Tag: Adam Chamber Music Festival at Nelson

Adam Chamber Music festival. Four Seasons

Boccherini: String Quintet in C; Rossini: Duo for cello and bass; Paganini: Introduction and Variations on ‘Nel cor piu non mi sento’ from La Molinara by Paisiello; Motoharu Kawashima: Paganigani (1999); Vivaldi: The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagione), Op 8, Nos 1-4

Nelson Cathedral, Friday 11 February, 7.30pm

The penultimate evening concert from this splendid festival moved into the large territory of very popular, and very funny, and very extraordinary music. It was a brilliant success.

There was a surprise at the beginning. The artistic directors had realised that the Boccherini quintet that was played at the opening gala dinner and concert should be heard by more than those who were there (I was one of those not there), and perhaps heard again by the latter.

Boccherini is a composer whose music depends somewhat on the spirit and skill of the performers to reveal its real worth. There is huge scope for musicians of that calibre and who care to explore, for the Yves Gérard catalogue of Boccherini’s music lists some 140 string quintets and almost 100 string quartets, masses of other chamber music, some 10 cello concertos and 30 symphonies and so on to over 600 works. There are probably a couple of dozen quintets in C major.

Though I haven’t been able to identify it in the catalogue, the one they played is distinctive because its last movement was used by Jean Françaix in his ballet based on Boccherini’s music, Scuola di ballo of 1933; its Allegro con moto is indeed a rhythmically striking piece. The ballet suite used to frequent the Dinner Music programme on 2YC, the predecessor of Radio New Zealand Concert and I was happy to discover there was more to Boccherini than the Minuet.

The quintet was played by the musicians of the Hermitage String Trio plus Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten, in the additional violin and cello parts, and the opulent tone they all produced and the careful handling of its subdued and charming accents awakened the audience to this composer’s importance.

Rossini’s Duo for cello and bass was introduced by Hiroshi Ikematsu, principal bass player of the NZSO, in a mixture of fact and facetiousness. The latter was the right manner for it proved one of Rossini’s incomparable masterpieces in the field of almost impossibly difficult as well as comic creations. Ikematsu ended by adding that it was worth noting that it was written for an amateur cellist but a professional bass player, grinning superciliously at Rolf Gjelsten. Along with the music itself, there was a stand-up comic routine comprising alarming difficulties, riotous musical juxtapositions and absurd virtuosity. I doubt that the piece has ever had such an exponent as this; and Gjelsten wasn’t too bad either..

Ikematsu was back on his own later with a piece by a Japanese colleague (Motoharu Kawashima), bearing the name Paganigani, which when translated phonically into Japanese ideographs contains the word ‘crab’. It combined a great deal of game playing with a gloved hand that I eventually understood to be the crab, that caused him a good deal of trouble, interfering with his attempts to play what he confessed was impossibly difficult music. He said he’d spent hundreds of hours on it, but it had all been a waste of time.

In somewhat the same class was an almost as extraordinary piece by the real Paganini, based on an aria from an opera of Paisiello, played by Martin Riseley. It contained every trick the book, at least up to his time, and the performance was highly accomplished, delivered with apparent ease, though the price one pays for such speed and dexterty is often some loss of tonal richness.

The crowd was there for The Four Seasons however, and I saw no glum faces at the end. It was a nice idea to have Danny Mulheron’s recorded voice reading the little poems with which Vivaldi had prefaced each concerto. Most of the players from the two string ensembles formed the ripieno group, one to a part, and the soloists formed part of it when they were not playing the solo.

Helene Pohl played Spring with shining tone, great brilliance, and the entire sound was so fine that one was delighted that Radio New Zealand Concert had managed to find funds from their ever-tightening budget to record this and the most important concerts in the festival. After the boisterous applause, she smiled as broadly as any in the audience. Douglas Beilman took the next concerto, Summer, which features the famous summer storm. He produces a much more velvety tone from his vintage violin and it generated a splendid dark colour for the hail and destruction of the crops.

From the Autumn concerto Rolf Gjelsten took over the cello part from Leonid Gorokhov while the soloist here was Martin Riseley, delivering the peasant style harvest jollity with tugging down-bows and strong rhythms. Finally, Hermitage Trio violinist Denis Goldfeld was the soloist in Winter, which gave him the privilege of playing the beautiful second movement. He used short chilling strokes with shivering irregular rhythms, enhanced by playing sul ponticello – close to the bridge – at one point.

There was a great outburst of applause at the end with many on their feet.

Adam Chamber Music Festival: Messian’s Quartet for the End of Time

Martin Roscoe (piano), James Campbell (clarinet), Helene Pohl (violin) and Rolf Gjelsten (cello)

Nelson School of Music, Thursday 10 February, 7.30pm

Major concerts in the evening slot continued through the week. This one drew on the ?fortuitous? presence of both a top-rank pianist and clarinettist to give us Messiaen’s great Quartet.

Some felt the programme was a little long, starting with Brahms first piano trio, a glorious, youthful (he was 20) work full of melody, optimism and enormous promise. It and the Messiaen would have made for a long enough concert, but three fairly short New Zealand works were added. I heard a few small complaints, but surely in a festival, time is not of the essence, and most of us are keen enough on music to welcome more than we might on a cold winter’s night in Wellington. .

A better line-up of musicians for the Brahms trio would be hard to find, certainly in New Zealand at the moment. First, it confirmed what superb chamber musicians all three were, which is not to denigrate their flair in solo repertoire. The restraint with which Martin Roscoe approached this large-limbed, extrovert work was not necessarily to be expected, but even with the lid on the long stick, it was always a perfect fit with the others. Towards the end of the first movement, which was played with the repeats but at a speed that allowed no one to become bored, the piano has a call to arms which stood out all the better after its earlier restraint. However, it was the slow movement that might have surprised some by its stillness and pensiveness.

The first of the New Zealand pieces played by Roscoe was Ross Harris’s short Study in Blue and Green, a colourful impression of the seascape from Paekakariki, beginning in calm and turning into a Northerly gale. John Rimmer’s portrayal of the endangered kokako from the 1970s, when outrage erupted about the continuing destruction of the small remnants of lowland podocarp forest, the kokako’s habitat; your reviewer was present at Pureora forest during the tree-sitting campaign. The piece is based on single notes that suggested the boom of the bird’s call evocatively enough, and trills in the right hand suggested scampering noises of birds and the wind. Not that far removed from the Messiaen piece that was to follow.

Three of Antony Ritchie’s 24 piano preludes were without any specific pictorial inspiration; the composer bravely but convincingly laid himself open to comparison with the Bachs, Chopins, Debussys and Rachmaninovs of the genre. Roscoe vouchsafed his intention to take the pieces back to the UK.

We came to the Messiaen after the interval. Again, there was a sense of wonderment that such a fine quartet of players was here at this festival.

Campbell talked very interestingly, articulately about the music and its origins; excellently chosen words, with the various players illustrating some of the main features. The ambience of the auditorium was atmospheric, with a candelabra behind the stage and spotlight falling solely on the players; perhaps not quite what a German prisoner-of-war camp was like, Musicians are often not sufficiently attentive to visual matters, but here it was admirable.

The eight widely varied movements held the audience spell-bound; as during the previous night’s Winterreise, silence was total till the breaks between each movement when there were careful stretchings and shiftings. The solo clarinet during the first movement, used simply because there was a clarinet player in Stalag 8, seemed to be speaking to the universe, in tones of profound spirituality, by no means a narrow view of Messiaen’s Catholicism.

There were remarkable features in the performances by all players. The clarinet and violin in bird calls in the first movement; the slow Abîme des oiseaux – the third movement – for solo clarinet, that emerges miraculously from nothing to become an awful scream: such breathtaking(?) control. The fifth movement, Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus, for cello and piano, seems central to the work, the piano’s repeated chords became almost intolerable, giving way to the solo cello. The whole is steeped in Messiaen’s unique, mystical religious belief, but the Danse de la fureur, pour les trompettes, in unison, creating a strong though irregular rhythmic pattern, creates perhaps the most specific religious reference; the last two movements succeeded in expressing an extraordinary spirituality, never sectarian, but of universal force and even relevance to today.

I’ve heard it performed live only about four times, and at the end, I was convinced that none had reached the profundity and degree of spiritual ecstasy that this performance had produced. No one capable of speech afterwards was able to express anything very different from that.

Adam Chamber Music Festival: Kugeltov Klezmer Quartet (NZSO players – Robin Perks (violin) and Malcolm Struthers (double bass); Tui Clark (clarinet) and Ross Harris (piano accordion)

St John’s Church, Nelson. Thursday 10 February 1pm

I first heard the Kugeltov Quartet in the Festival concerts at St Andrew’s on the Terrace last March, though they had been around for a while before that, and I was immediately enraptured by the music. There’s no barrier to its access, as it lies beneath so much European classical music; furthermore I’d come to love the popular music of all the Balkan countries when I lived in Greece in the 60s.

It is probably true that the success of the concert lies even more in the energy and idiomatic grasp of the various styles by the musicians themselves. It would be hard to imagine more spirited and brilliant players, especially those in the leading melodic roles, Robin Perks on the violin and Tui Clark of the clarinet. Both slipped easily into the boisterous manner characterised by slides between notes, shrill, squealing clarinet forays that seemed to eliminate the sound of a reed altogether, and rhythms that made it hard to stay in the seat.

There were about 25 pieces on the programme some grouped together and played as if they were parts of a larger piece. Ross Harris had written many of them.

So close are many of these tunes to the traditional music of various Ethnic groups of Eastern Europe that I have always wondered whether this Jewish music derived from the music of the Slav and Magyar – Christian or Muslim – people who surrounded them. Or the other way round.

Typically the music varied between fast and riotous dances that seemed to call for very fast foot-work, jumping and spinning, such as Der Heyser Bulgar and Freyt Aykh Yidelekh, and slow and soulful ones like Kale Bazetsn or Harris’s Vuhin gaitzu. And there were a few pieces that called up a distinct tradition like Greber and Dobriden, both in triple time.

They ended the concert with one of the most popular tunes from Ukraine, Hava Naglia, which brought the audience to stamping feet and clapping hands.

In the early festivals the trad jazz band Nairobi Trio was a popular highlight, playing in the Boathouse on Rocks Road. It’s good that the festival still imports such music that is in spirited contrast to most of the music and also offers such a strong antidote to ubiquitous pop and rock music.

‘Hermitage Serenade’

Dohnanyi: Serenade in C, Op 10; Beethoven: Serenade in D, Op 8

Hermitage String Trio

St John’s Church, Nelson. Tuesday 8 February, 1pm

This was really the first display of the visiting trio of Russian players in the festival, though they had been very conspicuous as individuals in most of the earlier concerts.

Dohnanyi’s trio is a favourite piece in a repertoire that has not been much enlarged during the past century. There are five fairly brief movements, very distinct and dressed in attractive melody and compositional treatments. The players’ ever-changing and ear-catching articulation contributed, perhaps not really necessarily, to the entertainment.

The second movement began with a lovely viola tune against pizzicato violin and cello, unpretentious yet masterly and it was followed by a Scherzo that began as a sort of furious fugue with jazzy chromatic descents. It was a delightful performance of a work filled with the confidence that it was still possible for a composer to evince in the first decade of the 20th century. And it was a splendid example of the impact of players of the top rank with absolutely secure intonation and unity of purpose.

Beethoven’s Op 8 Serenade is a work deriving from a similar period of optimism and self-confidence – the period of the French revoution when much of Europe was optimistic about its promise to bring freedom to the peoples of many repressive and absolutist states in Europe – Beethoven, like most thinkers and artists, had great hopes of political progress during the first years of Napoleon’s rule; furthermore, it was before the onset of his deafness.

This piece sounds little like the Beethoven of a few years later; in fact Boccherini is a composer that might come to mind if you were hearing it unannounced, though it is more colourful, energetic, filled with better tunes than most of Boccherini. The next guess would be Haydn, for the many curious turns of phrase, sudden changes of pace, of key, of false starts and stops. There are seven shortish movements, like the serenades of his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart. In the last movement, Marcia da capo, there’s quite a long pause at an unexpected point, and then its resumption as if nothing had happened, only to end with an unresolved cadence.

The two delightful works made for an ideal lunchtime concert on a sunny Nelson day.

Violin Sonata No 1, BWV 1014; Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248/4: aria – ‘Ich will nur dir zu Ehren leben’; Cantata No 41: aria – ‘Woferne Du den edlen Frieden’; Cello Suite No 5, BWV 1011; Organ Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541; Four pieces from the Anna Magdalene Notebook; Cantata No 85: recitative and aria – ‘Seht, was die Liebe tut … Ich bin ein guter Hirt’; Violin Concerto in E, BWV 1042

Keith Lewis (tenor), Douglas Mews (harpsichord), Denis Goldfeld and Douglas Beilman (violins), Rolf Gjelsten and Leonid Gorokhov (cellos), Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass), Mary Ayre (piano), the New Zealand String Quartet

Nelson Cathedral, Monday 7 February, 7.30pm

It has been traditional to use the cathedral’s lighting possibilities as dusk falls to capture a special atmosphere, usually in a concert involving a voice or voices.

For the first time I was sitting on the side, from which the stage was largely obscured by one of the massive romanesque pillars. Keith Lewis was not visible during any of his four arias. It was not so important since in the first aria, from the Christmas Oratorio, I enjoyed his singing which was unstressed and well focused; Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman played the obbligato parts while Rolf Gjelsten and Douglas Mews delivered the continuo.

The second aria was from Cantata No 41, with obbligato parts from Hiroshi Ikematsu and Gjelsten (whose part was particularly interesting), with Mews on a chamber organ. Again Lewis’s voice was mellow and sat comfortably in the music even though at the top it tended to thin: that often matched the emotion of the words, sometimes it didn’t. Though there were moments when the rhythms of voice and instruments came apart, that is no surprise given the hidden traps in Bach’s music.

There were two further Bach arias in the second half. The recitative and aria from Cantata 85, accompanied by Gillian Ansell on the viola, presented more difficulties for Lewis with its awkward, wide intervals. In the aria from Cantata 97 which offered an interesting obbligato role for Helene Pohl, Lewis’s voice traversed the music quite beautifully.

A wide range of instrumental music filled the rest of the programme. The performance of the Violin Sonata No 1 with Douglas Beilman and Douglas Mews showed some lack of pliability and tonal variety, perhaps as the first item on the programme.

The fifth solo cello suite was played by Leonid Gorokhov. It drew a wide variety of reactions as a result of its several unorthodox aspects. The A string is lowered to G; and recent research has showed that the Allemande might be played at twice the usual speed, with the result that it flowed graciously, and the counterpoint that might not be so highlighted was vividly revealed in the fast playing of the remarkable cross-string passages. The curious effect was the relatively slow pace of the Courante, which Gorokhov decorated elaborately. The Sarabande, one of the most striking sections of all the suites, was so highly ornamented that its rhythm became even more difficult to feel than it usually is in a sarabande, The gavotte was very far removed from its peasant origins, so rich was the cello’s tone and the Gigue became an headlong rhythmic gallop, as if there were no bar-lines. The impression was of a very different piece of music from what most cellists have made familiar. My reaction fell somewhere between the extremes, fascinated by the surprises and the extent of the tonal and dynamic nuances but at times feeling they were not there to serve the music as much as to make his interpretation strikingly different.

The first item after the interval was one of the more straight-forward organ Preludes and Fugues, BWV 541. Douglas Mews played it on the main organ with great confidence, creating a thoroughly main-stream organ performance, hardly of the baroque era.

A surprising interlude arrived at that point. Pianist Mary Ayre played four small pieces from the Anna Magdalena Notebook (written for Bach’s second wife) cleanly and unaffectedly.

And finally the Violin Concert in E, BWV 1042, probably the best-known and most popular. Violinist Denis Goldfelt from the Hermitage Trio played the solo part while other members of both ensembles accompanied with the ripieno. It was an exuberant performance, the soloist revealing again his great sensitivity to the music’s character and investing it with deliciously varied dynamics with a tone that was endlessly subtle, warm and brilliant.

‘Three Faces of Ebony’

Brahms: Clarinet Sonata in F minor, Op 120 No 1; Timothy Corlis: Raven and the First Man; Allan Gilliland: Suite from the Sound – ‘Parry’s Ground’; David Baker: Dance (1989); Copland: At the River; Srul Glick: The Klezmer’s Wedding (1996)

James Campbell (clarinet), Richard Mapp (piano), New Zealand String Quartet

Nelson School of Music, Monday 7 February 1pm

This lunchtime concert was a showcase for clarinettist James Campbell. In contrast with his problematic work in a Mozart Quintet on Sunday, this was an unmitigated triumph. Apart from the opening sonata by Brahms, and the folk-song arrangement by Copland, the music was unknown, yet it was all approachable and highly entertaining. Not only was it a showcase for Campbell the performer, but it was also a tribute to some of his composer friends in North America and a mark of mutual esteem.

First, the Brahms: one of his last works, written after being inspired by the beautiful playing of the principal clarinettist in the Meiningen Orchestra, Richard Mühlfeld. James Campbell called it one of the greatest clarinet sonatas (the other being Brahms’s second sonata), and he and pianist Richard Mapp offered convincing proof through their wonderful partnership, both demonstrating the same approach to the music. They responded assuredly to the music and to each other, emerging as sturdy and refined Brahms interpreters. The third movement, in slow triple time, is a gorgeous piece, and they played it as if life would go on for ever, and we wished that the music would do just that. And the last movement, sanguine and contented, proved a perfect vehicle to demonstrate the two players’ accord and their sense of scale.

The rest of the concert was given to compositions by Campbell’s friends and colleagues. If the character of the music was any guide, he has acquired friends of rare congeniality and humour. Timothy Corlis’s Raven and the First Men, written last year, was a clarinet quintet, with which the New Zealand String Quartet joined. His piece takes its name from a sculpture in the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology, echoing a legend that describes how a raven opened a clam shell to find little men hiding inside – the first human beings. There was no need to seek detailed connections between music and legend for the music stood on its own firm and adroit feet, employing the clarinet against pizzicato strings with great rhythmic interest, later an agitated section with tremolo strings; sun-lit, lyrical, human; and then an engaging accumulation sounds over in John Adams-like ostinati. I thought it was surprisng music from a country with much more severe weather than New Zealand experiences.

Allan Gilliland wrote a Suite from the Sound (the Parry Sound Festival) for James Campbell and the St Lawrence String Quartet; the quintet played the first movement of it, ‘Parry’s Ground’. It was jazzy, and sunny, with writing for clarinet that recalled the jazz styles of the 50s and 60s. And it offered the chance to hear the NZSQ in a happy, relaxed, idiomatic jazz mode, in delightful accord with the clarinettist.

Dance was a piece for clarinet and piano, the last movement of a sonata that the programme notes said had become a staple of the clarinet repertoire in the United States. I can well believe that, judging by its ebullient, happy nature with its mix of Latin and various jazz styles, from Scott Joplin on. Mapp proved a natural as the partner.

Aaron Copland’s piece from one of his sets of folk song arrangements began in a calm mood with an unclichéd accompaniment, providing a warmly comforting interlude. The recital ended with a piece by Srul Glick, The Klezmer’s wedding: gypsyish, popular, with an improvised feeling, boisterous, with Campbell delighting in the opportunity to use a wide variety of devices that would be impolite in ‘classical’ society.

I never discovered what the title of the concert meant, unless it was that three of the composers Campbell played were African-Americans. The programme notes did not reveal it.

A delightful start to the week’s concerts.