Tag: Adam Chamber Music Festival at Nelson

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Schubert for all

Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887

New Zealand String Quartet

St John’s Methodist Church, Tuesday 27 January

At 1pm the festival broke ground by presenting a free concert in St John’s Methodist Church and Nelson responded by filling it. It was no miscellany of pop classics: the New Zealand String quartet was determined to give the people the real thing, Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887 – his last quartet and a piece that cellist Rolf Gjelsten, in his introductory comments, placed together with Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op 131, as the greatest masterpiece in the quartet repertoire. It’s a ranking I support, in spite of the popularity of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and A minor quartets.

It was a revelatory, emotionally powerful performance of the almost hour-long work that indeed illustrated the mixture of despair, anger, resignation and joy that Gjelsten had bid the audience to listen for.

Though free concerts can send out the wrong messages to the masses about professionalism and actual the costs of presenting good music, isolated and well-judged excursions can awaken to great music those whom it has somehow bypassed.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Trombones in the Cathedral

From Gabrieli and Bach to Sousa and Dave Dobbin

Bonanza: Trombone Quartet

Nelson Cathedral, Tuesday 27 January

I should have known what to expect from the evening concert from the trombone quartet Bonanza – the name a creaky sort of pun. Though they’ve been around for 12 years, I had never heard them. I’m humbled.

To call their performance an illustrated historical survey of the trombone, would give no hint of what the evening was actually like. The reason for choosing the cathedral as the venue was at once obvious, for as the lights dimmed on this wet night without the sun gleaming through the west-facing stained glass, a spine-tingling canzona in 17th century Venetian style sounded from behind and the players became visible moving slowly up the side aisles. It was a sonata by Johann Schein, one of the three great German late Renaissance composers born almost exactly a century before Bach (the others were Scheidt and Schütz)..:

The effect was sheer delight; the audience’s wide smiles were audible. When they gained the dais, the four players took turns to enlighten us about their instruments noting their origin as ‘the romantically entitled sackbut’, played an arrangement of a brass Canzona by the great Venetian composer of at St Mark’s, Giovanni Gabrieli, while accounting for the survival of trombonists through the great Venetian plague if 1630 on account of their robust health.

The players embellished each piece with amusing pseudo-musicology. They wore period costume complete with white wigs, masks and embroidered tunics, which got modified as the decades rolled by. There followed a splendid arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, infinitely more successful than the famous Stokowski orchestration in its sheer brilliance.

Various reinterpretations of musical history followed as they discussed Mozart and the trombone parts in the ‘Tuba Mirum’ of the Requiem and in The Magic Flute. The trombone’s emergence in symphonic music – in the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony – and the torments of trombonists who sit silent through its first three movements led to a revision of the scoring of the first movement for trombone quartet.

Activities prescribed during the decadent 19th century for underemployed trombonists during such periods of idleness were revealed: drinking, reading the newspaper, doing the crossword and sleeping. The players pointed to the greater professionalism of modern trombonists who now pursue more intellectual activities: drinking, reading the newspaper, doing the crossword and sleeping.

Bruckner was the next candidate for biographical revision, with an account of his involvement in the re-interment of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s remains in the Central Cemetery in Vienna in 1888, leading to his lovely motet ‘Locus Iste’ – who needs singers? Surprisingly, their account neither of Royal Garden Blues, nor of the Washington Post March quite fulfilled one’s expectations of full-blooded New Orleans or arm-swinging Sousa.

But the subtle arrangement of ‘I Got Rhythm’ made the grade. And the concert ended with David Bremner’s arrangement of a New Zealand classic – Dave Dobbin’s ‘Slice of Heaven’, a certain dignity in the stylish, high-spirited performance. As encore they played a well-known piece by Meredith Willson, noting that they were 72 trombones short.

If you haven’t heard Bonanza, get a grip and seek them out even if it demands a serious detour ; they are brilliant entertainers as well as damn good musicians.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Flights of Fancy: music by Handel, Falla, Piazolla, Persichetti, De Castro Robinson, Grenfell, Andres, Fauré, Ravel, Ibert

Flight: Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp)

Chanel Arts Centre, Motueka, Sunday 25 January

At 2pm a Family Concert entitled Animal Antics took place in the School of Music. It featured Carnival of the Animals and Poulenc’s Babar the Elephant, with accompaniment from four of New Zealand’s finest pianists – Michael Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp and Emma Sayers, and the narratives, Ogden Nash in the case of the Carnival, were spoken by Helen Moulder.

It clashed however with a concert at Motueka called Flights of Fancy, from Flight, the flute and harp duo of Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills: that’s what I chose. Reports of the Animals concert from those who’d been there made me regret being unable to spirit myself from Nelson to Motueka at 4pm.

Flights of Fancy met with a rather small audience, possibly because some people wonder if the two instruments can sustain their delight for two hours. The concert began with one of Handel’s flute sonatas, the harpsichord part nicely transferred to the harp.

The balance of the concert was slightly skewed however because an arm injury that has afflicted Carolyn Mills, stopped her playing one of the De Falla pieces, a piece by American, John Thomas, as well as Bach’s Flute Sonata in C. The rest of the programme consisted of fairly recent music, both New Zealand and foreign, plus a final set of three happy and familiar French pieces that left the audience content.

The unfamiliar pieces were chosen with a certain flair. Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Pearls of the Sea called for the novel sound of the bass flute, and for a variety of unorthodox sounds – glissandi, tapping the harp’s soundboard and the keys of the flute. Four Pooh Stories came from a second New Zealand composer, Maria Grenfell, again creating an original sound world that was often droll and perhaps trite but evocative of A A Milne.

Serenade No 10 by American composer Persichetti comprised eight very brief and very different movements that seemed to call for a visual programme of some kind. But I most enjoyed a suite of pieces by Bernard Andres called Narthex, depictions of stained glass in French churches of Cluny and Saint Lazare, with their evocation of medieval Christian imagery through clear, vivid melodies: refreshing, straightforward stuff…

Adam Chamber Music Festival,Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Pianissimo: Piano Duos by Mozart, Bizet, Barber, Rachmaninov

Michel Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp, Emma Sayers

Nelson School of Music Sunday, 25 January

The evening concert was absolutely the essential stuff of a music festival; these performances, of great music, would have excited audiences at great European festivals like Verbier or La Roque d’Anthéron.

The Nelson audience was certainly conscious that it had witnessed something momentous as they clapped and shouted at the end of Rachmaninov’s long and strenuous Suite No 2 for two pianos, Op 17. Nothing could have been less apposite that the concert’s title, Pianissimo. I have sometimes wondered whether this dense and mighty work that emerges as if from one mighty instrument, would reveal more interesting interplay if the pianos were widely separated. The performance by Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons was monumental in its energy and power and in its near perfect ensemble; that alone is a singular achievement in such a piece.

Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos, K 448, which is also one of his great masterpieces, had opened the concert; it was played by Diedre Irons and Richard Mapp with Emma Sayers and Michael Houstoun in the humble role of page-turners. If the declamatory and extrovert outer movements were witness to Mozart’s self-confidence and his powerful creativity, the mature and profound slow movement was not only impressive in its unanimity and singular ensemble, but deeply felt, suggesting long gestation on the part of the players.

The concert was given a special quality through the use of projections from above of the players at the two keyboards on to screens at the back of the stage. Without distracting attention from the music, the images seemed to provide an insight into the sensuous intimacy that the strange phenomenon of the piano duet offers.

Nowhere was this slightly intrusive insight more delightful than the performance by Mapp and Sayers of Samuel Barber’s duet, Souvenirs, Op 28, involving a great deal of overlapping of hands, one often on top of the other or chasing each other the length of the keyboard.

Perhaps the most delicious, and to many, surprising piece was Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, every bit as serious music as Mozart or Schumann. This was at the hands of Michael and Diedre at one keyboard and they revealed the uncelebrated genius of Bizet as piano composer. For Bizet’s death at 35 (the same age as Mozart) was a terrible loss not just to opera, but to piano and orchestral music, and probably chamber music too. The music itself is filled with spontaneity and rich invention, but it needs a joyous and boisterous performance such as we heard here to demonstrate just how fecund was Bizet’s melodic imagination and his sense of shape and style.

The following evening (26 January) the same pianists returned for more; this time the emphasis was on aural spectacle, some, like Mark Wilberg’s Fantasy on Themes from Carmen frankly vacuous pyrotechnics, others – Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a Theme of Beethoven (from the Trio of Sonata Op 31 No 2) and Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini of some musical worth. John Rimmer’s Hammerheads, a 2008 work commissioned for four talented young Nelson pianists, was frankly astonishing.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Gala Opening Concert

Telemann: Concerto for four violins; String quartet (Michael Norris); Ravel: Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet;  Smetana: String Quartet, ‘From my life’

New Zealand String Quartet; Prazak Quartet; Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp); Philip Green (clarinet)

Nelson Cathedral, Friday 23 January

The Festival’s Gala opening concert took place, as usual, in the Nelson Cathedral, a strangely incomplete building, its primitive Gothic arches seeming to announce a much larger and more massive building; but above the arches, when money ran out, there is an incongruous ceiling, and walls of concrete blocks and an unsympathetic spire.

However, its acoustic properties are simply superb for singers and small ensembles; and the back wall of the sanctuary, painted deep blue and lit attractively, often provided an atmosphere that suited music as dusk fell on the long summer evenings. . This concert introduced both the New Zealand and the Prazak string quartets, as well as three other musicians. The result was perhaps an unusual programme but one which proved highly rewarding.

The ‘other’ musicians, from the NZSO, and the NZSQ, allowed the performance of Ravel’s enchanting Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet. Carolyn Mills took centre stage with the harp; while the piece may be a miniature harp concerto, the two wind instruments (Bridget Douglas – flute and Philip Green – clarinet), virtuosic and shrouded in subtle chiaroscuro, acted as if they were facets of the one instrument, and the strings too created sonorities that were haunting and ethereal. It was an experience that comes to you live perhaps once in a life-time.

Bridget opened the second part of the concert with a particularly seductive account of Debussy’s Syrinx. In retrospect, the opening piece, a concerto for four violins by Telemann, was incongruous. Though it opens with an enchanting, delicate Grave movement, the rest didn’t fulfill its promise, ending in a rather vapid, inconsequential Vivace.

Nothing could have been as remote from the Telemann as the premiere of a piece by Wellington composer Michael Norris. Commissioned and played by the NZSQ, his String Quartet is inspired by the treatment of death by four distinct cultures that offered scope for contrasting moods and a radical catalogue of ‘extended string techniques’.These included a first movement based entirely on harmonics and a third movement with extensive sul ponticello (bowing close to the bridge).

In Niflheim, its 3rd movement, Rolf Gjelsten’s left-hand fingers climbed so close to the cello’s bridge that one marveled that there was still space for the bow. The piece seemed to want to stop with the stark silence at the end of that movement, but as the fourth evolved it seemed to amend one’s impression of the architecture of the whole. While its structure and many of its ideas were musical, the piece suffers, like so much of today’s music, from the weight and expectations of its programme and its intellectual paraphernalia.

The centre of the concert came at the end with the Prazak playing the quartet From My Life by their compatriot Smetana. My attention passed from one player to another, each time with the feeling that here was the heart of the music. Yet the combination was so flawless and homogeneous, so richly opulent and so filled with the spirit of the composer’s life story, from joyousness to tragedy, that I felt that I had heard finally the perfect, never to be equalled performance.