somebody’s return. The music returns abruptly to the insistence of the triplets until what sounded like a cry of despair from the viola brought the piece to an abrupt conclusion.

The final movement’s  “Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck” (Slowly and with a melancholy expression) sounded like a love song, Stumm’s viola with the melody and Liu’s piano soaring overhead protectively, so “intertwined” a feeling (obviously a “Clara-inspired” sequence! – Clara, of course, being Schumann’s wife), so wholly a union! The piano took the lead for some moments, intensifying the ardour with triplet figurations, while the viola momentarily took flight, before the two returned to the opening, and made something characteristically rich and romantic of the ending.

Violist and pianist extended their accord with the audience via an unusual composition, a Scherzo movement written by Johannes Brahms for a piece called the F.A.E. Sonata, a collaborative piece by three composers – besides Brahms, there was Schumann and Albert Dietrich, who was one of Schumann’s pupils. The work was intended as a gift for the violinist Joseph Joachim, whom Brahms had met in Hanover earlier in the year, and who had introduced Brahms to Robert and Clara Schumann – the F.A.E. of the title stood for a phrase that Joachim had taken for a motto – “Frei aber einsam” (Free but alone). All three composers completed their work and Joachim gratefully accepted the gift and played the work! Just before his death, in 1906, he allowed Brahms’ Scherzo to be published. (I’ve not been able to find out whose transcription for viola Jennifer Stumm used).

Never before have I been so aware of Beethoven’s influence on the younger composer in this movement, as in this performance, right from the four-note motive reminiscent of “you-know-what” at the start! Using the viola, Stumm seemed to get the best of two worlds, the extra weight and gravitas of the lower instrument combining with the rich lyrical warmth of her playing of the second theme. And she can “take on” silvery violin-like tones whenever she chooses, it seems, the instruments highest notes having a glistening quality not normally associated with a viola. As for the playing of Jian Liu, her keyboard partner, it scintillated during the vigorous passages and captured the romantic glow of the piano writing in the work’s poetic central section.

Remaining was the evening’s grandest utterance, Brahms’ Third Piano Quartet Op. 60, a work conveniently ignored, it seems to me, by those people who aligned themselves with the musical conservatives of that time, people filled with self-righteous horror at the idea, espoused by Liszt and Wagner, that music was actually “about” something – the doyen of conservative critics Eduard Hanslick led the charge, laying about him with a will at the “progressives” who dared to attach ideas or even “programmes” to the music they wrote. Yet the “darling” of the conservatives, Johannes Brahms, the “upholder of classical traditions and ideals” here produced a work which he himself aligned with a “programme”, going as far as suggesting to his publisher that he print the work accompanied by certain images which would further convey the music’s “meaning”! The silence from the conservatives was deafening!

Brahms, of course was known in his later years for his mordant wit, especially regarding his own music – calling his massive B-flat Piano Concerto “my little concerto with a teeny wisp of a scherzo”, for instance – but in the case of aligning his Op. 60 Piano Quintet with a set of images and a programme, there’s nothing to suggest that he wasn’t serious. Of course, in any such conflict the contradictions abound – and today most music-lovers have little difficulty with appreciation and enjoyment of works from both sides of the historic “divide”!

Stumm and Te Koki Trio gave a strong, “interlocked  ensemble” sound to the first movement of the work, the music’s contrasts characterised so very heartwarmingly, with frequent instances of tender, wistful music-making gradually building towards stormier interactions – the coda seemed to collapse, exhausted, at the movement’s end. A call-to-arms from the piano at the Scherzo’s beginning set in play some partly playful, partly trenchant energies, mischief mixed here with desperation – a rollicking ride with plenty of “glint”.

Inbal Meggido’s ‘cello sang its cantilena-like opening  of the slow movement with much poetry, matched by Martin Riseley’s violin, the music singing and surging throughout, the solos usually “supported” by lines from one or two others, the piano having its turn with both arco and pizz. accompaniments – I was reminded of Dvorak’s “structuring” of his late chamber work melodies, here, with self-conscious building-blocks here seeming more like living tree-trunks advancing the music’s cause.

But what a finale to follow! – agitated at the outset, with the piano anxious and restless, driving the strings onwards and upwards! – a brief moment of calm, and the music surged forward once again, towards a questioning, almost confused “development” section, here “laid bare” for us by the players, before the music’s “flight” aspect again took hold. The ensemble playing all-encompassing in its desperately energised excitement, until the piano’s majestically-sounded chordal utterances rang out like a hymn of defiance! One’s first reaction was to regret the two sharpish concluding chords at the end as an unnecessary convention, until one remembered the composer’s “head with a pistol to it” illustration-directive to his publisher!

After these exertions, it was fitting that we heard some music from Brahms’ great mentor Schumann, the slow movement from his single Piano Quartet, in a performance that kept on reminding me of Borodin, in its limpid, delicately-voiced way……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Illuminating, even sublime perfection in solo recital by cellist Lev Sivkov

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime Concerts at St Andrew’s

Lev Sivkov – solo cello (who played Barber’s cello concerto with Orchestra Wellington on Saturday 3 August)

Khachaturian: Sonata-Fantasia (1974)
Piatti: Caprice No 5 in A flat
Bach: Suite No 2 in D minor for solo cello. BWV 1008
Dutilleux: Three Strophes on the name of Sacher (1976)

St Andrews on The Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 7 August, 12:15 pm

Sadly, it is rare that major soloists with our professional orchestras are taken in hand by enterprising entrepreneurs and offered recitals around the country. Lev Sivkov is clearly in the hands of an enterprising manager in New Zealand who is making excellent use of him.

Having heard him last Friday with Orchestra Wellington playing Barber’s cello concerto, I was delighted to be handed a flyer about this recital in St Andrew’s lunchtime concert series.  It’s a time to note that these concerts are both free for the audience (though most drop a ‘koha’ in the box) and without a fee for the performer; the vital contributions of church and Marjan Waartenberg also go unrewarded.

The programme was changed from that advertised, to take account of the need to retune the cello’s two lower strings by a semitone for the Dutilleux piece. No rearrangement could have affected the pleasure flowing from the four pieces, three of which were unknown to virtually everyone.

His playing of Barber’s cello concerto prepared me for the distinction of his playing here, which was extraordinary in every respect: intonation more than perfect, an expressiveness that succeeded in being utterly satisfying and tasteful; asked to rank his playing on a scale to 1 to 10, I would suggest 11.

The Barber was certainly a taxing work though strangely not quite a masterpiece. This was a far better opportunity to watch and listen up close to music that was again just short of being undisputed classics, apart from the two movements from a Bach suite.

Khachaturian is not thought of as a chamber music composer, but this Sonata-Fantasia from late in his life, aged 70, showed that perhaps there’s a lot of other orchestral, chamber and other music that we are being deprived of.

It had real character, with sequences of chords and individual notes that were not commonplace and on second hearing would very likely take root in the mind as interesting melodies; even without a second hearing, the piece was coherent and arresting and commanded the audience’s rapt attention.

A Piatti Caprice
Then a piece by a once familiar cello virtuoso and composer, whose simpler pieces could be tackled by an average student such as your reviewer. This Caprice was not to be underestimated; the words ‘musical substance’ came to mind, its shape and melodic sense were conspicuous, and there were decorative elements, feathery flourishes that were far from mere pyrotechnics, though they would challenge all but a highly accomplished player.

Bach Suite No 2
Sivkov then came to Bach’s second solo cello suite, playing the Prelude and Allemande. It was a wonderfully elegant and thoughtful performance, the Prelude never for a moment merely a tricky exercise, became an illuminating, naturally-breathed, musically absorbing movement. I’ve never been so conscious of the break in the middle that resumed in a spirit that had suddenly become ethereal and other-worldly. He played the Allemande as if it was being created on the spot, with easy spontaneity and delight; never a hint of a result of long and thoughtful practice.

The Dutilleux piece, which as a reckless Francophile I’d never heard though I have made myself familiar with most of his music, reveals his characteristically complex and elusive writing. It was one of the pieces that Rostropovich asked twelve composers to write in honour of the 70th birthday of Paul Sacher, the famous and deeply inspiring Swiss music patron, using the letters of his name as the theme: Eb, A, C, B, E, D. The most famous work commissioned by Sacher was Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, and Dutilleux used a quote from it in the Three Strophes.

It seemed to present a multitude of technical devices that could easily be mistaken merely for showy avant-gardish cleverness. Technically, it sounded impossible, with endless multi-stringed harmonics that created fairylike effects, left hand pizzicato, requiring supernatural dexterity, all delivered in such perfection that one could imagine the composer being astonished that he’d written something that could be handled with such sublime delicacy and understanding, sounding as even he might have hardly conceived it.

It attracted a quite large and noisily appreciative audience. This concert is likely to go down as one of the most memorable in St Andrew’s year-long series; in fact, in all the scores of concerts in Wellington this year.

 

Morton Trio shines in a concert of variety and splendour at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
MORTON TRIO – Music by Kenneth Young, Szymanowski and Brahms

Arna Morton (violin) / Alex Morton (horn) / Liam Wooding (piano)

KENNETH YOUNG – Trio for horn, violin and piano (2007)
KAROL SZYMANOWSKI – Mythes for violin and piano Op.30
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Trio for horn, violin and piano Op.40

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 7th August, 2019

I’m sure that gruff old conservative Johannes Brahms would have been delighted had he known that the music for his Horn Trio would leap over both a whole century and continental and oceanic distances to figure, however fleetingly, as a delightful string of vigorous reminiscences in an Antipodean composer’s work for the same forces! Upon hearing the finale of Kenneth Young’s work at this concert I wondered whether he’d composed the piece especially for the Morton Trio to play in tandem with Brahms’ work on this occasion, though a glance at the programme indicated that the music was written as long ago as 2007. Still, it came up as freshly as new paint in the hands of this group, two of whose members, incidentally (Arna and Alex Morton), had been Young’s students while at the NZ School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington.

On the face of it a horn might seem an impossibly heroic, out-of-doors instrument for chamber music, inextricably associated with vigorous adventure rather than refined, intimate discourse – the sheer scale of the instrument’s potential for strength and power would pose an absorbing set of challenges for any composer wanting to set it alongside any chamber-like forces. Young’s writing didn’t shirk the instrument’s propensity for strength and vigour, while allowing the instrument another of its properties – a “spacious”, open-ended quality, further enhanced by “stopped” or muted notes, Tennyson’s “the horns of elfland faintly blowing”. In fact instruments such as horns
enable chamber music to break those “refined, intimate discourse” stereotypes, and accord the genre its full-blown stature and potential for expression.

Which is what Young’s work did so engagingly, the dialogues animating as the music progressed, the horn rasping in places, the violin responding trenchantly and the piano deciding to “wade in” – the toccata-like exchanges that ensued featuring each instrument at full stretch, expressing the sailent features of the ensemble’s character, before the music turned towards each instrument in turn. So, the violin commanded the stage with a cadenza-like sequence, featuring lovely double-stopped intervals, followed by the piano, its notes spacious and ambient, its mood relaxed and dreamy, inviting both its companions to respond in duet, the horn’s ear-catching stopped notes echoed by the violin, the piano scintillating impulses somewhere in between.

In its single movement, the music readily explored the contrasting moods and ambiences of the instrumental combinations, the music’s “character” swinging between attitudes in what seemed entirely “organic” rather than contrived ways, deliciously “jogtrotting” at one point,  working up enthusiasm to the point of abandonment at another (the horn sounding the alarm at the violin’s gypsy-like antics), then subsiding into further dreams, with the horn noble and distantly heroic once more, the violin responding with gentle, fragrant tones. Suddenly, there it was (Brahms himself might have snorted, “Ha! Any jackass can see that!” all over again!) – I shall, however, risk stating the obvious by registering the “there it was” as the music’s “reminiscing” of the German composer’s main theme in the finale of HIS Horn Trio, the eponymous instrument leading the way! The horn’s encouraging both violin and piano to rumbusticate freely helped vary the pace and mood with some more reflective material, before returning to the Brahmsian fragment, tossing it about with great glee and tremendous elan! What a life-enhancing work it proclaimed itself to be, and especially in these youthful hands!

One of the twentieth century’s chamber masterpieces, Karol Szymanowski’s three-movement work Mythes for violin and piano was played next by Arna Morton and Liam Wooding. IN three movements, the piece draws from its subject matter on Greek mythology, the writing for both instruments replete with complicated harmonies, complex articulations and light, delicate textures, shimmering and vibrant. Szymanowski himself said he had, along with the violinist Paweł Kochański, created with “Mythes” “a new style, new expression of violin-playing, a truly epoch-making thing”, everything “a complex musical expression of the inspiring beauty of the myth”. In the first myth ”The fountain of Arethusa”, we heard flowing waters as the music’s main lines of expression, a spring formed by the goddess Artemis out of the fleeing form of the nymph Arethusa, rescuing her from the advances of the river-god Alpheus.

Rippling textures from the piano activated the stream waters, the violin’s sinuous and silken lines disturbed by the water’s agitations, both instruments so “focused” on their own sound-worlds, yet alchemically ‘entwined” – haunting harmonics from the violin, floating over the piano’s rippling explorations, the delicacies from both instruments building into agitations, the playing here so very visceral and involving! We sensed the effect of the nymph’s transformation, as the spring waters seemed to melt into the impulsive flowing of the whole, the violinist’s extraordinary range of textures and colours breathing more freely over the watery ambiences at the end.

The second myth depicted the unfortunate Narcissus, a full-throated opening from both players, the piano almost Ravelian and bluesy-sounding, the violin radiant, wonderful, long-breathed lines! The double-stopped passages suggested watery reflection as the unfortunate youth caught sight of his own image, the excitement and interest growing, the ecstasy here palpable, the violin surging, buoyed up by the piano’s weight and tone! The double-stopping returned, somewhat eerily, like a “fixed” state holding us in thrall, the music’s ending poised, beautiful and disturbingly static.

Angular and vigorous exchanges marked the opening of the third piece, a sense at once of urgency and abandonment, in the composer’s depiction of the god Pan chasing the nymph-like Dryads about the woodland – agitated figurations from the violinist, fleet-fingered scamperings from the pianist, building up to a tremendous, swirling climax – terrific playing! And what a change overtook the scenario with the evocation of Pan’s flute, here so dreamily conjured up by violin harmonics and gentle, limpid piano sounds, everything mesmerised by the god’s playing. Then, what amazingly quixotic changes of mood and colour in the music, over the final section! – at the very end Pan’s pipes again hold everybody in thrall, until with almost conjurer-like guile, the god and his playmates vanish! A stunning achievement, I thought,  from these two performers!

Back came all three players for Brahms’ Horn Trio, a work written by the composer to commemorate the death of his mother in 1865. Brahms had actually played the horn in his youth, so was well-versed in the instrument’s poetic, “woodland-evocation” qualities, much in evidence in this work’s opening movement. The opening idea, begin by the violin is echoed most evocatively by the horn, a more agitated section “driven” by the piano providing a telling contrast to the lyricism of the work’s opening – these two different sections dominate the movement, strongly underlining the music’s elegiac quality, as much by the poetry of the playing here, as by the characterisation of the quicker, more troubled music.  In the Scherzo which followed we enjoyed the players’ energies, the rhythmic angularities brought out for all they were worth, the teamwork between the three players most exhilarating to watch and listen to – the Trio gave us a tender, nostalgic contrast, rhapsodic in feeling and warm-hearted in effect, throwing into relief the elan and buoyancy of the playing in the scherzo’s return.

Sombre, mournfully-sounded piano chordings began the deeply-felt strains of the Adagio movement, the instruments sounding a gently-voiced lament, the horn then beginning a ritualised contrapuntal passage which the other instruments joined – as the music gradually intensified, the music’s pace quickened and agitated the music’s surfaces before subsiding almost as quickly, leading  us back to calmer, more tranquil realms. Straightaway, the finale gathered us up irresistibly and danced us along its exhilarating, sometimes madcap course – the group’s rhythmic zest and tremendous thrust carried the day right into and through the various sequences, the horn having its moments of unfettered “whoopery”, while playing its part in the music’s overall “give and take”, and helping to give this young ensemble the distinction of being a force to be reckoned with.

Innovative, adventurous, AND intensely musical!! – “Pictures” with Orchestra Wellington and Marc Taddei

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Music by Debussy, Barber, Alex Taylor, Musorgsky

CLAUDE DEBUSSY – L’Isle Joyeuse (orchestrated Bernardino Molinari)
SAMUEL BARBER – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra 1945
ALEX TAYLOR- Assemblage (robotic incarnation by Simon Ingram)
MODEST MUSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated Maurice Ravel)

(Images accompanying Musorgsky’s “Pictures” courtesy of Tony Mackle
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa)

Lev Sivkov (‘cello)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 2nd August 2019

Such a cornucopia of sound, image and incident, with projected images and robotic contraptions playing an integral part in the proceedings! One certainly sensed that something out of the ordinary was being enacted here in the Michael Fowler Centre, although it must be said that, right from the very beginning, in the foyers outside the auditorium was that familiar “buzz” of expectation which we’ve come to expect accompanying Orchestra Wellington concerts – and then, inside, was the overwhelming impression of a full-to-bursting hall of people instantly making for a kind of frisson of anticipation entirely its own. What a tribute to the work of the orchestra, along with its conductor and management over recent times!

True to form, there was even an unchartered surprise in store for us throughout the evening, conductor Marc Taddei at one point enjoining his enthralled audience to assist in the making of a “virtual reality” cyber-game which involved a player conducting an orchestra, and, in response to this receiving appropriately adulatory, lukewarm or downright derisive audience reactions to her/his efforts. What fun we all had, prompted by Taddei, simulating by turns a few seconds of each of these responses, all duly recorded!

All of it certainly added up to a distinctively “different” evening with an orchestra – and if some of the more experimental happenings were received with as much bemusement and bewilderment as appreciation, it was all part of the experience. Some of these “experiments” I do admit I found it difficult to respond to without sounding impossibly fogey-ish, but, buoyed along by the spirit of adventure and enterprise that marked the whole, I thought it important to set down a reaction as a mark of respect for people’s efforts, if nothing else. I should say, before going on, that musically, I found the evening an enthralling experience – even the Samuel Barber concerto on this occasion, which has in the past never done much for me.

The concert began with Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse though here, of course, in a version orchestrated by the composer’s friend the Italian conductor Bernardino Molinari. The latter used a large orchestra, a measure of the power of Debussy’s original solo piano evocation, which was inspired directly by a painting by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, L’embarquement pour Cythère (The departure for Cythère), depicting a group of revellers leaving for the island associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It was around this time that Debussy was “escaping” with his lover, Emma Bardac, to the island of Jersey, hence the music’s sensuality and excitement. We were shown Watteau’s painting on a screen above the orchestra during the performance, the image perhaps needing one of those gradually “closing in” views during the music for some of the central detail to involve us more immediately – but nevertheless, a nice idea.

Beginning with lovely, engagingly throaty wind-gurglings, everything delicately energised and transparently coloured, the music danced its way along, the orchestral timbres allowing a more obviously visceral element to the music, but keeping to the fore a constantly-turning, kaleidoscopic quality, the winds nimble and atmospheric, and the brass magically sonorous. The strings took full advantage of their thematic moments of romantic warmth, the whole gradually building up the excitement with surging “La Mer-ish” moments, then bursting forth with a full panoply of orchestral splendour!

After this, Samuel Barber’s “Cello Concerto seemed at first like dried biscuit following a sumptuous dessert, until one got use to the composer’s almost self-consciously fragmented manner in dealing with his themes, the first movement of the work mercilessly “worrying” its material for much of the time. I did think, though, that the playing of Lev Sivkov, the soloist was most impressive. The slow movement, however, converted me to the cause more than anything, a kind of measured Sicilienne, featuring beautiful work from the soloist and woodwind players alike, the oboe singing with the solo ‘cello in a dance-like processional, with all the winds distinguishing themselves in gorgeous outpourings, becoming increasingly fraught with emotion as the music proceeded – deeply moving in effect!

The finale’s full orchestral opening approached a “cry of pain” in effect, though the music quickly moved into gear, crackling with angular energies, Sivkov bringing off a number of fiendish-looking runs the length of the fingerboard, the orchestra by turns muttering and “shouting” the main theme insistently. A seesawing orchestral ostinato built up intensity like an approaching juggernaut, before allowing the ‘cello a little declamatory space, though there was no let-up in the orchestra’s determinedly-renewed onslaught, save for an impassioned solo from the ‘cello that did seem to gain some ambient empathy. A quirky triplet rhythm, another impassioned solo, and orchestra and cellist swiftly dealt the music its coup de grace-like final gesture!

Alex Taylor’s piece Assemblage came inextricably linked with visual artist Simon Ingram’s “autonomous painting robot”, its various manifestations mightily intriguing all and sundry! I wasn’t quite prepared for the “austerity”, let alone the somewhat static nature of the visual result, as the machine took its time to produce single lines, curves, arcs, in tandem with the musical composition. In this particular case the actual relationship between visual artist and composer, machine and music, was, as Alex Taylor explained in his SOUNZ interview, not dissimilar to any of the pictures/music relationship in the Musorgsky work, except that the “source material” for the composer (the machine and its visual creation) was , as he put it “alive, and an active part of the piece”.

As a listener/observer, one had to accept that the experience was “what it was” in terms of having to take in (a) the robot’s workings, (b) the picture that was being crafted by the machine as prompted by its operator, and (c) the music. It was all too much for this “bear of little brain” at a first encounter, my instincts (as with the Musorgsky work that followed, which was “inundated” with visual images) being to focus my attentions towards the music, though the distractions in this case produced more of a bewildered response than anything else, rather like the sailor in AA Milne’s poem from “Now We Are Six” who “never could think which he ought to do first”.

As for the music, orchestral sounds mingling with amplified robotic workings, the result was nothing if not inventive, beginning with low, sinister Fafner-like growls (I had not long ago listened to Wagner’s “Siegfried!), then suggesting some kind of inter-planetary lift-off, coinciding with the robot’s workings and its resulting arc-like markings being shown, enlarged, on the screen. We heard a series of excitable crescendi with differently-scored scintillations punctuating the flow, the effect at times filmic and transcending the robotic workings in terms of imagery suggested, while in other places generating toccata-like frenzies of motoric excitement.

After subsequently gathering its energies for a “birth-pangs” series of mighty efforts, and dragging something from the pupa – with the strings supporting a nobly heroic theme on the brass,  the music triumphantly reached a kind of “breaking free” threshold, suggesting open spaces and wide-eyed wonderment at some kind of journey’s end, the robot’s peregrinations having produced an angular assemblage of circles, as enigmatic as the machine’s actual workings!

Our “virtual reality audience” collaborations having then been mooted and satisfactorily executed, it was time for the evening’s culmination – a performance of Modest Musorgsky’s most famous undertaking, but one with a difference. In keeping with the evening’s focus upon music’s powers of “visualisation”, we were not only given French composer Maurice Ravel’s justly-celebrated orchestral transcription of Musorgsky’s original work for piano solo, but were shown a series of artworks from the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa to accompany the music, images selected to “match the categories of castles, tombs, witches and unhatched chicks”, as the programme note put it.

I wanted this idea to work, as it seemed such an exciting and out-of-the-ordinary thing to do – but as soon as I got the accompanying insert containing what seemed to me to be a huge number of images, I felt misgivings – surely all of this was far too much to “load into” a piece of music whose original conception was of pieces written in response to just ONE single image for each? Straightaway, the idea of showing different images of “people walking about in a variety of contexts” to illustrate the composer’s originally unifying and binding intention seemed to me damagingly discursive and superficial. Where were these people all going, and for what purposes? What was the plan?

In effect, the exercise for me became more frustrating than fulfilling – I felt there were too many vaguely conceptualised images, with most in any case having detailings that were impossible to discern properly at that distance. Occasionally one popped up which was arresting, and whose impact stayed with me – an example was the Waharoa, or gateway, from the Te Papa collection,  something whose power and gravitas could have easily maintained its stunning impact right throughout the playing of the work’s final ”Great gate at Kiev”. The problem of detail could have also been better addressed by having “close-ups” (detail!) from the picture or image selected. Musorgsky would have expected audiences to “enter the world” of each of his specific musical images during their individual courses – no chance of that was possible, here, unless one shut one’s eyes, or focused primarily on the music.

Which was what I eventually did, and which course brought forth such riches! – for, irony of ironies, this performance by Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington was one of the finest, most focused, exquisitely-detailed and richly-characterised I’ve ever experienced. Here was beautifully deep and rich brass-playing, characterfully nimble and artfully-textured winds, string-sounds of every conceivable hue and colour, both rich and delicate, (the players’ eerie pianissimi in “With the dead in a dead language” simply unearthly!), and everything from the deepest and most sonorous percussion to the lightest and most delicate detail. Individual touches such as the saxophone in “the Old Castle” and the tuba in “Bydlo” were vividly projected, the players deserving their own special accolades at the performance’s end, as did, from a justly appreciative audience, the whole orchestra and its conductor!

Voices of the World – Stroma’s ambient “girdle round about the earth”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
VOICES OF THE WORLD

Works by Celeste Oram, John Psathas, Luciano Berio. Julia Wolfe, Jack Body, Anna Clyne

CELESTE ORAM – An Overture (1807, rev. 2018, 2019)
(devised by Celeste Oram, Rob Thorne (taonga puoro), Ludwig van Beethoven and Stroma Ensemble, with Keir Gogwilt, violin, and Matthew Allison, trombone)

JACK BODY – “Bouyi” (from “Yunnan”2008)
Anna Van der Zee, Emma Baron (violins), Andrew Thomson (viola),Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

ANNA CLYNE – A Wonderful Day (2013)
Patrick Barry (bass clarinet), Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Sarah Watkins (piano),
Callum Allardice (guitar), Ken Ichinose (‘cello), Alexander Gunchenko (double-bass)

JULIA WOLFE – Reeling (2012)
Patrick Barry (clarinet), Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Sarah Watkins (piano), Callum Allardice (guitar), Ken Ichinose )’cello), Alexander Gubchenko (double-bass)

JOHN PSATHAS – Irirangi (Meditation) 2019
Alistair Fraser (taonga puoro), Bridget Douglas (flute)

LUCIANO BERIO – Folk Songs 1964
Bianca Andrew (soprano), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Michelle Velvin (harp), Thomas Guldborg/Sam Rich (percussion), Andrew Thomson (viola), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Thursday 1st August, 2019

Every Stroma concert I’ve had the good fortune to attend has pushed back my frontiers regarding what I’d thought of as viable and coherent musical expression, and by use of techniques and/or media that I might have previously regarded somewhat removed from “musical” realms. This “giving voice” to unconventional objects and means could be seen as taking one’s listening back to a time when music existed only as natural sounds which would have then slowly been developed alongside speech as a kind of language, the sounds then imitated by whatever objects came to hand, and which could in some cases be manipulated and varied for different results and purposes.

This latest Stroma presentation “Voices of the World” featured a couple of items which explored the idea of these pure, primitive sounds making their way into and through various human cultures and being gradually shaped for descriptive or expressive purposes. The concert’s first item was one of these, a new, intensely collegial work-in-progress called Overture 1807, rev.2018, rev.2019 (an impressive stand-alone chronology of connection in itself!). The work was the brainchild of NZ-born California-based composer Celeste Oram, an overture to a projected opera-in-progress whose material was “collectively devised and improvised” by a whole host of performer thus far in the work’s life, and included the playing of Rob Thorne, a noted exponent of taonga puoro, and material from 18th Century Vienna (though the overture as heard here extensively quoted Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture, a work from the early 19th Century).

Stroma’s programme note most illuminatingly told of one Georg Forster (1754-94), who, as a teenager, accompanied his father, a naturalist and scientist, on the voyage with Captain James Cook on the HMS Resolution between 1772 and 1775, visiting many South Seas Island places including New Zealand. As well as displaying sophisticated ethnographical skills in analysing different Polynesian Societies, the young Forster was a talented essayist whose book A Voyage around the World, published in 1777, earned him great fame as it uniquely combined factual and reliable data with colourful descriptions and observations of the different peoples and their customs, even including notated and translated  Polynesian songs. Goethe, Wieland, and even Beethoven were all said to have read some of Forster’s work, one commentator in the 1930s even suggesting that the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was inspired by a Maori chant!

By way of relating  the work of a great composer to a host of creative impulses that might have preceded it, and even “prepared its way” in generic forms, Celeste Oram chose the composer’s “Coriolan” Overture as the fulcrum around which were encircled various sounds and gesturings instigated by the taonga puoro playing of Rob Thorne – I found this experience a kind of “turned on one’s head” happening, the haunting tones, textures and timbres of the older instruments (including stones) “giving birth” as it were to the impulses that became the Beethoven Overture, by helping create the surrounding agglomerated ambiences. So this wasn’t “deconstructed” Beethoven, but rather “inseminated” (is there a unisex expression for this?) thought, impulse and gesture, all given musical and theatrical expression. Rob Thorne’s taonga puoro evocations of an ancient “being” instigating processes of creativity which, rather than self-consciouslessly wrought had a kind of “uncovered” aspect, made discernable by creative awareness, and leading towards the measures of (here) oddly-syncopated Beethoven that we knew so well, though underlining for us at the piece’s end the infinite patience of the sources of these tones and impulses in returning our sensibilities to the place of origin, though, of course, never to be quite the same again.

Each one of the concert’s next three pieces featured pre-recorded human voices (a duet and two solos) given a kind of freshly-wrought reactive ambience, as likely to contrast with as complement the singers’ sounds. These were “field” recordings, caught on the wing, as it were, and thus requiring from the instrumentalists a similar kind of spontaneity of utterance, an “entering into” the world of the vocalisings in both a physical and a spiritual sense. Jack Body’s Bouyi was something of a “rogue entry” into a catalogue of field recordings from Yunnan province in China, this being actually from Guizhou, a neighbouring province. It featured the voices of two Bouyi women duetting, though no translation was provided.

Two violins began softly and folkishly, evoking a spacious kind of serenity, enlivened by the women’s voices, to which the viola and ‘cello responded – the instruments gave the impression of “listening” to the voices, the instrumental harmonisings tender, sensitive and ambient, contrasted with the voices’ elegant earthiness. The instruments occasionally copied the voices’ interval of a second in places, but always discreetly and resonantly – it all gave an impression of a precious moment in time caught on the wing, to be enjoyed and marvelled at in times to come.

The ambient contrast between this and a similar kind of undertaking by British composer Anna Clyne couldn’t have been more marked, the recording being of an elderly man in a Chicago Street singing and tapping his walking-cane as he walked down the city’s “Magnificent Mile”. Stroma’s resident conductor Hamish McKeich magically appeared to direct this piece which was titled A Wonderful Day. The man’s voice made a great subject – very forthright, his “feeling” very emotional and overt, both in speech and song, the instrumental accompaniments gently “played with” the singer, before cranking the delivery up into a kind of gospel hymn! The piano and percussion helped to “open up” the ambiences, the double-tracking of song and commentary giving the performance a kind of resonance, riding triumphantly atop the traffic noise – a tremendously involving and great-hearted realization, the first of a collection of electro-acoustic recordings of street noises entitled “Chicago Street Portraits”.

American composer Julia Wolfe’s work Reeling used a recording of a French-Canadian singer who possessed an extremely rhythmic and lively vocal style, one generating tremendous momentum from the outset – the instrumentalists took up the vocalised rhythms firstly with fingers and feet, gradually bringing in clarinet, piano, cello and guitar, and finally the double-bass – the “ditty” was challengingly angular and syncopated in rhythm, sounding very street-wise, and clinching the “interactive” illusion when the percussion joined in with what seemed like proper “jamming”. The instruments were allowed a few measures without the singer, keeping the energy levels primed, the players matching the singer’s exuberance with gestures like the clarinet’s “transported” bird-calls sounded at the height of the tumult, and the singer then concluding with a flourish of strung-together cadences almost vertiginous in effect! Fabulous!

One would expect John Psathas’s music to easily replicate such Dionysian exuberances – but here was the composer of View from Olympus exploring a completely different realm of expression, one concerned with hidden, almost metaphysical properties of sounds and music, and evocations of such sounds. Psathas used the word “Irirangi” as a title for his piece, meaning a “faint voice”, a kind of “aspiration” produced by what he called a “reaching out” of realms towards other realms, but equating awareness of this phenomenon with the idea of “meditation”, a listening for these hidden voices (shades, to my surprise, of Robert Schumann’s proclaimed “one soft note for he who listens secretly” in his solo piano work Fantasie in C Major of 1839). As with the concert’s opening “Overture”, the piece here began with sounds equating more to the natural than to the “human” world via recordings of insects, birdsong, and rain, along with taonga puoro  played by Alistair Fraser, to which Bridget Douglas’s flute responded at first with simple, descending figurations, which gradually took on the character of something like an Aeolian harp, with as much breath as tone – all of these delicacies and subtleties attuned and honed our listening sensibilities in a way the composer undoubtedly meant with the word “meditation”, bringing into play the phenomena of normally inanimate objects such as stones being given the capacity to sound and “speak”, and “suggest” to the flute that it absorb these same sounds and “echo” them as the “faint voice” or “irirangi”. Haunting and moving……

As most people know, Luciano Berio wrote his Folk-Songs for the singer Cathy Berberian, to whom he was married. First performed in 1964, these are arrangements of folk songs and melodies from various parts of the world, and scored at that time for voice, flute/piccolo, clarinet, harp, viola, cello and percussion (Berio made an orchestral arrangement  in 1973). He’d set two of the songs, “La donna ideale” and “Ballo” much earlier (part of a student work from 1947 “Tre canzoni popolari”), before reworking them for the later collection. One presumes that the composer’s professed “profound uneasiness” when listening to piano-accompanied popular songs stemmed from his dislike of what he regarded as some kind of “gentrification” of the music, and that his scoring for a chamber ensemble to accompany the singer was meant to bring listeners closer to what he called “the expressive and cultural roots of each song”. Certainly the individuality of each setting is sharply expressed by the instrumentation,  more so than could a piano accompaniment alone provide – though it’s worth remembering that, often, “less is more” in these matters, and that we all (the composer himself included) “hear” things differently…….

As much as I would like to pleasurably dwell on soprano Bianca Andrew’s smilingly-voiced and vividly-characterised realisations of each one of these songs, I must hold myself in check and report merely that she seemed to me to take us right into the ambient realm of each song’s idiosyncratic world – the work of an artist with a gift for direct communication. I never, alas, heard soprano Victoria de los Angeles “live”, but a good friend of mine who did would always recall that singer’s ability to communicate a kind of “personalized” warmth of utterance, as if performing for each individual listener alone – throughout these songs I felt a similar directness of giving from this singer, an invitation to “share” the words and the music, with each item a delightfully individualized experience.

The first two songs aren’t actual folk-songs, but were composed by a Kentucky song-writer, John Jacob Niles – in “Black, black, black” the viola introduced the song, then whispered an accompaniment, before “answering” the singer after the first voice, together with the harp, everything ambient and lovely – “I wonder as I wander” was more processional, like a harp-accompanied carol, the winds contributing gently-floating harmonies, with flute and clarinet impulsively contributing some duetting bird-song! The Armenian “Loosin yelav” featured liquid harp notes and a gentle clarinet descant to the voice, concluding with a flurry of wind notes as the moon was chased into the clouds! – after which the French “Rossignolet du bois” gently told of a nightingale instructing a lover how to woo a sweetheart, voice, harp, clarinet and gentle percussive effects used here to persuasive effect.

What a contrast with the Sicilian “A la feminisca”! – at once herioc and dangerous seafaring sounds, the vocal line declamatory, in places low and trenchant, the accompaniments strident, but concluding with some lullabic assurances! The two Italian songs, “La donna ideale” and “Ballo” are both droll philosophical pronouncements concerning love, the former lyrical, the second energetic, with fantastic instrumental playing and a soaring vocal line rounding up the “whirling dervish-like” energies. More darkness with “Motettu de tristura” from Sardinia, plaintive vocal utterances, with deep, resonant chords, the flute and percussion piquant and pleading – far better to be in the Auvergne, unhappily married or no, as the case may be, in the first song! – the light, pastoral atmosphere here seeming somewhat at odds with the querulous subject-matter (Ironic as only the French can be, perhaps!) With the second Auvergne song we enjoyed the contrast between the viola’s and cello’s grim, sombre soundings, and the quasi-cautionary tale aspect of the singer’s story, the voice arched upwards so freely and expressively, the harp at the end adding a telling, liquidly-flowing  postscript.

As for the concluding Azerbaijan song, with the “untranslatable” words, here it swept along with plenty of elan, the musicians “telling” its unmistakably focused story without need of any translation, the discourse filled with glint, energy, mischief and scandalous revelation, finishing with a slate-cleansing shout, and metaphorically bringing the house down! –  the evening a triumph for Stroma’s avowed goal of engagement of its audiences with new music and new ideas, via performances of unfailing interest and brilliance.

 

 

Emotion-laden concert an appropriate response to the remembrance of the Holocaust

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Music of Remembrance

Compositions by Laurence Sherr

Elegy and Vision (1993)
Flame Language (2008)
Khayele’s Waltz (2018)
Sonata for Cello and Piano – Mir zaynen do! (2014)

Adam Concert Room, New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington

Tuesday 30 July 2019, 7 pm

Laurence Sherr is Composer-in-Residence and Professor of Music at Kennesaw State University, Georgia. He is a prolific and versatile composer. The son of a couple who escaped Poland just before the outbreak of the Second World War and settled in the United States, he has a strong interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust education. He lectures all over the world on Holocaust remembrance music and first came to Wellington for the 2014 Conference on Suppressed Music at Victoria University of Wellington. His compositions range from the avant-garde to the accessible, and include new timbres, spatiality, nature, and Judaic music. He is especially interested in music as a mode of resistance and a means for survival.

The first work on the programme was Elegy and Vision, a work for solo cello. Sherr wrote it in memory of his brother who died young. It employs cantorial lamentations used in Jewish memorial prayers. Like Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, a transcription of the memorial prayer on the Day of Atonement, the music suits the deep mournful passages on the cello. The repeated phrases, the sounds of crying, the high notes evoke heart-breaking sorrow. Some of the music had the quality of improvisation, but there was also a note of rebellion, with a dramatic passage ending with plucked strings and harsh dissonance. Inbal Megiddo played with great sensitivity and a beautiful rich tone.

The next piece, Flame Language, was performed by Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano), Deborah Rawson (clarinet), Inbal Megiddo (cello), Jian Liu (piano), and Leonard Sakofsy (percussion), conducted by Donald Maurice. This is an unusual combination of instruments with the percussionist moving from one set of percussion instruments to another and adding colourful sounds to the ensemble. The song is a setting of a poem by the Jewish Nobel Prize winning poet, Nelly Sachs, who found sanctuary in Sweden during the period of the Holocaust. The poem, ‘The Candle that I have Lit For You’ comes from a collection of poems, Prayer for the Dead Bridegroom. Although these poems are about the Holocaust, written in Sweden about friends and relatives who were left behind and died in Poland, they are also about universal suffering. The music opens with an extended introduction using the particular tones of each instrument, the clarinet plays Jewish modal patterns, then the mezzo-soprano comes in with a haunting melodic line. Margaret Medlyn sang this beautifully. The various instruments explore the components of the musical theme. It is an interesting work that is hard to place in the context of contemporary music.

Khayele’s Waltz was based on a song written by a fifteen year old girl in the ghetto. It is written for an unusual combination of two instruments: a clarinet, played by Deborah Rawson, and cello, played by Inbal Megiddo. It makes use of a well known Yiddish melody, but set to a dissonant duet capturing the disturbing memory of the period. The cello and the clarinet echo each other, but out of sync, creating uneasy tension.

The final work, the longest, was the Sonata for Cello and Piano, played by Inbal Megiddo and Jian Liu. It attempts to deliberately tell the story of the Holocaust as an act of defiance, resistance and hope of survival. Sherr uses five well known songs embedded in the work, a song associated with resistance in the Vilna ghetto, ‘El Mo V’Rahamim’, the Jewish memorial prayer, sung notably by Cantor Shlomo Katz, spared on the edge of a mass grave from execution when he was allowed to sing this for those who had been killed, and the final movement, a set of eight variations on the Jewish Partisan song Mir Zaynen Do. This song was inspired by the news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the words set to the melody from a pre-war Soviet film. It became one of the chief anthems of Holocaust survivors. The words are:

“Never say that you have reached the very end,
When leaden skies a bitter future may portend;
For sure the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive,
And our marching step will thunder: we survive!”

These were very meaningful words not only for those who survived the Holocaust, but also for young Zionists who saw Israel as a shield against future threats to Jews. It is an impressive and difficult work for the cello, but it is weighted by too much history. Incorporating emotionally laden themes in a piece of music presents special problems. Tchaikovsky did it in the 1812 Overture, Beethoven did it in the Battle Symphony, but these themes were not the substance of the music. In Sherr’s Cello Sonata it was impossible to separate the musical content from the emotion that the contemplation of history involved. Having said this, many in the audience were greatly moved by this long difficult piece, which was brilliantly played by Jian Liu and Inbal Megiddo.

It was an emotionally laden concert, and perhaps this moving reaction is the appropriate response to the remembrance of the Holocaust. It is to the great credit of the New Zealand School of Music that it has staff from different corners of the world capable of preparing, playing and recording this music. All the players participating in this concert deserve our accolade.

The best drawn from Wellington Youth Orchestra in taxing programme under Donald Armstrong

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Wellington Youth Orchestra (WYO)
Guest conductor – Donald Armstrong

Dukas: Fanfare to precede La Péri
Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48
Weill: Little Threepenny Music (Kleine Dreigroschenmusik)
Enescu: Rhapsody No. 1 in A major

St Andrews on The Terrace

Sunday 28 July 2019, 7 pm

The Wellington Youth Orchestra is the only full-size symphony orchestra for young players in Wellington. The ages of the members range from 25 to 13. They all have to go through a rigorous audition to join. The orchestra has an important place in the Wellington musical scene, not only for the varied and interesting programmes it offers, but because it is a stepping stone for young people who aspire to be professional musicians. A number of its alumni now study overseas or are members of professional orchestras. These include Gemma New, who is now carving out a successful career as a conductor in Canada and the US. In an interview she talked about the sheer pleasure of being part of an orchestra and its sound produced through the cooperation of a large team. This pleasure radiated from more than 60 young musicians who participated in this concert. The programme was designed for orchestral training as much as for its musical interest.

The concert opened with a Fanfare to precede Dukas’ ballet La Péri. Dukas is now mainly remembered for his Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but in his time he was a greatly respected teacher and composer. He was extremely critical of his own music and destroyed most of his works, which almost included La Péri. The ballet is now largely forgotten, but its magnificent fanfare which was originally used as the opener for the ballet is still enjoyed. It was played by the full brass section. Getting an ensemble of brass players to play with the subtlety and clarity that is demanded in an orchestra is a challenge to which these players responded ably. It was a grand piece that made the various brass instrumentalists listen to each other and make their sounds blend.

Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings was the string section’s opportunity to shine. The gorgeous rich string sound reverberated in the friendly acoustics of the church. The title and the structure of this work paid homage to Mozart and 18th century divertimento music, but Tchaikovsky renders these in his own Russian late 19th century idiom. The work is in the traditional four movements, ‘ I Pezzo in forma di Sonatina’, ‘Waltzer’, ‘Élégie’, and ‘Finale’. The first movement is a beautiful rich chorale scored for the whole orchestra with the cellos playing lots of fast notes underneath a slower moving passage in the upper strings. The cellos came through with an opulent sound, while the upper strings played the melody with a rich silky tone. The second movement, the Waltz, takes the place of the 18th century minuet. It is the best known part of the work, often played on its own. The third movement is lyrical, elegiac, with a hint of Tchaikovsky’s other worldly fairy tale like music. The final movement goes from a subdued opening based on a Russian theme to a vibrant section of Russian dance sequence. The orchestra played with clear precision and confidence, undaunted by the difficult filigree passages of this substantial symphonic work.

The brass and the strings having had their turn to shine, it was the turn of the winds and percussion to display their skills in Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music. The cultural gulf between the Berlin of the 1920s and Wellington of 2019 is huge, but the group of eight woodwind, four brass, piano, banjo and guitar, and percussion managed to capture the cynical, decadent feel of the popular themes from the Threepenny Opera, all tinged with parody. It is a difficult work with all the players exposed in solo parts. Credit to the whole team for tackling this seemingly light but technically difficult piece. It is very enjoyable music.

The whole orchestra came together for the final work, Enescu’s Rhapsody No. 1. This is an early work, based on popular dance tunes and songs of the time. It uses Romanian dance rhythms that get faster and faster until they get to a quite dizzying speed. It is ebullient, and outgoing, with none of the barbaric quality of the music of his contemporary, Bartók, who also explored the music of Romania. A clarinet, introduces the theme song that is gradually taken up by the whole orchestra. It is exuberant music and the large orchestra in full flight playing these wild gypsy rhythms was a joy to behold.

For an encore the orchestra played Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance from his ballet Gayane. It is a rumbustious, energetic piece, very appropriate for this concert by young musicians to end on.

Donald Armstrong is in appearance modest, self-effacing, but as Associate Concert Master of the NZSO, and vastly experienced conductor of various ensembles, he knew how to get the best from his players. He allowed them to play with confidence, gave them space, air, and freedom to express themselves. He let them play with a bold sound, yet still playing with discipline.

The Wellington Youth Orchestra is a great asset to the city. Such a concert augurs well for the city’s musical future.

The next concert of the WYO is on Sunday, 5 October.

The programme will include Saint-Saëns, Bruch and Glazunov.

 

 

Warming our hearts in mid-winter – Cantoris directed by Thomas Nikora

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cantoris Choir presents:
A MID-WINTER’S NIGHT
Music by Eric Whitacre, Morgan Andrew-King, Samuel Berkahn, Thomas Nikora, Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven and Josef Haydn

ERIC WHITACRE – Sleep / The Seal Lullaby / Lux Aurumque
MORGAN-ANDREW KING – River of Song
SAMUEL BERKAHN – With Ships the Sea was Sprinkled
ROBERT SCHUMANN – The Two Grenadiers
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Song of the Flea
JOSEF HAYDN – Cello Concerto in C Major (Ist Mvt.)
THOMAS NIKORA – Mass in E Minor

Barbara Paterson (soprano)
Morgan-Andrew King (baritone)
Samuel Berkahn (‘cello)
Liam Furey (piano)
Diana Muggleston (violin)
Thomas Nikora (piano and conductor)
Cantoris Choir

St.Mark’s Chapel, St. Mark’s Church School,
Wellington

Saturday 27th July 2019

This was the kind of programme whose content and presentation couldn’t have done a better job of warming the cockles of both audience hearts and sensibilities, having already drawn our attention via the concert’s title to the evening’s delightful and characteristic seasonal ambiences. Choral items naturally enough made up the lion’s share of the presentations, but by way of contrast and variety we heard two songs for baritone with piano, and a piano-accompanied movement from a Haydn ‘Cello Concerto . Amazingly, too, we were given, during the course of the concert, no less than three (presumably world) premieres of works all written by composer/performers associated with Cantoris Choir, two of the singers and the choir’s conductor. It was all in line with an overall warmth of utterance that suggested “living music”, as if we were at something like a Bach family get-together, with various members coming forward as both creators and performers.

The  work of American composer Eric Whitacre has figured prominently of late in choral concerts worldwide, his range of compositions catering for professional and amateur groups alike. Here we had three of his works, each of  which illustrated both the music’s attractive craftsmanship and ready accessibility as regards performers and audiences. I should have liked to have heard Whitacre’s original setting of Robert Frost’s words from his poem “Stopping by Woods of a Snowy Evening” for his “Sleep” (the composer was denied publishing rights for his work by the poet’s estate, and new words for the setting had to be substituted!), but the alternative text seemed just as evocative for Whitacre’s purposes – the final word “sleep” (shared by the original Frost poem) made a haunting conclusion to a finely-crafted, sonorous performance by the choir.

I recently encountered Morgan-Andrew King on the operatic stage in the NZSM production at the Hannah Playhouse of Puccini’s one-acter Gianni Schicchi (playing the part of one of the avaricious relatives awaiting the death of a would-be benefactor), so was, naturally enough, intrigued to find that he composed as well as performed – his work  River of Song was inspired, he told us in a spoken introduction by the Waikato River, the writing cleverly evoking the movement of water, the piece’s wordless opening  conjuring up a multitude of impulses, currents and streamlets whose lines coalesced in rich harmonic surges that expanded warmly at climaxes, everything truly suggesting that the composer “knew” the music’s subject well.

Another Eric Whitacre piece The Seal Lullaby readily “sounded” its name, the story of the piece’s genesis and history adding to its piquancy – a most affecting lullaby, with a beautiful piano accompaniment. The piece’s wordless sequences took on a “living instrumental” quality, enhanced by the choir’s gorgeously-voiced tunings – lovely stuff!  As a comparison, Lux Aurumque, the piece that followed, by the same composer, had a far more “international” quality, a “sheen” whose quality impressed for different reasons to the Seal Lullaby. At the piece’s end the choir managed some exquisite harmonisings set against held notes.

Samuel Berkahn brought a breath of bracing air to the proceedings with his assertion that his music would, after Eric Whitacre’s, “wake everybody up!”. His piece, beginning with a catchy “waltz-trot” kind of rhythm, was named with words of Wordsworth’s, and set melodic lines to angular piano accompaniments, the voices teetering on the edges of fugues throughout their exchanges, Berkahn hinting tongue-in-cheek at his recent interest in Renaissance madrigals and baroque polyphony, and keeping us “primed” as to their encoded presences.

After the interval, we were treated to two songs, each of whose subject-matter was steeped in the early Romantic era, and given suitably full-blooded treatment via the sonorous baritone voice of Morgan-Andrew King, firstly with Schumann’s ballade-like setting of Heine’s verses “Die beiden Grenadiere”, telling the story of two French soldiers making their way home from the Napoleonic Wars, only to learn that their beloved Emperor had been imprisoned. Schumann effectively contrasts the over-the-top patriotism of the French soldier, complete with the “Marseilles” quotation, with the sombre, utterly downcast piano postlude, superbly “voiced” by Thomas Nikora. King’s beautiful and sonorous voice I thought captured the “heroic” aspect of the song to perfection, though still leaving room for future explorations of the conflicted and contrasting range of emotion from each of the men. However, in Beethoven’s setting of Goethe’s “Song of the Flea”, the singer’s characterisations ignited more readily, working hand-in-glove with Thomas Nikora’s impish, volatile rendering of the piano part, and instantly engaging our interest and delight – marvellous!

Samuel Berkahn returned to the platform, this time with his ‘cello, to perform for us the opening movement of Haydn’s sunny C-major ‘Cello Concerto. With Thomas Nikora leading the way, bringing the opening orchestral “tutti” excitingly to life on the piano, the ‘cellist took up the challenge right from his opening phrase, superbly “sprung” at first, then full-throated and song-like in the second subject group, the solo lines speaking, bubbling and glowing. Intonation was sometimes a bit hit-and-miss in the instrument’s higher registers, but the overall line of the performance remained, thanks to the player’s energy and “recovery instinct” keeping the musical fabric taut and even, and maintaining a sense of enjoyment and buoyancy.

Which brought us to the third premiere of the evening’s concert, Thomas Nikora’s Mass in E minor, a work which the composer told us was inspired by his performing with Cantoris another Mass, that by Schubert, in G Major (D.167), and which Nikora had promised himself he would complete for his fourth year as Cantoris’s music director (time flies!). He mentioned also the Latin Mass’s flexibility and versatility as a text for musical settings, allowing him so many creative possibilities and options. Along with the SATB choir, the composer scored the work for solo soprano, violin, cello and piano.

Beginning with the Kyrie, the composer’s promise that there will be “plenty of fugal stuff” was immediately suggested with the voices’ opening contrapuntal entries, giving way to the solo soprano (the angelic-voiced Barbara Paterson) without a break at the Christe eleison with soaring lyrical lines. The return of the Kyrie was announced by the tenors with clipped, fugal figures, the texture thereby considerably enlivened with staccato chatterings, urgent and insistent, but softened by lyrical utterances from Samuel Berkahn’s cello.

Without a break, the Gloria burst in, the sopranos doing some lovely stratospheric work, and the pianist, Liam Furey, moulding beautiful bell-like chords to accompany “Et in terra pax hominibus”, the section somewhat surprisingly finishing with an “Amen”, allowing the Laudamus te to start afresh – again very fugal, and leading to a fanfare-like “Glorificamus te” with contrapuntal lines encircling the music. Violinist Diana Muggleston sweetly added her instrument’s voice to that of the cello to prepare for the soprano’s contribution to Gratias agimus tibi, an angel’s pure and fervent exclamation of thanks. I did feel here that the music had too many “stop-starts”, and that the whole could have been given a stronger sense of  “through-line” via the occasional ear-catching transition, imagining, for instance, that the morphing into waltz-time at the Domine Deus from the Gratias would have a stunning effect!

A true-and-steady solo voice (that of Ruth Sharman’s) from the choir introduced each line of Qui tollis peccata mundi, the effect moving and empathetic – as was Barbara Paterson’s delivery of Quoniam, being joined as sweetly by the choir’s sopranos after the solo utterances. And, while not as toe-tappingly infectious as Rossini’s “Cum sancto spiritum” fugue from the latter’s Petite Messe sollenelle, Nikora’s setting of the same passage had plenty of spirit, with wreaths of garlanded “Amens” honouring the deity’s glory, and violin and ‘cello lines most satisfyingly adding their voices to the tumult.

The Credo opened urgently, “running” in a fugal sense, and serious and sombre in tone,  the instruments keeping the fugal spin going underneath the voices’ “Et in unum Dominum”, then movingly ritualise the central “Et incarnatus est” with chorale-like accompaniments to the voices’ focused fervour, the soprano further lyricising the line “Crucifixus estiam pro nobis” (He was crucified for us), until the instruments cranked up the running accompaniments to Et resurrexit with exciting, stamping staccato figures. Then, true to intent, the music “grew” a giant fugal structure from Et in spiritus sanctus, all voices woven into the fabric in fine style – a strong, sudden major-key “Amen” brought to an end this impressive musical declamation of faith.

But not the Mass as such, of course – whose next sequence turned convention on its head with a Sanctus set in what sounded like the rhythmic trajectory of a Habanera! It made for a treasurable  “Now that I have your attention” moment, flecked with grins of delight from all sides, especially at the sultry piano glissandi and the exotic touch of the tambourine, giving the words a kind of extra potency in their delivery.  The Benedictus took a rather more circumspect rhythmic character, more of a “floating” aspect generated by “humming” sequences from the choir and a wordless melody from the soprano flowering into something that had the feeling of a heartfelt “personal” faith. The return of the “Hosanna” re-established the feeling of ritual, wordless voice-resonatings and instrumental accompanyings reinforcing the message of glory.

Agnus Dei gave us lovely, floating lines, creating a kind of living, gently-walking mosaic of sounds, snow-capped by a heartfelt “Dona nobis pacem” from Barbara Paterson – which brought us to the fugal (as opposed to “frugal”) Amen, not unlike Handel’s “Messiah” Amen, the tenors’ vigorous vocalisings particularly engaging! – as well as this “focusedly fugal” aspect, the writing included expansive lyrical lines as well, voices and instruments relishing their vigorous and full-throated exchanges right to the work’s conclusion. An enthusiastic reception, partly for the Mass itself and its composer, and partly for the performers’ delivery of the whole concert, carried the evening through in a satisfyingly warm-hearted manner – such pleasure to be had from an evening’s music-making!