Tag: Adam Chamber Music Festival at Nelson

Distinguished guests share Nelson concert of masterpieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

‘Memories’
Mozart: String Quintet in C minor, K 406, with James Campbell in place of first violin; Shostakovich: String Quartet No 8; Schumann: Kinderszenen, Op 15; Beethoven: Sonata No 32 in C minor, Op 111

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 6 February 2011

The evening concert offered no further obeissance to the national day. Instead, it was given over to two rather contrasting parts, returning the the universal instead of the parochial. In the first part strings were in the spotlight, together with clarinettist James Campbell; in the second British pianist Martin Roscoe played.

Campbell explained his adaptation of Mozart’s String Quintet K 406, for clarinet and strings. Since there were few chamber music pieces involving the clarinet, he said, and the fact that Mozart’s string quintet had started life as one of his wind serenades, the octet K 388, he believed it gave licence for a partial revision of the quintet to include the clarinet in the place of the first violin. In principle, not a bad idea; but in the event, it was unsatisfactory. I have not studied the changes made to Mozart’s allocation of parts as he transformed eight brass parts to five strings, but it seemed to me that slightly more radical rescoring might have been needed to give the clarinet the kind of solo place more akin to a concerto. As it was, it was at once too close, and not sufficiently distinguished from  the violin or the strings as a whole.

The players in the ‘clarinet quintet’ were Campbell, Douglas Beilman playing violin, the viola players from both ensembles, and Leonid Gorokhov on the cello. Perhaps because of the way it had been arranged, the clarinet was sometimes out of balance with the strings; often, Campbell simply played too loudly. The net result was a performance that did not quite meet the expectations of an audience whose appetite had been so whetted by the Gran Partita, for another marvellous Mozart serenade-style piece. The performance as a whole however, left no doubt about Mozart’s achievement in the creation of another masterpiece in the serenade/big ensemble genre.

The second piece in the programme was Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. Interestingly, it had been played at a ‘Pro-Am’ concert in the late afternoon in Fairfield House, a charming old mansion set in spacious grounds on the hills south of the city. The Pro-Am tradition exists to give amateur players the chance to be tutored by and ultimately play alongside professionals. This time hardly any of the amateurs were young people, which was the original intent. The professionals were violinists Justine Cormack and Rebecca Struthers, violist Victoria Jaenecke and cellist Euan Murdoch and each played alongside two or three amateurs. It meant playing the quartet with four players to a part, which would not have been inappropriate, for there’s a strong orchestra arrangement of the quartet by Rudolph Barshai as a prototype. Players of limited skill delivered a very different experience but it somehow sharpened my receptivity for the extremely fine performance a couple of hours later by the New Zealand String Quartet. Here was the first chance to hear the New Zealand players on their own, in music that they have thoroughly commanded. It was a powerful, finely nuanced performance doing complete justice to Shostakovich’s biting and angry masterpiece.

The second half of the concert belonged to pianist Martin Roscoe, making his first appearance at the festival. He claimed that he was about to play two of his favourite pieces of music, Schumann’s guileless but challenging Scenes of Childhood and Beethoven’s last, spiritually complex sonata.

Most of the Schumann pieces are familiar though it is rare for them to be played together: I’m sure I’ve never heard all 13 played live before. Roscoe proved a Schumann pianist of both subtlety and strength who succeeded in linking them persuasively into a sequence that enhanced them individually. There was unaffected magic in many of the pieces, burnished with a warm piano tone; his performances were never too retiring or diffident though; occasionally the piano’s heavy bass resonance was overbearing.

Beethoven’s last sonata was another matter. Roscoe’s playing captured the quietness and repose of the lyrical and legato parts; but subtlety in the forte and fortissimo passages seemed more difficult to achieve, an effect of the piano’s characteristics and the auditorium’s lively acoustic. Nevertheless, the dramatic narrative and feeling for shape and structure emerged powerfully, with great conviction.

New Zealand wind music to mark Waitangi Day at Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waitangi Winds. ‘To be announced’ (Sketches towards imagining the musical encounter between Tasman and Maori at Golden Bay); Philip Brownlee: Te Hau o Tawhirimatea for flute; Ken Wilson: Wind Quintet; Lilburn: Wind quintet (1957); Harris: Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet (2005)

Zephyr Wind Quintet (Bridget Douglas – flute, Robert Orr – oboe, Philip Green – clarinet, Edward Allen – horn, Robert Weeks – bassoon) and Richard Nunns – nga taonga puoro)

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 6 February, 1pm

A concert to mark Waitangi Day in appropriate fashion took place at lunchtime in the Nelson School of Music. It was given over to wind instruments, driven no doubt by the decision to feature Maori instruments, taonga puoro, largely wind.

The first piece for taonga puoro had been commissioned by Richard Nunns from Martin Lodge, but illness had stopped Martin from getting past a few sketches. Recent studies by Nunns with the late Allan Thomas and others has succeeded in throwing some light on the contribution that music might have made to the tragic outcome of the arrival of Tasman on these shores. Nunns described the scene that has been recreated from what paltry documentary sources there are, ignored by all the Dutch accounts of Tasman’s voyage.

The tribe would have delivered a challenge to the ships that had appeared in their bay and he proposed the long, recorder-like instrument, the pukaea, and the putatara, a small conch-shell instrument. Tasman would have looked for some way of responding. It so happened that some time earlier, Nunns had come across an old Dutch horn known as the mid-winter horn which Ed Allen, NZSO principal French horn, volunteered to manipulate. The exchange between these two fairly primitive horns was an uneasy one, and it was not hard to understand the scope for misunderstanding: a serious challenge had been responded to by sounds that the Maori perhaps interpreted as offensive or insulting: a classic case of people speaking past each other, so that when Tasman’s men set off next morning in the boats everything went wrong.

Culture contact in its most risky form, still to be seen in the phenomena of religion-fuelled strife today. The music’s further development and performance should awaken new interest in the unhappy events of 1642. For now the music which, Nunns remarked, might remain with the name ‘To be announced’, was very incomplete, but Nunns and flutist Bridget Douglas made a brave attempt to realise what the musical exchange between ship and shore might have been.

The following piece written by Philip Brownlee, Te Hau o Tawhitimatea (the breath of the wind god), employed three further instruments; the putorino, another long, recorder-like pipe that has a variety of playing techniques and five distinct functions; the koauau, a small piece carved from a dog bone, though I suppose bones of other mammals would have been used before Europeans arrived; and lastly the small white pumotomoto, used in birth rites, and played into the baby’s fontanella. While Nunns played these, Bridget Douglas played a modern flute and a piccolo.

The rest of the concert was devoted to three wind quintets by New Zealand composers.

The earliest was Lilburn’s of 1966 which has been resurrected in recent years by Ross Harris. Its character was retiring, and suggested a certain diffidence in its musical inspiration that was reflected in tentative weaving among the instruments with musical ideas that bore the familiar LIlburn stamp in their rhythmic shapes and melodic gestures.

Ken Wilson, a former NZSO clarinettist, wrote one of the early, classic New Zealand wind quintets. His idiom is strongly influenced, to no disadvantage at all, by French early 20th century wind compositions such as Poulenc’s; this is a piece that deserves to be heard more often.

The most likable of the three wind quintets was Ross Harris’s Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet., a set of short – mostly very short – pieces that captured a variety of traditional or 1950s jazz, swing, blues, all displaying Harris’s melodic confidence and his feeling for scale and shape.

The Zephyr Quintet gave all three pieces colourful and lively readings.

Rare and wonderful Mozart opens Nelson’s festival

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival: Grand Opening: Dvořák, Halvorsen, Mozart

Nelson Cathedral

Friday 4 February 7.30pm

For those who knew their music, this was a rare treat. Dvořák’s string sextet is a rich and gorgeous piece, one of those pieces that has familiar moments but is surprisingly neglected. Is it really too hard to get the necessary six player together? The sextet gains it special sonority and interest both from the more complex textures available and the addition of two lower instruments, an extra viola and cello. The four New Zealanders were assisted by the violist and cellist from the Hermitage Trio.

The extraordinary gifts of the latter trio were further revealed as the violinist and cellist played an astonishing duo composed by Norwegian Johan Halvorson based on a tune by Handel. No mere virtuosic show-piece (though it was all that), but a sophisticated and brilliant little composition in its own right. It unleashed a storm of applause.

But the real masterpiece was Mozart’s Gran Partita, or Serenade for 13 wind instruments (though the 13th is Ikematsu’s double bass) in B flat, K 361. It had profoundly impressed those who heard it in Vienna in 1784, and it has continued to enchant audiences ever since. It is less often heard live because it’s hard to get a dozen top-class wind players together. But the NZSO Soloists helped out and the performance was deeply musical, moving, tear-inducing, enthralling. Four horns, and two each of oboes, clarinets, basset horns and bassoons, plus double bass.

It’s almost an hour long, with seven movements including two minuets, a theme and variations movement and others in rondo or sonata form. There are very few other such ensembles and none that touch it in musical inspiration and depth.

It is a ever-changing pattern of solos from the various instruments, sonorous symphonies of sound from different combinations and often the entire band. There’s too much to detail, but constantly striking was the string bass, often suggesting timpani, from Ikematsu, grounding the whole fabric. Most rapturous was the third movement, an Adagio, in which Robert Orr’s oboe provided long ecstatic cries underpinned and echoed by clarinets and one by one, all sections. The remarkable fifth movement too captured deeper responses through its exquisite melancholy alternating with a brisk march rhythm, often accompanied by a hypnotic tread or pulsating chords from bassoons and basset horns.

The concert had begun with the little heard sextet in A, Op 48, by Dvořák, again neglected on account of its configuration. It really is too bad that string quartets have come to so dominate the chamber music field that the numerous quintets, sextets and larger ensembles are little known.

The beauty of the sextet in its normal configuration is a string quartet plus additional viola and cello, which gives both a heart-warmingly greater sonic foundation as well as allowing the composer to engage in more complex harmonic paterns. Though much of the melody was folk-derived, there was nothing peasantish about the composition or its performance.

The third movement – a furiant in place of minuet or scherzo – was probably most likely to sound familiar, from kinship with Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, but the entire work is filled with melody that the composer knows how to make use of in ever-shifting ways.
While the playing was polished and opulent, there were moments, as in the dumka second movement when a little more boisterousness might have helped. In the last movement a long viola solo from Gillian Ansell caught the ear: a theme and variations, whose melody and its various guises were enchantingly played by this happy ensemble that found complete unity of spirit throughout. Someone asked Haydn why he didn’t write string quintets and he said he’d tried but could never find the fifth voice (or something to that effect); Dvořák had no such problem finding richness through six parts with which to clothe his fecund source of melody.

Chamber Music Festival under way in Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson, 3 to 12 February 2011.

The Eleventh Adam Chamber Music Festival began with a gala dinner and concert at the Woollaston Winery out of Nelson with musical contributions from all the musicians present at that point; the New Zealand String Quartet whose first violinist and violist are the festival’s artistic directors; Canadian clarinettist James Campbell joined the quartet to play Weber’s Clarinet Quintet; special treat throughout the 10-day festival, of a fast rising Russian string trio, the Hermitage Trio. Their contribution was one of Beethoven’s string trios – the Op 3. Members of both the quartet and trio contributed towards Boccherini’s String Quintet in C. Finally, the NZSO’s principal bassist, Hiroshi Ikematsu, found a slot with cellist Rolf Gjelsten to play Rossini’s hair-raising and hilarious duo for those two instruments.

It was a stylish affair, with music between each of the courses of the elaborate dinner. I was not there, but patrons were delighted at the entire presentation.

The purely musical Grand Opening however was on Friday the 4th in the Nelson Cathedral.

Audiences at the festival have grown steadily over the years, till now several concerts were either sold out or almost so. That can be explained partly by the eventual awakening of New Zealanders, and a few overseas visitors, to the phenomenon that has taken firm root in other parts of the western, and even the Asian, world: the music festival, usually in summer in a charming place – like Nelson. The other stimulus in the case of New Zealand is the steady decline in artistic standards by the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington, to the point where classical music has a minor place and the festival is dominated by events aimed to attract casual audiences of limited interest in the arts, little cultivation and knowledge of music or the other mainstream performing arts. None of the other festivals in New Zealand, least of all the one in Auckland, takes its role as an arts festival seriously either.

Esa-Pekka Salonen recently remarked that people in their thirties and forties are awakening again to real music: “You realise that your time in not unlimited, that there might be an end to all this, and that life is too short to be wasted on things that are not quality”. In most countries, a whole generation has been let down by a school of ill-educated educationalists who have impoverished school curricula and allowed what is called the relativist view of culture to banish the systematic teaching of literature, general history, and the arts.

They have discovered that they can now come to Nelson for a rich diet of great, varied and wonderful music from top international players.

This festival was compressed into 10 days in comparison typically to about 17 days in the past. There have been varied reactions to this and time will tell how a programme with more music each day, but somewhat less overall, will impact on audiences and musicians …  and the bottom line.

We will post reviews of each concert in the coming days.

Adam Chamber Music Festival at Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival (A selection of events from the Festival)

Nelson, Marborough, Motueka, Golden Bay  

23 January to 7 February 2009

Cynics often remark, a propos of the hoo-hah surrounding ‘world premieres’, that second performances, like second editions of novels, are much rarer than first ones. So the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson has already entered the sphere of the remarkable by reaching its tenth.

It began in 1992, the brainchild of New Zealand String Quartet second violin Doug Beilman and NZSO violinist, the late Stephen Managh, and cellist James Tennant. The ambition then was for annual festivals but after the second festival, in 1993, it has prospered as a biennial event with the continued huge support from the Adam Foundation.

The artistic management has now moved to two of Beilman’s colleagues, Helene Pohl and Gillian Ansell. In the past there have been some famous and exciting ensembles and soloists from around the world: few more so than the Prazak Quartet, one of the world’s greatest string quartets; it also remains an important date in the diaries of many leading New Zealand, Australian, American and other musicians.

The festival’s administration, at first in the hands of Cindy Flook with logistic support from her husband, landscape architect Ron, has been assumed this year by Wellington music administrator Roger Lloyd. It is also necessary to acknowledge the many years of dedicated guidance by chair of the Festival’s Trust, Colleen Marshall.

 

Mendelssohn and More II

Beethoven and Mendelssohn Quartets: respectively Op 132 and Op 13, in A minor

New Zealand String Quartet, Prazhak Quartet

St John’s Methodist Church, Monday 2 February

The 1pm concert at St John’s on Monday featured both quartets in a special programme offering an example of Mendelssohn’s devotion to his predecessors. Having heard the first quartet, Op 12, on the Sunday, a work in which Beethoven’s influence is clear enough, this concert was specifically devoted to playing Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op 132 on which Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No 2, Op 13 was modelled.

Gillian Ansell spoke about the thematic and spiritual relationship between the two works and the New Zealand String Quartet began with the Mendelssohn. It couldn’t have been written by Beethoven even though only a year or so younger than Beethoven’s, in 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death. But it was by an 18-year-old, a composer 40 years younger, and its spirit was of a later era. In place of the great slow movement in Beethoven’s quartet, Mendelssohn’s Adagio has a somewhat sentimental feel, even though there is weight and it is meditative in a way that few young men of his age would manage. In the NZSQ’s hands it was affecting nevertheless. It’s as if the young composer whose compositional skills were already astonishingly mature, knew what it should be like but lacked the years of disillusion and frustration, and spiritual ecstasy, that fed Beethoven’s late works.

Given all that, this was a very significant performance by the New Zealand String Quartet, the fruit of some years devoted to study of Mendelssohn’s chamber music. It was generous to give the Beethoven to the Prazak Quartet, for it gave the audience the chance to hear them in one of the great masterpieces, in a performance that was a study in Beethoven’s expression of unimaginable emotion: the wit, flippancy, torment, spiritual power equalled by hardly any other composer before or since.

Mendelssohn hardly scratched the surface of all that, and the Prazak Quartet had the key to it. It was yet another Nelson concert that ended with the audience, emerging into the midday sun, bemused and many without words.

Coda

There was a concert at Motueka on Monday afternoon, 2 February, by American guitarist, David Tanenbaum. It was the most disappointing concert of my festival and I concluded that he was having a bad day.

I left Nelson on the Tuesday of the second week; the festival continued till Saturday, 7 February, with several great concerts to come: Mendelssohn’s Octet and his Quartet Op 18; another Piers Lane concert, repeating in part his Blenheim one; the Prazak in Blenheim repeating the Dvorak Quintet plus Haydn’s Emperor Quartet; the Prazak Quartet and others in Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, and York Bowen, Schubert, Webern; a New Zealand programme with Farr, Whitehead, Rimmer and Ian Whalley featuring Richard Nunns on taonga puoro; Schubert’s String Quintet in C and a grand finale including Tchaikovsky, Kenneth Young, Haydn and Bartok.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mendelssohn and More I: Music by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and Schumann

Prazhak Quartet, Piers Lane (piano), Rolf Gjelsten (cello), Jenny Wollerman (soprano)

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 1 February

The first phase of the mini-Mendelssohn festival featured the Prazak Quartet, Piers Lane and other musicians. Cellist Rolf Gjelsten was the first of the others, playing Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata, Op 38, with Piers Lane; it’s a wonderful, ripe, joyous work of fearful difficulty. Mendelssohn is in his characteristic scherzo vein right from start; the score, filled with melody, drives both players through high-speed, finger-breaking gymnastics. The quintessential Romantic, even with its Bachian echoes, appears in the Adagio where the players met the sonata’s demands, not exactly with ease, but leaving both audience and themselves breathless.

Piers then played four Songs Without Words, perhaps to recover his composure, with sparkle and affection. The concert was as much about Mendelssohn’s musical milieu as about him, and we next heard Jenny Wollerman singing three songs each by Felix and his sister Fanny. Her songs were charming enough, as sung with simple clarity by Wollerman, but they lacked the assurance and polished melodic and expressive genius of her brother.

They included Frage, Die Liebende schreibt and ended with the very fine Sukeika, the ecstatic quality of which Wollerman expressed with conviction. The String Quartet, Op 12, was played by the Prazak Quartet. It’s the mark of the most gifted players that they can infuse a work that is not in the ‘great’ class with a depth of feeling and sense of the inevitable that seems to raise it almost to the level of Mozart and Beethoven whose influence in this work is overt. That they did from its very opening phrases: glorious ensemble, each instrument lending its own colour and exact weight to the balance of the whole.

Schumann’s most inspired chamber work, the Piano Quintet, Op 44, had its connection with Mendelssohn through his playing the piano part at its premiere, when Clara, who would have played it, was pregnant. This too was performed by the Prazak Quartet with Piers Lane and, to my prejudiced ears, demonstrated Schumann’s superior creative gifts, through the strength and individuality of melody, driven by a rare musical impulse that was also guided by sure feeling for shape and all the elements that hold an extended structure together.

This performance left me with the confirmation that its finale is simply one of the most thrilling things in the chamber music repertoire.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Floating Bride

Songs, violin sonata and piano trio by Fauré, Harris, Elgar, Brahms

Jenny Wollerman, Piers Lane, Douglas Beilman, Helene Pohl, Rolf Gjelsten

Nelson School of Music, Saturday 31 January

Piers Lane is a top international pianist and he should fill a house of reasonable size anywhere in the world. Here he did not play solo and was happy to be simply a collegial musician: he accompanied singers, a violinist and took the piano part in a trio. But his presence, his modesty and ready collaboration as equal partner with other musicians were a constant delight.

It opened with Jenny Wollerman singing, first, three Fauré songs: Les roses d’Ispahan, Au bord de l’eau and Après un rêve. There was a little much graininess in Wollerman’s voice in the first but her normal purity of tone returned in the second; for the third, her voice was perhaps a bit too wide awake to portray her state on waking from a dream.

Then came Ross Harris’s new song cycle, The Floating Bride, The Crimson Village, settings of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan that were inspired by paintings of Chagall; a project that Harris had himself suggested to O’Sullivan. They were sung most skillfully and imaginatively by Jenny Wollerman whose discreet gestures and body movement – in The Dancer for example – helped her interpretation: and though the settings did not always aim to reflect the sense or feeling of the words, they often created visual images that were surprisingly evocative of Chagall’s paintings.

The piano part was quite elaborate, sometimes even, as in The Ladder to the Moon or Give me a Green Horse, drawing the attention away from the voice and Lane did them proud with careful, detailed handling.

Piers Lane’s next job was to play Elgar’s Violin Sonata with Douglas Beilman. This late piece, of the vintage of Elgar’s Piano Quintet and the String Quartet, demands warm and passionate playing and it flourished with Beilman’s flawless performance on his opulently-toned instrument and Lane’s fluent and commanding playing, from the dramatic to the feathery and lyrical. The thoroughly prepared, beautifully balanced partnership made it something of a revelation both to those familiar with it and to others.

In Brahms’s Second Piano Trio Lane was joined by Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten; the opening passage was magically subdued but there was full-blooded playing later in the movement and a sparkling, quirky Scherzo. For all Brahms’s alleged antipathy to the Romantics around him, this work proves he’s a fully paid-up composer of his age of high Romanticism.

The riches of the entire concert reinforced the disappointment that it had not attracted the full house that it deserved.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Bach by Candlelight

Cantatas, Solo violin sonata, Passacaglia and Fugue BWV 582, Brandenburg Concerto No 6

Jenny Wollerman, Catrin Johnsson (sopranos), New Zealand String Quartet, Prazak Quartet, Martin and Victoria Jaenecke (violas), Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass), Douglas Mews (harpsichord)

Nelson Cathedral, Friday 30 January

The evening concert was held in the Cathedral: an all-Bach programme. The main draw was the appearance of two singers to perform cantatas. Four cantatas, each consisting in just one section and calling for one or two solo voices. The scoring was reduced in each case to a violin or viola plus continuo (Rolf Gjelsten’s cello and Douglas Mews on the harpsichord; in the case of the Cantata No 78, ‘Wir eilen’, Hiroshi Ikematsu added his plucked double bass to the continuo).

Three chamber pieces and an organ work were included n the programme. It began with the Sonata for Bass Viol in D, BWV1028, with the Prazak Quartet’s violist Josef Kluson who weighed in with a rather unbaroque density that was sometimes uncomfortable with Mews’s harpsichord.

Mews, on the cathedral organ, played the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV582, a very fine performance indeed, careful of registrations and of the building’s acoustic. Though we were there primarily for the cantatas, this was a highlight. Brandenburg Concerto No 6 was also well done; it includes no violins and this performance used violists from the two string quartets plus the Nelson violists Martin and Victoria Jaenecke, cellist Rolf Gjelsten and Hiroshi Ikematsu (lending a most welcome weight and richness, even brilliance) and Mews on the harpsichord. I enjoyed this performance hugely.

The four cantatas might have been the centre-piece in terms of concert planning, and the singers, with well contrasted soprano and mezzo voices, each brought excellent qualities to these works. Johnsson’s voice has colour and interesting grain which she used astutely in Cantata 11 and in duet with Wollerman in Cantata 78.

Wollerman is singing better than ever, singing on her own in Cantatas 36 and 58; her voice is very attractive, with just enough character to lend proper discretion to these religious works. It is technically very secure, keenly focused and even in articulation throughout her range. No 58, ‘Wir eilen’, is a lively, secular-sounding cantata, in which the cello bow dances on the strings and Ikematsu’s double bass plucks its way joyously throughout.

The surprise of the evening was a musicological curiosity. Helene Pohl had been exploring a recent study by a musicologist specializing in numerology, whose calculations and consideration of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas has led to speculation that they were composed, in a sense, as elaborate accompaniments to certain chorale melodies. I let that pass; however, Pohl played, with remarkable accomplishment, the Solo violin sonata in A minor (BWV1003). A different chorale was pressed into service for each sonata movement and they did indeed fit together harmonically, creating the sort of spiritual feeling heard in Gorecki’s Third Symphony.

I heard one or two remarks about the violin’s dominance over the voices; that to me was the point, and not inappropriate, for the violin sonata was the essential element. It was an interesting game, the result of numerological studies to which Bach has long been subjected and in which he himself was believed to be interested.

The whole project was admittedly very speculative and I suspect might fall into the same class of ‘scholarship’ as the deniers of Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays.

Blenheim concert by Piers Lane for Adam Chamber Music Festival

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Piers Lane in Blenheim

Beethoven (Andante favori), Brahms (Piano Sonata Op 5), Chopin (Preludes Op 28)

Brancott Winery, Blenheim,

Thursday 29 January 2009

At lunchtime in the Nelson School of Music there was a charming recital from Swedish soprano Catrin Johnsson and New Zealand pianist Rachel Fuller in songs by Mozart, Sibelius, Stenhammer and from less-than-familiar Broadway sources.

The scene changed in the evening, with a 2-hour drive to the Montana Brancott Winery, out of Blenheim, for a 6.30pm recital of Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin from pianist Piers Lane. Here the setting might have been a little too intimate for the good of the piano, a vintage Steinway that has been refurbished but whose somewhat uneven articulation was audible. The capacity of the recital room was suitable but the low ceiling provided very little space for the sound to expand. Thus we heard Lane under slightly less than perfect conditions.

What he played was unexceptionable. He began with Beethoven’s Andante favori (an early try at a slow movement for the Waldstein Sonata): piano album Beethoven if you like, but a well crafted and very attractive piece which Lane treated with rhythmic and dynamic subtlety.

Brahms Third Piano Sonata, his first great work, Op 5, was different; it demonstrate the rugged side of Brahms which is never far absent from most of his later output. It is not often included in concert programmes and is thus a true festival piece. Lane’s brief introduction for an audience not necessarily well-acquainted with the repertoire was well judged, and he thus felt justified in giving them a performance that made no concessions to the faint-hearted. The care he was able to take with the subtleties, both lyrical and rhetorical, was of course tempered by the shortcomings of the piano, but it did not affected in any real way the drama and tonal variety, the careful dynamic and tempo changes.

The second half was given over to Chopin’s complete 24 Preludes which were an even better opportunity to observe Lane’s poetic sensitivity, a myriad of colours and emotions, though the wayward action of the piano did cause unevenness in weight and regularity in fast runs and passagework.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Janacek (Quartet No 2 – The Kreutzer Sonata), Martinu (Quartet No 7), Dvorak (String Quintet, Op 97)

Prazak Quartet

Nelson Cathedral, Wednesday 28 January

On the sixth day of the festival came the concert that many of the committed chamber music passionnées had most looked forward to. The superb Prazak Quartet had their own concert, and played music entirely from their homeland. It followed the pattern of all good concerts, with one very familiar, ravishingly beautiful work, one slightly less known but one which has attained masterpiece stature more recently, and a more modern but very accessible piece that scarcely anyone would know.

In the Cathedral again (this festival used the Cathedral more than previous festivals have), the quartet opened with Janacek’s first quartet, named The Kreutzer Sonata, because Janacek was moved by the fate of the heroine in Tolstoi’s novella. Many in Wellington will recall the intriguing theatrical adaptation of the story, presented at Bats Theatre early last year with the Nevine Quartet playing Janacek’s music,. There is a tendency to allow the character of the work to translate into somewhat harsh expression, with bows tugging violently on the strings.

These players approached it as if it was Beethoven or perhaps Dvorak, with tone that was rich and sensuous, not even allowing the anguished little motif that appears first on the cello to sound other than beautiful. They seemed to be telling the audience to find the emotion in the music itself and not by having it driven into their ears by the players’ insistent interpretations. It struck me as a lesson that composers who exploit the ugly extremes of instrumental sounds to depict anger, nastiness or tragedy might do well to think about.

The result was a performance that went to the heart, yet missed nothing of the complex emotions by which Janacek responded to the tragic tale with which he could so well identify. Martinu’s 7th String Quartet was composed just after the Second World War when he harboured the hope that he might be able to return from the United States to his country; it uses Czech-flavoured themes and reflects optimism.

That it is not a great work cannot be ascribed to the fact that it shuns the avant-garde styles of the time. There is vitality and melodic charm, especially in the second movement, but Martinu’s distinctive fingerprints are not as marked as usual. Its spirit flowed from his hopeful mood after the war and seems to have more in common with the early 19th century than with a century later. Regardless of its character, I cannot imagine a performance more persuasive than what we heard from the Prazak Quartet.

The Cathedral had fallen into darkness during the first half so that by the time Dvorak’s String Quintet, Op 97, began, the players were silhouetted in front of the back wall of the sanctuary, beautifully lit in deep blue. This is one of the two or three best-loved of Dvorak’s chamber music works, overflowing with rich melodies that evolve, interweave and relate to each other in the most engrossing way.

It is scored for two violas, like Mozart’s string quintets, and the violist of the New Zealand String Quartet, Gillian Ansell, took the other viola part. It meant that she played the striking opening phrase of the first movement and also that of the third movement. In fact, this piece gives unusually prominent and beautiful music to the two violas and cello, allowing those players especially to shine and to delight in the special richness afforded by an extra low instrument.

As far as one could tell from the point of view of a mere onlooker, Gillian’s rapport with her colleagues was warm and musically intimate and her contribution was beautifully integrated with that of the Czech players. It was a performance of unequalled splendour and intensity of an especially inspired work from one of the richest eras of music-making in history.