Tag: chamber music

Takács Quartet (Edward Dusinberre and Károly Schranz (violins), Geraldine Walther (viola), András Fejér (cello)
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Haydn: String Quartet in D, Op.76 no.5
Anthony Ritchie: Whakatipua, Op. 71
Webern: Langsamer Satz
Dvořák: String Quartet no.14 in A flat, Op.105

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 4 August 2017, 7.30pm

My initial reaction at the concert was a longing for the Town Hall to be restored to use; chamber music does not sound nearly so well in the cavernous Michael Fowler Centre unless one is near the front, which I was not; it simply does not provide the resonance, and makes ‘chamber music’ a misnomer.

The concert began with vintage Haydn – musically, and chronologically, being written around 1797, (he was born in 1732) part of a set of six quartets.  Its performance immediately demonstrated the lovely cohesion of the players and their subtly varying dynamics.  This is the seventh visit of the world class quartet to New Zealand, but the first visit, I think, for violist Geraldine Walther.  The quartet was founded in Hungary in 1975, but for the larger part of its life has been based in Colorado, USA.  The only remaining original member is the cellist, András Fejér.

After quite a fast allegretto first movement, the placid and charming largo, cantabile e mesto impressed with its lyrically beautiful melodies and harmonies, a touch of melancholy pervading it here and there.  The warmth of tone of the members of the Takács was always apparent in their expressive playing.

The Menuetto and Trio (allegretto) were full of movement.  The higher strings carried the melody and harmony while the cello grunted away underneath in the Trio.  A return to the minuet brought sunnier, uncomplicated music

Chords opened the presto Finale dramatically, then interesting rapid themes with sprightly rhythms took hold.  A change of key added piquancy.  The whole performance was faultless, played with panache, and in an appropriate style.

Anthony Ritchie is an established New Zealand composer who writes in several different genres, always with musical interest, and not tied to any school such as minimalism, but always something worthwhile to say.

His Whakatipua was a musical depiction of Lake Wakatipu, and its town, Queenstown.  The dramatic scenery, the busy tourist town, and the gold rush history all found a place in his musical essay.  In the early part, there was juxtaposition of pizzicato against the bowed lower instruments that was most effective.  Cohesiveness of the instruments with each other was a feature.  Lightness and lift, along with the business-speak aspect of the town seemed to be features of the inspiration.

There was vigour aplenty in the piece.  The last section returned to a more serene depiction of the landscape, as at the beginning, and called forth an atmosphere of peace and calm, before the piece petered away on a high note.

If one heard only of Anton Webern’s works his Langsamer Satz, one would have no idea of his later atonal, twelve-tone music.  This piece began with a Romantic, mellow melody and accompaniment.  There followed a fine passage with pizzicato from the first violin while the other instruments were bowed.  The mellow, somewhat chromatic  music persisted, with its rather introspective mood.  Plaintive tones arose.  This was warm-toned, vibrato-aided playing, which gave the work a richness that contrasted with the classicism of Haydn and the relative austerity of Ritchie’s composition.

In places the music reminded me of Schönberg’s Transfigured Night, composed in 1899, six years before Webern’s piece.  The programme notes state that, after commencing study with Schönberg in 1904-05, Webern began ‘producing work of structural rigour and musical cohesion, uniting meticulous craft and profound emotional expression.’  These elements were apparent in this one-movement work as was the influence of Mahler, especially in the final part of the work, of which the notes use the word ‘transcendence’.  The clarity of the music was a delight, and the ending quite magical as well as satisfying.

The major work on the programme was the Dvořák String Quartet no.14, one of the composer’s many exhilarating, cheerful, melodic compositions.  The first movement starts with an adagio that is low and sombre, beginning on the cello, followed by viola then violins.  Then an allegro appassionato breaks forth energetically, with plenty of work for all the players to do.  Again we had demonstrated such accomplished playing; they made the music glow.

The Scherzo second movement was a lively Bohemian dance, followed by a gorgeous lyrical melody.  Lento e molto cantabile was the marking for the third movement, where a calmly beautiful theme was developed.  The quiet, pensive mood took on a more solemn character after a time.  As in the first movement, the two violins sing a song while the lower pitched instruments accompany, initially with pizzicato.  The movement has an ecstatic pianissimo ending.

The opening to the Finale was quite lovely, and the movement was full of sprightly Bohemian motifs.   The cheerful and optimistic mood carried on to the triumphant ending.

The audience received it all with much enthusiastic applause and cheers, and we were granted an encore: the spirited, fast last movement of Haydn’s quartet Op. 20, no.4.  It made for a jolly ending to a first-class concert and was received with delight.

The Troubadour String Quartet (Arna Morton and Rebecca Wang – violins, Elyse Dalabakis – viola, Anna-Marie Alloway – cello)

Haydn: String Quartet in G, Op 77 No 1
Alfred Hill: String Quartet No 3 in A minor (The Carnival)
Britten: String Quartet No 2 in C, Op 36

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Monday 24 July, 7:30 pm

At the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson this year, the Troubadour Quartet gave two free concerts, one giving the same Britten quartet that they played here, the second, Schubert’s A minor quartet (Rosamunde). I was there for a few days and really regret not hearing them.

Haydn
For it took only a few bars of the Haydn quartet (one of his very last) to show me that these were players of real talent and insight. Its first movement came as a revelation of care, sensitivity, delicately springing rhythms, subtle humour; an interesting range of instrumental colour, in part at least through the contrast between the bright first violin and the warmer, almost viola-like second. In particular, I delighted in the quartet’s agility, tossing the parts from one to another.

In the second movement, cellist Alloway had a few bars of prominence, enriching its meditative character, and she also supplied a throbbing undercurrent. After about three minutes all movement seems to cease and the players held us breathlessly awaiting the return of the main theme and its slow pulse.

There was a seriousness and emotional depth in the Adagio that reminded me that it was written, 1799, around the time of Haydn’s last, beautiful masses; no more symphonies, concertos, operas or piano trios. And after this came just two more string quartets, one unfinished.

The Menuetto took us back to the more familiar Haydn, energetic, overflowing melody and rhythm; and then the rather astonishing trio section, hard down-bowing, no longer any semblance of aristocratic minuet; as the programme remarks, it approaches the Beethovenish Scherzo which replaced the minuet and trio of the earlier, Classical period. Then in the last movement, Haydn reminds us that he was to become most famous for his 104 symphonies, as both in the denser scoring, playfulness and rhythmic energy; it sounds like a symphony trying to break out. It all emerged in a performance that was clearly thoroughly rehearsed and thought out. The applause rather suggested that the audience was pretty surprised at such an accomplished and committed performance.

Alfred Hill
The quartet by Alfred Hill probably aroused more uncertainty in many listeners, as till very recently, it has been fashionable to dismiss him as an inconsequential imitator who was unable to measure up to the great figures of his generation (born 1869, close to Sibelius, Reger, Busoni, Roussel, Vaughan Williams, Scriabin, Rachmaninov… and Schoenberg!).

The Wellington-based Dominion String Quartet has recorded all 17 of Hill’s quartets and have been sturdy advocates for his music; however, some of his 13 symphonies, mostly derived by Hill from his quartets, have been championed by Australia (recorded by the Melbourne and Queensland symphony orchestras). Australia likes to claim him as one of theirs as he was born in Melbourne, but his family came to New Zealand two years later and Hill spent most of his first 30 years in New Zealand, in Wellington, with a period at the Leipzig Conservatorium. He spent most of his latter 60 years in Australia because he was offered better opportunities, being co-founder of the NSW Conservatorium and was an important figure in Australian music. His 90th birthday was celebrated by a special concert of his music played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Henry Krips.

No comparable attention has been paid to him here, and as far as I know none of his symphonies have been played by a New Zealand orchestra.

Listening to this quartet is to feel its place in the Hill’s era, if in the company of the rather less famous and ground-breaking. The first movement intrigued me with a feeling of its rhythmic uncertainty, as if there were permitted alternative ways of handling the metre. Unadventurous perhaps, but not to be dismissed. The dreamy Andantino, second movement verged on the sentimental until a modulation made me pay attention, and indeed, it became more interesting, with a genuine emotional feeling. And Dalabakis’s viola became prominent in its last phase. The third movement was marked with a distinctive character, even if not radical or especially original; yet the players exploited its individuality with commitment.

The last movement was another matter: was there a certain Maori quality in its rhythm and melodic feel? Or was it more akin to Balkan, Gypsyish sounds; and still looking for resonances, there seemed melodic hints of Viennese operetta. There was even an episode in which stamping called up eastern European folk dance, even though the notes drew attention to the piece’s original title The Carnival or The Student in Italy. It was a very lively and committed performance of a piece that should encourage more exploration and performance of Hill’s music.

Benjamin Britten wrote three string quartets; this one was written to mark the 250^th anniversary in 1945, of Purcell’s death. And it was the third movement, a chaconne, that offered references, though probably not especially conspicuous for most listeners, to the earlier composer.

The performance opened dramatically, not simply in the somewhat mysterious, even anguished, wide-spaced themes that introduce it, but with leader, Arna Morton, breaking a string. A repeat of the opening measures was rewarding, as it had been so immediately arresting, and the emotional impact was simply duplicated; and after a little while it gathers both speed and emotional force.

Even though written in a tonic vocabulary, it sounds of its time, the end of World War II, through its generally sombre feeling rather than any particular lamenting. As for its context, Morton, who has studied Britten for her PhD, drew attention to his feeling of isolation, as a homosexual, a pacifist, a committed left-winger (did she also say, his aversion to the prevailing ‘pastoral’ character of English music of the period?), all of which might account for the mood of the music.

Without a score it’s not easy to describe the structure of the first movement, and I’m limited to remarking the episodes (‘variations’ in essence) of markedly different speed, motifs that are chased, canon-like by each player in turn, the throbbing beat of four-note quavers, the biting commentary by the cello here and there. There are surprises such as the series of glissandi around the middle, and a meditative, viola-led diminuendo as the end approaches.

Nothing was more striking, perhaps chilling, than the slow subsidence to a high, lonely, ppp note from Morton’s violin, followed by a motivic scrap from the central section, on the cello. One anonymous remark from the Internet: “Britten’s number 2 is an isolated masterpiece of a genius. This is as powerful, astonishing and emotionally draining as any work for the genre ever written.” I admire such definitive, risky assertions like this, instead of the more usual cautious, ambivalent judgements that most of us shelter behind.

The second movement, Scherzo, seems to be a reworking of the more spirited parts of the first – on the cello, much more agitated, with ferocious down-bowings, driven by fast triplet quavers, referred to in the programme note as a ‘Danse macabre’: to me, not really….

The third movement, Chacony: Sostenuto, honouring Purcell, quarter-hour long, seems an extraordinary creation by a youngster of 32. The first section is a chorale-like lament with almost incessant dotted semi-quavers: calm, edgy, verging dissonance, in which all contribute till Alloway’s cello plays a long, plaintive meditation leading to an agitated section that becomes increasingly impatient.  If a set of variations in the slow triple time that’s characteristic of the chaconne is what you expect, it wasn’t the main focus for this listener, even after the pulse rate drops in the meandering, polyphonic writing around the middle of the movement.

Rebecca Wang’s second violin had a long, grieving solo passage, soon passed to others, importantly the cello again, then viola. Some parts – variations, though the individual sections are profoundly evocative, yet elusive – might seem rhapsodic, though the sense of its imposing structure was always clearly felt, and impressively so in this performance that seemed so thoroughly studied, ingested and technically mastered.

In spite of hints of a wide range of musical eras and genres, try as I might to spot influences, I couldn’t mistake such prevailing unity of mood and sense that left no one but Britten as a candidate composer. In all, it was a concert that emerged with far greater variety and richness than I’d expected: revelatory, fascinating and compelling.