Tag: chamber music

Too important to let go – Ashley Brown with a “new” NZTrio for Braid, a Suffrage Year concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZTrio presents:
BRAID – Celebrating the Feminine in all of us……Braid

RACHEL CLEMENT – Shifting States
CLARA SCHUMANN – Piano Trio in G Minor Op.17
ELENA KATS-CHERNIN – Spirit and the Maiden
VICTORIA KELLY – Sono
FANNY MENDELSSOHN – Piano Trio in D minor Op.11

NZTrio – Benjamin Baker (violin) / Ashley Brown (‘cello) / Stephen de Pledge (piano)

City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

Wednesday, 26th September, 2018

This is the second concert with overt connections to the recent 125th suffrage anniversary that I’ve recently reviewed, very different to the earlier one (Cantoris Choir, Wellington), though packing a similarly powerhouse punch on behalf of women’s musical creativity. It was titled Braid, and is one of three concert series given by the trio this year featuring the work of women composers, the other two being called Weave and Twine. As with Cantoris Choir’s presentation, I very soon forgot the “idea”of these sounds I was hearing having been composed by women, so caught up was I in the process of listening – reacting to creative sensibilities expressing the kind of individuality and focus which put any idea of “gender” in a proper existential context. To use less convoluted language the sounds were soon coming to me as a listener “on their own terms”.

The NZTrio has of late reconstituted in an altogether startling way, losing both its violinist (Justine Cormack) and its pianist (Sarah Watkins) in relatively quick succession, due entirely to attrition. Surviving member, ‘cellist Ashley Brown has joined forces with various other musicians in order to present the group’s 2018 series of concerts, given the titles Weave, Braid and Twine. This was the second in the series, Braid, and brought into the picture the talents of violinist Benjamin Baker and pianist Stephen de Pledge, an all-male lineup which found itself addressing the entirely female-composer essence of Braid. One article I saw concerning the concert was subtitled “The classical blokes saluting unsung women composers”, which certainly conveyed the ironies of the situations in no uncertain terms!

Perhaps it’s a “sign of the times” that both the Trio and Cantoris, mentioned above, featured works by nineteenth-century as well as contemporary female composers, allowing a comparison of contexts in which women worked to create music. Cantoris featured an 1892 Festival Cantata by the American composer Amy Beach, as well as including pieces by Dame Gillian Whitehead and Jenny McLeod, while the NZ Trio gave us chamber works by two different nineteenth-century women, both connected with illustrious male composers by blood or marriage – firstly Clara Schumann, and then Fanny Mendelssohn. Along with these we heard pieces by Australian Elena Kats-Chernin (b.1957), as well as contemporary NZers, Rachel Clement and Victoria Kelly.

To open the concert the Trio chose an attention-grabbing piece by Rachel Clement, one called Sabbia (sand) from a larger work whose title “Shifting States” referred to the process of artistic glass-making in its numerous forms. The opening sounds were flung at us by the composer, the playing positively suggesting flint-like substances with hard, sharp edges, able to change shape and form at a moment’s notice, evoking by turns long, sinuous lines, scintillations and colourings. These sound-impulses developed a certain breadth, suggesting either dreams of a substance morphing into something else, or in the hands of a glassmaker interacting with her or his artistic imagination! A certain “exotic” element in colour, texture and rhythm also evoked something of sand’s natural environment, desert vistas, long lines of unbroken space, something of a wonderous contradiction with the piece’s actual brevity. Austere and yet beautiful and startling!

In the programme Fanny Mendelssohn’s D Minor Piano Trio was next scheduled, but Ashley Brown told us that the group had done a rethink, and swopped the pieces’ order around, which meant we got Clara Schumann’s Trio first. Had the music been unannounced and simply played, then away from any programme listing, I would have hazarded a guess that Robert Schumann was the composer, right from the flowing tune that opened the work – though some of the following piano figurations seemed to push the music slightly more Mendelssohn’s way. I did like the generosity of both melody and interchange throughout, the flowing theme of the opening tempered in its seriousness by the more quixotic second subject.

I enjoyed the charming quirkiness of the Scherzo’s opening, and the “different-worldliness” of the Trio, so circumspect in its poise, equivocal in its rhythmic trajectories, and yet so passionate in its string unisons, played here with the kind of focus that made every note mean something. The third-movement Andante begins as a veritable “song without words”, with a piano solo whose “drawing-room” melody give way to vigorous dotted-rhythm exchanges in the movement’s middle section, the players digging into the forthright statements with a will. The ‘cello leads the music out of this mood and back into its opening lyricism most tenderly, with melting acquiescence from both violinist and pianist.

Again I thought the finale’s opening Schumannesque in its anxieties and suggestions of flight, the melody having a “haunted” quality, which the violinist’s chromatic descents seemed at first to take further, though the rather chirpy second subject was more of a children’s “hide-and-seek” game than anything deeper and more sinister. I liked the chromatic figuration of the fugue-like development, the players giving their various entries a trenchant quality that again took the music away from the drawing-room and into more fairy-tale realms. In the work’s coda the players found both qualities , the anxiety given more energy and punctuated with vigorous phrases that resolved as many doubts as showed their faces.

It seemed quite a quantum leap to go from these gracious drawing-room gestures to Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s Spirit and the Maiden – very much an “in your face” work right from the beginning, with driving rhythms and deeply-etched melodic lines creating a strongly “filmic” kind of atmosphere, the trajectories covering a lot of ground, dancing along, wildly and abandonedly, with occasional folkish touches that eventually steer the sounds into wonderment at the first movement’s enigmatic conclusion. The story involves an affair between a young girl and a water-spirit, which ends, as these things seem always to do in folk-lore, tragically – and much of the music’s course over the first two movements was wild and vigorous, as if emotion on all sides was hper-driven by both exhilaration and fear. The second movement’s dance-like course again concluded mysteriously, with added menace and unease suggested by a string tremolando whose sound seemed to dissolve into spectral-like regions.

Unlike the first two movements this concluding piece began lugubriously, with heavy sighing, gradually becoming more animated and florid, everything seemingly trapped in a great trough of despair, the ‘cello upwardly sighing with great glissandi, and joined by the violin, continuing a series of increasingly-despairing moments. The piano then ”upped” the rhythm to a march that became more and more savage until the textures suddenly started to dissolve, as it were, right in front of our ears! All momentum ceased and the sounds drifted into nothingness.

Victoria Kelly’s Sono is, literally, the stuff of dreams, in this case, it seems, a rude awakening from a dream. Not unlike Rachel Clement’s Sabbia in its initial impact, this was more obsessive an experience, long-term, the music trying to both enter into and escape a world from which the sensibilities have been, according to the composer, “untimely ripp’d”. Here, it was a superbly-sustained dreamscape, one half-lit but made altogether tremulous with possibility. As the piano picked its way through its own sound-world, the strings more and more insistently beamed their tones upon the wanderer, half-encouraging, half-mocking the figure’s progress. Depending on one’s mood one could have been wandering lost after being cast adrift, or, more passively, immersed in some kind of meditation amid an extended jazz-piano solo, the strings present either as fellow-musicians or representing a totality of listener-responses, a “did we dream you or did you dream us” scenario. Whatever the case, the music was superbly focused on states of consciousness and their waxing and waning, setting up a state of trance-like wonderment, seeming to me to be in the process of fusing outward and inward states of being.

Awakening us from such reveries was the programme’s final work, a Piano Trio by Fanny Mendelssohn, in fact her last published piece (of almost 500 separate works found posthumously only eleven found their way into print!), and one which was completed only a short time before her death. By all accounts she was as talented a performer as her more famous brother, Felix, and on the strength of her surviving compositions, possessed gifts as a composer that matched his own. In fact Felix occasionally published her songs under his own name to give them a public life otherwise denied most of her work at the time. Pianist Stephen de Pledge introduced the work to us, calling it “remarkable”, and drawing our attention in particular to the finale, in which the writing, he remarked “goes mad”, perhaps partly reflecting the composer’s urgent desire to complete the music in time to present it to her sister as a birthday gift!

I thought on the strength of this evening’s hearing, it overshadowed Clara Schumann’s work in content if not in form, its intensities reflecting what seemed an “inner life” of enormous depths of artistic feeling and imagination. That Fanny desired recognition as a composer was indicated by her decision to publish some of her works, initially without her brother’s approval, but then, in 1846, on being approached by no less than two publishers, six opus numbers of works, with his (probably reluctant) blessing! Hearing this Op.11 Piano Trio with its compelling outer movements, one gets the feeling that this was music which desperately NEEDED to be written!

The opening Allegro vivace began with a remarkably Schumannesque melody sounded by the strings over an agitated piano accompaniment, the players bringing out the music’s restlessness, which was then partly relieved by a wide-leaping melody shared by all three instruments in turn, with variants of the melodic line then tossed about among the individual players. At the development it seemed as though the music’s underlying mood had merely been waiting its chance – with the piano once again in agitated mode, the players built the music towards some wonderfully full-blooded romantic gesturings, with even the wide-leaping melody being subjected to the composer’s “sturm und drang” manner, removing all hints of drawing-room sensibility with splendidly assertive gesturings (I was going to use the word “virile”, but thought better of it!). After what appeared to be a somewhat desolate little coda, the music suddenly re-ignited and flung the last few bars at us most unapologetically!

A piano solo began the slow movement, andante expressivo, joined by the strings, the instruments in turn given ample chances to sing, not only with the opening, but a more flowing minor-key melody in the music’s middle sequence, one which is heard again later as a piquant counterpoint to the opening tune – everything is “voiced” by the players with great poetry and sensitivity. Instead of a third movement scherzo, we got a “Lied”, a brief but beautiful “Song Without Words” kind of movement requiring little comment. Not so the finale – beginning with a heroic recitative-like flourish, the piano took charge from the outset, launching into a swaggering dance-like processional, not unlike a Czardas in rhythm, and one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies in mood. The strings entered soon enough, joining in with the dance, and helping to build up the tensions, adding weight and pace to the textures, including a forthright “strut” to the dance-rhythms – very sexy in places, with the piano contributing great flourishes. Finally, the coda galvanised the energies further, paused for a brief reminiscence of the slow movement theme, then despatched the rest with a tremendous burst!

All credit to the NZTrio for their scintillating and thoroughly engaging traversal of music which ought to be heard more often.

 

 

Amici Ensemble consolidates its reputation as valuable, adventurous Wellington adornment

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Music 
Amici Ensemble: Donald Armstrong and Malavika Gopal (violins), Andrew Thomson (viola), Ken Ichinose (cello), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Barry (clarinet) and Carolyn Mills (harp

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581
Debussy: Syrinx for solo flute
Salina Fisher – Coastlines for string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp
Mozart: Flute Quartet in D, KV 285
Saint-Saëns: Fantaisie in A for Violin and Harp, Op 124
Ravel: Introduction and Allegro for string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp

St. Andrews on The Terrace

Sunday 16 September 3 pm

We have owed a great deal to this splendid, many-facetted ensemble over the years, held together by NZSO Associate Concertmaster Donald Armstrong. Most ‘chamber music’ groups are either trios or quartets, and occasionally a quintet by adding a piano, a cello, a clarinet… Here we had enough variety to give us Mozart’s clarinet quintet, and also Ravel’s septet that is disguised as Introduction and Allegro for string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp, a delightful concoction that clearly inspired Salina Fisher to write her new piece, using the same forces.

Mozart: K 581
I have a feeling that in most of my reviews of Mozart’s clarinet quintet I have regaled readers (if any) with my nostalgic affair with a motor car, a cassette and by-ways of rural France and Spain,  err… 40 years ago. Almost all my discoveries of great music are embedded in memories of time and place of first hearing – not a bad way to prepare for life’s later years.

This performance of the Mozart did that again, for its tones, tempi, spirit were very similar to those produced by that long-ago cassette, and so it aroused admiration for the loving performance that NZSO string players, plus principal clarinettist Patrick Barry, created. Their re-creation of the gorgeous melodies of the dreamy slow movement, again both clarinet and strings equally ‘lime-lit’; the clarinet’s perfectly normal, undulating arpeggios and scales , though mere accompaniment, momentarily stole attention from the strings. The menuetto with its two trios became unusually interesting, more than many a Minuet and Trio; and the ‘Theme and Variations’ of the finale offered surprising contrasts between delight and pensiveness.

The Debussy memorial year was marked here with his Syrinx from Bridget Douglas, warm tone without any hint fluty shrillness that sometimes alters its mood.

Coastlines
Then came Salina Fisher’s Ravel look-alike, but in instrumentation only, Coastlines. The tremulous clarinet begins, then a mere punctuation by flutes. Its title did rather call up the feel of the Kapiti Coast, being a commission from the Waikanae Music Society, though I have difficulty using landscape or narrative as a way of understanding or assessing music. The instrumental combination seems to hint at all kinds of natural or man-made sounds, and the sounds of the sea, wind, birds and the atmosphere conjured by light. The breathy flute, the blend of harp and clarinet, but it was a sense of the music’s trajectory, of one phase evolving towards another, one instrument relating with another, that took hold of the attention for a few moments as a sound pattern took shape.

There was the flow of a story somewhere and satisfaction about the patterns of sound that left me finally with a feeling of contentment with Fisher’s chimerical creation.

After the interval Mozart’s first flute quartet restored conventional sounds and patterns, and again, here was a time for Bridget Douglas to become a leading voice, although with Mozart, even a sort of solo instrument doesn’t remain for long in the limelight, but places the music rather than the player centre stage. The performance emphasised the warmth of melody and the importance of the ensemble element. It never allowed one to think that even in a fairly early piece (1777/78, aged 21), Mozart was not concerned primarily with producing interesting, even unexpected events, for example the unresolved end of the Adagio, making the finale Rondo necessary.

Saint-Saëns: violin and harp 
The novelty (apart from the Fisher piece) was a much older piece: Saint-Saëns at 72, in 1907. It’s quite true, as the programme note writes, that it might have sounded old-fashioned to the more adventurous music lover at the time, though the avant-garde music then starting to emerge would have been quite unknown to the average concert-goer. Nothing essentially ‘Second Viennese School’ was circulating; Debussy and Ravel, and perhaps the Strauss of Salome, were the radicals of 1907.

But the unusual combination – violin and harp – might have gained it some attention. It’s a polished, stylish and idiomatic piece, generally bright and warm and not the least uninteresting. For the record, the sections are: Poco Allegretto – Allegro – Vivo e grazioso – Largamente – Andante con moto – Poco Adagio.

There is momentary darkness with the descending, double stopped notes in the Allegro but a genuine allegro spirit takes over quickly. And the following Vivo e grazioso cannot really be dismissed as fluff. The remaining three sections are fairly slow but do not lose their feeling of continuity; and they create a rather charming picture, especially as played so persuasively by Armstrong and Mills.  The whole thing sounds as if the composer had been taken with the possibilities of using these two instruments and quite attractive ideas came easily to him.

Ravel: Introduction and Allegro 
Finally, the second major piece (second to the Clarinet Quintet). It was interesting that Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro was contemporaneous with the Saint-Saëns Fantaisie. Though I knew the story about commercial competition between Paris piano makers Pleyel and Érard, I couldn’t remember which way the conflict went. In 1904 Pleyel invented a new chromatic harp and commissioned Debussy to demonstrate its worth (Danse sacrée et danse profane), while Érard defended his century-old double action pedal harp by commissioning Ravel’s piece. The latter prevailed in the market place (political corollary: this sort of result from competition does permit an exception to my general scepticism about its social, even economic efficacy).

Happily, both pieces are much-loved favourites, and it was a delight to hear the Ravel played by such accomplished musicians. Ravel might have been too radical for the Prix de Rome judges at the Paris Conservatoire, but this piece is gorgeously romantic and playful, and as this programme showed, there’s plenty of room for both Saint-Saëns and Ravel in civilised society.

The concert more than lived up to the reputation of Donald Armstrong and the Amici Ensemble’s as a valuable and adventurous adornment to Wellington’s rich musical scene.

 

Polished recital from Steel and Irons of flute and piano masterpieces at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Rebecca Steel (flute) and Diedre Irons (piano)

Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Prokofiev: Flute sonata in D, Op 94

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 5 September, 12:15 pm

While the series of concerts from students that occupies St Andrew’s lunchtime series regularly around this time of the year, are always a delight and sometimes expose unusual and interesting music, it’s nice to get back to the mainstream, with truly accomplished professional musicians.

The concert’s pun-prone title (Steel and Iron{s}} did announce a couple of New Zealand’s finest artists in their fields.

Though I tend to be wary of arrangements-of-convenience, the treatment of Debussy’s ground-breaking masterpiece, is a natural for such treatment (though its arranger was not mentioned), as the flute occupies such a central place in the work. And even though the rest of the orchestral parts are there in the mind, their transmutation at the hands of such an accomplished pianist seemed to meet all the expectations. Undulating piano sounds others depicting the heavy hooves of the faun (spelling in English looks wrong – we’ve become more used to Debussy’s, French faune). From the flute, meandering sounds, rippling arpeggios, moments of lazy voluptuousness and dappled shade; and it was hard to think that most of the writing for both flute and piano was transcription from a rich orchestral tapestry. I thought it all lost very little in translation.

Prokofiev’s 1943 flute sonata is the music he later transcribed at David Oistrakh’s suggestion, for violin and piano, which is the form that’s more familiar to me. However, the original, in the hands of this duo, emerged as a ever-slightly more idiomatic and made to measure, flute-inspired. For one thing, there were hints of the world of a flute-playing faun, in certain melodic turns of phrase.

It holds an important place in the flute repertoire which seems to include few formal sonatas: on thinks of Poulenc’s, Hindemith’s, and there’s apparently one by Reinecke which was originally included in this programme, and a few by Bach and other baroque composers. But only miscellaneous (some very fine) flute pieces by most of the ‘great’ composers.

This is a four-movement work that meets all the normal classical sonata criteria. It contains no suggestion of wartime, partly I suppose because Prokofiev was among the Soviet artists evacuated to pleasant sanctuary in the Caucasus or Urals. Certainly, the first movement breathes quietude between passages of busyness, and the second, Scherzo, Allegro, bustles with cheerfulness and high spirits, where the duo captured it all, including the pensive moment in the middle; and where their playing became almost reckless before coming to a halt – one of those that announces clearly that it’s not the end of the piece.

There was an airiness in the playing of the Andante: typical Prokofiev, excluding any hint of emotion, any revealing of personal feelings. That is also the nature of the longish Finale, Allegro con brio, in which piano and flute often seemed to inhabit different spaces, the flute fluttering brightly, up high, while the piano goes its independent way with heavier chordal diversions. One is strung along, expecting the end some time before it actually arrives, and it did strike me either that the composer was filling it out to meet certain dimensions, or that the players here were secretly waiting for the last page to be turned.

That may have been an unkind thought for a recital all of which I had thoroughly enjoyed.

Stroma – Iconic Sonics at the City Gallery, Wellington…..revisiting the new, along with the new

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
ICONIC SONICS – Music by Reuben Jellyman, Iannis Xenakis, Kaija Saariaho,
Witold Lutoslawski and Gyorgy Ligeti

SAARIAHO – New Gates (1996)
LIGETI – Ramifications (1968-9)
JELLEYMAN – Designs (2018 – world premiere)
XENAKIS – Aroura (1971)
LUTOSLAWSKI – Chain 1 (1983)

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich

City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

Wednesday 29th August 2018

Eighteen years into the 21st Century a lot of music-lovers are still coming to grips with the innovators and radical figures of twentieth-century music.

It’s a process which was in some ways mirrored a century ago by the fin de siècle attitude of many people to the works of Berlioz, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Bruckner and Mahler, all of whom had to wait for a “later time”, at which stage their creative achievements were able to be given a fairer, more contextual hearing. Each of these composers achieved some degree of early success based on less challenging, more populist aspects of their output at the time, but all as well produced significant music that underwent neglect and/or earned them hostility, some of which “fallout” continues in certain cases to this day.

Each one of the offshore composers represented in this concert emulates those 19th century figures in their music of a century later, wanting to change the existing order of rules and conventions in order to discover hitherto unexplored worlds and renew human creativity. Though there continues to be something of a “divide” between traditionalists and supporters of the new, it’s by no means as pronounced or indeed as “character-assassination-like” in intent as of yore – and in fact there’s plenty more coming-and-going between the two “sides” than there used to be in the good/bad old days!

It’s possible that the music of Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006)  is the most widely-disseminated of that of the group, having, of course, been given a “head-start” by Stanley Kubrick in his iconic film 2001 – a Space Odyssey (albeit without the composer’s consent at first).  Ligeti’s music evokes the cosmos like no other, with no sounds conceivably more unearthly or far-flung than his Atmospheres, enthralling a whole generation of film-goers with his micro-polyphonic clusters piled up and intertwined like a great city’s communication-centre’s wires and cables. But he was never content to repeat himself, and though he was continually fascinated by polyphonies he strove to formulate new ways of arranging, or even “de-arranging” (deranging?) them. His Ramifications, for twelve solo strings, which we heard tonight, and which date from the end of the decade of Atmospheres, already show the composer employing “destabilising” techniques – diversifying the polyphonies by having half the ensemble tune higher than the other half, thereby heightening his writing’s tensions with built-in-dissonances.

The piece opened with “nature-sounds”, gently undulating textures pursuing separate patternings, like distant individual conversations, whose resonances seemed to gradually fuse as if organically linked, a kind of naturally-wrought beauty burgeoning towards the stratospheres and growing in intensity. The sounds clustered around and fused with a single note, before others magically “turned on” as if they were glow-worms in a dark cave. Lower instruments began their own patterned journeyings but with more volatile results, irruptions, re-stratifications, everything pursuing its own rhythmic and pitch courses – what frenzy! – what abandonment! – what devastations, as everything played itself out and tumbled down to the depths in a kind of private Gotterdammerung.

But with that, was the work finished? No, Ligeti’s fine wisps of skeletal light then quietly reactivated the “survivors” across a spectrum that reached down to things that went “bump” in the night, all of whom enigmatically withdrew, whispering ethereal blandishments into the composer’s eternities.

At this point I ought to confess that I’ve jumped ahead, as, for housekeeping reasons, the first piece Stroma presented was not Ligeti’s but one written by Kaija Saariaho (b.1952).  This work, titled New Gates was written in 1996, and was derived from a ballet called Maa, from five years earlier. The concert’s excellently-notated printed programme informed us that this ballet is constructed not around a plot as such but built out of “thematic archetypes” representing passing through into something new – gates, doors, journeyings, new worlds. Saariaho’s  sound-world here was accordingly made up of lucid, minimal gestures and figures, allowing we listeners time and space in which to connect with both finely-wrought timbral detail and larger, further-reaching ambiences and movements.

Written for just three instruments, flute, harp and viola, the music sounded a single note out of the silence of its beginning, whose pitch was bent upwards in a way that suggested a striving of impulse towards the heavens.  Throughout the music’s course the flute and violin breathed, bent and stretched their lines as the harp “texturised” the spaces and/or circumlocuted the portals of passage, often “bardic-sounding” as if accompanying a sequence of storytelling, or “fleshing out” an ongoing pulse. Those “fine timbral details” mentioned in the programme note were very much in evidence throughout, the timeless process of progressive change taking on varying forms, the most prevalent being a series of on-going exhalations which for a while gathered up energy and focus and threatened to burgeon without actually doing so, the light and movement of the impulses turning increasingly inward and gradually becoming infinitesimal.

Amid these and other compositional “heavies” stood steadfastedly the music of Reuben Jelleyman, here a world premiere of a work called Designs, written for the Stroma ensemble earlier this year. I thought the programme note, written by the composer, nicely “of a piece” with his music (which, of course, should go without saying, but at times doesn’t always seem to), having a freshness and candour regarding his youthful impressions. The music’s quiet opening belied the soundings of energies that followed from the eight instrumentalists, extremely visceral bendings, burgeonings, swayings, slidings, creakings and slippings, all very kinetic, and uncannily fluid and jagged all at once. The work unhesitatingly reacted with itself along its course, blending repetition with its composer’s reinvention of remembered things, the more extreme sonorities (an agonised screeching whose origin I couldn’t identify through sitting too far back, for example) becoming more integrated dynamically and rhythmically, as if the process of recollection had “shaken them down”. Things reached the point of tonelessness with thrummed strings, and breathed-through winds and brasses resembling ambient sighings as the ghosts drifted back to their places of origin, the harp uncannily playing what sounded like a brief reminiscence of Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro” from the midst of the sonic debris, the remaining fragments becoming as things forgotten but still forever imprinted. I enjoyed this work due to its accessibility and its thoughtful exploration of the relationship between memory and recreation.

Having always previously trod cautiously around and about the music of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), I was interested to encounter an autobiography of sorts on an internet post (words which will probably already be familiar to the composer’s fans, of course), in which he talks about the uniqueness of individual human response to music, and specifically to his own creations: – “….Whatever I place there, consciously and probably also unconsciously, is perceived by the listener in a way that is perhaps not completely different, but sufficiently different in any case that you can never immediately draw conclusions about the meaning or value of a piece of music.” Along with Stroma’s programme note for Xenakis’s piece Aroura (1971) which was also written by the composer, the two statements in their different ways emboldened me to throw caution to the winds and “think inside” the sounds that I heard throughout the piece.

Xenakis’s opening observation regarding the title being the Homeric word for “earth” itself spoke volumes, as did the “word-made-flesh” textures of the piece’s sounds, a “virtual recreation” of the earth itself as we perceive it. My notes recorded as many of the multifarious realisations by the instruments as I could (my shortcomings in this exercise obviously akin to one’s limited conscious perceptions of the world – as with life, one does what one can with music!). So this piece marked, for me, an encounter with sounds which I could not only equate at least to some degree with their composer’s avowed intentions, but also allow myself my own impressions of, with hitherto unrealised confidence.

Too many to dwell upon all in detail, here, I’ve retained, firstly, a memory of a particularly haunting sequence of glissandi that opened up most disconcertingly what seemed an ever-widening chasm between lower and upper strings, exposing mysterious and suddenly vulnerable spaces between extremes in which it seemed we lived most of our lives. Then, at the piece’s conclusion, I registered a quiet, sardonic gesture of finality which silenced the “danse macabre” bouncing of bows upon strings (difficult to distinguish between hair and wood from a distance) with a single instrument’s whisperings.

Lastly came the work of Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) whose music I was introduced to in the 1970s via the composer’s Concerto for Orchestra. This was a work entitled Chain I, written in 1983, and one of a trio of works similarly-titled, though  otherwise unconnected. As with Xenakis’s work, the composer’s comments regarding the music were reproduced in what I thought was a model of its kind for a concert’s printed programme.

Lutoslawski was quoted as saying that he thought the act of composing was a search for listeners who thought and felt the same way he did—he once called it “fishing for souls”.  He wrote his work Chain I in something of that spirit, as a “gift” for the musicians of the London Sinfonietta, whom he had enjoyed working with – he called the work a “souvenir of……common music-making”.

The form of Chains I divided the music into two strands, with sections along the strand overlapped or “staggered” in terms of their beginnings and ends, and forming the greater part of the piece, with things increasing in complexity towards the end and allowing for individual figurations played “ad libitum” forming what Lutoslawski described as a “network of melodies”.

In effect, the sounds were impactful from the word go, with opening bursts of colour and energy reinforced by reverberant brass, then contrasted with cheeky winds flecked by harpsichord and percussion sonorities. The music developed into a dream-like dance, various instruments crossing the spaces as if entranced, the ambiences ghostly or crepuscular, depending on the listener’s predilections. A series of instrumental games featured several solos dovetailed as to produce ever-changing textures containing ravishing moments, whose freely-concerted strands of lyrical expression burgeoned in intensity and energy. Things took on an increasingly martial air until the gong and cymbals sounded us all up with a round turn, the winds flurrying like frightened birds! Having briefly tasted freedom, the ensemble was then reined in, the textures dissolving hue-by-hue and strand-by-strand into the silences.

Mention must be made of the concert’s surroundings, the City Gallery’s walls featuring parts of an exhibition entitled “Iconography of Revolt”, and visually expressing something of the determined individuality and uncompromising impact of new art found in abundance throughout Stroma’s skilled and whole-hearted musical presentations.

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting and rewarding St Andrew’s recital from students of stringed instruments

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime concert
String students of the New Zealand School of Music

Music by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Gareth Farr and Wang Xhihao

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 22 August, 12:15 pm

This was one of the usual series of concerts at this time of the year by students of Victoria University’s School of Music (I counted eleven players).

Beethoven came first. Cellist Rebecca Warnes, with the school’s piano tutor Catherine Norton. played the first movement of Beethoven’s third cello sonata, in A major, Op 69. It was a model performance, beginning somewhat quietly, intonation was accurate, with carefully etched tone. It demonstrated Rebecca’s understanding of its emotional character and a style that showed appreciation of the taste of its period.

Violinist Leo Liu, again with Norton at the piano, played Beethoven’s Spring Sonata (Op 24). It’s not an easy piece with which to deal in expressive terms; even though suggestive of Spring (not Beethoven’s name for it) it doesn’t flow easily and Liu’s bowing technique needs perhaps a bit more finesse and emotional colouring, though his intonation was very good.

It’s always interesting to meet players prepared to tackle Shostakovich’s quartets, other than the ubiquitous No 8. The third movement of No 9 in E flat lasts only about four minutes (the first four of the five movements are all of about the same length) but it was enough to hear the way the players (Hayden Nickey, Ellen Murfitt. Zephyr Wills and Emily Paterson) engaged with its enigmatic, somewhat disturbed mood. It gave the composer much trouble: he burned his first attempt and started afresh a couple of years later, in 1964. It was an interesting challenge, intellectually, which the four players met very well.

Then came Gareth Farr’s Te Tai-o-Rehua (The Tasman Sea, a co-commission by Chamber Music New Zealand and the Goldner Quartet), again for string quartet (Claudia Tarrant Matthews, Grace Stainthorpe, Grant Baker and Olivia Wilding). It began low with the violin on the G string, inviting the others to join in turn, very soon becoming markedly compulsive (and, I think, compelling, with its irregular, throbbing note on the viola), dwelling on an insistent Maori-flavoured motif, though that is a risky assertion. It is a demanding work, a task that was undertaken conspicuously by perhaps the most experienced players. It took only a short time for the music to take on a vivid and meaningful character: it certainly had something to say, and the players found ways to express it with considerable confidence. It’s about five years old; Farr’s music just gets ever more interesting and impressive. At about 10 minutes, it was the centre-piece of the concert.

However, it was followed by a ‘Fantasy’ by Wang Xhihao, played by Nick Majic (vioin) and Liam Furey (piano). Though he used the microphone to introduce the piece, Majic’s voice didn’t carry. (I have discovered nothing about Xhihao). The opening did not suggest a particularly radical character, though a genuine musical imagination was evident, with distinct melodic integrity that didn’t strive for any special originality. My scribbled notes suggested a feeling of rather relief that the composer was not subjecting me to the task of unravelling unduly complex and difficult music, such as composition students produced 20 or 30 years ago. A second section was a little brisker, perhaps a bit agitated, but still essentially tonal in character.

So this was an agreeable concert that allowed a number of students to demonstrate talents at various levels of maturity, through music of genuine interest.

 

Swedish-New Zealand ensemble beguiles Waikanae with varied pieces: brand new, interesting, much loved

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Klara Kollektiv (Anna McGregor, clarinet; Manu Berkeljon, violin;Taru Kurki, piano)
Waikanae Music Society

Anthony Ritchie: Picture Stone: Trio for clarinet, violin and piano. Op.198
César Franck: Sonata for violin and piano
Brahms: Clarinet Sonata no.1 in F minor, Op.120 no.1
Khachaturian: Trio for clarinet, violin and piano

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 29 July 2018, 2:30 pm

On picking up my printed programme when entering the hall, I recalled the last chamber music concert I reviewed: Wellington Chamber Music Trust’s concert at St. Andrew’s Church in Wellington on 15 July, where larger-size programmes (double A4) were available; an example Waikanae should follow, given the older-age group that comprises the bulk of the audience.

This time the audience was considerably smaller than is usual at this venue, which was a shame.  An interesting programme and top-class players were received enthusiastically.  The trio comprises two New Zealanders resident in Sweden, and a Finnish pianist who also resides and teaches in Sweden.

The opening work (Picture Stone) was written specifically for Klara Kollektiv, last year, and the current New Zealand tour is its premiere outing.  This work, and the Khachaturian are common to the other programmes the Trio will play in New Zealand, but the other works differ.  A few introductory remarks gave us the interesting thought that if we see a painting we do not like in a gallery, we can simply walk away.  Not so with music in a concert.  However, we were assured that the Ritchie work was very likable, and this proved to be the case.

There were headings in the printed programme to indicate topics considered in the music, but they were not formal movements, and the music was continuous, with no breaks.  The headings: Dawn – Child – Journey – Battle – Sacrifice.  The title ‘Picture Stone’ refers to ancient Viking artefacts.  The music takes the point of view of a child in Viking times, contemplating such a stone, and imagining a journey and battles.

After a piano opening, very appealing but somewhat mournful tones came from violin and clarinet, the latter featuring some very high and shrill notes.  The music contained a lot of repeated notes and repeated phrases, and a spiky, jaunty effect, perhaps depicting the child.  This was followed by running figures, especially on the piano, which I considered perhaps denote the journey.  Then a livelier section – battle?  Or sacrifice?  A chord on the piano held for some time by the sustaining pedal and all the players remaining still for some time, presumably symbolising sacrifice, ended the work.  The music was rewarding, but like much music, another hearing would give the opportunity for forming a better impression of it.

I have to confess that the Franck sonata is not one of my favourite chamber works.  One hears it not infrequently on radio, sometimes in arrangements for other instruments.  However, these musicians played it very sensitively, and with plenty of variety from rubato excellent tone, and changes of dynamics.  Thus they made it interesting and diverse compared with other renditions I have heard, which can strike me as merely long-winded repetition.

The music moved from allegretto ben moderato in the first movement to an allegro second.  Again in this faster music, the violin’s tone was varied and lovely, while the piano playing was excellent and full of subtlety.

The third movement, Recitativo – Fantasia, began with a strong and forthright recitative, while the fantasia was played with a variety of timbres, moving from delicacy to almost bombastic utterances, and back again, its pace becoming variable.  Imaginative playing from all the players made for enjoyable listening.

Strong themes and references back to the opening movement feature in this and the Finale (allegrettto poco mosso) – but there is a lot of repetition, and the canon in the last movement becomes tedious as it goes over and over a simple theme related to the first movement theme.  The massive ending required prestidigitation from the pianist – something she was well capable of.

After the interval came the Brahms sonata.  The composer’s fondness for the clarinet in the latter stages of his composing career was evident in his beautiful melodies and  acrobatic figures.  There was plenty of interest to be found in the writing for both instruments.  Following an allegro appassionato first movement, the second (andante un poco adagio) developed a rather plaintive melody, creating a charming effect.

The allegretto grazioso third movement exploited the full range of the clarinet, while providing plenty of appeal in the piano part.  The movement was short and sweet.  The vivace finale was fast and playful, and made a good summing up. This was a satisfying performance, marked by clarity.

Khachaturian’s Trio piano opening struck me as orchestral in style.  The andante opening movement was notable for the delectable writing for both violin and clarinet.  It was short but attractive.  The second, allegro, was bouncy and bright,  and became fast and furious, using folk tunes as a basis, as in the other movements.  In the middle section, the piano became somewhat independent of the other instruments.

The third, and last, movement (moderato) opens with solo clarinet, then the piano is added, and finally violin, in a duet with the clarinet.  The clarinet repeats its part while the others go into new byways.  The Trio has a rather sudden but peaceful ending, after much liveliness.

The trio’s encore was a surprise: a song (presumably a Swedish folk-song), sung by Anna McGregor, accompanied by piano improvisation (very discreet) and violin drone.  In between the verses, the violin played a little tune above the notes of the drone.  So out of character with the rest of the programme, this was an unusual diversion.

 

Tutors at the ASQ Academy confirm their stature in rare Shostakovich quartet, plus other masterpieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime Concerts
Aroha String Quartet: concert by tutors from the 2018 ASQ International Music Academy

Mozart: Piano Quartet in G minor, K 478 – 1st movement
Shostakovich: String Quartet No 11 in F minor, Op 122
Dvořák: String Quintet in E flat, Op 97 – 1st movement

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Thursday 26 July, 12:15 pm

Rosemary Collier’s review of Wednesday’s concert by participants in the 2018 Aroha String Quartet International Music Academy, offered a view of the level of performance skill that emerged from the week-long participation in the Academy, the fourth in what has become an annual event. Middle C appears to have overlooked them in the past. Further recitals by participants are taking place in the evenings and notably on Saturday evening, 28 July.

This however, was an opportunity to hear performances by the tutors themselves: the four quartet members, plus others who contributed to the tutoring demands of the participants.

The main event at this recital was Shostakovich’s eleventh string quartet. But I will leave comments on it till last.

Mozart
The concert began and ended with first movements of a couple of major pieces (it struck me that this might be an infection spread by the misguided behaviour of RNZ Concert which is now broadcasting, through most of the day, just single movements of works that composers had taken great pains to compose as complete, balanced works of art).

Mozart’s two great piano quartets do deserve to be heard in their integrity. However, it can be forgiven in circumstances like this, in a brief lunchtime concert that’s a sort of testimonial presentation. Here, in the second quartet, we had the rare chance to hear the fine pianist Emma Sayers along with violinist Donald Armstrong, and viola and cello from the Aroha Quartet itself. It was a remarkably vivid performance, driven by buoyant energy, each instrument exhibiting its individuality, almost to the point of sacrificing perfect ensemble; but I hasten to say, that was never affected.

Dvořák
It was equally delightful to hear the first movement of Dvořák’s string quintet, Op 97. It may have been programmed to complement the performance of his string quintet, Op 77 (which uses double bass instead of a second viola or cello) by Academy participants the day before. It’s not a well-known piece; Dvořák is a somewhat unfortunate composer who’s known to the average music lover for just one piece in each class of music – the New World Symphony, the Cello Concerto, the American Quartet, the Piano Quintet, Op 81, perhaps the Dumky Piano Trio, the Carnival Overture and some of the Slavonic Dances. In each genre, there are many other delightful works.

This is one of them and it’s first movement got a performance that revealed its beauties and character admirably. The players were Aroha’s first violin, Haihong Liu, violist Zhongxian Jin and cellist Robert Ibell, plus Donald Armstrong on second violin and Brian Shillito, the second (or was he technically, first?) viola. A viola (I couldn’t see which) opens the piece with a typically ruminative, Slavic theme, a minor third, quickly joined by other players who soon assured the major key’s dominance. Though the programme note remarks on the presence of Algonquin drumming patterns, I can only take their word for it. Even though, the movement ends with a typically climactic peroration which could well be heard as the end of the Finale, it should have given listeners a strong inducement to hear the rest.

Shostakovich No 11
Few of Shostakovich’s quartets other than No 8 are much played, though I think over recent years we’ve heard Nos 4, 5, 9, 11… and certainly one or two others.

It is a unique piece, unorthodox in form, written in 1966 as a memorial for the death of his close friend Vasily Shirinsky, second violinist in the famous Beethoven String Quartet. It’s in seven movements, of varying lengths and character. Though it is not uniformly tragic in mood, in its entirety it emerges as a remarkable, deeply felt creation. The first violin opens alone with a feeling of unease, a motif of cold beauty before being joined by the others to create a bleak though very human landscape.

The second movement also opens in a sort of pretend brightness, with the violin alone and it continues in a sort of fugal fashion, the staccato motif punctuated by ironical swoops by different instruments. It expresses a feeling of reluctance to give voice to much lyricism; nevertheless there are melodic thoughts, though presented sparingly, offering no reason for unalloyed delight.

The third part, enigmatically entitled Recitative entered with shocking violence, with harsh bowing by the cello. While each movement presents a very different musical character, there is no let-up from the pervasive feeling of anguish or anxiety, even in the bizarrely entitled Humoresque which seems to be the composer in typical disguise, with wild endlessly throbbing thirds on the violin.

As the notes pointed out, the sixth movement, Elegy, is the heart of the work, the longest movement at about four minutes, and the quartet drew from it a profound sense of terror and pathos. In the Finale, Shostakovich allows the first violin to offer a tiny hint of comfort, but in spite of the return of the slightly droll, upwards violin scoop, over pizzicato, he seems to deny the listener much hope.

In spite of the utterly different depictions of life by Mozart and Dvořák played before and after it, the Shostakovich was the music, played uncompromisingly, with utter sincerity, that stuck in the mind.

Though I have come to think I’d heard all Shostakovich’s quartets, I think this must have escaped me, but it will remain embedded for the rest of my life. (But one can say that about so much of his music: would we have such a store of awful, soul-searing music if he had not lived through such distressing times?).

As I hinted at the beginning, it is surely time for one of our resident quartets to stage a mini-Shostakovich festival at which all 15 quartets are played. Since I heard most of them in a revelatory series of late-night (10.30 to midnight) concerts by a gifted Israeli quartet at the Verbier Festival ten years ago, I have the feeling that Night suits their character, and that such an atmospheric presentation, in the right place, could capture the imagination of a few hundred Wellington music lovers.

Klara Kollektiv musicians vary the musical fare to resounding effect

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents:
KLARA KOLLEKTIV
Anna McGregor (clarinet)
Manu Berkeljon (violin)
Taru Kurki (piano)

ANTHONY RITCHIE – Three Scenes (for solo clarinet – 2016)
CÉSAR FRANCK – Sonata for violin and piano  (1886)
DOUGLAS LILBURN – Sonatina for clarinet and piano (1948)
JEAN SIBELIUS – Romance for violin and piano Op.78 No.2
BÉLA BARTÓK – Contrasts, for clarinet, violin and piano  (1938)

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Thursday 26th July 2018

I wondered on first sighting whether the name “Klara Kollektiv” indicated the first names of the group’s three musicians – could this be “a bevy of Klaras”, a “Klaras kollektiva”, so to speak? And then I saw Anna McGregor’s name in the publicity, which in the nicest possible way put paid to my brief whimsy, as subsequently did the ensemble’s playing throughout the concert, demonstrating part of the title’s true purpose, ”klara” being Swedish for ”clarify”. Each of the pieces presented had either a simplicity or a startling vividness of utterance in performance, nicely balancing the content with its exposition, and bringing us closer to the music as a result.

As for the ”kollektiv” part of the title, it referred to the group’s collaborative aspect, the two New Zealanders, Anna McGregor and Manu Berkeljon, joining musical forces with Finnish pianist Taru Kurki for this current Chamber Music New Zealand tour. Both McGregor and Berkeljon have previously toured here with other musicians – see Middle C reviews from 2014, https://middle-c.org/2014/07/dalecarlia-clarinet-quintet-getting-the-music-through/ and https://middle-c.org/2014/07/scandinavian-and-new-zealand-players-unite-wonderfully-for-the-two-greatest-clarinet-quintets/ – and will presumably continue to do so on future occasions for our much-anticipated pleasure.

As the above linked reviews suggest, the venture seems to bring out the very best from the players, the music-making to my ears having a special kind of eloquence, perhaps born of both commitment to the cause and a delight in partnership, between performers and with composers as well.  The concert’s opening item featured a work for solo clarinet by Anthony Ritchie, written for Anna McGregor in 2016 – in three movements, or ”Scenes”, the music took us on a journey of exploration, firstly, in an opening movement subtitled Stealth, of the clarinet’s capacity for contrast and colour, in setting cheek-by-jowl passages of cat-like tread against sudden raucous squawks of alarm. The music allowed for plenty of theatricality, both in the instrument’s startling variations of sound-character and the player’s capacity for physically choreographing the music – one (eventually) thought beyond one’s childhood memories of Sylvester-the-cat and Tweety-bird cartoons to more enigmatic scenarios or narratives as the music unfolded.

The second part, Bush scene, presented tranquil and ruminative resonances at the start, McGregor’s long-breathed phrases generating eons of endless time and stillness with each impulse (beautifully-controlled playing!), before moving into a livelier, more rhythmic sequence with a chatterbox-like aspect becoming more and more eloquently ”passionate” (excuse the word) of utterance, and then subsiding and returning to the stillness of the opening. Finally, Play danced with infectious fun and energy, McGregor relishing the contrasts between sequences, setting ”cool” against ”full-on”, and ”impish” against ”soulful”,  her intonations unfailingly true across a brilliantly varied dynamic range of expression.

What followed couldn’t have been a greater contrast, with Manu Berkeljon (violin) and Taru Kurki (piano) setting in motion the limpid opening tones of César Franck’s Violin Sonata, the music most beguilingly “awakened” by the players, pianist Taru Kurki’s beautiful colourings preparing the way for violinist Manu Berkeljon’s rapt purity of line, both musicians giving us the notes as if freshly discovered throughout the opening exchanges. Once or twice a hesitancy in the violinist’s phrasing ruffled the music’s surface momentarily – the final ascent seemed a tad off-balance, which hurried the concluding string phrase – but generally, the sense of rapturous awakening to delight was shaped most winningly throughout.

Happily, the pianist seemed less interested in the second movement’s ”virtuoso roar” than in finding a matching voice to intertwine with the violin’s, Franck’s own brilliance as a performer reflected in the piano part’s occasional near-Lisztian demands. What commanded special attention was the dialogue between the instruments in the movement’s central section, the exchanges by turns thoughtful and impassioned, with Taru Kurki seeming to me to give more attention than usual to the middle voices in her keyboard outpourings. Despite a couple of awkwardly sounded figures amongst the agitations, both players captured the growing excitements and burgeoning momentums of the music’s accelerando-like conclusion.

More heartfelt dialogues followed, in a slow movement which moved from the ”stand-and-deliver” mode on both sides to gestures of accord between the two instruments, as from out of the tremulous explorations and recollections of times past grew a long-breathed theme which seemed to unite the gestures and impulses in one accord. Franck’s canonic finale continued this ”entente cordiale”, with both Berkeljon and Kurki giving us the tenderest and most delicate treatment of the opening I’ve ever heard, saving the blood-racing moments for the music’s bigger climaxes towards the end, and instead fully engaged in realising some of the composer’s typically sinuous modulatory byways amongst the music’s ebb and flow.

After the interval we were treated to another home-grown piece of music, this time for clarinet and piano – Douglas Lilburn’s lovely Sonatina for clarinet and piano, written in 1948.  In three movements, the music began with a distinctive Lilburn rhythmic fingerprint in the piano part, over which the clarinet sang long-breathed, out-of-door phrases, the loveliness of McGregor’s playing enhanced by Kurki’s resonant way with the piano rhythms in a way that opened up the landscapes for us.

The Andantino second movement began with sombre, chant-like piano tones, and long-breathed responses from the clarinet, with McGregor simply making the music her own by dint of the generosity of her tones and the expansiveness of her phrases. Kurki played the ensuing flurries rather more delicately than did Margaret Nielsen on her recording with Peter Scholes, bringing out, I thought, a birdsong-like character more readily, the clarinet murmuring its assent in reply. What mastery in the writing, here! – so much ground seemed to be covered in such a brief space of time, with the clarinet’s musings suddenly given thrilling amplitude, McGregor and Kurki allowing the composer’s burst of emotion full rein to the music’s end.

The two musicicans took what seemed to me a sturdy, unhurried view of the final movement, making it almost sound like ”road music”, with the composer’s characteristic rhythmic kicks keeping everything sufficiently on the move. Again I marvelled at McGregor’s naturalness of phrasing, heightening the sense I often feel with Lilburn’s sound-world of something ”caught from the air”, and here, with some invigorating support from Kurki, taking us out-of-doors on a bracing and rewarding adventure.

Somewhat surprisingly when considering the music’s composer, we found ourselves back in the drawing-room for the Sibelius piece for violin and piano which followed. Though it may sound heretical to say so, I thought it a mildly charming but otherwise flavourless work, much less interesting, for instance, than Elgar’s ”Salut d’Amour” – and I count myself as a reasonably paid-up Sibelian, violently in love with those tone-poems and the great symphonies! I’m obviously an insufferable snob, but I would have vastly preferred the musicians to have chosen something a bit more characterful – and if something Finnish was wanted, why not go for broke salon-wise with an arrangement of the same composer’s ”Valse Triste”? – at least it’s music which has a bit of characteristic brooding atmosphere!

Nobody could ever accuse Béla Bartók’s music of being bland or unatmospheric, which was what the Kollektiv concluded the scheduled part of the programme with, by way of compensation! – this was a work called ”Contrasts”, written for and dedicated to violinist Josef Szigeti and clarinettist Benny Goodman in 1938 and given the title ”Rhapsody”. It was originally intended (by Goodman and Szigeti) that the work be a two-movement piece which could be recorded on a single 78rpm disc, but the composer had other ideas – not only were each of these movements Bartók wrote too long for such a scheme, but he also had in mind a middle movement which he produced AFTER the original pair of movements were premiered! Bartók himself, with Szigeti and Goodman, subsequently performed and recorded the whole work, now renamed ”Contrasts”, in a justly-famous 1940 recording.

First up was the Verbunkos or ”Recruiting-dance” movement, which began with a lovely, swaggering rhythm generated by the strumming violin and warbling clarinet, at first keeping in step with the piano’s marking time, and then breaking out and exchanging phrases in vigorous virtuoso mode. The piano valiantly persisted with the dance-rhythms, in the face of both violin and clarinet awaiting their chance to forcefully declaim their points of view, their phrases building up into a series of strident exchanges. After some curmudgeonly rhythmic by-play amidst all three instruments a brief but agitated clarinet cadenza concluded with the violin and piano sneaking the music to a close!

The ensuing Pihenö (Relaxation) featured long, slow-moving lines from clarinet and violin, with the piano occasionally playing tremolandi or slow ostinati. The music’s mood seemed in places to derive from the composer’s ”night music” mode in other works, except for a brief frisson of excitement between violin and clarinet, after which the charged nocturnal stillness drifted slowly backwards through the music’s last few moments, everything beautifully breathed and floated by the players.

With Manu Berkeljon laying down her violin and picking up another prior to the last movement we knew something was afoot – and so it proved!  Suddenly we were plunged into a kind of ”danse macabre” by the violinist’s opening chords as the Sebes movement began, the hair-raisingly madcap molto perpetuo in which everybody joined not unlike the sounds of a klezmer band playing as if possessed! Gradually the pace fragmented and changed to a wistful, gently syncopated gait, with some eerie chromaticisms thrown unexpectedly into the mix! All of this was swept away by the return of the frenetically-paced opening, leading to a wild cadenza from Berkeljon’s violin, skin and hair flying, before the others rejoined the fun-and-games, with wild, exuberant cries emanating from all the instruments as the players drove the music to its exhilarating conclusion!

We’d been promised an encore by the players provided our applause at the concert’s end was enthusiastic enough (a foregone state of things in the wake of such engaging music-making!), and so the musicians duly reappeared on the stage ready to give us a little more. Then, to everybody’s surprise and delight, Anna McGregor forewent her clarinet and, to the accompaniment of folksy violin figurations from Manu Berkeljon and hypnotically-voiced piano chords from Taru Kurki (the overall instrumental effect being somewhat like a hurdy-gurdy), she sang a plaintively beautiful rendition of a song called ”Worldes Bliss”. It made for a haunting and memorable ending to an interestingly varied and thoroughly engaging concert.

Admirable results of a week of string instrument coaching from the Aroha String Quartet

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Aroha String Quartet International Music Academy

Participants’ Concert of music by Dvořák, Popper, Albinoni and Elgar

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 25 July 2018, 12.15pm

The Aroha Quartet is innovative in a number of ways, not least in convening this annual week-long course for amateur string players of all ages, participants coming from Australia and China as well as New Zealand.  The music they produced, without much time for rehearsal, was remarkable.

An almost-full St. Andrew’s Church heard the music performed by 25 enthusiastic amateur musicians.  The concert began with the first movement of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No 2, Op. 81 in A, written in 1887.  It is an attractive work of chamber music, in the composer’s cheerful, lyrical yet romantic style.  After a false start, the cello opened the piece, with light piano accompaniment.  Both players acquitted themselves well, as did the other three musicians.  I was particularly impressed by the pianist’s excellent playing; at the opening it was appropriately subdued.  Then there is a shock when the other players all join in with vigour.  The pianist was Nicholas Kovacev of Wellington.  His playing was never too loud for the strings, his phrasing was splendid, as were his dynamics and fluency.

It is to be expected that a group of amateurs of all ages, who have played together for only a few days, will not have perfect intonation at all times.  However, they tackled this mature music with a will, and with skill and commitment.  On the whole, the tone they produced was good.  The music was conveyed competently and confidently.

The second work was a short Gavotte in D minor (Op.67/2, first published ca.1880) by David Popper (1843-1913).  This was performed by a group of 5 cellists, all of whom were mature men.  It was good to see them taking part in a course consisting mainly of young people.  Their sound was generally good and their ensemble spot-on.

The last chamber work was the first movement of another Dvořák quintet, this time for strings, including bass.  It was Op.77 no.2, written in 1875.  There was some lovely playing, especially from the first violinist, who also led the string orchestra that followed.  She is from China and is listed in the programme variously as MeiJuan Chen, or May Chen.

The quintet showed great attention to dynamics, but the interpretation was perhaps insufficiently subtle.  However, on the whole this was a good effort, with strong playing when required.

All the course participants came together to play a piece by Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751), introduced by Donald Armstrong, who conducted.  This was Albinoni’s Concierto a Cinque, Op.5 no.1.  As the title says, it is for five parts: two violin parts, two viola, and cello (plus bass).  It was a very lively and tuneful work in two movements, well-executed and thoroughly enjoyable.

Finally, we had Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, published in 1892.  Its three short movements are    allegro piacevole, larghetto and allegretto.   Such a number of cellists were attending the Academy that the four who played in the Albinoni were replaced by five others for this work.  Elgar’s rather nostalgic sentiment was conveyed well by the players.  Cellos, at the beginning, violas and violins all have their turn to shine on their own, and all did well, but especially the violas.  This was a very creditable performance, ending with a ringing crescendo and a three-fold chord.

 

Interesting recital of Romantic French music for cello and piano

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Miranda Wilson (cello) and Rachel Thomson (piano)
Wellington Chamber Music Trust

Louise Farrenc: Sonata in B flat for piano and cello, Op.46
Lalo: Sonata in A minor for cello and piano
Chopin: Sonata in G minor for cello and piano, Op.65

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 15 July 2018, 3 pm

The first thing that struck me at this concert was not musical – it was pleasure at having a large-print programme!  Others, please copy, for those of us who find it hard to read the normal-sized print, especially in a darkened auditorium – which this wasn’t.  A further improvement in readability would be to use a different type-face; the fashionable sans-serif fonts do not pass readability tests s well as the ‘old-fashioned’ Times New Roman etc. fonts.

The first work played by the duo was by an unfamiliar name: Louise Farrenc (1804-1875).  The excellent programme notes by Miranda Wilson told us of this French woman, who was  a professor at the Paris Conservatoire as well as a composer, pianist, and music printer.  The numbering of the sonata, her opus 46 from 1859, reveals that she wrote a considerable quantity of music.

Strong playing opened the first movement (allegro moderato).  The music was melodious and, as the programme note said, it was largely rooted in classicism, despite its date.  It was in that tradition with the piano being to the fore, as reflected in the title, putting the cello after the piano.  However, this didn’t mean that the cello does not have plenty of lovely tunes to play.

Miranda Wilson threw herself at the music with energy and enthusiasm; her rapport and accord with pianist Rachel Thomson was exemplary.  (Apparently they played together as students at Victoria University, years ago.)  It was good to see Miranda back in her home city; she currently lives and teaches cello in the United States.

This was a worthwhile work to have unearthed for an all-French programme.  There were plenty of changes in mood through the movement, and lots of fast finger-work, especially for the pianist.

The andante sostenuto second movement was sober but straight-forward at the beginning.  A gorgeous singing tone was created by the cellist, who had more of the melody line here.  The mood was slightly melancholic – or maybe just nostalgic, before becoming briefly more joyful.

The finale of the three-movement sonata was marked allegro, and used some of the thematic material from the previous movement, decorated this time.  It became quite rollicking in places, with both players rushing all over the place, but the musical shape was always apparent.

Édouard Lalo’s music is largely known through his Symphonie Espagnol, but he wrote a considerable quantity of other music, including numbers of concertos.  This sonata was written three years before Farrenc’s sonata, but bears a much more noticeable Romantic character.  It features a very dramatic opening; the work brought the cello to the fore compared with the Farrenc.  There was more contrast and greater drama, plus a wider dynamic range.  Many bold statements were advanced, and the music was harmonically more adventurous.  (It’s inevitable to make comparisons with the dates of composition were so close.)  It was also a longer work.

The second movement (andante) gave opportunity for some sonorous playing from Miranda, in a long-drawn-out melody of a highly romantic nature, which was followed by very robust passages, then rippling piano figures over a pedal point on the cello.  In this it was similar to a passage in the Farrenc work.

Such was the apparent ease of execution by these two musicians, one could think they had been playing this music together for a long time, which is obviously not possible with one in New Zealand and the other in the USA.

The allegro finale had plenty of variety.  There were delightful pizzicato motifs on the cello, matching staccato on the piano, and the work ended with a grand statement.  I did miss beauty of tone through some of this piece.  Factors that may have had a bearing on this were firstly, the very bright acoustic in St. Andrew’s church and the fact that the piano lid was on the long stick, and also the circumstance that Miranda Wilson was playing a borrowed cello.

We turned to the pure Romantic now, with Chopin’s sonata, a more familiar work.  The allegro moderato first movement was decidedly romantic in idiom.  Here I found the tone a little too abrasive for the idiom.  The sound was usually quite loud, even in a venue full of people’s sound-absorbing bodies.  However, the accuracy of the notes was impeccable.  The pianist’s part was notable for many cascades up and down the keyboard.

The scherzo second movement was jaunty, lively, and varied.  It was followed by a peaceful largo movement.  Here we had euphonious cello and delicate, melodic piano.  The music’s tranquil mood grew slowly.  Here was some of the most mellow cello sound of the concert, in long, elegant, well-rounded phrases.

It was a short movement, so we were soon into the allegro finale.  It developed themes from the slow movement, but the pace was faster, of course; it was very busy.  This work was written in 1846, so prior to the two works in the first half of the programme, but it was very much more the Romantic piece.  Lilting moments there were, in between the rushing gaiety around them.  Chords from the cello were somewhat brutal, but made an emphatic end to an interesting concert of fine music played by accomplished performers.