Tag: chamber music

Last three days of the triumphant 2015 Chamber Music Festival in Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part Three

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 February

Thursday 5 February

For the first time, at this festival, two trips out of Nelson were organised, primarily as part of the full festival pass package; on Tuesday it was St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti; today, to Upper Moutere to visit Höglund’s glass studio, the Neudorf Winery and a concert by The Song Company in a beautiful country church.

I decided to remain in Nelson in spite of that meaning foregoing the concert which included songs from the late Middle Ages – the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The song, Crist and Sainte Marie by St Godric, is one of four, ‘the oldest songs in English for which the original musical settings survive’, according to Wikipedia. I will record a personal reference, that Godric spent many years in the famous Lindisfarne Priory (indirectly giving me my name), where the beautiful illuminated eponymous Gospels were probably written in the early eighth century.  There was also a song by the enlightened Castilian King Alfonso X (13th century), English madrigals by Tomkins, Morley, Gibbons and Weelkes; and then a song cycle by Gareth Farr, the Les Murray Song Cycle, and modern madrigals from Australia and Denmark.

In Nelson the concert by the Ying Quartet that I heard on Tuesday at the lake was repeated.

French piano music
Thus there was only the 7:30 pm concert at Old St John’s, entitled Joie de vivre. That was on account of the full programme of French music in which Kathryn Stott was the still point of the turning world.

The earliest piece was five dances by Marin Marais (recall the film, Tous les matins du monde). Phillip Ying took Marais’s viola da gamba part on his viola which might not have altered it materially, but did remove the music from a particularly idiomatic 1700ish sound, partly the effect of a piano in place of a harpsichord or similar instrument of the period. The dances were varied and charming.

A Ravel rarity, which I’d not heard before: Trios beaux oiseaux du paradis, was sung by the Song Company, a cappella.

Kathryn Stott returned to join Rolf Gjelsten’s cello to play first, Fauré’s Après un rêve and then Debussy’s Cello sonata. Rolf read us a translation of the poem by Romain Bussine, a poet and singer who co-founded, with Saint-Säens, an important society in Paris, the Société nationale de musique, for the promotion of French music in the face of, mainly, Germanic influence. It included Franck, Fauré, Massenet and Duparc and several others. The former is very well-known and its performance was enchanting, not at all sentimental (which it rather lends itself to). The Debussy sonata may not be quite as assured a work as the violin sonata but this was a most attractive performance that both distinguished and brought together the distinct lines of the two instruments.

The New Zealand String Quartet joined Stott in César Franck’s Piano Quintet, in a performance whose spirit was very much guided by Stott’s playing, poised and restrained, with space between the phrases, her chords lean and clear. These remarks were true for the first two movements, following the composer’s indications, but in the third, Franck’s marking ‘con fuoco’ was licence for the release of the feelings it was rumoured that Franck had for a particular student at the Conservatoire. The big throbbing melody seemed steadily to increase in speed and dynamics, to quite a climax.

This most welcome performance added to the little effort initiated with Stott’s performance on Tuesday of the splendid Prelude, chorale and fugue, no doubt driven by the pianist, to pay attention to Franck’s unjustly neglected masterpieces.

Friday 6 February

Waitangi Day has usually fallen during the festival and offers an obvious excuse to explore New Zealand music, familiar and unfamiliar.

Nicola Melville remembers Judith Clark and shared friends
The 1pm concert served to showcase former Wellington pianist Nicola Melville who now teaches at Carlton College Minnesota, in music associated with her teacher and mentor at Victoria University, Judith Clark who died last year.

The programme note explained that the pieces were by composers dear to Judith’s heart. And there was a second set of pieces by composers who are among Nicola’s favourites.

The first played was Lilburn’s Three Sea Changes, the first two written in 1946 and the last in 1981. They have become familiar through the sensitive performances by Margaret Nielsen of 40 years ago, and it was good to hear them played by a pianist with a couple of generations’ longer perspective, of their acceptance as among the most characteristic of Lilburn’s piano music.

Then followed a new commission called simply, Gem, by Gareth Farr, a kaleidoscope of shifting tones, sentiment and sparkle. Its performance was full of affection and delight.

Ross Harris recorded in note about his offering, In Memory – Judith Clark, which was written for her 80th birthday, that she addressed him ‘you flea’. In it there was an immediate feeling of sadness, the notes spaced in a gentle and thoughtful way. It seemed to touch a deeper vein, especially in Nicola’s delicate and sensitive performance.

Eve de Castro-Robinson marked her tribute to Judith, “free, capricious, whimsical”, and that was the case. It might have been a characterisation as much of Eve as of Judith, with its scampering, quirky wit, that may well have enlivened the meetings between the two.

Jack Body’s offering was changed from the advertised Five Melodies to two pieces labelled ‘Old Fashioned Songs’, in Body’s inimitable treatment of them: Silver Threads among the Gold and Little Brown Jug. The expected and the unexpected in ‘Threads’, diversions from cadences that the ear and mind might have expected, yet enough of the original remained to tease. The ‘jug’ was treated to semi-staccato, spaced plantings of notes, it increased steadily in complexity, liveliness and interest, and Melville played them both with clarity and a keen sense of their wit and eccentricities.

Nicola in America
The music then moved abroad, to the United States. The first composer was an avant-gardist with wit and a mind to entertain: Jacob TV which is the American version of his Dutch name, Jacob ter Veldhuis. The Body of Your Dreams is a scathing look at the mindless world of TV advertising, using tapes and loops, rock idioms, of an advert for an electronic weight-loss programme, using repeated words a few of which I could pick up like ‘fat’, ‘press the button’ ‘no sweat’, ‘amazing’, the language of the bottom end of youth culture, advertising and the electronic media.

The piano was very busy in collaboration with the junk-burdened noises on the tape, good for a moment’s contemplation of the meaning of music, satire and what passes for culture.

And finally, a return to a composer I think ranks high in Melville’s pantheon: William Albright who wrote a number of rags, among much else. These two were entitled: Dream Rags, comprising The Nightmare Rag, with the parenthesis suggesting Night on Rag Mountain (though I detected no hint of Mussorgsky) and Sleepwalker’s Shuffle. They were, I have to confess, closer to the idiom of ragtime than the pieces by Novacek heard a few days before. In any case, Melville was very much at home with them and they delighted the audience.

Verklärte Nacht in the evening
The 7:30pm concert called on The Song Company and both string quartets. The Song Company sang songs from the 14th and 16th centuries. William Cornish’s ‘Ah Robin, gentle Robin’ with the singers taking varied roles, the men first and then the women while conductor Peelman accompanied with a drum; voices and the drum steadily rose in pitch and intensity, as the words revealed the singer’s despondency at the realisation of his lover’s likely faithlessness.

‘Where to shud I expresse’ possibly by Henry VIII followed, along with the anonymous, c1350 song ‘The Westron Wynde’, each a lament on a lover’s fickleness, or at least, absence. Here was the style of singing that best suited The Song Company, capturing lovers’ troubles with individual voices most advantageously on display, between their coming together to create beautiful vocal fusion.

Two New Zealand pieces were Lilburn’s Phantasy for Quartet, and John Cousin’s Duos for violin and viola of 1973. The Lilburn was a 1939 exercise written at the Royal College, for Vaughan Williams, winning the William Cobbett Prize. Here was a nice link with the previous song bracket, as Lilburn used the tune from The Westron Wynde, at first with restraint, and then increasingly energetic. The New Zealand String Quartet gave it a sweet, loving performance; apart from an early performance in Christchurch, I think it was said to be the near premiere in New Zealand.

Cousin’s three duos were Waltz Lee, Lullaby for Peter and Polka for Elliot, very much a family affair. These early examples of the composer’s work are charming, characteristic, offering a nice opportunity to hear other than his more commonly encountered electro-acoustic music. They were played engagingly by Janet and Phillip Ying.

The Ying Quartet returned in full to play their own arrangement of an Alleluia composed by Randall Thompson in response to the early years of the Second World War. There were hints of Samuel Barber sure enough, but its somewhat incongruous lamenting character in contrast to its title, led to an interesting, quite complex contrapuntal piece; the quartet may well have made it something of a personal utterance.

Which left the rest of the concert to Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht). The programme note described it rightly as ‘his glorious Sextet’, and this performance by the New Zealand String Quartet, plus the violist and cellist from the Ying Quartet, made a wonderfully rich and emotional job of it.

Saturday 7 February

Cornerstone Classics – Haydn and Mozart
Here, on the festival’s last day, was the chance to hear three New Zealand players not otherwise represented. Their style however, conformed with the approach to early music that was one of the hall-marks of the Song Company. Douglas Mews at the fortepiano and Euan Murdoch on the cello are well-known exponents of ‘period performance practice’; the violinist replacing the advertised Catherine Mackintosh, Anna van der Zee, is a regular member of the NZSO’s first violins, but proved to be fully sensitive to the playing style considered appropriate for the ‘classical’ period.

Two Haydn piano trios (Hob.XV/18 and 19) enclosed Mozart’s violin sonata in C, K 403. The feathery decoration applied to Haydn’s G minor trio enhanced the fortepiano’s lightness of sound, which in turn coloured the playing by the two stringed instruments. Even for one who is perfectly used to music played in accordance with historical practice, the first impression when a new and, I must confess, unfamiliar piece is played, is of a touch of the insubstantial. But the ears quickly adjust. Haydn’s trio in A (No 18), played after the Mozart, was as full or ornaments as was No 19, but more lightened with wit, and quirky gestures as well as the modulations that even one quite used to Haydn’s behaviour finds surprising.

I really enjoyed Mozart’s violin sonata, played in comparable, genuine style, it sounded closer to the Romantic era than Haydn, even though written ten years earlier; it’s part of an incomplete set that his friend the clarinettist Anton Stadler tidied up/completed. The first movement is marked by a strong rhythm, with an unusually emphatic first note in the bar, or at least that is the way it was played (I hadn’t heard it before). It seemed that the Andante might have been marked molto andante on account of its rather imposing slowness. I found the whole thing very attractive and so it did surprise me that I hadn’t come across it before.

Grand finale –cries of the cities
No doubt the big crowd at the final concert in the cathedral was there mainly for the Brahms Sextet. Yet there may well have been a good deal of curiosity about the set of seven ‘cries’; they filled the first half.

They involved, again, both quartets and the Song Company. The order departed from that in the programme. First came not the earliest, but the Cries of London by Orlando Gibbons, inspired by the earlier Cries of Paris. It’s a far cry from Gibbons’s familiar madrigals and keyboard pieces with its colourful and probably sociologically interesting words and atmosphere.

Louise Webster’s Cries of Kathmandu succeeded in using music of a generalised Indian character embroidered with Hindu religious imagery to paint an intriguing though on balance, distressing picture of a once charming subalpine city largely ruined by capitalism and mass tourism.

It was a short step to Jack Body’s Cries from the Border, a piece typifying the composer’s profound human and political concerns, now coloured by his own imminent mortality. The tale of the fate of German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, trapped on the French-Spanish border attempting to escape from Vichy France and the Nazis in 1940. Body wrote: “Unlike Benjamin, I am a traveller reluctant to transit. But the sentence has been pronounced…”. Musically it expressed these complex emotions committedly and convincingly.  Jack Body was there to stand for the applause.

The Cries of Paris of c. 1530 by Clément Janequin was a predictable sequel. Like that of its imitator Gibbons, it did contain the cries of the city’s street vendors, which were no mere medieval phenomenon, but petered out only around the First World War. The performance left no doubt about the reason for their survival and now renewed popularity.

Then came two New Zealand latter-day efforts: Cries of Auckland by Eve de Castro Robinson which dealt with the anti-Springbok Tour and the cries of the protesters throughout the country, still vivid in the memories of all of us who were involved: “1 2 3 4, we don’t want your racist tour! … Shame! Shame! …Amandla, Amandla”  and hints of later protests about asset-sales and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

And Chris Watson contributed a comparable political offering from Wellington. More words, and a wider lens: the morning commuter trials (cries of frustration?), the dramatic revealing of Wellington Harbour at the bottom of Ngauranga Gorge (cries of spiritual uplift?), but then the realities of political Wellington at the time of the negative, dirty politics, election campaign – the cries of debate, perhaps the cries of hopelessness, from the victims of the victory of inequality.

Brahms Sextet
The Ying Quartet plus the violist and cellist of the New Zealand String Quartet had the last word, with the glorious second string sextet by Brahms (Op 36). Reference is usually made, and was here, to the belief that it contained hidden reference to Agathe von Siebold with whom he had been in love with a few years before, encoded in the first theme of the first movement. Typically, Brahms shied away from commitment, which he apparently later regretted. The work’s high emotional intensity, especially the Adagio, slow movement, can colour the listening experience, but it hardly matters what specific narrative the listener allows to accompany a performance, for it is such a transcendent experience from the young composer, aged 33.

These festivals have often succeeded in bringing things to a conclusion with a musical creation of unusual splendour and emotional power. This one achieved that very movingly.

 

Nelson chamber music festival: the second three days, with a trip to St Arnaud

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part Two

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Monday 2 to Wednesday 4 February

Monday 2 February

PianoFest I: Dance
Sunday’s rain which had been threatened to continue today, disappeared and there was sun first thing, but clouds soon returned and umbrellas reappeared as we set off for the 10.30 PianoFest I: Dance.

It featured four prominent New Zealand pianists: David Guerin, Jian Liu, Stephen de Pledge and Sarah Watkins. ‘Dance’ was a rather approximate term as the first piece, Ravel’s Mother Goose, in the original piano duet form, was not designed for dancing; though Ravel’s later orchestration was in fact expanded into a ballet in 1912. I don’t know how successful it was or how much it is performed today. But predominantly it consists of charming, quiet depictions of some of Perrault’s (and others’) famous fairy stories. It was played by Jian Liu and Sarah Watkins, who brought to each scene a wonderful delicacy, precision, an awareness of the spirit of each tale and the pianistic colours demanded by that character. There were vivid revelations in each of the five movements – a special finesse in the depiction of the Beauty and the Beast (Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête).

There were three pieces by New Zealand composers: David Hamilton’s Three Rags were genuine dance material, closer to the Scott Joplin originals than the elaborate and over-sophisticated rags by Novacek, heard the day before. These were for eight hands at two pianos, positioned face to face, Watkins and de Pledge on the Steinway on the left and Guerin and Liu at the Yamaha on the right. Lilburn’s rather untypical Tempo di Bolero written when he was flatting in his twenties in Christchurch with Leo Benseman and Lawrence Baigent, both pianists. So it was for three pianists, in very close proximity; the three this time were, treble to bass, Guerin, Liu and Watkins. It was an energetic piece, that rather burdened the bolero rhythms with complexity, but nevertheless made one rather wish that Lilburn had been drawn into the business of composing for the theatre, to find the sort of popular success that Farquhar found with his Ring round the Moon music. Though the three Canzonettas, that were played on Wednesday in the Stabat Mater concert were teasing hints at what might have developed if the climate had been different.

The last piece in the programme was an extended exploration of Bottom’s characterisation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘A Tedious Brief Scene: Bottom’s Dance’ by Leonie Holmes. The employment of all four pianists (left: Watkins, Guerin; right: de Pledge and Liu) imposed a certain chaos on the music that depicted Bottom, the butt of jokes and teasing, through rhythms and in the handling of musical ideas.

Also in the hour-long programme was the third Slavonic dance from Dvořák’s first set, in the composer’s original piano duet form. It occurred to me that we could use a couple of nationwide recitals featuring the two pianists, de Pledge and Guerin, doing the entire two books of these small masterpieces.

The only music by Scharwenka that I knew till a few years ago was this Polish Dance (Op 3 No 1) that both my wife and I were surprised to confess to have played, after a fashion, in our youth. The programme note explained how commonplace our experience was, noting that it had been one of the ‘greatest hits’ of its time, the sheet music selling in millions.

Prokofiev’s own piano arrangement of parts of his Romeo and Juliet ballet is for one pianist – here, Stephen de Pledge alone. The Lily Dance of the Maidens: curious and careful, contrasting with the heavy, confrontational Montagues and Capulets.

In the afternoon we got PianoFest II
It was advertised as ‘World Voyage’, for the usual reason of widespread composer birthplaces, though the distribution was pretty normal: France and Germany, the United States and a couple of pieces by New Zealanders.

This festival has been given a certain quirky interest by pairing music that has been transformed, generally by the composer from the original instrumentation to something else.

Beethoven featured twice. Late in his life, he had rewritten his third piano trio (heard on Sunday), as a string quintet (heard on Saturday); and on Monday we heard his Piano Sonata in E, Op 14 No 1 which he later transcribed as a string quartet to be heard on Wednesday from the young Nelson quartet, The Troubadours.

The Piano sonata was the first piece in the PianoFest II programme and it was played by Jian Liu.

I was enchanted by Liu’s playing of this unpretentious sonata, evincing a very carefully considered, understated performance of beautiful delicacy, with fleet little decorative passages, that, again, made me long to hear Liu in performances of a lot more Beethoven.

The contribution from France was Messiaen’s Regard du silence from the huge canvas, the Vingt regards sur L’Enfant Jésus, played with enormous authority by David Guerin. From the United States: John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction for two pianos, from Stephen and Sarah who exploited the interesting sonic possibilities that Adams wrote into his boisterous piece.

New Zealand composer Sarah Ballard wrote a set of four pieces representing the four medieval elements: earth, air, fire and water, and here we heard the four pianists (treble to bass, left to right: de Pledge, Guerin, Watkins and Liu) in two that portrayed an ancient Mexican cave and Mount Erebus.

A different disposition of the four pianists then played Gareth Farr’s Bintang, probably danceable enough, but a stimulating and impressive listen.

Bach by Candlelight
The evening concert was the focus on Bach which has become a key element in the festival. It was made particularly distinguished as the first appearance of The Song Company; and the forces also included both resident string quartets Douglas Mews (organ), Robert Orr (oboe) and Loan Perernau Garriga (double bass).

To start, Ying Quartet’s leader Ayano Ninomiya gave an impressive performance of the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No 3 for solo violin, and followed with Eugène Isaÿe’s astonishing treatment of the music  in his second sonata for solo violin. The performances of both pieces were distinguished by extremely high technical brilliance and artistic integrity.

The first of Bach’s vocal pieces on the programme was Jesu meine Freude. This is one of Bach’s real masterpieces and demands exquisite balance and blending between parts and both richness and dramatic characterization. Inner parts sounded too prominent, and though each voice was technically assured, the tone was not uniform; I am not bothered by vibrato in baroque music, but here it obtruded occasionally. Here was an example, I felt, when the possibly authentic use of one voice to a part made it very hard to meet achieve a simple, beautiful, dramatic performance.

Hannah Fraser sang the best-known aria from the St Matthew Passion, ‘Erbarme dich’. I’d loved her Brahms songs the night before, but was not so convinced by this, perhaps on account of a voice that was so warm and emotional, beautifully adapted to the 19th century, but didn’t meet the stylistic expectations that have become normal for Bach today. Her lovely accompaniment was from a blend of players from the two quartets plus bassist Joan Perarnau Garriga and organist Douglas Mews.

Soprano Mina Kanaridis sang the gorgeous aria, ‘Mein gläubiges Herze’, from Cantata No 68, with a real sense of ecstasy and conviction. But the real triumph of the concert was the performance by bass Alexander Knight of the cantata Ich habe genug (Cantata No 82), with a simply superb voice, and a stage demeanour that commanded the entire space both by means of his penetrating gaze at his audience and the sombre expressiveness of his singing. He was supported admirably by oboist Robert Orr, and again bassist Perernau Garriga and Mews at the chamber organ, all three of whom had given comparable backing to Mina Kanaridis.

A second instrumental piece was the third of Bach’s not often played Gamba Sonatas (BWV1029): on Gillian Ansell’s viola, accompanied by Douglas Mews, it was modest and unpretentious, and free of artifice of any kind.

 

Tuesday 3 February

To St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti
This was the day of the lake: when the music and the pass holders go to St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti where the Ying Quartet play in the lovely little chapel whose windows give on the beech forest and to the distant mountains. We walk to the School of Music where the bus will depart at 9.30am. The uncertainty of the weather, though the sun was shining then, means there is a wide variety of dress, from optimists to pessimists: I was in the middle with a light jacket and proper shoes.

Most of the way in through varied farmland and the series of villages south of Nelson till we turn off after about half an hour; the road becomes more winding and we travel through more plantation forest; almost no native trees apart from occasional patches of totara till within about five miles of St Arnaud. Why did the State allow land sales and native forest felling to make way for exotics so close to this beautiful lake? However, the immediate environment is largely beech.

After morning tea at the Visitor Centre we go to the little chapel where the Ying Quartet is already seated, backs to the windows, while the audience gets lovely views of close kanuka and more distant beech.

Quartets by Haydn and Tchaikovksy and a trio by Anthony Ritchie
 The acoustic is gorgeous in the small timbered space with its curved laminated beams that create the feel of a vaulted gothic crossing; and the first few minutes are spent wallowing in the immediacy of the individual and collective sounds of the Haydn first movement. Better than at earlier performances we could here enjoy the quartet’s elegant and sensitive playing, Haydn’s wit and teasing, all with such care for the ebb and flow of phrases and dynamics.

The programme is Haydn, Op 20 No 4, Tchaikovsky, Quartet No 1 and a trio by Anthony Ritchie, entitled Spring String Trio. The Tchaikovsky drew more power and drama from the players, their painstaking attention to fluctuating dynamics and rhythmic effects more exploited.

In introducing Ritchie’s little piece, in which leader, Ayano Ninomiya stood down, giving the violin part to second violin Janet Ying, Phillip Ying referred to the piece as Spring String Ying Trio. Though commissioned as a birthday present, its tone was initially serious though quite brisk: getting older is no laughing matter.

But it was a delight to hear Janet Ying’s fine, confident violin playing, unobscured by her leader’s dominance, which is the common fate of the second violin. Its slower second section cemented its place as a small but substantial work.

Helene Pohl talks with the four PianoFest pianists
Back in Nelson later in the afternoon, it was the turn of the four pianists participating in the PianoFest, to chat with Helene Pohl. As well as exploring each pianist’s early experiences, and how a commitment to a professional career emerged, there was interesting discussion on the sense or otherwise of multi-pianist performances such as we had at the first and second ‘PianoFests’: the consensus was that it was fundamentally an eccentricity and perhaps stupid, except for Schubert’s which were justified as a means of getting very close to members of the opposite sex.

Kathryn Stott
Kathryn Stott’s major piano recital was in the evening. It demonstrated her special interest in French music with Ravel’s Sonatine, a nocturne by Fauré, L’Isle joyeuse by Debussy and Franck’s formidable Prelude, chorale and fugue. Their variety, and the rare hearing of the splendid Franck made it a memorable and, for the many probably unfamiliar with Franck, a revelatory event. The second half was dominated by Stott’s illuminating playing of the original piano version of Grieg’s Holberg Suite, too rarely heard, that restored Grieg’s place as a great piano composer; the rest was from South America, Villa-Lobos’s Choros No 5, Guanieri’s Danza negra and Ginastera’s Dance No 2 from Argentinian Dances. It ended terrifyingly with a rather extended, killer piece she had commissioned from Graham Fitkin called Relent, evidently a mark of his sense of humour since its speed, ferocity, complexity and sheer impossibility for anyone less than a Stott, was utterly unrelenting.

Wednesday 4 February  

The anchors of the festival
Three main groups provide the backbone of this year’s festival. The New Zealand String Quartet of course; the Ying Quartet from the United States; and the Song Company from Australia. Some festivals are very particular in the range of musical genres, but most like to include players that lie perhaps a little apart from the popular central element of a festival’s character.

Several times it has been a singer or singers. That is excellent because the world of chamber music tends to give rise to somewhat narrow areas of acceptability for quite a few, who might just surprise themselves if they ventured out of their narrow comfort zone.

So the Song Company had an important role to play in a festival like this, and they tackle it on several different levels: inserting a couple of Brahms Lieder in a chamber music programme; doing several of Bach best loved choruses and arias alongside violin pieces; testing the water with a wide variety of styles and musical periods – Medieval and Renaissance polyphony and madrigals, the Baroque, the classical and the romantic periods, the modern or twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And of course, there are factions within each of those categories, those who turn off early music, or scorn romantic music, or art songs, or opera but love religious choral music, find English music boring, and so on.

Roland Peelman and The Song Company
A challenge to all these limiting fads and fashions was offered on Wednesday morning in the vigorous and wide-ranging discussion between Rolf Gjelsten and Roland Peelman, the director of The Song Company.

As with all these sessions designed to shed light on the making of a musician, this began with Peelman’s description of the unmusical life in a small Flemish town in Belgium where, from nowhere, a strong musical impulse arose, that sought out a music teacher at about age eight and induced the family to buy a piano. Then a quite rich musical life at a boarding school, a useless year at a local conservatorium (he mentioned almost no Belgian place names apart from Ghent), but more fruitful general education at university.

His learning went on to Cologne, the base of the post-Darmstadt, avant-garde school led by Stockhausen, and it included the important (for Peelman) teaching of Alois Kontarsky (you’ll remember him from a chamber group at one of the very early New Zealand Festivals in Wellington in the late 1980s).

Insights into conducting came mainly from those with almost no standing as a conductor but with a flair for giving invaluable guidance and inspiration. One had said he could tell him everything about conducting technique in an hour but it would take a lifetime to learn.

While he had initially said that the impression of Australasians that Europe was seething with culture was delusional, his later account of rich and flourishing arts and music scenes in at least the main centres of Europe, hardly supported his argument. Much of what he said seemed to place high value on wide general cultural awareness and knowledge instead of on narrow, music-only, highly technical, and detailed analytical study.

His own wide exposure to literature, several languages, history, the arts generally and music in particular was enviable, especially in a country with steadily narrowing cultural and intellectual horizons.

Peelman was interesting about the close relationship between musicians who inhabited the avant-garde and those who explored early music performance practice from the 1970s. The one had spawned and informed the other; especially the realisation that one could not live on the former but there were growing audiences for the latter.

To Australia
His account of his shift to Australia in 1982 was fascinating. His contact with Aboriginal ‘Dreaming’ music at Waggawagga left a mark on his brain; his first job was at Mt Gambier on the South Australia/Victoria southern border teaching keyboard and singing and conducting the brass band.

Life became serious when he was appointed assistant chorus master at Australian Opera in Sydney, in the far-off days when the company had 22 productions in its annual repertoire (now about half that in a good year; it was the late 80s when I started going to Australia to make wonderful opera discoveries). Though he allowed himself reservations about aspects of opera as spectacle and its perception as amusement for the wealthy (“music takes second place”, he said – maybe, but not for me), he gained varied and valuable skills, describing the hectic, non-stop life as intoxicating.

Then in 1990 came an offer of appointment with The Song Company, Australia’s only full-time professional small choir. He had much to say about its evolution, about the fundamental contrast between four and six voices. A finally he disclosed that, after 25 years, he’s ready to take on something else.

PianoFest IV
After lunch on this fine day, when the rain had gone, the fourth in the series of PianoFests, which had been planned and organised by Stephen de Pledge as a mini-festival-within-a-festival, took place in Old St John’s, as its deconsecrated embodiment is now known.

More multi-pianist performances, this one subtitled ‘Opera’. Official participants were: David Guerin, Jian Liu, Stephen de Pledge, Sarah Watkins.

The first, played by De Pledge by himself was Liszt’s transcription of Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde. Liszt had the taste to ensure that Wagner’s scoring did not lose anything in the process, and the piano version moved just as ecstatically from calm grief to necro-erotic frenzy.

Nor did the transcription of the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg suffer with four hands at two piano (Stephen on piano A, left, and David Guerin on piano B, right); in the transcription by Max Reger, its lines were if anything etched with more clarity than in the original.

Norma
But the real revelation was the fantasia drawing melodies from Bellini’s wonderful opera, Norma, by Czerny, a contemporary of Bellini, as well as of Rossini and Schubert. He was a piano teacher and composer of piano etudes and impossible exercises: this one for six hands at one piano. The emotions remained alive and well, and the rhythmic pulse under the final heart-rending melody, rather undid me.

It lay in the way he spread the melodies to the very limits of the keyboard, with not inappropriate adornments; inter alia, it called for De Pledge, in the treble position, to reach repeatedly with his right arm across Sarah Watkins to plant notes outside of his own territory; Sarah was wedged between, with David Guerin at the bass. The combination, towards the end, of exciting, pulsing bass rhythms and gorgeous, heart-rending melody, rather undid me. As I remarked yesterday, I felt, as the result of the glorious music that Bellini wrote for this great opera, and Czerny’s sensitive and exciting treatment, that this piece had a serious independent existence, vindicating the genre of six or more hands at one piano.

Freddie
Then came another kind of novelty, though it was not altogether clear whether Double F for Freddie, had another life as some kind of opera, it was, as described, a humorous romp at the very limits of one piano: viz. four at one keyboard – from top to bottom, Guerin, Watkins, Liu, with de Pledge offering, as far as I could see, just the final deep bass note at the end.

Carmen for the madhouse
Then came an indescribable, extraordinary party piece devised by De Pledge for all four pianists in riotous disarray. It’s mainly Carmen, but there are other impertinences: Die Fledermaus, and Sarah suddenly interrupting Stephen doing Micaela’s act 3 aria with the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, which was the signal for the arrival of other players, of growing chaos, of shifting piano stools, of forcible position changes at different keyboards, some corruptions like the Habanera delivered by Jian with feminine delicacy.

Carmen herself arrives (Rae de Lisle), tosses the rose to the pianists and then joins the riot. Five at two keyboards is unbalanced however, and De Pledge set out to find another pianist in the audience, and finally forcibly arrests Kathy Stott; she puts up a considerable fight to avoid this unseemly press-gang musical recruitment but joined the chaos of six at two keyboards with gusto to deliver the coup-de-grace to Carmen.

Troubadours
The third event of the day was at 6.30pm in the Cathedral, restoring a more orderly and civilised tone. The Troubadours, the noted student string quartet, who have been spotted around the city during the week, playing at schools and charities, were here to play Mozart’s Divertimento K 136, and the old filmic hit, Over the Rainbow. In particular, they played Beethoven’s own arrangement for string quartet of his piano sonata in E, Op 14 No 1.

These players, students variously at Auckland, Waikato and Victoria universities, were Julian Baker, Hilary Hayes, Jin Kim and Heather Lewis. Their playing was stylistically idiomatic, beautifully articulated, nicely phrased and judged for gentle rhythmic and dynamic variations.

Stabat Mater
This title referred of course to the great Pergolesi cantata that filled the second half. Sung by two sopranos from The Song Company, Mina Kanaridis and Anna Fraser, it was accompanied by the Ying Quartet, minus Janet Ying, plus Donald Armstrong and Douglas Mews at the chamber organ.

For a work that is so famous and so well-loved, I have heard it too few times, more in other countries than in New Zealand. I think it is no longer spoken of as it once was, with a degree of scorn or superciliousness, the result of a piece of music being too much loved on account of its beauty, not a virtue in mid-20th century avant-garde circles.

This performance was truly beautiful, fully justifying the employment mainly of the festival guests from Australia and the United States. The voices expressed the overwrought religious grieving that lies at the heart of the medieval poem, with sobriety and restraint, as well as extraordinarily sensitive control of tempi and expressive gesture. Led by Ayano Ninomiya’s strong but scrupulously handled violin, the ensemble gave a performance that would have impressed the most discriminating audiences anywhere in the world.

The earlier part of the concert had comprised a lovely Song without Words by Gillian Whitehead from Rolf Gjelsten’s solo cello. Donald Armstrong and Gillian Ansell played Lilburn’s entrancingly lyrical Three Canzonettas for violin and viola. Ayano Ninomiya delivered a Kreisler piece of high virtuosity and musical interest, breathtakingly.

Then the Song Company appeared to sing El fuego by Mateo Flecha, a 16th century (and so, contemporary with Tudor England) Spanish (Catalan) ‘ensalada’, in five parts, or was it six?  Vividly Hispanic, it and its performance were a delight.

All this highly heterogeneous material made it one of the most unexpected and delightful programmes of the festival.

 

Thirteenth Nelson chamber music festival better than ever: the first three days

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part One

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Friday 30 January to Sunday 1 February

Introduction

Coverage of this year’s Adam Chamber Music Festival (the 13th) will be divided into three parts. This first part covers the concerts, ignoring the Gala Dinner on Thursday the 29th at which an ad hoc variety of music was played, from Friday 30 January to Sunday 1 February. Parts 2 and 3 will follow.

Readers who have been drawn to the website of Chamber Music New Zealand will recognize among the following reviews of this year’s festival, texts that appeared under a pseudonym in the former source. Readers will notice that the style for the CMNZ website was rather more casual that has become the pattern in Middle C, and perhaps it is a style that we should adopt.

The aim of CMNZ was to create a lively impression of the whole environment of the festival – the geographical and cultural setting, and the weather, for those who don’t know Nelson; after all, it is by far the largest and most varied chamber music presentation in New Zealand. The atmosphere created by the artistic leadership and management which was so inclusive and welcoming, peripheral activities that audience members might have enjoyed.

The key players of the festival were: Colleen Marshall, the longstanding chair of the Nelson Music Festival Trust; Bob Bickerton, the ubiquitous manager, multi-instrumentalist, trouble-shooter, master 0f ceremonies and introducer of many of the concerts; the artistic directors, Helene Pohl and Gillian Ansell, who double as the first violinist and violist of the New Zealand String Quartet.

The New Zealand String Quartet has been the musical anchor of the festival from the beginning in 1992, and they gave many performances on their own and shared the stage, individually and as a whole, with many of the other performers including, most importantly, the Ying Quartet.

From Wellington to Nelson
We took the long road to Nelson as we’ve often done before: across the Strait in magnificent weather from that foreign country, the North Island, leaving the stark, dry, Brent Wong hills of Cape Terawhiti, to reach the dramatic, green and delightful Marlborough Sounds. Coffee at Blenheim’s well-preserved railway station, overnight at Kaikoura with the looming, jagged Seaward Kaikouras to westward, then inland by the Leaders Road to Waiau and Hanmer Springs, which becomes more Swiss alpine with every passing year.

I never tire of the Lewis Pass, first cycled in my teens over unsealed roads, memories still clear, of heat, very rare traffic, dips in the rivers, and the arrival of sandflies with the beech forests around the pass.

It’s a long, still largely uninhabited drive, through 33 degree Murchison, to Nelson, spotting traces of the sadly aborted Railway, victim of faint hearts, north from Gowan Bridge.

Our favourite back-packer’s awaited us in Nelson – we’ve stayed there for more than ten years; mainly young, foreign visitors, German, French, Dutch, occasional Swedish, Japanese, Italian and Spanish, generally much younger than us: intelligent, well-read, liberal – even radical, with refreshing, unclouded views about New Zealand. After coming back late evening from a concert, there’s still time to fix the world.

Ah, yes – the concerts.

Changes in 2015
There are still opinions about the benefits of having compressed the former 17-day festival into 10 days, which was a change at the 2013 festival. It somewhat reduces flexibility for excursions like to Golden Bay, but you can get more music in a shorter time.

The big change at the 2015 festival is the sad closure for strengthening of the Nelson School of Music (whose example of the European pattern of music conservatories in every town failed to take root here) and its replacement by St John’s church on Hardy Street. At least, the church was designed by the same architect as the School of Music, and the sound is lovely.

We were assured by Bob Bickerton that the strengthening and improvements to the school of music would be complete for the next festival in 2017: improvements will include air conditioning and better facilities for the audience and performers.

Friday 30 January  

The Grand Opening Concert, however, was as usual in the Cathedral. They wheel in some of the festival’s main performers: the New Zealand String Quartet of course, whose initiative the festival was back in 1992, the New York-based Ying Quartet, clarinettist David Griffiths and harpist Helen Webby. Greater variety of music and means would be hard to devise, no doubt opening ears for many in the
audience. As ethnically mixed as our hostel: French, Russian-Jewish-Argentinian, Hungarian, German and New Zealand. The only ‘main-stream’ piece was one of Schumann’s rather neglected, but highly rewarding, Quartets (in F).

For most, there was no familiar piece, yet the audience seemed delighted: at the beguiling opening section of the violin and harp Fantaisie by Saint-Säens (played by Ying Quartet first violinist Ayano Ninomiya and harpist Helen Webby); then a sonic adventure in Florence by Hamilton composer, Martin Lodge, played by the cellists from the two string quartets, one the observer, the other the manifold sounds of the city and its people.

The New Zealand String Quartet and David Griffiths played a three movement piece by Osvaldo Golijov whose opera, Ainadamar, on Garcia Lorca astonished last year’s New Zealand Festival in Wellington. Based on writing by an early Jewish rabbi, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind mixed hypnotic Klezmer rhythms with the outlandish sounds that came from Griffiths’ five clarinets (hardly knew there were so many models), and he followed with a brief solo clarinet piece by Béla Kovács.

The main course in the second half was the little-known Schumann quartet, in F major, Op 41 No 2, played by the Ying Quartet. A highly persuasive performance, revealing a beautiful slow movement and highly inventive Scherzo.

I bought the Ying’s CD of the three Schumann quartets.  What greater endorsement could there be? 

Saturday 31 January 

It rained lightly overnight and was a bit cooler. A late start? But the temptation of hearing Gillian Ansell talking with Kathryn Stott at 10 am abbreviated breakfast rituals. It was in St John’s church.

Kathryn Stott
She proved a thoroughly unpretentious virtuoso star, born in a town called Nelson in Lancashire of working class parents with musical interests if not great accomplishment; but enough to detect and encourage piano learning aged five which led at eight to her applying for and being accepted in the Menuhin school. Though her first years were productive and contented, by her teens she had fallen into the hands of an unsympathetic teacher, chronically embittered in Kathryn’s opinion, and she left to enter the Royal College of Music. Things went well there, encountering both Nadia Boulanger and Vlado Perlumuter who gave her deep sensibility into French music. She did not disgrace herself when, perhaps prematurely, she entered the Leeds Piano Competition; it led to an agent and sudden demands for a much bigger repertoire than she commanded. Her career seemed to be spinning out of control and before long she withdrew entirely.

But after picking herself up, she had an unusual and fruitful encounter with Yo Yo Ma and success came quickly; finally, at the peak of her career, she finds herself in a Nelson on the other side of the world.  A real insight into her talent and naturalness, and determination to hear everything she will play here.

Lines from the Nile
After lunch, a small musico-dramatic show took place in the church hall. A piece called Lines from the Nile, recreating a musical soiree in colonial Nelson, in a hall such as we inhabited. Soprano Rowena Simpson graduated from Victoria University before heading for the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague to study early music practice. That was more than 15 years ago.

Back in Wellington she puts her training to excellent use; this time, in a satirical piece that purported to celebrate Queen Victoria’s wedding with Prince Albert: soprano Mrs Garratt with her compliant accompanist, Mr Hammersmith (Douglas Mews). A text by Jacqueline Coats, who also directed, it uses music by Haydn, who had been appropriated by the English – the couple performed, with hilarious histrionic flair, jingoistic piety, several pieces with an English connection, glorying in British naval supremacy, expurgated references to Nelson and Lady Hamilton, his naval victories at the Nile and Trafalgar, and the glories of Empire.

Quintessence = quintets
The daily swim at Tahunanui was fitted in before the evening concert, again in the Cathedral, entitled Quintessence, a careful distortion to mean music for five. The quintets were delightful rarities: the first, Beethoven’s own arrangement of his Piano Trio, Op 1 No 3, which utterly removed any sense of its origin through the use of a second violin and two violas. Joining NZ String Quartet players were the Ying’s leader, Ayano Ninomiya and violist, Phillip Ying. Emphatically, it deserves to be ranked equal with the original.

The second was Bruckner’s little known quintet, again employing two violas (this time, Ying players Janet Ying – violin and again Phillip). Bruckner is a bit of an acquired taste: I have acquired it chronically and incurably, though it’s a long time since I aired my recordings of this quintet. The Scherzo is entertaining and the Adagio rather beguiling, though undoubtedly needing two or three hearings for it to take root.

Along with those two biggies, Helen Webby returned with her harp (and charming comments about its origin) to play a piece written for her by Pepe Becker, better known as a fine early music soprano, and then a gorgeous performance with Helene Pohl of the famous Meditation from Thaïs.

Sunday 1 February

It had rained overnight and there was still rain in the air on Sunday morning. I woke at 9am but before I could have breakfast I went to the ‘Conversation’ this time between Helene Pohl and members of the Ying Quartet.

Helene Pohl talks with the Ying Quartet
Helene got them talking about their family and how each became musicians. They were a Chicago family, father a doctor, I inferred, clearly well off, who might have wished them to have pursued a more serious profession, but was supportive of their choices. At first there were four Yings in the quartet but the first violin left about five years ago, and they described the difficult process of finding a substitute; Ayano Ninomiya was the result, with whom the Yings are clearly very happy.

The two men, Phillip and David Ying, tended to talk most and were very articulate, told amusing anecdotes, particularly about their time under a National Endowment for the Arts scheme (the United States equivalent of an arts council) in a very small town in Iowa. It lasted for two years after which the NEA decided to divert the funding to an entirely different purpose. There was clear implied criticism of the ridiculously small federal budget for the arts.

It was an illuminating view into the richness of the US musical world, but also of its relative financial poverty in relation to the size of the country and its enormous wealth and ability to spend hugely on the military and related activities.

Kathryn Stott solo piano and in piano quartet
The 1pm concert at St John’s began with two New Zealand piano pieces played by Kathryn Stott: Waiting for the Aeroplane and Dance Fury by Gao Ping. It was good to hear the early Psathas played by such a gifted pianist who could plumb the emotional qualities that the music touches. Dance Fury was an extraordinary piece of ferocious virtuosity, which she played with tremendous energy and apparent enthusiasm.

The main item was Dvorak’s Piano Quartet in E flat. I had misgivings about it, as it was generally stronger in intensity, dynamic extremes, percussiveness than in delicacy and emotional sensitivity. I’m sure it would have benefitted from longer and less pressured rehearsal. However, this extrovert and flamboyant performance brought a standing ovation.

Conspicuous in the line-up which included Stott with violist Gillian Ansell and cellist David Ying was the second violinist from the New Zealand String Quartet: not Douglas Beilman, but Donald Armstrong who took his place following an injury to Beilman’s arm. Donald Armstrong is associate concertmaster of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; he was also on hand in the Shostakovich piano quintet in the
evening concert, mentioned below.

Kathryn Stott and Brahms, Beethoven and Shostakovich
At 7.30pm, also at St John’s, Kathryn Stott was again in the limelight. With Gillian Ansell, she accompanied mezzo Hannah Fraser in two Brahms songs, from Op 91: Gestille Sehnsucht and Geistliches Wiegenlied.  They were absolutely beautiful, revealing a voice (she is one of The Song Company) that sounded a perfect fit with Brahms in a characteristic deeply emotional mood. It was mellow and gentle but of wonderful richness and probably one of the finest mezzos in Australasia.

There followed Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C minor, Op 1 No 3 which we heard in its quintet version the day before. It was not just that the string version sounded so perfectly adapted to that medium, as if conceived primarily for it, but for all Stott’s skill and temperament and interpretative powers, there was a sense of not being entirely at ease with each other. I sensed a feeling, mainly on the part of the violin and cello (Helene Pohl and David Ying), that they needed to match each other as well as to balance the vigour of the pianist. But then again, it was a fairly radical piece in its day – the one that Haydn was a bit cool towards.

The first half ended with Three Rags by John Novacek, played by the Ying Quartet. They took the Scott Joplin style of rag to extremes, and especially with the first, The Atlantic Side-step, that the plain sound of the string quartet was so foreign to the style that it really didn’t work. In the slow second piece, The Drifter, the strings did not seem such a bad fit, though the effect for me was still unconvincing. The last piece, Intoxication, was an exercise in pure frenzy and rhythmic and tonal excess, probably capturing a particularly agile and energetic drunk, but far too extreme to call for a second hearing.

In the second half Lilburn’s Inscapes II of 1972 was played over the sound system, confirming even more positively the strange obsession that Lilburn was prey to after about 1960, trying to turn himself into an avant-garde composer with equipment that has become so dated and so lifeless so quickly, though it’s true that musique concrete continues to attract some young composers – and to be employed by a very few more mature ones content to occupy a tiny niche position in music. For me these pieces are simply failed, if worthy, experiments which are dusted off occasionally in obeisance to the near-god-like stature that Lilburn has in New Zealand.

Then, without pause, Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet began: Stott and the New Zealand String Quartet with Donald Armstrong in Doug Beilman’s place. There was no hint in the ensemble that Armstrong had not been a long-standing member of the quartet.

It’s a long time since I heard this played and though I had clear recollections of only the Scherzo and parts of the Fugue and the Finale, its impact was powerful, and its depth of feeling undeniable, ploughing ground similar to that of the Piano Trio and the Eighth Quartet, and this was a performance that understood what Shostakovich faced in 1940 after the worst of the Terror had passed, but as Stalin bought time (to put the best gloss on it) with a strategic alliance with Nazi Germany, aware that war was inevitable.

 

Gala recital to invest the new piano at Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons – pianists, and friends: Robert Orr (oboe), Bridget Douglas (flute), Rachel Vernon ( clarinet), Robert Weeks (bassoon), Ed Allen (horn)

Schubert: Moments musicaux, D 780
Mozart: Quintet for piano and winds in E flat, K 452
Poulenc: Flute Sonata
Bizet: Jeux d’enfants for piano duet (“piano four hands”)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Sunday 25 January, 2:30 pm

Though the new Steinway piano has been played before, this was a special concert hosted by Chamber Music Hutt Valley to welcome it formally and to attempt to pay off the remaining cost. Thus the players all performed without fees and the Hutt City Council did not charge for the theatre, and at the concert’s end it was announced that the Little Theatre Piano Trust had gained some $10,000, which was expected to cover the balance.

Michael Houstoun himself arranged the concert, and it was a delight to hear him as he introduced the music and his colleagues, with friendliness and a relaxed charm. In addition, I understand, Houstoun had contributed the programme notes, models of pertinence and brevity: a model that practitioners of that craft (not to mention reviewers) might well emulate.

Diedre Irons opened the programme with Schubert’s six Moments musicaux, that explore myriad moods and emotions. While some follow a simple pattern, in more or less uniform character though always with lots of diverting modulations, most follow the classical ABA pattern, offering a ‘trio’ section of quite marked contrast. The outer sections of the first one, Moderato, are emphatic and extravert while the middle is more flowing with a meditative sensibility, all of which Irons captured beautifully.

Houstoun’s note quoted the famous remark that Mozart made to his father that this quintet for piano and winds was the best thing he’d written. That statement might arouse a degree of trepidation in players, but there was no call for it here; though this is not a permanent ensemble that has played together for years, the four wind players have the advantage of wide orchestral experience together, so their playing easily met the music’s expectations; Houstoun was the pianist here. It was the second movement, Larghetto, that most touched the emotions, shifting from the contemplative, to melancholy, to contentment.

Poulenc’s Flute Sonata is one of three sonatas written towards the end of his life, for wind instruments – flute, clarinet and oboe. Each has won a place in the regular repertoire of the three instruments. Without in any way denigrating the other pieces in the programme, the brilliance of this performance by Bridget Douglas and Diedre Irons set it somewhat apart from the rest. Douglas’s playing of the very demanding music, embroidered with double tonguing and fiendish fingering marked it as startlingly accomplished, world class.

Finally, the two pianists at the piano played Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants. It took a little time to trace my previous hearing of this delightful little masterpiece. It was at the 2009 Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson and it was played there by these same two pianists. Then I wrote: “This was at the hands of Michael and Diedre at one keyboard and they revealed the uncelebrated genius of Bizet as piano composer. For Bizet’s death at 35 (the same age as Mozart) was a terrible loss not just to opera, but to piano and orchestral music, and probably chamber music too. The music itself is filled with spontaneity and rich invention, but it needs a joyous and boisterous performance such as we heard here to demonstrate just how fecund was Bizet’s melodic imagination and his sense of shape and style.”

Six years later I can’t do better, for their playing here had the same, perhaps if anything more impressive mastery of the idiom, perfect ensemble, endless variety of colour, wit and esprit.

And it might be good to reproduce Houstoun’s note in the programme: “Children’s Games? What is it with French composers, childhood and piano duets? Ravel wrote his Mother Goose Suite, Debussy his Petite Suite, Fauré his Dolly Suite. All of them glorious, but Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants may well be the best of them all – indisputably a masterpiece.” I still think so.

So the splendid new piano was brilliantly invested in the presence of a full house, and the promise of a series of five fine concerts, starting and ending with piano recitals, and in between, a string quartet, Affetto – an early music ensemble, and a piano and winds quartet.

And I should add, as free advertising, that the lobby of the Little Theatre has finally been brought up to scratch with the expected coffee and bar facilities.

 

Aroha String Quartet’s tenth anniversary concert offers excellent, varied, exquisite programme

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Aroha String Quartet: Haihong Liu and Blythe Press (violins), Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (cello)

Tenth Anniversary Concert

String Quartets:
Beethoven: in A, Op 18 No 5
Shostakovich: No 1 in C, Op 49
Ravel: in F major
Chinese pieces:
Hua Yan-Jun: Er Quan Ying Yue
Traditional: Fan Shen Dao Qing

Old Saint Paul’s

Sunday 7 December, 3 pm

The first performance by Wellington’s Aroha String Quartet took place in this venue at this time on 5 December, just 10 years ago. I wrote a review of it in The Dominion Post, ending “This is one of the finest ensembles to emerge from the NZSO ranks. I hope they can find the time to give many more concerts”. I’ve always felt pleased to have been there. This time, too, their concert clashed with another, the same, by the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, which again had the result of smaller audiences at both.

Membership has changed from that at the first concert, then entirely of Chinese-born players. The original second violinist, Beiyi Xue, and cellist, Jiaxin Cheng, have departed and their places taken by several others: Robert Ibell now as permanent cellist and Blythe Press as interim (before heading overseas) second violin. This afternoon there was no hint of any absence of homogeneity in their ensemble, lack of stylistic command in their approach to the music’s character.

Old Saint Paul’s is a lovely venue for chamber music, though sight-lines can be a bit obscured by posts. But the players are now on a new platform making them generally visible.

The fifth of Beethoven’s Op 18 quartets is in A major and the happiest and most extravert of the six. It began with some slight diffidence. But its energising speed, driven by the fast, darting lines of the first violin quickly generated assurance in all the players, and the first movement became a simple delight. And, come to think of it, so did the other three.

There was charming swing in the minuet (what a huge range of tempi, rhythms and moods seem to be encompassed in the old dance called the ‘minuet’). The Trio in its middle was in marked contrast, a bit blowsy perhaps, a strong triple beat with emphasis on the third note.

The another facet of the happy A major spirit (though this starts in D major) came with the almost swooning opening of the Andante Cantabile, though each of the following variations was expressed with delightful individuality (the programme note called them ‘variants’ – a form of the word that I’m only familiar with in Vaughan Williams). There’s the bustling third variation and the dreamy beauty of the fourth and then the extended fifth variation that recovers the determination and spirit, as well as the calm of the other movements.

The last movement also shifts moods quixotically, carrying us along with a strong current: all so compelling even to the teasing final bars.

What a change to be offered other than No 8 out of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets! No 1, written just before the second world war, and in the shadow of Stalin’s devastating attack on Shostakovich and others, opens in a somewhat secretive manner, with no big tunes or distinct mood till Ibell’s sunny, peaceful cello pronouncement arrives. Jin’s viola soon picks it up and the viola also opens the second movement with a tune that grows on you, with a certain unease as the cello weighs in heavily. Lots of fast scales characterise the Allegro Molto, with little decorative flourishes that don’t actually decorate anything other than themselves. It seems to avoid certainties, mutes giving a feeling of indirection.

But the last movement, violin-led, turns on the light and pushes up the speed, and this splendid revelatory performance leads me to hope that this could be the group to pursue a complete Shostakovich series over the next year or so (one of the most memorable highlights at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland a few years ago was a complete late-night series of them all from the Aviv Quartet from Israel).

After the interval came a couple of engaging Chinese pieces: one by an early 19th century composer, Er Quan Ying Yue by Hua Yan-Jun, for the erhu (which you will hear being played by a singularly musical player in the subway to the Wellington Railway Station every Friday). It lay very high on the violin with the other instruments playing tremolo before the others took turns with the tune.

The following piece was an arrangement of a traditional folk tune called Fan Shen Dao Qing; from the early communist period in the 40s, it energetically reflected the optimism, hopes of the dawning of the new age, then a slow, more pensive middle section and finally a virtuosic fast-fingered finish with a short bluesy episode before the return of the upbeat character.

The two pieces were an ideal return from the pause: an introduction to the highly individual sound of Ravel’s string quartet. The quartet approached it in a spirit of huge familiarity and musical intimacy, smooth and suffused with magic light: the performance was bewitching. The second movement is much dominated by pizzicato not written to be played by beginners and the ensemble and general execution suggested high talent and scrupulous, detailed rehearsal of Ravel’s demand: Assez vif, très rythmé; the muted middle section is languorous, allowing the players a short respite (though no less demanding) from the brittle outer parts.

The breathtaking changeability continues through the Très lent third and Vif et agité last movement. The third emerged pensive though not sad, opening with the viola; then a creepy, growling cello in the middle. Though it’s slow and outwardly uneventful, the exquisite playing sustained rapt attention, saying rather beautiful things quietly.

The energetic rhythm of the last movement, with tremolo and pizzicato and little exclamations, continued to throw up hints of earlier phrases in new ways and in new contexts. The entire performance was beautifully executed, warm-hearted, perfectly attuned to Ravel’s intentions. How sad that Ravel left us so little music, particularly chamber music!

Though there was not a huge audience – a few more than 100? – the enthusiasm of the applause might have suggested several hundred.

 

Tingling strings at Futuna – Dean Major and Robert Ibell

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Colours of Futuna Concert Series

Music for Violin and ‘Cello

by JOSEF HAYDN, REINHOLD GLIÈRE and MAURICE RAVEL

Dean Major – violin

Robert Ibell – ‘cello

Futuna Chapel, Friend St., Karori

Sunday 16th November, 2012

Josef Haydn, whom previous generations knew as “Papa”, was one of music’s great humorists. Of course, everybody knows the slow movement of the “Surprise” Symphony with its sudden fortissimo chord right at the end of a piano phrase – but most of his jokes are far more subtle. They’re more in the realms of the “musically unexpected” than in the “things-that-go-bump-in-the-night” kind of way – Haydn treats his listeners to unexpected pauses, outlandish key modulations, deliberately uncertain rhythmic figurations, and false endings to movements. Often they’re things that straightaway sound quirky or eccentric, but to audiences it’s sometimes not immediately apparent why.

This penchant for humour has probably worked against Haydn in some quarters – it’s said that the Emperor, Joseph II, among others was displeased at some instances of the “holy art” of music being debased by Haydn’s quirkiness, and that this attitude carried over to the composer being thought less highly of than either his friend Mozart or his pupil, Beethoven. Obviously, it’s a case where posterity has deemed cheerful irreverence a “lesser” sign of genius than either premature death or deafness.

I’m not sure how far the composer might have gone in terms of giving similarly quirky instructions to his performers, or whether, in some instances, editors or publishers “interpolated” tempo markings, based on what the music “looked like” on the page. At a recent Futuna Chapel concert given by violinist Dean Major and ‘cellist Robert Ibell, a Haydn Duo began the program – for Violin and ‘Cello in D, Hob.VI – the opening movement bearing the indication Adagio non molto.

The playing was immediate and engaging – not absolutely bang-on in intonation at the outset, but once the players (and our ears) got “the pitch of the hall” the sounds found their centres more readily and mellifluously. I thought the tempi as performed beautifully suited the music and its character, as we heard it. But was this flowing, walking-pace opening really an “adagio” – as Oscar Wilde would have said, of any kind whatever? It certainly was “non molto” – in fact so “non” as to be “not at all”! Was this the mischievous spirit of the composer at work, once again?

Whatever the tempo indications, we found ourselves thoroughly at one with what the players did throughout all three movements of the work – a robust, bucolic Allegro second movement featured many felicitous touches, including writing for the cello that brought out a very viola-ish voice (as happened also in the opening movement, where some of the lines rose above the violin’s). Then, the final movement’s Menuetto was a “theme-and variations”, with a wealth of inventive interplay between the instruments, the players again impressing with plenty of tonal and dynamic variation amid the bravura passages.

The first music I ever heard of Reinhold Glière’s was NOT the much-played “Russian Sailors’ Dance” from the composer’s ballet The Red Poppy,  but (via an elderly DGG mono LP from the Palmerston North Public Library – those were the days!), the epic Third Symphony, entitled “Ilya Muromets”, a symphonic celebration of a legendary Russian warrior, said to have lived around the twelfth century. ‘Cellist Robert Ibell described Glière as a composer who was able to work both in Tsarist and post-revolutionary Russia, writing music almost exclusively concerned with folk-lore at the outset of his career, and subsequently becoming a “People’s Artist”, producing works like the aforementioned “Red Poppy” ballet.

His “Eight Duets for Violin and ‘Cello Op.39” presented the pre-revolutionary composer in a more abstract mode, attractive character pieces bent on conveying a collection of moods and impressions, rather like a Baroque suite. Violinist and ‘cellist played five of the set’s eight pieces, beginning with a deep-throated, somewhat Schumannesque Prelude, in which the ‘cello took the melodic lead. A Haydn-ish Gavotte followed, elegant, but with a pesante-like Trio, the ‘cello’s drone-bass almost Bartokian, and emphasizing the more contrapuntal nature of the opening section when it returned – it received playing by turns cultured and rustic, as required!

A salon-like Cradle Song received a sinuous, beguilingly-played violin line accompanied by gentle ‘cello undulations, while an Intermezzo again showed a Schumannesque inclination, like one of the composer’s “Jean-Paul” characters from a Masked Ball – the players’ characterful and quixotic responses enlivened both the melody and its accompaniment. But the Scherzo which concluded the selection was the highlight – a boisterous Vivace, replete with syncopations, rather like a vigorous waltz, imbued with the élan of both musicians’ playing. The more salon-like Trio further enhanced the scherzo’s brilliant, attention-grabbing effect, leaving we listeners properly exhilarated at the end.

The concert’s “main course” was undoubtedly the final item, Ravel’s 1922 Sonata for Violin and ‘Cello. The musicians demonstrated some of the piece’s aspects to us at the beginning, such as the major/minor motif that recurs throughout the work. Ravel wrote the work as one of a number of similar tributes to Debussy. It was originally a single movement, but the composer took it up again within a year of completion, and expanded the work to four movements.

Ravel himself regarded the work as important, and not just because of its dedication to an illustrious and recently-departed colleague.  The piece, however, gave him a good deal of trouble – he referred to it as “this rascal of a duo” – and at one point he threw out the entire scherzo and replaced it with a freshly written one. When told by the first performers that the work was so difficult that no-one would play it except virtuosos, the composer replied, “Good – I shan’t be assassinated by amateurs!”

Beginning with the alternating major/minor motif on violin, the piece was rhythmically undulated into life, the cello taking over the haunting, urgent oscillations before the violin’s return, the two instruments sometimes weaving their lines in synchronization, and sometimes counterpointing their voices, at one point tightening the tempo excitingly, but then returning to the more circumspect pace of the opening – here, precise, incisive, and at the end, very tender.

The pizzicato second movement also opened with the same major-minor oscillations, the players enjoying the “marching” sequences where each instrument alternated between robust goose-stepping, and a long-breathed, trenchant theme, the latter almost a mocking commentary. The figurations tightened their interaction, and after a brief “wind-blown” sequence, dug into an arco version of the goose-stepping before throwing away a final pizzicato chord – all very vividly projected by these two players!

The third movement, Lento, was begun by a long-breathed ‘cello solo, one which the violin emulated, with its efforts “counterpointed” by the ‘cello – such eloquent playing! Ghostly octaves from the violin and a lament-like melody from the ‘cello were sounded and exchanged – the music pressed forward urgently, until momentum was exhausted, and the lines quietly replenished their breath, the music spare, sombre and inward, and  played with incredible concentration.

Then it was the finale’s turn “Vif avec entrain” (bright with gusto) indeed! The ‘cello began a kind of irregular dance pattern, joined by the violin – the opening dance was repeated, and a “square-dance” variant took its turn, its stamping creating sparks. What games the two played! – it was “anything you can do, I can do, too!” country, each goading the other to the point of checkmate! And we in the audience were pinging and ponging with the excitement of the exchanges between the two players!

It was as if we were being rewarded for surrendering up a golden afternoon, missed through being indoors – we were blessed in our turn with skilled and committed performances of an inspired and absorbing programme.

Diverting and wide-ranging concert from the SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

SMP Ensemble: Nachtmusik

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht for string sextet, and other music by Salzedo, Britten, Biber, Brad Jenkins and Cilla McQueen

Jennifer Newth (harp); Gregory Squire and Tabea Squire (violins); Peter Barber and Megan Ward (violas); Jack Hobbs and Charley Davenport (cellos); Rebecca Steel (flute); Karlo Margetic (clarinet); Nick Walshe (bass clarinet); Chris Gendall (conductor)

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Friday 14 November, 7:30 pm

The SMP Ensemble’s programmes, often devoted to experimental, New Zealand music, are not always particularly easy for the average classical music lover to enjoy. This one, advertising Schoenberg’s best-loved piece, Verklärte Nacht, guaranteed pleasure. But word of it had obviously not got out as the audience was sadly small.

The first half did include a couple of, shall we say, unusual pieces, but it began and ended with harp player Jennifer Newth performing two established harp compositions that were intrinsically beguiling, but also played with astonishing virtuosity and exquisite delicacy. Carlos Salzedo was born in Paris of Sephardic Spanish parents, and later came to find an affinity with the Basques. He took up the harp as a child and gained a world-wide reputation becoming a famous virtuoso as well as composer for his instrument. Read the interesting entry in Wikipedia which draws attention to his wide-ranging musical activities as composer (for music in many genres), conductor, teacher, and to his international reputation in the general musical world and around the world.

Salzedo’s playing is described in that article as characterized by clarity, facility, articulation, fluidity, and subtle phrasing. They were some of the words that came to mind as I listened to Jennifer Newth’s enchanting and breathtaking performance of Chanson dans la nuit.

Jennifer returned before the interval to play the Nocturne from Britten’s Suite for Harp which he wrote in 1969. I was not familiar with the piece and might have been hard pressed to identify its composer. After the preceding two New Zealand pieces, it emerged as main-stream, genuinely musical, exposing Britten’s idiomatic and imaginative writing for the instrument. Its nocturnal setting did not prevent
its becoming muscular and emphatic as it progressed through this incisive and insightful performance.

Brad Jenkins (notes in the programme leaflet about the composers and the music were rather limited; and, incidentally, the meaning of the acronym SMP seems to be ever concealed: I am told it stands for Summer Music Project) is a young Wellington composer who won the Douglas Lilburn prize at the New Zealand School of Music in 2012 for the piece played here, Nocturne No 1. It belongs to the long tradition of experiments in sound that seem to be an essential part of a student composer’s equipment in the ‘coming-of-age’ process. It involved ‘players’ positioned on all sides of the audience: piccolo/flute Rebecca Steel (her second appearance for me this week), cellist Charley Davenport, dismembered clarinet Karlo Margetic, bass clarinet Nick Walshe, viola Peter Barber, violin Tabea Squire, all conducted by Chris Gendall. Jenkins’s aim was to deconstruct the character of each instrument by removing all its essential tonal sounds so little more than breath or the swoosh of bow cutting through the air was audible. Slowly, hints of pitches emerged and the sounds became more abrasive, scrupulously unmusical ion the normal sense. I wondered as I listened whether this was what the world would be left with after its conquest and domination by ISIS or the Taliban.

Cilla McQueen is known to me, and I suppose most, as a poet; but here was another departure from the orthodox. Her ‘score’ of Rain Score 2 was reproduced on the back page of the programme: a spiral formed by faint, interlacing seaweed or elementary life patterns. The septet stood in a semi-circle in the front: the two violins, the two clarinets, Peter Barber, Charley Davenport and flute. Again, orthodox sounds were few as the players improvised, imitated, in a sort of aleatoric process, though there were sheets of paper on music stands visible to some players that presumably offered a bit of notated guidance. The performance even involved the mysterious effect of bowing the cello below, but not apparently touching, the strings.

The main draw for the concert was the original, string sextet version of Verklärte Nacht. Here, the string players already mentioned were joined by cellist Jack Hobbs.  I was immediately entranced by the performance, in an acoustic that was beautifully adapted to it. There was something in the sound that drew attention, as it hasn’t before for me, to the marvelous variety of the piece’s scoring in which each instrument has the most interesting individual lines, and there were entrancing utterances and delights in many short passages from, for example, Hobbs’s cello and Megan Ward’s viola.

The episodes of the poem’s story, depicted graphically enough in the score, were dramatized with particular clarity and with the emotional generosity that had obviously attracted Dehmel and Schoenberg to explore the lovers’ delicate situation. It’s interesting that Schoenberg later dismissed the poem as repulsive and sought to have the music heard as independent of it. Thus commentaries that relate the sections to episodes in the couple’s nocturnal experience are, like most attention to the ‘programmes’ of music, unhelpful and distracting.

But those thoughts do not detract from the delight one feels at the evolving shapes and emotions, key changes, acidulous harmonies that Schoenberg presented to the Vienna of Johann Strauss and the Secessionist movement. This performance captured the floaty, suggestive transfiguration; and it must have been a delight to be involved in such a beautifully integrated performance.

The concert ended with a couple of German lullabies, in which Tabea joined as gentle, subtle singer. And then Heinrich Biber’s The Nightwatchman had Greg Squire singing the words from the rear, coming forward in woollen jerkin and cloth cap for the second stanza. The light slowly dimmed as players left one by one to diminuendo staccato notes, to end a diverting and highly enjoyable concert. One regretted deeply that so few were there to enjoy it.

 

Polished and delightful lunchtime with winds at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music for winds by Villa-Lobos, Doppler, Briccialdi, Chopin, Schumann, Arnold

Played by Rebecca Steel (flute), David McGregor (clarinet), Calvin Scott (piano and oboe)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 12 November, 12:15 pm

To return from a nearly two-month trip in Europe to a Wellington rich with such plentiful and excellent live music has been a considerable consolation. Not that I ever underestimated the phenomenon of a fairly small city with such a wealth of practising musicians, plus their indispensable facilitating by enterprising impresarios and concert managers such as St Andrew’s enjoys.

In the Paris weeklies Officiel des spectacles or Pariscope, in a city 20 times Wellington’s size, you will find some 20 concerts on an average day, equivalent to Wellington’s one or two, on a good day. (I wasn’t in Paris this time though).

Wednesday was an average day, with the usual lunchtime concert at St Andrew’s.

Still a bit jet-lagged, the promise of some music for three wind instruments was just what I needed. It proved a beautifully measured programme, beautifully played.

And surprisingly, the three musicians had names that rang only vague bells. I recall oboist Calvin Scott as a member of the Aeolian Players in a Lower Hutt lunchtime concert in 2011 and see that Frances Robinson had heard clarinettist David McGregor in an NZSM concert at St Andrew’s last year and Peter Mechen mentioned him playing in a recent National Youth Orchestra concert.

But I can spot Rebecca Scott’s name in no Middle C review. This concert seemed to be led by her; she spoke before most of the pieces, though both other players spoke once. Rebecca is a highly experienced orchestral flautist, in London and Sydney as well as Wellington and Christchurch; and here she proved a versatile and engaging chamber musician, evidently returned permanently to Wellington.

The six pieces were perfect midday fare: a mix of the bright and the pensive, the classical and the modern. Rebecca and David opened playing Villa-Lobos’s Chôros No 2, not one of the more familiar ones (for me), but an engaging exercise in agility and wit in a performance that captured the native idiomatic character of Brazilian street music.

Franz Doppler was a contemporary of, let’s say, Franck, Johann Strauss II, Lalo, Vieuxtemps, Bruckner, Gounod, Offenbach … But he was Polish-Hungarian, born in Lwow, then in Austria-occupied Poland, now Lviv in Ukraine, from which the Polish population was expelled in 1945. He was primarily a flautist, and followed a style that owed much to Paganini and Schubert and melodically to Chopin and early 19th century opera. His Andante and Rondo for two flutes (the second flute part here by clarinet) and piano, Op 25, keeps his name alive, and this virtuoso performance demonstrated why, with its charming, melodies, swaying rhythms, turning to a brisk march later in the Andante section. There was brilliant, delicious twinning of the two parts – enhanced in colour, I thought, through a clarinet replacing the second flute.

Then came a version of Carnival of Venice, a folk song that’s been used by many composers including Paganini (his reused by Liszt) and Bottesini. This one for flute and orchestra by Briccialdi, another contemporary of Doppler, offered spine-tingling passages of brilliant ornamentation, triple-tonguing through the otherwise graceful triple-time tune. Obviously a popular party-piece for the flautist, and here a stimulating lunch spicing that Rebecca Steel tossed off effortlessly.

The favourite Chopin Nocturne, D flat, Op 27 no 2, came in an arrangement in which the right hand part was taken by flute and clarinet. Its character was altogether changed, I wasn’t entirely sure, for the better; though on its own terms it employed flute and clarinet in thoroughly idiomatic ways.

Rebecca retreated so that David McGregor and Calvin Scott might play an arrangement of Schumann’s ‘Stille Träne’, from the Twelve Songs by Justinus Kerner, Op 35. (Kerner was a close contemporary of Byron’s, though he far outlived Byron). This didn’t work so well without the words and their varied timbres and emotions, and the long notes rather cried out for verbal qualities. Yet the clarinet still captured much of the lyrical beauty of the song.

Finally, the most delightful piece of the afternoon: Malcolm Arnold’s Divertimento for flute, oboe and clarinet. Here pianist Scott abandoned the keyboard and took up his oboe which he played with comparable accomplishment. Though the piece is in six movements, Arnold has offered an admirable example of a work that is full of ideas that in other hands might encourage elaborate and extended treatment, but which makes its startling impact with such economy and brilliance.

Here, each movement lasted around two minutes; though it began about 12.55pm, the concert ended pretty much on schedule before five past one. In the space of this time, we had been subjected to a dizzying range of musical moods and rhythms, the three instruments rarely playing in ensemble fashion but contributing disparate elements in wild contrapuntal fashion that fused together in the most delightful way.

The applause seemed hard to stop. A great welcome home to Wellington!

 

Carnival for Guy Fawkes’ Day – the music of Alfred Hill

Posted on by admin

St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series:
Alfred Hill on Guy Fawkes Day

ALFRED HILL (1869-1960)
Quartet No.3 in A minor “The Carnival” 1912 (orchestral version)
Movements: In the Streets / Andantino / Scherzo / Finale

The Dominion Strings, conducted by Donald Maurice

St. Andrews-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 5th November 2014

This work was the earliest of Alfred Hill’s string quartets to be expanded later into an orchestral version, and is better known as Symphony No.5 “The Carnival”. He frequently “recycled” existing works into new formats, and this transcription benefitted from the larger forces which could very successfully convey the bustling, crowded atmosphere of a fiesta.

The opening street scene was graphically depicted with vigorous, sunlit writing and attractive melodies, propelled along by dancing triplet rhythms. Closing gently, as though the fading light of evening were approaching, it could easily have been an evocative film score, no less effective for the absence of visual effects.

The Andantino was full of gentle melody passing from voice to voice, supported by rich harmonies that conjured up the balmy night air, and the pleasures of wandering hand in hand, somewhat apart from the noisy revellers. The languid, surging phrases eventually subsided into a pianissimo close, as though the moon were sinking, heavy with sleep, below the horizon.

The Scherzo woke to a new, sunlit morning, a bright breezy romp full of the new day’s energy, evoking colourful stalls selling wild flowers and sweet treats. It led quite naturally into the energetic Finale which opened with the vigour of almost flamenco rhythms and colour, then moved into a central contrasting section of lilting melodies, with almost a hint of pathos, before returning to the opening mood. There was a dramatic accelerando coda to round off the work with brilliant, festive flair.

This was a thoroughly attractive, almost programmatic work, from a composer who understood the appeal and art of skilful melody writing. The familiar tonal structure made it easy listening, while never sounding tired, but always fresh and creative. The players were clearly enjoying themselves, and their enthusiastic and lively engagement in the work spilled over easily to the appreciative audience.

This concert marked the release of Vol.5 of Hill’s string quartets from Naxos, recorded on CD by the Dominion String Quartet. The last recordings are just complete, with the final Vol.6 due next year. Before the concert, Donald Maurice spoke of the genesis and development of this project over a number of years, then Chris Blake (NZSO CEO) gave some background to Hill’s life and work.

The latter’s prolific output included ten operas (some on Maori themes), thirteen symphonies, seventeen string quartets, many choral works, concertos, chamber music, sonatas, songs and short works for a variety of instruments. Researcher and publisher Allan Stiles has noted that there are over 2,000 titles attributable to Alfred Hill and of those, many have never been published and relatively few commercially recorded. (Programme notes.)

Chris Blake spoke of Hill as “the only significant Australasian composer representing the Late Romantic era”, but I would put Richard Fuchs (1887-1947) very firmly in that category too, although he was a naturalised New Zealander who lived here only from 1939 to 1947. Like Hill he was prolific in many genres, and all his surviving works have been published by the Richard Fuchs Archive, though as yet only a handful of his beautiful songs are available on CD (see www.richardfuchs.org.nz).

Both these composers have been too little heard and enjoyed by New Zealand audiences, but those who attended today’s concert obviously appreciated this opportunity, judging by the turnout and their most enthusiastic applause.

“Nature, Life and Love” for our time, from the NZTrio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

City Gallery Wellington presents:
NZTrio Art3

Justine Cormack (violin)
Ashley Brown (‘cello)
Sarah Watkins (piano)

Salvatore Sciarrino – Piano Trio No.2
John Zorn – Amour Fou
Leonie Holmes – ….when expectation ends (premiere)
Arnold Schoenberg (arr. Steuermann) – Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)

City Gallery, Wellington

29th October 2014

I did like the NZTrio’s characterizing of its most recent Wellington concert at the City Gallery as “an edgy international exploration” – though further linking the concert to the Gallery’s October exhibition of the work of William Kentridge, a multi-media presentation called “The Refusal of Time” was frustrating, as I hadn’t had the chance to see the latter – apparently a truly “immersive” amalgam of cinematic methodology – animation, live action and pixelated motion. After listening to the NZTrio’s playing in the concert I wished even more that I’d seen the exhibition as well!

With music from the USA, Europe and New Zealand packed into an eventful eighty minutes, the Trio certainly gave value for money. The musicians have played in this venue before, though against the wall behind this audience, last time round that I remember. On that occasion I remembered being partly enchanted, partly distracted by the floor-to-ceiling artwork on the said wall behind the Trio – but this time the art gave out a rather more circumspect aspect, both in itself and its presentation!

But what musicians these people are! Chamber groups vary enormously in terms of what and how they “give out” to their audiences – an obvious example to hand would be a comparison between the present group and the Borodin Quartet, who visited Wellington earlier in the month. While the latter group remained physically undemonstrative while transfixing us with its sounds, the players’ aspect and posture as a group magnificently “contained” as they regaled us with the most superbly-focused tones, the NZTrio musicians compelled as much as by their body language as their sound. There’s something to be said for marrying musical efforts to appropriately organic gestures – within reason, a kind of performance choreography – and the NZTrio thus engaged our attentions on a visceral as well as musical level.

For this reason I never tire of watching the group perform, in particular pianist Sarah Watkins, who throws herself into whatever she’s doing, metaphorical boots and all! A far more connective comparison than with the Borodins, in terms of performance style, would be with the Austrian ensemble, the Eggner Trio, a group that’s frequently visited New Zealand, and which has a similarly engaging concert platform manner.

So, onto the “edgy international exploration”! First up we encountered Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino’s Piano Trio No.2, music by a composer who’s known for his music’s evocations of silence and transparency of texture, with occasional irruptions of loud sounds – contrasts which demonstrate that a state or condition can be defined as much by its antithesis as by itself.

The hushed, almost ghostly whoops and descents of the communing strings at the outset contained to my ears a number of impressions, amongst them acts of impulse defying darkness, in space, or in the near-impenetrable gloom of great forests or vast oceans – at one point I imagined nascent reminiscences of the Latin plainchant “Dies Irae”; while the violin’s ascents towards stratospheric harmonics again evoked a similar kind of scalic chanting (what else had I been listening to of late?)…..Every now and then the ghostly voices’ mix was “stirred and shaken” by piano interpolations, which led to galvanic descents from the strings, “silvering” the ambience, into which the piano again intruded, with ever-increasing dynamism and coruscation. But the strings kept their energies in check, conversing in glissando-like mode, rather like spent meteorites falling from the sky – it was afterwards that I read the programme annotations which mentioned “ancient whale song and crystal meteors” wondering whether or not the words were the composer’s own……

Whatever suggestions of “bumt-out energy” might have been gleaned from these ambiences were belied by the piano’s “this is it!” reaction to the Dali-like suspensions of energy in time – great shooting-star glissandi and scintillations poured our of the instrument, with the sustaining pedal throwing open the cosmos, rather like a Black Hole operating in reverse! As for the strings, each instrument was transported by frenzied ecstacies/agonies, the work’s concluding exchanges hearkening back to those opening silences by default, the sounds appearing to “blister” from within the very beings of those far-away beginnings, a realization the listener is usually able to savour rather more tellingly via the silence at the end of a recording, than in a concert, with its intrusive(!) applause – now there’s a performance conundrum! – but it’s one that frequently comes to mind, as, of course, we all have our lists of pieces of music which we think really shouldn’t be applauded when they finish……..

Interestingly, both Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins provided us with some “byplay” at the end of the Sciarrino piece, Ashley Brown explaining that he had to make some “unbeautiful” sounds, i.e., activate his bow to remove excess resin accumulated during the Sciarrino, in order to be able to then make further beautiful sounds. But because I was sitting in a “last-minute-arrival” seat I wasn’t ideally placed to ascertain whether Sarah Watkins was putting on or removing from over her hands protective glove-like covers, “to stop blood from going all over the piano keys” as she put it – certainly the intensity with which she addressed Sciarrino’s keyboard writing towards the end of the Trio suggested that something might well have suffered some attrition as a result!

The Trio reversed the printed program order of the next two pieces, putting John Zorn’s Amour Fou ahead of, rather than following, Leonie Holmes’ …when expectation ends. In retrospect I felt it was to spare our sensibilities rather than the composers’ – instead of having two shortish pieces together, followed by two relatively lengthy ones, the dimensions were alternated. Stylistically, too, Zorn’s discursive explorations of the abysses between impulsive attraction and reflective confusion in love was more appropriate as a counterweight to the abstract brilliances of Sciarrino, than as an equally weighty cheek-by-jowl partner to Schoenberg’s “dark night of two souls”.

Away from the piece’s name and the programme’s suggestion of a universal discourse on love’s nature, I would have given Zorn’s music a dream-like title upon first hearing and characterized the sounds accordingly – it seemed to me that the sounds were presenting realities formulated in spontaneously-occurring ways, viewed in many instances through different lenses of perception or chartered on grids which showed different interpretations, like maps of the same area in an atlas showing different characteristics. But of course the title pushed my receptive sensibilities in a certain direction, and, as the composer probably intended, allowed me some traction in “interpreting” the sounds.

What a beautifully poised, expressionist opening! – plaintive piano chords sounded beneath a shimmering dream-like violin line, whose figures were then acted upon in surreal ways, accelerating, caught in ostinati, haunted by eerie tremolandi – everything seemed dream-like, not of this world. The piano for a while seemed to maintain the line, as the string-characters came and went, piquantly, quixotically, mysteriously, like the sultans in Omar Khayyam’s “batter’d-caravansarai”. The music frequently used repeated notes, chords and figurations  in a hypnotic way, simultaneously creating moving and frozen imagery, indicative of the overall ambivalence of perception/reality. And there were startling contrasts, both of dynamics and of movement – like a world of first impressions and immediate, rather than considered responses, as if consciousness was utterly at the mercy of involuntary impulse. If, as the title suggested, the piece was about love, then the sounds were clearly giving tongue to philosopher and cynic H.L.Mencken’s maxim that it was all “a triumph of imagination over intelligence”.

As the music  continued its fascinating peregrinations the piece seemed to me to increasingly cohere – it felt as though the figurations were extending their impulses and trying to form partnerships, reach out tendrils and forge bonds between groups of material, however disparate. I thought it an endlessly fascinating web of sounds, in places clearly demarcated, while in others characterized by fierce, intense interactions, even if the repetitive nature of a lot of the material still suggested that impulse and spontaneity rather than sense and intellect were driving the responses. And, interestingly, almost right up to the end there was that ambivalence of those disparate forces, presenting alternative states of reality – the cross-rhythms between piano and cello pizzicati hardly displayed a sense of hearts beating together. And was the violin’s final flourish some kind of “cri de coeur”? – John Zorn wasn’t telling!

Earlier this year I had greatly enjoyed reviewing an Atoll CD of Leonie Holmes’ orchestral music for radio, and as a result was looking forward to her new work (a world premiere performance, in fact), called “…when expectation ends”. As with her orchestral writing, Leonie Holmes here demonstrated a feeling for the instruments’ characteristic ambient voices – firstly, a plaintive violin solo, which was answered by widely-spaced piano figurations followed by ‘ethereal ‘cello harmonics – some lovely “cluster-chords” for piano further enabled a “floating” kind of atmosphere – one could imagine the sequence as a state wrought by the mind, which then began to unravel in the face of sterner realities – the instrumental lines started to pursue their own individual ends, occasionally clashing and creating discordant combinations. With the piano as peacemaker, order was momentarily restored, and a second lovely episode sounded out for our pleasure – even if the music’s inherent impulsiveness couldn’t be subdued for long. A string unison led to vigorous and even volatile points of instrumental contact, swirling colourings and textures, in fact excitingly orchestral in effect – marvellous, stirring stuff!

Finally, a sober, dark-browed ‘cello solo was duly comforted by violin and piano, the strings singing of times past, and the piano allowing the stillness to “surge softly backwards” at the end – these were gentle but hard-won tranquilities, stripped of illusion and enjoyed for what they were. Something of the same process in a deeper, darker, rather more fraught form was found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which concluded the program. Written by the composer originally as a string sextet, the work has been more often performed by a string orchestra (the composer’s own arrangement), but there exists also a transcription for Piano Trio (which I had never heard) by the composer/pianist Eduard Steuermann, a pupil, and later a colleague of Schoenberg. Most enterprisingly, it was programmed by the NZTrio for this concert.

Two things above all others surprised and delight me regarding the transcription and its performance here – firstly, the effectiveness of the piano as a protagonist in the work, not only rendering the music of the four displaced strings with absolute surety, but using its own special resonance to bring additional interest to the scenarios. The instrument’s voice created a distinctive ambience in which the two main protagonists, the man and the woman of the original poem by Richard Dehmel, could clearly and unequivocally interact as ‘cello and violin respectively, their thoughts, feelings, words and actions given a unique focus instead of having to compete with additional string textures.

Secondly, though Brahms and Wagner have always been cited as Schoenberg’s major influences in the writing of this work, the transcription’s keyboard writing interestingly brought out the influence of Liszt on the work. Quite apart from Schoenberg’s tendency to put melodic phrases in repeated pairs and near-pairs (as Liszt does throughout most of his orchestral symphonic poems), the figurations assigned the piano bore the stamp of Liszt in a number of sequences. I thought I also detected some of Franck’s influence in Schoenberg’s chromatic leanings when delineating the woman’s confessing to begetting a child with a stranger (and never before have I heard the “theme of reconciliation” sounding so much like that beatific second theme in the opening movement of  Franck’s Symphony!). As well, there are reminiscences of Chopin and his B Minor Piano Sonata’s slow movement, shortly afterwards, during the quietly ecstatic exchanges of accord between the couple.

For these reasons alone I simply loved this version of Verklärte Nacht that we were given – all of it presented with such an amalgam of varied feeling and intensity by the Trio. The work’s final paragraph, depicting the man and woman walking together through the transfigured dawning of their new life together, brought us textures suffused with love, joy and hope, those heartfelt strings floating upon ecstatic piano figurations, before all became as windblown wisps of sound at the end. We were left replete, aglow with warmth but also breath-bated at the fragility of the remaining silences…..