Piano quartets from Diedre Irons and NZSO string principals

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Music
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Julia Joyce (viola), Andrew Joyce (cello), Diedre Irons (piano)

Schubert: Adagio and Rondo Concertante in F, D 487
Fauré: Piano Quartet in C minor, Op 15
Brahms: Piano Quartet in A, Op 26

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 7 August 3 pm

There was little doubt that a piano quartet comprising three of the principals in the NZSO plus one of the most admired New Zealand pianists would produce a delightful concert. And the composers to be played were further assurance of a couple of rewarding hours.

That expectation could withstand the unknown quantity of the first piece, by Schubert. Written aged 19 and therefore, in Schubert’s case, the work of a thoroughly experienced, even mature, composer. After all, he’d already written more lovely music than most composers do in a long life: seven operas, four symphonies, eleven string quartets, scores of songs and piano pieces.

This was practically the only music he wrote for piano quartet. Diedre Irons’s programme note remarked on the prominence given to the piano, and I thought she was to be admired for making little effort to disguise that feature. There were occasional moments when, for example, the cello sounded as if it might be offered something worthwhile to do, but often that was just a passing distraction; and one of the violin’s appearances soon led to a defeated sounding, descending arpeggio.

That was the introductory Adagio part. The Rondo proved a bit more interesting, though it still sounded rather like a piano sonata with obbligato strings. However, there was more liveliness here and better evidence of Schubert’s singular musical gifts. For all the comparative reticence by the three stringed instruments, the players explored all the latent possibilities of colour and dynamics and varied pacing that are to be found in Schubert.

The first of Fauré’s two piano quartets, probably his most popular piece of chamber music, brought us to well-known territory. And there was never a moment’s doubt about either its musical worth or its illuminating playing by these four musicians. By the time Fauré was about 30, when this was written, he was displaying great maturity in handling ensemble music and in creating interesting, well balanced music that evolved in an imaginative way. In this work he seems to be seeking as full and varied a sound as possible, even striving towards the spirit of an orchestral work, perhaps the piano concerto he never wrote.

Often in music these days, what I look forward to is the slow movement (when I was young it was usually the fast, exciting parts). So in this quartet, I particularly enjoyed the Adagio with the slow, thoughtful theme that was introduced by the piano and cello, though soon it encompassed all the strings which were particularly beautiful. And the cello’s return later in an extended passage was especially captivating. The strongly contrasted finale – Allegro molto – created a feeling of inevitability with some moments in which the piano became quite insistent; but the work’s overall feeling is of a generous and perfectly reasonable sharing of all the musical material among the four players.

Brahms was five or six years younger than Fauré when he wrote his two piano quartets. It’s the other one, Op 25, that’s rather better known, and more popular; so this outing was most welcome.

It might seem odd that Op 25 is in a minor key (G minor) while this, which a generally fairly peaceful and meditative, is in the most sanguine of keys, A major. The experts hear a good deal of Schubert in this piece, in the handling of the piano by itself in, to mark out a big extended tune as the strings murmur along. It’s been observed that with these chamber works Brahms was responding to the discovering, unearthing, in the 1850s (much by Schumann), of a great deal of Schubert’s music which had simply been filed away, unplayed and unpublished.

As I listened, I had begun to make notes to the effect that in this quartet, Brahms was stretching the limits of convention by injecting greater variety in each movement with unexpected mood changes and a disinclination to adhere literally to the character of each movement as announced by its title.

This became so erratic and puzzling that when I got home I looked up the movements of Op 26 and discovered that those printed in the programme related to Op 25, and of course, my notes conformed much better to the real names of the movements, as they should have been shown: 1. Allegro non troppo, 2. Poco adagio, 3 Scherzo – Poco allegro, and Trio, 4 Allegro. The main discrepancy was the reversing of the fast and slow, second and third movements. (Op 25’s second movement is marked as in the programme, Allegro ma non troppo and a Trio: Animato). Then it fell into place.

In any case, the players seemed to rejoice in the idiosyncrasies in Brahms’s composition, and there was a real feeling of pleasure and engagement. In the Finale the piano led the way at once with the strings contributing cohesive support for it, though individual strings took their turn in the limelight. And here I had remarked that, if Brahms had intended to inject a gypsy element in it (‘alla zingarese’, in the G minor quartet), he seemed to have encountered a fairly sedate gypsy band that day. However, there was a touch of the zingarese here, though nothing to remark on.

Happily, of course, the mistake probably bothered only the one who was trying to keep track of what was going on, in order to be able to write something that was vaguely sensible.

It was a most satisfying concert, a mixture of the known and the not well known and the unknown; but all rewarding and performed with the greatest musicality, zest and imagination.

 

 

 

 

NZSO and Christiane Libor in wonderful Strauss songs and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart with Christiane Libor (soprano)

Strauss: Four Last Songs
Mahler: Symphony No 4 in G

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 6 August, 7:30 pm

It might have been possible to blame a rival entertainment or the wet and chilly weather for the rather loosely packed audience for a concert that I’d expected to have a ‘full house’ notice at the door. One might also wonder whether it’s a reflection on the slow decline of musical tastes, and that those of us who were brought up with a certain amount of great music in our ears as children are disappearing (and being replaced by, let’s say, generations with different tastes).

Has Wellington become blasé about the fact that we have one of the world’s great orchestras living here, conducted by an eminent conductor of the older generation, and the programme comprised a couple of what I’d have thought were among the most popular and best-loved classical works.

German soprano Christiane Libor’s reputation rests primarily on Wagner and Strauss and she is based largely in Europe with a few North American outings; none, by the look of her biography, in Britain or other English-speaking countries. While it would have been wonderful to have heard her in a substantial chunk from the Ring cycle for example, the Four Last Songs are a moving summation of the art of Richard Strauss.

Her gifts were evident within the first few bars of the first song, Spring, with a voice that was not just strong and opulent, but could also find the pathos and beauty in Strauss’s late music. The song’s themes however, are not uniformly elegiac, depicting life’s twilight years, capping a long, richly creative life. This first song is suffused with a calm happiness, the optimism of springtime. The second however, September, presages autumn, is a more elaborate song where Libor could demonstrate her vocal fluidity, ranging between glowing fortissimi as well as quiet.

The third and last of the three Hesse songs, Beim Schlafengehen, introduced by low stings, later featured a lovely solo from Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s violin, and then rose to an ecstatic climax. It sometimes seems to me the right place for the cycle to end (there were discussions about the most appropriate order of the four songs), for the spirit awoken by singer and orchestra seems a mixture of that ecstasy and a going out.

But the words of the last song, Im Abendrot, by Eichendorff, one of the most distinctive poems of the early 19th century Romantic poet, contemporary of Rückert and Heine, do make a more meaningful ending, Libor’s voice now in a warm vein of acceptance.

Though the huge size of Strauss’s orchestra makes possible occasional overwhelming effects, more often it’s the range of instruments used with finesse, that have evolved over centuries in western music, that allows an ever-changing chamber music quality to emerge, subtly reflecting the sense and emotion of the words, and supporting, almost never obscuring, the voice.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was, I think, the first live Mahler performance I heard, 20-ish, and I remember being at once captivated and baffled by its size and character. It employs a smaller, more discreet orchestra than the other symphonies: no trombones or tuba and only five horns, when some at the time, were using eight or nine (as in NZSO’s last Strauss plus Escher concert). Its character is perhaps defined by the poem used in the last movement, somewhat peasant-like, naïve; so it opens with sleigh-bells (I have an early recording by Bruno Walter where the sleigh-bells are deleted).

Its magic only deepens and expands with the passing years.

Which prompts me to reflect on the behaviour of some of those who ply my trade of music critic. This work attracted some nasty and cruel reviews at its first performances, and some were quoted in the programme notes; similarly it’s sad to read about the cruelly treated Bruckner, himself a somewhat naive figure, who was routinely attacked by the myopic Brahms-lover, Hanslick who seemed to regard music criticism as ablood sport.

It’s the fairy-tale qualities that endear this music to the listener, and De Waart, to help create that, encouraged woodwind players (in particular) to deliver keener, shriller tones, often by raising their instruments to a horizontal position, and making much use of the three flutes plus piccolo. And thematic fragments get passed around in a way that creates a sort of children’s game.

Another peasant-like feature appears in the second movement where Leppänen switches to a scordatura-tuned violin (typically tuning the G string down a tone or so) to capture that amateur fiddler sense, in music that moved between the Ländler dance (pre-curser to the waltz) and rough peasant tunes. The orchestra played along with it all in seeming delight.

The Ruhevoll (Adagio I guess) movement has always seemed to me is a kind of try-out for the Adagietto in the Fifth Symphony and I’ve wondered why it hasn’t achieved a similar life of its own. But it’s great length – round 20 minutes – would be against it. Its variety of mood is also greater than in the Adagietto, with its combination of splendour and delicacy and rough, peasantish passages.

The reappearance of Christiane Libor, walking in slowly during the opening bars of the fourth movement, felt like a home-coming – we needed to hear more of her. In some ways the last movement might seem something of an anti-climax after the splendours of the third. It’s a setting of one of the 700-odd folk poems collected by Arnim and Brentano and published as Des Knaben Wunderhorn between 1805 and 1808.

It was criticised from that time, not for additions through the nineteenth century, but for its lack of scholarship – the sources were not adhered to, some were subject to embellishment or addition, and some were simply inventions by the compilers themselves. But they are no less a rich treasury of folk poetry that helped inspire the many poets and composers of the Romantic era, from Heine and Eichendorff to Weber and Schumann.

The combination of the ebullient, colourful orchestral scoring with a voice beautifully equipped to blend their playfulness, naivete and spirituality. They rejoiced in the simple things of life, bringing about a subsiding, ‘glow of serenity and peace’ (to quote a quote the programme notes take from musicologist Hugh Macdonald).

The absence of a Beethovenish coda led initially to a somewhat subdued response from the audience, though it grew in passion as the minutes passed, as people understood what a wonderful performance they’d heard.

 

Diverting, accomplished, baroque concert from Auckland’s NZBarok on a cold night

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Cello Charms

Mozart: Divertimento in F, K.138
W.F. Bach: Suite in G
C.P.E. Bach: Symphony in E minor, Wq 177
Haydn: Cello Concerto, Hob. VIIb:1

NZBarok led by Graham McPhail, with Daniel Yeadon (cello)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

5 August 2016, 7.30pm

Formerly known as AKBarok, this Auckland group was making its first visit to Wellington, though it has been in existence for 14 years!  It was a welcome visit, with an audience almost filling the downstairs and half-filling the gallery at St. Andrews, this despite the night being wet and perhaps the coldest of the year.  It was a pleasure to find the gallery open; it is not always for evening concerts.  The sound is good up there – and hot air rises, so this made it a valuable location on such a cold night.

The highlight of the programme was Haydn’s first cello concerto, with Australian-based English cellist Daniel Yeadon as soloist.  This was claimed to be the first original instrument performance of the work in New Zealand.

These performers play original instruments of the baroque era, having gut strings and using baroque bows.  They stand to play (except of course the cellos, though on Wednesday evening I saw Rolf Gjelsten briefly play his cello standing up!).  Both these factors give them a freedom and a different sound from that from modern instruments.

The Mozart Divertimento was lively, though the group took a little time to settle into intonation and ensemble.  One doesn’t usually think of Mozart (or Haydn) as baroque composers, though in his introductory remarks David McPhail made links between the two periods, with the Bach brothers rather straddling both.

His brief remarks were informative and useful, since there were no programme notes.  Made up of seven violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass and fortepiano, the group has considerable rapport, and plays under the leadership of McPhail, with no conductor.  Fortepianist James Tibbles is up with the times, using an iPad or similar instead of sheet music – but I did find the winking light of the control unit under the instrument a little distracting; incongruous when the music was from the eighteenth century and the instruments were authentic ones.  Apart from McPahil and Tibbles (and Daniel Yeadon, who played with the ensemble in the first half), all the players were women.

The music was charming and, well, diverting, as are all Mozart’s divertimenti and serenades.  We should, of course, have been eating, drinking and conversing during it.  Its sudden ending was part of its charm.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s suite began with a smooth larghetto introduction that gave opportunity to hear the gut strings’ tone which is general clearer in articulation as well as being warmer in tone.  The fortepiano sound was not much in evidence from where I sat, in the gallery.  The allegro contributed plenty of rhythmic vitality and variation.  While not comprised of the set of dances that baroque composers used in suites, there were some dances.  The term ‘Torneo’ puzzled me, and none of my music dictionaries, nor Wikipedia, obliged with a definition.  However, the Italian dictionary did: tournament.  I could not detect horses and lances.

The following adagio Aria was lyrical and beautiful.  It could also be interpreted as an elegant baroque dance.  Menuetto followed; the courtly slow dance it usually is.  The final movement, Capriccio, was more unusual and variable melodically and harmonically than the others.  Nevertheless, I have to say that this music sounds plain after the Mozart; that work was written in 1772 when the composer was only 16, at which time W.F. Bach would have been 61.

The C.P.E. Bach work, written in 1756 was the only one of his twenty symphonies published in his lifetime.   After quite an abrasive opening, it continued to have plenty of dynamic contrasts in the first movement (allegro assai).  A smooth, ingratiating andante followed; again it was possible to envisage a stately dance.  The allegro last movement was rhythmically alive, with dotted rhythms in a melodic line that darted from top to bottom of the stave.

The highlight of the programme was the Haydn concerto.  Yeadon spoke to the audience, explaining some variants in his style from what we come to expect: a narrower vibrato, portamento (slurring), and less than strict rhythm in places.  These, he said, were the fashions in the composer’s time.

The concerto was a familiar one. It was composed around 1761-65 for longtime friend Joseph Franz Weigl, then the principal cellist of Prince Nicolaus’s Esterházy Orchestra.  Its mellow introduction had less staccato playing from the soloist that we have heard in some performances.  Our cellist had a warm, full tone and flawless intonation and bowing.  He imbued the work with taste and grace, and brought out the beauties in it, as did the accompanying strings.  The short cadenza was stylish and at one with the other music.

The adagio bore a sublime melody; syncopation was part of its charm; no wonder it is a popular concerto.  This was playing of a very high order.  Here, the fortepiano was more to the fore.  The total effect was magical.

The third movement was an exciting allegro, and a pretty quick one at that.  At times it was almost a perpetuum mobile.  It was a very skilful performance; the brilliant playing in this work was not only from the soloist.  It evoked a deservedly enthusiastic response from the largely young, and very attentive, audience.  As an encore, Yeadon played the well-known Prelude from J.S. Bach’s first Suite.  It was interesting to see that for this, Yeadon extended down the spike of his cello; all the cellists had played in true baroque style without this accoutrement.  The work sounded very different on gut strings, and made a gratifying end to a fine concert.

 

 

 

The New Zealand String Quartet – a “new look” ensemble….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand String Quartet presents:
Heartland Classics In Wellington

HAYDN – String Quartet in D Op.71 No.2
FARR – Quartet “Te Tai-O-Rehua” (The Tasman Sea)
SCHUBERT – String Quartet in C Minor D.703 “Quartettsatz”
DVORAK – String Quartet in F Op.96 “American”

The New Zealand String Quartet
Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Friday, 5th August, 2016

Having gotten so used to the familiar line-up of faces, performing aspects and collaborative interactions which for such a long time “were” the New Zealand String Quartet, one found oneself, to one’s surprise, initially unnerved by the prospect of experiencing a change in the order of things – especially in view of the long-term and all-round excellence of the ensemble. Of course, it stood to reason that the group, having determinedly wrought such standards of achievement, would choose a replacement for second violinist Douglas Beilman worthy of maintaining and enhancing those same standards. The thought was reassuring – one did, after all, TRUST the artistic judgements of these people!

Nevertheless, I could still feel a certain tension amid my expectations, while awaiting the appearance of the players in the Hunter Chamber Auditorium at Wellington’s Victoria University, concerning the change in ensemble which had brought Australian violinist Monique Lapins into the picture. Receptivity to individual styles of music-making is a funny thing – I’ve sometimes found myself at odds with opinions expressed by others regarding what musicians are seen and heard to do, recognising that such an individualisation is part-and-parcel of a real and personal connection with things. One can, of course, admire what a player does without feeling very much engagement or empathy with what is produced. I’d gotten so very used to being so very “engaged” with the NZSQ’s music-making, I found myself feeling anxious that such feelings would continue.

It sounds like a cliché to say that I needn’t have worried, but from the outset of the concert there seemed an uncanny “business as usual” aspect to the playing, which I suppose could partly be attributed to Monique Lapins’ undoubted abilities as an ensemble player – every concerted gesture and individual interaction between her and her colleagues had a confident, and nicely “involved“ aspect that suggested sympathy, accord, rapport – whatever one would like to call it! Naturally, I was giving her contributions more-than-usual attention, and, given that there was probably a fair degree of relief in my observations, was not being particularly dispassionate at that point in time!

So, having gotten those “concerns” off my chest, I feel now as though I can make appropriately delighted noises of welcome regarding Monique Lapins – and, as a Wellingtonian myself, wishing for her not only the enjoyment of many “great cups of Wellington coffee” whenever she gets the chance to spend time in this part of the world, but also for her and the ensemble a fruitful collaboration of many performance successes and satisfactions to come.

To the actual concert, now – and as ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten made clear in his spoken introduction to the first item on the programme, there was simply no better way to begin an evening of music for string quartet than with a work by the composer “to whom we owe everything – Josef Haydn!”. We heard the second Quartet from the Op. 71 set, written for the composer’s second visit to England after his first had proved such a great success. With these quartets Haydn took care to write more “orchestrally” than previously, as the public performance venues outside Esterhazy (where he had worked for so long) were larger, and required bigger and bolder gestures than in his previous works in the genre – hence the spacious opening chords of this work, played here with a rich, warm sound. And how richly-voiced were the interchanges between all four instruments in the allegro which followed, the music’s high spirits as much generated by the flow between the players as by the themes and rhythms themselves.

The prayerful opening to the Adagio was buoyed along by a dotted rhythm, then floated beguilingly throughout murmuring sequences, with everything shaded so subtly and beautifully, the textures almost orchestral in places as the players dug into their phrases – here, I was particularly enjoying the partnership between first and second violins, Helene Pohl’s bright, eager sounds at once matched by and contrasted with Monique Lapins’ poised, more burnished tones. Then, what delicious fun was conveyed by the players with the brief Minuet, and how much sheer delight made by Helene Pohl of the arpeggiated twist at each phrase-end, something amusingly “thrown off” by all the players at the end of the dance.

Haydn seemed to almost “leg-rope” his players at the finale’s beginning, giving the music a curious “limping” quality, which after due extended consideration suddenly animated into a “proper” allegro, the music energising players and listeners alike as all four instruments were made to scurry into and through a divertingly dovetailed latticework of lines (pardon the alliteration!), here, piling on the textures and pushing out the ambiences as they did so! It was great and engaging music-making from all concerned.

Next on the programme was Gareth Farr’s string quartet Te Tai-o-Rehua (the Tasman Sea). I liked the quote from the composer concerning the quartet – “a really interesting dinner party for four people” – though I can’t remember whether or not Monique Lapins repeated that quote for us in her introduction to the work or whether I read or heard it elsewhere. Still, it seemed entirely appropriate that the Quartet’s new member air her thoughts about the music, given its trans-Tasman associations – Farr had originally written the work for Australia’s Goldner Quartet to play as part of a co-commission between the musicians and Chamber Music New Zealand, to mark the 21st anniversary of the Wellington/Sydney sister-city association in 2013.

At the beginning we heard chant-like patterns from the second violin in tandem with more exotic-sounding elements sounded by the other instruments, mysterious tremolandi and counter-harmonics, with a wide, folksy vibrato coming from the first violin. The viola took over the rhythmic trajectories allowing the others to interact, using angular pizzicati and eerie harmonics. I thought the sonorities conjured up by these configurations and unreservedly delivered to us by the players produced a sometimes startling aural and deeply-felt experience, with the sounds ranging in effect from utmost delight of delicacy to grim and purposeful vehemence. Gareth Farr’s work has always been rhythmically driven, sometimes to the point of obsessiveness – here, in so many places I was struck by the music’s balance between rhythm and colour, and for the composer’s inventive, unpredictable deployment of those sounds, making for whole sequences of incident that lost no time in moving between the pictorial and the emotional. It all made for a darker, more volatile work that I perhaps expected to hear something which excitingly stretched one’s sensibilities.

Having remarked so frequently in the past on the NZSQ’s capacities for bringing a whole-heartedness to whatever it performs, enabling its listeners to really get to grips with the music, I was grateful to once again be transported by the experience, in particular with a work such as this, after all, conceived and written about relatively familiar territories – it was, as Douglas Lilburn once said “music about ourselves”, with as much variety and range of expression as such a quality might bring forth. I thought that, especially in a programme devoted largely to European music, the work served notice that universalities of human emotion can often be expressed just as meaningfully in local accents as in the tones of more standardised and established figures.

Gillian Ansell introduced Schubert’s Quartettsatz (literally, “Quartet-Movement”) written in 1820, after the interval. This music was intended to be part of a larger work, and would have been the first of the composer’s complete “mature” works in this genre – but for some reason – we don’t know why – Schubert abandoned the work after completing just one movement and the first few bars of a slow movement. The music was just too good to be ignored as a “failed attempt” at a complete work and so the Quartettsatz has become an often-played item at string quartet concerts. Schubert did go on to complete three further quartets, including the famous “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. Perhaps the agitated nature of the writing of this quartet movement is a clue to what might have been happening in Schubert’s life at this time. It all seemed to me to be a kind of study depicting the interaction between light and dark, with the light in this case seeming so frail and tentative, vested with a kind of vulnerability in the face of the dark’s onslaught. The tones are spectral, almost “spooked”, as if waiting for the next debilitating outburst.

Need I say more than that the Quartet in characteristic fashion threw themselves at the music, making it an intensely visceral happening. The players unhesitatingly brought out the music’s fierce and brutal contrasts, giving the entire sequence of exchanges an intensely fatalistic character, almost Tchaikovskian in places. The intensities reached such levels that one was left with the feeling at the end that it seemed somewhat voyeuristic to have “enjoyed”music which conveyed so much suffering! Still, perhaps music enables a kind of understanding of such extremes, while recognising that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.

I was surprised when Helene Pohl told us, by way of introducing the concert’s final item, that, at a Canadian chamber music festival she had recently attended, an “audience-poll” had on that occasion identified none other than Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet as the gathering’s out-and-out favourite piece of chamber music. Having tantalised us with this piece of information, the Quartet proceeded to demonstrate why this was perfectly possible, with a performance that conveyed in the music such love of life and intensity of feeling as to enable us to feel we were hugely enjoying the company of somebody energetic, gregarious and unfailingly warmhearted.

I remember reading, long ago, a remark made by some commentator or other, to the effect that Dvorak’s music was frequently “an expression of joy that brings one close to tears” – given that human responses to art are individual, and of course subjective, I do find myself returning to that remark whenever I hear certain passages in certain works by the composer. The quartet brought out this quality both in their soft playing of the first movement’s second subject, and in some of the beautifully-poised duetting passages of the slow movement, between first and second violins. And what a beautiful sequence shortly after the Scherzo’s beginning, with the two violins in melancholy duet and Rolf Gjelsten’s ‘cello singing in reply, the viola adding a gorgeous “snap” to its rounding-off comment by way of completing the circle.

After all of this, what exhilaration there was to be had from the finale’s opening rhythms! – especially from violist Gillian Ansell’s engaging sense of “schwung” throughout the opening, one taken up readily by the other players, the music’s sense of forward movement seeming to spring from a deep-seated desire to express “this worlde’s joye”. And with what ease and spontaneity the players modulated between completely different territories, taking those measures of veiled retrospection in single, deep-seated breaths before reactivating the opening’s energies and driving the music brilliantly and vigorously onwards to its joyously beckoning conclusion!

After these outpourings of physicality, the composer’s beautiful Cypress No.3 (“When thy sweet glances on me fall”) was like the proverbial balm in places, operatic and passionate in a brief middle section, then rapt and achingly lovely at the end. It was a haunting and dream-like way to finish the concert, leaving us with a kind of fully-engaged contentment with what we’d heard throughout the evening, and, in a troubled world, some reassurance in the continuance of things that are necessary for us to go on living in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second of New Zealand String Quartet’s 12-concert tour in fine auditorium of Porirua’s Pataka museum

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Heartland Tour
New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello)

Mozart: String Quartet no.16 in E flat, K.428
Gillian Whitehead: Poroporoaki
Dvořák: Cypresses, nos.3 and 11
Mendelssohn: String Quartet no.3 in D, Op.44 no.1

Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua

Wednesday, 3 August 2016, 7.30pm

In the Quartet’s Heartland Classics tour, a number of smaller venues are being visited.  This was the second on the 11-centre tour.  It attracted an audience of approximately 100; the outstanding programme and playing received generous applause from those present.  It was good to see some children there.

The programme began with one of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ Quartets.  In her remarks, Gillian Ansell informed us that the first performance was played by four composers: Haydn, Mozart, Dittersdorf and Vanhal (also spelt Wanhal).  The first movement (molto allegro vivace) had sombre opening chords that soon gave way to euphonious jollity.  There was both expression and dynamic variety in the playing.  The subtlety of utterance was quite breathtaking.

The opening of the andante second movement was gorgeous: smooth, lyrical, blended, idyllic.  Listening to this was like being in another world.  The modulation into a minor key affected the mood, but it was still blissful music.  It was so good to hear it in a smaller venue than is often the case.

The third movement was a sprightly minuet.  A staccato section was quite amusing in its lightness and playfulness; the trio was almost doleful by comparison.  The return to the minuet was marked by great precision.  The final movement, allegro vivace, had a similar jolly character to the first movement, bravura passages and all.  Its motifs were uncomplicated, but their treatment gave plenty of scope for intriguing variations.

We moved now to an unusual work, introduced by Helene Pohl in some detail.  The musicians demonstrated Gillian Whitehead’s skilful incorporation of the sounds of a number of taonga puoro, played on their stringed instruments.  It was amazing how much like the originals, made variously of wood, gourd, stone and shell, the sounds could be, using a variety of techniques.  They showed photos, some considerable enlargements, of the original instruments. This work was written for the Quartet to play at a conference in China honouring the composer Jack Body, last December.  It was a brilliant piece of work, superbly rendered.  The interweaving of the various instruments was achieved in a thoroughly musical way, each of the stringed instruments having its moments of prominence, but all as part of a cohesive and striking whole.

Two short pieces by Dvořák followed.  These were two of the 12 pieces entitled Cypresses, inspired by poems by Gustav Pfleger Moravsky, that Dvořák arranged for string quartet from the larger number of songs he had written much earlier.  The quartet pieces were published in 1887, and the two we heard were entitled ‘When thy sweet glances on me fall’ and ‘Nature lies peaceful in slumber and dreaming’.  Monique Lapins read out the poems, which were, like their fellows, about unrequited love.

The first certainly expressed a sort of exquisite pain, while the second, in contrast, had a more positive tone, contemplating the joys of nature, though still being about unrequited love. That love of melody and of rhythmic felicity typical of Dvořák was much in evidence in this attractive music.

The New Zealand String Quartet has recorded all of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, including some shorter pieces written for four string players.  The quartet no.3 was introduced by Rolf Gjelsten, whose lively remarks stressed the excellence of the counterpoint to be found throughout the work, making it very interesting for each part to play.  Its setting in the happy, cheerful key of D major helped to make this one of NZSQ’s favourite works to play.

The exuberant first movement (molto allegro vivace) had contrasting quiet passages – but these were almost obliterated by the sound of heavy rain outside.  Nevertheless, the movement was full of zest and enthusiasm, as was the playing.  A repeated passage that was almost spooky followed, yet it also had delicious harmonies and intricate counterpoint.  Indeed, no moment lacked interest.

The second movement (menuetto: un poco allegretto) began in a pastoral, languid mood, yet it also had intensity, and strong melodies.  The third movement (andante espressivo ma con moto) was lilting, but with drive.  The principal melody on the other strings was accompanied by pizzicato from the cello.  This was a delightful movement.  The finale (presto con brio) was spirited and dance-like.  Mendelssohn knew how to capture the audience’s attention from the first notes or chords.  The fugato in this movement, with which the composer was apparently very pleased (according to the programme note) was indeed thoroughly satisfying, as was the entire programme.

The Quartet play again, a different programme, on Friday 5 August at 7:30pm, at the Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington.

Cellist Rebecca Turner with intriguing and entertaining music on carbon-fibre cello

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime concert

Rebecca Turner (cello) with help from electronic tape

Music by Christopher William Pearce, Carl Vine and Pêteris Vasks

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 3 August, 12:15 pm

There are certain benefits in forming habits, and the weekly lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s are among the less sinful of what I’m prepared to confess to. Well, there was the weather. But I was there and though we (Middle C Incorporated) had not assigned the reviewing to anyone, Rebecca Turner’s performance of a totally unknown composer soon had me reaching for pen and notebook.

It was by a composer friend of the cellist, 42-year-old American, Christopher William Pearce, and involved things that I often find pretentious, alienating, uncalled for, even disguising a lack of ideas. Sometimes the involvement of electronics or wacky instruments are a turn-off, but by setting aside prejudice, one can be surprised and delighted.

The first adventure however, was her cello, a black instrument without the traditional shape, but rather the shape of a large acoustic guitar. It delivered a warm and perfectly well projected sound. In spite of a normal wood-like sound produced when she hit the side of the cello, it was made of carbon-fibre which has become widespread in sports equipment and in the popular music field. It’s been accepted more recently in the non-classical field, but is still looked at askance by most classical musicians. I might have believed that too, before becoming increasingly uneasy at the madness of the multi-million dollar Stradivarius market; though I have given up claiming to detect a difference between a 1700 model and a well-made one of yesterday. There are in fact differences in the sound produced, but I suspect the untutored ear would only hear a louder and richer sound.

Rebecca played Pearce’s Variations on Wondrous Love, based on a ‘folk hymn’ from the American South, not familiar to me. It began normally, but slowly started to be interfered with by Asian sounds, a drone at the bottom end of the cello, eerie harmonics at the top, hypnotic sequences, hints of pentatonic tonality, trills and fancy efflorescence. Towards the end she parked her bow and attacked with pizzicato, which developed into a hair-raising technique as the plucking was linked with quick stroke down the string which created a sort of bowed effect. I found myself increasingly intrigued and amused (if that’s an emotion permitted of a reviewer of classical music).

The second piece was by Australian Carl Vine, some of whose music I know: not particularly main-stream.  Rebecca Turner gave some details about how it was to work. It involved a microphone placed near the cello and the activation of a tape that the composer prepared and supplied with the score. That was a bit mysterious to me; I found it hard to see or hear how she activated the tape and controlled its behaviour; how her playing actually engaged with and kept in line with the accompanying tape (and at one point with a not incongruous police siren on the street). The tape later became increasingly dominant, leaving her as an unequal contestant, threatening to obliterate the cello’s mere human-created sounds.  The sounds became increasingly complex, vying with each other, but the cello recovered its confidence and eventually subsided, as the main player, into rather gentle, lyrical music that even had touches of beguiling charm.

It did not annoy me and I had confess that for all its machine-driven aspects, the cellist’s skill in keeping abreast with the tape’s formidable demands, and the actual sounds produced, both impressed and delighted me.

Rebecca Turner, by the way, comes from Wellington – Tawa College, then a bachelor’s degree from Canterbury University, masters from Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Goldsmiths College, University of London (where she was taught by the late cellist, Alexander Ivashkin, whom she’d followed after he left Canterbury), and where she now teaches.

Another excursion into the unorthodox was Pêteris Vasks’s Pianissimo. (Latvian: I have a special, irrational affection for Riga, a lovely, art nouveau-rich city with a splendid opera house where I got to four operas in a week, and Wagner worked in his twenties).  It is the second movement of a piece called Book. Rebecca also described some of the experimental aspects of this, helping her cause by allowing a secretive smile to appear once or twice. The excitement here was an accompaniment, not from machine but from the cellist’s own voice, as she pursued a gentle contrapuntal line, her voice nicely modulated to accommodate the cello’s strenuous line, and long sinuous glissandi down the A string. In fact, her singing voice carried quite well, though I had some difficulty catching all she said in her introductory remarks.

Though there was no mention of using tape material in the Vasks piece, there were times when the high line carrying the decorative melodic sounds were accompanied by a low drone that I couldn’t imagine could have come from an adjacent string. But in fact, it did – fingering high on the D string, accompanied by the open G string.

Here was a recital where the existence of electronic elements and fairly unusual techniques seemed really at the service of music rather than, as I have too often felt, being experiments for their own sake. In any case, I enjoyed all three pieces for their musical interest and the impressive skill and musicality of the cellist.

 

 

“Orchestras Unite” – a brilliant success for youthful Wellington musicians

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra and
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
presents:

ORCHESTRAS UNITE!

Lavinnia Rae (‘cello)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra and
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

MUSORGSKY (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
SHOSTAKOVICH – ‘Cello Concerto No.1 in E-flat Op.107
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Symphony No.2 – A London Symphony

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Wednesday 3rd August 2016

These days I count myself proudly, if also a little ruefully, among the grey-headed majority who attend classical concerts – of course, these are the people whose loyal and continued support of our various concert series and occasional special events helps to ensure their continuance. Nevertheless it was a refreshing change to find myself sitting in an auditorium for a classical concert with what seemed like hundreds of heads of different shapes and sizes sporting youthful hues and colours of all kinds – egad, it was actually a youthful audience!

Did I say a classical concert? With such a preponderance of young people in attendance, the programme would surely have gone for a kind of “instant appeal” impact – plenty of “wow!” factor, of the kind that would make such an audience want to come back for more, yes? Let’s have a look! – er, what’s this? – Shostakovich? The First ‘Cello Concerto? – Good grief! And Vaughan Williams’ “London” Symphony? Crikey! – That’s a bit of a haul! What’s that?  Musorgsky? – Night on a Bare Mountain? Well, yes, that’ll go down well, but what about the rest?

I could go on, most tiresomely, in a similar vein, expressing further open-mouthed stupefaction at the makeup of the orchestra and the youthfulness of the soloist in the concerto, none of which has any great relevance to the business in hand, that of reviewing a splendidly-performed concert.  More seriously, what needs far more urgently to be emphasised and approved most enthusiastically is the gesture of the Wellington City Council with support from the NZSO in enabling Wednesday night’s concert at the Michael Fowler Centre to be a FREE event for the public! In my book that’s the kind of support so badly needed by the arts at present, in this case giving young people a golden opportunity to experience some wonderful music-making at first hand and at no cost!

Which is where the “Orchestras Unite!” concept worked so brilliantly in every way. Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams and all, the exercise provided one of the best possible “advertisements” for classical music and music-making that I’ve even witnessed. Under the watchful eye and inspired direction of conductor Kenneth Young, the Wellington Youth Orchestra and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra came together, plus a number of tutor-players from both the NZSO and Orchestra Wellington, together forming a co-operative ensemble of almost 100 musicians whose amalgamation was itself a positive endorsement of music-making in the capital. With such forces it became more than possible to perform works such as the Vaughan Williams “London” Symphony, the numbers generating the requisite weight of tone which helped the piece really work.

Another motivating energiser in the scheme of things was the presence of ‘cellist Lavinnia Rae, whose performance of the first of Shostakovich’s two ‘Cello Concertos was eagerly anticipated. An NZSO National Youth Orchestra player, and leader of the Wellington Youth Orchestra ‘cello section for the last three years, she had already won numerous awards and scholarships during her studies, and is currently working under the tutorship of Inbal Megiddo at the New Zealand School of Music. Again, having a soloist of Rae’s calibre willing to tackle one of the repertoire’s 20th Century classics contributed inestimably to the programme’s lustre.

In thanking the various people and organisations that had helped get the show “on the road” conductor Ken Young himself made reference to the excitement of having so many players to work with, particularly in relation to the Vaughan Williams symphony. He cited the work as a particularly apt challenge for youthful orchestras as there was, as he put it, “plenty for everybody to do”. He didn’t keep us waiting long, as we had already heard from NZSM boss Euan Murdoch and Orchestra Wellington Music Director Marc Taddei adding their endorsements of the occasion, so after the talk had been dispensed with we were quickly and magically transported to that realm of infernal carousing immortalised world-wide by Russian composer Modest Musorgsky.

As most people will already know, Musorgsky was one of a group of composers (who came to be known as “the Mighty Handful”) who wanted to forge a distinctly “Russian” style of composition free from the somewhat more conservative, German-influenced style espoused by the establishment. Much of Musorgsky’s music was, however, considered somewhat harsh and clumsily written, even by his associates, one of whom, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, took it upon himself, after Musorgsky’s tragic early death, to “improve” and make what he thought would be more acceptable versions to the public of some of his colleague’s well-meaning but outlandish-sounding efforts. These “corrections” of Rimsky’s included an entire opera by Musorgsky (Boris Godunov) and the piece played in the concert this evening, St. John’s Night on a Bald Mountain. The programme note really ought to have read “RE-orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov” as there does exist a fascinating “original” of the piece by Musorgsky, somewhat differently constructed to Rimsky’s, and with a far more abrupt and sardonic ending.

Still, the more familiar revised version which we heard tonight continues to pack plenty of punch in places, and the players seemed to literally throw themselves at the piece’s dramatic and theatrical contrasts as if their lives depended on the outcome. It was all tremendously exciting, and expertly-played – the very opening triplet figure on the violins depicting the arrival of the infernal spirits from out of the air in all directions had a focus and a stinging quality that made the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up in gruesome delight and anticipation!

With weighty percussion providing plenty of bangs and crashes, the brass chiming in with portentous fanfares, and the winds creating a suitably “eerie” atmosphere, the music built up through its various episodes to a suitably orgiastic ferment, at which point somebody sitting towards the back of the orchestra dropped something on the floor with a clatter, to add to the general sense of chaos and abandonment! To the rescue came the orchestral bells signalling the first indications of morning light and the gradual dispersement of the spirits into the air from whence they came. Here, the strings and winds drifted and oscillated beautifully, supporting beautiful solos from firstly the clarinet and then the flute. It was all presented most beautifully and serenely, even though the ending wasn’t Musorgsky at all, the whole of the final morning-bell-tolling sequence being that man Rimsky-Korsakov’s invention!

Lavinnia Rae’s entrance and deportment gave an initial impression of a David (the ‘cellist) pitted against something of a Goliath (the orchestra), which the music’s opening measures seemed to confirm – the ‘cello, repeating a variant of the composer’s own DSCH motif, seemed to be trying to lighten the mood, while the orchestra seemed to want to keep the soloist firmly in check. Lavinnia Rae spun her line most resolutely throughout, perhaps wanting a touch more girth with some of her more assertive figurations, but keeping her music buoyant at all times. She interacted magnificently with the solo horn, leaving the winds wailing as the music trotted away with the soloist, and leaving them to manage only a brief, petulant outburst before the movement came to a sudden end.

The slow movement was one of Shostakovich’s angst-ridden affairs, with the solo horn adding to the strings’ anguish, the mood warmed by the ‘cello’s entry – apart from a brief intonation lapse, some gorgeous playing, here, from the soloist, matched a few moments later by the strings’ chilly beauty. So many moments-per-minute in this music! – we were able to experience at first hand why the soloist in her programme note nominated this as the music from the work she felt the most emotionally connected to….the solo horn posed its question and the soloist mused on the answer amidst haunting harmonics-coloured exchanges with the celeste, the music absolutely rapt and beautiful.

The remarkable cadenza-like third movement also held us in thrall with Lavinnia Rae’s playing, a heartfelt outpouring which gradually articulated more and more freely and urgently, quoting the opening four-note theme amid the agitations, and then suddenly striding out and beckoning the orchestra to follow – keystone cops chasings, headstrong waltz-rhythms, and giant-like rhythmic angularities led to a full reconciliation with the DSCH theme, which, pushed enthusiastically along by the ‘cello’s repeated notes, blared out triumphantly on the winds at the end. What a work and what a performance!

All this, and Vaughan Williams’ “London” Symphony to follow after the interval! – as with the Musorgsky work, one felt a satisfying “weight” of tone register as the “London” began and unfolded, the fruit of having such a numbers of players, and of the composer’s scoring emphasising the potential for depth and richness of sonority. Ken Young and his players caught the music’s “living stillness” at the work’s outset, and the sense of something hanging in the early morning air about to be awakened. The Big Ben chime gradually roused the music from its slumber, leading from a crescendo to a harsh, strident outburst which seemed, on the face of things, unduly forceful and discordant a note to strike by way of introducing a great and much-beloved city – still, as other parts of the work were to demonstrate, the composer was definitely not about to regard the “flower of all cities” through rose-tinted spectacles in this work!

In the past I’ve often regarded Ken Young as a particularly no-nonsense interpreter of whatever music he conducts, sometimes to a fault in music where I’ve felt the need for a touch more spaciousness and breadth in the playing. Here, by contrast, there was time and space aplenty – and the playing of the young musicians blossomed, I thought, as a result! Every phrase, every figuration had room to sing and unfold as it should, while every surge and diminuendo of tone had the freedom to mix spontaneity with obviously well-rehearsed gestures, making for what sounded like a particularly rich and deeply-felt interpretation. The final crescendo leading up to the movement’s end was simply terrific in impact.

The slow movement was another vivid evocation, with conductor and players allowing the music all the time and space in the world to paint and colour the music’s hues and round and shape their lines and contourings, all the time giving rise to such intensities of feeling – the composer’s description “Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon” begs the question of the music’s deeper intent – things like the superbly-played trumpet solo, and the instrumental detailings accompanying the gently-jingling carriage harness sounds were, I thought, preludial to something deeply melancholic about the work as a whole – my notes read at this point, “such passionate climaxes!”, ones which seem to suggest as much tragedy as any other kind of feeling as the bottom emotional line. This was reflected in places, too, by sensitive instrumental detailing as tellingly as red-blooded climaxes – a beautiful viola solo, for example, at the movement’s end was as richly-wrought a gesture as any in the work.

Having praised the interpretation’s spaciousness I must admit to feeling, in places in the scherzo, that the music could have done with a bit more ginger in its step – a hypercritical thing to say, perhaps, in view of my enjoyment of the whole. The players certainly caught the music’s “gait” – and the short, canonical “church-bell-like” section for strings came across with great verve and “schwung”. However, I did feel the brief Trio section hung fire ever-so-slightly at its beginning, even if the more flowing tempo suited the strings’ warmth when they took up the tune just before the return to the scherzo proper. Still, one was prepared to forgive Ken Young almost everything after experiencing the visionary power of what he and the musicians were able to do with the eerie, throbbing pulsations at the movement’s end – another instance of the composer hinting at a darker side of things beneath the surface gaiety.

That “darker side of things” was certainly given full rein at various places in the work’s final movement, not least of all right at the beginning! An almost Mahlerian cry of despair flashes across the face of the orchestra, not once, but twice, before the music settles down grimly to what some commentators have called the “March of the Unemployed”, though the composer was rather less specific when characterising the music’s inspiration. Here, Ken Young and his musicians seemed to emphasise the music’s purposeful and positive energy, with playing that unleashed the magnificence of the composer’s orchestral writing, grand and ceremonial.

After this the musicians galvanised the allegro section, awakening tremendous energies marked by surging strings, roaring winds and flailing percussion, energies which  embedded themselves in the textures of the “march” theme’s return, and literally conflagrated the music – what baleful, menacing, utterly overwhelming playing! One was left wondering how a city’s image could possibly survive such savage treatment!

The answer came with the work’s epilogue, which in its turn brought out some of the evening’s most heartfelt and moving playing from the two orchestras. Vaughan Williams characterised the symphony’s ending by quoting a passage from a novel by H.G.Wells in which the writer describes in allegorical terms the passing of things as we know them via a voyage down a river – “the river passes, London passes, England passes…..” Here, it was all so moving, so heartbreaking and yet so filled with wonderment and magic – the playing caught the music’s timelessness and inevitability, its beauty and its tragedy – the somewhat Wagnerian two-note cry which began the finale was sounded once again on muted trumpets, signifying much the same kind of dissolution (albeit in a less incendiary manner) as the minor-key version of the Rheingold motif from Götterdämmerung.

Very great work from all concerned, and to those people, for all of it much gratitude and appreciation.

Music Futures diverting showcase for rising young musicians

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music Futures: The Sound of Wellington Youth Music 2016

Blue Notes (Tawa College Chamber Choir, conductor: Isaac Stone, accompanist: Martin Burdan)
Mendelssohn and Daughters; Zephyr Wills (violin), Vanessa O’Neill (piano) and Emily Paterson (cello)
Guest artists: Malavika Gopal and Anna van der Zee (violins), Thomas Guldborg (percussion)
Lavinnia Rae (cello) and Hugh McMillan (piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 31 July, 3 pm

Music Futures is an independent enterprise set up by a group of people who felt there was a need for something more to help talented young musicians through financial awards, performance, opportunities, workshops and masterclasses, mentoring, and lending and hiring instruments. This was their first public performance this year. Members of the NZSO are among the tutors and mentors.

This concert set out in part to illustrate the range of musical genres: a chamber choir, a cut-down concerto, a chamber group and an arrangement of an Indian raga from some of the grown-up participants.

The Tawa College’s small choir, Blue Notes, demonstrated a quality that would, for any average listener, demand top place in any choral competition, such as the Big Sing in Dunedin, where they have been nominated as finalists later this month. Three small pieces, one by their suburban mentor Craig Utting (Monument), slow, clear harmonies and, like all their items a display of admirably sensitive dynamics. Their other offerings were from almost the extremes of western music, from the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis to Stephen Sondheim’s The Miracle Song. They also contributed at the end of the concert with a careful studied a cappella choral piece by Brahms: ‘Dem dunkeln Schloss der heil’gen Erde’ and Karimatanu Kuicha by Ko Matsushita, that involved tricky intonation and rhythms: all from memory.

The first movement of Mendelssohn’s piano trio in D minor, Op 49 was played by three players from Kapiti and Wellington Girls’ colleges, two girls and a boy, named as if they were Mendel’s son and daughter. Though it’s such a gorgeous work and I know it so well, I can’t remember when last heard it. They played it with a certain languorousness, not altogether inappropriate; but an excellent way to prolong the delicious experience of that rapturous second theme.

Three NZSO players then recreated an arrangement by violinist Malavika Gopal of a raga by Ravi Shankar, entitled La Danse, for two violins and tabla. That offered an attractive contrast to the rest of the concert.

Then we had a foretaste of the concerto that NZSM student Lavinnia Rae was to play the coming Wednesday at the combined concert between the NZSM orchestra and the Wellington Youth Orchestra: Shostakovich’s first cello concerto (first two movements), the orchestra’s part played by Hugh McMillan. Played without the score, this was a remarkably mature and accomplished performance that revealed a real dramatic awareness, as well as brilliant handling of false harmonics in the second movement.

I regretted the likelihood of missing that concert.

There will be two further concerts from Music Futures: on 18 September and 13 November. They too are bound to be highly rewarding experiences for the audience.

 

 

Oleg Marshev – pianistic pleasures at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
Oleg Marshev (piano)

BRAHMS – Piano Sonata No.3 in F Minor Op.5
RAVEL – Valses nobles et Sentimentales
Gaspard de la nuit

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday, 31st July 2016

This was the sort of programme that, on paper, would quicken the pulse of anybody interested in the romantic piano repertoire in general – and with Oleg Marchev’s name attached to the enterprise, would settle the issue for the majority of piano-fanciers, myself among them. And while I might not have put Brahms’ name forward as a composer whose music I would have liked to hear Marshev play ahead of people such as Liszt, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, I confess was eagerly anticipating the chance to hear in recital that seldom-played titan among piano sonatas, Brahms’ Op.5 in F Minor.

Is there a more confrontational, cheek-by-jowl, eyeballing opening to a piece of solo piano music in the romantic repertoire than the beginning of this work? My first-ever live encounter with this music was at the hands of the great Peter Donohoe (until recently, well-known to New Zealand audiences), on a never-to-be-forgotten occasion I witnessed in a Midlands English town twenty years ago, when he too began his recital with the piece. There I felt as if the piano was in danger of coming apart out of sheer strain generated by the power and physicality of the playing! – and even with Marshev’s slightly more controlled responses to the music, I still got the impression of a fist being shaken at the heavens, though with rather more nervous energy and urgency than sheer, granite-like power and muscle.

As important as these moments were the contrasting lyrical sequences, which Marshev presented in beautifully-appointed paragraphs, building the ensuing surges of tone up into noble climaxes. What the playing might have lacked in raw visceral impact, it gained in cumulative effect, Marshev’s control excitingly let off its leash at the development’s opening, the pianistic textures jagged and attention-grabbing, leaving our sensibilities exhausted and gratefully receptive to whatever solace the music brought us in the aftermath. A noble, golden-toned major-key version of the opening reassured us for a few moments before the music plunged back into the opening, everything once again magnificently orchestrated and awe-inspiring. How wonderful it was to be again relieved by Marshev’s way with those poignantly contrasted, rolling lyrical paragraphs once again, persuading us that life’s storms are to be stoically endured rather than suffered without any hope or consolation.

The second movement of this work, Andante expressivo, has frequently provided ammunition for commentators mindful of the conflict between rival musical factions in the latter part of the 19th Century. A war of bitter acrimony sprang up between the conservatives, who upheld Brahms as their champion, and the supporters of the “New German School”, who promoted the music of people such as Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner. The reactionary critic Eduard Hanslick was a particularly virulent opponent of the latter group and their ideals, in particular the idea of “programme music”.

Hanslick at one stage famously declared that “music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.” However, here was Brahms, the darling of the conservatives, prefacing a movement in one of his works with three lines of poetry from the work of the poet Sternau: – “The twilight falls, the moonlight gleams, two hearts in love unite, embraced in rapture.” It didn’t go unnoticed in some quarters that Hanslick was strangely silent concerning this “self-indulgence” on the part of his young champion!

Leaving aside Brahms’s use of poetic imagery as inspiration, I’ve always thought a separate irony regarding this music was that it sounded so much like Liszt in places! Marshev sang it all so beautifully, seeming to echo the legendary pianist Claudio Arrau’s words, “..the most beautiful love-music after Tristan – and the most erotic”, building the piece’s amplitude to majestic proportions at the climax, and rounding off the resonances with properly bardic tones at the end. Then, again, with the mighty Scherzo that followed, bursting in on the tranquility of the Andante’s aftermath, Marshev gave the “motorcycle kick-start” aspect of the music plenty of muscle and flair without making an absolute meal of it, keeping the waltz-rhythm poised throughout, and taking care to preserve the slightly creepy, almost spectral aspect of those descending arpeggio figures.

If the Andante enshrined a kind of love-tryst, the fourth-movement Intermezzo (subtitled Rückblick -“backward glance”) seemed to negate the former’s sentiments, giving us sorrowing descending figurations and fraught declamations of despair punctuated by muffled drum-beats – again, to my ears, the shade of Liszt flitted among the music’s textures, Brahms’s utterances echoing gestures found in places in the older composer’s Annees de Pelerinage collections. As for the finale, Marshev nicely energized the angular, whimsical opening, enjoying the contrasts of the instrument’s different registers, and pointing the contrast with the warmly-flowing second subject, bringing out the cascading accompaniments and the beguiling mix of elfin playfulness and portentous gesturings which whirl the different episodes through to the celebratory coda, as festive and exultant anybody would wish for.

Despite all of these felicities, I found myself struck by the feeling, when Marchev came out after the interval and began the first few measures of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, that here was the music this man was born to play – those first sounds had a kind of insouciance which felt so right, a glowing kind of poise which instantly captured the listener’s attention and enchanted the ear. Here was a cool, spacious, limpid, completely malleable sound-world recreated before us by a master musician, completely at one with the music’s composer and his particular vein of magic.

Marshev brought out in places the links with the composer’s own orchestral work La Valse, which appeared nine years afterwards. We got a teasing foretaste of the latter in the fourth waltz, Assez animé, and again in the ninth piece, Moins vif, whose halting, hesitant steps at the beginning gradually coalesced into the most outrageous and unequivocal of dance-gestures, beautifully and commandingly brought into being. The final waltz, Épilogue, lent, was all magical, nostalgic driftings, forms delicately shaped, and colours wondrously subtle, making for a heart-rending, lump-in-the-throat experience. It was all a rare evocation of creative mastery, spread out before us like W.B.Yeats’ Cloths of Heaven – “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams”.

Ravel himself regarded the Valses as “…le plaisis délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une occupation inutile” (“the delicious and ever-fresh pleasure of a useless occupation”) – but his 1908 work Gaspard de la Nuit by contrast seemed to have engaged his sensibilities to an unprecedented degree. A group of poems, notable for their preoccupation with the surreal world of dreams written by the French Romantic Poet Aloysius Bertrand (1807-41) and published under the title Gaspard de la Nuit provided the composer with his inspiration – Ravel chose three from a set called La nuit et ses prestiges (“The Night and its Distinctions”), the first being the poet’s version of the age-old story of Ondine, the water-sprite who falls in love with a mortal.

Having said that he wanted “to say with notes what a poet says with words”, Ravel did precisely that, evoking the world of the mischievous nymph teasing and tantalising the sleeper with a dream of delight which at the end dissolves in a shower of waterdrops flung against the “resonant panes” through which shone the moonlight. Oleg Marshev was this music’s ideal interpreter here, magically evoking the liquid playfulness of the nymph’s appearance. His playing of those repeated notes and floated arpeggiations conjured up a beguiling world of enchantment, holding us in thrall to the apparition’s beauty and beguilement before bringing dream and reality together in a frisson of alarm and confusion as the nymph mocked her would-be mortal lover and vanished – the pianist caught, in those moments immediately afterwards, those vast spaces between dream and consciousness, echoing with hints of distant laughter and/or weeping.

Just as evocative was the second piece Le gibet, after Bertrand’s bleak depiction of a corpse hanging from a scaffold in the reddening light of the setting sun. Marshev caught the mood of utter desolation with his spacious, patient unfolding of the grisly scene, his playing of the tolling bell’s ostinato pitiless and inexorable in its effect. I have heard those eerie, descending chords played even more creepily than here, somehow “prepared” even before being sounded, held back fractionally so that there’s a sense of a kind of horror whose depiction is about to take its toll on both player and listener, a feeling which Marshev’s cool and dispassionate reading didn’t explore. Instead I felt the playing had a disconsolate feeling of finality, the ending superbly wrought, with the bass notes shrouding everything in gloom.
Ravel apparently wanted the last of the three pieces, Scarbo, to surpass in difficulty Balakirev’s tone-poem for piano Islamey, thinking in terms of an orchestral transcription for the piano. Here was menace aplenty, the composer’s depiction of a demonic goblin-like nocturnal visitor, the “Scarbo” of Bertrand’s poem. Marshev’s playing conjured up real “glint” amid the gloom, bringing out the music’s volatility and unpredictablilty as per the character, and infusing the Hispanic dance-rhythms with tremendous elan. He got that “frightening nothingness behind the curtain” feeling in the music’s quieter, more louring sequences, and then magnificently orchestrated the creeping chromatic sequences that brought the piece to its overwhelming climax and enigmatic, sotto voce conclusion – “his (Scarbo’s) face pales like the wax of a candle-end – and suddenly he is extinguished…..”
As if we all needed some “normality” at the conclusion of such flights of fancy, Oleg Marshev generously gave us two encores, a beautifully-graded Chopin Prelude (No.4 of Op/28 in E Minor), and Rachmaninov’s Op.23 no 5 G Minor Prelude, the latter featuring the occasional volatile rhythm-surge in the march’s accompaniment, and some beautiful counter-voicings in the trio. Perhaps if we’re lucky enough to get a return visit we might hear from Marshev some more Rachmaninov – one of the sonatas, perhaps, or the unjustly-neglected Corelli Variations which, admittedly, I heard him play on a previous visit – but I would love to hear him play the work again…….

Full success for three works at Edo de Waart’s first Strauss excursion of his tenure

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Edo de Waart, with Samuel Jacobs (French horn)  

Escher: Musique pour l’esprit en deuil
Mozart: Horn Concerto No 4 in E flat, K 495
Strauss: Sinfonia domestica, Op 53

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 30 July, 7:30 pm

In an account of the music I got to hear in Sydney last December (see review of 4 January 2016), I reported hearing two concerts by Edo de Waart and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; one of them featured Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and I allowed myself to be delighted that we would probably be getting some fine Strauss from him after he took over the reins of the NZSO.

This was the first Strauss outing, though we heard Mahler’s Third Symphony and Beethoven’s Eroica under De Waart in April.  Last year, you’ll recall, he came and conducted Mahler’s Ninth in August.

So the somewhat less often played Sinfonia Domestica was much looked forward to. However, I was a little surprised at the not-full house for this splendid concert, and can scarcely believe that anyone would pass up such a concert in order to sit in the freezing wind in the Stadium to watch a football match.

Rudolf Escher
The concert opened with a real surprise – a symphonic poem by a Dutch composer I’d never heard of: one Rudolf Escher whose father was the half-brother of M C Escher, the artist whose architectural etchings depicting irregular, impossible perspectives have continued to intrigue.

There has always been curiosity as to why the Netherlands has scarcely produced any famous composers, at least not since the Renaissance. Some of those you think might be Dutch turn out to be Belgian, like Joseph Jongen. But there are Alphons Diepenbrock and Willem Pijper; and there are a few others from the mid 20th century, including Rudolf Escher. His Musique pour l’esprit en deuil (‘Music for the spirit in mourning’) impressed me from its opening, the almost inaudible notes, finding in it a great deal of what I enjoy generally of the music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was written after Rotterdam, where he lived, was bombed to oblivion by the Germans in 1940 destroying most of his scores and possessions. While the music clearly expresses grief, it was also strangely beautiful and compelling, engaging with a rich, complex palette from a large orchestra that was skillfully and interestingly handled. There was apparently no detailed programme; anyway, I rarely try to conjure a narrative or images when listening to new music, though occasionally things come to mind.

Obviously, the composer had much on his mind here, and Edo de Waart helped the music to play itself so that the highly evocative score was endlessly absorbing without any need to look for a story or visual imagery.  The scoring was very colourful, with a piano creating a steady beat for a while, along with a wide variety of percussion, all of which seemed inevitable rather than used just because it was there. The big, slowly assembled, anguished climax came (I don’t think it was intended to depict the bombing, which would have been too trite and superficial in a composer of such obvious subtlety and intelligence), and faded calmly over a long coda, with acceptance.

Horn concerto
Mozart’s fourth horn concerto followed; such a disconnect damaged neither work. The total break between Escher and Mozart, occupied by extensive changes of players and orchestral configuration, to a small body of strings plus two each of horns and oboes. It sounded perfectly adequate after nearly four times that number a few minutes earlier.

The horn soloist was Samuel Jacobs who is soon to return to the position of principal horn in the orchestra after an absence that included the same position with the Royal Philharmonic in London. Even without the obvious international distinction of the post with the NZSO, and the impressive pedigree detailed in the programme booklet, the ears bore evidence enough of gorgeous playing confirming him as one of today’s most distinguished players.

The main feature of his playing is an almost unreal smoothness and perfection of tone which makes no gesture at all towards the idiosyncratic sounds produced by a natural horn, the use of which has become popular even in some late 19th century music. Even for a valved horn Mozart offers challenges, but audible flaws seemed inconceivable. The orchestra matched the elegance of the solo playing.

Sinfonia Domestica
The riches of this splendid concert were not exhausted however. Strauss’s domestic symphony is not as often played as for example, Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra or Don Quixote; and that’s not just because of the embarrassing intimacies that Strauss exposes us to, or the enormous wind forces that he calls for. There’s a certain naiveté and excess that is not always perfectly matched by subtlety and taste; and it’s those characteristics that no doubt fueled its enormous success at its premiere in 1904 in New York and at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia (6000 attended there over two nights), as well as the rather pious and pedantic attacks and ridicule that some critics have directed at it. If Strauss had refrained from offering any detail at all about the inspiration behind it, I’m sure its reputation would be very different.

Happily, the programme notes did not enlarge too much on the story and the audience was ready to be won over by the spectacular size of the orchestra (five saxophones, nine horns, quadruple winds elsewhere) and the stunningly accomplished performance that could still, and did, generate a rare excitement. That the house did not sell out to a knowledgeable public (do we still have one?) made me cringe for the groundless boasting by civic leaders about the ‘cultural capital’ which has been unjustified since the 1990s.

De Waart’s performance dwelt on the colour, drollerie and the purely musical elements of the composition, while taking care not to overplay aspects that lend themselves to burlesque or caricature. Then, the grand virtues of this episodic and idiosyncratic composition could be heard without hindrance and be enjoyed simply as a somewhat excessive orchestral showpiece with plenty of entertaining features and musical strengths.

It certainly succeeded splendidly at that level.