Excellent performance by Nota Bene of Rossini’s marvellous Petite Messe solennelle

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Petite Messe solennelle by Rossini
Nota Bene conducted by Peter Walls

Soloists: Georgia Jamieson Emms, Maaike Christie-Beekman, Patrick Geddes, Simon Christie
Piano: Fiona McCabe; harmonium: Thomas Nikora

Wellington Cathedral of Saint Paul

Saturday 9 July, 8 pm

Rossini’s end-of-life setting of the Mass has a somewhat special place in the repertoire – secular or sacred? serious or ironic? Thus, some more humourless music lovers have difficulty in enjoying it as some of the music is a bit unusual in tone, remote from the way a ‘proper’ sacred or liturgical work should be.

I think it would be hard to perform it in a way that suggested any lack of sincerity or seriousness however. For a work on this scale and in the knowledge that it was his last composition, it would be a remarkably shallow, not to say stupid, composer who would have devoted so many of his last days to something that was not a little bit important to him. It was clearly important to him both as music and as an expression of his Christian faith.

In any case, Rossini’s well-known words in his last rites, asking God to bear in mind his Stabat Mater and this mass setting as evidence of his faith, are rather persuasive.

For the audience, seated in the front of the nave, the sound was uncluttered and diction clear. A spirit of delight reigned from the very first staccato motif on the piano which in this performance sounded distinctly more brilliant and life-affirming than some performances with orchestra I’ve heard. They might succeed in creating a more liturgical, more grand atmosphere, but not so special. As it progresses the tone does become more serious, as at the ‘Et Resurrexit’, for example, which climbs to a distinctly more triumphant tone in keeping with its subject.

One of the most distinctive, and perhaps unorthodox aspects, is the accompaniment by piano, and by a piano part in which one can easily hear Rossini himself playing (for he was a splendid pianist).

Rossini originally scored it for two pianos and a harmonium but a couple of years later, he orchestrated it, knowing that if he didn’t others would; that too shows how well he regarded his late masterpiece. Here we had only one piano and a harmonium though the harmonium, played by Thomas Nikora, on the right was generally not very audible to me, sitting on the left.

Fiona McCabe did a wonderful job in the composer’s possible role (we know that he only acted as page turner for the first piano at its first performance). It succeeded in being brilliant, witty, marvellously adapted to its role as support for the singers whether a solo or the full choir. The piano lent the entire work a singularity of tone and spirituality, an ever-present lightness and ebullience, bringing a remarkable immediacy to its spiritual qualities. In fact, I suspect for most listeners the piano is one of its most engaging and individual characteristics throughout, nowhere more conspicuously than in the ‘Credo’ where its colour and clarity gave it something that a big orchestra couldn’t really equal.

Rossini apparently intended it to be sung by just eight choir members and four soloists; there were 23 choristers at this performance, plus the four soloists, which was fully justified here, as the premiere was in a private mansion in Paris where small forces would have been enough.

A memorable hearing
It was certainly the piano sound that made an impact at my first live hearing which I will plead forgiveness for reminiscing on. In Paris in 1992, after I’d spent a week with the NZSO at the Seville EXPO, I ran into the late Gary Brain (former NZSO timpanist and after a wrist injury, an orchestral conductor in Europe) in a street near the New Zealand Embassy. He was full of excitement, about to go to his first professional conducting engagement after his studies in Paris; would I like to come? Where? At a small festival at St-Florent-le-Vieil on the Loire, between Angers and Nantes.

I took the train down there next morning, found at the first hotel out of the railway station and across the river, that Gary had booked me a room; then I found my way to the small church where the festival was held. The church was full (about 300) that evening for Gary’s performance of the Petite messe solennelle, with the choir and four soloists from the Opéra-Comique in Paris, with a piano and a harmonium (memory a little uncertain – maybe two pianos). I think it was a very good performance, in my memory very much like what I heard on Saturday evening.

Next evening, back in Paris, I dictated a purple-prosed review to the nice copy-taker in The Evening Post where it was printed next day.

In such a setting, and witnessing Gary’s professional debut, the music had a very special significance and excitement. Any new performance brings up enchanting memories of that one on the Loire.

Composers of mass settings often vary the divisions between the sections, and Rossini divides his into 14. There is no separate section for the ‘Benedictus’, for example, which simply flows as part of the ‘Sanctus’.

The mass has attracted composers over the centuries for the varied, dramatic possibilities offered by its summary of Christian ritual and stories, in its varied purposes; Rossini identified the possibilities for engaging with a secular audience as much as with a religious congregation. And Peter Walls inspired the choir to find as much entertainment and religious feeling too, from the words and from the character of the music at every stage.

The soloists
We heard all four in the ‘Kyrie’ and the ‘Gloria’, some a cappella moments in the ‘Kyrie’ offering a taste of their excellent balance and verbal clarity. The first soloist to stand out was Simon Christie, in the ‘Gloria’, wonderfully robust and strongly projecting as it was later in the ‘Quoniam’ where again he shone with his steady descents below the stave, with an operatic, dotted rhythm; elsewhere his voice had an imposing prominence that was never out of place.

Tenor Patrick Geddes had his solo turn in the ‘Domine Deus’, and on his own his pleasant voice created a feeling of enjoyment that quite overcame a touch of insecurity.

After a charming piano introduction, the two women sang unaccompanied in the ‘Qui tollis peccata mundi’, most excellently, as one after the other caught a penitential note; but not for long, as there is also a distinctly lyrical, operatic quality. Each also had her place in the sun elsewhere: Georgia in the ‘Crucifixus’ where her voice soared with a sort of happiness that might seem out of keeping with the marking of Christ’s crucifixion. Maaike had solo moments with two other soloists in the ‘Gratias’; the warmth and polish of her voice was most engaging. But her big solo came in the ‘Agnus Dei’ where she used her voice movingly, weaving around the voices of the choir.

Four soloists from the choir sang at certain points, notably in the ‘Credo’, where the ecstatic quality of ‘Cum spirit sanctu’ suddenly changes to something serious, a statement of belief. They reappeared in the ‘Sanctus’, where a more sombre tone is also required.

The centre point of the mass might well be the ‘Cum sancto spiritu’ and here I can be forgiven for thinking that its tremendous youthful verve and melodic glory, striking with piano, actually does sound even more impressive and thrilling with orchestral accompaniment. Nevertheless, Peter Walls’s vigorous gestures here helped create a rising excitement, ending with the ecstatic ‘Gloria in excelsis’.

Just about everything in this performance of a marvelous work was admirably judged and accomplished, once more demonstrating the choir’s musical gifts, as well as the apparently happy relationship with Peter Walls who took over the choir at the end of last year.

The audience, not quite as big as the performance deserved, was highly appreciative.

Youth and experience together produce brilliant and heartfelt Messiaen

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
Olivier Messiaen: ÉCLAIRS SUR L’AU-DELÀ (Illuminations of the Beyond)

Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
The NZSO National Youth Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 8th July 2016

Elizabeth Kerr’s pre-concert talk, gratifyingly well-attended and enthusiastically received, placed its listeners right in the epicenter of things relating to Olivier Messiaen and his final completed work Éclairs sur l’au-delá (Illuminations of the Beyond), whose performance by the NZSO/NYO was to follow shortly after.

In a masterstroke of juxtapositioning she took us straightaway to an event that took place in January 1941, in a German prisoner-of war camp, Stalag 8A at Görlitz in Silesia, where the thirty-two-year-old Messiaen had been interned after being captured. It was here that he wrote a work for a quartet featuring violin, ‘cello, clarinet and piano whose first performance has long since passed into legend, the players all prison inmates, and with Messiaen himself as the pianist.

Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) was thus first heard outdoors, and in the rain, on somewhat battered instruments  which were the only ones available, before an audience of about 400 people, other prisoners and their guards. Messiaen commented, later, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention.”

The idea of beginning this talk with reference to a quartet written by the same composer fifty years earlier than the work which was to be the last he completed was to show how consistently Messiaen applied certain fundamental elements of his creativity to his music. Religious belief, birdsong ornithology, colour/synthesia, modes, and a sense of timelessness were presented as integral aspects of his output, as evidenced by the salient characteristics of both the early Quartet and this last completed masterpiece for orchestra.

Elizabeth Kerr also talked about the composer’s music having a quality of “dazzlement”, describing its manifestation in terms of a kind of supernatural experience which, naturally enough, expressed religious faith. Messiaen himself described his own antithesis to this quality, an experience he underwent while composing Éclairs sur l’au-delá – “I imagined myself in front of a curtain, in darkness, apprehensive about what lay beyond….” The “dazzlement” of what the composer was able to imagine behind that curtain helped form the basis of the work we heard played by the two orchestras later that evening.

Conductor Zubin Mehta was to conduct the premiere of Éclairs in 1992 with the New York Philharmonic, but to his intense despair, Messiaen died before he could give Mehta any guidance as to the work’s performance – “The birds in this piece are self-explanatory – everything else is not!” lamented the conductor. However, the composer’s widow, Yvonne Loriod, was able to supply some of the work’s origins of inspiration, not the least being various quotations from the Book of Revelations and the writings of both Thomas Aquinas and the Benedictine scholar Dom J. de Monleon, which prelude the individual movements. Loriod summed up for Mehta the work’s essentials in the following words (printed in the evening’s programme):

The work is inspired by the Holy Scriptures, and also by the stars (my husband was interested in the latest discoveries in astronomy), by the colours of precious stones in the Apocalypse, and by birds….this is a work of faith, a very rich work which comprises all the discoveries about rhythm, harmony and melody which my husband made in his whole life….

On the podium for this evening’s performance was one of Britain’s leading conductors, Sir Andrew Davis, lately of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Sir Andrew greeted us before the concert in the auditorium, expressing his pleasure at making his “New Zealand debut” with such a significant work. He spoke about his work in collaboration with Messiaen himself and with the aforementioned Yvonne Loriod (herself an accomplished pianist and celebrated interpreter of her husband’s piano music).  Sir Andrew talked about the work’s performing challenges, even taking us into his confidence regarding the difficulties of directing the orchestral players in the work’s aleatoric ninth movement (in which the players are directed to set their own tempi for their individual lines). He told us about what he called “one of the tricks of the trade” in keeping the “liberated” players under some kind of control – it was all very communicative and good-humoured!

These preambles completed, the two orchestras took the stage, firstly the NZSO, and then, filling the spaces next to the “normal” complement of players, the members of the 2016 National Youth Orchestra, all told a total of 128 players. From this vast ensemble came an incredible array of textures, colours and rhythmic patternings over the next hour, as conductor and players made their way through the composer’s infinite variety of expressive outpourings. Besides the massive sonorities we heard, what also became apparent was the music’s lightness of touch in places, the composer treating the gigantic resources at his disposal with both strength and delicacy, and handling the ebb and flow of contrasting sequences with great sensitivity.

The work began almost ritualistically, with solemn, stepwise brass chords whose progressions seemed at once predetermined and free-flowing, claustrophobic and outward-reaching – it was as if we were being invited to observe an imposing, solidly-built and slightly angular structure from different angles and with different illumination. This was the opening Apparition du Christ glorieux (Apparition of Christ in glory), the NZSO/NYO brasses producing granite-solidtones, multi-surfaced textures and infinitely mysterious ambiences.

The succeeding movements then took us through a cornucopia of light and colour, stillness and energy, strength and filigree impulse, each episode in its way expressing a manifestation of the composer’s vision of the world’s “beyond”, either through natural phenomena, such as birdsong or the play of light on surfaces and atmospheres, or by way of “seeing through” material constraints and into worlds further afield than this one.

In the predominantly birdsong movements we were able to enjoy the players’ skills in realising instrumental detailings of a phenomenally complex order, with winds and percussion expertly providing a central core of rhythmic and textural incident, augmented by strings and brasses with wonderful delicacy.

The third movement, L’Oiseau-lyre et la Ville-fiancée (The Lyre-bird and the Bridal City) made an astonishing effect with its angular volatilities from strings, winds and percussion, as did the following Les Elus marques du sceau (The Elect marked with the seal), which was a kind of kitchen utensil display with babbling birds in concert over ambient strings and little toccatas for percussion. As for Plusieurs oiseaux des arbors de Vie (Many birds of the trees of Life), this “chaos of delight” was superbly realized, the wind players enjoying their taste of aleatoric freedom with raucous gusto.

The movements in which birdsong vied with other instrumental groupings seemed to look outwards with a kind of barely-disguised longing, characterized by frequent upward-thrustings and frissons of agitation. The composer’s characterization of his star-sign Sagittarius (La Constellation du Sagittaire) depicted a kind of chorus of earth-bound disparates coming together and gesturing towards the heavens, while the more elaborate Les Étoiles et la Gloire (The Stars and Glory) more pro-actively and somewhat alarmingly brought together its disparate forces at the sequence’s end, resembling a kind of irresistible force of will, conductor and players bent upon goading the music to try and break through all earthly barriers towards light and enlightenment.

Even more confrontational was the penultimate Le Chemin de l’invisible (The Path of the Invisible) its strident declamations and ferocious energies recalling the composer’s “Turangalila” Symphony in places, the whole ensemble engaged in a rhythmic, colourful and cross-currented confrontation of impulses, culminating in some huge cosmos-shaking shouts of whole-hearted purpose.

That “purpose” seemed to me to be fulfilled by at least three of the movements, each of which struck me as purely transcendent, as depictions of what might be “intended” by our existence. The first, Demeurer dans l’amour (Abiding in love) featuring sweet sostenuto strings soaring and gliding above a sea of gently undulating string-tone. The musicians beautifully maintained the music’s serenities before going with its passionate intensification towards the end, so very stratospheric and unworldly for a few precious moments.

In complete contrast was the apocalyptic vision of Les Sept Anges aux sept trompettes (The Seven Angels with seven trumpets), in its way overwhelming, with brass and percussion announcing a kind of “day of reckoning”, the quote from Revelations literally set to music – I thought, here, the effect more ritualistic and cumulative than instantly terrifying, compared with, say, the all-out percussive onslaughts in parts of both Berlioz’s and Verdi’s Requiem Masses. This seemed more like ritual than theatre, impressive in its implacability, and here played steadily and relentlessly to underline that quality.

And so we came with a kind of inevitability to the work’s concluding movement, a tremulously-expressed paean of ecstatic fulfillment sounded by the strings and wreathed with the gentle tintinabulations of triangles. Here, the effect was incredible, with that aforementioned sense of timelessness allowed to drift in around and over the entire listening-space, as if the entire cosmos was imbued with this music of the spheres, which the composer characterized as Le Christ, lumière du Paradis (Christ, Light of Paradise). We in the audience were held in thrall, as much by the sound as by the silences which followed for what seemed like a moment of blissful eternity……it was all beautifully realized by the conductor and players and contributed as much as what had gone before to the strength of acclamation which followed. From the beyond, Messiaen himself would, I’m sure, have beamed his approval.

An intriguing anniversary concert from Jonathan Berkahn and Heather Easting at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

1816 on the piano
Jonathan Berkahn and Heather Easting solo and duet piano

Music by Clementi, John Field, Weber, Schubert, Diabelli and Beethoven

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 6 July, 12:15 pm

For me, there is a rather compulsive fascination with musical and other anniversaries, and with the fitting of events, of births and deaths, into a time-frame. Here I’d met a kindred spirit who introduced the programme by referring to some of the major events of around two hundred years ago. They had mainly to do with war – the Napoleonic Wars and most closely, the Battle of Waterloo, which took place six months before the year in question. The Congress of Vienna too, had run from the end of 1814 to the June in which Waterloo had taken place. The Congress was intended to and largely did dismantle everything that Napoleon had achieved, and effectively restored absolute monarchy wherever it had prevailed before. It was in the city where the waltz was becoming a craze and where someone responded to an enquiry how the Congress was faring, saying “il ne marche pas, il danse” (a play upon the dual senses of ‘marcher’, being both, literally, to march and to come along or to progress.

Jonathan Berkahn’s contribution to Congress lore was to remark that it experienced much but learned nothing, a variant on ‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ (how many egregious examples could we find today!).

There were one or two names we’d heard of, like Schubert and Beethoven, and others like Weber (no not Webern) known to the scholars, and others who might have become more famous if their names had started with B or S.

Clementi, for example, opened and closed the show. Those who’d learned the piano for a couple of years knew his name on account of nice if somewhat unmemorable pieces, probably called sonatinas, that were regarded half a century ago as good for children. There were flashy bits that were not very hard but could, in the right hands, sound impressive; but Jonathan played a piece from a huge collection of exercises called Gradus ad Parnassum (Latin: ’steps to the home of the Muses’); No 18, comprising an Introduction and a Fugal allegro, first a series of arresting flourishes and then a not very fugal but confident and courtly number. He captured the spirit, serious and a little tongue-in-cheek.

The final piece, also by Clementi, was a Waltz in C, Op 38 No 9 which Berkahn characterized learnedly as cheeky and cheezy; indeed it gave one renewed respect for the composer as someone who could be flippant and playful, and excellent at writing ideal pieces to end concerts with.

One of Clementi’s students was Irishman John Field, famous for inventing the Nocturne, one of which Berkahn played, the second, in C minor: rolling arpeggios and a melody that might indeed have had a trace of the blarney.

The arrival on stage of Heather Easting to take her cosy place at the bass end of the piano, provided the occasion for some pertinent and amusing musico-political asides. Weber was not one of Clementi’s pupils but was nevertheless a brilliant pianist who wrote a lot of often showy music for his instrument (his most famous piano piece today might well be Invitation to the Dance which we know almost solely through Berlioz’s orchestration). His Rondo from a set of pieces for piano-four-hands, Op 60, was lively and entertaining, for both the players (evidently) and the audience.

Jonathan assumed in his audience a depth of musicological erudition when he said that Diabelli had written more than just the tune that Beethoven set to a massive and famous set of variations in his latter years. He was also a music publisher and a decent pianist who, remarked Jonathan, wrote music for four hands on an industrial scale, and he referred to blood and thunder as elements of his armory which we could discern in the spirited playing by both keyboardists, and which we could agree was all in good fun.

Schubert and Beethoven
Then came the composer who in 1816 was, i) only 19, and ii) probably considered during most of his life, inferior to all those whom we had already heard: Schubert. The piece Berkahn played (by himself now) was an Adagio from what seems to be a musicological conundrum; D 459 was earlier thought to be perhaps a five-movement sonata, but its third movement (this one), together with movements 4 and 5, was later amputated and then called ‘Three Piano Pieces’, D 459A. That left the first two movements as a putative two-movement sonata in E.

It was here that Berkahn engrossed his audience with an autobiographical snippet about a 17-year-old, grade 7 level piano player who discovered volumes of Schubert’s sonatas in the Wellington Public Library (probably still there: have a look), which included this. It was an immediate epiphany, a Road to Damascus, leaving the pianist with a permanent affliction with which to titillate his listeners ever after.

As with most of Schubert, every exposure is a fresh, profoundly musical discovery, and Jonathan’s playing supported his story.

It might be hard to insist that was on a par with the Beethoven sonata that followed and one would not try. This was one of the four that form a sort of inter-regnum between the ‘Middle’ and ‘Late’ periods, between the Appassionata and Op 101. In fact, he could have played the sonata Op 101 here as it was actually written in 1816, but Berkahn clearly wanted to make a case for the three or four somewhat wayward sonatas, Opp 78, 79, 81a and 90; it was the last, Op 90, in E that he played, and in the context of the other more or less contemporary music played, perhaps we listened through altered ears and musical associations. It also allowed Berkahn to quote Beethoven’s perhaps apocryphal remark that its two movements represented first, a battle between head and heart and second, a love-song between the two. It was a delightful image which the music seemed to be in accord with.

The entire programme delivered a liveliness and spirit of delight, perhaps not always note perfect but which had the far greater virtue, on the part of both pianists, of being contagiously persuasive and fun.

If you were to get the impression that I’d rather enjoyed myself, in both the head and the heart, throughout the concert, I would have to plead guilty.

 

 

 

Change of players leads to interesting programme nevertheless

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Hutt City Lunchtime Concert Series

Mike Curtis: Five Huapangos
Bréval: Two Airs for violin and cello
Schulhoff: Due for violin and cello

Konstanze Artmann (violin) and Margaret Goldborg (cello)

St. Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 6 July 2016, 12.15pm

Sadly, the change from the advertised programme, Maaike Christie-Beekman, mezzo-soprano, with Catherine Norton, piano, was caused by the singer’s illness.  We trust that she is making a speedy recovery.

In its place was an interesting instrumental programme – a different combo from what we usually experience: violin and cello.

Mike Curtis is a contemporary American composer and bassoonist, much influenced by Mexican rhythms, as here, in his suite of Huapangos.  The huapango is a Mexican dance that mixes different time signatures.  The first movements are all named after cities, towns or locations in Mexico. The first, “Santa Cruz” was fast, while the second, “Las Islitas” was slower and more graceful.  The third had a familiar ring to it: “Miramar”.  As well as being a suburb of Wellington, Miramar is a beach resort in south India, and a city in Mexico.  The solo cello played a large part of this movement, a faster one than the previous dance.

“Ofelia” followed, and was more doleful – whether because the location in Mexico City is sad, or due to the famous character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I do not know.  Again, there was an unaccompanied cello section.  Finally, we heard “El Llano” (the name of a municipality, i.e. county, in Mexico), a light and airy, strongly rhythmic piece.  The entire unfamiliar work was admirably well played, and enjoyable to listen to.

Jean-Baptiste Bréval (1753-1823) seems to be having a small local revival; his music is being performed by Robert Ibell and Douglas Mews in their current series of concerts around the country for Chamber Music New Zealand.  We were told that his writing for cello was in the viola da gamba style.

The first Air was in theme-and-variations form.  There was much work for the cellist high on the fingerboard, and a great deal of double-stopping for the violinist.  A few intonation lapses in this piece did not spoil the delightfully simple melody line.  The complex variations added a lot of difficulty, however.

The second Air was in a minor key.  Again the air was stated, followed by increasingly complex variations.  The melody alternated between the instruments, which were very well balanced tonally.  The whole had a pleasing effect.

Jewish composer Erwin Schulhoff  (1894-1942) was born in Prague; he died in a concentration camp during World War II.   His duo, written in 1925, was full of interest.  The first movement, Moderato, incorporated left-hand pizzicato for the violinist and playing sequences of harmonics for both musicians.  Mutes were employed to great effect towards the end.  “Zingaresca” lived up to its gipsy name, being bouncy and highly rhythmic.  Left-hand pizzicato was required of both players, and glissandi added excitement.  The movement had a dynamic and jolly effect.

Andantino was the inscription for the third movement.  It began with a sombre theme, and employed lots of pizzicato.  Finally, the last movement was marked Moderato again,  followed by Presto fanatico.  The first part became quite impassioned, then returned to its opening serenity.  That was replaced by chords, followed by the fanatico.  The cello played spiccato, the bow bouncing on the strings while the violin played pizzicato chords.  These effects were interspersed with repeated anxious phrases.

The overall effect was intriguing and musically interesting.

The audience was most appreciative of a concert of unfamiliar but exciting works and of the excellent playing of the musicians, called on at short notice.

 

 

Fine concert from a three-nations piano trio in a three-nations choice of great music

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Waikanae Music Society

Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor
Gao Ping: Su Xie Si Ti / Four Sketches
Schubert: Piano Trio in B flat, D.898

Calvino Trio (Jun Bouterey-Ishido, piano; Sini Simonen, violin; Alexandre Foster, cello)

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 3 July 2016, 2.30pm

A Canadian cellist, a Finnish violinist and a New Zealand pianist got together at Prussia Cove in England in 2013, and have made a very competent and successful trio.  We were honoured to hear such a fine group of young musicians.

The Ravel work is a much-loved and often performed trio.  It was one of the works performed by the former Canterbury Trio, the death of whose outstanding violinist and teacher, Jan Tawroszewicz, was sadly noted this past week.  There’s a link here: Jun Bouterey-Ishido studied with Diedre Irons when she was a member of the Trio.

The work is a gift for the pianist; the ethereal opening for that instrument is a wonderful start to the trio (first movement: modéré).  It does not end there; the strings enter and add to the magic.  All three instrumentalists are given the opportunity by Ravel to fully exploit the sonorous qualities of their instruments.  They produced vigorous playing when required.

Despite there being little eye contact between the performers compared with what happens in some chamber music groups, these players were obviously well aware of each other, and their ensemble lacked nothing.  The audience sat attentive and spell-bound.

The opening of the second movement (Pantoum: assez vif) was startling; so different from the first.  There was much diversity and liveliness: a vociferous mélange of different sounds and rhythms.  The third movement (Passacaille: très large) begins on the piano, then velvety sounds from the cello and violin emerge.  Noble passages for piano follow.  A muted section for strings was quietly intense.

The fourth movement (Final: animé) was always thoroughly alive; all of Ravel’s twists and turns were meticulously rendered.  One could imagine watching dancers on  a summer’s day, the bees buzzing as the dance became more and more agitated.  This quartet demands much of the players; the Calvino Trio had it in spades.

The Gao Ping work had been written for NZ Trio in 2009.  The first sketch was entitled Xiao (Boisterous), and indeed it was.  Each player was all over the place.  One could feel the bumpy motorcycle ride described in the programme notes.   The second (Cuo Diao; Split Melody) used an intriguing sequence of individual notes; charming. For the third (Dui Wei; Counterpoint), the violinist disappeared, and played her part from behind the screen that masked the door through which the players enter.  Piano and cello began solemnly – this movement refers to  funeral procession, but the violin plays ‘happy music’ while cello and piano continue with mournful music.  This sketch would be challenging to play, but it was both interesting and evocative to listen to.

The final movement (Shuo; Shining) had the violinist back in her place.  Pizzicato on all the instruments was very effective, the staccato continuing on the piano against chords and glissandi on the strings  All was excitement in ending the work.

After the interval came the glorious and familiar Schubert trio.  It opened with verve.  Jun Bouterey-Ishido appeared to be in his element.  He is a very sensitive pianist and colours his phrases beautifully.  All three players seemed well attuned to each other.

A delightfully sprightly passage with cello pizzicato was superbly played, as was the following section with the melody on the cello.  Schubert’s inventiveness was fully on display here.  Dynamics were observed with great panache.  Cellist Foster’s sotto voce pizzicato was delicious.  The pianist, too, had wonderful pianissimo passages that he played with an enviable lightness of touch.  The effervescence of this long movement could not fail to capture the audience.

The andante slow movement was very affecting in its solemnity.  Slight rubati were absolutely consistent between the players.  The many variations held each its own delights and profundities; in short, gorgeous. The scherzo revealed Schubert at his good-natured best.  The waltz trio features off-beat piano accompaniment – an enchanting touch.  The return of the scherzo was given depth as well as liveliness.

The rondo finale was dance-like, with quieter interludes; delicacy and robustness alternated.  It was a joyous performance.  Just a slight loss of intonation towards the end of this movement was the only lapse – otherwise, the playing was faultless.

The pianist always looked as if he was enjoying himself; the violinist often had a slight smile on her face, though the cellist was more impassive, expressing himself through his beautiful playing.

This was a fine concert indeed, and all would wish the Calvino Trio success and enjoyment on the rest of their tour for Chamber Music New Zealand, and in the future.

 

Stunning clarinet playing and a “Great” symphony courtesy of the WCO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Overture “The Magic Flute”
WEBER – Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra – No.2 in E-flat Op.74
SCHUBERT – Symphony No.9 in C Major D.944 “The Great”

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Vincent Hardaker (conductor)
David McGregor (clarinet)

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

Sunday 3rd July 2016

Mozart’s Overture to his opera/pantomime “The Magic Flute” began the Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s latest Sunday concert at St.Andrews in grand and ceremonial fashion, though it wasn’t long before the music slyly stepped out of its ritualistic garb and started to dance. Conductor Vince Hardaker kept the players up-to-speed throughout the introduction with a flowing tempo that moved easily into the allegro. Though there was obviously a “warming up” aspect to the playing, with the wind tuning taking time to settle, the ensemble eventually “found” itself, with some solid work from the individual sections, including adept solos from flute and oboe.

The brass acquitted themselves well with their noble chording in places (the three stately fanfares midway – the flute “helping out” here as well – were played “straight”, without any distancings or echo effects, as is sometimes done in performances in the opera house).  Those tricky subsequent strings-and-wind dovetailings, though occasionally loose-limbed in effect, were generally handled confidently, and conductor and players built up the music to a resplendent final tutti – great brass with rasping trombones, and imposing timpani-playing brought it all to a satisfying conclusion.

We were then introduced to the afternoon’s concerto soloist, clarinettist David McGregor, a former NZSO National Youth Orchestra principal, and a winner of the NYO Alex Lindsay memorial Award two years in succession. His studies included working at Victoria University in Wellington with one of the NZSO’s co-principals, Philip Green, and more recently at the University of Tasmania in Hobart with Sydney Symphony associate principal clarinet, Francesco Celata.

Carl Maria von Weber’s concertino works are de rigueur for capable clarinettists, though perhaps because of their extreme difficulties they seem not to appear too often in concert. I had never heard the second of Weber’s two clarinet concerti performed “live”, so was looking forward to this with some eagerness. I certainly wasn’t disappointed, as, right from the beginning the orchestral playing had a surety and sharpness of focus, and David McGregor’s solo playing was simply breathtaking, right from his first two-octave “leap into space” entrance!

Throughout the first movement, soloist and players seemed to enjoy their interactions, tossing their phrases back-and-forth with great aplomb, the clarinet-playing exhibiting a winning range of dynamic and colouristic responses to the music, capping everything off with a terrific ascent to the high E-flat just before the recapitulation. Another feature of McGregor’s playing was his breath-control – such long, liquid runs with nary a pause in which to gasp for even a skerrick of air to replenish the resources – a remarkable display!

The slow movement brought us romantically murmuring strings supporting long lines for the soloist, again, demonstrating amazing breath control – the programme-note talked about the lyrical lines having ‘the benefit of being unbroken by the breaths that a singer would usually require…” – all very well, except that wind players have to breathe sometime, too! (I did, however, look up some information about something called “circular breathing” which may well be an integral part of most wind players’ technical resource these days…). Conductor Hardaker got very settled playing from his ensemble throughout, making the theatricality of the movement’s “recitative” section all the more striking, the soloist playing as if improvising, and the orchestra following.

Came the jolly “Polacca” finale, which the players were encouraged to take at a real “lick”, in fact faster than the soloist’s fingers wanted briefly to go at one point where a flourish went slightly off the rails. The excitement, though, was palpable at that speed, and soloist and players risked all with their rapid-fire dialogues. Eventually, an exciting orchestral crescendo led to a series of “sextuplet flurries” from the clarinet, the soloist really demonstrating his mettle throughout the work’s final pages. Deserved accolades rang through St.Andrew’s at the piece’s conclusion for David McGregor’s spectacular playing and the support from orchestra and conductor.

After the interval came a differently-flavoured kind of business, a performance of one of the most remarkable of nineteenth-century symphonies. This was Schubert’s Ninth, in the key of C Major, and known also as “The Great” (the composer had written an earlier C Major Symphony, one which posterity has since conveniently nicknamed “The Little”). The music’s had a checquered history, unperformed during Schubert’s lifetime, and then rediscovered by Robert Schumann in the late 1830s, who, upon looking through the work coined the immortal phrase “heavenly length”. It received its first performance in Leipzig in the hands of Felix Mendelssohn, who appparently had more success with the work on this occasion than later on in London in 1844 where the players appparently refused to perform the symphony on account of its length and repetitive figurations.

No such strictures inhibit the work’s performance in this day and age, though along with much of the instrumental repertoire of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the symphony has been “authenticised”, or, in other words,“cleansed” of over a century of romantic “overlay” by many of today’s performers. Consequently, it simply isn’t fashionable to play the work in the manner I first got to know it, via recordings by Furtwangler, Barbirolli, Klemperer, Krips, Bohm and Boult, the great Schubert conductors of the post-war era – taking Robers Schumann’s phrase “heavenly length” at its word, those performances drew out the tempi of sequences such as the work’s introduction, and adopted a free, almost improvisatory attitude to the music’s trajectories, especially in the first and second movements.

Vincent Hardaker’s interpretation of the work reflected these revisionist trends – from the outset we heard sprightly, smartly-paced tempi, which imparted a jauntiness to the music, removing the “poetry of awakening” which romantic sensibilities invested in the opening horn-call and the answering woodwinds. There was still grandeur in the big unison statement of the opening theme, but no longer did we experience the thrill of the accelerando from a stately opening tempo to the urgency of the first movement allegro. To my ears, there were gains and losses – the music certainly took on a fresh overall urgency, but lost some of the grandeur and poetry I’d always associated it with. There was some engaging swagger once the allegro got under way, the playing a bit raucous-sounding in places (partly the fault of the confined St.Andrew’s acoustic, which doesn’t take kindly to a fair-sized orchestral tutti), but with plenty of spirit.

One or two of the transition passages sounded awkward for the players, particularly the change from the first subject’s dotted rhythm into the second subject, though a similar passage leading into the development section was negotiated far more tidily. Here the brass came into their own, the trombones lovely and noble-sounding, while the winds “ensembled” nicely with their triplets leading into the recapitulation, and the horns contributed some telling detail. Energies were gathered up most effectively as the coda was approached, with the brass again resplendent and exciting, and though the tempo was pushed hard right through the sequence conductor and players held it all together, with only the slight rallentando before the final chord catching the ensemble out.

A somewhat Charles Ives-like element was added to the music at the slow movement’s beginning, with a fire alarm sounding from an adjacent building. To their credit conductor and players continued, undaunted by the ensuing cross-rhythms, catching the music’s gait with angular but expressive playing from the winds, though clarinet and oboe seemed to have slightly different ideas as to the tuning at this juncture of the music. Brass and timpani coloured the ambiences strongly and securely at this point, as they did right throughout the movement. The oboist did a splendid job with his extended solos, as did the strings in the movement’s trio-like second subject group, violins singing and cellos counterpointing most fetchingly.

I found it difficult to really “get into” the scherzo, as it seemed the players were feeling the pulse of the music at a slightly slower rate than their conductor wanted – the music’s gait was, I thought, a fraction too rigidly applied. Thus, the second, “swinging” melody on the strings was phrased by the players at a more naturally expansive pulse than the accompaniments, which kept on getting ahead.  The trio was more “together”, if still a bit breathless (usually one of music’s most charming and lovable sequences), with the strings steadfast and the winds and brass dovetailing their rhythmic patternings patiently and accurately – a lovely horn counterpoint at one point added to our pleasure.

Amends were made in the finale by Vince Hardaker’s steady, well-controlled tempi at the opening, allowing the orchestral shouts and the answering rhythmic patternings enough space to properly tell, and, later bring out the “spin” of those repeated sequences which incensed those London players in 1844 to the point of mutiny. The winds did well with the “Beethoven Ninth quotation” episode, and the brass then took to the music with a will, followed by the strings in canonic repy, again directed with plenty of controlled energy by the conductor. And the coda’s growing excitement was unerringly detailed by the winds and coloured by the brass towards those great surges of tone which broke over the soundscape at the end so splendidly and energetically. Hard-won, but exhilarating to achieve, and a sterling effort from all concerned.

Full vindication of the glories of the violin and piano repertoire, courtesy the Michael Hill violin competition

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Suyeon Kang (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano)
Chamber Music New Zealand

Mozart: Violin Sonata in E flat, K 380
Ravel: Violin Sonata No 1 in A minor (posthumous)
Schubert: Sonatina in G Minor, D 408
Kenneth Young: Gone
Stravinsky: Divertimento

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 2 July 7:30 pm

Suyeon Kang won last year’s Michael Hill International Violin Competition and it is thanks to the splendid relationship between the competition and the chamber music organization that the winners can be heard in a series of concerts throughout New Zealand.

There are others in this project: the Queenstown Winter Festival (where the preliminary rounds of the competition are held), Musica Viva Australia (where two of the concerts in the series take place) and the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. Together with pianist Stephen De Pledge, Suyeon is in the middle of a sixteen-concert tour of New Zealand and Australia.

Presumably of Korean descent, Suyeon is Australian, and her early training there culminated at 16, in winning the Symphony Australia ABC Young Performer’s Award.  Since then she has won major prizes at many international violin competitions, and has played with eminent orchestras, such as Camerata Bern and the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester (which was the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra till 1993), and in chamber ensembles with leading musicians. Clearly the Michael Hill competition attracts experienced violinists on the verge of major careers.

Stephen De Pledge, her partner in this concert series, was an Auckland University graduate who studied at the Guildhall in London and had a flourishing career in Britain and many parts of the world before returning in 2010 to teach at Auckland University.

While on the context of this concert, I might mention that those arriving a bit early were invited to listen to competitors in this year’s Schools Chamber Music Contest, finalists from Wellington’s preliminaries who competed for the semi-finals. I heard the final few minutes of the Apollo Trio playing part of Gareth Farr’s Mondo Rondo and then Trio Funky Dumky playing the Poco Adagio from the eponymous Dvořák piano trio: quite magically expressed, slow, hushed and breathless. See: http://www.chambermusic.co.nz/news-and-reviews/free-pre-concert-events

It might be fair to observe that, even more than solo piano recitals, duos involving violin or cello and piano, seem to have become rare events. And so, violin sonatas that remain in the memory from my teens have had very few occasions to be refreshed in recent years; which was the case with both the Mozart and the Schubert.

I was enraptured right away with the playing of Mozart’s E flat sonata.  The violin spoke with a febrile tenderness, elegant, her bow moving lightly over the strings, producing subtle colours; and De Pledge echoed her mood and expressiveness, producing from the Steinway a sound that approximated somehow the spirit of a fortepiano of Mozart’s era. There were no histrionics or false emotions. The Andante continued in a similar, thoughtful way, and although in the minor key, it wasn’t sadness so much as restlessness that ruled this beautiful movement.

There was pure classical levity and pleasure in the finale – Allegro, the playing confident yet discreet, phrased in the most sophisticated, sensitive way and, if you like, oblivious to the troubles surrounding Mozart’s world.

It is surprising that Ravel, whose output was not all that large, would have forgotten about a piece that he wrote aged 22, while at the Paris Conservatoire. But that’s the story of his sonata in A minor, not unearthed and published till the 1970s. It would take rather specially gifted ears and perhaps wishful thinking to hear much of the typical Ravel in it, but there’s Fauré and perhaps Chausson and perhaps Lekeu. In one movement, it reveals taste and a refined musicality, no tunes that are likely to pester you as you try to get to sleep, but just very agreeable music, and played with exquisite care and persuasiveness. In fact there were arresting passages which offered some contrast though nothing that could be mistaken for high drama.

Schubert’s ‘Sonatina’ in G minor is one of three that Schubert wrote in his teens and had called sonatas but were posthumously published by Diabelli as sonatinas; perhaps on account of the relative brevity. In some composers, brevity would be gratefully accepted, but not in these. Its strength is conspicuous at once as; in a fairly serious tone, the piano takes the tune through fast, pulsing violin figurations; then their roles reverse. It remains lively and interesting through the Andante, with agreeable understatement and restraint. But I wondered a little at the third movement – Menuetto, which purported to be allegro vivace, but where the energy seemed to ebb a little.

Competitions usually have a compulsory set piece, and it was Kenneth Young who was commissioned to write something that would expose weaknesses as well as strengths (am I right about its purpose?). His piece for solo violin was called Gone. The programme notes explained how emotional labels of many kinds could be attached to it, and so it was played. In the event, scope for identifying and exploring conspicuous pains seemed limited, which might point to emotional incapacity on my part; but Suyeon navigated its alleged storms and frustrations with technical ease and even a certain detachment.

Finally, Stravinsky’s Divertimento; four movements drawn from themes in the charming 1928 ballet Le baiser de la fée, which in turn had drawn on songs and other music by Tchaikovsky whom Stravinsky was particularly fond of. That is a sufficient reason to be predisposed to rejoice in its inventiveness, melodic charm and humour (a uniquely Stravinsky but hardly a Tchaikovsky quality) and, in this case, admiration for and delight at the ingenuity and awareness of its characteristics by both players who truly captured all its balletic and theatrical charm. It, and the Suite Italienne (which they play in the other programme which you could catch at Palmerston North on 8 July), are treasurable additions to the violin and piano repertoire.

They acknowledged the strong applause with the Heifetz arrangement of Debussy’s youthful song Beau Soir.

I began by reflecting on the supposed lack of interest in solo chamber music or duos such as for violin, and the not overflowing size of this evening’s audience did seem to justify my speculations. For me this was a quite delightful concert both for the choice of music and for its stylistically and technically superb performances.

Two fine sopranos in rare, varied, Wigmore Hall-quality recital

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Songs by Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Brahms, Korngold, Schubert, Chausson, Delibes, Berlioz and Britten

Georgia Jamieson Emms and Megan Corby (sopranos), Catherine Norton (piano)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 29 June 2016, 12.15pm

Here was a recital that would have hacked it in the Wigmore Hall, London, or in any other suitably-sized venue, for that matter.  It was good to have a programme (mainly) of duets – so rarely heard these days.

The programme began with great panache, in ‘Herbstlied’ and ‘Maiglökchen und die Blümelein’ from Sechs Duette by Mendelssohn.  The voices were well-matched, and Catherine Norton, as always, was a reliable and sympathetic accompanist.  The pronunciation of German was throughout the concert uniformly very good.  The first song began the recital at a very high standard.  Meaningful facial expressions were employed by both singers, and some hand gestures – the latter a little excessively in Corby’s case.

Mendelssohn’s ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ (On Wings of Song) is a much-loved solo song; the poem is by Heinrich Heine.  Although it has received many arrangements, I do not remember hearing it as a duet before; it was delightful and charming.

The French love-affair with things Spanish in the latter part of the nineteenth century extended to Saint-Saëns writing a song in that language and idiom: ‘El Desdichado’ (Boléro).  Written originally for orchestral accompaniment, it was a sparkling song that I didn’t know.  There was plenty of scope for the voices, the Spanish character was communicated well, but the piano accompaniment especially was magical quicksilver.

A change of mood came with Brahms; ‘Wie Melodien zieht es mir” is a lovely song, but I would have liked more dynamic variety in this contemplative piece, which was a solo presented by Megan Corby.  Georgia Jamieson Emms followed with her solo, which was ‘Schneeglöckchen’ by Korngold.  This was a lovely rendition of an unfamiliar song.  Its style eminently suits this voice.  The singer gave it varied expression and dynamics most attractively.  I felt she was conveying the meaning of each word.

The greatest writer of lieder, Schubert, was represented by the duet ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ a sombre, sad, dramatic song, quite difficult to perform.  The two voices go their separate ways much of the time.  Catherine Norton’s varying dynamics were superb.

Chausson’s  ‘ La Nuit’ and ‘La Réveil’ (Deux Duos) were much more harmonic in character than the Schubert.  The first was interesting and subtle; the singers’ vowels matched beautifully.  The second was enchanting and engaging; the French pronunciation was excellent.

Still in France, we had ‘Les trois oiseaux’ by Delibes and ‘Le Trébuchet’ from Fleurs des Landes by Berlioz.  The former was a mildly humorous song, in separate episodes for the two voices; depicting the dove, the eagle and the vulture, then the voices came together in thrilling conversation, before separate utterances again, but a unified ending.  The story was communicated brilliantly.

Berlioz’s song was even more amusing, about tentative lovers.  A sparkling accompaniment contributed hugely to a delicious duet performance.

Finally, it was almost strange to hear the English language, in another sparkler: ‘Underneath the Abject Willow’, by Benjamin Britten, a setting of words by poet W.H. Auden.

It would have been good to have had the names of the poets whose words inspired these songs printed in the programme, but it was very useful to have translations of the opening lines, and the composers’ dates.  Music scores were used throughout; in Megan Corby’s case, on an iPad.

With these two singers, there was never any question about intonation.  Both intonation and timing were spot on all the time.  To have such splendid accompaniment was a great bonus.

While not as many attended as at some recent St. Andrew’s lunchtime concerts, those who did were delighted with what they heard.

 

Temples on the heights and simple dwellings – Ludwig Treviranus at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
LUDWIG TREVIRANUS (piano)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Grand Variations and Fugue for Piano, Op.35 “Eroica”
PAUL SCHRAMM – Mania
EDVARD GRIEG – Lyric Pieces Op.54
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”

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

Sunday 26th June 2016

For three-quarters of his recent Wellington Chamber Music St.Andrew’s piano recital, Ludwig Treviranus bestrode the performing space like a young colossus. It seemed the young man could put hardly a finger, gesture or word wrong, such was the pleasure given by both his playing and his speaking to the audience. I’m aware that there are people who don’t ever want to listen to anybody speak at concerts, but nobody present could have seriously objected to listening to someone with such a charming and enviable gift for natural, spontaneous-sounding communication.

Treviranus spoke clearly and entertainingly about each of the items he was going to present to us, putting the music in the context of what was happening for its composer, after which he delivered vivid and characterful performances of the pieces in question. And though his rendition of the programme’s final work, Beethoven’s titanic Op.57 Sonata, the Appassionata, didn’t quite display the consistency of execution enjoyed by the other pieces on the programme, it was nevertheless performed with much the same whole-heartedness and engagement with the music.

Beginning the program was an earlier Beethoven work, though one hardly less epic in its way than the Appassionata. This was the piece which came to be known as the Eroica Variations, due to its theme’s subsequent reappearance in the finale of the composer’s eponymous Symphony No.3 (the Eroica), which Beethoven completed in 1804, two years after the “theme and variations” piano work. There are fifteen variations and a fugue, and , as with the symphony’s finale, the first few variations focus on the bass-line, gradually adding fragments in each succeeding variation until the “theme proper” grandly comes into being – a most exciting and satisfying process to listen to.

Treviranus took us through this process of fruition with tremendous élan and vivid detailing, at once galvanizing our sensibilities with an arresting opening chord, then deliciously playing with the bas theme’s opening notes, contrasting their delicacy and reserve with his forthright response to Beethoven’s three “call-to-arms” notes in the melody’s second half. We were thus straightaway ignited, energized, charmed and exhilarated by the music in the pianist’s hands in a way that focused our listening for what was to follow.

The Variations then took the stage, each with its own singular character, Treviranus bringing out the detail as vividly as the whole – my notes contained responses such as “I like his strut!”, “beautiful liquidity”, militaristic jog-trotting”, “amazing hammering of the bass chords”, “a murmuring, almost Schubertian left-hand”, “poised and ritualistic” ….and so on. It was like a fantastic carnival procession of different, but equally purposeful presentations.

The complex “maggiore” finale sounded very modern in places in Treviranus’s hands. The music presented us with what seemed like incredible transports of delight on the composer’s part – Beethoven speaking with the “Spirit” – before the fugue tripped its way into the picture, voices dovetailing with both charm and quirkiness. I like the pianist’s enjoyment of pianistic sonorities, conjuring up sounds that the composer may well have himself imagined, far in excess of the limited range and dynamism of the instruments he would have heard before his hearing became impaired.

Last year Treviranus gave a recital which included pieces by Austrian-born Paul Schramm, and did so here again, with a different set of works this time round. Refugees from Nazi oppression, Schramm and his Dutch wife Diny settled in New Zealand in the late 1930s, but were treated with suspicion by the New Zealand Government during the war years. Leaving his wife and son in New Zealand after the war Schramm went to Australia to reactivate his career as a piano virtuoso. However, the privations of the war years had taken their toll, and his success was short-lived. He eventually gave up music as a career and rather ignominiously became a door-to-door salesman. He never returned to New Zealand and died in Brisbane in 1953.

As if to help redress the balance of wrongs a little, Treviranus had recently resurrected some of Schramm’s compositional output for piano – most of which is still in manuscript in the Alexander Turnbull Library’s music collection. This new offering was presumably put together as a kind of suite by the composer with the somewhat disturbing title Mania. They’re rather Bartokian-sounding pieces, with hints of other composers thrown in, psychological in effect, rather than pictorial, and in the case of the final piece, oppressive and gloomy.

First up was a piece with the title Savage March, music which reminded me by turns of Gershwin and Percy Grainger – Treviranus’s playing generated real swagger and energising momentum, bringing out the angularities of a 7/4-like section and a cataclysmic csacading sequence at the end. The second piece, Gaiety, seemed ironic as a title, as the music suggested a kind of “mouse-in-a-wheel” claustrophobia, though relieved by a groovier middle section.

Two diametrically opposed opposites followed: Hilarity presented a dancing, if dogged kind of humour, with a three-note chant repeated somewhat artlessly at the end, while the black opening chords of Defeat came as a terrific shock, its grim and oppressive trajectories reminiscent of Musorgsky’s “Bydlo”. The music’s loneliness and despair was relieved only by occasional pinpricks of light, notes from a toybox kind of tune sounded as if part of a dream relieving sorrow. But it was to no avail, as the bleakness loomed up spectre-like once more, dragging the music towards a kind of oblivion.

Respite from such privations came for us with the interval, and then with some of Edvard Grieg’s adorable Lyric Pieces, the Op.54 set of six. (Incidentally, the first four of these went on to achieve wider fame when orchestrated as the Lyric Suite.) The composer said he wanted with these pieces to create “simple dwellings in which people might feel happy” – he certainly would have been charmed with Ludwig Treviranus’s playing, which caught whole worlds of flavoursome atmosphere, incident and feeling.

Beginning with the Shepherd Boy, the pianist realised the music’s gentle, solitary melancholy from the beginning, though I would have liked him to have given more air and space to those gently cascading triplet runs whose impulses adroitly modulate the music upwards and “tell” so poignantly…but this was otherwise a beautiful and thoughtful performance. The other pieces were unalloyed delight – Treviranus quite deliciously orchestrated the Ganger (March), the forward movement so easeful and redolent of its surroundings, allowing plenty of both airy textures and deeper resonances.

As for his playing of the very first note of the Nocturne, his touch proclaimed the presence of a poet at the piano, while his rumbustious approach to the March of the Dwarves forcefully brought out the piece’s “Mountain King” grotesqueries. Two lesser-known pieces remained, the Scherzo glinting with magical, elfin qualities, while the simple, but richly evocative Ringing Bells seemed to anticipate Arvo Pärt’s tintinabulations in a similarly bracing, out-of doors way. In all, I thought it a most treasurable performance which gave the music its proper stature.

And so we were brought to the granite-like entranceway of Beethoven’s imposing Op.57. Treviranus “squared up” to the opening measures with impressive gravitas, conjuring up the “elemental” nature of the sounds with great conviction. The second subject, a cleverly inverted version of the opening, was here kept on the same kind of trajectory, allowing for little false relaxation, and keeping the overall purpose in view. I did think some of the pianist’s responses to the music’s agitations more febrile than elemental, as if at times the fingers ran ahead of the notes (even losing the line momentarily during the development, but getting the argument back on the rails with real determination!)……it was as if he felt the need to “push” the music in places rather than trusting in and going with the piece’s own inner momentum.

After wrestling titanically with the first movement’s combatative aspects, Treviranus took us into the relative tranquility of the theme-and-variations second movement, which, apart from an anxious moment or two from the pianist’s fingers, flowed inexorably towards the threshold of the maelstrom to follow. The finale’s incredible swirling aspect was vividly engaged, the playing leading us square-shouldered through the flailing agitations and brooding intensities which by turns took the music over. Though a flourish was dropped through misdirection at one point, other sequences were splendidly realised – for instance, the “stamping” passages preceeding the recapitulation thrilled with their power, the music not rushed but kept steady and inexorable, allowing those cosmic impulses to speak with their own inherent force.

To my great delight, Treviranus included the movement’s second-half repeat this time round (I heard him about a year ago play the work without it). I thought a bit more right-hand assertiveness was needed from the pianist in sounding the alarm before plunging the music afresh into the development’s black-browed tumult – but still, this gesture most satisfyingly pushed out the music’s vistas, past any residual concert-hall confines that might have hung grimly onto the proceedings up to this point. From here, the performance moved into the realms of classical tragedy, the arpeggiated recitative passages charged with foreboding, the rhythms gathering power and weight with uncompromising focus, and the coda positively juggernaut-like in its relentless physicality. It was playing that risked everything and delivered for all of us a cathartic sense of coming through with the ringing out of those final, defiant chords.

Typically, the pianist then did two things which perfectly expressed both his and our somewhat rung-out state amid those magnificent resonant ruins of the music’s dissolution – he first of all announced that he was “ready for a beer, now!”, and then sat down to help us return to our lives by playing for us a beautifully expressed encore (straight after the Appassionata? – was the fellow mad?)…..this was another of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, one called Summer Evening, which gently brought our sensibilities back from wherever they’d been flung in the cosmos, so that we could all go back to our “simple dwellings” once again and feel happy.

Emma Sayers – piano recital of connections, dedications and premieres

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
CONNECTIONS, DEDICATIONS – a piano recital by Emma Sayers

W.A.MOZART – Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” K.455
JACK BODY – Five Melodies (1982) – No.5
ROSS HARRIS – For Judith Clark (2011)
DAVID FARQUHAR -Telephonic No.13 (721-230) – Eve Page
DOUGLAS LILBURN – 9 Short Pieces – Nos 1,2DAVID FARQUHAR – Black, White and Coloured – (Homage to G.G.)
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Three Pieces for J.A.R. – Fanfare / Aria for Anita / Perpetua

Emma Sayers (piano)

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

Wednesday, 22nd June 2016

Emma Sayers began her recital with the Mozart Variations, then spoke briefly to us by way of welcome, outlining how the remainder of the program had come about. She had been approached by composer Anthony Ritchie to perform a set of pieces written in memory of his parents, the whole (Three Pieces for J.A.R) named for his father, John Ritchie, with one of the set (Aria for Anita) remembering the composer’s mother. Incidentally, the work was originally commissioned by (and dedicated to) Margaret Nielsen, a long-time friend of John Ritchie.

Almost straightaway the pianist was, she told us, reminded of other music written by people either associated or contemporaneous with John Ritchie, which she thought would “sit alongside well” in a larger tribute – hence the “Connections, Dedications” title of the recital. The Mozart Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” was, however, a separate goal marking a return to solo public performance, and put in an amusing context by the pianist as, in her own words, “something I couldn’t manage when I was pregnant, because my tummy kept getting in the way of the arm-crossings”.

I was surprised that it had been such a long time (May 2005) since I’d last written about an Emma Sayers solo recital – her playing of the Variations certainly underscored the things I wrote about her then, and served to remind us of what we had been deprived on in the interim. That particular solo appearance was prior to Middle C’s formation, so I feel justified in quoting from my notes for the radio review, regarding her playing of Bartok’s Op.6 set of 14 Bagatelles – “…Sayers took us on a marvellous journey through what seemed like the “landscape of a musical mind” with all its individualities and influences….” as those words applied equally to what she gave us here of Mozart’s at St. Andrew’s.

The first thing which struck me was her playing’s vivid and forthright character, contrasting the contained, tasteful treatment of the theme with the full-blooded flourishes of the first variation’s phrases, done with flair and theatricality. At the risk of thumping a particular tub of mine, I feel compelled to venture the opinion that this was “timeless” Mozart-playing in an entirely appropriate grand piano context, the piano used to “orchestrate” the music in a way that the composer could well have imagined himself, though never actually experienced as sound coming from his own instruments.

Again and again I found myself marvelling at Sayers’ ability to invest her phrasing with some ineffable impulse of characterization which compelled one’s attention, at one and the same time realizing and transcending the composer’s “classical” context and bringing into play something intensely and universally human about the music. It all seemed so “free”, so spontaneous and alive – and yet Mozart was always Mozart, even if such energy and physicality might be thought more the preserve of Clementi or even Beethoven. By way of “exploring” the theme rather than merely decorating or prettifying it, Mozart employed a range of expression here brought out by the pianist in as direct and unmannered a way as seemed possible.

If it seemed like a recital of two, or even three parts on paper, in practice there was no lessening or burgeoning of intensity in Sayers’ playing from the Mozart throughout to the home-grown items assembled to “connect with” and pay tribute to John Ritchie and his music. Beginning with the last in the set of Jack Body’s Five Pieces for Piano, we were taken by the music to a world of light and shade, its components turning and flickering like a magic kind of kaleidoscopic wheel, and bearing our sensibilities unobtrusively but gradually into different realms, from which we emerged changed, our delight replaced by sobriety at the transitory nature of things, at the piece’s end.

Ross Harris’s work For Judith Clark, was written by its composer for the 80th birthday of one of Wellington’s foremost piano teachers (and, appropriately enough, played here by an ex-pupil, who had also played the piece at her former teacher’s’s funeral, in 2014). It’s a beautiful, sonorous piece, taking shape like some kind of frozen soundscape being brought into view and explored from different points. Deeply-rooted frameworks were laid down, and set against the play of light on the various surfaces, the pianist ensuing the serenity of the hues were occasionally enlivened by volatilities, an evocation of a goddess whose aspect occasionally flashed and scintillated, giving fair warning to those in close proximity.

Next we heard a work Sun and Shadow by David Farquhar, one of a number of pieces called Telephonics that he composed for various friends and associates, using their telephone numbers as a basis for the pieces’ composition. Farquhar stressed that the pieces were intended as a series of “musical offerings” rather than as “portraits” of the people involved. This was a piece dedicated to the artist Evelyn Page, and, by association, her husband Freddie Page, who established the Victoria University Music Faculty in 1945, which Farquhar himself was to join in 1953 after his return from a period of study at London’s Guildhall. The music conjured up an impressionistic effect, with resonantly flowing harmonies and brilliantly-etched flashpoints, Sayers allowing their interactions plenty of room to “play out” and eventually subside within the piece’s enfolding silences.

The last time I heard Emma Sayers at an actual keyboard was when she gave a performance of Douglas Lilburn’s Nine Short Pieces in conjunction with Stroma, who performed responses by various composers to each one of the pieces. Here, she revisited the first two of the Nine Pieces by way of paying tribute both to the composer and to Margaret Nielsen, to whom Lilburn in 1967 gave a bundle of unpublished pieces of piano music, collectively labelled “Crotchety at 51!” along with the words “See what you can make of these”. Nielsen was, of course, Lilburn’s “preferred interpreter” of his piano music, and had given the premieres of many of the individual works, so it seemed logical that he would entrust her with the task of creating some order from the apparent chaos.

Sayers in her notes talked about the “searching quality” and the “quirky character” of the pieces, and her remarks were borne out by the performances we heard, the first piece epic, jagged and far-flung, the second impish, angular, questioning and wryful. Again, it was the “character” of each piece which was unequivocally presented to us – under Sayers’ fingers, the music in both instances seemed to know exactly what it was doing.

David Farquhar’s music again featured, this time a piece from a different collection of pieces, entitled Black, White and Coloured. This was one called Homage to G.G. (George Gershwin) – a brilliant transcription of the song I got rhythm, flavoured by the technique of writing for one hand on the white keys of the piano, and for the other on the black, resulting in some ear-catching sonorities. Sayers gave the accented phrasings just the right amount of “ginger”, bringing out the piece’s drolleries at the beginning and unerringly building the music’s trajectories towards the bluff humour of the ending.

And so to Anthony Ritchie’s commemorative Three Pieces for J.A.R. – music intended by the composer to reflect different aspects of his father, John Ritchie’s life. Before the pieces were played, Anthony RItchie spoke briefly and movingly about Margaret Nielsen’s friendship with and support of his father over the time of their association. The first part of the work, Fanfare, marked John Ritchie’s long involvement with brass players, both in bands and orchestras, using a simple, chant-like figure at the beginning subjected to all kinds of different harmonic modulations, some progressive, others all elbows and knees, harsh and abrupt. A deep-toned, briefly sounded sequence made a humourful ending to the piece.

The second piece, Aria for Anita, brought Anita Ritchie, John’s wife into focus – making reference to her soprano voice, Anthony RItchie quoted part of Solveig’s Song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, one of her favourites. The music’s recitative-like opening suggested a high voice at first, then varied the line with an alto-like response, the phrase-ends coloured at several points with the interval of a fifth. The music seemed to accrue its own ambient warmth, figures sounded out and then left to resonate as a context in which newer motifs could appear – a deep, rich bitter-sweet climax grew out of the exchanges,  as a strummed accompaniment to the soprano/alto voice exchanges allowed the music to deepen and linger before gently disappearing.

From the silence came Perpetua, the final movement, the upward-thrusting opening shared between the hands before changing into an attitude-driven march rhythm whose insistence scintillated into cascades of figurations, the repetitions making their own rhythmic patterns in lime with the “perpetual motion” suggested by the piece’s title. Having scattered all before it, the music then irradiated the textures with Ravel-like scintillations, even-handedly defining the heavenly vistas while at the same time plumbing the depths. Anthony RItchie in his notes alluded to the old prayer which included the phrase “perpetual light”, suggesting the soul’s continuing journey through what the composer called the “starry nothingness” of the ending.

All of this was delivered by Emma Sayers with what seemed and felt like complete identification with the music’s natural, spontaneous outpourings. Nothing in the music was forced or unduly amplified, but allowed instead by the pianist its own range of mellifluous voice-soundings which readily  put across the composers’ intentions. In a relatively short time we had been taken through an exploration of some magnitude across the face of people’s lives and sharply-focused creative achievements. I felt at the end of it all we couldn’t have had a more inspirational guide at the piano throughout our journey.