Spring hailed in impressive exhibition of 20th century French choral songs by Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir conducted by Karen Grylls
Salut Printemps!
Accompanied by Rachel  Fuller with Catrin Johnsson, vocal consultant

French music for Springtime: Debussy, Mark Sirett, Lili Boulanger, Jean Adsil, Poulenc and Donald Patriquin

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

Saturday 21 October,  7:30 pm

Here was a concert to which many of us attended, blind. The publicity had mentioned Debussy and Poulenc (and these were indeed the only well-known composers) and “romantic chansons and a quirky song-cycle”. It was dedicated totally to songs in French, mostly by French composers.

I guess the programme was assembled through the wonderful resources of Google and Wikipedia by searching ‘vocal music for Springtime’; though perhaps I underestimate Karen Grylls’ encyclopaedic familiarity with the entire choral repertoire through all ages and all countries! .

Instead of printing the words and their English translations in the programme leaflet, the person I took to be the choir’s ‘Vocal Consultant’, Catrin Johnsson, recited translations in an admirably clear and well-articulated voice from the front, before each song. My shorthand was not up to noting the salient points, and so, here and there, I have also had recourse to the Internet.

On the whole, French choral music from the late 19th to mid-20th century is not very familiar, and so, the only music that was at all familiar to me were the pieces by Poulenc. Nor was all the music by French composers: Sirett is Anglo-Canadian and Donald Patriquin, from Quebec. Jean Absil was francophone Belgian.

Debussy’s Salut printemps
It began with the eponymous piece by the 20-year-old Debussy, a setting of a poem by Anatole de Ségour. He may have been a rather obscure poet, but this poem was also set by other composers, suggesting that he was not unknown. Almost everything Debussy wrote in his early years was vocal, songs, and this looks like his first choral work, for female voices with piano accompaniment. It was certainly a charming evocation of Spring – light in spirit, and with a sympathetic piano accompaniment that at times was a little too prominent in the cathedral’s hard acoustic. The unnamed soloist made a particularly lovely contribution.

Mark Sirett turns out to be a Canadian, though not Québéquois, who’s got a high profile as composer and conductor in Canada. He was born in Kingston, Ontario in 1952, educated in Iowa, but returned to work and teach in Alberta and Ontario.

He wrote Ce beau printemps, a bright, optimistic, a cappella piece based on a poem by the great 16th century poet Pierre Ronsard. It was a predictable song for mixed choir celebrating love in the Springtime; somewhat more thoughtful and less full of delight that one might have expected; just rather lovely.

A group of Trois chansons by Debussy followed. The Old French (Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder!; Quand j’ay ouy le tabourin; Yver, vous n’estes qu’un villain) gave them away as Renaissance poems, by Charles d’Orléans. Again, an unaccompanied group, and another solo female contribution was very attractive; she sang the words while the choir performed wordlessly. Markedly wintery sounds emerged during the third song denouncing Winter (‘Yver’ – Hiver).

Lil Boulanger used to be referred to as Nadia’s (the remarkable teacher of numerous famous 20th century composers) less-known sister; but it was Lili who was the gifted composer and her fine music has gained a firm foothold in recent years. Her three songs: Hymn au soleil, Sirènes, and Soir sur la plaine, settings of different poets, were most imaginative, and to me, among the most colourful and delightful of the concert. The first and third were for mixed choir while the men retreated for the particularly gorgeous Sirènes. (the poet, Grandmougin). The last, Soir sur la plaine, by the noted symbolist poet Albert Samain (c.f. Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud), was an impressive, minor theatrical piece, with exchanges between male and female soloists, and the body of the choir, splendidly performed.

Le bestiaire was a group of songs, no doubt those referred to in the promotional stuff, as ‘a quirky song cycle’. It was a minor zoological foray, the little poems by Apollinaire, dating from 1911, set for unaccompanied mixed choir by Belgian composer Jean Absil in 1944. That was a long time after Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, which might have remained lurking in the background, perhaps nourished by Erik Satie in the meantime. Would serve as useful revision for your French zoological vocabulary. They were sung in the true spirit of the words as well as Absil’s settings which were both clever and droll.

Two groups of songs by Poulenc came next, not in the least the same spirit as the Absil songs; Nos 2 and 3 of his Quatre petites prières de saint François d’Assise. They took us to the heart of Poulenc’s singular religious awakening in the 1930s, though they were composed in the 1940s. ‘Tout puissant’ and ‘Seigneur, je vous en prie’ were settings for a cappella male voices, and Poulenc’s marked individuality was immediate, melodically confined to a rather limited range of notes.

The same composer’s Les Petites Voix is a set of five songs from 1936 for unaccompanied women’s voices; they sang three: La petite fille sage, Le chien perdu and Le hérisson (hedgehog). The droll verses were theatrically narrated, lines clear, amusing and well balanced, and as with everything in the concert, pitched with a keen ear to the acoustic character of the church (as usual with Karen Grylls).

Finally, Donald Patriquin, a Québéquois, though his biography (McGill and University of Toronto) and list of compositions are evenly balanced bilingually. The choir sang J’entend le moulin, amusing, with dancing, dotted rhythms, prancing up and down, sexual differentiation between men and women singers. Fast, energetic, hypnotic in its incessant rhythms and melodic phrases. It made a fine finish to a highly impressive concert.

 

Wonderful Mozart trio for clarinet, viola and piano (plus Schumann and Bruch) from Karori Classics series

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Karori Classics: Rachel Vernon, clarinet, Christiaan van der Zee, viola and Rachel Thomson, piano

Mozart: Trio for clarinet, viola and piano in E flat, K. 498 (‘Kegelstatt’)
Schumann: Märchen Erzählungen, Op 132 
Bruch: Eight Pieces, Op 83 – Nos 5 & 6

St. Mary’s Church, Karori

Friday 20 October, 7 pm

The fall-out from the International Viola Congress a few weeks ago seems to be continuing relentlessly. One Wednesday, viola students and a month ago the same violist as appeared this evening, at the previous Karori Classics concert.

They turned the programme round, starting with the two pieces from Bruch’s Eight Pieces for the instruments gathered at St Mary’s this evening. What we heard here was probably the complete works for clarinet, viola and piano, an extraordinary situation considering the great and beautiful piece that Mozart had written 240 years ago that you would have expected to have inspired scores of scores.

When I asked Christian van der Zee after the concert whether he hankered for the chance to play all eight of Bruch’s pieces, he looked bemused, rather suggesting that even though they are fairly inoffensive little creations, a couple of them, disposed of without ado at the beginning, was all that might be tolerated before sending the audience to sleep. Many people claim to find Bruch a yawn-provoking composer; Isabella Faust recently commented dismissively about his first violin concerto.

No 5 is described as a Romanian melody, beginning with a slow viola theme over rolling piano chords, soon joined by the clarinet. No 6 is also slow, another Andante piece, nocturnal, fluid in feeling. Two of the eight certainly made an attractive opening to the recital, and served to demonstrate the close rapport between the three orchestral musicians, used to listening attentively to each other.

All four of Schumann’s Märchen Erzählungen followed and even a devoted lover of most of Schumann’s music found these pleasant rather than enchanting; his melody gift hadn’t altogether deserted him at the wretched end of his life, but they were agreeable rather than memorably individual. The second is a march in a singularly unmilitary vein, which changes rhythmically after a little while almost becoming a slow dance, and the third is a slow piece in triple time in which the three instruments blend most successfully. The last piece is buoyant and lively, sounding more characteristically Schumannisch than the previous movements, recalling the sort of spirit found in the Kinderszenen, though that comparison might be a bit cruel.

I suppose most of us were waiting for the Mozart, which is where this instrumental combination first appeared. As I am often inclined to do, I recall vividly my first hearing of it, as I was browsing the LPs in Kirk’s record department, one lunchtime, probably in the 1970s. The music was playing and I was just transfixed; I bought the record and still have it.

It’s a fairly short, compact work, each movements not much more than five minutes and you are left wishing that Mozart had continued to elaborate and do repeats. This performance allowed it to breathe, with slightly prolonged phrases, little rallentandos, that made the enchanting first theme simply rapturous. There were nice dynamic contrasts, as from the quiet opening of the Menuetto, that was followed by a slightly bolder repeat, happy impressions of the legato clarinet and fast fluent scale passages from the viola.

Though the last movement is the longest, and we get repetitions of the marvellous spirit-raising melodies; if there were moments that suggested that rehearsals had been a bit limited, after the more prolonged Allegretto movement that seemed ready to go on for ever, I was, as always, left longing for the whole thing to be played again.

The Karori Classics concerts are driven by several players from the NZSO, importantly, I think, by violist Christiaan van der Zee and violinist Anna van der Zee; here, of course, they were represented by orchestral pianist Rachel Thomson and clarinettist Rachel Vernon. The Karori Anglican and Uniting churches (St Mary’s and St Ninians), support the concerts and they benefit the Wellington Samaritans.

Maximum Minimalism – simple, state-of-the-art complexities from Stroma

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: “MAXIMUM MINIMALISM”

Bridget Douglas (flutes), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Reuben Chin (saxophone), Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion), Leonard Sakofsky (vibraphone), Emma Sayers (piano), Anna van der See , Rebecca Struthers (violins), Giles Francis (viola), Ken Ichinose(cello), Matthew Cave (contrabass), conducted by Mark Carter.

Steve Reich: Double Sextet (2007)

Alison Isadora: ALT (2017)

Julia Wolfe: Lick (1994)

Terry Riley: In C (1964)

City Gallery, Wellington,

Thursday, 19 October 2017

“Maximum Minimalism” was the wittily oxymoronic title for this concert by Wellington’s (New Zealand’s?) premiere contemporary music ensemble, Stroma. “Minimalism” was the name bestowed on a group of American composers who, in the 1960s, reacted against the forbidding complexity of atonal and serial music and began (largely independently of each other) employing the extended repetition of simple elements. Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley were the pioneers (La Monte Young is sometimes included, but this is confusing, because his work explores indefinitely sustained sounds, tuned to ratios from the harmonic series, rather than rhythmic repetitions).

Steve Reich preferred the term “process music”. His early compositions were as rigorous in their way as anything in the preceding period of modernism: tapes which went gradually out of phase (Come Out, 1966), or chirping chords progressively lengthened until they became an oceanic swell (Four Organs, 1970). Later, he started making composerly interventions into these strict procedures. In Double Sextet the forward driving momentum was interrupted by slower chordal sections, and the whole piece included a slow movement. The live instrumentalists (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano) played with precision against a recorded version of themselves (hence the “Double”), producing a dense, busy texture. This, and the interaction between Emma Sayers’ high piano and the piquancy of Leonard Sakofsky’s vibraphone, created an edgy, astringent world of sound.

If Double Sextet represented late minimalism, Terry Riley’s In C stood right at the beginning. His approach was very different from Reich’s. Here the complex counterpoint was the result, not of careful calculation, but of giving the performers freedom progress through a series of short melodic fragments, each at their own pace. I was impressed by how these classically trained musicians handled the improvisatory elements. While there was no particular overall shape, Stroma created the dynamic ebb and flow that could be expected from experienced improvisers. There were even segments of long notes where the tempo seemed to slow down, despite the persisting pulse of the high C’s on piano and percussion.

American cross-genre composer Julia Wolfe’s Lick began with short, arresting phrases before the syncopated rhythms kicked in. Reuben Chin’s saxophone and Nick Granville’s electric guitar contributed to the jazz-rock ambience. Again I felt the absence of a clear overall structure, but was engaged by the well-paced contrasts of texture and rhythm.

For me, the highlight of a Stroma concert is often the premiere of a New Zealand work, and this was no exception. Victoria University graduate Alison Isadora has spent much of her life in The Netherlands, but maintains her connections with New Zealand, and held the 2016-17 Lilburn House Residency. Many of her compositions have involved mixed media, often with a political undertone (“agitator-prop”, perhaps – one piece included an onstage washing machine). Her recent scores have been more introverted however, the string quartet ALT notably so. Ethereal and understated, ALT wove its texture almost exclusively from string harmonics, sometimes near the top of musical pitch-perception. But its quietly seductive surface was underpinned by a well-formed musical structure, propelled to a subtle climax by a gentle pulse in the cello, before resolving into a sustained sense of suspended time. It could almost have merited a place in Stroma’s next concert (“Spectral Electric”, City Gallery, Thursday 16 November), which will be a tribute to the Spectralist composers who base their sonorities on the harmonic series: this will feature a new concerto by Michael Norris for Wellington’s own, Mongolian trained, throatsinger, Jonny Marks.

Viola Students from the New Zealand School of Music with diverting sampler of well-played pieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Viola pieces by Bach, Hoffmeister, Hindemith, Anthony Ritchie, Schumann and Rebecca Clarke

Violists: Debbie King, Georgia Steel, Grant Baker
Pianists: Catherine Norton, Matt Owen

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 18 October, 12:15 pm

Three violists and two pianists put this lunchtime programme together. Such student presentations always reveal music that one has never come across before, and the discoveries here – not the composers’ names, which one had a casual knowledge of – were of the pieces of music. A viola concerto by Anton Hoffmeister, a contemporary of Mozart, a character piece by Schumann, viola sonatas by Anthony Ritchie, Hindemith and Rebecca Clarke (all of which one should probably have known; none was played at the recent International Viola Congress in Wellington).

But it began with the Bach’s third cello suite, in C. Although one has become somewhat accustomed to other instruments purloining these great suites, the original version seems to become ever more deeply embedded in one’s consciousness, with the result that the cello’s nearest relative sounded – to me – just a little inauthentic. The intonation was good, but perhaps a certain lack of flexible articulation and bowing that was not quite as flawless as it might have been, detracted slightly. Debbie King chose the three fastest movements and managed pretty well, though the pair of Bourrées were more relaxed than the Gigue which might have been more engaging at a slower pace.

Georgia Steel, with Catherine Norton, chose to play the second and third movements from Franz Anton Hoffmeister viola concerto in D (another, in B flat also appears in the archive). A plaintive Adagio, with ornaments still in need of a bit more refinement, and the Rondo finale which was certainly of the Mozart generation without the beguiling charm and inspiration. However, the pair had absorbed the genuine idiom and made one conscious of a composer well worth watching out for.

Perhaps the most formidable of the pieces was Hindemith’s solo sonata, Op 25 No 1, of which Grant Baker played movements I, II and IV. The first, labelled Breit, ‘Broadly’, is unrelentingly severe, though it becomes more varied after a couple of minutes, evidently running without a pause into the second movement, ‘Very lively and strict’. It’s the fourth movement that is the show-piece, translated: ‘Furiously fast. Wild. Tonal beauty is secondary’; and Grant Baker did well.

Anthony Ritchie’s steadily growing corpus has become very imposing with music for a very wide range of instruments, genres and purposes. Here was Debbie King again, with pianist (I assume, Matt Oliver, though neither violist nor pianist was named). The piece was the Allegro tempestuoso (first movement) from the ‘Viola Concerto’, though the note explained that we were to hear Ritchie’s rewrite of the original concerto as a sonata for viola and piano. Ritchie’s music is always both interesting and approachable, as well as idiomatically composed to suit the intended performers. Debbie clearly found the music congenial as well as being in tune with the piano part; and the listener too found this a very engaging piece which strongly invited one to hear the other three movements.

Next came another first movement – ‘Nicht schnell’, from Schumann’s Märchenbilder (Op 113). Schumann didn’t invite the listener to try to conjure specific images to his fairytale pictures and nothing presented itself to my imagination. But Georgia Steel and Catherine Norton, again, fell easily into the spirit of these pieces written late in Schumann’s life when mental disabilities were starting to emerge. The brilliant inspiration of the pre-1840 piano works was gone gone.

Finally Grant Baker, with Catherine Norton played part of the viola sonata by British composer/violist Rebecca Clarke. I’d heard its first two movements at a St Andrew’s lunchtime concert back in 2010. Now we heard the third movement (Adagio – Allegro). It’s an attractive work, very much of its era, though not under the influence of atonality or undue abrasiveness. The piano part is as interesting as the viola’s, and Norton played with all her usual finesse and intuition. And the viola writing was far from routine; opening with a longish Adagio that subtly becomes more spirited and inventive.

As well as being an always rewarding impression of the nature of today’s student talent, this was a very interesting glimpse of the wide variety of diverting music for the viola.

Wilma Smith and Friends play fine programme for Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wilma Smith (violin), Caroline Henbest (viola), Alexandra Partridge (cello), Andrew Leathwick (piano)

Piano quartets: William Walton’s in D minor; Andrew Leathwick’s No 1 and Brahms’s No 3 in C minor, Op 60

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 15 October, 3 pm

We reviewed Wilma Smith and Friends at their Waikanae concert on 24 September. There they had played Beethoven’s not-much-played Op 16 piano quartet, Dvořák’s greatly loved Op 87 as well as the piano quartet by the group’s pianist, Leathwick.  I suppose I can wait till next August when I see that Wellington Chamber Music’s just announced 2018 Sunday series will hear the Dvořák played by the Leppänen, Thomson, Joyce, Irons quartet.

Wilma’s three colleagues, two of whom are New Zealanders, all have an association with the Australian National Academy of Music, in Canberra, while Wilma herself teaches at the two principal Melbourne universities.

This Wellington programme avoided playing anything too well-known: Brahms’s 3rd piano quartet is the least familiar of the three. Played here with such finesse and musicality that its relative neglect became hard to understand.

Walton’s 16-year-old creation
However, the concert began with a, to me, totally unknown quartet, by a 16-year-old William Walton. Though it might not display the brilliance and musical delights that Mendelssohn or Mozart were producing at that age, this was a very impressive achievement, even allowing for its getting revised much later in the composer’s life (when he was 72).

It was written in the last year of WWI and so might have reflected the Englishness of Bax or Ireland or Vaughan Williams, even Elgar. All I could say is that the music had a generalised English, as distinct from a Continental feel, and Herbert Howells’s own piano quartet has been offered as a possible influence. Would Walton have heard Bartók in 1918? something at the start of the last movement suggested it. It was too soon for the iconoclastic Walton of the Bloomsbury years to be audible anywhere, but there could have been touches of Ravel, for there was much in it of a surprising sophistication.

It began with a clear conception of certain melodic ideas that seemed authentic rather than arbitrary, and an understanding of the art of building music in a formal shape. It was indeed formal in having four movements –  a bright, positive opening, a scherzo that seemed singularly assured, then a calm Adagio in a nocturnal mood, with muted strings, and finally an energetic Allegro that might have attempted to emulate the radical composers of the Continent, even certain rhythmic elements from Eastern Europe (do I mean Bartók?though what was known of him in England in the First World War?).

Writing for the quartet as a whole was quite mature, and it was clear that the young composer had a refined appreciation of the characteristics of each instrument – a solo viola passage caught the ear. Music from the first movement returned in a natural-sounding was to bring it to an end.

Andrew Leathwick’s quartet
A quartet by the group’s pianist Andrew Leathwick, followed. He introduced it, but in rather too casual a way, without sufficient care for enunciation and for the rhythms of his speech to be easily followed. The music largely explained itself – an opening that was almost secretive, improvisatory, slowly awakening with long phrases carried high on the violin strings. The second movement, entitled ‘Freely’, began with muted violin and cautious piano notes and signs that the composer became aware of the need to retain the listener’s attention with an almost Dvořákian melody. The composer seemed sensitive to the particular character of each instrument, subtly varying colours and dynamics; the viola carried a vaguely familiar elegiac tune which I couldn’t attribute. The composer recorded that ‘the great Romantic composers’ had inspired the last movement – Con moto. Those influences were clear enough. The whole piece, written in an idiom (idioms?) of earlier music made me aware of the styles of music that music students now feel free to write, far removed from the strenuously avant-garde, ‘original-at-all-costs’, audience-alienating music that I used to subject myself to in my early years reviewing for The Evening Post in the late 80s and 90s.

The style adopted in this piece is now accepted in a more open and tolerant musical environment in music schools, though one naturally hopes that it will not discourage a freedom to explore more adventurous approaches that make judicious use of influences from the music of the recent past.

Rosemary Collier’s review of this piece will be found in the review of 24 September.

Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3
The last piece was Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3, Op 60.  As I noted above it’s not as well-known as the Op 25 quartet, or perhaps even as the second one. But here was a performance that did it credit. It launches itself in a distinctly C minor manner, commanding, weighty and serious minded, rather than seductive, first in the Adagio opening and then the Allegro non troppo main part. But it’s exactly what a paid-up Brahms-lover looks for; not what the censorious Schoenberg who orchestrated the Op 25 piece because he thought it too dense for chamber music, would have enjoyed at all.

For it is indeed almost symphonic in its textures although the quartet produced all the clarity that I needed. Though the second movement is more animated, it dwells in a similar  sound world, darkly impassioned, with energetic piano writing that Leathwick handled, though the piano lid was on the long stick, in excellent accord with the strings.

The third movement, Andante, opens with a soulful, though sanguine duet between piano and cello which offered Alexandra Partridge (and again the pianist) an admirable opportunity to be enjoyed. And the finale too confirmed that impression left from all that had gone before of a carefully studied approach in which the essence of Brahms had become thoroughly embedded. Rapport between strings and piano was always perfectly integrated in terms of balance and interpretive view.

It ended a very satisfying chamber music recital, offering a sound reason to take comfort in a cultural relationship with Australia.

 

 

Excellent NZSO concert – Berlioz, Elgar and Tchaikovsky – draws disappointing audience

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Travels in Italy

Berlioz: Harold in Italy
Elgar: In the South (‘Alassio’)
Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini (Symphonic fantasia after Dante)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Judd, with Antoine Tamestit (viola)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 6 October 2017, 6.30pm

Here was a stirring programme, the items linked by their composers’ inspirations from Italy.  It happens that these three were all superb orchestrators; the works all exploited the orchestra fully.

We have had both Berlioz and Elgar already this year in NZSO programmes; no shame in that.  James Judd was noted for his Elgar performances when he was Music Director of the NZSO – one of the eminent composers of his homeland, just as after him, Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen programmed much music of his homeland’s most famous composer, Sibelius.

Berlioz treats the theme of Harold (aka Childe Harold in Byron’s long narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) in four different scenes, or movements, and so our eminent viola soloist also travelled, performing from different parts of the stage, not only from the front, which added interest.  Some commentators have seen the work as semi-autobiographical.  It is neither symphony nor concerto, but has elements of both.  Berlioz had recent experience of living in Italy, as winner of the Prix de Rome.

The opening of the work is quite spooky, a portentous wind solo playing against repetitive strings in a minor key, then the soloist played the main theme, standing behind the second violins.  During the movement he began his travels by moving forward to the usual position, on the conductor’s left  It was inspiring to hear the lovely tone of Tamestit’s viola, a Stradivarius from 1672.  One of the movement’s highlights was hearing the harp passages beautifully played, as a counterpoint to the brilliance of the viola solo.  The latter played variations on the main theme, all performed with flair and gesture, but without any element of technical display for its own sake.

The movement, titled “Adagio: Harold in the mountains.  Scenes of melancholy, happiness and joy”, built up feverishly and dramatically, reminding one that it was Paganini who requested Berlioz to write a work, that turned out be this one.  Snatches of brief phrases were tossed around the woodwinds, then things went almost berserk at the end of this movement, and the soloist retreated to the rear of the second violins.

The second movement is marked “Allegretto: March of the pilgrims singing the evening prayer”.  The whole orchestra plays the main theme; this is repeated with muted upper strings, while the cellos and basses play pizzicato and the woodwinds intone a single note.  There is an atmosphere of timorous expectation (rather spoilt by the amount of audience coughing).  A bell tolls as the procession fades away.

“Allegro assai: Serenade of an Abruzzi mountain dweller to his mistress” is the description of the third movement.  There is a splendid cor anglais solo.  Horns rumble away on the main theme; a dance tune is played by the woodwinds, accompanied by violas.  The soloist plays throughout, weaving in and out of the orchestral textures.  All is understated, and muted in the last phrases.

The solo viola has less to play in the final movement, which is “Allegro Frenetico: Orgy of brigands.  Memories of scenes past.”  Tamestit strode to the rear of the basses and played from there.  We heard rambunctious chords from the orchestra, with plenty of brass and percussion interjections.  The master orchestrator maintained the work’s interest throughout.  Violins were frenetic.  After some more quiet playing from the soloist, then Wham! Bang!  The end.

In response to prolonged enthusiastic applause, Tamestit returned to the platform and played an encore by Hindemith: a movement from one of his viola sonatas – a phenomenally fast and furious little piece of perpetuum mobile.

The remaining two works were each half as long as the Berlioz one, which had acted as both symphony and concerto.  In the South is one of Elgar’s inspired shorter orchestral works.  It, too, involves a solo viola, but in this case it was not the distinguished soloist from the Berlioz who performed, but an unfamiliar face, who took over the principal’s chair from Julia Joyce for this item.  A knowledgeable young violist sitting near me informed us that the principal was soon to take maternity leave, so we assumed that the excellent unknown violist was to fill in for her.  He gave a a fine and beautiful performance of the folk-song solo – slow and dreamy.  Perhaps this could be the southern Italy siesta?

The very spirited opening section soon led to quiet playing, the strings using mutes, and the woodwinds playing meditative music.  Some of the Elgar pomposity appears here and there, but this is a characterful work, partly gentle in character, though in the middle of the work there is a grand slow march; as the programme note said “… the texture of the music rapidly transforms between  expressive grandeur and secretive meditations.” Then brass and percussion come to the fore.  There was much light and shade in the music, and a great build-up to the climax.

Tchaikovsky’s theme was much more sombre, inspired by the tragic story of Francesca di Rimini from Dante’s Inferno.  Here was another portentous opening, cellos vying with woodwind for the honours in presenting the dramatic themes.  The violins then took over issuing the challenges.  When the brass broke in, we had the full drama.  The storm raged, to be followed by a sublime clarinet solo.  Muted strings featured in this work too, with a large, sweeping unison melody.  Flutes came to the fore, sounding like a flight of birds.

The work continued with many and varied orchestral colours and dynamics.  Oboe and flute had a conversation; the horn joined in, followed by the big unison theme again.  As the programme note said: “…Tchaikovsky at his most romantically lyrical.”  It was so dramatic one could almost see the stage or screen action – stirring stuff indeed, and all extremely well performed.

It was disappointing to see many empty seats in the Michael Fowler Centre, given it was such an interesting programme.  Perhaps for many people 6.30pm is not a favoured hour for a concert.  Nevertheless for those present, it was an early evening of outstanding music, stunningly well played.

 

NZ Opera’s Kátya Kabanová packs a punch at the St.James in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
KÁTYA KABANOVÁ
Opera in Three Acts by Leoš Janáček

Cast: Kátya Kabanová – Dina Kuznetsova
Boris – Angus Wood
Dikój – Conal Coad
Kabanicha – Margaret Medlyn
Tichon – Andrew Glover
Kudrjas – James Benjamin Rodgers
Varvara – Hayley Sugars
Kuligin – Robert Tucker
Glasha – Emma Sloman
Feklusha – Linden Loader

Conductor: Wyn Davies
Director: Patrick Nolan
Assistant Director : Jacqueline Coats
Designer: Genevieve Blanchett
Lighting: Mark Howett
Chorus Director: Michael Vinten

Freemasons Chorus
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

St.James Theatre, Wellington
Saturday 7th October, 2017

(from Thursday 12th to Saturday 14th October)

Janáček wrote to his long-time, would-be amour Kamila Stösslova about his leading character in the new opera he was planning, in 1920 – “The main character there is a woman, so gentle by nature…..a breeze would carry her away, let alone the storm that breaks over her….” This was Kátya Kabanová, or Káťa Kabanová as the Czech spelling has it, the first of three operas whereby the composer sublimated his passion for Stösslova, a young married woman thirty-eight years his junior, portraying her in different idealised ways in each work. Here as Kátya, she was a woman possessed by “great measureless love”, while in The Cunning Little Vixen, the heroine was a resourceful and self-sacrificing wife and mother – and lastly, in The Makropoulos Affair she was a glamorous 300 year-old woman in the grip of an enchantment which had brought her many lovers, but whose spell was about to lose its power and bring her life to its end, resigning her to her fate.

Kátya was based on a play by the Russian Alexander Ostrovsky, The Thunderstorm, which Janáček himself had not seen performed, but being an ardent Russophile was an admirer of writers such as Gogol and Tolstoy (and had already used the work of each of these as inspiration for his own compositions). He was particularly attracted to the character of Katerina in the play, a woman who embodied exceptional goodness of spirit and sensitivity, but was locked into loveless circumstances from which she struggled to escape, a conflict which eventually claimed her own life through guilt and remorse resulting from her own actions. Powerful stuff!

Though not highlighted as such by Janáček, the storm scene that gave Ostrovsky’s play its name was suitably apocalyptic in the opera as well – here, it marked Kátya ‘s breakdown as, overwhelmed by her sense of having irrevocably sinned, she despairingly confesses to her adultery in front of her husband and family and the townspeople, at the thunderstorm’s height. Kátya does have allies, Varvara, her younger sister-in-law (though a foster-child), and the latter’s lover, Kudrjas, a neighbour, though both are simply too preoccupied with one another to give her proper support. But while the domineering Kabanicha (her mother-in-law) is unkindly disposed towards Kátya, and both Tichon her husband and Boris her lover are weak, vacillating men (Tichon subservient to his mother and Boris to his uncle, the merchant Dikój), Kátya’s ultimate undoing is her own sensibility and its fatal interaction with religion-induced guilt and small-town hypocrisies – a world that a contemporary critic had called, in Ostrovsky’s original work, the “realm of darkness”.

At the outset I thought this NZ Opera production’s setting, in rural America (this was a production imported from Seattle Opera), somewhat incongruous in tandem with the sounds of the Czech language being sung, and found the prominently-displayed “stars-and-stripes” and the stage-dominating archetypal white picket fence almost crude and repellent (was the former a none-too-subliminal “Make NZ Opera great again!” message?) – but, in view of those recent populist-driven events in the United States, all too indicative of the upsurge of a contemporary “realm of darkness” as dangerous as any in the past, it all began to make sense as the net began to tighten its inexorable grip on the heroine, putting her salvation beyond earthly reach.

With the opera’s advancement the production seemed to me to shed its parochial blatancies and take us more undistractedly into universal human behaviours, though of the characters only Kátya seemed to grow as a human being – even Kurdrjas’s and Varvara’s decision to elope, made at the height of Kátya’s torment is treated lightly by the couple, more like a holiday than a radical change of direction – “Here’s to a new life, then – and fun!” sings Varvara (and I’m almost certain I heard Kudrjas sing “V Moskvu matičku?” (To Moscow, then?) – though to be fair, it might have been the name of a similar-sounding American city, sung with a Czech accent!).

For the rest, life goes on – Kátya’s husband Tichon remains in thrall to his unrepentant mother, the Kabanicha; and her lover, Boris, having abandoned Kátya to her fate, is sent out of sight and out of mind by his tyrannical, God-fearing uncle, Dikój, (in Janáček’s libretto, to work in Siberia! – though I wasn’t paying enough attention to the surtitles to pick up any further geographical incongruity!). Only Kátya is truly affected, in fact transfigured – but at the cost of her own life. For her, a happy release, perhaps – but for we in the audience, a disturbing human tragedy.

As Kátya, Russian-American soprano Dina Kuznetsova grew on me – at the very beginning she seemed disconcertingly middle-aged, even matronly in appearance, an impression which confused my expectation of her being as a “young wife” to Tichon, her husband. However, as the scenes unfolded, Kuznetsova’s portrayal gathered more and more youthful energy – her impulsive fancies, which she at first expressed to Varvara as wanting freedom to “fly like a bird”, were skilfully metamorphosed into candid revelations of suppressed sexual desires – her descriptions of someone whispering to her at night in her dreams, “like a dove cooing” were very beautifully and tremulously released, conveying desire and guilt at one and the same time with a convincing amalgam of confusion, ecstasy and compulsiveness.

With her husband, Tichon, about to leave on a business trip, her pleas for assurance and strength of response from him were pitiful in their desperation, accentuated by Tichon’s bewilderment at her emotional display, and his dismissive, ineffectual responses, to the point where Kátya’s “goodbye” to him had the air of a kind of death-knell to their marriage. By this time, Kuznetsova had fully “brought us in” to the heroine’s desperate state of being, so that we were practically “willing” her to take up the equally impulsive Varvara’s “setting up” of Dikój’s nephew Boris, by her giving Katya a spare key to the house, allowing her free access to her would-be swain!

Janáček’s music in the subsequent scene for two sets of lovers beautifully contrasted Kátya’s depth of emotion in the throes of her desperation with that written for Kudrjas and Varvara, the younger pair’s exchanges more “folksy” and carefree (echoes of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in places!). For me, this was, as well, the scene where the production “threw open” the opera’s vistas, with backdrops of stars and naturalistic ambiences giving the human interactions a universality all the more telling for its delayed release.

Act Three featured the thunderstorm and Kátya’s subsequent confession, transfiguration and death – throughout, Dina Kunetsova demonstrated just why her performance was a must-see, in every way imbuing the repressed character presented in the opera’s opening scene with desperate, recklessly courageous and open-hearted honesty of expression. The grim, tight-lipped responses of everybody else to the situation and its outcomes were thus exposed as caricatures of human behaviour, and the characters themselves also as casualties of existence, in a completely different way.

Kátya’s allies, Kudrjas and Varvara, were splendidly brought to life by James Benjamin Rodgers and Hayley Sugars, each capturing a distinctive interpretative quality in voice and manner, Kudrjas both a nature-poet, marvelling at the beauties of the passing river, and a man of science, explaining to the bullish merchant Dikój about lightning-rods during the storm – and then Varvara, the Kabanov’s “foster-child” (Ostrovsky’s play had her as Tichon’s sister), and therefore a kind of “outsider”who’s obviously something of a “free” spirit, judging by her encouragement of Kátya to pursue her affair with Boris, and her ready acquiescence with Kudrjas’s “elopement” plan!

Angus Wood as the attractive but self-absorbed Boris conveyed just the right mix of bravado and self-pity regarding his situation to his friend Kudrjas at the work’s beginning, leaving us ambivalent regarding how “true” and “constant” his feelings for Kátya might prove. An ardent lover of Kátya during their garden scene, his protestations were nullified by his subsequent passive, weak-willed reactions to her overwhelming distress, his farewell words to her “What sorrow parting is! – What sorrow for me!” underlining his self-centredness.

On the face of things, the ghoulish pair of the Kabanicha (Kátya’s mother-in-law, played by Margaret Medlyn), and her weak, hen-pecked son, Tichon (Andrew Glover) was largely responsible for Kátya’s life being such a misery, the Kabanicha demanding absolute loyalty and affection from her son at her daughter-in-law’s expense, while expecting the latter to know her place and be subservient to her husband and family. Margaret Medlyn continued her success with the composer’s operatic characters begun in Jenufa with the role of the Kostelnicka, and continued here with the still more odious Kabanicha (a good thing she has in other repertoire undertaken more likeable characters!). Here she epitomised utter ruthlessness, as exemplified by her final cynical dismissal of the onlookers after Kátya’s body is recovered from the river. Her near-complete absorbtion of her son Tichon’s affections is grotesquely echoed in her holding in thrall the otherwise dominating bully Dikój, like a duchess exercising control over her fiefdom!

Where Andrew Glover’s Tichon brilliantly epitomised emasculation with uncomfortable veracity, Conal Coad’s convincingly larger-than-life Dikój was all outward macho aggressiveness (except in the presence of the Kabanicha, who became like his “confessor”). Each of these three characters made up a chilling component of that “realm of darkness” previously referred to, which Kátya sacrificed her life in trying to escape. The other players in the drama, Glasha (Emma Sloman), Kuligin (Robert Tucker), and Felushka (Linden Loader) nicely characterised their brief pre-ordained roles as pieces in this same rigorously-wrought social structure, as did the various members of the Freemasons’ Chorus with their on-the-spot presence in the drama’s framing scenes.

It’s Janáček’s music as much as the dramatic action and the stage characterisations which make the opera such a vivid experience, though – and Music Director Wyn Davies and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra demonstrated with great skill and sure dramatic instinct the score’s powerfully-wrought amalgam of lyricism and dramatic force. From the opera’s Prelude it was Kátya’s music that dominated, all the other characters to an extent drawn into her phrases and themes in a way that reflected their interaction. Whether impulsive (Kátya’s confession to Varvara of sexual longings), repressive (the Kabanicha’s bullying of Kátya via her son Tichon), or despairing (Kátya’s confessing of her “sins” to the whole company), the character of the music held sway, the composer managing to encompass both voices and instruments in a full-blooded panoply of intensities that wrung out the emotions in no uncertain terms – and the players of the NZSO were more than up to the task of rendering their part in the whole with distinction.

As I’ve previously indicated, it was a production that, to me, made increasing sense and gathered weight and pace as it progressed – from Act Two’s Garden scene, and right throughout Act Three, with its thunderstorm, Kátya’s final meeting with Boris, and her suicide, the atmosphere seemed at once to throw open the vistas while tightening the dramatic grip almost to breaking-point – those starlit skies of Kátya’s vision alternated with images of the river’s brooding menace in the wake of the frightening thunderstorm served the drama well, and paid tribute to the abilities of the creative team, director Patrick Nolan and his assistant, Jacqueline Coats, along with designer Genevieve Blanchett and the skilfully-applied lighting of Mark Howett.

Kátya Kabanová has but two days to run at Wellington’s St.James Theatre at the time of my writing this review – it’s great music and theatre, which this production delivers with compelling force and surety.

A fine solo cello recital at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Inbal Megiddo, solo cello recital

Bach: Cello Suite no.2 in D minor, BWV 1008
Pigovat: Nigun
Hans Bottermund and Janos Starker: Paganini Variations

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 4 October 2017, 12.15 pm

A good-sized audience heard a memorable recital of advanced cello music in a varied repertoire.

Inbal Megiddo is an extremely accomplished cellist, who teaches the instrument at the New Zealand School of Music, and plays in the Te Koki Trio.

It was a pity that the programme notes gave no information about the works performed, because her spoken introductions were far too quiet to be heard in much of the church; even after Marjan van Waardenberg gave the musician a microphone, because it was held too far from her face.

The Bach was played absolutely splendidly, with lots of light and shade.  Strong fortissimos, pianissimos that were never weak but intense, subtlety of phrasing and very resonant playing throughout the dynamic range were all superb features.

However, it was a pity not to have the titles of the movements of the Suite printed in the programme; Google had to come to the rescue later; given their very different characters from one another, it was a shame the audience did not have the descriptions.

After the lively opening Prélude came the Allemande or German dance, and then Courante, or running dance, which in this performance was almost an Olympic sprint, but very exciting.  In contrast is the slow dance, the Sarabande, which originated in Spanish America.  Then came two Menuetts; parts of these and the Sarabande were very tender, with ornaments executed exquisitely.  The two differed from each other, and were followed by the Gigue final movement, which was very complex.

It all made up to an accomplished and satisfying whole.

Boris Pigovat is a Russian-born and educated Israeli composer.  Donald Maurice of NZSM has been a champion of his music, and has performed and recorded significant works by this composer.  On consulting Pigovat’s web-site, I found listed three versions of Nigun, for solo viola, solo violin and for string quartet – but not solo cello.  Wkipedia informs me that a “nigun or niggun (pl. niggunim) is a form of Jewish religious song or tune sung by groups. It is vocal music, often with repetitive sounds such as “bim-bim-bam.””

The piece (composed in 1996) opened with strong bass notes.  It incorporated some amazing techniques of fingering – playing the melody and the drone accompaniment at the same time; playing sul ponticello (on the bridge).  The work was demanding technically, with numerous different tonal effects.

The variations by Hans Bottermund and Janos Starker (both cellists) on Paganini’s theme was also an astonishingly complicated piece technically.  It was certainly brilliant, incorporating left-hand pizzicato in the first variation following the theme, then in the next, double-stopping.  The third was almost entirely made up of harmonics, i.e. the strings were not fully pressed down, but the natural harmonics to be found at various points on the strings are made to sound by lightly holding the fingers on them.  Another pizzicato movement followed, to be followed by a very fast variation.  Altogether, the work was a demonstration of a myriad of advanced cello techniques, and ended a recital that revealed what a fine cello and a thoroughly accomplished cellist could do, without any support from other instruments.

 

China/New Zealand Ode to the Moon concert with a radiant Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

China Cultural Centre in New Zealand presents:
ODE TO THE MOON
Celebration of the 2017 Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival

Music by A.Ke-Jian, Zheng De-Ren, Ding Shan-De, David Farquhar,
Zhou Long, Bao Yuan-Kai, Huang Kiao Zhi, Anthony Ritchie,
Shi Yong-Kang and Zu Jian-Er

The Aroha Quartet
Haihong Lu and Ursula Evans (violins)
Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

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

Sunday October 1st, 2017

This was one of those concerts that, had I been an ordinary audience member I would have looked forward to immensely! However, being a reviewer and facing the prospect of commenting on a genre of music about which I knew very little, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation about what I might encounter! As it turned out I need not have worried, as the music written and arranged by the Chinese composers listed above possessed strength, energy and beauty as I could easily relate to – the sounds communicated to my ears something essentially meaningful, however “unfamiliar” the actual pieces themselves might have been.

Of course the music was refracted here through the medium of the string quartet, one wholly familiar and identifiable to my ears. Having said this, I was amazed by the extent to which the instrumental timbres were made by the players to sound exotic, especially those conjured up by the quartet’s leader, violinist Haihong Lu, whose instrument at times sounded thoroughly “folk-traditional”, not at all like the tones and timbres of a conventional violin.

The programme began with an adaptation of a folk-melody by composer A Ke-Jian and jazz musician Zheng De-Ren into a Song of Emancipation given the title “Fan Shen Dao Qing”, here a forthright and energetic statement of bold intent, its direct and vigorous manner not unlike that of Dvorak in some of his chamber pieces. The piece included a contrasting “slow” middle section, notable for the instruments’ used of “slides” between notes, creating to my ears a wondrously exotic character, while the return to a more vigorous manner included a lovely “dancing on tip-toe” effect, and a brief valedictory sequence with folksy violin to the fore once again, the whole concluding with an exciting stretto.

The life of Hua Yan-Jun, or “A-Bing” as he was known to his family, seems like the stuff of racy novels, albeit with a tragic, premature conclusion due to ill health. Regarded as one of the most important Chinese musicians of the 20th Century, his legacy includes a work for erhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle) “Reflection of the moon in the Er-quan spring”, which has become one of the most-loved pieces of Chinese music, arranged for many combinations of instruments. The Aroha played a quartet arrangment made by Ding Shan-De, a prominent composer and pianist who studied at the Paris Conservatoire and afterwards taught at the Shanghai Conservatory.

The arrangement by Ding Shan-De gave all of the instruments opportunities to express their characteristics, the violins playing very much in the Chinese style, a mournfully affecting, lump-in-the throat-inducing effect, as befitted the music’s nature, for me – a kind of lament / prayer / invocation expressing in music the beauties of the moon’s interaction with the waters of a spring amid life’s joys and tragedies.

Though whole worlds apart in style and content, David Farquhar’s “Ring Round the Moon” music seemed to fit like a glove in this company. As was the previous piece to its composer, Hua Yan-Jun, Farquhar’s is easily his best-known work, its genesis a commission by the New Zealand Players for their 1953 production of Jean Anouilh/Christopher Fry’s play “Ring Round the Moon”. Though what the quartet played for us was described as a “Waltz Suite” only two of the three movements could have been characterised thus, as the concluding “finale” was a boisterous galop! Each of the other movements was also “quick”, which denied us an effective contrast during the course of this otherwise attractive music – a pity we weren’t treated to at least one of the two beautiful slow waltzes from the full work. Incidentally I’ve not been able to find details of which movements Farquhar used in his versions of either the complete “Waltz Suite” or in his transcription for strings commissioned by Nova Strings in 1989.

Evoking reminiscences of Anatoly Liadov’s “Eight Russian Folk Songs”, the next item gave us a comparable overview of Chinese folk-music from the composer Zhou Long, in the form of his “Eight Chinese Folk Songs”, published in 2002. Having completed both traditional Chinese and formal music studies at Beijing University the composer then relocated to the United States, there continuing to write and arrange music in the traditional Chinese style for both folk- and western instruments, and promoting performances of this repertoire. He currently works as Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

I was taken by the emotional range of this music, almost Janacek-like in places in its direct, heartfelt use of the instruments’ full capacities, the opening of the first song “Lan hua-hua” demonstrating the sweep of feeling across vistas of anxiety, loneliness and grim determination, the original work concerning a girl escaping from an arranged marriage to be with the man she really loves.

Each of the song arrangements delivered a similar kind of strength and focus, while covering a wide range of human activity. The music abounded both in exquisite detailings as well as broader sweeping gestures – the second song, “Driving the mule team”, demonstrated, for instance, the composer’s exceptional ear for evocative rhythms in its combination of arco and pizzicato scoring, the resulting textures mimicking the sounds of the team’s harness bells.
The third song “The flowing stream” readily depicted a watery delicacy as a backdrop to what was originally a love song, while the fourth song “Jasmine flower”contrasted the rhythm of the dance with the performer’s awareness of the jasmine’s scent in the music’s more contemplative sequences. The remaining four songs continued with these kinds of evocations, mingling the ordinary with the fabulous in delightful and sometimes unexpected ways, as witness the hearty shouts of the quartet members-cum-herdsmen in the final jaunty “A horseherd’s mountain song”.

The programme’s second half again judiciously presented a New Zealand work amid music by Chinese composers, with the same resonantly positive outcomes. Three arrangements of traditional songs from various parts of China came first, followed by a depiction of an iconic New Zealand landscape via the music of Anthony Ritchie, a work evoking the countryside around Lake Wakatipu. The scheuled programme then concluded with an arrangement of music from a work called “The White-Haired Girl” – music originally cast in operatic form in 1945 before being reworked as a ballet, in which guise it has achieved the most popularity. This adaptation was the work of Shi Yong-Kang and Zhu Jian-Er, completed in 1972 at the time of American President Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking visit to China.

The three folk-song arrangements were played without a break – the first, poignantly called ‘Little Cabbage” actually enshrined a pitiable lament of a child (some sources say a girl, others a boy) who was ill-treated by her/his stepmother, and longed to be reunited with her/his mother. The music was appropriately wistful and played with great feeling (beautiful solos for both violin and viola) with an exquisite passage in thirds for both violins, with pizzicato accompaniment from the lower instruments. The second, “Camel Bell”, featured a great variety of exchange and dovetailing between the instruments to a jogtrot rhythm, in places freely modulating, the effect rather like a rapid-fire theme and variations treatment – as promised by the group’s second violinist, Ursula Evans, who introduced the group of pieces, we heard the actual “camel bell” at the end played softly on her instrument. The final song, “Happy Harvest” delivered what its title promised, after a “ready – steady – go!” kind of beginning – headlong tempi, real hoedown stuff, contrast brought about by an almost sentimental, more reflective section, in which the gestures reminded me of ritualistic happenings, with the instruments having turns to lead, and sliding notes of the most expressive kind figuring largely. A return to the stamping rhythms then brought about an appropriately bountiful conclusion!

Anthony Ritchie’s work “Whakatipua” came next, a single-movement work whose slow-fast-slow structure set the scene at the piece’s beginning – music of open, isolated spaces, with an almost lullabic character conveying a sense of nostalgia. Rather more matter-of-fact by contrast was a descending phrase heard at the outset and then returned to, suggesting a certain degree of depth and solidity, something enduring over time. A more active, urgent spirit awoke within the music, throbbing viola notes bringing ready responses from the other instruments, outdoor, angular figurations breathing copious draughts of fresh air, the sounds not unlike Douglas Lilburn’s “Drysdale” Overture in overall feeling. After the running exchanges between instruments had worked off some of the music’s energies, I liked the way in which everything gradually settled back into the serenity and spaciousness of the landscape, re-establishing a sense of isolation and distance (was that a hint of the erhu in one of Haihong Liu’s phrases?), the long-held notes at the end gradually dissolving into memory.

The final work on the programme carried with it something of a history, having been first set as an opera, then adapted to being a ballet, and in that form achieving classic status in China. This was a piece titled “The White-Haired Girl”, the story depicting the bravery and fortitude of a young girl who triumphs over adversity in difficult times. The music shared some thematic material with the folk-melody, “Little Cabbage”, which we heard earlier in the concert, and which link was demonstrated by one of the players.

A strong, forceful opening, achieved by vigorous bowing from the quartet members, opened the piece, followed almost immediately by a lyrical romantic theme, perhaps one which characterised the girl in the story, Xi’er. It was but one of many attractive, lyrical themes which provided a foil for subsequent sequences depicting conflict and struggle, the music making determined efforts to win through adversity through vigorous action – all very like Tchaikovsky in its heart-on-sleeve emotion, and requiring full-blooded responses from all four musicians! None were found wanting, as the piece took both players and audience through a gamut of feeling, the music freely ranging from hushed expectation to grand declamation at the piece’s end, rounded off by a brilliant running finish!

As if the players hadn’t given their all, they chose to entertain us with a stunningly brilliant encore which, to my ears sounded like gypsy music with eastern influences, something which I thought somebody like the Roumanian composer Enescu might have written, inspired by folk-themes depicting the utmost in visceral excitement. I subsequently found out that the piece (called Sa Li Ha, a girl’s name) was connected with Kazakhstan ethnic groups of the Xingjiang Uyghur Autonymous Region in northwest China. My informant told me I had been on the right track, but needed to go a little further eastwards! Still, the most important thing was what I thought of it all as music – to which I could reply unequivocally, “What a piece, and what a performance!”

Orpheus Choir sets Wellington Cathedral alight with vibrancy, in Mozart and Faure

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents:
MOZART – Mass in C Major KV 220 (196b)*
FAURE – Requiem Op.48

Lisa Harper-Brown (soprano)
Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby (alto)*
Giancarlo Lisi (tenor)*
James Clayton (bass)

Richard Apperley (organ)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Brent Stewart (Music Director)

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul
Molesworth St., Wellington

Saturday, 30th September, 2017

Orpheus Choir Music Director Brent Stewart announced at the concert’s beginning that the evening’s performances were dedicated by the choir to the memory of Professor Peter Godfrey, who had died a couple of days previously on September 28th. Regarded by many as the”father” of New Zealand choral music, Godfrey was closely associated with both Wellington Cathedral as Director of Music during the years 1983-89, and with the Orpheus Choir as its Director from 1984 to 1991.

Appropriate though the Faure Requiem turned out to be for such an occasion, the work would have been something of a drawcard for concertgoers in any case, the organisers having enjoyed the great satisfaction of declaring the concert a “sell-out” a day or so before. But of course, this distinction was genuinely deserved, as the Requiem is one of the world’s most beautiful and best-loved choral works. Its companion on this occasion was a Mozart Mass intriguingly titled the “Sparrow Mass” on account of its chirping accompaniments during parts of the Sanctus.

Brent Stewart got a delighted reaction from his listeners when he made the declaration that we in the Cathedral made up “the largest audience EVER to witness a performance of Mozart’s “Sparrow Mass” in public”. Interestingly, the work was one I knew well, as I’d sung in a performance in Palmerston North as a student, many years ago (I found myself humming the bass parts of the “Sanctus” as the music tripped along, and marvelling how I seemed to remember them in particular as the music unfolded). Though I didn’t remember much of the rest of the work in the same hands-on manner, I thought this performance brought out the singers’ engagement with the notes and texts, the opening “Kyrie eleison” most satisfyingly stirring the blood with the choir’s beautifully-graded dynamic levels most richly and directly explored.

I didn’t remember from that previous experience of the work the cantor-like openings of both the “Gloria” and the “Credo”, with bass-baritone James Clayton filling the role in both instances. In the Gloria, it was difficult to clearly hear the soloists, as if the single voices were still battling to be heard amid lingering resonances from the full choir. I sadly fear that those resonances were the building’s own, and they couldn’t help but colour and refract both large and small interactions between voices. Having little idea as to where the soloists would be placed beforehand I chose from the spaces available to sit on the right-hand side of the auditorium, reasonably close to the front – alas, the four soloists stood on the opposite side, with the alto, on the end, seeming very far away! Given that each had material to sing of some significance, one would have thought they would have been given a central, forward position as a counter to the “rapacious maw” of that acoustic!

What I gleaned from the solo voices’ delivery of passages such as the “Laudamus te” from the Gloria, was that their singing was in each case accurate and focused, though varying in impact. Of the tenor and alto, I thought the former, Giancarlo Lisi, had the better chance to be heard due to the tessitura of each singer’s line, the alto’s part seeming to give Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby fewer chances to “sing out”. Both soprano Lisa Harper-Brown and bass-baritone James Clayton had stronger voices applied to brightly-registered solo lines, each able to invest their individual lines with greater clarity.

GIven the “generalising’ effects of such an acoustic, I thought that Brent Stewart and his choir produced amazingly varied dynamics and vocal textures throughout both works. Though Mozart’s work was styled as a “Missa Brevis”, there was nothing limited or small-scale about the music’s emotional range in places. A particularly telling example was during the “Et Incarnatus est” sections of the Credo, where conductor and voices conveyed such mystery and inwardness of mood compared with the outburst of joy that galvanised our sensibilities at “Et Resurrexit”.

Where the soloists were allowed greater space in which to properly “sound” their voices was in the lovely “Benedictus” part of the “Sanctus” – begun by the soprano, the dovetailing of the separate lines was winningly achieved by all, though Lisa Harper-Brown’s voice was particularly radiant. I enjoyed the voices’ rich and secure blending, marvelling as I did so how anybody could (as has been the case regarding this music) consider this to be the work of any composer other than Mozart – it seemed to me to have his unique “voice”, most especially during this beautiful interlude.

The “Agnus Dei” further demonstrated the musicians’ control of atmosphere and mood, the voices stressing the words “peccata mundi”, unequivocally depicting humanity’s self-proclaimed guilt in the throes of sin, and desperate urgency in the act of seeking forgiveness. From these dark moments came radiant hope in the form of a joyously energetic “Dona nobis pacem” – a splendid finish!

Mention must be made at this point of the superb organ-playing of Richard Apperley, here in complete control of an instrument that, despite its diminutive size seemed to pack plenty of punch, especially in its lower regions. (Most people will be aware of the Cathedral’s recent problems with its regular organ due to damage to the pipes caused by the November 2016 earthquake.) I recalled a chamber orchestra accompanying us in that performance I was involved in, all those years hence, though it didn’t seem to my ears as though much was “lost” in having an organ instead, thanks to the nimbleness and strength of the organist’s efforts throughout the first half.

I’d previously heard the Faure Requiem in concert with both organ and orchestra as the respective accompaniments, preferring the orchestra because of the colour and visceral impact given the music both in general and by various particular instruments. Coincidentally enough, I had a “performing” history with this work as well, this time as a timpanist, which of course partly explains my bias towards orchestral accompaniment! Faure himself never sanctioned an organ-only accompaniment, initially scoring the work’s instrumental forces to include harp, timpani, organ and strings, and in later amendations adding firstly horns, trumpets and bassoon, and finally a near-full complement of winds plus trombones!. He reportedly complained of a later performance that the orchestra had been “too small”, clearly wanting those colours and timbres to be heard.

In most instances involving performances of this work the prohibitive cost of hiring orchestral players would prevent choirs from programming the Requiem at all, I expect – but with organists of the calibre of Richard Apperley and Douglas Mews in Wellington, the prohibitive becomes possible with the use of organ accompaniment. As with the Mozart work, Richard Apperley’s organ-playing seemed at first to fully compensate for the orchestra’s absence, though as with other performances I’ve heard, the “Sanctus” didn’t quite come off as it always does with those wonderful, scalp-prickling horn-calls introducing the choir’s cries of “Hosanna in excelsis!”. I’ve always wanted organists to really “pull out the stops” at that point, and have never really been transported with the delight that I’m expecting, when the horns are absent. Faure was also insistent that the violins “sing out” their counterpointed melody to the choir’s opening phrases of “Sanctus” (he significantly amended the “solo violin” of the original version to a group of violins in later versions), though here, as with most of the movement’s detailings I thought the phrasings of the player amply represented the composer’s intentions.

Brent Stewart’s direction of his voices inclined more towards urgency than spaciousness in places throughout the work, creating a parallel undercurrent of tension alongside the “faith in eternal rest” and the “happy deliverance” of Faure’s own expressed intentions. The near-anguished full-throatedness of the singing in places such as “Exaudi orationem meam” kept us mindful of the intensities of human aspiration towards God, giving what I thought was a proper “edge” to the listening experience; and this fully-dynamic response to both text and music throughout made the performance a living, breathing one. This “squaring up to” the work’s occasional sequences of near-dissonant anxiety again enlivened the music at “Christe eleison”, and contrasted well with those moments of relief and relative calm in places such as the movement’s end.

I enjoyed the organ timbres – so ecclesiastically reedy and evocative! – during the introduction to the Offertory, preparing us for a series of invocations (“O Domine, Jesu Christe, Rex Gloriae”) from the choir, each more intense than the last, and superbly built up by conductor and voices! I thought the admirable James Clayton’s baritonal timbres at the “Hostias” somewhat inhibited-sounding at first (the singer was on that “other side” of the platform, which may have accounted for this, though once again I felt the acoustic “lost” some of the voice’s resonance in general), but his soft-singing towards the end was lovely. The re-entry of the choir with a repeat of “O Domine” seemed, along with the soloist’s quiet beseechings, to fully capture a sense of a plea from humanity for mercy.

When discussing the “Sanctus” above I neglected to mention a sudden lighting backdrop change, one suggesting to me some sort of of transcendent movement, a “bringing closer to God” kind of ambient progression towards a purer, more intense state of awareness, one that, if none too subtly applied, at least indicated that the music was taking us somewhere different. This continued throughout the sublime “Pie Jesu” sequence, with Lisa Harper-Brown’s truthful and accurate singing penetrating to the music’s core. I thought at first her voice not entirely “pure”, but became more and more convinced as she progressed, and especially with that “grain of humanity” which coloured her utterances entirely appropriately (more so here, in my view, than the ethereal tones of a boy soprano, which was what Faure originally had in mind, constrained by ecclesiastical edicts forbidding female singers!). Here, I thought hers a lovely, insightful performance.

From blue, the backdrops were suffused with orange, with the beginning of the “Agnus Dei” (somebody may, at some stage, explain to me the rationale, here!) – again, Brett Stewart moved the music with some urgency, voices and organ, after a lyrical opening, darkening the textures with deep, heartfelt tones, giving great and resonating emphasis to the “miserere nobis” (Have mercy on us) sentiments. After this came that remarkable sequence of downward modulations at “Lux aeterna, luceat eis”, music that seemed to come straight out of Wagner’s “Die Walkure” (Wotan’s sleep-inducing kiss on the forehead of his daughter, Brunnhilde), followed by a return to the opening “Requiem”, organ leading into the choir’s entry with strong and assertive declamations, and the choir excitingly raising its collective voice at “Et lux perpetua”, leaving the organ to finish as the movement began.

James Clayton’s singing of the portentous “Libera Me” kept something in reserve for his forceful delivery of “Dum veneris judicare” (When thou shalt come to judge), the choir’s tremulous realisation of “Tremens factus” (I tremble with fear) then leading up to the “Dies illa, dies irae” passages – the only part of Faure’s conception that approaches Verdi’s own “Requiem” in its agitation and vehemence. Here, organ and voices flung their sounds at us splendidly, the tones falling away in terror and uncertainty towards the reprise of the “Libera Me”, firstly by the choir, with an outburst of blazing supplication at “Dum veneris judicare”, then quietly pleading, along with the baritione voice, at the movement’s end.

After these projected tribulations and terrors, the balm of Faure’s overall vision reasserted itself with the concluding “In Paradisum”. Though the organ wasn’t quite as “pipy” as I would have liked, the playing kept the textures elevated, and the sopranos’ voices were simply to die for, here, with their radiant, angelic tones – so too were the richly-wrought harmonies of the remaining voices reinforcing those ethereal beauties at the very end, the choir repeating the word “Requiem” to lump-in-the-throat inducing effect.

Need I add, an appropriately sublime performance!