Tag: chamber music

Glittering prizes from a talented duo at St.Andrew’s

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St. Andrews on the Terrace: Lunchtime Concert Series

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918): Nocturne for Violin and Piano
Haydn: Sonata No.47 in B minor for piano (Hob.XVI No.32)
Brahms: Sonata No.1 in G Opus 78 for Violin and Piano

Simeon Broom (violin) and Rachel Church (piano)

29th October 2014

This concert was a joy, definitely in the very top bracket of 2014 lunchtime offerings at St. Andrews on the Terrace. The committed musicianship and professionalism of the two artists was apparent from the first note, when one understood immediately that this was all about the music, not the players.

Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne is a gem. In this duo’s hands it opened as a gentle meditation, languid with the warm sultry air of Mediterranean nights, that blossomed into a passionate central section before fading beautifully into the closing pianissimo of eyelids too heavy for anything but sleep. Superb artistry from first to last.

Rachel Church’s Piano Sonata No.47 by Haydn was marked by that indefinable, unassuming confidence of a musician who is completely at one with a work – its stylistic, rhythmic, historical idioms all embodied in a reading that seems entirely appropriate and convincing.

The polished opening Allegro led into the Minuet whose Trio in the lower registers was rich with almost romantic warmth. The closing Presto was taken at a very lively clip that teetered on losing some clarity of line during fast runs, but just snuck through thanks to Rachel’s technical facility. It rounded off a most satisfying experience of this colourful and dramatic sonata.

Brahms’ first violin sonata opens with a familiar and much loved theme that was expressed in Simeon Broom’s silken tone with exquisite tenderness. It was the start of a wonderful journey through this work that explores such a huge range of emotions, from the most forceful passions to the most moving pathos.

The constantly shifting tonalities were subtely revealed as they appeared; and Brahms’ thematic complexites, which can become quite bewildering in less skillful and sympathetic hands, were fashioned into an ever evolving, but comprehensible stream of musical consciousness. There was total understanding between the players of their common vision and interpretation, which were allowed to take centre stage due to the total physical economy of their performance styles.

These two artists have toured in 2012 for Chamber Music NZ as part of the Akoka Quartet, but they undoubtedly merit a tour of their own in this duo format. They offer music making of the highest order that chamber music lovers throughout the country deserve to hear, so I very much hope to see them in future CMNZ programmes.

Two Harps create magic at Futuna Chapel

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Colours of Futuna Concert Series presents: Two Harps

Music by Debussy, Britten, Young, Fauré, Scarlatti, Becker, Scott and Guard

Jennifer Newth and Michelle Velvin, harps

Futuna Chapel, Karori

Sunday, 26 October 2014

The Futuna chapel proved to be an ideal venue for harp music, being small and intimate,  and very resonant, with its timber and concrete surfaces.  There was no difficulty in hearing the quietest sounds, and the resonance of notes after they had ceased to be plucked, was sustained and beautiful.  The occasional raw tone, upon a string being plucked again while still sounding, also stood out, but this happened rarely.

Unfortunately I missed the first item, Debussy’s Pour Invoquer Pan, transcribed for two harps.  A pity, as I am sure in would have been magical.

Jennifer Newth played ‘Hymn’ from Suite for Harp, Op. 83 by Benjamin Britten.  It was a wonderful piece of intricate music, beautifully played, featuring variations on the hymn tune ‘St. Denio’, most frequently sung to the words ‘Immortal invisible, God only wise’.

This was followed by Kenneth Young’s Autumn Arabesque, which revealed a great variety of dynamics.  This was a brilliant performance, full of subtlety.  Lovely timing and shimmering, ecstatic sounds were notable in this delightful work, demonstrating the skill of the composer as well as that of the performer.  The programme note quoted Young as saying that the piece ‘has a bitter sweet nostalgic quality which I often associate with Autumn’.  We were experiencing a chilly spring day, but the tones and gestures of the music were telling.  The resonance of the final note was sustained for an amazing length of time in this acoustic, thanks to the stillness of the audience.

Fauré’s Impromptu had a much more rambunctious opening than did the previous pieces.  This extended work demonstrated the skill of the composer in writing music absolutely apt for the instrument.  Jennifer Newth played it without the score.  The lush tones and varied dynamics meant the playing was always interesting and the sonorities were enchanting

Following Fauré, Michelle Velvin played her bracket, that began with Sonata in A minor, Kirkpatrick 148 of Domenico Scarlatti, which the performer had transcribed herself.  It sounded so straight-forward after the delicacy of much of the Fauré!  It was very apparent how much more light and shade the harp was able to express compared with the harpsichord.  As with the piano or the harpsichord, notes once struck on the harp cannot be sustained except by resonance, unlike the case with the organ or wind instruments, on which sounds can be held by the fingers.  Thus the magic of playing in a small, resonant venue gave a whole new life to this music on the harp.

However, this very feature meant that it was particularly unwelcome in the quiet music to hear the accompaniment of cellophane wrappers on cough sweets being undone.  I have no shares in the manufacturing company, but I always use and advocate for “Fisherman’s Friend”, a cough lozenge that brings no additional auditory effects to a concert.

The next work was by Wellington singer and composer Pepe Becker: Capricorn 1: Pluto in Terra.  I heard this work just over a year ago, played by Helen Webby.  Its astrological significance was not detailed in the programme note this time, but rather the aspects of the Christchurch earthquakes that the composer was evoking.  In her words that were quoted (though not here in quotation marks!) ‘… evoke both gravelly and murky qualities of slowly-shifting earth’.  I enjoyed it even more on a second hearing.  The use of a piece of paper between the strings early in the work, changing the tone; knocking on the soundboard and passages of low humming from the player all added to the other-worldly effects of the music.  Intriguing off-beat rhythms were a feature.  It was indeed evocative, and very effective.

I was struck by the fact that a harpist is so graceful to watch – the movement is like an elegant dance.  Michelle’s playing was a little less incisive than Jennifer’s; it was interesting to be aware of some difference in tonal quality, but the playing of both was skilled and enjoyable.

Crossing Waves by contemporary British composer Andy Scott was a stunningly beautiful piece and very descriptive of its subject matter.  Amazing glissandi from forte to pianissimo were among its delights, depicting the ocean and its moods.  These were followed by a serene section.  The programme note described the work as reflecting ‘the many moods of such a journey [as that taken by solo rower across the Atlantic Ocean, Roz Savage]: apprehension and excitement at the start, isolation and beauty in the mid-ocean, and energy and optimism as the journey is almost over.’

Finally, for something completely different; three short pieces from the Isle of Man, arranged for two harps by Charles Guard, one of the top Celtic harpists – but played here on the orchestral harp, as was the entire programme.  They were titled “Manannan Mac y Lir”, “Slumber Song” and “Flitter Dance”.  The players demonstrated a variety of technical skills, exploiting the versatility of their instrument in these colourful pieces.

We are fortunate to have such skilled harpists in Wellington, thanks to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s harpist, Carolyn Mills – obviously an outstanding teacher.  And of course to the dedication and hard work of the soloists, whose musical accomplishment it was a pleasure to hear.

Yvette Audain and friends “in the groove” – a new CD

Posted on by Peter Mechen

YVETTE AUDAIN
GROOVES UNSPOKEN

Featuring Yvette Audain (saxophone)
With: Hong Yul Yang (piano)
Katherine Hebley (‘cello)
Damon Key (soprano sax)
Donald Nicholls (tenor sax)
Nicola Haddock (baritone sax)
Zyia-Li Teh (tenor sax)
Andrew Uren (baritone sax)
Anthony Young (conductor, “bulletproof petals”)

Tracks: Grooves Unspoken / Hazine (Treasure) / Meditations upon Nasreddin Hoca
Hold Fast / An Irksome Vengeance / bulletproof petals / A Charleston Kick With Steel Caps

The CD launch at “Meow”, Edward St., Wellington

Featuring Yvette Audain (soprano sax, clarinet, recorder, Irish whistle)
with Jonathan Berkahn (piano and accordion)

Sunday, October 19th, 2014

Yvette Audain modestly commented beforehand that what would make her night would be at least TWO people in the audience for the launch of her CD “Grooves Unspoken”. Well, she got her wish and more, besides – not a great deal more, but those of us who were there were caught up in the creative and recreative web and waft of the music and its performance. And with the surroundings and amenities available at “Meow” in Edward Street in Wellington, we wanted for nothing as we listened to and grooved along with both Yvette and her fellow-performer Jonathan Berkahn – the latter had told me before the performance that he was still getting to grips with some of the material, but to my ears this wasn’t evident in his playing, versatile musician that he is!

The two musicians pretty well replicated the first four tracks on Audain’s CD, Jonathan Berkahn “filling in” more than adequately for the pianist featured on the CD, Hong Yul Yang in the title piece “Grooves Unspoken” and also the lovely “Meditations Upon Nasreddin Hoca”. The other two tracks featured the composer herself, demonstrating her versatility in playing both saxophone and clarinet. The former instrument evoked plenty of exotic ambience and colour in a piece called “Hazine” (Treasure), while the latter’s tones paid homage to Audain’s own part-Scottish ancestry in “Hold Fast” (the McLeod family’s motto!), mixing plenty of melodic fluidity with equal amounts of rhythmic vitality.

Hearing these four tracks “live” gave oceans of extra atmosphere to my later listening to the CD – the choreography of interaction, the physical gesturing and the direct contact with the tones and timbres of the instruments in question came back readily to my subsequent listening sessions. The CD had been planned beautifully as regards order, the sounds  of each track seeming to effortlessly give way to each instance of organic flow or marked contrast as it happened. Most appropriately the album (as did the evening) began with a piece of unashamed homage to a past giant, whose music Audain acknowledged as a formative experience – this was Dave Brubeck, whose signature album “Time Out” had obviously made a telling impression, judging by the “echoes” present in Audain’s beautifully-constructed piece, very appropriately named “Grooves Unspoken”.

From this we were taken elsewhere, to places replete with Middle-Eastern flavours and gypsy-like impulses. This was the aforementioned “Hazine”, a patient, measured and evocative creation whose character gradually shed its rhythmic carriage in favour of freer, more ambient sequences of figuration – spaces opened up via long-breathed notes and occasional pitch-bending, all of which conjured up a real sense of time passing, almost Omar Khayyam-like, into oblivion.

Not quite as overtly exotic, but as suggestive regarding different moods and realms was “Meditations Upon Nasreddin Hoca”. The work was made up of a number of ritualistic exchanges between piano and saxophone (again, Hong Yui Yang was the CD’s excellent pianist) – voices striving to unite but separated by distance or circumstance. A wide-eyed opening evoked a soul contemplating “the inverted bowl we call the sky”, one that was partly delighting in, partly despairing at the star-clusters and their loneliness. Whatever answer it was that came from the lonely spaces took the form of an invitation to dance and exult, which piano and sax did, revelling in the interchanges, before again seeming to part company. I loved the smoky lower register of Audain’s instrument, even if she very briefly seemed to lose her line to breathiness on a single high note, but recovering almost immediately and taking up with the piano once again. Throughout the two instruments would contrive to separate, join and separate again, bringing something new to each exchange after tasting their individually-wrought moments of disjointedness. The final exchange, an Eastern-flavoured dance, by turns sinuous and angular, re-established the “together but different” character of the interactions throughout, concluding with an exciting and confident flourish.

“Hold Fast” took its name from the motto of the Scottish McLeod clan, to which the composer’s grandmother belonged. The opening sounded a kind of clarion call, perhaps a summoning of the said clan, replete with Scottish snap and pipe-skirl, the declamations occasionally giving way to startling moments of rhythmic impulse, complete with occasional foot-stampings. One of Audain’s earliest compositions, the piece aptly honoured a tradition of both song and dance.

I loved the title “An Irksome Vengeance” and thought the combination of clarinet and ‘cello most splendidly explored the ensuing timbral concoctions, as well as staying true to the composer’s aim of keeping a basic pulse to the fore. I can’t really speak for musical currencies such as “post-grunge” and “progressive rock”, but thought that the music’s dynamism and knees-and-elbows angularities were, to say the least, arresting. And I thought the liveliness of the exchanges didn’t let up, even through the more lyrical sequences. Fantastic playing by both Audain and the ‘cellist Katherine Hebley – the ending itself was a treat, a masterpiece of po-faced comedy. One assumed the “vengeance” in question had by that time been wrought, or, alternatively, tossed aside as too “irksome” for any further consideration!

All three of the final trio of pieces on the CD seemed to me to particularly command the attention – the second piece, “bulletproof petals”, scored for a quartet of saxophones, sounded an outlandish note at the beginning, before taking a five-note figure and “deconstructing” it with no little glee. A wistful phrase was solemnly passed around the group, though like children told to be serious, splutters and giggles ensued. The wistful phrase returned, this time more formally and contrapuntally, and just as it seemed something imposing and grand was welling up out of the growing confidence, the splutters and giggles returned – one was left with unanswered questions, such as, “Was the “thick skin” of the composer’s explanation of the piece too easily penetrated?” and “Did the creative resolve buckle under the weight of derision too soon?”

But my favorite piece on the album had to be the final one, “A Charleston Kick with Steel Caps”, a piece that never let up in its “swing”, through different tempi and rhythmic trajectories – in fact, so involved was the CD’s “live” audience with the performance that they were ready to applaud at the first hint, midway through, of a final cadence, all too ready to deprive themselves of a wonderfully raucous buildup to a characteristically upbeat throwaway ending. I thought the music had the spirit of the times – a trifle Kurt Weill-ish in places, even, as well as its composer’s fingerprints on things like the derivation of the accompanying rhythms of the final section of the dance from earlier in the work – organic thinking which involved all of the instruments in melodic, or motivic as well as harmonic contributions to the whole.

Briefly, I thought the disc’s contents a happy amalgam of “entertainment” and “provocative” pieces – in this respect I thought particularly well of the last three works on the CD, culminating in, for me, a piece that seemed to sum up Yvette Audain’s achievement in making her playing such a gift to all kinds of sensibility. This is not to under-appreciate the other, earlier pieces, just as bagatelles, divertimenti and serenades are the sunnier sides of deeper purposes. “Grooves Unspoken” is a delight, an uninhibited and unashamed self-portrait of creative impulse that Audain can be justly proud of.

(Visit Yvette Audain’s website at www.yvetteaudain.com for further information)

Borodin Quartet in Wellington – Old-World elegance, universal beauty

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
THE BORODIN QUARTET

MYASKOVSKY – String Quartet No.13 Op.86
SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No.11 in F Minor Op.122
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat Op.130

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 16th October, 2014

Mention the name “Borodin Quartet” and the average classical music-lover’s eyes will either take on a dreamy, far-away look as if contemplating whole histories of music-making in every prestigious place imaginable, or else flash with sudden excitement at the prospect of encountering this world-renowned group’s playing. Last week in Wellington, chamber-music enthusiasts had the chance to indulge in either or both reactions, as the Borodins (their 2014 lineup of players, of course) gave a concert in the city as part of a Chamber Music New Zealand tour.

The group was formed in 1945, though with a different name, the Moscow Conservatoire Quartet (all of its members then and since, have been graduates of the Moscow Conservatory) – interestingly, the first ‘cellist of the group was none other than Mstislav Rostropovich, though he left shortly afterwards to concentrate on his solo career, his place being taken by Valentin Berlinsky, the group’s ‘cellist for the next sixty-two years!.

In 1955 the group adopted its present name, in homage to the composer Alexander Borodin. Since then the quartet’s personnel has changed entirely and repeatedly, with violinist Ruben Agharonian (the present leader) and violist Igor Naidin joining in 1996, ‘cellist Vladimir Baishin in 2007 and violinist Sergey Lomovsky the most recently recruited member, in 2011. This was the quartet’s sixth visit to New Zealand, the first (with four different players) being in 1965, and the most recent prior to this present one being in 2010.

The ensemble first encountered its great compatriot Dmitri Shostakovich in 1946 – though Shostakovich’s favourite quartet remained the Beethoven Quartet (who premiered all but two of his fifteen quartets) the Borodins also worked with the composer on each of the individual works, giving their interpretations a unique flavour and insight. The Quartet actually recorded two complete cycles, the first at the time when only thirteen quartets had been written by the composer, and the second following the latter’s death in 1975.

On tour this time round the group brought the Eleventh String Quartet, written just after the composer’s Thirteenth Symphony had been lambasted and banned by the Soviet authorities, on account of its controversial subject-matter, the setting of texts by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The Eleventh Quartet is, by comparison an essentially “private” work, made up of seven shortish, continuously-played movements. Though not as powerfully-projected a work as some of its fellows, the music throughout cast its own darkly-fscinating spell in the Borodins’ hands.

Beginning with a melancholic, somewhat elegiac opening, the music quickly and sure-footedly moved through its various sequences. There were ironic exchanges between an obsessively repeated figure and upwardly-mocking glissandi, which were abruptly interrupted by explosive, and energetic outbursts producing the most amazingly resonant chord-dissonances. Everything was suddenly whirled away by molto-perpetuo violin figures which did their best to ignore shouts of disquiet from the other strings – the composer ironically gave this section the tiltle “Humoreske”!

Perhaps the “dark heart” of the work came with the “Elegy” section, where Shostakovich quoted the Funeral March from the “Eroica”, a section of the work written to commemorate the death a year before of the Beethoven Quartet’s ‘cellist, Vassily Shirinsky. After this, an epilogue quoted from material heard right at the opening of the quartet, by now, seeming a world away. As performed this evening by the Borodins, the work was, in places very much a memorable “Fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” kind of listening experience.

The Shostakovich quartet had been preceded on the program by a work from Nikolay Myaskovsky, born in Poland to Russian parents in 1881. I’d not heard a lot of his music, with the exception of his Symphony No.21, dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and recorded with the orchestra by Morton Gould.  Myaskovsky’s String Quartet No.13 Op.86 was his very last work to be published, and was in fact dedicated to the same Beethoven Quartet that had championed Shostakovich’s music.

The music actually won the composer a posthumous Stalin Prize, in marked contrast to the reception a few years earlier accorded his 26th Symphony, denounced by the infamous “Zhdanov decree” in 1948 (along with fellow-composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev), for “formalist tendencies” – i.e. music “inaccessible to the people”.  But I thought it was interesting that a friend I talked with during the concert’s interval found the Myaskovsky work “bland and ordinary”. I must record that, after some discussion, we begged to differ on that point!

Certainly in comparison with the Shostakovich work, Myaskovsky’s music wasn’t difficult or challenging – instead, it was evocative, colourful, energetic, and quixotic, in places even volatile in its unexpected changes of metre and contrasts of mood. The quartet’s opening made me think of Pasternak and his “Doctor Zhivago”, a vein of melancholy informing the music that the Borodins kept taut and sharply-focused, never allowing over-indulgence of tone or phrasing. The “presto fantastic” of the second movement was very much that – urgent and unsettled, interchanging dotted rhythms with whirling triplets, before precipitously plunging into a dark, slow waltz, like a kind of lament – we were kept on the edges of our “listening-seats” throughout by the composer’s quixotic sensibilities and the deftness of the Borodins’ playing.

The richly-melodic Andante which began the slow movement brought an unashamedly nostalgic ambience to the fore, the music’s development reiterating the same themes but with different voices and different kinds of emphasis – very lovely. The finale’s emphatic opening “bounce” introduced the first of many sequences, all too rapidly “crowding-in” to do full justice to in print, but tossed off with great élan by the musicians, complete with a wonderful “surprise” ending.

So, with two very different “Russian” evocations behind us, each fascinating in its own individual way, we squared up after the interval to the Borodins’ playing of one of the “great” Beethoven quartets. This was Op.130 in B-flat, which the New Zealand String Quartet had “spoiled” us with in concert a couple of years ago by playing the composer’s original ending to the work, the astounding “Grosse Fugue”. We had to content ourselves here with Beethoven’s revised ending, a substitute finale whose cheerful and disconcerting garrulity the Borodins were able to temporarily reconcile me to.

And the Quartet’s performance of the remainder of the work brought handsome rewards.  Throughout the concert one noticed how the players had the knack of creating tension and focus without apparent external effort – it all seemed to be coming from the instruments rather than from the players’ use of them, to a disconcerting degree, in places, though the sounds certainly conveyed all that the music carried. If less involving on a visceral level than, say, the playing of the NZSQ, the Borodins made up for this with their surety of application of musical values.

So, the first movement of Op.130 was poised, balanced and aristocratic, making the following Presto movement more spectral and agitated than usual, the triplet section dispatched with astonishing virtuosity, and the reprise of the opening like a devil pursuing and snapping at a pair of heels! The Andante con moto had an incredible lightness of utterance, seeming to rise above its usual bucolic ambience, instead enjoying the lightest and most sensitive of touches.

The Quartet played the German Dance (Alla danza tedesca) with the same swiftness of movement and lightness of touch, the violin’s central running figurations briefly evoking the fairground before returning to the lyrical atmosphere of the first part – everything easeful and without a trace of heaviness. As for the exquisite Cavatina, its “hymn to life” aspect in the composer’s gallery of human impulse touched our hearts, the syncopated melody appearing to float freely during the piece’s almost hallucinatory middle section, before returning to earth and anchoring our spirits safely once more.

As for the finale, the problem with the music  is obviously mine, as the group lavished as much care on its droll jog-trot rhythms as anywhere else in the whole work. In all, it was “old school” music-making of the highest order – and the players rewarded our extended appreciation of their efforts with a short transcription of a Tchaikovsky song, performed obviously to the manner born, for our delight.

 

Alexa Thomson – possibility and accomplishment on the viola

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St. Andrews-on-the-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series:

Alexa Thomson, Viola
Rafaella Garlick-Grice, Piano

Brahms – Sonata for Viola and Piano in F minor, Op.120
Bartok – Moderato, from Viola Concerto, Sz.120, BB 128
Paganini (arr.Primrose) – La Campanella

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

Wednesday 15th October 2014

 This concert was an Honours music degree recital for Alexa Thomson, and St.Andrew’s church was a most suitable venue for this scale of performance. The Brahms Sonata is, of course, one of the lynchpins of the violist’s repertoire, and it was a good vehicle for Alexa’s artistic phrasing and warmth of tone which was entirely free of the edgy, nasal quality that can often detract from the upper register of a viola. The balance of piano and viola was excellent, obviously benefitting from Rafaella’s wide experience in such collaborative roles, and together the players very effectively captured the many contrasting moods of the opening Allegro appassionato.

They did likewise in a beautifully wistful reading of the following Andante and a very gracious Allegretto. The demanding Vivace finale was very polished and technically competent, and rounded off a thoughtful and musical performance of this iconic work. For my part, I would have preferred a reading with less gentility, more overt passion and Romanticism, and a wider exploration of the dynamic range that Brahms’ rich idioms can offer so many opportunities for; but a more subdued approach obviously sat  very comfortably with the players.

Next was the opening Moderato movement from Bartok’s concerto, a work that, for me, offers some pretty challenging listening, given its unforgiving dissonance and aggressive, angular writing in places. But the duo attacked it with impressive technical skill, and highlighted well its widely contrasting moods, be they angry or lyrical. This was a more passionate reading than the Brahms, and the movement definitely benefitted from that.

La Campanella is an unashamedly show-off piece in Paganini’s very recognisable style, and like its many stablemates it is very demanding technically. Both players had all the fireworks thoroughly sorted out, with Alexa pulling off the brutal double stopping with considerable flair. There was good contrast between the widely varying moods of the piece, with the musical phrasing of the more lyrical sections punctuating the frenetic interludes very effectively. The work closed with a great flourish that had the audience expressing their appreciation most enthusiastically.

The programme notes stated that “Alexa really aspires to have a solo career” but she came across to me, and others I spoke to, as a gentle soul, with a refinement more suited to chamber or orchestral roles. For a solo career, I think she needs to find that element of the bruiser that is, I feel, essential to tackle this intractable instrument. It was never designed to go under the human chin, and in a solo situation calls more for a cellist mentality than that of an “alto violinist”. Nevertheless, this very demanding programme was most professionally pulled off, and Gillian Ansell must be a very proud teacher.

SMP Ensemble – Sound Barrel a “lucky dip” for this listener!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SMP Ensemble presents:
SOUND BARREL

Music by:
CHRIS CREE BROWN, HIROYUKI YAMAMOTO,
JASON POST, GIACINTO SCELSI,
BEN GAUNT
Graphic Scores by:
TOM JENSEN, LYELL CRESSWELL,
SCILLA McQUEEN

Special guest artist:
KANA KOTERA (euphonium)

SMP Ensemble:
Karlo Margetic, Richard Robeshawe, Reuben Jellyman
Cordelia Black, Tabea Squire, Sam Vennell
Chris Wratt, Anton Killin, Jason Post

Adam Concert Room,
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 26th September 2014

That enterprising and congenitally provocative performing group, the SMP Ensemble presented a characteristic program for our delight and fascination at the Adam Concert Room last Friday evening.

Every piece on the program brought its own specific amalgam of spontaneity and thoughtfulness to bear on both the recreative process and the audience’s receptivity – a kind of “expect the unexpected” ethos whose attendant challenges, bewilderments and satisfactions truly “spiced up” the evening’s music.

I must admit to a certain level of self-generated bravado in writing these words, gobsmacked as I was by the effect of some of the sounds that I heard, experienced and watched being made throughout the evening. Particularly thought-provoking were the items featuring graphic scores, each of which was displayed clearly and spaciously (excellent and audience-friendly visual displays were a feature of the concert), giving us some unique insights, both cerebral and instinctive, regarding that mysterious, often nebulously wrought “womb of interactivity” that exists between composer and performer – and, of course, by extrapolation, each listener.

It was very much a case for me of being faced with music for which I had relatively little previous reference in terms of being able to make judgements and draw conclusions based on what I saw and heard. I found myself going back to points of revisiting of my own “formative responses” to sounds, well before my current ostensible crop of expectations relating to conventional classical music. I was reminded, again and again, by what I heard the SMP players do, of my first encounters with things that were world-enlarging, both in terms of timbre and colour and texture, but also in terms of structure and organization and juxtapositioning.

In short, I was “undone” to a large extent by the concert, and this is a record of the ensuing impressions I received from the music while in that partly delightful, partly precarious state.

The concert began with a piece by UK composer Ben Gaunt, one whose basic idea interestingly “resonated” within me – that of “Sympathetic Strings”, ambiences created by material that resonates as a consequence of other materials being “played” – of course stringed instruments do have this very particular on-going quality, whether intentional or incidental. Gaunt carried this idea over to having sounds generated by performers whose creative imaginations “resonate” as a result of what they hear other performers do. The performance was directed by Jason Post, whose own music was to make an appearance in the concert’s second half.

The Ensemble’s formation at the beginning visually expressed a kind of Newtonian “action” and “reaction” process, with clarinet, double bass and violin to the right of the performing area, and an accordion, violin and percussion set antiphonally to the left. The music began with beautifully-floated, nocturnal-like lines from clarinet, double bass and violin, occasionally punctuated by irruptions from the left, as if worlds were colliding and rubbing along each other’s edges. Of a sudden all hell seemed to break loose, in particular from Karlo Margetic’s clarinet, which seemed to be expressing some kind of musical apoplexy, a process which led to the player actually collapsing and having to be revived by a violinist – was this a mere theatrical touch, or an organic consequence of the “sympathetic” pressures brought to bear on the performer by the music?

Christchurch composer Chris Cree Brown’s “Sound Barrel” gave its name to the concert, but amply characterized the music we heard, scored for euphonium and fixed media playback. We were first introduced to the guest soloist, Japanese-born Kana Kotera, obviously a virtuoso of her instrument, judging by the timbal and coloristic command she was able to exert upon the euphonium’s sounds, ranging from cavernous, tuba-like grunts and galumphings to honeyed-tone croonings. “Elephantine Dreams” could as well have been the piece’s title, as the fixed media playback gave a definite “narrative” context for the soloist to muse upon Quixotic-like adventures, alternating between the fantastical and the extremely visceral.

Poet and composer Cilla McQueen’s work “Rain” added a graphic visual element to the evening’s proceedings, the ensemble “playing” two of the composer’s semi-abstracted “graphic scores” – works of art in themselves, of course! It was a colourful assemblage of instruments indeed! – a ukulele played with a painted stick, a double-bass, bongo drums played with sticks that had soft felt heads, a violin and an accordion – and some kind of tube with a piece of chain attached. The composer/artist’s  second score had a more recognizable kind of contouring, in the shape of a fern frond about to unfold. More obviously rhythmic at the piece’s beginning than was  the first realization, this piece seemed to me more ritualistically or ceremonially conceived than the first one – perhaps a more public as opposed to a previous private acknowledgement of the psychology of weather. Instruments such as a gong advanced a feeling that the second graphic score invited a more structured and kinetic approach to the composer’s own inspiration

Wellington is currently playing host to composer Hiroyuki Yamamoto, from Japan, here on a three-month composer residency – his piece “Ginkgo biloba”, written for solo euphonium set the player a number of technical challenges and difficulties, designed to show off the particular qualities of the instrument, and the virtuosity of the player. Beginning with a kind of definitive euphonium statement of declaration, Kana Kotera seemed to “own the work” – she adroitly moved from her opening “calling card” mode to the piece’s “real” business, setting sostenuto lines against staccato impulses, the music’s momentum gradually building, the animation increasing and the ratio of introspection diminishing.

Some of the composer’s explanations I understood – microtones and multiphonics, for example – but “half-valve” defeated me! – I assumed it was some kind of “shortening” technique used to alter pitch and timbre, and would have been used by the soloist as part of the extraordinary array of speech-like intonations throughout the piece, in which mouthing and tonguing would have had a significant part to play. Her timbral and coloristic capabilities on the instrument were in fact astonishing, the potentialities she unlocked for expression fulfilling almost to excess the prescription expressed by the composer that the sounds needed the kind of inherent ambiguity which suggested and demonstrated their basic instability.

More graphics accompanied Lyell Cresswell’s “Body Music” – appropriately dedicated to Jack Body (who was present at the concert) at the time of his fiftieth birthday (how time flies!) – here were great flourishes of exuberance, the sounds fluid and dynamic, the liquidity of the textures advanced by the use of a celeste. I took from it a kind of celebration of human physicality and impulse, the music shaping form and characterizing movement in sound. The actual graphic score appropriately displayed a human shape packed tightly with notes, a depiction of a truly musical being!

Giacinto Scelsi’s 1976 work “Maknongan” brought back Kana Kotera, eager to explore with her euphonium the Italian composer’s refined, somewhat austere world of limited notes inflected with microtones. Called by one commentator “the most focused and abstract work Scelsi ever composed”, the piece was also one of  the composer’s very last works. The euphonium’s rich sound seemed to me to “humanize” the composer’s characteristic austerities (well, as with the ones I’d previously heard, anyway!), the soloist furthering the process by employing a stylish hat with a paper rose in the hat-band as a kind of “mute” for the instrument! As these things often do, the mere sight of the hat performing this function enhanced the aural effect!

The work, true to the composer’s style, revolved around a single note, the music’s explorations of associated notes (octave-plus-one leaps, various microtonal “shifts”  and numerous timbal contrasts) creating a kind of centre for the work upon which we listeners could focus. As with any sound, constant repetition alone gradually changes the ambient receptivity – this, together with the numerous variants, aural and visual, made for a kind of  micro-journeying of transformation within the piece’s surprisingly short span. The piece was written for “any bass instrument”, thereby inviting further conjecture regarding what kind of sound-world a string bass, for instance, would create – all very intriguing!

More work for Kana Kotera and her trusty euphonium, with Jason Post’s “yatsar”, a work for the instrument and electronics. The composer alerted us to the meaning of “yatsar”, a Hebrew word for fashioning or shaping, as would a potter fashion a vessel from clay, which is, of course, a well-known biblical metaphor for God’s creation of man. This idea was expressed by breath to begin with, the player blowing tonelessly through the interment, while the electronically-contrived ambience suggested pulsations of rhythmic movement amid a kind of “white noise”. The euphonium’s notes seemed to my ears to be recorded as well as played “live” – whether or not “looped” I wasn’t sure. I imagined that the interaction between “real” acoustical sounds and the electronic ambiences might have represented a kind of relationship between creator and the fashioned object.

What to make of Tom Jensen’s “What is it?” which followed, a piece for solo violin played by Tabea Squire? – perhaps the rhetoric of the title is its own best description, given the composer’s own quasi-nihilistic notes regarding (a) the initial creative urge, (b) the self-characterised “chaos” of mind from whence the impulse sprung, © the resulting graphic score, (d) the title-question which arose from the score, and (e) the doubt as to the actuality of that same question (and by extrapolation, every previous step in the process)! And was the work a suitably portentous, grandly-conceived, groaning-under-its-own-weight, aesthetically convoluted series of existential sound-structures, unerring in its progress towards self-annihilation? – after all, JS Bach’s Chaconne from his D MInor Partita, a work also for solo violin, was able to create a whole universe of structured sounds and potentialities.

Perhaps, in direct opposition to Bach’s “order in the midst of chaos” sublimities, Tom Jensen took us on a journey via Tabea Squire’s violin, into the dark heart of disorder – the “toneless tones” of the opening section was almost an “all is vanity” exposition of sounds left to cohere in the minds of the listener, with no direction from the composer as to how this “ought” to be. The sotto voce middle section brought to ear wraith-like voices, whose conflagrations of approximate pitch suggested an order and structure on the edge of day-to-day conventions, the occasional irruptions of tone like flint-sparks in the darkness. This all seemed to intensify in a concluding section whose “do I wake or sleep” disembodied ghostings had, I felt, taken me into the throes of my subconscious – an extraordinary evocation.

It needed John Adams to come to my rescue at the concert’s end, by way of a work called “American Standard” – a deconstructionist approach to popular American music forms. This was the first movement of that work, a March, called “John Philip Sousa” but with none of the celebrated March King’s wonderful tunes and swaggering rhythms – instead, the composer instructs that the musicians employ “a plodding pulse, with no melody or harmony”, in fact the inverse of what Sousa would have intended. The program note quoted Adams as saying that the piece sounded “like the retreat from battle of a badly-wounded army”. So it was a kind of subversion of original intent (like all good parodies, of course), this one being particularly disconcerting in effect, due to its dour, non-celebratory aspect, and its brief displays of angst (the occasional groan/shriek).

As TS Eliot observed, “not with a bang, but with a whimper” came the concert to its end – extraordinary stuff, and definitely not for the faint-hearted in places! I thought the playing used a kind of “unvarnished” quality to an engagingly spontaneous effect. Also effectively managed were the technical aspects of the presentation – I thought the screening of the graphic scores was a marvellous thing to do, indicative of the ensemble’s willingness to put itself out there and communicate its stuff – food for thought for all of us!

 

 

 

 

 

NZSM Classical Guitar students square up to a challenging recital

Posted on by admin

New Zealand School of Music presents:
NZSM Classical Guitar Students

Lunchtime Concert Series
Old St.Paul’s, Wellington.

 Tuesday September 23rd, 2014

This brief concert was a welcome opportunity to hear again the talents of the NZSM Classical Guitar students under the tutelage of director Dr. Jane Curry. The full ensemble consisted of fifteen players, of whom four were guest members from the School’s pre-tertiary programme. The recital comprised a wide variety of works that spanned the “Golden Age” of Elizabethan lute music, the Baroque, and the 19th and 20th centuries.

The initial work, for full ensemble, was Three Distractions by Richard Charlton (b.1955). The first two short numbers involved lots of complex, irregular and syncopated rhythms, while the third was  marked by angular atonal writing with many percussive effects. It was a challenging piece, where the complexities were well handled and the integration of the large ensemble was excellent.

Then followed two duo numbers, firstly The Flatt Pavan and Galliard by John Johnson (1550-1594) who was one of the fathers of the “Golden Age” of English lute music. The characteristic graceful Elizabethan writing was well balanced by George Wills and Jake Church, with musical phrasing and good dynamic variation. The following Jongo for Two Guitars (1989) by Brazilian composer Paulo Bellinati was a total contrast where rhythmic complexities and clever percussive effects were also very effectively realized.

The bracket was completed by a duo version of Manuel da Falla’s unmistakable Spanish Dance which was given a very competent reading, though the quietest dynamics tended to disappear in the church’s acoustic, and some slightly untidy passagework popped up occasionally between the two players.

The next bracket comprised works for guitar quartet, with players Royden Smith, Dylan Solomon, Amber Madriaga and Christopher Beernink. The first work was Toccata by Leo Brouwer (b.1939), a Cuban player-composer who often combines “traditional forms with energetic, rhythmic flare resembling Cuban folk and street music. Brower’s compositional style is unique, consisting of a multitude of different sounds, techniques and cultures.” (programme notes). The Toccata was certainly busy with all of these, yet it somehow failed to grasp me in an integrated experience  that engaged the ear and led one on a musical journey. Its technical challenges were certainly met head on by the quartet, but some essential dimension seemed to have eluded the composer’s pen.

The next work was a transcription for guitar quartet of the opening sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata BWV 29 Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir. Bach himself wrote three versions of this movement – the first for solo violin (in BVW 1006), then the cantata sinfonia scored for orchestra, and finally a transcription for solo lute (BVW 1006a). I have not heard this last, but I felt that this guitar version was simply not able to do justice to the wonderful contrapuntal writing. Its very life blood derives from the gutsy, incisive attack and timbre offered by bow, reed or trumpet, and the guitar can simply not produce this.

There may well be merit in pedagogic versions that test the technical capacities of players (which were very adequately demonstrated here), but it does not sit comfortably in a concert programme. However, this particular recital was serving as an assessed element of the university course, so the parameters are somewhat different.

Spin by Andrew York (b.1958) was next on the programme. It was a work that challenged the players with tricky rhythms shifting between 7/8, 3/4 and 4/4, and with complex busy writing, all of which they handled with technical aplomb. I felt however that the intricacies of Spin would have been given greater shape and meaning by a wider dynamic range and more thoughtful phrasing.

The final work in the programme was Folguedo by Afro-Brazilian guitarist/composer Celso Machado (b.1953). Scored for guitar orchestra, it was billed as “a gem of a piece [in] the canon of large guitar ensemble repertoire”. It proved to be just that: the first of the two movements was immediately attractive, featuring a guitar solo introduction which then blossomed into ensemble writing that was presented with pleasing balance and dynamics. The second movement involved a considerable complexity of rhythms, textures, interweaving lines and harmonies, which were all handled pretty competently. Once again I felt that the challenge of the technical demands tended to be uppermost in the performers’ minds, whereas a greater exploration of the dynamic possibilities would have considerably enriched the music.

But having said that, the work was presented with a verve and enthusiasm that was shared by all the ensembles heard in this recital, a feature which has marked all the concerts I have heard from this tertiary programme. The Old St. Paul’s venue offered a very suitable acoustic and ambience which further enhanced the privilege Wellington audiences enjoy from hearing the fruits of this excellent NZSM endeavour.

 

 

 

Eggner Trio and Amihai Grosz win all hearts

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Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
EGGNER TRIO WITH AMIHAI GROSZ (viola)

Mozart Piano Quartet No 2 in E flat K493
Schumann Piano Trio No 3 in G minor Opus 110
Anthony Ritchie Oppositions
Dvořák Piano Quartet No 2 in E flat Opus 87

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday 14 September 2014

The Eggner sibling trio of Georg (violin), Florian (cello) and Christoph (piano) presented this programme with viola player, Amihai Grosz, Principal Viola of the Berlin Philharmonic and a founding member of the Jerusalem String Quartet.

I had not heard the Eggner group before, but from the very opening lines of the Mozart it was obvious why they are firmly established in the forefront of chamber ensembles today. Viola associate Amihai Grosz melded seamlessly into the mix, and shared obviously in the pleasure they clearly enjoy in making music together.

The phrasing, tone and sensitivity of the melodic conversation that unfolds in the opening Allegro of the Mozart revealed a profound musicianship and impeccable polish that continued to mark the whole work, and indeed the entire programme.  The three movements of the Mozart score give wide scope to display the artistry of the tenderest melody making, for bold tempestuous interplay between competing instruments, for whimsical or thoughtful moods by turn, and the players made the most of every opportunity that this masterpiece offers.

Schumann’s Piano Trio no.3 is a rather turbulent work, where melodic motifs are often brief and frequently interrupted as they are exchanged or developed. The first movement is indeed marked “bewegt” (turbulent) and all three instruments are given the opportunity to participate fully in the dramatic, restless writing. The  tranquil second movement was a wonderful contrast that showcased some glorious melodic playing, before the vigour and strength of the two final movements, where the players explored every turn of the rich colour and variation. One could not fail to sense a level of mutual understanding that has had the chance to blossom in this trio group over many years of family music making.

Anthony Ritchie’s Oppositions was composed in 2005 for the NZ Piano Quartet. The composer’s programme notes explain that “It is in one movement, and is based around the idea of opposing forces, whether they be literal or imaginative. In musical terms, the piano is frequently pitted against the strings………..”. There is a lot of violent, strident, percussive writing, contrasted sometimes with more lyrical episodes, but the work is marked throughout by restless, abrasive tonalities that further heighten the tension and conflict between the various instrumental idioms. There is an outpouring of anger and violence that is clearly intended, and the players threw themselves into it with total commitment.

One felt both mentally and musically assaulted by the clash of the “Oppositions”, but for me the vivid descriptive qualities of the “music” became, frankly, overwhelming. While it was a very effective foil between two highly romantic items, I was relieved when the work ended, ungrateful as that may be of Richie’s acknowledged skills as a composer.

The Dvorak Piano Quartet no.2 is a heroic work in this genre, which the programme notes aptly described: “The work displays a melodic invention, rhythmic vitality and instrumental colour typical of the nationalist Dvorak at his peak……….”  The quartet threw themselves into the music with tremendous vigour and polish, displaying a huge dynamic range across the widely contrasting episodes which stretch from the most wistful delicacy to the almost symphonic proportions of the finale.

It was a riveting delivery that brought huge accolades from the audience, who were treated to an encore of the slow movement from Brahms’ E Minor Piano 4tet. The long opening cello melody was quite breathtaking, and made me wish for an opportunity to hear Florian Eggner in a sonata recital setting, where every note of his masterful playing would be heard. There had been times during the concert when, from our seats, it had been difficult to discern the cellist clearly, even though he had clearly been playing his heart out. It will be good when the Town Hall is again available for chamber music concerts, as such situations might well be taken care of there.

 

Nikau Trio celebrates Spring with enchanting, vivacious music

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Haydn: Trio no.1, Hob. XV:17, for flute, cello and piano
Enescu: Cantabile and Presto, for flute and piano
Martinů: Trio for flute, cello and piano

Nikau Trio (Karen Batten, flute; Rachel Thomson, piano; Margaret Guldborg, cello)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 3 September 2014, 12.15pm

The opening trio fitted the mood of the day, and enhanced it.  Haydn’s good humour was just right for another windless, sunny day (following over a week of such delightful spring weather), and it was harmoniously reflected in what we heard from these three fine musicians.  They played this joyous music with alacrity and commitment.  The flute particularly, evokes spring and the bursting of new life.  The work was charmingly and sensitively played.

Romanian composer George Enescu (1881-1955) (misspelt as Enesco on the printed programme) wrote his work in Paris, in 1904, we were told by Karen Batten.  The Cantabile had quite a sultry feel; it began low in the flute’s range.  It was a graceful movement, with beautiful passages for both instruments.  When the presto commenced, immediately the playing was more dynamic and forceful, yet still graceful.  It proved to be a delightful work.

Rachel Thomson talked about the fun and good humour in the work by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů – i.e. in similar vein to Haydn’s.  Gaiety bounded from the first notes.  Each part seemed independent, yet in their coming together they made up to more than the sum of their parts.  The first movement had lots of that – running movement.

The tranquil adagio was the opposite – great stillness to begin, but gradually working up to a fierce climax, before subsiding to a gentler mood.  It was full of piquant harmonies and juxtapositions of the diverse timbres of the three instruments.

The third movement opened with only the slow flute, followed by a sprightly, bouncy allegretto with jaunty themes.  A grand theme at one point failed to quell the high spirits.  Then a wistful, slower section had Margaret Guldborg’s cello sounding solemn, even plaintive, with the mute in use.  Exuberance returned, and the music dashed away to a spirited conclusion with many notes, especially for the pianist, whose complex part seemed at times to prefigure minimalism in its repetitions.

This was a wonderful programme of music that was unfamiliar to me, played by a trio exhibiting great elan, musicianship, technique and enjoyment. Bravo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passion and circumspection from the wonderful Faust Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
FAUST QUARTET

(Simone Roggen, Annina Woehrle, vioiins
Ada Meinich, viola / Birgit Böhme, ‘cello)

JOHN PSATHAS – Abhisheka

LEOŠ JANÁČEK  – String Quartet no.2 “Intimate Letters”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN  – String Quartet in A Minor Op.132

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Tuesday, 2nd September, 2014

Named after German literature’s archetypal questing figure, the Swiss-based Faust Quartet currently on tour in New Zealand, gave us an appropriately far-reaching programme for their Chamber Music Hutt Valley Concert at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre. Led since 2012 by New Zealander Simone Roggen, the group also has German, Norwegian and Swiss members, its cosmopolitan “face” also reflecting the range and origins of the music presented on this occasion.

As with the group’s previous Wellington concert (reviewed by Rosemary Collier for Middle C), the programme featured two “classics” of the quartet repertoire with a contemporary piece. New Zealander John Psathas’ work Abhisheka began the concert, the focused intensities of the work nicely sharpening our sensibilities and preparing us for what was to follow. Moravian composer Leoš Janáĉek wrote two String Quartets, the second of which, subtitled “Intimate Letters”, was nothing short of a sharply-focused outpouring of almost pure emotion relating to the composer’s love affair with a much younger married woman. The evening was “rounded off” by Beethoven’s renowned Op.132 String Quartet in A Minor, itself a work of great intensity, containing the well-known “Holy Song of thanksgiving from a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode” as its slow movement – no rest, it seemed, for either players or listeners!

John Psathas’s single-movement work 1996 work Abhisheka has become something of a classic quartet repertoire piece in this country, one whose qualities seem somehow freshly-minted with each performance one hears. Its exotic, meditative sound-world suggests a kind of ritual, as befits its name, derived from a Sanskrit word for “anoint”. The work’s themes have a definitive Eastern flavour, underscored by occasional pitch-bending on certain notes in the solo lines. There’s drama, too, in the way that some chords (such as at the work’s very opening) seem to come into being from a void of silence, a kind of metaphor for the birth of consciousness, or of awareness of a special state of being,  the “anointing” perhaps associated with the conferring of a state of grace upon the individual’s soul.

Whatever the case, Psathas has, with this work, contrived a unique sound-world, whose utterances draw us deeply into what seem at first like normal divisions of music and silence. However, with each note-clustered crescendo we’re taken further and more strongly into a kind of timeless state of being, where every gesture and its accompanying impulse and associated resonant effect seem to adopt a Wagnerian “time and space are one” quality, freed from movement towards and away from certain points, and having instead a ‘”centre of all things” fullness. The Faust Quartet’s concentrated, transcendent playing enabled us to give ourselves entirely over to the world into which the music had so readily transported us.

In retrospect the intense focus of Psathas’s work had the effect of activating and priming our sensibilities in “controlled conditions” by way of preparation for the scorching blasts of Leos Janáĉek’s fierily passionate String Quartet “Intimate Letters”. This was the second of two quartets written by the Moravian composer, both towards the end of his compositional life. They were inspired directly by his unrequited passion for a younger, already married woman, Kamilla Stösslová, the first quartet, subtitled “Kreutzer Sonata”, appearing in 1923, and the second written in 1928, the year of the composer’s death. Though Kamilla was the inspiration for both quartets, it’s in the second work that Janáĉek explicitly and directly expresses his feelings for her – incidentally, the subtitle “Intimate Letters” was given the work by its composer.

What a work, and what a performance! The players delivered this jagged, volatile, highly emotional, and in places seemingly unstable music at what seemed “full stretch”, employing the widest possible dynamic range and the greatest possible diversity of tones, timbres and colours. I’m sure I sat open-mouthed for much of the time, marveling at the gutsiness of it all, at the group’s readiness to meet the music at its expressive extremes, conveying without hesitation or reserve the unbridled, part-exhilarating, part-disturbing force of the composer’s hot-house bestowment. On this cheek-by-jowl showing, Janáĉek’s music puts even the Cesar Franck Piano Quintet in the shade as regards erotic suggestiveness.

Janáĉek’s penchant for extremes of  showed its hand right at the work’s beginning, with full-blooded declamations followed by whispered pianissimi, after which introduction followed sequences of such tangible physicality paralleled with moments of breathtaking tenderness – the playing of the violist Ada Meinich, in particular, seemed to suddenly underline the incongruity of concert-dress for such abandoned and unconfined utterances. The second movement’s romantic, rhapsodic-like beginning gave our sensibilities some respite, Janáĉek getting his players to bend, stretch, twist, coil and unwind the same melodic fragment  through countless treatments, before too long galvanizing the rhapsodic feeling with some savage, biting accents and manic presto-like scamperings.

Whatever the music did the players were there, pouring out sounds from their instruments that one couldn’t imagine wrought with greater intensity of physical and emotional commitment. The wild, winsome third movement, with its forceful dotted rhythmic trajectory, and the equally fraught finale both were put across to us with what seemed like anarchic force, to the point in the finale where one felt the music was expressing something near to emotional disintegration. Those episodes of vicious tremolandi during the work’s last few minutes sounded so raw, so animal-like, as if all human reason had been lost, and only primordial impulse remained – even more frightening was to encounter these savage gestures in tandem with moments of folkish gaiety and lyrical tenderness!

We certainly needed an interval after these outpourings, and especially in view of the music that was to take up the concert’s second half – Beethoven’s mighty Op.132 A Minor Quartet, known as the “Heiliger Dankgesang” Quartet by dint of its remarkable slow movement. Perhaps it was partly my expectation in the wake of the Faust’s remarkable performance of the Janáĉek work that I felt, increasingly so in retrospect, some disappointment in the players’ delivery of this very part of the work. It could also have been that the group’s concentration had been unsettled by the unfortunate circumstance of Simone Roggen’s instrument breaking a string at the beginning of the movement’s first dance episode, and that the music’s organic flow had been fatally checked – but however it was, the succeeding variants of the opening molto adagio seemed to me not to build in intensity and radiance as I would have expected – falling short of that “life infused with divinity” description, commented on by the program note.

I wondered, too, whether the experience for all of us of hearing the Janáĉek work earlier in the evening put extra onus on the performance of the Beethoven to “atone” in a way for the Moravian composer’s emotional excesses – here were the very different outpourings of two powerful creative spirits responding to tribulations of contrasting kinds. What Janáĉek’s music was depicting was its composer’s wrestling with the unrequited nature of his love for a younger woman – hence the music’s desperate, in places almost deranged aspect. Beethoven’s music had a corresponding kind of power, but of fierce determination and intense triumph over tragedy, and the intensity stemmed from both determination and triumph. I thought the quartet’s playing of Beethoven’s molto adagio sequences needed more of that fierce, intense sense of “being there” thru determination and tragedy, in a sense completing a process that Janáĉek, for all his greatness as a composer, wasn’t by dint of circumstance able to do.

The interesting thing was that the remaining three of the Beethoven work’s movements were given by the quartet one of the finest performances I’ve ever heard, nowhere more so than with the last movement. I’ve waited for many years to hear a reading of the latter that matched in feeling that of the old pre-war recording made by the Busch Quartet, to the extent that this present one did. Here, the players caught the “strut” of the music at the beginning, the theatricality (gothic-gestured in places) of the mad, melodramatic recitative-like section, and the darkness and unease of the subsequent allegro appassionato, the playing superbly conveying its swaying, vertiginous rhythm and haunted thematic material, as the music traverses the “dark wood” of human experience with all its enigmatic and expressionist gestures of dogged progression and determined resolve to “get through”.

How wonderfully the players caught that frisson of energy and thrust at the movement’s end, the accelerando both thrilling and hair-raising, for fear of where it might end, but bringing the music at last out into the sunlight, where there’s relief and circumspection rather than joy and celebration – the end is certain and emphatic without being aggrandized in any way – here it was what Sir Edward Elgar would have called a triumph for “the man of stern reality”, as he described the conclusion of his “Falstaff”. But for the curious want of real thrust and intensity in places in the slow movement, as well as occasional edginess of intonation on single notes in passage work, I would want to call this performance of Op.132 a truly great one. It was certainly, in the context of the whole concert, a memorable listening experience.