Tag: chamber music

Fire, flamenco and folksong ‘cello style, from Ramón Jaffé

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Ramón Jaffé (‘cello)
Catherine McKay (piano)

CHOPIN – Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante
BEETHOVEN – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano in C Major Op.102 No.1
JAFFÉ – flamenco improvisation
BRAGATO – Graziela y Buenos Aires
DVORAK – Piano Trio No.4 in E Minor “Dumky” (with Carolyn van Leuven – violin)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Tuesday 1st March 2016

The title given to this concert by the artists rolled off the tongue colourfully and evocatively enough – however, I confess that I found myself involuntarily drawn into slightly circumspect mode over the word “fire”, having over the years grown somewhat weary of being assailed by regular barrages of hype from major arts organization by way of advertising their oncoming productions.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried, as what followed during the actual concert was precisely what the title suggested. In fact, “fire” in its threatening, smoldering form aptly characterized the playing of ‘cellist Ramón Jaffé throughout a good deal of the proceedings, especially when he tackled those pieces related directly to a Latin American tradition of music-making, such as flamenco.

What the programme in fact described as “a flamenco ‘cello treat” was just that, when Jaffé played for us a piece which he had written in honour of flamenco guitarist, Pedro Bacán, with whom he had closely worked, and who had since died in a tragic accident in 1997. Jaffé described how he had to “begin again” as a ‘cellist when taking up the flamenco style, putting aside his classical training and learning new techniques and responses to the music, and reaching a point where he could play and improvise as if he were a folk musician.

I wrote down what I remembered Jaffé called his piece (the name wasn’t written down in the programme), which was something like Canta de Passion (in translation, Passion Sings, or Song of Passion). It was a detail which didn’t seem important at the time, so arresting were the sounds the player was drawing from his instrument. His bow danced suggestively upon the strings, the rhythms allowing pizzicati from both bowing and “fretting” hands to generate an ever-burgeoning excitement  which broke off into a kind of a kind of recitative and then developed into something almost hymnal, free and sonorous.

Rhythmic impulses reasserted themselves in the form of percussive gesturing, Jaffé knocking and slapping the ‘cello’s body and tapping his feet to the music’s pulsating, using the dancing bow on the strings once again and working things up to an intensity which carried through to the piece’s end. In both song- and dance-like sequences the music generated a good deal of impassioned feeling.

Jaffé then joined forces with pianist Catherine Mckay in a work, Graziela y Buenos Aires, by one José Bragato, an Italian-born Argentinian composer who celebrated his hundredth birthday in October last year. ‘Cellists who play tangos more often choose the works of Astor Piazolla, (most often a piece called  Le Grande Tango) but Jaffé told me after the concert that he preferred to play Bragato’s work.

Loaded with sultriness and dark-toned suggestiveness, the music began with the ‘cello following the piano’s mood-jazz lower-register evocations, occasionally giving the trajectories a “lilt” to enliven the languid atmospheres. Solos from each instrument alternated with racy, interlocked Latin-American dance rhythms, driving the music along with ear-catching timbres and hues, as when the ‘cellist played over the bridge of his instrument amid droll piano glissandi.

The piece’s concluding sequence memorably took in a long and sinuous ‘cello melody, tenderly and delicately partnered by the piano, the pair of instruments breath-holding and trance-like in their murmurings towards the music’s end.

Before either of these exotic pieces were performed, ‘cellist and pianist had given us two more conventionally “classical” works, beginning with an early work by Chopin, Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante. A lilting Andante-like beginning featured plenty of give-and-take between the instruments, though with the piano more typically forthright and decorative than the cello’s more song-like lines, after which both players launched into the Polonaise section with great gusto.

In places I was reminded of the piano writing in Chopin’s concertos, giving the player a real work-out in places, leaving the cellist to impress us with aristocratic poise and gorgeous tones. Catherine McKay balanced the virtuoso element beautifully with the poetic moments, the give-and-take between both musicians giving a strong and positive impression as to the music’s worth. Beethoven, of course, received similar advocacy in his Op.102 No.1 C Major Sonata which followed, the music’s improvisatory manner in places drawing forth finely-drawn tones from both players.

Particularly delightful were the “cat-and-mouse” sequences between the instruments in the work’s second movement, the cello’s “open fifths” and the piano’s teasing gestures subsumed into the playful allegro vivace with terrific élan, leading to the throwaway payoff.

Concluding the concert was Dvorak’s well-known “Dumky” Trio, for which Ramon Jaffé and Catherine McKay were joined by violinist Carolyn van Leuven. From what I’d heard ‘cellist and pianist do earlier in the concert, I anticipated that they would bring out this music’s expressive qualities to a point of deep satisfaction – and I wasn’t disappointed. From the tragic, lamenting opening, through to the inhibited gaiety and energy of the quicker sections of the movement, the players seemed fully engaged with the sounds and their purposes, thus conveying to us plenty of that “Bohemian lament” character for which the composer’s work was and is justly renowned.

Of course, ‘cellist and pianist were already “on fire” with the conflagrations of the concert’s first half, so that it took a little while for violinist van Leuven to find her richest voice to contribute to the textures, though her rhythmic sense instantly “kicked in” with the ensemble. The poco adagio second movement drew us in from the beginning, the violinist responding to the cellist’s eloquence with atmospheric “squeeze-box” tones, so very nostalgic and moving!  Even more so was the andante moderato which followed, the music having a “heartbroken” quality, a great longing which subsequent episodes of energy and dogged strength didn’t entirely banish.

Such moments came thick and fast during the finale, with its volatile shifts between tragedy, introspection and gaiety, the motto theme tossed almost recklessly between the instruments and spontaneously inflected as to express a bewildering variety of moods, with no holds barred – that last-named quality a defining characteristic of the concert’s overall music-making. Each of the musicians played a part in serving up this feast of creative re-enactment for our delight – we did our best to mirror their efforts with appropriately enthusiastic appreciation.

Worlds brought more closely together – the Miyata-Yoshimura-Suzuki Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music NZ and the New Zealand Festival present:
MIYATA-YOSHIMURA-SUZUKI TRIO
Music from Japan and New Zealand

Mayumi Miyata (shō)
Nanae Yoshimura (koto)
Tosiya Suzuki (recorder)

CHRIS GENDALL – Choruses
OSAMU KAWAKAMI – Phoenix Chicken
SAMUEL HOLLOWAY – Mono
TOSHIO HOSOKAWA – Bird Fragments 111b
DYLAN LARDELLI – Retracing

TRADITIONAL – Banshiki no Choshi (for shō)
Tsuru no Sugomori (Nesting of Cranes – solo recorder)
Chidori no Kyoku (for koto and voice)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 28th February, 2016

For a time it seemed as though the world had realigned its meridian intersects and taken St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace and its occupants north of the equator to somewhere in Japan. Woven into this enchanted web of things were a trio of musicians, a clutch of composers and a spell-bound audience, united for a brief time to wondrous and magical effect by means of exotic strains and realizations, wrought by the performers. The latter were inspired by both traditional work and present-day creativity, performing a programme of music with age-old folk-music presented side-by-side with new compositions from both Japanese and New Zealand composers.

Not for these musicians a performing world of merely antiquities, featuring only museum pieces or cultural artifacts from bygone ages – the trio has encouraged living composers to write for their instrumental combinations as well as for the solo instruments – a glance at a list of composers who have worked with these musicians indicates their involvement in music-making as a living and creative tradition, besides paying homage to the great works of the past.

All of this would be of specialist interest only, were not the actual sounds created by the instruments in this ensemble of such beauty, poignancy and atmosphere. Whether playing together or individually, the sounds and timbres brought with them such strongly-flavoured and sharply-focused evocations as to hold our attentions in thrall for timeless durations. The concert’s opening took us straight to such a sound-world, by way of Mayumai Miyata’s playing of the shō, a traditional Japanese mouth-organ, the musician giving us a traditional work, Banshiki no Chosi.

I found the listening experience arresting, if at first a little disconcerting through not being able to clearly see the player’s face (I can’t think of another instrument that’s similarly designed – the mouthpiece is at the bottom, so that the instrument’s “body”, when held up to play, almost completely obscures the player’s facial expression and any movement associated with the physical act of breathing. Still the strains made by the instrument are so ethereal and unworldly, that this “disembodied” effect given by the player isn’t inappropriate. The timbres were not unlike the highest notes of an organ played softly and sustained for great, long-breathed periods of utter calm and serenity.

Chris Gendall’s piece Choruses, which followed, was anything but serene, resembling choruses of  wild things uttering long-drawn cries, punctuated by excitable flurries of energy. The shō player.Mayumai Miyata had exchanged her instrument for a lighter, wood-grained affair, though I couldn’t discern a difference in sound-quality to that of the previous item – the instrument exhibited the same kinds of ethereal ambiences, with many variations of intensity.  I had difficulty observing the recorder-player, Tosiya Suzuki, as the composer, (Chris Gendall, who was conducting) kept getting in the way, though the sounds made by the player via his instrument certainly had a mournful and volatile impact upon the whole.

No such impediment obscured my view of the koto player, Nanae Yoshimura, who coaxed from her instrument a range and depth of expression which I found remarkable, not only in the music’s more forceful sequences, but in the sustaining resonance of the lower timbres. The music seemed to me to set different time-frames together, as if they were warring relativities – as with peace and war, calm and tumult, chaos and clarity, we experienced through the music a series of “altered states” which left its impression upon us long after the sounds had ceased. Each of the instruments contributed to the contrasting effect of these opposing realities, a point from a different view, or state of mind, one that left this listener more-than-usually sensitized to disruptive potentialities!

The trio again took the stage to perform Osamu Kawakami’s somewhat disconcertingly titled work Phoenix Chicken – the only clue to this mystery was the equally enigmatic comment in the composer’s printed biographical note: – “Kawakami is deeply interested in living creatures, and many of his works (including Phoenix Chicken) have been titled after them”. Tosiya Suzuki had exchanged his flute-like recorder for one of the largest I had ever encountered – whether a great bass, or sub-great-bass, contra bass, or sub-contra bass I didn’t know, but it impressed with its looks alone, and it made a splendid noise!

How helpful the Phoenix Chicken title was for the listener I wouldn’t have liked to have guessed at in general – perhaps some contextual reference of which I remained blissfully aware! To me the piece seemed to deal with different kinds of rhythmic complexities and tensions, building them up through interaction and then dissipating them, the recorder augmenting the textures with various kinds of bird calls, gurgling  and chuckling, as if pursuing a kind of separate internal rhythmic pulse. The koto mused over melodic figures in a cimbalon-like way, varying the figurations beautifully with strummed chords augmented by interjections from the shō, a texture through which the recorder lurched and strutted like some kind of living creature, the music’s last few measures resembling some kind of poultrified climax!

Birds of a different kind of feather then glided gently into our ambient sensibilities with the magically-distanced beginning of the folk-inspired Tsuru no Sugomori (“Nesting of Cranes”), Tosiya Suzuki here exchanging his hookah-like contraption for a recorder about the size of a clarinet. He used this new instrument to convey at once a sense of the spaces into which the birds flew to build their nests, via graceful phrasings and resonant tonguings. The music introduced new calls throughout, including one sounding uncannily to my ears like a quote from Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela”, amid the diametrically different surroundings of the Japanese piece.

A similar kind of spatial experience using a very different harmonic language was provided by Samuel Holloway’s Mono, the music beginning with what seemed like a tentative exploration of a scale and octave, the instruments making their unisons and individual notes like depth-soundings in reverse, pushing gently upwards and outwards as if creating spaces in a void, energizing the inert spaces where there was nothing except the will to receive and to be impregnated with impulses. After establishing some kind of acoustic domain, and pausing to consider how best to proceed, the music then tried some semitone ascents, involving slow repetition of single notes before moving upwards, a fascinating/frustrating/despairing process of laying bare that which silence had hitherto concealed – almost like Michelangelo’s famous slaves slowly emerging from the raw marble, frozen with tremulous wonderment at having been given their freedom in any degree or part.

Toshio Hosokawa used just two instruments to express his work Bird Fragments IIIb, the shō paired with the recorder, enough to evocatively set ground-fowls against a high-fliers! The ethereal tones of the shō at the outset conjured up images of elegance and graceful beauty, until the entry of the recorder’s timbres brought an angular, at times raucous presence to the sound-picture. This intensified with the introduction of a smaller recorder, capable of the most ear-splitting squeals, until the tones of the shō finally prevailed and order of sorts was restored.

With a third traditional piece, Chidori no Kyoku, Nanae Yoshimura demonstrated to us the expressive qualities of the solo koto, a kind of Oriental dulcimer, capable of conveying a vast array of tones, timbres and colours. I was pleasantly surprised to find the piece was actually a song, which Nanae Yoshimura delivered with pleasantly plangent tones, at first activating her instrument with a brief introduction containing a flourish and a short but dignified processional sequence before beginning to sing. The music gave an impression of great depth of melancholy, the player varying the vocal line with the occasional tremolando effect, before breaking into a quicker dance tempo – one might have interpreted the sliding figure at the end as a dry death-rattle or else a strengthening of resolve to dispense with the song and go on throughout life, taking it as it comes.

It was left to Dylan Lardelli and his beautiful work, Retracing, for the ensemble plus a guitar (played by the composer) to conclude the evening’s music. At the beginning the recorder (here, played as if it were a transverse flute) and then the shō breathed on the wind to one another, the guitar adding its voice with a few low notes as the “dialogue of winds”  grew in intensity, before being joined by the softly-strumming koto. Occasionally the recorder and shō made attention-grabbing sounds, goading the guitar and koto into a response, and animating the discourse, a dynamic which all too soon reverted to those half-lit ambiences of the opening. Particularly beautiful were the guitar’s pin-pricks of light gently punctuating the firmament of sound, everything generating a sense of emotion recollected in tranquility.

Was it a kind of re-exploration of youthful impulses? – the gently pulsating sounds seemed to re-evoke memories, but at the same time surrender them to the inexorable tread of time – it was all, at once, beautiful and desolate. Still, one wouldn’t have wanted the afternoon’s music-making to end otherwise, as the musical worlds we were taken into were, for the most part, of such a delicate and fragile nature. In fact they demonstrated something we need to be reminded of occasionally, in this frantic, insistent world we’ve created for ourselves, that simplicity and understatement have a power and resonance all of their own to refresh and renew our human spirits.

Waikanae’s chamber music year starts brilliantly with Amici Ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Amici Ensemble
(Waikanae Music Society)

Violins: Donald Armstrong and Malavika Gopal; violas: Julia Joyce and Andrew Thomson; cellos: Andrew Joyce and Ken Ichinose

Strauss: Prelude (Sextet) to Capriccio
Anthony Ritchie: Ants: Sextet for Strings, Op 185
Boccherini: Quintet in D, G 270 – Grave and Tempo di fandango
Brahms: Sextet No 2 in G, Op 36

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 21 February, 2:30 pm

It is the season for beginnings of the year for series of concerts from a variety of musical organisations. After St Andrew’s on The Terrace comes the first of Wellington’s four main chamber music bodies, the Waikanae Music Society, which presents the most concerts: nine this year.

The Amici Ensemble, comprising leading NZSO players, has been a regular and prominent contributor at Waikanae. Its composition changes according to the demands of the music; for this concert, it’s a string sextet, and all but one of the works was for those six instruments.

Capriccio was Strauss’s last opera, written early in World War II, and premiered in Munich in October 1942. The Sextet which serves as its prelude is actually the beginning of the action: the Countess Madeleine (the main figure in the opera) and her brother are listening to a sextet written in honour of her approaching birthday. The opera is greatly loved by Strauss aficionados (including the writer), a ‘conversation piece’ that debates the relative merits of words and music in opera, drawing on an 18th century play, Prima la musica, poi le parole which Salieri composed as an opera. The Countess’s two suitors are a composer and a poet, and the question remains at the end unresolved but, for the audience, it’s rather unfairly stacked in favour of the music, given the Countess’s long and rapturous soliloquy that brings the piece to an ostensibly inconclusive end. The role of Countess became one of Kiri’s greatest, and Renée Fleming has been its supreme interpreter for many years.

The sextet is simply beautiful, and these players left us in no doubt that they think so too. It was warm and generous in spirit, giving little hint of what later in the opera becomes a somewhat intense debate; its easy invention and exquisite scoring hardly suggest a composer approaching his 80th birthday. From where I was sitting the sound was opulent and beautifully projected.

With a commission from Christchurch music patron Christopher Marshall, the Amici offered here the first performance of Anthony Ritchie’s Ants, inspired by the request for a sextet (the ant is a six-legged insect, if it had escaped your notice). Its five sections considered aspects of ants’ lives and characteristics, and fate. Obviously, not a heavy-weight composition seeking to plumb emotional or intellectual complexities, nor to tax the listener with avant-garde structures and idioms, yet it did not belittle the audience’s cultivated taste. The use of varied instrumental techniques and rhythmic patterns applied to agreeable tunes conjured up impressions that reflected the titles of each section, such as ‘Anteater’ and ‘Self-impaling’, created a sense, perhaps, of danger or ingenuity. The performance fully explored all its individuality and badinage.

The Fandango from Boccherini’s String Quintet in D, commonly played in the composer’s arrangement for guitar and string quartet, has rather replaced in popularity the formerly ubiquitous ‘Boccherini Minuet’ from the Quintet in E, G 275. It’s the last movement of the string quintet in D, G 270. The quintet (momentarily retiring the ensemble’s second viola) captured most convincingly, with spiccato bowing and other Guitar effects, the character of the Andalusian dance. The performance was lively, even spectacular, particularly the virtuosic part for the first cello, flawlessly rendered by Andrew Joyce. A splendid end for the first half of the concert.

Brahms second string sextet occupied the second half. Its first movement is one of Brahms most rapturous creations, the second theme of which employs the letters of the name of the young woman, Agathe, he had spurned a few years before and which later caused him pain; it got a performance that would perhaps only have increased Agathe’s sadness over her failure to overcome Brahms complex relationship with women, that led to his never marrying. For me, it ranks alongside the gorgeous second movement of the Op 18 sextet. The rest of the Op 36 does not quite equal that first movement, with a second movement, Scherzo, in common time, that doesn’t take off till the triple time Trio section. The players found a suggestion of uncertainty in the third movement, Poco Adagio; again one wondered whether that too reflected Brahms’s regrets. The last movement somewhat recaptures the spirit of the first, as the players tossed themes from one to another in the concluding Coda.

A great start to what looks like a splendid concert series.

 

 

 

Accomplished duo play Brahms at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Catherine Norton (piano) and Carolyn van Leuven (violin)

Brahms: Violin Sonata No 1 in G minor, Op 78
Scherzo from the F.A.E. Sonata (1853)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 17 February, 12:15 pm

The lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s started last Wednesday; Middle C neglected it.

But I was delighted to be at this one, starting the year so splendidly with Brahms. Catherine Norton’s name is reasonably familiar in Wellington, and I realized that Carolyn van Leuven’s ought to have been, too, as her short biography revealed, though her origins are in Canterbury, with studies and work in Europe and America, that she has played with the NZSO. She is now working in Wellington.

It was clear from the start that this was a seriously rehearsed performance, with care over balance, each taking pains to offer space and attention to the other; the piano, even with the lid on the long stick, remained a perfect partner. Brahms offers plenty of warmth and lyricism in his violin sonatas: the warmth of the violin and discretion of the piano part. They handle bits of melodies from two of his songs, ‘Regenlied’ and ‘Nachklang’, which offer a sort of emotional basis to the music. Though it is hardly fair to expect listeners today to pick up themes from a quotation from a song in another language, the symbolism of rain and then of sun shine, the alternating feeling of sadness and peace were there; in the second poem rain mingles with tears and they are audible in the semi-quavers in the last movement.

But Brahms is always careful to avoid emotional references that are too bold and precise or too obvious. The rather secretive opening of the Adagio led perhaps to a slightly too emphatic piano passage: perhaps understanding the poetic reference would have helped the listener, but that is inadmissible. The finale, Allegro, however was both calmly paced and even, though quite assertive, clearly followed the detailed dynamic markings, bringing to an end what was a singularly polished and satisfying performance.

To play the Sonata before Brahms’s Scherzo contribution to the ‘FAE’ collaboration with Schumann and his pupil Dietrich – a gift to their violinist friend Joseph Joachim – tends to draw attention to the Scherzo’s surprising maturity, written 25 years earlier, when Brahms was 20. The confidence of the brisk opening phase with its clean staccato piano chords, followed by a broad, meditative section were splendidly captured by the players, as if Brahms was referring to the character of the other movements of the sonata for which he was not responsible. Yet the feeling almost of grandeur towards the end could have been felt as the conclusion of the work rather than just the third movement (Schumann was assigned to both the second and last movements). It’s strange that the entire sonata is not played much.

This was a recital that dramatically illustrated the value of, the gratitude we should feel for, the year-long series of Wednesday lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s on The Terrace. For me at least, if I may for a moment reflect on my own relationship with them. In the mid 80s, I went regularly to the St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts, and pinned on various departmental notice boards details of forthcoming concerts, encouraging awareness of all the delights to be found there. They were probably a catalyst that led to my taking early retirement from the Public Service and devoting myself to both nature conservation and the preservation of historic buildings in Wellington, as well as to writing about music.

St Andrew’s, led by its minister, John Murray, was also important in dramatizing various civic issues such as the preservation of Wellington’s historic buildings. This was the time of building frenzy when council and developers were allies in the widespread destruction of scores of buildings that should simply have been valued and restored. The building boom culminated in the collapse of 1988; the bitter irony followed with many of them, many head offices, being vacated soon after by the companies that had built them, abandoning Wellington for Auckland and elsewhere.

One minor but precious one was 22 The Terrace, a very early building and near neighbour of the church, which survives thanks to the efforts of John Murray and others including the feisty ‘Save our City’ campaign.

The mid 80s (1986) also marked the first New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, with its important three-week-long series of lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s. Those concerts drew together a great many leading New Zealand musicians, as well as a few from abroad, who were not the main focus of the big festival events. The lunchtime concerts, and for a couple of festivals, daily early evening concerts as well, continued to enrich the festival till, in the post-Chris Doig era, through the later 90s, its artistic standards declined, turning away from a focus on acknowledged classics in the performing arts.

With the devoted enterprise of Marjan van Waardenberg and the generous support of the church itself, St Andrew’s helps preserve much of Wellington’s important musical character.

Trombone meets harp – the intractable made enjoyable!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

OPPOSITES ATTRACT
Peter Maunder (tenor / alto trombone)
Ingrid Bauer (harp / narrator)

Basta  (1982)              Folke Rabe (1935-)
La Source Op.44                Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912)
Ngarotopounamu (2009)           Peter Maunder (1960-)
Ancient Walls (1990)            Sergiu Natra (1924-)
Three Songs                  Cole Porter (1891-1964)
So in love,
In the Still of the Night,
Begin the Beguine
Henry Humbleton’s holiday        Guy Woolfenden (1937-)
Tarantula (Fourth Mvt. from “The Spiders’ Suite”)     Paul Patterson (1947-)
Intermezzo Op.118 No.2         Johannes Brahms (1823-1897)
Take Five              Paul Desmond (1924-1977)
At Last               Mack Gordon (1904-1959
                            &Harry Warren (1893-1981)

(all arrangements by Peter Maunder)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Saturday, 14th November, 2015

I suppose there must be even more outlandish combinations of pairs of musical instruments than trombone and harp playing somewhere else in the world at this very moment, though none would, I think, bring together and reconcile such profound differences more successfully than did Peter Maunder and Ingrid Bauer with their respective instruments.

Each player performed a “solo” at the programme’s beginning, seeming to tease us further with the unlikelihood of the “Opposites Attract” title by emphasizing the specific character of each instrument – the trombone predominantly abrasive, forthright and assertive, and the harp liquid-sounding, limpid-textured and enchantingly atmospheric. How were these two very different personalities ever going to “get on”?

Peter Maunder began with Basta, a piece written in 1982 by Swedish composer Folke Rabe, himself a trombonist as well as a composer, one who writes a good deal for brass instruments. Rabe wrote this piece (the title “basta” means, of couse “Enough!” in Italian) to convey the idea of a messenger arriving to deliver a piece of news and then wanting to hurry away again, the person’s manner conveying a degree of stress and haste and volatility. But, not only did the player seem to want to convey a sense of urgency and impatience – one sensed there was a burning desire to tell listeners about things that gave rise to frustration and woe – so in contrast to the bluster and agitation, there were passages of remarkable introspectiveness,  sustained, chord-like notes producing harmonied effects most remarkably, having a “baring of the soul” effect upon the hearer in places.

No greater contrast with these candidly-expressed volatilities could have been presented than with Alphonse Hasselmans’ La Source, Ingrid Bauer making the most of the characteristics that we all associate with the harp – magic, wonderment, romance and liquid flow – by playing a piece that exploited these qualities in an almost definitive way, the work”s melody supported throughout by a rich tapestry of arpeggiated beauties.

Having thereby demonstrated to us these potential intractabilities, the musicians proceeded to make delightful nonsense of them with a series of musical partnerships that surprised and delighted the ear. For reasons outlined by Peter Maunder, in his excellent and entertaining spoken introductions to the pieces, most of the items in the concert were arrangements, made by Maunder himself. In nearly all instances I thought them highly effective as presentations, and of course their delivery, in the hands of these skilled players, was well-nigh everything one could wish for.

As one might have expected, Maunder cited the chief difficulty encountered by a trombone-and-harp partnership as lack of repertoire.. Included in the programme were at least two original works for trombone and harp, one written by Maunder himself – I did a quick internet search which turned up only one further work, though, interestingly enough, I found several other examples of, on the face of things, unlikely partnerships with a trombone, one of them involving a marimba..

So, the first two pieces played by the duo in the concert were written specifically for trombone and harp – Maunder’s own piece was Ngarotopounamu, whose English translation locates the name as belonging to the Emerald Lakes which intrepid trampers encounter when making the famous Tongariro Crossing among the Central North Island volcanoes. Such an evocation called for both epic grandeur and shimmering beauty – and in general the trombone evoked the vastness of the terrain and the outlines of the contours, while the harp filled these spaces with ambiences which suggested both beauty and loneliness in tandem.

The second original trombone-and-harp piece was by the Roumanian-born Jewish composer Sergiu Natra, whose early life was spent in Europe before emigrating with his family to Israel in 1961. His work Ancient Walls was written in 1990, a work reflecting the composer’s great fondness for the harp, and manifesting itself in a number of other compositions for the instrument. A prominent Jewish harpist, Adina Hraoz, wrote of her involvement with Natra’s music, comparing the experience with “watching a wonderful plastic arts creation”. In this particular work, the trombone seemed to me like a voice of antiquity, perhaps even Jahweh-like in places (shades of Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast”, perhaps?), interacting with the harp’s figurations in, by turns, volatile and concordant ways, and achieving a kind of synthesis of feeling at the piece’s end.

Worlds apart were three transcriptions of songs by Cole Porter, lovely things which indicated Maunder’s fondness for American popular songs of the 1930s and 40s. In general the melody line was carried by the trombone through these arrangements, with the harp preluding and post-scripting as well as occasionally punctuating the episodes with counter-melody or cadential decoration. After the opening “So in love”, Maunder’s use of a mute with his instrument for the second song “In the Still of the Night” took us to just such a scenario, the harp giving us Ravel-like delicacies creating both time and place in which the trombone could lazily and smokily etch out the contours of the melody amid the fume-filled gloom.

FInally, “Begin the Beguine” featured a change of mute (something Maunder called a “harmon mute”), which produced a “wah-wah” sound, and worked deliciously well with the song’s Latin-American rhythm – I particularly liked the harp’s “taking over” of the melody line in places, here, and wondered if that could have been exploited a bit more by the arrangements in places – the varying of textures created added interest to the melody line, the harp here playing the song’s “high” reprise, with enchanting results.

After this we were further entertained by a bit of music-theatre, a work by British composer Guy Woolfenden, entitled Henry Humbleton’s Holiday, a presentation which the performers here had (I presume) cleverly adapted to suit a New Zealand scenario. So, Ingrid Bauer left her harp to become the narrator, and  Maunder and his trombone were the “dramatis personae” of the story, a charming tale of a bank clerk who, after sleeping late, succumbed to the temptation afforded by a beautiful Monday, to naughtily “escape” from his work to the beach, accompanied by his faithful trombone!  By way of enhancing the theatrical atmosphere of it all, we as the audience even got a turn to join in the fun at a couple of points, all of which was very jolly and invigorating.

After all that trombonic self-indulgence on Henry Humbleton’s part, it was appropriate that Ingrid Bauer gave her harp a turn, which she did performing the fourth and final movement of a suite Spiders, a work for solo harp by British composer Paul Patterson called “Tarantula”. Naturally enough, the piece has a fantastically obsessive rhythmic quality, denoting the tarantella dance made by the victim of a bite from this particular creature – for the player it’s obviously a real tour de force technically, and it was despatched here with great brilliance.

At this point in the program Maunder switched trombones, from tenor to alto, to perform what I thought was perhaps the most ambitious of his arrangements, a well-known Intermezzo (the second piece) from the Op.118 set  of Brahms’ Piano Pieces. Maunder set himself a couple of challenges, here, not the least of which was the extremely difficult high entry on the first note of the melody’s inversion, when everything “turns” for home most affectingly – he actually managed it, a bit shakily the first time but nicely the second time! I liked the harp’s “interlude” in the piece’s central section, and thought the piece might be even more effective with more frequent exchanges between the instruments – for example on that exposed note, trombone and harp could have alternated, or even played it together (Brahms harmonizes the melody, so the notes are actually there to use). But I really didn’t like the piece’s final note transposed up an octave – the melody didn’t, for me, find its true, easeful destination at the end. It was the one thing which for me didn’t quite altogether work as an arrangement as it stood, lovely though some moments were.

But Take 5 was a delight from beginning to end, with plenty of interchange between the instruments and some lovely improvisatory “explorations”. After this the Gordon/Warren number At Last  (which kept on reminding me of the Marcus/Seller/Wood number “Till then”) was beautifully done, introduced by a great harp solo, then generating a deliciously indolent gait, though building up to an impressive level of intensity at the melody’s reprise, with a properly declamatory and valedictory pay-off at the end.

Peter Maunder and Ingrid Bauer are to be congratulated upon an inventive and absorbing evocation of worlds within worlds, keeping their audience entertained, intrigued, satisfied and re-educated! They’re repeating the concert in the Wairarapa this weekend, in Greytown on Saturday afternoon. For anybody in the vicinity, it’s well worth giving the enterprising pair – yes, these opposites DO attract, the trombone and harp! – a try!

NZTrio at the City Gallery with a programme slightly changed from Upper Hutt three weeks before

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZTrio (Sarah Watkin – piano, Justine Cormack – violin, Ashley Brown – cello)

Beethoven: Symphony No 2 in D (arranged for piano trio)
Kenneth Young: Piano Trio (a new commission)
Fauré: Piano Trio in D Minor, Op 120

City Gallery Wellington

Tuesday 10 November, 7 pm

I had reviewed the pieces by Beethoven and Kenneth Young at the Trio’s concert at the Arts and Entertainment Centre in Upper Hutt on 19 October. Here at the City Gallery, the Saint-Saëns was replaced by Fauré’s Piano Trio.

I was pleased at the chance to hear both the Beethoven and Young again. It confirmed my enjoyment of Ken Young’s commission by the Trio, his facility with the instrumental characteristics of the trio, both in ensemble and more particularly in his attractive and arresting writing for the individual instruments, alone or in duet.

I had written somewhat half-heartedly about Beethoven’s arrangement of his second symphony for piano trio. This second hearing changed my opinion quite significantly. Whether on account of the more immediate acoustic of the hard surfaces of the gallery (surrounded by the enhanced photography of Fiona Pardington) or of being closer to the players, or even the result of studied or incidental changes in the balance between the instruments, I can’t say.

Now I felt that the way Beethoven had distributed the orchestral parts among the trio members sounded much more idiomatic and natural than they had before. So I found myself rather more in sympathy with the comments by Ashley Brown, admiring of the success of Beethoven’s commercially-driven adaptation of his symphony.

The new item in the programme was Fauré’s Piano Trio. It is better known than the Saint-Saëns in the other programme, but not as popular as, say, the first piano quartet; it deserves to be. The historical context of music is generally relevant, at least for music of the 20th century and later. It occurred to me that here was Fauré, like Saint-Saëns, writing music that was apparently deaf to the effects of the First World War that ended four years before, to the activities of young French composers such as Les Six, to Ravel, Stravinsky, or the Second Viennese School. Yet it is a sophisticated work that reflects the genius of the period in which the composer flourished.

The opening, by piano and cello, is warm and lyrical, and I recalled his birthplace, Pamiers, south of Toulouse, towards the sunny foothills of the Pyrenées; and I didn’t really expect the build-up of energy, even passion later in the first movement. The players’ feeling for balance was specially marked in the second movement, an Andantino, which didn’t stop a particularly assertive statement from the violin towards its end, enough to make me pleased I was a few rows back from the action.

The last movement was the only place where I felt the possible impact of more contemporary musical influence, perhaps of Ravel, and through rhythms that hinted at Latin America I wondered whether Fauré had heard Milhaud’s Brazil-influenced music or even Villa-Lobos himself. The Trio captured the work’s spirit with impressive energy and a determination to prove that even at 77, Fauré still retained his creative vigour and a lively musical imagination, far from settling for an old age without originality or challenge.

 

 

Aroha Quartet , with SOUNZ and RNZ Concert, does local composers proud

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SOUNZ, Radio New Zealand Concert, and the Aroha Quartet present:
RECORDINGS CONCERT 2015

New Zealand Works for String Quartet:
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Whakatipua
JEROEN SPEAK – Auxetos
ROSS CAREY – Toccatina (Elegy)
ALEX TAYLOR – Refrain
BLAS GONZALEZ – Spasms
HELEN BOWATER – This Desperate Edge of Now
KIRSTEN STROM – Purity

The Aroha String Quartet:
Haihong Liu, Anne Loeser (violins)
Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 26th October 2015

This concert was the initial fruitful outcome of a new collaborative project between SOUNZ (Centre for New Zealand Music), Radio New Zealand Concert, and the Aroha Quartet. It was undertaken in association with CANZ (Composers’ Association of New Zealand) and Chamber Music New Zealand.

The Aroha String Quartet rehearsed and workshopped seven pieces for string quartet prior to recording sessions (held over the weekend of October 24th/25th) during which the performances of these works were recorded (RNZ Concert) and filmed (SOUNZ). From these activities came today’s public performance at St. Andrew’s.

Introducing the concert and the Quartet on Sunday afternoon at St.Andrew’s was Diana Marsh, the executive director of SOUNZ, who expressed her delight with both the processes and the projected outcomes of the project. Obviously the focus was on string quartet works this time round, but in future years there would hopefully be opportunities for other ensemble configurations.

Two of the works I had heard previously – Helen Bowater’s This desperate edge of now and Jeroen Speak’s Auxetos. The other five were new to me, though all, I think, had been recently played variously elsewhere, with Kirsten Strom’s Purity and Blas Gonzalez’s piece SPASMS being the most recently-written. Together, the works made a most absorbing programme, demonstrating the versatility of the string quartet genre and, of course, of the Aroha Quartet players.

Anthony Ritchie’s Whakatipua began the concert, a ten-minute distillation of the composer’s feeling for a typical South Island mountain landscape, specifically that found around Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu – the work, in fact was commissioned as a birthday present for someone who lives in that same district. The work is written with a real “feel” for the expressive qualities of string instruments, both in tandem and as individual voices. Instrumental lines dovetailed their utterances with a focus that served the piece’s larger lyricism, while providing plenty of energy and contrast with motor and syncopated rhythms. The opening’s “sighing” featured a number of mellifluous “exchanges” of  lyrical nature, for instance, while there were plenty of energies generated by both motoric and syncopated rhythms during the piece’s central section. One day I should like to hear, as well, the composer’s arrangement of the piece for string orchestra.

From sounds relating to a specific place we were taken by the next piece, Jereon Speak’s Auxetos, to music being plucked out of the air all around, it seemed – some sounds were born soft, some achieved ambient glow and some had agitation thrust upon ’em, to coin a phrase! The composer’s title “Auxetos” means “that which may be stretched”, the idea having its genesis in a South American folk-song recording made by the composer in which a common melody line was shared by the musicians but not synchronized. It meant that the various voices all contributed to the piece while pursuing different individual courses, held together by what the composer called an “inextricable bond of likeness”.

Over a sustained and ambient line, the music’s differently “voiced” episodes seemed by osmosis to extend the range, scope and frequency of their utterances and interactions, in places generating considerable aural excitement by various means – enormous irruptions of energy and just-as-sudden reversions to sotto voce expression, an impassioned solo ‘cello line at one point, an agitated response from the violins in reply – the sostenuto lines of the opening replaced by a ferment of agitation – a single stratospheric sustained violin note then refocused the music, the tones “wrapping around” what sounds like a reaffirmed purpose, the viola holding its long-breathed ground while the remaining instruments each pay some kind of homage to that which has endured, then fade their particular tones away to nothing. Most satisfying!

Ross Carey’s work Toccatina (Elegy) was next to be played, a piece dedicated to the memory of Australian Aboriginal singer/songwriter Ruby Hunter who died in 2010. Hunter and her partner Archie Roach were both members of the “stolen” generation of Aboriginal children, placed in homes with white foster families at an early age – her music and performances brought out these circumstances and addressed the issues that arose from them. Ross Carey’s work doesn’t actually use or quote Ruby Hunter’s music, but conveys an emotional response to her life’s work and her passing.

The music opened with a driving rhythmic pattern rather like train wheels, over which sounded melodic lines whose character changed from dogged insistence to a gentler, more soaring manner, and back again, then moving into a delicately-nuanced Martinu-like central sequence whose momentum was more circumspect of manner and intent – more relaxed and dreamy, with the melody’s shifting harmonies adding to the dream-like ambience. Inevitablty, the “train wheels” took up from where they left off, though the accompanying melodies were more assertive this time round and wasted no time building to a more impassioned climax. That done, the music gently took a bow and faded as enigmatically as it had begun.

Next came Alex Taylor’s refrain, the composer’s own program note amusingly reproducing three dictionary definitions of the word “refrain”, each of which could be cited as an “influence” upon what was to follow. Written during what Alex Taylor himself describes as a “social paralysis” time, the music explores ideas of action and inaction in the manner of an on-the-spot “gestation” – at once wry, circumspect and very involving! The music’s bruising, aggressive opening caused the lower strings to “take cover”, while reflecting a “hanging back”, an inertia, an unwillingness to engage. The process of confrontation and withdrawal was repeated by the instrumentalists, before the “broad chorales’ referred to by the composer began to work their magical spell – enchanting, and in places, halo-like ambiences which gave the moments of agitation a contrasting force and vehemence.

At one point the drifting material was spectacularly “sliced up” by slashing chords, though despite such irruptions order and reason seemed to hold sway. We heard such things as a beautiful cello solo growing from the concourse of sounds, followed by a canonic sequence from the violins, indicating some willingness to interact – and though this business became volatile and over-wrought, the music again found resolution, this time in gentle pizzicati, feet firmly touching the ground. By way of conclusion came a lament-like line, whose course seemed to turn back on itself, leaving us with equivocal feelings as to what it was that had been resolved.

Argentinian-born Auckland composer Blas Gonzalez contributed a most intriguing programme note regarding his piece SPASMS – he alluded to two sections of the work, the first “Mensurabilia” based on chromatic sequences polyphonically arranged, and the second (somewhat alarmingly) called “Olivier’s Dreadlocks”, referring to a fusion of Messiaen-like rhythmic impulses and what he described as “pseudo-reggae”. The work’s first part, Mensurabilia, put me in mind of a slowly revolving ball with patterns that repeated but which also interacted, so that one was immediately fascinated by the osmotic nature of it all – intensities built almost before one realized they had begun (rather like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings – everything was recognizable but somehow different, as the music made its unhurried way along our listening-spectrum. Much briefer and rather more “visceral” was Olivier’s Dreadlocks, a cool, pirouetted dance-like assemblage of lovely detailings between instruments, with second violin and ‘cello having a particularly engaging interaction!

We turned then to Helen Bowater’s work This desperate edge of now, inspired by the words of a poem from Mervyn Peake . Having read the latter’s gruesomely fascinating “Gormenghast” novels some years back, I wasn’t surprised to find the poem was somewhat dark and pessimistic. The words seemed to describe either an exterior or interior neo-apocalyptic scenario, a worst-case evocation guaranteed to resign one afresh to one’s invariably commonplace but relatively untroubled lot in life, even if one reflects that the events of the last few days in Paris have unexpectedly blown apart handfuls of lives in a way that does give Peake’s concluding words “Only this sliding second we share: this desperate edge of now” a kind of context that produces shivers of unease, and throws up shadows of disquiet.

Evidently the composer responded along not-too-dissimilar lines, the work’s opening resembling a cry of pain, with subsequent dark moments bringing forth nothing but angular impulses railing against one another angrily and despairingly at the prospect of human loss and the impotence of feeling. There’s no solace, here, as, in between the big, dark-browed gestures of anguish, there’s an ongoing sense of disquiet among the inner voices. It’s a skilfully-wrought study of turmoil between without and within, a bleak soundscape which the ‘cello addresses, and to which the viola responds – the ambience has an eerie quality, as if creation is giving some room to the participants in the drama (“I and they”), to nullify the fear, shock and desperation, to counter-charge the destruction and hold onto some kind of supporting through-line.

The ‘cello, then viola, and finally the other strings with their resounding pizzicati and haunting octaves, did their best to remold nearer to the heart’s desire – but the energetic charge of the “fierce instant”  that galvanized the music and its players drove things towards the inevitable. The “sliding second” (like a kind of ecstasy of awareness) fused the moment and tossed the remaining words and music in to a kind of oblivion. The viola’s abrupt concluding gesture, disquietingly, spoke volumes!

Asking us to return to our lives after experiencing such traumatic evocations of the tenuous hold we have on the same was obviously a bit much! – so, it was a relief when Kirsten Strom and her work Purity ( as per programme, originally scheduled as the third item) came to our rescue! The quartet took the opportunity to retune before playing this work (the violinist said to us “We like to make sure – especially with this piece!”). I could see what she meant when the work started – a single note was played by all instruments (in a note the composer had written “Beauty can be found in simplicity: a single note contains more than enough.”). Well,here it was, and the result was enchanting, with instruments sliding to different notes in an almost ritualistic kind of way, as if music itself was being worshipped.

The ‘cello enjoyed a broad theme, as the upper strings gave out an undulating figure, with the viola following the ‘cello. The music began to dance, the exoticism of it all maintaining a ritualistic feel, and giving rise to the listeners’ predispositions, either meditative or rather more active flights of fancy, the result  engaging and mesmeric. And all from a single note (which the quartet players made sure was “in tune” for our very great pleasure!). I liked very much the work’s patient, steadfast focus and, yes, purity! And, in conclusion, one must say that no words can express too strongly the extent of the Aroha Quartet’s commitment to the task throughout the whole of the afternoon, which, in their capable hands became a time and an occasion for celebration and delight.

Enchanting, polished recital by Rebecca Steel, flute and Ingrid Bauer, harp

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Rebecca Steel (flute) and Ingrid Bauer (harp)

Music by Debussy (En bateau and La plus que lente), Persichetti (Serenade No 10 for flute and harp), Bach (Flute sonata in G minor, BWV 1020), Piazzolla (Bordello and Café from Histoire du tango)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 21 October, 12:15 pm

I last heard Rebecca Steel in a recital with Simon Brew and Jane Curry, as the Amistad Trio, in May, when I commented that it was the third concert involving the flute in a month. I wasn’t complaining.

Here she was, a confident, conspicuous figure, contrasting with the commonly perceived view of the flute as an instrument of ethereal delicacy. With Ingrid Bauer’s harp, it proved a combination made in heaven even though there was little in their playing that could be dismissed as delicate or transcendental.

They opened with a transcription of Debussy’s En bateau. It is the first part of the Petite Suite which the Amistad Trio played in May.

I think this version worked better. Here, the thought of a marriage of true minds came to me, as the transcription of the original for piano, four hands, called up a spirit that seemed to capture even more than Debussy’s own version did what the composer might really have been seeking; and it’s well known that he tended to avoid orchestrating his music, often leaving it to others. (Yes, I know there are many wonderful exceptions to that observation).

To begin, I thought the flute had a little too much presence, and could imagine a more subtle, languid sound, but the two players soon bewitched me; I’d prefer it to the orchestration by Henri Büsser.

And it so happened that as I was finishing this review I heard Elric Hooper in one of his classic discussions with Des Wilson on Concert FM; talking about his own life, after years of their delightful, insightful discussions on a wide variety of musical, dance, theatrical and generally artistic subjects. Elric’s last words, about music that touched him deeply, that calmed his soul; he said: “En bateau; it always fills me with joy”. Yes, I think so.

At its end Rebecca made a remark about Mallarmé: a poem? Or what? I think En bateau was based on a poem of Verlaine; there’s also Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre which might also have had a connection.

La plus que lente (‘the more than slow [waltz]’) is in rather a similar vein, written for solo piano; the performance was based on an arrangement for violin and piano. Though it doesn’t purport to suggest water or clouds or anything insubstantial, an expectation of dreaminess and other-worldliness might well be met by these instruments, and they approached that spirit. In fact, as has been observed by others, it can be compared, in its ironic, satirical intention, to Ravel’s in La Valse, reflecting the immense social significance of the waltz in 19th century Europe.

The useful website AllMusic, records: “It represented Debussy’s laconic reaction to the pervasive influence of the slow waltz in France’s coffee-houses, dance-halls, and salons. But, writes Frank Howes, ‘La plus que lente is, in Debussy’s wryly humorous way, the valse lente to outdo all others.’ Apparently Debussy handed the manuscript of this piece to the gypsy fiddler Leoni, whose Romany band played to great popular acclaim in the ballroom of the New Carlton Hotel in Paris. It was almost certainly here that Debussy got the idea for the work in the first place.”

It was a delightful partner to En bateau.

I’ve heard Persichetti’s Serenade No 10 before, most recently in a 2012 performance, by Michelle Velvin, harp, and Monique Vossen, flute; it was reviewed in Middle C. In 2009, I heard, and reviewed, a performance by flutist Lucy Anderson and Ingrid Bauer, as members of the then National Youth Orchestra.

Persichetti is a strangely under-exposed composer, ignored probably for not writing in idioms that impress the academic music industry. Indeed, its eight short movements don’t allow much chance for the material to evolve in clever, complex ways. But Ingrid Bauer had briefly demonstrated a few of the harp techniques that Persichetti used to create an unpretentious work that would not tax too greatly, yet entertain an audience with visual surprises, with its tonal variety and colour as well as finding melodic ideas that were piquant, never hackneyed or sentimental. The movements ranged from triple time, dance rhythms, through many moods and soundscapes: meditative, joyous, dreamy, boisterous, always diverting. It was a performance of elegance, wit and skill.

The Bach flute sonata in G minor is one that invites a certain amount of scholarly scrutiny; it’s the seventh of his flute sonatas – the other six are authentic J S Bach – but this might be by C P E Bach, as Rebecca Steel told us, and I was easy to persuade to hear a ‘galant’ flavour in it rather than heartland J S Bach. It lies beautifully for the harp which plays alone for the entire opening ritornello, but when the flute arrived its lines were so charming that it was hard to sense its minor key modality. One had to search for that flattened ‘mi’. The two players together made wonderfully congenial sounds, especially in the middle Adagio movement, which indeed sounded too Romantic for Bach père. At times I was reminded of the melodic flavour of Telemann.

The first two movements of Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango ended the recital; Bordello and Café. It’s fair to recall that Rebecca, with her Trio Amistad, had played it in a Wellington Chamber Music concert back in May. There was nothing raunchy or unseemly about the music Piazzolla imagined for his Buenos Aires brothel (bordello is a friendlier word?) It is an engaging exploration of the latent musical potential of the tango, the variety of subtle rhythms and melodic shapes that can evolve under fertile conditions. And it was played with such verve and delight.

The Café scene was very different; I’d heard it played a few days before by Donald Maurice on his viola d’amore and guitarist Jane Curry; while that was very attractive, this offered another, perfectly tasteful approach, the harp acting like the guitar to paint a decorous scene. Without a strong rhythm, dreamily, it soon becomes more lively but after a while tricks the listener to feeling that the subsiding energy is rambling to the end. After a pause it resumes with renewed firmness and a more definite melody which is elaborated and brightens.

It was one of the most charming recitals I’ve heard this year from the very strong competition at the St Andrew’s lunchtime series.

Nikau Ensemble at St Mark’s Lower Hutt with Mozart and Dohnányi

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Nikau Chamber Ensemble (Konstanze Artmann, violin; Karen Batten, flute; Christiaan van der Zee, viola; Margaret Guldborg, cello)

Mozart: Quartet in C, KA [i.e. Appendix to Koechel’s catalogue] 171
Dohnányi: Serenade in C, Op.10 (Marcia, Romanza, Scherzo, Tema con variazoni, Rondo) for string trio

St. Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 21 October 2015, 12.15pm

I had gone to St. Mark’s expecting to hear Arohanui Strings, young string players of primary school age who have free tuition in a Sistema-style programme in the Hutt Valley. Instead, as I entered the church, I heard a flute being warmed up in the vestry.

On came the Nikau Ensemble, minus their oboist Madeline Sakofsky, who was indisposed. They were scheduled to appear next week. Not that the ensemble disappointed, but it was not until an announcement at the end of the concert that I learned the two had swapped places, and the Arohanui Strings will perform next week.   Maybe the regular members of St. Mark’s audience were aware earlier of this change, but the occasional attender did not know of it.

The Mozart work immediately made me sit up – the flute quartet made such a lovely sound. The excellent articulation of the notes in all parts was a delight. I recently read a book that consisted of interviews with leading sopranos and mezzos of the 1950s – 1990s (including Dame Kiri te Kanawa), and most of them said that Mozart was one of the hardest composers to sing – everything had to be clean and clear, and there was nowhere to hide: the line was very exposed. It is the same with the chamber music. These players were clear and accurate, yet expressive.

The variations consisted of some in major mode and others in minor, which added to their interest. The last one featured pizzicato in the lower parts, with the melody above. This gave a cheerful effect, to end a gracious work.

The Serenade of Hungarian composer Dohnányi was for string trio. Mozart’s work was written when he was 21, Dohnányi’s when he was 26. It began with a March which was jolly rather than pompous or solemn. The players produced great warmth of tone, and it was noticeable that for this music of 1904 they ‘dug deeper’ into the strings than with the Classical-era Mozart piece. The Romance began with a long-breathed melody on viola, over pizzicato on the other strings. Then the two upper strings continued the melodic line over cello pizzicato, the latter often on two strings at the same time.

The third movement was an excited yet genial Scherzo. The instruments entered one at a time, from the highest to the lowest.   Their sonority was very fine. Then theme and variations again, Dohnányi’s version beginning with a chorale-like theme. The tonality moved into minor harmonies, becoming more sombre and wistful; the movement ended on that note.

The Rondo that ended the work was brisk and cheerful. It was a busy movement for all the players. Towards the end, long chords depicted a folk-like melody, or perhaps a dance. A quiet ending received the full-stop of a loud final chord. The musicians showed real rapport in their playing together, and the audience of 40+ gave the ensemble appreciative applause.

 

New trio by Ken Young, an under-rated Saint-Saëns trio and Beethoven, not as you know him

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZTrio (Sarah Watkin – piano, Justine Cormack – violin, Ashley Brown – cello)

Beethoven: Symphony No 2 in D (arranged for piano trio)
Kenneth Young: Piano Trio (a new commission)
Saint-Saëns: Piano Trio No 2 in E minor, Op. 92

Expressions: Arts and Entertainment Centre, Upper Hutt

Monday 19 October, 7:30 pm

The programmes put together by NZTrio are always unpredictable or eccentric or from left field; there’s always something that attracts strongly, something that rings a bell and induces you to give it a go, and something quite unknown – usually a new work and often by a New Zealand composer. The latter was the case here – a commission by the trio itself from New Zealand composer Kenneth Young.

The piece that was unknown but rang a bell was Beethoven’s arrangement of his second symphony. As the programme note recorded, Beethoven (and most composers in the days before orchestral music was available on record, over the radio or even in frequent live performance) made arrangements of orchestral works for piano or small ensemble. (When I was young I acquired piano transcriptions of several Beethoven symphonies, and duet versions of Weber’s overtures).

I have to admit that it was hard to get rid of the orchestral sound and I felt for some time, through the adagio introduction, that too much was missing. By force of will I succeeded (after a while, more or less) in hearing the music on its own terms, and then it often sounded like a reduction of either a piano or a violin concerto, depending on which instrument was taking the main melodic line. What seemed most difficult to adjust to was when the piano took on the fast accompanying figures played by the orchestral strings or by woodwinds. The situation wasn’t helped by the imbalance between piano and violin on the one hand, and the cello on the other: the latter often obscured by the former. This might have reflected genuine difficulty in achieving balance between passages that were conceived for groups of instruments that found their balance more naturally.

The above relates more to the first movement than to the second or the fourth where the distribution of parts seemed to adapt more readily to the smaller ensemble. The arrangement was fairly comfortable in the Larghetto, and in the last movement, the fugal character of the writing certainly leant itself to the trio well, though I sensed that the speed and the handling of the fast ostinato accompanying figures didn’t come easy. Things only got more hair-raising in the Coda.

Though readers will sense that I have misgivings about the need to exhume a score like this, the music was still Beethoven, and the musicians still highly skilled and sensitive to the essence of his composition and its structure, and I’m sure audience curiosity would have been stimulated.

The new piece was a total success. I should, perhaps, confess to being a long-time admirer of Ken Young’s music which finds a place between rigorous modernity, as in serialism and its lesser, but still alienating incarnations, and soft-centred, traditional, tonal music. Here, in the piano trio commissioned by NZTrio, there are tunes; they evolve and weave coherently with disparate material; there are alternating episodes of calm, where the music drifts into near silence.

I did not read the programme note beforehand; but I had scribbled notes about the music seeming to be inspired (is that the right word?) by feelings of alarm or anger at political events around the world and/or in New Zealand. When I read the programme at the interval I was surprised to find that the notes recorded that Young said that he had been affected by “a couple of things that were going on – political and societal issues here in New Zealand. My ire was raised and … I always find it a good time to pick up a pen and take it out on a piece of manuscript paper.”

And the notes reflected my own impressions of the significance of the moods portrayed: the anger and frustration with which the piece begins leading to calmer and more accepting phase, concluding that one should put external troubles aside and cultivate one’s garden.

In plain musical terms, the first few pages with its hints of Messiaen or Shostakovich, the clarity of the writing for the three instruments, there was a compelling appeal where agitation subsides towards resolution, such as in the long solo cello followed by the piano drifting into silence; and then the muted violin and cello uttering ghostly, subliminal murmurings. I was moved too by the elegiac duetting by piano and violin. Life and optimism return at the end.

It got a thoroughly persuasive performance and I’m sure there will be a life for this piece long after the attention given to its initial exposure fades.

Finally, the second piano trio by Saint-Saëns: twice in the past six months I’ve heard student trios play the first movement and that had surprised me.

Let me record what I wrote at the second hearing of the trio’s first movement which I had first heard in June:

“I was even more impressed hearing it again, and wondered why I hadn’t been … acquainted with this accomplished, compelling work before, a work that deserves to be in the standard piano trio repertoire (perhaps it is in other countries). I’d have thought that it would, from its publication in 1892, have been confirmed as a major chamber music work of the late 19th century, certainly of the French school. The trouble would have been the long-lasting disparagement of Saint-Saëns as a great composer…”

I could well tidy up some of the syntax, but having now heard the whole work, I would not disagree with my opinion, especially given the well-studied performance that NZTrio lavished on it. The subdued urgency of the opening movement demands attention from the first and though it becomes calmer, it never loses its compelling momentum. I would only say that the three middle movement (there are five) are less impressive, lighter in spirit with attractive melodies that take on changing moods which is no less agreeable. The last movement has a buoyancy and impulsiveness that approaches the first movement’s drive. It is achieved through fast fugal passages, laced with Gallic wit and an energy that befits a last movement but doesn’t in the end quite match the first in weight and substance.

Nevertheless this was a most rewarding concert, very characteristic of the adventurousness and musical conviction of these splendid players. They play again in the Wellington City Gallery on Tuesday 10 November, the Saint-Saëns replaced with Fauré’s Piano Trio.