Tag: cello

National Youth Orchestra’s summer concert a brilliant showcase for cellist Balzat in Elgar concerto

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZSO National Youth Orchestra conducted by Guy Noble with Matthias Balzat (cello)

Beethoven: Leonore Overture No 3, Op 72b
Elgar: Cello Concerto in E minor, Op 85
Dvořák: Symphony No 8 in G, Op 88

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 3 February, 7:30 pm

To start the year, neither Peter Mechen nor I was prepared to forego hearing the National Youth Orchestra and debated the question of authoring a review. We settled by both giving up something we each hated being deprived of – that is, the entire concert.

The compromise: I cover the first half and Peter, the second.

Much as one attempts to avoid repetitious expressions of amazement at the remarkable accomplishment and musicianship exhibited by the National Youth Orchestra, and talented young musicians generally, those qualities of talent and insight are drawn out by gifted mentors and conductors and cannot be ignored.

Though the MFC was at least half full, these concerts deserve full houses. Professed music lovers should never miss them; there, as well as hearing thoroughly rehearsed performances, they will often be exposed to great music that seems to get overlooked in regular concerts. Dvořák’s earlier symphonies are a case.

Leonore III
The first half of this concert was rather more familiar, for the Elgar cello concerto gets a fair amount of exposure, and Leonore 3 is probably the most played of Beethoven’s four overtures for his much revised opera Fidelio, and more than his several other great concert overtures.

Guy Noble is an Australian conductor who has a reputation for popularising and demystifying classical music, often working with young people, hosting educational programme and collaborating with musicians in the pop world. The effect of his easy manner on the players quickly became clear in the opening bars of the overture.

Leonore Overture No 3 was the overture for the first revision of Fidelio in 1806; it’s generally considered the most substantial of the four overtures, using material from the opera, including famously, the trumpet call announcing the arrival of the minister, Don Fernando in the nick of time, releasing the illegally imprisoned Florestan. It’s sometimes played in Act II of opera performances.

Just a musicological aside: there were other operatic interpretations of the actual event during the French Revolution. The programme note referred to two French settings: only one was French: Pierre Gaveaux (Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal, 1798). Two later settings by Italian and German composers in 1804 just preceded Beethoven’s: L’amor coniugale by Donizetti’s famous teacher Simon Mayr, and Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora, ossia l’amour coniugale.

The opening, after the big call to attention, proceeded with the exquisite hushed first phrases on strings bearing a secretive message that set the tone for the whole performance – in turn restrained, suspenseful, heroic, joyous…, moving with an unusual secretiveness till the lovely rising triadic theme from principal flute Matthew Lee (and he shone again with the main theme later) signalled the beginning of the drama. The music rose confidently, dwelling not on the events in the opera’s first act but inspired mainly by Leonore’s bravery and her ultimate triumphant rescue of her husband. Its performance, marked by careful balance between strings and brass whose playing was particularly dynamic, though timpani was occasionally too strong. It certainly left one aroused, rather hoping that the entire opera would follow.

Elgar’s Cello Concerto
A few years ago I suffered Elgar cello concerto over-exposure, and Dvořák’s too, through regular attendance at the Christchurch cello competition inspired by late, lamented Alexander Ivashkin. The Adam International Cello Competition ran from 1995 to 2009 and its end was a result of the Christchurch earthquakes, perhaps one of the most lamentable losses due to the earthquakes.

This performance by Matthias Balzat, last year’s winner of the National Concerto Competition and a number of other important competitions,  awakened me again to its very special character, its deeply pensive musical inspiration, far from the character of Elgar’s earlier, ‘imperial’ symphonic works.

The cello, together with an orchestra that proved comparably sensitive to the unique spirit of the music, produced a totally arresting performance right from the cello’s other-worldly opening with merely hesitant gestures from other strings. The cello part’s handling by the 18-year-old Waikato University graduate (a James Tennant pupil) of the gorgeous main theme of the first movement Adagio set the tone for the heartfelt, melancholy music, which permeates the piece, especially the third movement – also Adagio.

Those two movements are filled with a profound meditative spirit which can be ascribed to its composition after his wife’s death, the First World War and presentiments of the end of Empire; cello and orchestra captured its spirit, exquisitely, in perfect unity.

In the brief but arresting second movement – Molto allegro – Balzat exhibited a fully-formed, virtuosic confidence, sustaining a feeling of trembling expectancy. He coped with all that ferocious demi-semi-quaverish tremolo with energy that would have won the admiration of Jacqueline du Pre. And the last ten minutes or so – Allegro – Moderato – largely rids the scene of the lingering grief, at least in the orchestra. The cello’s sometimes wild ride was subdued with spacious, beautifully phrased passages where some of the Adagio’s depth of emotion resurfaced.

Perhaps it’s taken some time for my appreciation of the concerto to recover from the Christchurch competition’s over-exposure: this performance by a very gifted young cellist and an orchestra under a conductor who emerged as rather more than merely a good front man and colourful advocate for classical music, accompanying in the most apt, sensitive and unobtrusive way, restored this great concerto’s place in my musical pantheon.

(Peter Mechen’s continuation, covering the Dvořák symphony, follows below….)

Dvorak – Symphony No.8 in G Major
A truly Bohemian symphonic musical experience – one of Dvorak’s masterpieces
by Peter Mechen

After the interval, conductor and orchestra returned to the platform to tackle one of the most adorable of romantic symphonies, Dvorak’s G Major Eighth Symphony. For many years concert-goers and record collectors knew the work as No.4 (a number of the composer’s earlier symphonies having not been published and numbered, as it were). Dvorak had previously made a breakthrough as a symphonist with his Sixth Symphony (the first one to be published), a work whose outer movements were unashamedly (and fascinatingly) modelled on Brahms’ Second Symphony. He followed that with the stern, and in places tragic tones of his Seventh Symphony (originally labelled No.2), which, though obviously a greater, more original work, is in a sense, the least “Czech” of all his symphonies, owing little to ethnic dance elements or melodic expression.

With the Eighth, the composer declared that he wanted to write something completely different, “with individual ideas written out in a new manner”. The result was a work which, more successfully than any other the composer had produced, spoke with a truly distinctive voice, expressing easily and naturally within a symphonic framework those ambiences and rhythms we most readily associate with Bohemian music. Apparently Brahms, who was one of Dvorak’s most avid supporters, was not impressed with the work, considering its ideas “attractive but fragmentary”, and lacking the symphonic focus required to give an impression of strength and true seriousness.

But Dvorak was by this time more than ready to be his own man as a symphonist, and where one finds, in the previous symphony, plenty of “strength and true seriousness”, here in the eighth there’s a joyous exuberance added to the symphonic argument which brings it all to life in a far more characteristic central European way. Everything flows in a thoroughly uncontrived manner, though still beautifully crafted and characterfully detailed. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, this is music which for me “age cannot wither….nor custom stale…..”

So it was with some initial concern that I listened to conductor Guy Noble’s direction of the work’s introductory bars with his young players, the melancholic opening phrases seeming to me pushed along and not allowed much chance to properly “voice” the turns of their phrases. Fortunately, things started to “flesh out” – the succeeding episodes were given more space for the players to build and shape their tones, the strings relishing their accompanying triplets beneath the winds’ soulful utterances, and gathering strength and momentum as they pushed upwards towards their climaxes, with everything excitingly capped by the brasses.

The detailings came thick and fast from this point onwards – a lovely flute phrase lead to a heart-warming partnership with the violas, one replicated by the violins and oboes, the horn barely able to contain its excitement as it summoned the rest of the orchestra to arms, leading to a thrilling and resplendent climax, in the wake of which sounded the dulcet tones of the cor anglais. The music’s volatility kept things moving, clarinets buoyed along by the lower strings’ rhythms, and thoroughly galvanized by the strings’ brilliant, gleaming ascent, answered by the brasses, and driven to an exciting ending, the timpanist splendidly on the ball with his rapid-fire detailings.

I thought the slow movement’s performance particularly successful, everything deeply considered and beautifully shaped, with the minor-key irruptions properly volatile and dramatic. And what a stunning contrast was afforded by the trio section’s dancing rhythms, the violin solo plaintively singing, and urging the rest of the strings on. Nothing was stinted, here, the strings fervent and fiery, the timpani strong and unremitting, and the solo trumpet gleaming at the snow-capped climax.
How confidently the players moved from episode to episode here, under their conductor’s beautifully-paced direction, with the horn and then the strings inviting groups of winds to forcefully having their say, and make something strong and virile of the exchanges.

But I particularly enjoyed the strings’ heart-on-sleeve manner with the dance-tune’s reintroduction, their tones saturated with warmth, and the horns chuckling with pleasure in their accompaniments. What a tremendous moment it therefore was when the music darkened unexpectedly once more, brass and timpani making their presence felt while the strings strove to keep the agitations within control, allowing the disturbances to pass and put themselves to rest.

The scherzo exuded grace and confidence, the instrumental detailings having enough thythmic elbow-room to sing and deliciously dance at the same time, not perhaps as indulgently as some performances I’ve heard, but still with beguiling effect. And in the trio, firstly the winds and then the strings flooded the textures with feeling and sentiment, the strings adding a touch of portamento, making for an ambience so very beautifully realized. The coda then properly galvanized our sensibilities, rousing us from our reveries in preparation for the work’s finale.

Trumpets splendidly called the opening, echoed by throbbing timpani and dark- browed winds, before the strings ambled in, the violins particularly bright and focused when counterpointing the lower strings, and then incisive and muscular when the allegro kicked-started – a lovely airy wind-and brass exchange contrasted nicely with the more “boots-and-all” sections – all very rustic and vigorous and exuberant.

I greatly enjoyed the “skin-and-hair” excitement of the middle-section, especially the shouting brass, with the trombones and tuba making telling contributions, and thought the quieter variation sequences worked the music’s contrasts to perfection – what lovely playing from the individual instruments here – flute, clarinet, oboe, horn, bassoon, all underpinned by strings so beguilingly. It made the final stamping, cheering payoff all the more effective, with the final brass clamourings tumultuous!

Obviously I find it difficult to contain my love and enthusiasm for this music when writing about its performance – but here, the players’ enthusiasm and the conductor’s steady and unflagging hand combined with the composer’s natural exuberance to give a truly joyous overall effect. I forgot to mention that I noticed ‘cellist Matthias Balzat (the soloist in the first-half concerto performance) sitting with the other cellos during the symphony’s performance, enjoying the music-making as much as any, and delighting those of us who noticed him there all the more.

I thought the music-making remarkable under the circumstances, continuing with the strong impression the first half of the concert made upon my reviewing colleague, Lindis Taylor. I hope people will find our sharing of this first Middle C orchestral review of the season to their taste, and look forward to it all coming together for you to read.

A somewhat impromptu lunchtime recital proves a delight at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Fleur Jackson (violin), Olivia Wilding (cello), Lucy Liu (viola), Ingrid Schoenfeld and Catherine Norton (piano)

Beethoven: Piano sonata in C minor, Op 30/2, movements I and 3
Schumann: Cello Concerto in A minor, Op 129 – arranged for cello and piano, movements 2 and 3
Bloch: Suite (1919) for viola and piano, movements 2, 3, 4

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 9 November, 12:15 pm

Having left the reviewing duty unplanned, both Lindis Taylor and I found ourselves at this recital, mutually unaware of each other at the time; we decided to combine our impressions. Prizes (a free annual pass for the St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts in 2018) for successful identification of the origin of the various remarks.

This programme was arranged at short notice after the originally scheduled players withdrew. Three separate duos, it proved very engaging, even though each pair played only some of the three or more movements. In principle, one should regret that such truncations are made, as they distort in some way the composer’s original intention. In the circumstances however, and given how well each piece was played, it was an interesting and musically satisfying recital.

The first performers began Beethoven’s none-too-easy Allegro con brio first movement with excellent attack, beautifully integrated. The lively staccato character of the music seemed to belie its minor key; Ingrid Schoenfeld’s lively, ear-catching piano and the bright, buoyant sound of Fleur Jackson’s violin, spiced with well-placed emphases not only characterised the first movement, but continued without the calming Adagio cantabile of the second, to the third movement, Scherzo, which persisted in the spirit of the first, in a dancing spirit, full of optimism.

Schumann’s Cello Concerto doesn’t quite rank alongside those of Dvořák, or Elgar, even of Saint-Saëns or Haydn; but it’s a charming work. Being less familiar, there was not the same feeling of something major left out, in spite of the fact that there is no break between the three movements and in the way they simply merge, one into the next, lends the whole work a particular integrity. To start with the Langsam, second movement, worked very well, and the elimination of the orchestra didn’t seem at all barbaric.

Olivia Wilding and Catherine Norton were finely paired in the expressive opening; the cello has much double stopping while Norton’s piano was a model of subtlety and sensitivity; resulting in a very convincing feeling that Schumann might actually have written it as a sort of cello sonata. One can miss the scale and colour of an orchestra in such a reduction, but the music spoke for itself, uninhibitedly.

The success of the seamless transition from the second to the last movement might profitably have been a model for later concertos, except that it removes some of the crowd-pleasing drama from the conventional concerto structure. The challenges of the Sehr lebhaft finale did not daunt Olivia Wilding, brilliantly executing the lightning shifts from deep bass to high notes. It was a scintillating performance.

Ernest Bloch can often seem a very serious composer, but in the three movements of his Suite (in four movements) for viola and piano, he imagined the islands of Indonesia, which he never visited. They were full of interest, of light and shade. Lucy Liu and Catherine Norton began with the second movement, Allegro ironico, subtitled ‘Grotesques’. The enchanting opening phrases from both viola and piano might have been animals padding through the jungle.

The Lento third movement (‘Nocturne’), a pensive piece, revealed gorgeously rich tone from the muted viola, while it was rewarding to pay attention to the piano part that Norton handled with great sensitivity. The last movement, Molto vivo (‘Land of the Sun’), included some sequences influenced by Chinese music. Strong, confident playing left a Debussyesque feeling and the sense that the suite probably deserved a more prominent place in the viola repertoire. Both players were absolutely on top of the music, technically and interpretively.

It might have been a somewhat impromptu concert but between them the five players delivered an interesting, thoroughly enjoyable concert of works that one might dare call great.

A fine solo cello recital at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Inbal Megiddo, solo cello recital

Bach: Cello Suite no.2 in D minor, BWV 1008
Pigovat: Nigun
Hans Bottermund and Janos Starker: Paganini Variations

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 4 October 2017, 12.15 pm

A good-sized audience heard a memorable recital of advanced cello music in a varied repertoire.

Inbal Megiddo is an extremely accomplished cellist, who teaches the instrument at the New Zealand School of Music, and plays in the Te Koki Trio.

It was a pity that the programme notes gave no information about the works performed, because her spoken introductions were far too quiet to be heard in much of the church; even after Marjan van Waardenberg gave the musician a microphone, because it was held too far from her face.

The Bach was played absolutely splendidly, with lots of light and shade.  Strong fortissimos, pianissimos that were never weak but intense, subtlety of phrasing and very resonant playing throughout the dynamic range were all superb features.

However, it was a pity not to have the titles of the movements of the Suite printed in the programme; Google had to come to the rescue later; given their very different characters from one another, it was a shame the audience did not have the descriptions.

After the lively opening Prélude came the Allemande or German dance, and then Courante, or running dance, which in this performance was almost an Olympic sprint, but very exciting.  In contrast is the slow dance, the Sarabande, which originated in Spanish America.  Then came two Menuetts; parts of these and the Sarabande were very tender, with ornaments executed exquisitely.  The two differed from each other, and were followed by the Gigue final movement, which was very complex.

It all made up to an accomplished and satisfying whole.

Boris Pigovat is a Russian-born and educated Israeli composer.  Donald Maurice of NZSM has been a champion of his music, and has performed and recorded significant works by this composer.  On consulting Pigovat’s web-site, I found listed three versions of Nigun, for solo viola, solo violin and for string quartet – but not solo cello.  Wkipedia informs me that a “nigun or niggun (pl. niggunim) is a form of Jewish religious song or tune sung by groups. It is vocal music, often with repetitive sounds such as “bim-bim-bam.””

The piece (composed in 1996) opened with strong bass notes.  It incorporated some amazing techniques of fingering – playing the melody and the drone accompaniment at the same time; playing sul ponticello (on the bridge).  The work was demanding technically, with numerous different tonal effects.

The variations by Hans Bottermund and Janos Starker (both cellists) on Paganini’s theme was also an astonishingly complicated piece technically.  It was certainly brilliant, incorporating left-hand pizzicato in the first variation following the theme, then in the next, double-stopping.  The third was almost entirely made up of harmonics, i.e. the strings were not fully pressed down, but the natural harmonics to be found at various points on the strings are made to sound by lightly holding the fingers on them.  Another pizzicato movement followed, to be followed by a very fast variation.  Altogether, the work was a demonstration of a myriad of advanced cello techniques, and ended a recital that revealed what a fine cello and a thoroughly accomplished cellist could do, without any support from other instruments.

 

University cellists bring ensemble to St Andrew’s lunchtime concert series

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand School of Music Celli

Samuel Berkahn, Alex Hoare, Emily Peterson, Toby Pringle, Lavinnia Rae, Rebecca Warnes, Olivia Wilding, Inbal Megiddo (cellos)

Bach: Suite no.6 in D, Prelude
Albéniz: Malagenia (normally spelt Malagueña), arr. Claude Kenneson
Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K.525, arr. Blaise Dejardin
Pergolesi: Stabat Mater, arr. Robert Legg

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 13 August 2017, 12.15pm

A well-filled church was treated to a very enjoyable concert performed by the New Zealand School of Music cello ensemble, made up of current and past cello students of the NZSM.  It opened with supremely well-played Bach, performed by Olivia Wilding.   There were a few slight lapses of intonation in this difficult music, but the cellist’s playing was highly competent and confident, her tone and volume excellent.

She was followed by the full ensemble of eight cellos playing, firstly, a Spanish piece.  I find that the arranger, Claude Kenneson, was a Canadian, who died a few years ago.  There was some magnificent playing, especially from those who did short solo parts.

Another arrangement was of the well known Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.  This was arranged by Blaise Dejardin.  Google informs me that he is a young French cellist now playing in the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  After a slightly shaky start to the allegro first movement, the ensemble showed excellent rhythm and phrasing throughout.  The players produced a pleasant tone, and the balance between the parts was fine.  However, the lack of variety in sound quality compared with hearing the full family of strings play the work made it pall a little.

The minuetto third movement seemed to me to be played too fast to allow a graceful dance to be performed to it.  There were a few rough moments.  The rondo final movement was brisk and robust.

The final item was another arrangement.  Pergolesi’s work was arranged by Robert Legg, a staff member of the New Zealand School of Music.  This was a very fine performance; the playing seemed somewhat better controlled than in the Mozart, with a lovely, cohesive tone.

The concert was proof of the excellent teaching going on at the School; the teacher, Inbal Megiddo, was part of the ensemble.

 

Schumann and Barber – adventurous and absorbing sounds from the NZSO, with Daniel Müller-Schott

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZSO presents:
SCHUMANN AND BARBER

BRAHMS – Tragic Overture Op.81
SCHUMANN – ‘Cello Concerto in A Minor Op.129
BARBER – Adagio for Strings / Symphony No.1

Daniel Müller-Schott (‘cello)
James Feddeck (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 17th June 2017

Poor old Brahms was left out of the title for this concert, despite his “Tragic Overture” opening the programme, though therein lies a rub – I thought in a sense it was apposite this time round, as the NZSO’s performance under James Feddeck for me lacked any real sense of tragedy – rather it came across as an intermittently “worried” piece of music trying its best here and there to put a brave face on things. Brahms is, I think, partly to blame – if he had called the work something like “Overture to a Tragedy” one might perhaps more easily accept a narrative or scenario which includes contrasting biedermeier-like cheerfulness. It is a difficult piece to bring off in a specific programmatic sense, requiring in places a determined, sharp-etched focus which ought to be taxing to perform as well as to listen to – here a combination of compositional abstraction and all-purpose performing intent made for me a pleasant, if somewhat remote listening experience.

In theory, of course, Brahms was an appropriate choice of composer to introduce a late work of Robert Schumann’s, the latter’s beautiful, whimsical ‘Cello Concerto, here given the kind of performance by the players that fully enabled the music to fully express its unique character. Perhaps it would have been better to have introduced Schumann’s work with either his “Manfred” or his “Genoveva” Overture, though such was the involvement and sense of direction of the playing, we found ourselves transported to the composer’s strangely troubled world with the first orchestral chord. I’ve always thought it remarkable how this composer’s music in particular identifies itself within a few seconds, whatever the work – so “confessional” in one sense and yet so elusive in other respects.

Soloist Daniel Müller-Schott gave a masterful performance, never over-indulging the whimsicality or vain-glorious gestures in the music, but giving full voice to the poetry of utterance that informed the discourse, handling the awkwardness of some of the composer’s writing for the instrument with great fluency. The work took on the character of an extended meditation upon aspects of existence, with snatches of impulse and wry reflection tossed between the solo ‘cello and the orchestra with apparent ease, if occasionally demonstrating near-dogged obssessiveness – a Schumann characteristic, very much an “I’ll say it again, in case you didn’t hear me the first time” kind of thing. These musicians, however were able to vary the emphases and flex the occasionally four-square rhythms in a way that maintained our interest throughout.

Orchestrally there was nothing of the occasional all-purpose blandness that had neutralised some episodes of the Brahms work – in response to the soloist’s first great utterance, Feddeck and the orchestra gave the first great tutti spadefuls of forthright character, and another leading to a solo interjection from the ‘cello that magically transformed the music into reverie and poetry which marked the slow movement’s beginning. A beautiful, rapt opening from soloist and orchestral winds developed into a rich “sighing” passage, like a giant squeezebox or harmonium gently “breathing” the harmonies, the orchestra’s principal cello duetting with the soloist.

Only when the concerto’s opening theme returned did the magic of the sequence give way to sterner realities, as soloist and orchestra briefly sparred for primacy, before the finale’s theme gathered up both combatants and propelled them into the movement’s opening, by way of a perky three-note motiv that seems to find endless opprtunities for exchange and elaboration. Daniel Müller-Schott’s playing worked hand-in-glove with the orchestra’s, everything kept buoyant and supple, the exchanges having an almost wind-blown quality, like leaves blowing about in an autumn breeze, making a strong and definite contrast with the great orchestral tutti delivering the three-note theme with terrific conviction.

The final moment of magic came with the soloist’s cadenza, the lines climbing out of the depths, getting the occasional hand-hold from widely-spaced orchestral chords, while musing and rhapsodising in between, until the bow began gently dancing upon the strings and the music activated and stirred the blood for a final show of trumpet-like triumphal energy from both ‘cello and orchestra. How wonderful to have such playing put at the service of music which responds so rewardingly – for many people in the audience, the occasion would, I’m certain, have marked a particularly happy discovery of a hitherto unknown or unfamiliar work, one to place alongside the composer’s far better-known A Minor Piano Concerto.

Daniel Müller-Schott returned to give us a movement from a Bach ‘cello suite, one which began with big-boned, grandly-arpeggiated chords, their improvisatory nature suggesting some kind of rich, meditative exploration of sounds that speak in ways which transcend what an eminent musician once described as the “tyranny of conscious thought” – timeless utterances that continue to delight and fascinate, centuries after their inception. I’ve since learned that it was, in fact, the Sarabande from the Third ‘Cello Suite BWV 1009.

After the interval came a similar kind of pairing of works to the concert’s first half, that of the familiar with the not-so-known – though this time round only one composer was involved. American composer Samuel Barber wrote his only String Quartet in 1936, later that same year rescoring the Adagio Movement for string orchestra. This single work has become the composer’s most often-played music, heard most frequently in tandem with events of a sombre or tragic nature. In this commemorative respect it could be said to parallel Elgar’s “Nimrod” from the English composer’s “Enigma Variations”.

It was a tribute to both the strength of the composer’s original inspiration and the inspired playing of the NZSO strings most ably directed by James Feddeck that Barber’s work once again exerted its considerable emotional “tug”. There was certainly absolutely nothing routine about the performance, the opening B-flat as sonorous and withdrawn at one and the same time as any sound could have been, the accompanying strings providing the foundation for the melody’s arch-like progressions. The constantly varying time-signatures created a kind of improvisatory feeling as the violins, and then the violas and ‘cellos presented their “versions” of the arched sounds, the piece gradually and inexorably building towards four intensely-focused, feeling-suffused chords before suddenly breaking off, allowing the resonances time to mingle with the silences, and then finish on an unresolved chord after a final statement of the opening theme.

From around the same period of his compositional life Barber wrote his First Symphony, the product of a sojourn in Rome after he had won, in 1935, at the age of twenty-six, the coveted American Prix de Rome. In fact the work was premiered in that city and its immediate success helped earn for the young composer a performance of his work in the United States six weeks afterwards. Further to this came a performance of the work at the 1937 Salzburg Festival, one which drew the attention of conductor Arturo Toscanini to Barber’s work. In response to Toscanini’s request for some more music, Barber sent him the as yet unperformed Adagio for Strings, thereby sealing that piece’s (and the composer’s) fate!

Barber was to revise the symphony five years later, in which form it was to remain. Written in a single movement, and lasting about twenty minutes, the work has been compared with Sibelius’s one-movement Seventh Symphony which, like Barber’s work, moves in a single, continuous arc through its different moods and aspects towards an inevitable conclusion. Rather more volatile in aspect than Sibelius’s nature-inspired grandeur, Barber’s work hits the listener with titanic force at the outset, in places bringing to mind a Hollywood epic scenario, but one convoluted with angularities and tortured-sounding progressions, with strings and brasses vying for supremacy in a sound-world where anything might happen.

Throughout this opening I thought the orchestral playing simply magnificent under James Feddeck’s direction, the physical momentums and the thematic thrusts both coherent and larger-than-life in a properly dramatic way, the first movement both impressive and bewildering in its variety of orchestral incidence. The titanic conflicts and interactions having spent themselves for the moment, the scherzo movement, Allegro molto, allowed the elves and fairies to dance out from the gaps in between ravaged textures and revitalise life’s enjoyment and sense of fun, the winds in particular colouring the textures in beguilingly varied and unpredictable ways – gradually the strings and brasses added their voices to the orchestral games, until the whole orchestra took up the pounding synopations, rather like the Nibelung’s anvils in Wagner’s Das Rheingold!

After this the oboe introduced a heart-easing theme, with strings murmuring a richly-wrought accompaniment, a solo cello furthering the beauty of the sequence as did the clarinet – the strings took up the music’s thread with passionate advocacy, stimulating great rolling swathes of sound from the brasses, and building into an epic climax! – from the ensuing resonances came the first notes of a passacaglia, the strings continuing to pour out endless torrents of emotion, until winds and brasses flung themselves into the fray with wild, angular cries, returning the music to the apocalyptic turmoil of the opening, a cosmos of reiterated incident over which human kind seemed to have little or no control!

What a work, and what a performance! Evidently conductor James Feddeck thought so, too, as he took some pains at the music’s end to acknowledge the contributions made by individual players, too many of whom to list here. The Brahms Overture apart, I thought the whole concert a triumph – of programming, and of performing. A pity the hall was somewhat less than full (the Barber Symphony too much of a “wild-card” for some patrons, perhaps?) – this venture deserved every success and every gesture of public support.

Archi d’Amore Zelanda with delightful programme of New Zealand compositions, plus Bach

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Archi d’Amore Zelanda
Donald Maurice (viola d’amore), Jane Curry (guitar), Inbal Megiddo (cello)

David Hamilton: Imagined Dances
J.S. Bach: Suite no 1 in G major for solo cello
Michael Williams: Archi Antichi

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 14 June 2017, 12.15 pm

The ensemble brought a thoroughly delightful programme to an appreciative audience.  What was unusual was that apart from the solo Bach work, the music played was contemporary, whereas one would expect that the viola d’amore would be playing music from a much earlier times.  The programme notes included this comment ‘…the instrument has been enjoying a renaissance since the mid-twentieth century, with new works being composed and old works being adapted…’

Just over a year ago I reviewed a concert of Vivaldi music performed by Archi d’Amore Zelanda, which on that occasion consisted of eight players.

The common factor between the items was that all were suites of movements (almost all) based on dances.

The David Hamilton work suffered from the fact that all three instruments were stringed, whereas the composer’s original had been for flute, violin and guitar, though the composer had approved the version we heard.  The original would have had more contrasting timbres than this version.  Thus, in this version individual instrumental lines and characters did not always stand out; the closeness in pitch of the guitar to the viola d’amore was another factor.  The Williams work, on the other hand, was written for these instruments, and it was constructed differently, with more solo, or solo and accompaniment passages.

Hamilton’s dances began with a pensive Sarabande, a slow dance.  A flamboyant Tango followed, then a Waltz with a lilting melody; after a slow introduction, it was fast and rhythmic.  The final Mexicana had stirring rhythms and repetitive phrases, with a shriek at the end.

Inbal Meggido made some introductory remarks, as did Donald Maurice at the beginning of the concert, but unlike him, she held rather than used the microphone, so I did not catch most of what she said.  However, her performance of Bach’s first Suite for Cello was superb.  Never have I heard it played with such variety of dynamics and tone.  The opening Prelude was a statement in which her playing overcame familiarity; its freshness was a delight.  There was a fine resonance, and very subtle bending of the rhythm.

The Allemande was gracious but at the same time rhythmically sparkling.  Courante was a fast and spirited run.  Meggido’s variety of tone and dynamics gave the music meaning.  There was nothing mechanical about the playing.

The Sarabande, being slower and more thoughtful was an excellent contrast to its predecessors.  Minuets 1 and 2 were bright and vigorous, working up to the lively Gigue that ended the Suite.  This was a splendid performance.

Archi Antichi was written for Archi d’Amore Zelanda, and as the title indicates, was based on antique dances, to some extent.  It consisted of Fugue, Cavatina, and Arrhythmia (though missing its first ‘h’; commemorating the heart condition the composer had experienced).  As Donald Maurice said in his remarks opening the concert, it was somewhat ‘Lilburnish’ – particularly in the opening movement, I found.

Jane Curry introduced the work, and I was pleased to hear her pay tribute to Marjan van Waardenberg for the work she does organising these lunchtime concerts.

The Williams work began with the cello alone, in Bach-like manner.  The others joined in with pizzicato.  Moving into a minor key, the music became more complex, the parts following their individual lines clearly, but nevertheless making a pleasing and cohesive whole.  A slower section again had each instrument complementing the others in a satisfying way.

The cavatina had a slow, undemonstrative start, followed by a strong but mournful duet for cello and viola d’amore.  The guitar joined in after a time, in a beautiful piece of writing.  The other instruments blended gorgeously in accompanying the melody.  The “Arrythmia” featured pizzicato in an off-beat rhythms and good interplay between the parts before the music became agitated; it ended with a delicious little motif – perhaps saying ‘everything is all right now’, to end a fine concert of interesting and well-played music.

 

 

 

 

Solo cellist Christopher Hutton in Wellington Chamber Music’s second 2017 concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Christopher Hutton (cello)
(Wellington Chamber Music)

J S Bach: A Suite Sampler
Britten: Suite for solo cello No 1, Op 72
Reger: Suite No 1 in G minor, Op 131c
Bolcom: from Suite No 1 in C minor
Harbison: Suite for solo cello (1993)
Corigliano: Fancy on a Bach Air

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 28 May 2017, 3 pm

Though originally from Wellington, Christopher Hutton had most of his education in the United States, at Boston University, the Eastman School of Music at Rochester, the University of North Carolina and the University of Delaware, before becoming an associate professor at the Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

He has made previous tours for Chamber Music New Zealand and Wellington Chamber Music, recently as cellist in the Poinsett Piano Trio. This may be his first return visit as solo cellist.

Given the general unfamiliarity with most of the music exists for solo cello (apart from Bach), he put together an interesting, and generally engaging programme.

Bach
It began with a not unsuccessful ‘sampler’ of a movement from each of Bach’s six cello suites, arranged in the same pattern as Bach followed, thus: the Prelude from No 1, the Allemande from No 2, the Courante from No 3, and so on. Apart from those with perfect pitch, the mixture of keys (no two are the same – the Bourrées in E flat followed by the Gigue in D) presented no problem. In the cases of very familiar movements, there was merely the matter of hearing, as each ended, the next actual movement in your head.

Before each piece, Hutton spoke interestingly and fluently, and his confident, unhesitating manner carried into his playing, through the varied phases of the first Prelude as well as the Allemande and the brisk Courante. At times it felt a little too restless. The Sarabande (from Suite No 5), however, was given its due as a more meditative piece. And he struck a clear contrast between the two Bourrées from the E flat suite.

Britten’s cello suite, one of three dedicated to Rostropovich, ‘clearly echoes Bach’, as Hutton says, but in such a way as to rather puzzle an innocent listener, who is likely to be less musically gifted and sophisticated than Rostropovich. It’s one of those pieces that is ‘tonal’ but not necessarily enrapturing. But I am not a reliable observer; I’ve long loved the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, the operas Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw and Gloriana, the War Requiem, the folk song arrangements, the piano and violin concertos; but some of the chamber music in particular, which some find ‘interesting’, I might find cold, obtuse, calculated, often cluttered with complexity.

However, Hutton gave it a splendidly idiomatic performance though perhaps it was one emphasising its rigour and intellectualism, driving it so fiercely that whatever lyricism and more simple beauty became a bit hard to discern.

Reger
Much more to my liking was Max Reger’s first suite; he, like Britten, wrote three cello suites paying homage to Bach. Forty years older than Britten, he lived just in time to avoid the serialist and other avant-garde pretensions, so his Bach emulations sounded much closer than Britten’s to their source; my notes even went so far as to ask: ‘Bach’s Seventh Suite?’

There were quite extrovert, even exhibitionist, passages but it was essentially musical. The Adagio middle movement was charming, with lengthy passages of double stopping, which made me wonder whether this was a candidate for extracting as solo, Bach-aria-type piece. There was an impressive fugal episode in the last movement which the soloist’s notes likened to Bach’s solo violin sonatas.

Bolcom
Three American composers, all born in 1938, followed. I’m more familiar with William Bolcom’s songs, which are very attractive, than his chamber and other music, but the three movements from his first cello suite had many agreeable features; it was in the Badinerie movement (Bach’s famous example is in the second orchestral suite) that Hutton displayed particular aplomb in handling its bravura character with confident mastery. And he captured the almost flippant spirit of the Alla sarabanda final movement splendidly.

Harbison
Bolcom was born on the west coast; John Harbison was born in Massachusetts. Hutton’s notes remark that his suite for solo cello resembles Bach’s solo violin sonatas and indeed, here was another approachable American composer who successfully took Bach as a model. Less easy to discern was the influence of Britten’s cello fugues, as suggested by Hutton; the blustery Fuga-Burletta, second movement, rather suggested Bach to me. Again, the genial musicality and the engaging scraps of melody that seemed to evolve one to another; the sober Sarabanda, and the rhythmically riotous Giga avoided anything that might alienate a mainstream listener. The music was imaginative, spontaneous in feeling, elegantly composed; and persuasively played.

Corigliano
The last item was something of a playful offering, from the many-sided John Corigliano (best known I suppose as composer of The Ghosts of Versailles, for the Metropolitan Opera, New York). His piece was called Fancy on a Bach Air; in fact, the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  It was characterised by long-breathed melodic ideas as well as very large intervals that, strangely, taxed Hutton’s intonation ever-so-slightly. Yet it was splendidly played, a fine way to end this successful, generally not too challenging, though unusual recital.

Further programme material from Christopher Hutton

Christopher Hutton had supplied interesting backgound notes to Wellington Chamber Music for incorporation into their printed programme.  Space constraints prevented most of the text from being used.

They are reproduced below as they deal interestingly with each of the pieces played. I should add that I refrained from reading them till I had written my review in order not to be influenced by words not available to the audience on the day; naturally, there are certain things that do not perhaps line up with my own impressions of the music. So be it.

Lindis Taylor

Today’s program juxtaposes music from J.S. Bach’s much beloved Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello with music by later composers who were influenced or inspired by Bach’s music.

As hard as it may be to imagine, J.S. Bach was not widely known as a composer when he wrote his cello suites almost 300 years ago, and as famous as he is now, there is plenty we do not know about the genesis of this music. We do know they were written in Cöthen between 1717-1720. It is uncertain who exactly might have first performed them, but they may have been intended to impress his employer Prince Leopold who was an enthusiast of the Viola da Gamba. Bach surely never intended this music to be used for actual dancing but he knew that his contemporaries enjoyed dance music so much that dance styles were commonly integrated into instrumental music written purely for amusement.

This meant that Bach could readily draw upon firmly conventionalized styles with meters and figuration specific to each kind of dance. As such, each suite consists of an introductory prelude followed by a series of five dances, always appearing in the same order: Allemande (moderate-tempo in 4/4 time), Courante (quicker, in 3/4 time), Sarabande (slow and stately in 3/4, often with a particular emphasis on the second beat), and Gigue (fast, with triple rather than duple rhythmic subdivisions). Between the Sarabande and Gigue each suite has a pair of short dances called Galanteries: Minuets in the first and second suites (moderately quick, 3/4); Bourées in the third and fourth suites (quicker, in 3/4), and Gavottes in the fifth and sixth (relatively quick, in 4/4 time). All seven of these dance styles have their roots in courtly dances that had become standardized in France in the late seventeenth century, and although by 1720 the French court had moved on to newer dances, the older styles were still common in other countries.

Because a performance of all six suites lasts well over two hours, today’s program begins with a “Suite Sampler”, presenting one movement from each of Bach’s Suites, each in a different key. By combining movements from multiple suites one can get an impression of the musical affect of each suite and of the variety of different movements contained within, perhaps whetting listeners’ appetites to seek out the set of six suites as a whole. This set begins with the Prelude of the first, G major Suite, which is almost certainly the single most famous movement of solo cello music ever written. It is remarkably simple, a series of arpeggiated chords that modulate through a number of keys before settling on the dominant (fifth scale degree).

Resolution back to tonic is inevitable, but is withheld. The tension inherent in that delayed gratification builds until the chords of the opening measures return in a cathartic moment of rapture. This is followed by the usual series of dances with the contrasts between each style heightened by the different keys and character reflective of each suite: the introspective Allemande in D minor, the fleet-footed Courante from the sunny C-major suite, the melancholy and extraordinarily sparse Sarabande from the C minor suite, the playful Bourées from the otherwise grandiose E-flat Suite, wrapped up with the brilliant and thrilling Gigue of the D major suite.

Though the cello rose to prominence as a solo instrument in the nineteenth century and cellist-composers wrote for unaccompanied cello, this music has generally not become a part of the modern cellist’s canon. The first solo cello works to have attained the status as standard repertoire were three suites composed by Max Reger (1873-1916) almost two-hundred years after Bach’s suites. Though written in 1914, after Schoenberg’s early forays into atonality and Stravinsky’s landmark Rite of Spring, Reger’s suites are deeply rooted in the richly chromatic tonal harmonies of the Romantic era. Each of Reger’s suites is dedicated to a leading cellist of the day: Julius Klengel (1859-1933), Paul Grümmer (1879-1965), and Hugo Becker (1863-1941). These names are likely unfamiliar to general audiences, but are well-known to cellists as composers of etudes and other music, and editors of music including Bach’s suites – versions of which are still in print from each of these cellists!

The G-major Suite, Op. 131c No. 1, opens with a running sixteenth-note (semiquaver) figuration instantly recognizable as relating to Bach’s prelude in the same key. In Reger’s case, however, the range is greatly expanded, and the simplicity of Bach’s model gives way to much more extroverted virtuosity. This opening movement is followed by an Adagio that is not clearly based on any specific movement by Bach, but combines extended passages of double-stops (common to many of Bach’s Sarabande movements) with intricate, quickly-moving scales. Bach only wrote one movement for solo cello that one might call a fugue (in the prelude to the fifth suite), but he wrote movements titled “Fuga” in each of his three sonatas for solo violin. Writing a fugue for a solo instrument is a challenge, but in the finale of his suite Reger (like Bach before him) uses a relatively simple subject that permits the layering of the theme over (or under) other voices. While not the same as one of the four-part masterpieces of the Well-Tempered Clavier or a fugue for organ, the technique is remarkably effective.

Like Reger, Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote three suites for solo cello, though in this case not as a set, but rather among a series of five works written between 1960 and 1974 for and dedicated to the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007). The first suite was written in 1964 and premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1965. Inspired by Rostropovich’s playing of Bach suites rather than Bach’s music itself, it still has movements that clearly echo Bach. Both the Canto which recurs in different guises throughout the Suite (much like the Promenade of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition) and the Lamento relate quite strongly to Bach’s Sarabande in C minor in the way they explore the dissonant interval of a half-step (semitone). The Fuga channels the contrapuntal writing of Bach’s fugues, and here Britten comes up with the ingenious idea of including silences in his theme which allows him more leeway in giving the impression of multiple voices (allowing voices in other registers to fill in the gaps).

Rather than imitate the typical kinds of dance movements found in a Baroque suite, the later movements are distinctly Britten. The serenade is played pizzicato throughout, with strings plucked by both the left and right hands. The sarcastic march (perhaps echoing Shostakovich, another composer who collaborated with Rostropovich) has trumpet and drum effects which gradually draw closer and then further away. The fifth movement, Bordone, alternates between higher, scurrying themes played with the bow contrasted with lower and slower notes plucked by the left hand, all layered with a sustained drone D. Later in the movement the quick motive dissolves into the drone itself which then accompanies a plaintive melody first above and then below. In the finale Moto perpetuo the scurrying theme of the Bordone is further developed, culminating in a return of the Canto refrain. The Canto that has been haunting the suite is finally exorcised and at the end of the movement the last note is a dyad of the dissonant half-step of F# and G which resolves to G alone as the open string rings longer. The piece is a real tour-de-force both of composition and as a showcase for the abundant talent of its dedicatee.

The remaining works on this program were all composed within a span of two years (1994-96), and coincidentally were all written by composers born in the same year (1938).

William Bolcom adapted his Solo Suite No. 1 in C minor from his score for Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass. Like most of Bolcom’s cello works, it was written for the cellist Norman Fischer who now teaches at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The Prelude is a brusque and angular march with percussive effects. That contrasts greatly with the playful third-movement Badinerie. “Badinerie” is a relatively obscure French term that might best be translated to the more commonly used Italian term “scherzo” (joke), and is a title that Bach used in the finale of his second orchestral suite. The final movement of Bolcom’s suite, titled “Alla sarabanda” is a direct homage to Bach with a recomposed version of Bach’s C minor Sarabande
followed by a series of five increasingly technical variations, and followed by a reprise of the theme.

John Harbison’s Suite for Solo Cello is set in four movements, very much in the form of Bach’s Sonatas for solo violin (written around the same time as the cello suites). It begins with a rhapsodic, improvisatory Preludio followed by a Fuga-Burletta which is – as suggested by its title – a comic fugue. It has similarities to the fugues in first suites of both Britten (with its use of silences in the subject) and Reger (with voices layered into double- and later triple-stopped chords). The brief Sarabanda updates Bach’s Sarabandes with 20th-century harmonies, while the Giga (Gigue) finale is a rip-roaring moto-perpetuo inspired by some of Bach’s cello gigues (notably that of the fourth cello suite) and the fast finales of his violin sonatas and partitas.

John Corigliano’s “Fancy on a Bach Air” is an introspective single-movement piece inspired not by any cello music, but rather the Aria of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for harpsichord. It was written in memory of one Robert Goldberg who had commissioned a number of composers to write a series of variations for the 25th anniversary of his wedding to his wife Judy. The set of pieces was to be performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, but before the commission could be fulfilled Robert died of cancer leaving the variations to stand in memorium rather than their original, celebratory purpose. The long-breathed phrases of Bach’s original air are imitated here in long, legato lines, written without notated rhythms to suggest a sense of freedom. It seems an appropriate way to bring this program to a close.

For more information go to ReflectingBACH.com

Aotearoa Plus from the NZSO set alight by Gareth Farr premiere

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
AOTEAROA PLUS

PIERRE BOULEZ – Mémoriale (….explosante-fixe…Originel )
GARETH FARR – Cello Concerto “Chemin des Dames” (world premiere)
JOHN ADAMS – Naive and Sentimental Music
Sébastien Hurtaud (‘cello)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 5th May, 2017

A concert with the name “Aotearoa Plus” begs the question of how an orchestra might best support and present the music of native composers – the title is one which, in my artless way, I thought might have fairly been expected to accompany rather more homegrown examples of composition than were allowed for here.

Thank goodness, then, in my view, for Gareth Farr’s work, and its performance, which delivered a kind of visceral wallop and emotional candour that dominated the evening’s listening, putting even the quasi-Brucknerian symphonic-in-situ explorations of John Adams which took up the second half, in the shade. Before all of this, opening the concert was an ambient, beautifully-breathed work of Pierre Boulez’s, which might have surprised many people with its accessibility, considering the composer’s reputation as a once “stormy petrel” of the contemporary music world.

Boulez was a creative musician whose career followed a kind of predictable pattern – a firebrand in his youth, he presented an uncompromising anti-establishment series of stances marked by outrageous aphorisms seized upon by the media, such as “All opera houses should be blown up”, and “Anyone who has not felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic (12-tone)system is OF NO USE!”. Some of his contemporaries weren’t spared, either, when he remarked on a contemporary composition style that it “amounted to frenetic arithmetical masturbation”. Music for him had a “tainted past”, necessitating the creation of a “new world” of musical expression. As he got older Boulez seemed to mellow, and acknowledge that works like his own Le marteau sans maître DID owe a great deal to music of the past that he had previously railed against. He also forged a new career as a conductor, becoming known for his interpretations of Wagner (he actually directed Bayreuth’s own Centenary production of The Ring in 1976, to the musical world’s astonishment), Mahler and Bruckner, acknowledging the music of the last two composers as having a “real influence” on his own work.

There may have even been some kind of convoluted disappointment in the minds of some people expecting to be repelled by anything written by Boulez, invariably something which would be angular, discordant and downright unpleasant to listen to. We were, instead drawn into a world of beauty and whimsicality, rather like birdsong with many different variants (Bridget Douglas demonstrating her complete command of the flute’s textures and timbres, here). These variants were a series of exhalations, in which the solo instrument, the strings and two horns here and there breathed the most delicate and finely-wrought impulses, in between advancing engaging short-term rhythmic trajectories.

Basically the piece came about through the composer’s habit of re-working scores, and in the process generating what the programme note liked to call “a constellation of related satellite pieces”. In 1972, Boulez produced a work honouring the memory of Igor Stravinsky who had died the previous year, a work called explosante-fixe…Originel (“Exploding-fixed…original”). Written for solo flute, chamber ensemble and live electronics, the E-flat pitch with its German notation Es signified Stravinsky. In 1975 parts of the music resurfaced as a tribute to composer Bruno Maderna, entitled Rituel – and ten years later another reworking of the piece was published as a tribute to the flutist Laurence Beauregardflute, with whom Boulez had worked. The composer seemed to lose faith with the electronic-tape component of the piece due to the unreliability of the technology, and went on to produce an “acoustic” version of the music, one in which the flute dominated, and the accompanying sounds either mirrored or ambiently complemented what the flute did.

One of these “complementations” I really liked came from the horns, playing what I like to think sound like “electric lines,” an idea which came from my fascination with those marvellously evocative railway lines and accompanying lights, besides and along the main road just north of Huntly and between Meremere and Mercer. These lines and lights always seemed to me to “hum” their held notes with vibrant accord as if impulses were coursing up and down those tracks, watched over by those solicitous single-note sentinels. By way of variation, there were occasional flashes of increased prominence, but really little more than micro-versions of triple-time tip-toeing. And, just when things seemed to be getting more involved, the composer called a halt to the piece’s quiet irruptions, on a long, somewhat resigned note.

As the performing area needed to be re-organised for the increased numbers of players required by the next item on the programme, conductor Hamish McKeich took the opportunity given by the hiatus to bring its composer, Gareth Farr, onto the stage and talk with him about the oncoming performance (a world premiere, incidentally). This was a ‘Cello Concerto dedicated to three of Farr’s great-uncles who were killed in the First World War in France at a place known as “Chemin des Dames”, in 1917. Farr wanted to commemorate both their deaths and the effects of the loss of so many young lives upon families such as theirs. The name of the battle-place “Chemin des Dames” (Pathway of Women) underlined for Farr the involvement of women in such conflicts, both as casualties themselves and as bereaved sweethearts and wives, mothers and sisters, with their ongoing loss and grief over the years that followed.

It was an interview with “moments per minute” rather than the other way round, profound regarding the work’s subject matter, but also entertaining with Farr’s quicksilver responses to McKeich’s focused enquiries concerning the writing of the work. Farr praised his soloist, Sebastien Hurtaud, for the latter’s collaboration, telling us in no uncertain terms that, for this reason, a concerto was far easier to write than would have been a purely orchestral work because of the vibrancy of such an exchange, and the relief for the composer afforded by this “working together”, instead of the latter having to be a “dictator” with the musicians.

McKeich raised the question of Farr’s music being regarded as “loud”, which the latter agreed with! – stating by way of explanation that, as a percussionist, he had come from “the loud end of the band”! Again, Farr emphasised that when writing a concerto, the music is about the soloist and his/her instrument – in this case the ‘cello, whose tones approximated those of a baritone! Rather than make an impression via loudness, Farr sought to make a kind of “hole” in the orchestral texture for the soloist to fit into, therefore negating the possibility of any orchestral “loudness” cross-cancelling the soloist’s tones, and therefore preserving the musical argument’s clarity – most interesting!

I would have happily listened to these two conversing for longer, but things were obviously now “set to go” regarding the performance! – so, with the word about to be made flesh, the orchestra entered, followed by the soloist and conductor, and the work was begun.

A brief subterranean percussion rumble, followed by soft strings and arpeggiated keyboard (celeste?) notes prepared the way for the solo ‘cello, singing, lament-like around a single note, like a weeping voice in the middle of a barren landscape. Various orchestral detail – a brass chord, soft, chirruping winds, and longer brass notes led up to a huge percussion crescendo, music of devastation in the wake of some terrible event.

I was struck by the way the solo ‘cello dug into the notes in much the same way as at the opening of another work lamenting the tragedy of war, the Elgar “Cello Concerto, the solo intstrument here expressing a similar kind of amalgam of anguish and anger. Another composer evoked was Shostakovich, with a solo trumpet and side-drum suggesting militaristic activities – these evocations of other works didn’t, however, sound contrived or “tacked on”, but instead set up a thoughtful resonance of reference to similar responses to human conflict.

The work expressed so many different emotions, delineated by a number of figures which seemed to recur as motifs – determination and bravery (the ‘cello soaring upwards, answered by the strings and echoed by brass and percussion), excitement and fear (the ‘cello agitatedly playing running passages punctuated by energetic pizzicati and tremolandi, and the occasional roar of full percussion), and homesickness and nostalgia (tender, ruminative explorations from the ‘cello, lyrical birdsong-like figures from the winds). Then there was what sounded like music of conflict – the ‘cello energised with running, toccata-like figures, picked up by horns and winds, and augmented with motoric driving strings, and occasionally baleful brass, pushing a three-note figure repeatedly and mercilessly, with what sounded like woodblocks and tambourine sounds adding to the driving fray.

Then there were passages where conflict and lament seemed to coexist, as if the privations of warfare and grief seemed to intermingle and become as one single tragedy – the ‘cello agitations brought to my mind parts of Bloch’s “Schemolo” anguishing and lamenting amid the tumltuous orchestral irruptions, a relentless onslaught whose struggles left the soloist momentarily exhausted, though still imbued with sufficient life-force to renew the lament via a cadenza-like passage, filled with extremes of bitterness and deep sorrow, at the end of which the orchestra returned us to the work’s beginning, to a world where the futility of what had happened was demonstrated, and the cost was laid bare for all to experience.

I’ve given more attention to the work than to its performance, but with the proviso that, in this case, the work WAS its perfomance, very much so with the soloist and the orchestral and conductor being the ones the composer specifically had in mind when writing the work. Its overwhelming impact was a tribute to all concerned.

At this point, going back in my mind over the concert, I remembered asking myself both at the time (and beforehand), why, in a presentation entitled “Aotearoa Plus” the orchestra had then programmed so much non-New Zealand work…..had I read the programme’s title incorrectly? – Was it in fact “Aotearoa Plus-PLUS”? What was more, what we were about to hear was the SECOND work programmed by the orchestra of this particular contemporary composer’s work this season! Given Resident Music Director Edo de Waart’s historically significant association with American composer John Adams, I’m certainly prepared to accept that we might hear more than usual of his music….but why should so much figure in the one programme the orchestra specifically tags as having New Zealand content, one not even directed by de Waart?

In any case, after hearing Gareth Farr’s piece given such stunning advocacy, I really felt like connecting further with something else that was home-grown, something whose sound-world had been wrought from similarly cultivated and nurtured material, if of an earlier milieu. I thought of several works which would have easily fitted that prescription, music which deserves to be know better and played far more often (in one case almost embarrassingly so!). To tackle the mooted “embarrasment” first-up, I would have plumped for programming one of the finest pieces of exploratory orchestral writing (after all, THIS was the raison d’etre of the John Adams work we heard – Naive and Sentimental Music – parts of which, in my opinion, flirted with over-inflated bombast) to come out of this country, David Farquhar’s First Symphony. The awkward part is that the NZSO, after giving the public premiere of this work (and, most ironically, subsequently recording it TWICE!) has never performed it again at a concert. I wish somebody who knows would quietly take me aside, sit me down, and explain to me just why this remarkable music hasn’t been played by our National Orchestra in public for nearly sixty years!

Still, ours is not to reason why, or lament what didn’t happen, but, instead, as reviewers, to report on what actually took place when Hamish McKeich stood in front of the NZSO and set in motion this astonishing piece of music created by John Adams – Naive and Sentimental Music? Just what did the composer mean by it all? In a programme note, Adams himself outlined his self-described “tortured” reasonings, drawing from an eighteenth-century essay by Schiller, “Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”), in which all creative activity was characterised as either “naive” (natural, direct, unselfconscious, brought about for its own sake), or “sentimental” (seeking to restore something that has been lost, indulging in self-analysis in order to “find” an ideal, or resorting to parody or satire as a means of demonstrating the “chasm” that had opened up between sense and sensibility in artistic creation).

Adams further cited Anton Bruckner as an inspiration, when contemplating his approach to symphonic form in writing this present work, shortly after hearing a live performance of that composer’s Fourth Symphony. Of course, Bruckner was and still is popularly regarded as something of a “naif” in the ways of the world, though it’s a label the composer seems to triumphantly ride above with his music. I can’t imagine how anybody but a genius of staggering intellectual capacity could recast his symphonic material so readily in response to critical vituperation, which in itself would have poleaxed a lesser man! However, maybe Schiller in theory (and Adams in practice!) would each ascribe a “naive” set of impulses to the composer’s unique processes, thus keeping Bruckner on the side of those creatures of pure impulse, the angels!

So, in short, we got from Adams a symphonic work of near-Brucknerian proportions in three movements, one in which the composer seemed to use as a kind of creative theoretical workshop for processing different kinds of musical ideas. I found the journey pushed my sensitivities to their limits in places, most obviously in the first, eponymously-named movement, which for me outstayed its welcome in the long run, falling back upon itself towards the music’s end and reworking veins of exhausted paydirt. Up to a point I thought the music charming and fecund in how it treated the lyrical theme, which began the work, with the utmost freedom and variety of means. The orchestra most expertly dealt with everything Adams threw at the players, apart from an untypical “did we dream you or did you dream us?” sequence of uncertain syncopation between brass and strings at one point. Conductor Hamish McKeich was like an experienced campaigner controlling the ebb and flow of the various arguments, one minute encouraging a lyrical blending of strings and wind, and the next minute riding the footplate of what soulded like a great machine coming to life and moving onto the main line out of the siding!

The second movement “Mother of the Man” featured, along with murmuring strings and haunting percussion harmonics, a guitarist contributing piquant sounds to gentle, patient unfoldings and oscillations. I imagined flecks of light falling in gentle shoals onto a landscape, the players under Hamish McKeich’s firm control “drifting” their sounds with the utmost delicacy, creating miracles of stillness. Such was the rapt atmosphere that when the strings began their series of crescendi, the sudden change in dynamic intensity was almost knife-edged, repeated rising scale motifs piling on the upward pressures to a point where the strings suddenly silenced the tumult and allow things to wind down.

Church bells rang out over a galumphing bass at the finale’s beginning, the volatilities building through great glow-ball-like swathes of sound and strings and scintillating percussion racing along together, rushing up to the feet of great off-the-beat percussive crashes, and the heavy chortlings of big-boned brass. As the instruments took up the patternings and add their particular accented notes, the patterns kept changing, giving the listener the feeling of something beginning to cohere and fragment at one and the same time – so many voices, so many syncopations. One couldn’t think a composer could go any further – and then the rockets of sound began shooting up! Pandemonium! What a guy!

Very great credit to Hamish McKeich and the NZSO players for bringing such a saga off so resplendently – not so much in terms of length but of relentlessness of musical argument, the piece taking no prisoners and giving the performers nowhere to hide! Even so, I would have liked to have heard the work in a different context – it should be that, in our orchestral programmes, we don’t have to sacrifice our music to get to hear the rest of the world’s.

Nelson Chamber Music festival again New Zealand’s biennial musical highlight

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Adam International Chamber Music Festival (Thursday 2 to Saturday 11 February 2017)

Theatre Royal, Nelson and Nelson Cathedral

These reviews cover concerts from Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 February 2017

My visit this year to the Nelson Chamber Music Festival was shorter than in previous years, arriving late afternoon on the Tuesday and departing midday Saturday.

The highlights from abroad were the presence of Hungarian pianist Dénes Varjon, the Australian tenor, Andrew Goodwin (singing Schumann’s Dichterliebe), the Goldner Quartet and cellist Matthew Barley.

The essence of the festival rests with the New Zealand String Quartet, which founded and sustained the festival from its beginning in 1992: for many years, artistic directors Helene Pohl and Gillian Ansell. The quartet whose membership remained fixed for over 20 years, saw the retirement last year of second violinist, Doug Beilman and his replacement by Australian violinist Monique Lapins, who at this festival enjoyed solo exposure, notably in Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor.

Frequent visitors over the years have been the New Zealand Piano Trio (NZTrio) which played as a group and also played individually with a variety of other players. And the Goldner Quartet from Australia which has visited a couple of times in the past.

An old friend, clarinettist James Campbell, returned, to join in music by Brahms, Gao Ping, Schumann, Jean Françaix…    as well as several New Zealand and other contemporary pieces. Plus marimba player Ian Rosenbaum.

A central element of this festival was ‘The Cello’, involving the performance of all five of Beethoven’s cello sonatas, from five different cellists, who were joined by eight others for the cello jamboree in two concerts on Friday the 10th.

Waitangi Day has always fallen within the festival and has offered an opportunity to feature New Zealand works. This time Gillian Whitehead was present for the New Zealand premiere of her new one-voice opera Iris Dreaming.

Naturally, I was there for only some of these, from the Tuesday evening.

My first concert on Tuesday 7 February, 7:30 pm, was entitled ‘Cadenzas’. It began with the third Beethoven cello sonata (Op 69), this one from Matthew Barley accompanied by Dénes Varjon. (the Op 5 sonatas had already been played). I have never felt that the cello sonatas were among Beethoven’s real masterpieces, but Barley gave this one a sort of raw individuality that, while not speaking in unmistakably Beethovenish tones, was a study in vivid contrasts between movements and within movements, lyrical or tough-minded, rhapsodic or strictly formulated.

Pre-eminent Canadian clarinettist James Campbell has been at Nelson, perhaps twice before, and is clearly a good friend to both the New Zealand String Quartet and the festival itself. While I truly lamented missing his playing in the Brahms clarinet quintet in the final Gala performance, it was a pleasure to hear him with marimba player Ian Rosenbaum in Canadian composer Alexina Louie’s Cadenza II.

Louie is of mixed Chinese-Canadian descent and this improvisatory piece drew on those contrasting influences. Rosenbaum’s virtuosity may visually have somewhat outshone the less flamboyant character of a clarinet player, and the mingling of sounds did not especially persuade me of their natural affinity, but the vitality and exotic character of the music provided an excellent punctuation mark between two pillars at either end of the 19th century.

Brahms first piano trio, essentially a youthful piece (aged 20), is a favourite of most chamber music fans, such as me. And its performance by Varjon with New Zealand String Quartet’s Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten was a huge success, rich and romantic, refined and compelling.

Wednesday the 8th began with a meet-the-artists with the Goldner Quartet in the morning – most entertaining and interesting according to those who attended.

The 2pm, hour-long Theatre Royal concert, entitled Fire in the Belly, focused on the last piece, of that name by Jack Body commissioned by the New Zealand Trio in 2008 and played by the trio here. It might be something of departure from much of Body’s music that shows the influence of the indigenous music from many parts of the world. It was perhaps a reassurance for those who might wonder whether he also succeeded in writing music in a fairly traditional form, for traditional western instruments, in an idiom that was original yet accessible; it held my attention firmly, and is worthy of its place in the piano trio literature.

The concert began however with the fourth of Beethoven’s cello sonatas (Op 102 No 1) which Rolf Gjelsten played beautifully; though in his introduction he spoke, uncharacteristically, a bit too long. His pianist was Dénes Varjon who’d accompanied the Op 69 sonata on Tuesday and the accord was again heart-warming.

It was followed by Kakakurenai, by Japanese composer Andy Akiho, for marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel, originally for ‘prepared steel pan’, having an effect rather like Caribbean steel drums; that quality could be heard through the two keyed percussion instruments. It started interestingly but became repetitive in its rhythmic and melodic ideas, though it came comfortably to an end at the right time.

Then a piece for viola and piano, Märchenbilder (Fairytale pictures), Op 113, by Schumann; one of his last works. Though played by affectionately and persuasively by Gillian Ansell and Dénes Varjon, it rather lacked much energy and its melodic interest was routine in comparison with the enchanting inspirations of his earlier piano music and Lieder.

On Wednesday evening at 7.30pm came one of the festival’s centre-pieces – ‘Bach by Candlelight’, inevitably, in the Cathedral, with the evening sun setting through the western stained glass. The pattern has been established over the years: a mixture of arias from cantatas and some instrumental works. As usual it involved most of the string players at the festival, from the NZTrio, the New Zealand String Quartet, the Goldner Quartet and the young Nelson ‘Troubadours’, as well as Matthew Barley, NZSO bassist Joan Perarnau Garriga, Ian Rosenbaum, Douglas Mews – harpsichord and organ, and Australian tenor Andrew Goodwin.

The two orchestral works this time were the lovely violin concerto in A minor, solo by the New Zealand String Quartet’s second violinist, Monique Lapins. At the end, Brandenburg Concerto No 6 which is unusual as it uses no violins: just violas and a cello and a bass, producing a gorgeous warm sound that I really love. So that was a delight.

The four arias were sung by Australian tenor Andrew Goodwin, a smooth, beautifully nuanced voice, strong and full of character. In some previous years I have found some cantata excerpts s a bit tedious, but these four, as sung by him, were just wonderful, simply creating music that may have been religious in intent but were typically rich in musical substance, easily sustaining the rapt attention of the capacity audience in the cathedral.

The one oddball element in the concert was Bach’s fifth cello suite, C minor, arranged for marimba. Ian Rosenbaum performed it from memory, with astonishing energy and musicality, but the sound, for me, was simply not right. It performance on a stringed instrument is so embedded in my head that playing the notes on a percussion instrument, even one capable, as is the marimba, of very subtle dynamic variety, was too hard to accommodate. Furthermore, the ability to strike four keys at once created more harmonic opportunities and that too altered its character, to the point where I would have wondered, hearing it for the first time, who the composer might have been.

In the 2pm Thursday concert in the Cathedral Matthew Barley began with Bach’s first cello suite. His playing revealed a rhythmic freedom, with the tempo in the Prelude far from the strict, steady rhythms that are sometimes imposed on Bach’s music. The Allemande was painted with a soft brush while in the Courante the bow skipped lightly, never biting into the strings. But it was the Sarabande where the greatest rhythmic freedom appeared, with a surprising silence before the final note. The whole performance was infused with an appealing, organic sense that prepared the ground for the following very recent compositions.

Tavener’s Threnos for solo cello is somehow a seminal late 20th century work that uses the simplest material with utter sincerity. There are three phases that move from the deepest spiritual level through lighter realms in higher registers before returning to the first phase; beautifully played as it was, I wondered whether Barley had quite discovered its essential profundity.

Appalachia Waltz by Mark O’Connor explored another spiritual region; its waltz character is unimportant but its roots half way between the classical and folk music realms as well as its beautiful unpretentiousness have made it famous. Barley’s lovely playing of its strange, haunting quality stilled the audience.

Italian cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima’s name might not be familiar to classical audiences (though one is shamed to see the long list of compositions in his Wikipedia listing). He too spans the fields of popular and classical music and his Lamentatio is easily associated with the two earlier pieces on this programme. The ‘lamentation’ was given extra impact through the cellist’s vocalisations at certain points, and while it began in the spirit that its title suggested, it soon became a frenetic double-stopping farrago, eventually ending with racing, descending staccato arpeggios, spiced by hard spiccato bowing below the bridge.

Improvisation was a major element in Barley’s performance of the last three works. However, there were no formal markers indicating where the composed music ended and improvisation began, and it was rather a matter of guesswork for me, since I had not heard either the O’Connor or the Sollima before. Sometimes I felt a change of tone and direction; sometimes the improvisatory music seemed completely fused with what the composer had written.

The concert was both an illuminating demonstration of the art of improvisation, and a fascinating awakening to some music that proved very much worth knowing and which I have enjoyed hearing again on YouTube clips since getting home.

(As a quite irrelevant aside, after looking on the Internet after getting home, I found one of Sollima’s performance colleagues has been poet and musician Petti Smith; both have been associated with Yo-Yo-Ma’s Silk Road Project – and both O’Connor and Sollima have been associated with it. At Nelson’s interesting new boutique bookshop Volume (on Church Street) I picked up Smith’s recent autobiographical M Train).

The concert on Thursday evening, 9 February, in the Theatre Royal was one of the true high points for me: both Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Brahms’s Piano quintet, Op 34 are right at the top of my musical loves.

But the concert, entitled ‘Love Triangle’, naturally included Clara Schumann: Helene Pohl and Dénes Farjon played her Three Romance for violin and piano, Op 22. Dedicated to violinist Joseph Joachim, it consisted of three contrasted pieces that showed real compositional talent, if not truly memorable music such as her husband or Brahms created. The first, Andante molto, was a dreamy, meandering melody, and a more vigorous middle section formed by wide-spaced intervals.  that was carefully constructed and agreeable; followed by an Allegretto built around a pensive melody, with a more lively middle section. I wrote during the performance: ‘Charming little morceaux’, or I might have said ‘Bagatelles’.

I can’t resist quoting a comment in a Wikipedia reference: “Joachim continued to play the pieces on his own tours. He reported, in a letter to Clara, from the court in Hanover that the king was in ‘ecstasy’ over the Romances and could ‘hardly wait’ to enjoy such ‘marvellous, heavenly pleasure again.’ They are lovely, private pieces, conceived in one of music history’s richest households.” (Tim Summers, violinist).

Dichterliebe is a song cycle that is commonly rated alongside Schubert’s two great cycles. We’d heard Australian tenor Andrew Goodwin in the four arias from Bach cantatas on Wednesday evening and while not detracting from the rare enjoyment of those, his singing of Schumann might have been a more significant endorsement of his musical scholarship and vocal sensibility. Apart from the singing, the piano parts are even more intrinsic to Schumann’s songs than to Schubert’s. And the spirit of many of them is foreshadowed in a longish piano introduction and in a postlude that sometimes offers a commentary that elaborates or lays to rest troubled emotions in the words.

Pianist Isabella Simon, Dénes Varjon’s wife, with whom she often plays duets, has accompanied many singers in Lieder and other art song; she was here for Schumann. Her introduction to the very first song, ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’, her personal, idiomatic approach was evident; there was often a studied waywardness, evident from the start, and which matched Goodwin’s discreet and careful handling of Heine’s words (all the poems were drawn from his highly successful collection, Buch der Lieder of 1827). Even for those not understanding the German, there was a distinction between the purely lyrical and the more narrative songs, such as ‘Aus meinen Tränen…’, or ‘Ein Jungling liebt ein Mädchen’. There were often quite long pauses to allow the impact of an emotion to be ingested by the listener, and the vivid expressive qualities of Schumann’s settings would have told almost as much as fully understanding the words about the poems’ meaning.

One of the great strengths of the cycle is the pithiness of the poems, no word wasted, no emotion tediously prolonged. Schumann plunges straight into some, like ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen’ while in others there’s a long preamble or a long postlude, such as that following ‘Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome’ or ‘Ein Jungling’, or the extraordinary piano mediation in ‘Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen’. Yet there are songs where the voice starts alone, like ‘Ich hab’ ein Traum geweinet’, with breathless angst, and its ending too, a pained dialogue between voice and piano, with frozen, wide-spaced piano chords, was magically paced. In all these, voice and piano found instinctive rapport.

And the stark contrasts between ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube’ – passionate, impulsive – and sombre songs like ‘Im Rhein’ (above), created a singular dramatic antithesis.

Naturally one waited in high anticipation for ‘Ich grolle nicht’, but the start shocked me – it was so calm, so restrained, compared with the typical performance where a proud disdain for self-pity is often cried out, declaimed fortissimo; Goodwin maintained a calm tension right up to the last lines when he let go, with full voice with a far greater impact.

It was the one of Schumann’s songs that first impacted me through a music-loving German master at secondary school; that class room, east wing, lower floor, in the morning sun, remains vivid in my memory.

The rare experience of hearing the full cycle from these two fine artists was one of the true highlights of the festival.

Brahms Piano Quintet
As if that wasn’t treasure enough, in the second part of the recital, Dénes Varjon and the New Zealand String Quartet played Brahms’s wonderful piano quintet, Op 34. The magic impacts at once with that strange, exploratory opening which quickly becomes such a gorgeous whole-hearted, melodious movement, though an underlying sobriety is never far below the surface. Again, Varjon showed his gift for embracing at once the musical personalities of his fellow players, as indeed the quartet reciprocated, and there was simply no moment where one could sense disparate musical tastes or sensibilities.

It’s a long work and I have to confess that I’ve sometimes felt that the first movement seems paralysed in its aversion to quitting that stage, but whether that feeling arises is totally dependent on the performance. Here the thought never entered my mind; in fact I dreaded its ending, even after its full quarter hour. All other movements had the same effect, and it had me composing a petition to the NZSQ to make a habit of offering at least one concert a year with Varjon or another comparably collegial pianist to fully explore the piano quintet repertoire (the known masterpieces few, but there’s really a lot worth exploring).

Friday the 10th of February brought my stay to an end. The day of the cello.
The 2pm concert in the Cathedral was ‘Cellissimo’: a dozen cellists, probably the cream of resident New Zealand cellists, from the three ensembles present, from orchestras and university music schools around the country, along with three of the visitors.
Bach’s Air (‘on the G string’, if you like) from the third orchestral suite, BWV 1068, opened to such opulent beauty that I wondered whether one could any longer justify its performance on the (violin) G string. Would it be hard for any of those present to tolerate any other version? Four cellists played: Megiddo, Barley, Joyce and Edith Salzmann. Presumably it was an arrangement of the ‘arrangement’ (which was transposed from Bach’s D to C major) and not derived directly from the original air.

A different group played a Bach Toccata (Gjelsten, Eliah Sakakushev von Bismarck, Ken Ichinose and Ashley Brown); not the famous Toccata from the organ toccata and fugue in D minor, but one from an unidentified source by Alan Shulman.

And a different mix of players performed an arrangement of Bach’s Viola da gamba sonata No 1, BWV 1027. This had a particularly authentic feel, as the viola da gamba is a close relation of the modern cello.

Five cellists then played an attractive piece by Dvořák, Silent Woods, originally No 5 of a set of pieces for piano-four-hands (Op 68), which Dvořák arranged for cello and piano. Its singling out, here for five cellos, could be explained by its warm, opulent melody, which offered Eliah Sakakushev and then Julian Smiles (of the Goldner Quartet) the limelight.

Bartók’s Romanian Dances (six of them) also began life as piano pieces and were arranged for orchestra by the composer. Rolf Gjelsten duetted with Inbal Megiddo, alternating lyrical affection, with rhythmic energy, building to barbaric excitement in the last.

And the concert ended with five players. including Matthew Barley, in yet another arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise.

The Friday evening concert, entitled ‘Cellos by Candlelight’, again in the Cathedral, included varied cellists, ending with all present – I counted thirteen for the last two pieces by Piazzolla and Julius Klengel.

It consisted of mainly short  well-known pieces, but the whole was presented by ever-changing groups of players. Starting with the quintessentially enrapturing Canon by Pachelbel, and then the opening of the William Tell Overture, which I supposes everyone expected to continue for its full 12 minutes or so, but when the opening cello melody ended, that was it.

We heard two of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilleiras: No 1, actually written for an orchestra of cellos, it engaged eight players (if I’m not mistaken: Eliah Sakakushev, Megiddo, Tennant, Du Plessis, Brown, Salzmann, Ichinose, and the cellist from the young Troubadours quartet, Anna-Marie Alloway).

Later Jenny Wollerman sang the beautiful soprano part in Bachianas Brasileiras No 5 with a different cello assemblage, with a singular ethereal quality, the sort-of-wordless vocal line seeming to emerge from far up in the cathedral vault.

There were also two pieces by Pablo Casals, the Song of the Birds and Sardana, which the composer famously conducted with 100 cellists in New York in 1970. These provided a few minutes of variety, music that was probably as unfamiliar to most of the audience as it was to me.

Continuing to honour Casals perhaps, other cellist combinations played more Latin music: the six pieces that comprise Manuel de Falla’s Suite populaire espagnole, which had been arranged from the composer’s original Siete canciones populares españolas (Seven Spanish Popular Songs). Variously, they provided solo opportunities for lovely playing by several of the cellists. The surprising thing about these pieces, and indeed the whole cello-dominated concert, was the remarkable variety of tone and dramatic character to be found in this most human of the string instrument family.

And the concert, and for me, the festival itself, ended, with Piazzolla’s seductive Oblivion and Tango, and another rather obscure piece that proved emotionally attractive, a Hymnus for 12 cellos (Op 57) by Julius Klengel, a German cellist and prolific composer, mainly for the cello, whose life spread across the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Friday was very much a celebration of the cello, of massed cellos, which only becomes a possibility in a festival setting; it is one of the most important features of a festival, the opportunity to create musical ensembles that can make music that is rarely possible in the ordinary course of concert-giving.

Let’s list those involved in the Klengel piece, just for fun, as it was the total of the cello phalange at the festival: Anna-Marie Alloway, Matthew Barley, Ashley Brown, Rolf Gjelsten, Ken Ichinose, Andrew Joyce, Inbal Megiddo, Brigid O’Meeghan, Heleen du Plessis, Eliah Sakakushev von Bismark, Edith Salzmann, Julian Smiles, James Tennant.

Coda
Stage management was a most particular undertaking which had been noticed at earlier concerts but which reached a climax of complexity and precision at the Friday concerts, since they involved so many cellists. Each clearly had his or her own seating preference and as the players changed places for each piece, manoeuvres with chairs, as well as with music stands equipped for sheet music or tablets, took place with military precision and efficacy. Detailed maps had obviously been drawn up and memorised so that the stage managers could prepare fresh seat dispositions for each piece. In charge was stage manager Brendyn Montgomery and his assistant, Janje Heatherfield.

One must also acknowledge other management of the festival, a body of musical passionnées whose devotion to the cause goes way beyond whatever they are paid.

There’s the festival trust, chaired by Colleen Marshall who introduced many of the concerts and artists; Bob Bickerton, manager, and droll anecdoteur as he shared the introductor-assignment, in addition to being the multi-instrumentalist and entertainer of children.
The fundamental task of artistic planning and management remained the role of two members of the New Zealand String quartet: Helene Pohl and Gillian Ansell. Success of the festival rests essentially on them, for the music chosen and the musicians who play it.

To end, I should add that one of the little curiosities of this festival was a series of little addenda at the end of each set of programme notes, entitled ‘Conversation Piece’.
An example from this last concert read:
“How can one work of art or music exist successfully in many contexts? Does the emotional affect of a work change depending on its context, or do these works succeed because of the strength of the original content?”
(and note the carefully distinguished use of the word ‘affect’, commonly confused with ‘effect’).

 

Shaken but not stirred – Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s “Peter and the Wolf” and other delights

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
GIOVANNI GABRIELI: Canzon per sonar septimi toni a 8 Ch.171
Sonata Octavi Toni a 12, Ch.184
CPE BACH: ‘Cello Concerto in A, Wq.172 (H.439)
TCHAIKOVSKY –  The Nutcracker Suite (three movements)
PROKOFIEV – Peter and the Wolf

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Andrew Joyce (soloist and conductor)
Garry Smith (narrator)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace

Sunday 4 December 2016, 2:30pm

This concert was very well attended, the audience including many children, despite its not being advertised on RNZ Concert’s “Live Diary”, or the fact that the NZSO performed one of the works the previous afternoon at a free concert at Te Papa.

The Gabrieli works featured brass instruments only. The nature of the work and the instruments employed were described by Andrew Joyce, and the instruments were demonstrated by their players. The antiphonal nature of the music, written for St.Mark’s Venice, was very effective (though the intontion was a little wayward at times, early on), the two brass choirs facing each other across the platform.

Amazing to think that, in Gabrieli’s time, these instruments had no valves…..

Next the strings came to the fore, with more explanations; and Andrew Joyce played the solo part in the CPE Bach concerto, one of the first ‘cello concertos ever composed. I found that, in this item, as compared with those later in the programme, most of the children were not attentive. Obviously the melody and characterisation of the other pieces appealed much more.

A very fast, busy Allegro was tossed off with apparent ease. The Largo produced some beautiful melodies and lovely long lines from the soloist – when I could hear him above the children’s chatter! – the latter varied hugely in how “good” they were. They were all given a page with illustrations for them to draw and enlarge on.

The allegro assai finale contained an energetic solo that nevertheless had variety and subtlety. Andrew Joyce’s playing was very accomplished. Throughout the orchestra’s playing was fine, even if it seemed to be lost on most of the children.

The first half concluded with three movements from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite: the “Chinese Dance”, “Dance of the Mirlitons”, and “Waltz of the Flowers”. Now there was demonstration and explanation of the woodwind instruments, part of the much bigger orchestra for this work. The children were much quieter in this: it was more appropriate music for them to enjoy, and was played with verve and expression, though I found the flute’s intonation suspect in the first one.

Peter and the Wobble…er…Wolf, comprised the second half. I thought the programme over-long for children. With the encore it made up over two hours – though there was a generous interval. Some of the audience left after the first half. The reason for the amended “title” was the earthquake that occurred at 16 minutes past 4, one that turned out to be 5.5 in scale. So inured are we to these events now that nothing stopped, no-one dropped, covered and held, and apart from glances with raised eyebrows between adults, there was no reaction.

While I felt the introduction to the work contained too many unnecessary words, I found Garry Smith’s narration of the story excellent. He didn’t miss a beat when the church shook. I have been unable to find out who was responsible for the delightful English translation of the words: the original of the story was written by Prokofiev himself.

The orchestra’s playing of this magnificent music gave us a wonderful performance. It beautifully demonstrated the woodwind instruments particularly. It was good to hear the detail so much more clearly in this venue compared with a large concert hall. The composer’s delightful and decorous music,  and the words in Garry Smith’s characterisations, easily brought to life Peter, Grandfather, and the cat, bird, and duck – and the wolf!

The encore was the “Sleigh Ride” from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite.