Tag: chamber music

Faust Quartet with a different view of Schubert and a perplexing study of mythological horses

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Music Trust

Schubert: String quartet no.12 in C minor, D.703 ‘Quartettsatz’
Helena Winkelman: Quadriga for string quartet (2011)
Schubert: String quartet in D minor, D.810 ‘Death and the Maiden’

Faust Quartet (Simone Roggen and Annina Woehrle, violins; Ada Meinich, viola; Birgit Böhme, cello)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 31 August 2014, 3.00pm

Yet another European ensemble (the other was the Dalecarlia Quartet in July) with a New Zealand member – Simone Roggen, the first violinist.  This group, too, had a change of membership from that originally advertised.  There were several striking things about this ensemble; their handsome appearance on stage, their intense concentration and the performers’ remarkable techniques among them.

Another striking thing was the extremely pianissimo entry to the first item on the programme.  The playing was delicate and subtle, with an astonishing range of dynamics.  Thoroughly musical sounds conveyed the bitter-sweet nature of Schubert’s sublime music.  Was the range of dynamics too extreme?  It was certainly more so than in other performances I have heard of this wonderful single-movement quartet, yet the playing revealed the Romantic nature of the work to the fullest degree possible.  It was beautifully balanced and blended, making for a blissful experience.

Helena Winkelman (spelt with only one ‘n’ by Wikipedia; Helen Winkelmann is a New Zealand judge who was prominently in the news recently) was born in 1974.  Like the players she is Swiss, and well known to the Faust Quartet (yes, Roggen’s origins are Swiss too, and she now lives in Switzerland).  Roggen gave a spoken introduction to the work, and musical examples from the various movements were played, to illustrate the points being made.  These employed a variety of string techniques.

The narrative of the work dealt with horses: the first movement was named ‘Kelpie’, a Celtic water-demon which in this case was a horse.  The second, a scherzo, was entitled ‘Alwakr and Alsvidr; two horses who pulled the sun-chariot in Norse mythology.  The third employed seven fragments from the poet Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh notebooks.  While the opening line of the first fragment as printed in translation in the programme speaks of ‘leading a storm cloud by the bridle’, the subject matter is nature, flight and escape rather than horses.  The final movement is titled for an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir, Odin’s horse of Norse myth.

This horse has the power of flight, and epitomises the last of the four elements, air.  The first movement employs one voice, though not purely unison playing, and symbolises the water in which Kelpie lives; the two horses (and two voices) of the second movement represent fire, being captives of Sol, the sun-god.  The third movement speaks of the earth (the third element).

The opening movement incorporated numerous extended techniques for the players; watery sounds could certainly be heard.  The scherzo was very angular in musical character, and obviously difficult to play.  I found the sharp contrast with Schubert’s music not easy on the ear at times.

Despite my admiration for the skill of the performers, I did not find the composition at this stage stimulating. In this movement there were very intense, insistent sonorities, which worked up to furious interplay, which died away towards the end.  The horses fought each other, but they seemed to come to a mutual understanding and respect.

The Mandelstam movement featured exceptional playing, and employed a great variety of rhythms and complexity; the young women exhibited astonishing energy and skill.  Here, there was high-pitched interplay and excitement, but much was harsh and discordant.

The final movement began with angry turbulence. The horse was wilful and did not succumb happily to discipline – whereas these players do!  There were extended passages of double-stopping, making for thick textures. In this movement, passages incorporating vocalisation from the players gave a pleasing change of sonority before they returned to the gut-wrenching (in both senses of the term) timbres.

I have to say I found some of the timbres and sounds excruciating in the very lively acoustic of St. Andrew’s, especially in the final movement, and I was not the only one to feel this way.  The work was challenging for the players – and for the audience, but not a challenge I enjoyed rising to.  At times I envied those in the audience who found it possible to fall asleep.  Others had more positive attitudes to what they had heard, I discovered during the interval.

Schubert’s wonderful ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet is familiar, yet there is always something new to find in it, especially in the hands of the Faust Quartet.  I have these two Schubert works on the same LP (yes, I still play them).  Again, that great dynamic range these performers have was something new.  The little subtleties in their treatment of the rhythms and figurations were delightful to hear, as was their beauty of tone.  Nothing was skirted around – it was all there, in glorious technicolor.

The opening allegro was somewhat faster than is usually heard, but the melody was treated with gorgeous tone and expression.  The Faust finesse ensured that Schubert’s profundity was all there.

The andante con moto second movement contains the well-known Schubert song of the quartet’s title; the melody and exquisite harmony pull at the heart-strings.  Is there anything more sad in music than this?  The solo lines were deliciously played, principally, but not only, by Simone Roggen.  The tragic mood was sustained throughout the movement’s variations on the theme.  The seductive beauty of this movement is beyond compare, in my opinion, not least the cry of despair that ends it.

The Scherzo (allegro molto) is boisterous but unsettling at the beginning, then it becomes wistful and perhaps regretful, ending emphatically.  The playing of the Faust’s members conveyed all of this very directly.  Their technical expertise was such that they as individuals never got in the way of the music, and their cohesion and unanimity were astonishing.

The presto finale was almost feverish, rushing whence?  The music was ethereal and mysterious then frightening by turns, and the false endings added to the effect.  What enormous facility these players have!  We can only thank Chamber Music New Zealand and Chamber Music Wellington for enabling us to hear fine ensembles like this.  This was a stand-out performance in a year of excellent music-making.

 

Chamber Music New Zealand hosts exciting concert by pianos and percussion

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music New Zealand: “Rhythm and Resonance”

Mozart’s Sonata for two pianos, K 448; Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin (arr. Guldborg); Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Lutoslawski: Variations on a Theme by Paganini (arr. Ptaszynska)

Diedre Irons and Michael Endres – pianos; Thomas Guldborg and Lenny Sakovsky – percussion

Michael Fowler Centre

Tuesday 26 August, 7:30 pm

This step outside the usual range of string-dominant chamber music attracted a big house in the Michael Fowler Centre; the welcome by CEO Euan Murdoch also suggested that a larger number of younger people had been drawn by this programme, with its less familiar instrumental context, yet of major works.

And he drew attention to the use of an overhead camera that projected a bird’s eye view of the array of instruments – mainly the percussion – on the stage.

But the concert began with the only sonata that Mozart wrote for two pianos (the only other piece for two pianos is a Fugue in C minor, K 426). It’s a magnificent richly melodic masterpiece that responded whole-heartedly to treatment by four hands on two Steinways – the thought of any possible advantage from fortepianos never entered my head. The performance exploited the sonic possibilities of two instruments without producing sounds that were too dense or cluttered.

The two instruments were lined up side by side rather than facing each other with their bodies curling intimately together; so the primo player (in this case Diedre Irons) was visually dominant. The two have not dissimilar approaches to performance, devoted to playing of clarity and vigour as well as a scrupulous treatment of the varying dynamics. Even more impressive was their subtle rhythmic elasticity which, from the very percussive nature of the piano, poses a considerable challenge for two players: mere ensemble is hard enough.

In brief, this was music of genius played by two pianists who were virtually flawless in ensemble and musical spirit, and their performance entranced me from start to finish. There are so many beguiling phases, among the most charming the exquisite trill-opened motifs near the beginning of the Andante which were crystal clear yet imbued with magic.

The performance of Ravel’s Tombeau might have surprised an audience unprepared for the arrangement of the stage, pianos removed, leaving it dominated by three marimbas to be played by the two NZSO percussionists. From the start I found myself quite accepting of the altered quality of the music: much as I love the piano original, I am particularly partial to the marimba. Yet I wondered whether there might have been some monotony in the sound after a while. But that was at least partly avoided as Sakofsky moved, at the beginning of the Forlane, from the marimba at right angles to the audience, to one facing the audience, that produced a somewhat brighter, keen-edged tone. The spirit of Ravel survived excellently, since the eight mallets flourished by the players seemed to encompass all the notes in the piano score.

After the interval there were further re-arrangements: marimbas moved to the rear and xylophones, along with tam tam, side and bass drums, timpani and cymbals filled the stage. Oddly, this was one of the first truly ‘modern’ pieces of classical music I came to know through the small but curious collection that my girl-friend (later my wife) brought to our joint LP collection when we were about 21. It’s one of those works that seems to sound just as shocking and barbaric now as it did then (and that performance, an Argo recording paired with Contrasts for piano, violin and clarinet, still surprises me by its violent sounds and extreme dynamic contrasts).

What we heard on Tuesday was rather more well-mannered and less fierce. In addition, the big acoustic of the MFC subdues the harshness and acerbity of extreme sounds, and it was no doubt the more civilised sound that the four players produced that allowed the audience to enjoy this classic of modernity as they evidently did, judging from the applause. I think it loses little with less hard-edged sound and brutalism and that was the way it came off the stage; though it would have been too much to ask that such music be flawless in togetherness and finesse.

Incidentally, instead of being on the medium level stage as earlier chamber music concerts, including the Houstoun Beethoven concerts, had been, these performances which involved more instruments were at the usual high level of the stage which makes visibility difficult for the front dozen rows – hence the usefulness of the view from above, projected on the screen.

The last item had not been on the advertised programme or otherwise conspicuously announced: Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini. It is shorter than other famous treatments of this piece (Paganini’s 24th violin Caprice), though there are about twelve variations (the programme note did not disclose and that was my slightly uncertain count).  Lutoslawski wrote it in the early years of the war in German-occupied Warsaw, when he and Panufnik lived by playing piano duets in cabarets (for a revelatory account of that, read Panufnik’s autobiography Composing Myself). It was about the only one of Lutoslawski’s pieces to survive the horrendous German onslaught on Warsaw to put down the famous Warsaw uprising, as the Soviet army sat on the other side of the Vistula and did nothing to support the Polish resistance.

What we heard was an arrangement of the two-piano original commissioned by the Danish Safri Duo, made not by the composer, but by Polish Chicago composer Marta Ptaszynska. Compared with that original, I have to confess to finding the percussion additions a little superfluous. The original, which contains echoes of the Rachmaninov version, is sufficiently percussive and the addition of percussion instruments seemed to reduce the unique impact of the two pianos which, in good hands has all the brilliance, excitement and visceral scariness that is needed to bring a concert like this to a thrilling, hire-wire climax.

To hear and see what I mean, look at You Tube for a recent performance by Anastasia and Liubov Gromoglasova in Moscow. However, that is a small matter alongside the otherwise brilliant exhibition of skill and musicality that these four splendid musicians demonstrated in all four works. I had the very clear impression of a delighted audience leaving the MFC at the end.

 

 

Forbidden Voices liberated in NZSM conference on music and musicians banned by Nazis

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music: Recovering Forbidden Voices:
 Responding to the Suppression of Music in World War Two

Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday)
Schreker: Sonata for violin and piano in F major
Zemlinsky: Serenade in A major
Korngold: Violin Sonata in G major, Op 6

Duo Richter-Carrigan (Goetz Richter – violin and Jeanell Carrigan – piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 23 August, 8:15 pm

This evening’s concert was session number 11 in the weekend’s conference of talks, concerts and panel discussions dealing with the suppression of music and other arts during the second world war, primarily through the Nazi suppression of what they considered ‘Entartete Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’. It’s been a mixture of music and the spoken word, the latter examining aspects of the hideous impact of Nazism on art and artists wherever the regime gained control. Jews were by no means the only artists, musicians, writers to suffer, and music by Shostakovich and Messiaen have been heard in the concerts.

To this point there had been a performance of Hans Krasa’s children’s opera Brundibar (reviewed by us), concerts of chamber music by Schulhoff, Weinberg, Ullmann, Gidon Klein, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, as well as contemporary composers whose lives were deeply affected by fascism and communism; lectures and discussions about the repression of Jews and other minorities, and musicians in exile like Martinu; a celebration of the work of conductor/composer Georg Tintner, who sought refuge in New Zealand from WW2, but was largely ignored. He began to make musical headway only after going to Australia in 1954.

One of the ironical effects of the Nazi treatment that made so much art, music and literature disappear, was the West’s pursuit of the avant-garde in many of those fields since the end of World War 2, resulting in those composers remaining ignored for several decades, only now being revived, as here.

For Middle C the conference has presented a bit of a problem as various things have prevented each of us from paying the kind of attention that we should have liked, and which it deserved.

This lecture-recital began with a brief talk by the violinist Goetz Richter expanding on the theme music and the aesthetic of revenge – the revenge being that of Hitler against the bourgeois society that had rejected him as a creative artist (according to Richter). Unfortunately I was not sitting close enough to hear it well and Richter delivered it at a pace that was not well adapted to a thesis that was dense with complex propositions and argument.

Goetz Richter is a violinist, trained at the Hochschule für Musik, Munich. with a PhD in philosophy from Sydney University, a past associate concertmaster in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, now an
associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Jeanell Carrigan is senior lecturer in ensemble studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, having obtained her musical education in universities in Queensland, Sydney, Wollongong and studies in Europe with various piano pedagogues including Alfons Kontarsky and Karl Engel.

The duo has been playing together for 30 years.

The programme included works by three German or Austrian Jewish composers born with 25 years at the end of the 19th century. Each was written when the composer was young: the Schreker aged 20, the Zemlinsky at 24 and the Korngold at the age of 15. It was the Korngold piece that was the longest and most ambitious, and may have proved the most challenging in execution.

The three movements of Schreker’s piece are: Allegro Moderato, Andante con Moto, Presto. While his sonata bore the marked influence of Brahms, and sounded the most conventional of the three, given the time of its composition, after major chamber music by Debussy for example, Korngold’s sonata of only 14 years later was much more complex technically. Though, unlike the music that Schoenberg was writing by then, it was melodically still accessible; however, it does not sound as imposing or perhaps as promising as does Strauss’s violin sonata of ten years earlier.

Schreker’s second movement was quietly meditative, breathing calmly with a performance that was warm and burnished, yet quietly adventurous harmonies peep through. There may well have been hints of the later Schreker of the operas such as Der ferner Klang, Die Gezeichneten, Der Schatzgräber – which I’ve just missed during visits to Germany over the past decade as they have been unearthed, given interesting productions and been widely acclaimed.

The Zemlinsky piece of 1895 was a Serenade (or suite) in five fairly short movements: Massig; Langsam, mit grossem ausdruck; Sehr schnell und leicht; Massiges Walzertempo; Schnell. It was a charming piece, distinctly lighter inspirit than a sonata, its rhythms and melodies more striking and engaging than some of Zemlinsky’s music of more serious intent. The main theme of the first movement was quite joyful, while the second, that I’d noted, in the absence of movement names in the programme, as a Largo, was lit by its variety of twists in melody and rhythm and quixotic mood changes, ending with a passage of heavy piano chords. The fourth movement, a waltz, risked becoming schmaltzy had it not been so well crafted, so inventive and playful – tossing the waltz rhythms back and forth between the two instruments. The last movement called the Schumann of the early piano pieces to mind.

Then the astonishing Korngold sonata. One of the characteristics that caught my ear was the melodic tendency of spirit-lifting upward grasps such as Scriabin performs, and from then on I tended to feel the presence of the Russians like Rachmaninov and Medtner. A long work, it presented the players with daunting technical challenges with mighty fistfuls of notes at the piano and passages of both dazzling virtuosity and quiet beauty from the violin – in the third movement especially. Though later in the Adagio it slipped into a commonplace, late romantic character.

The four movements are: (1) Ben moderato, ma con passion; (2) Scherzo: Allegro molto (con fuoco) and Trio – Moderato cantabile; (3) Adagio: Mit tiefer Empfindung; (4) Finale: Allegretto quasi andante (con grazia).

The last movement impressed me however as more rigorous in shape and structure, with quite striking melody: the piano soon announced a fugue which evolved interestingly between the two instruments. Perhaps as a result of the discipline imposed by the fugue, and the commanding and illuminating performance by Richter and Carrigan, it came to seem the most imaginative and substantial music in the whole sonata.

So this was one of those recitals that the timid or unadventurous would avoid, but which revealed three composers and three works by those composers that were revelatory and most important of all, thoroughly engaging and enjoyable at the hands of two musicians of the top rank. It served to show how little we know of the Australian music scene that such splendid players, who have been playing as a duo for three decades, were unknown to me and, I imagine, to almost all the audience (which was sadly small).

 

Inspiring concert by young students of Donald Armstrong

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime concert at Old Saint Paul’s

Andrew Kelly – Brahms: Violin Sonata No 3 – First movement
Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – Elgar: Violin Sonata, Op 82 – First movement
Melanie Pinkney – Bruch: Violin Concerto No 1 – First movement.  François Schubert: The Bee
The Elegiac Trio (Andrew Kelly, Josiah Pinkney – cello, Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – piano) – Rachmaninov: Trio élégiaque No 1, in G minor
Catherine McKay was the accompanying pianist for the three violinists.

Old Saint Paul’s church

Tuesday 29 July, 12:15 pm

This concert, in the regular Tuesday lunchtime series in the former Pro-cathedral, was the last appearance of The Elegiac Trio before they took part in the final stage of the Schools Chamber Music Contest, held this year in Christchurch on the coming Saturday. It proved a remarkable exhibition of young talent by the three members of the Trio as well as the 12-year-old violinist Melanie Pinkney. All three violinists are tutored by NZSO associate concert-master Donald Armstrong.

Andrew Kelly established at once what could easily be felt as the prevailing quality in the violin playing: a warm and even tone that provided the foundation for playing that was rich in dynamic subtleties; in which the central section of the Brahms sonata was so magically hushed, demonstrating the composer’s essentially romantic and emotional character, though cast within broadly classical shapes. It prepared the audience thoroughly for his role in Rachmaninov’s elegiac trio at the end of the concert.

Claudia Matthews, 16, is a little younger than Andrew, but showed greater confidence, though their playing was invested with very similar degree of painstaking care and finesse in handling the bow. Elgar’s sonata is not nearly as familiar to most people as Brahms’s three sonatas: perhaps it does not have the same immediate melodic charm and memorable character; it’s one of those works whose beauties are slower to become embedded in the mind. Claudia’s confidence, firmness and accuracy matched her ease in navigating Elgar’s particular way with the notes, bending them secretly, creating an air of remoteness and gentle drifting, speaking of a maturity that seemed well beyond her years.

Melanie Pinkney is only 12, and I imagine I was not alone in feeling that her musical gift was in the class of the musical prodigy. The Bruch concerto in G minor is a truly grown-up masterpiece; it opens with Catherine McKay’s piano, capturing the orchestra’s character hypnotically, drawing the audience mysteriously towards the memorable first theme by the violin.

Melanie planted her notes with mature assurance, giving no suggestion that it presented any difficulties, since it all lay so comfortably under her fingers. She dealt with every musical colouring and decoration as if she was improvising, yet also with beguiling musical feeling that held you spellbound.

The fine Bruch structure was followed by a little Schubert piece that I haven’t heard for many years. Yes, it IS by Franz Schubert, but he goes under the French version, François – and that’s because it’s a fellow born in 1808 in Dresden, not Vienna, and died in 1878 and though he lived more than twice as long as the eponymous Viennese musician, he didn’t gain immortality. Though The Bee, from his Bagatelles, Op 13 (No 9), named in French, L’Abeille, published in the 1850s, survives.

In any case, it offered another display of a wonderfully fluid bowing arm that produced perfect tone.

After all this precocious virtuosity, one might be surprised at nothing, and that was the case with Rachmaninov’ first piano trio – he wrote two, both called Trio Élégiaque. This first is in G minor while the second in D minor, which is much longer, was inspired by the death of Tchaikovsky.

The tremolo opening of the piece seemed to emerge mysteriously from the dim timber recesses of the church, as the arrival of each instrument each seemed in turn to pick up the same emotion and tonal character of the previous one. They seemed to have paid scrupulous attention to each other’s sound; as the violin took up the theme from the cello it seemed simply to be an extension upward of the latter’s sound, not a different instrument.

Admittedly, this is a gorgeous acoustic for chamber music, but the raw material needs to be there for it to flourish. These musicians seemed not only to have worked together to integrate their sound but also to have judged successfully how their playing needed to be adapted to the space.

Much credit is due to the teacher of the violinists, Donald Armstrong, who oversaw the concert as a whole, but also to Andrew Joyce who coaches cellist Josiah Pinkney and Claudia Tarrant-Matthews’s piano teachers.

 

Echt-quartet experiences from the Doric String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
The Doric String Quartet

HAYDN – String Quartet Op.76 No.6 in E-flat
BRETT DEAN – Eclipse
SCHUBERT – String Quartet No.15 in G D.887

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 25th July, 2014

I didn’t get to see and hear the Doric String Quartet on their first New Zealand visit in 2010, but on the strength of what I heard at their recent Wellington concert I’ll be keeping an eye on their schedules and things from now on. Whatever coincidences of conditions were brought to play, they were of an order which left me in a kind of trance for days after the Quartet’s concert, with scraps of the music they presented continually sounding in my head and refusing to leave me alone.

What these players seemed to me to be able to do was generate a kind of “the ordinary and the fabulous” music-making world, to which we in the audience were all invited. From the first few phrases of the Haydn (in that gorgeous E-flat Major key) our sensibilities were taken “somewhere else” by a combination of the warmth and piquancy of the writing and what I can describe only as a kind of focused sensitivity on the part of the Quartet’s players.

It was a feeling quite at odds with the cavernous spaces of the Michael Fowler Centre, a venue which was never designed for chamber music, but which nevertheless yielded on this occasion to the blandishments of the sounds brought into being by the musicians. But in a strange and alchemic way, those vistas had a part to play in the process of creating the fabulous – the quartet’s penchant for hushed tones throughout seemed to throw down a kind of gauntlet to our listening environment, as if to say “Can these spaces unlock our secrets? – or will our tones be scattered as wildflower petals in the wilderness, lost just as if we never in the first place made these sounds?”

Well, the musicians needn’t have worried – thanks to that aforementioned “focused sensitivity” everything the players did with the music registered, from the softest whisperings to the fullest, richest declamations. But I think the combination of larger-than-usual listening-distances and the quartet’s fondness for finely-wrought, inward-sounding tones resulted in a kind of focused, concentrated interplay between music, musicians and listeners that worked a potent spell throughout the concert.

Haydn’s theme-and-variations opening movement of his Op.76 No.6 quartet beguiled us right from its opening, every phrase and contrasting impulse carrying with it both spontaneity and logic. The second, hymn-like movement seemed almost like a 3/4 version of the famous Emperor Quartet’s slow movement. I liked the “breathless with wonderment” aspect of the playing, with not a note or phrase sounding mechanical or contrived – a momentary shift into minor mode at one point called forth pauses charged with expectation, before a communion-like resolution provided the only possible response.

Deftly-wrought syncopations throughout the minuet’s opening gave way to the trio’s pealing bell-like scales, sounded by the players with great delight among the combinations, by turns droll and festive in character. Then, the finale’s almost ritualistic minuet-like aspect at the beginning occasionally released an energized, scampering figure which enlivened the textures and gave a wider context to the movement’s apparent severity – the quartet dug into some wonderful modulations and danced its way through some tricky canonic interchanges, the sequences communicating to us a great deal of creative satisfaction – as the poet Hopkins wrote about his early-morning sighting of a falcon’s flight – “the achieve of: the mastery of the thing!”

Brett Dean’s work Eclipse took us to realms as far-removed from Haydn’s finely-abstracted creations as could be imagined. This work for string quartet, in a single movement but with three distinct sections, was written by the Australian composer in response to the 2001 Tampa crisis, the name referring to a Norwegian vessel whose captain’s actions saved the lives of hundreds of Indonesian refugees on board a boat which got into difficulties while heading for Australia. Though Dean in a programme note describes the work as “first and foremost a piece of chamber music”, his initial impetus to create the work would for most listeners surely seem an inextricable part of the process of listening to and understanding the end result.  I think it was Sibelius who once said “music reflects life” – and as a political statement Dean’s work is no less musically impactful – in a completely different way – than was Finlandia.

The composer described his work as “brooding, troubled and at times aggressive”, his music describing a situation in which people found themselves “riding the cusp between life and death….and entering the realm of sheer existence”. It’s certainly a tour de force of virtuosic quartet-playing, employing techniques and effects which were exploratory to an extreme degree and positively orchestral in their impact. The work’s three sections, played without a break, described in turn the sounds and ambient contexts one might have associated with a ship drifting out at sea, the naked power and terrifying effects of an oceanic storm, and finally the ensuing calm associated with feelings of both relief and uncertainty on the part of the ship’s passengers regarding their fate.

Each section made a different kind of impact, one which tended to go beyond the composer’s actual programme and draw on deeper, more archetypal feelings concerning aspects of the “human condition”.  Thus the quartet’s opening evocations seemed to me to suggest the reality of vast spaces through which we humans carry out our small business – at the outset things were only a notch or two up from inaudibility, though things gradually built up by a kind of “growing from seed” process. It became a slow coalescence of dry, spectral impulses with variegated timbral and gestural features, such as tremolandi, and afterwards pizzicati, the spontaneous, even chaotic assemblage subsiding into order as the music proceeded.

The “storm” sequence was nightmarish to say the least – extremities of textures and dynamics, between which were “roller-coaster rides” of the utmost physicality, the players extracting from their instruments sounds that readily conveyed terror, helplessness and despair by dint of their menace and vehemence. At its climax brutal punctuations vied with awful silences which were then whipped into a frenzy by vicious tremolandi passages, whose intensities gradually dissipated, leading the way to an ambience of shattered fragments, of exhausted spirits, tremulous voices, and glimmerings of hope, a solo cello’s wraith-like traceries attempting to imbue the besieged human spirit with the will to recover and continue.

In some respects Dean’s work resembled that which concluded the concert, Schubert’s equally searing G Major Quartet D.887. Both pieces inhabited realms of physical and psychological duress, presented in each case with unequivocal visceral impact, though Schubert’s work had no programme as such, rather, abstracting its dramatic qualities via sonata form. But what power there was in those abstractions – what candour! – what tragedy!

The Doric’s way with this music was to bring out a kind of rapt inwardness to the quieter, more lyrical sections, playing with the utmost concentration and refinement of tone. This approach had the effect of making us listen all the more intently to the music-making in that vast space – having captured our sensibilities thus, the music’s more vigorous moments came across with all the more impact and character. Though not as “gutsy” as the trenchant attack adopted by some groups I’d heard in the music’s more harrowing sections, the Doric’s keen focus and intensity put across the music just as strongly and tellingly, made all the more journey-like by the observance of the first movement repeat.

Equally as memorable was the stark beauty of the ‘cello-led lament which began the second movement, the players paring all warmth from their tones so as to sharpen the intensities of contrast with the trenchant second subject – here, at once tightly-focused and vastly-flung, the ambience a-tingle with anguish and grey-hued with sorrow. But then the quartet made certain we felt the touches of warmth on our faces which came with the major-key statements of the opening towards the movement’s end, Schubert characteristically putting on a brave face through the music’s tears.

The spookily elfin scherzo kept its sotto voce mode for as long as it could, the playing hinting at something diabolical darting between the shadows, with occasional szforzandi causing a scalp-prickling effect. Set against these urgencies, the long-breathed waltz-likeTrio seemed like a kind of distant dream of dancing phantoms, the shades, perhaps, of happier memories. But even more startling was the finale’s frenetic pace, its flight more psychological than physical, the notes falling over themselves in places trying to “escape” the claustrophobic crowding of those syncopations, and the brutality of the occasional szforzandi. I’ve never heard this music take on such a sinister “ride to the abyss” aspect, its energies transformed into compulsive shudderings, everything haunted with a ghostly pallor, like a rider set on galloping towards a grim and unremitting destiny.

One could conclude from the above, quite rightly, that the concert was for me a throughly engaging and richly-wrought experience – sterling testimony to the skill and musicality of an exceptional quartet of players.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Engaging lunchtime concert by woodwind students

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Woodwind students of the New Zealand School of Music

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 23 July, 12:15 pm

Five students under head of winds Deborah Rawson at the school of music gave a delightful recital on a cold day which saw a slightly smaller audience than usual at St Andrew’s.

As usual the standard of the performances was remarkable, resulting in several revelations of unfamiliar music. The first was a movement from Saint-Saëns’s clarinet sonata, one of his last pieces, written in the year of his death. Hannah Sellars played its second movement, Allegro animato, not without slight blemishes but with interesting variety of tone and an easy fluency in the runs and other decorative elements.

A second clarinettist was Patrick Richardson, rather more confident both in his presentation and his execution; he played two pieces, the first a successful arrangement of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin, and then the Allegro from Stamitz’s 2nd clarinet concerto (while the programme had J (for Johann) Stamitz as composer, Richardson said correctly that it was by Carl, Johann’s son; Johann wrote only one clarinet concerto). The Debussy was limpid and fluid, every note entranced by the girl’s beguiling hair, the piano part only slightly diminished in its importance; the concerto movement by the son of the genius of the Mannheim school which so influenced Mozart, was a happy experience, chosen no doubt to exemplify the stylistic contrast between the classical clarinet and the late romantic. The clarity of tone, the player’s firm confidence carried him through the decorative phrases and cadenzas, with striking support by pianist Rafaela Garlick-Grice.

Harim Oh was a third clarinettist; he chose a piece that represented a very different challenge: the first movement, Lento, poco rubato, from the solo clarinet sonata by avant-garde Soviet composer Edison Denisov, born in 1929 and died in 1996. Littered with tricky pitches, micro-tones, note bending and smudged trills, this was a fine performance of a famously seminal piece, defying Soviet orthodoxy.

Two other instruments featured: Annabel Lovatt’s oboe and Peter Lamb’s bassoon. Annabel’s presentation was slightly hindered by nervousness compounded by a non-functioning microphone; however I did hear her say that the CPE Bach piece for solo oboe was originally for flute – no doubt for his patron the flute-playing Prussian king Frederick. One of the really significant revelations of recent decades has been the discovery of Bach’s oldest son’s genius, replacing the earlier view of him as a merely talented odd-ball. This piece made its way through an Adagio with an intriguing, twisting melody, short varied pauses and odd tempo changes; then the Allegro, a show-piece that was just as inventive and entertaining, punctuated by unexpected pauses, which Annabel played with considerable accomplishment. It may well have been more difficult on the oboe than on the flute.

Peter Lamb played a short suite for bassoon and piano by Alexander Tansman, who came alive for me when I visited the city museum in Lodz some years ago to find it largely dominated by Arthur Rubinstein and Tansman, both born there – Tansman 1897–1986. Since then, Tansman’s music seems to have emerged interestingly. This suite explored the instrument’s great and highly contrasted range in sunny melodies that engaged the piano (always played so splendidly by Garlick-Grice) in a real partnership. There seemed to be four movements, varied in a neo-classical manner. Not only does his music avoid modernist tendencies (in Paris in the 1920s, he declined an invitation to associate with Les Six) and certainly the serialists, but there is little to suggest any kinship with his compatriot Szymanowski, 15 years his senior. So this was an engaging, and interesting work that the two played with affection and commitment. It’s time for more serious exploration (by RNZ Concert?) of Tansman’s impressive oeuvre.

Comments later confirmed my impression of a particularly engaging concert.

Dalecarlia Quintet in a third and different programme in Greater Wellington

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Music Trust
Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet (Anna McGregor, clarinet; Sofie Sunnerstam, violin; Manu Berkeljon, violin; Anders Norén, viola; Tomas Blanch, cello)

Anthony Ritchie:  Purakaunui at Dawn (2014)
Ross Harris: Fjärran (2012)
Brahms: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op.115

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 13 July 2014, 3.00pm

Two New Zealanders resident in Sweden and three Swedes made up the unusual complement of this quintet, come together pretty recently to replace the programmed Antithesis Quintet.

Before we could assess whether this had any effect on the quality of performance, we were treated to a prologue from the Glazunov Quartet, made up of four young people from Hutt Valley schools, who were runners-up in the Wellington Regional final for the New Zealand Community Trust Schools Chamber Music Contest.  These fine young performers (two girls and two boys) played two of the eponymous composer’s ‘Five Novelettes’.

The first was slow and meditative, while the mood of the second was fast and spirited, very rhythmic, featuring pizzicato, but then reverting to the modal tonality and themes of the first piece.  The playing was cohesive, warm, and yet sad.  The players exhibited good tone and balance. There were a few aberrations of intonation and attack, but nevertheless, the performance was very fine.  I was particularly struck by the splendid viola player.  Variations of dynamics were executed confidently and well.  These young people have a bright future ahead of them if they choose to continue with music, and chamber music’s future is in good hands.

Anthony Ritchie’s work was commissioned for this tour.  It describes dawn at Purakaunui, a seaside village near Dunedin and was most effective, especially for the clarinet; the strings were sotto voce much of the time.  It was an evocative and pleasing short work, the clarinet in splendid form playing the part of a bellbird.

Ross Harris’s work, whose title means ‘something far away, elusive, to be understood only in fragments’ was a little more problematic.  The very fact that the musical fragments were not connected made the work so elusive and apparently without shape or structure that it made me think of Yeats’s words “…the centre cannot hold…”.  The composer explained before
the players began that the work used the opening bar from the Brahms quintet.  This link seemed to survive only briefly.

The opening featured lots of disconnected melodic fragments, and plenty of prominence was given to the clarinet, which was beautifully played by Anna McGregor.  The work was much more sombre than Ritchie’s, and more angular, but exploited the agility of the clarinet.  As with much music (not only contemporary), one would need to hear it more than once to fully appreciate it.  It was played with commitment, and absolute rapport between the players.  The tempo was slow in the main, but there were a few quick sections.

There were many interesting phrases and passages, but it was hard to get an idea of structure, or where the music was going.
I felt that the piece was rather too long; the lack of tonal security and structural shape palled for me.  A loud section preceded the pianissimo ending.

What immediately struck me at the opening of Brahms’s wonderful quintet was that this was a performance in which each part could be clearly heard.  The smaller venue than that to which we have been accustomed made this truly chamber music. The delicious harmonic twists had full impact in St. Andrew’s.

Although this is a familiar work, the performance was never predictable; nuances passed between the players, and the gorgeous tone of the clarinet was produced with much subtlety – indeed, this factor was true of the other instruments too.

The opening allegro was robust and spirited, and, in the words of the programme note, was ‘notable for its blending of the instrumental sounds’.  The adagio was rendered in a somewhat more solemn manner than I have sometimes heard it; i.e. slower, and with much delicacy.

The andantino was joyful and sparkling, while in the finale, drama interspersed the beautifully modulated quieter variations
Piquancy gave way to the final variation’s haunting nature, the mood built up by subtly varying dynamics.

Considering that the group have only been together as a chamber music ensemble for  a short time, the blend and unanimity were most commendable.  The audience showed high appreciation at the end of the concert.

 

 

Scandinavian and New Zealand players unite wonderfully for the two greatest clarinet quintets

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society

The Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet:
Anna McGregor (clarinet), Manu Berkeljon (violin), Sofie Sunnerstam (violin), Anders Noren (viola) and Tomas Blanch (cello)

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A, K 581
Brahms: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op 115

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 6 July, 2:30 pm

I understand that the Waikanae Music Society asked for and got a programme other than those that the promoters of the New Zealand tour (Chamber Music New Zealand) was offering. Both Chamber Music Hutt Valley and Wellington Chamber Music settled for either the Mozart or the Brahms plus ‘fillers’ in the first half.

This concert was first advertised as the Antithesis Quintet, which might have referred to the programme, sub-titled ‘Concert of Opposites’. But as a result of an injury sustained by one of the string players, the personnel was changed and subsequently the name, to Dalecarlia. The players are members of the Dalasinfoniettan orchestra, based in Falun which is in the region of Dalecarlia (Dalarna in Swedish) in central Sweden.

For the record, the original material that we posted on Coming Events on this website, listed the following members: Anna McGregor (clarinet), Hilda Kolstad Huse (violin), Sofie Sunnerstam (violin), Fanny Maréchal (viola) and Katrine Pedersen (cello).

Neither the interview with Eva Radich on Upbeat on Friday nor the websites we’ve looked at touched on the reasons for the three personnel changes and the name change.

I’d been at the Lower Hutt concert and had been impressed by the Mozart quintet but at Waikanae, from the very opening, there was something different, in the extraordinary beauty and gentleness of the clarinet’s rising phrase, and the same feeling of greater care and finesse from the strings. The pianissimi were breathtaking, from all the players.

I wondered whether the quite different acoustic might have explained what I felt was a more fine-grained and penetrating performance (still jet-lagged at Lower Hutt?). It has been customary to criticise the hall as a cavernous sports stadium but, apart from the sound becoming more dim for those seated far from the stage, the sound now is clear, seeming to enhance the distinct timbres and articulations of the individual instruments. I really relished the sound.

Naturally, the exquisite second movement, Larghetto, prospered is this space where the clarinet is very centre-stage, and it was possible to delight in Anna McGregor’s rapport with the strings (remarkable given that the group has really been together such a short time); I am often given to thinking as I listen to music of great beauty, that it is the most overwhelmingly beautiful creation ever, and this was indeed one of those times. And the Menuetto and Trio were not far behind: beguiling, unhurried, with long passages for strings alone, the first violin (Sofie Sunnerstam) producing a lean yet satin-smooth tone.

The last movement is in the theme and variations form, though the variety that Mozart introduces makes one quite overlook the fact that we are hearing the same basic tune over and over. The third variation, in A minor, gives the viola (Anders Noren) a gorgeous minute of exposure, a premonition of the longer Adagio of the fifth and last variation. These gracious slow phases seemed to me the most awesome moments of the work, though it ends with a restorative Allegro coda: just perfect.

Fancy getting the Brahms Quintet in addition, in the same concert! That will also be played at the Wellington Chamber Music concert at St Andrew’s this coming Sunday, along with pieces by Ross Harris and a Swedish composer.

Brahms makes a much more concerted work from his resources than Mozart had. Clarinet and strings play together, singing their distinct parts in more complex five-part ensemble. For this, the two violins changed places: Manu Berkeljon was leader here. At Lower Hutt I had felt that her violin blended slightly better in the ensemble, but at Waikanae I could not make such a distinction, though Sofie’s instrument sounded a little lighter in tone, lending a welcome contrast between the two.

Compared with the sunny, delighted mood of the Mozart, composed just two months before he died, Brahms, in B minor, sounded a great deal more weighed down by the burdens of the world (though his death was still six years off), with almost anguished passages in the first movement. Violins had the opening phrase of the first movement, but the clarinet opens the sombre Adagio with its three descending notes, leading to one of Brahms’s most beautiful, elegiac melodies; its stillness was transfixing.

The players handled the brief third movement, a disguised Scherzo, giving no pause for meditation. Like Mozart’s, the last movement is a set of five variations; it’s led by the cello (the excellent Tomas Blanch) into deeper waters, not to be misled by the tempo marking Con Moto.  Again, considering the shortness of their time together (though most of them are used to collaborating in the chamber orchestra in Falun), I was moved by the integrity, of their playing, of the same mind, exploring Brahms’s essentially serious nature through the complex strands of the Finale and finding profundity as well as enchantment in it.

The loud applause from the 350–plus crowd proved that the Waikanae Society had not been wrong to seek both these great works – after all, why not when you’ve travelled 20,00km to play them?

 

Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet – getting the music through….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
The Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet

Sofie Sunnerstam, Manu Berkeljon (violins)
Anders Norén(viola), Tomas Blanch (‘cello)
Anna McGregor (clarinet)

Emmy LINDSTRÖM – Song for Em (2006)
Anthony RITCHIE – Clarinet Quintet (2006)
W.A.MOZART – Clarinet Quintet K.581 (1789)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Thursday July 3rd, 2014

“A concert tour of the new and old from the northern and southern hemispheres” was the entirely apt, refreshingly hype-free description of the undertaking which produced this concert at Lower Hutt earlier this month – Anna McGregor, New  Zealand-born clarinetist, was originally supposed to tour New Zealand with the Antithesis Quintet, a group she had founded in 2010 while studying and working in Sweden. Due to injury incapacitating one of the players, things were rearranged, post-haste, with two of the original quintet, Anna McGregor and Sofie Sunnerstam (violin), joining some of the principal players in the Swedish ensemble, the Dalasinfonietten, Falen, with whom McGregor has been on contract.

One of these was another New Zealander, Manu Berkeljon, originally from the West Coast, and an experienced orchestral violinist, having worked with groups in New Zealand, Australia and Europe. She’s currently Associate Principal 2nd Violin in the Dalasinfonietten. The new group, called the Dalecarlia Clarinet Quintet, was completed by Anders Norén (viola) and Tomas Blanch (cello). The group brought the original Antithesis Quintet programme content with them, including the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets as well as Anthony Ritchie’s 20006 Clarinet Quintet.

The group chose to open their concert with the kind of item that the redoubtable Michael Flanders (of “Flanders and Swann” fame) might have described as “helping to get the pitch of the hall” – this was an unashamedly romantic piece by one Emmy Lindström, called “Song about Em”, a darkly-swaying piece with a discernible melody whose repetitions charmed without complication – rather like a light piece by, say, Alfven.

Sterner stuff hove to immediately afterwards, in the guise of Antony Ritchie’s Clarinet Quintet, written to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. We were advised by the programme notes that Ritchie took “motivic ideas from (Mozart’s) Quintet, but without direct reference until the third movement”. Though there exists the proviso that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, it seemed from the music, to me, that Anthony Ritchie had something else on his mind – the music occasionally was stalked by other shades, Bartok and Shostakovich having, to my ears much more of a resonant presence than did the near-divine Wolfie…..

The work began evocatively, a clarinet solo brooding darkly amid ghostly rustlings from the strings, leading to some quixotic declamations and the beginnings of motoric rhythms, begun by the strings and added to by the clarinet – edgy contouring, explosive accents and tight, highly-strung harmonies.

Moments of repose were given little room as the instruments took up the rhythmic trajectories once again, this time tossing the figurations between one another, tones and timbres beautifully playing off one another, each instrument at certain points raising and asserting its particular voice. I liked for instance the swaying, sighing violin line throughout one episode contrasting with the bouncy, driving rhythms underneath, before the voices were gathered in for a toccata-like ensemble, whose plain speaking obviously exhausted all participants, abruptly leading to the movement’s end.

Unisons from the strings fragmented into individual lines, leaving the clarinet to rhapsodize and ruminate, at the slow movement’s beginning. The strings persisted, the sounds becoming declamatory as an impasse was reached, the lines clustering together, prompting what seemed to resemble techno-timbres, the strings hissing and scratching, still trying to bring the rhapsodizing clarinet into line! The strings then drew deeply and “attacked” their chords, after which they worked through an intensely-wrought and closely-knit passage, gaining a truce with the clarinet and settling all issues when the latter followed the strings back to their movement-opening gestures at the very end. I got the feeling that this music had intuitive more than formulaic motivations for the sequences and instruments to be doing what they did – very Mozartean in that sense, I thought……..

I enjoyed the Nielsen-like oscillations of the finale, passing from instrument to instrument, and backdropping birdsong figurations from the clarinet taken up by the violins and intensified, making for sound-vistas whose barriers seemed gloriously expanded as the music went on. The players seemed to my ears to really “take” to the writing, building up Shostakovich-like intensities and creating a feeling of combatants at a tournament, before the music enigmatically gave up its ghost. As for the aforementioned Wolfie, he may well have been flitting between and around some of the phrases, but neither myself nor a musician friend with whom I sat caught any kind of pre-echo of the work we were going to listen to after the interval – we obviously needed a different kind of listening wavelength……

Still, the experience sharpened and focused one’s listening sensibilities, enabling a keener appreciation of the performance of the Mozart which followed, pre-echoes or no pre-echoes! I liked the slight “huskiness” of the string tones at the beginning, a sound with a distinctive character, not excessively and blandly moulded, one against which the clarinet’s liquid outpourings strongly and distinctively contrasted. The chording supporting the second subject had lovely “squeeze-box” timbres, perhaps enhanced by the Lower Hutt venue’s dry-ish sound, though any suggestion of restricted tones was soon dispelled by the ensemble’s lively dynamic range, from the softest breathings to fully assertive chordings at some of the cadences. I also liked how the players conveyed the sense of coming to this music for the first time, even when making the repeats – their sounds had a fresh, exploratory quality, probably as much to do with listening to one another as playing the music.

Surely the slow movement of this work contains some of the most heavenly utterances devised by a human being! – Anna McGregor’s playing of the opening had at once a purity and a warmth which suggested some kind of concourse between this world and the divinity of whatever persuasion – occasionally I wanted the first violin to sing a little more ardently in response, but only as a personal preference – there was no doubt as to the sensitivity of the interchanges. This could be heard as well in the deftness of the playing’s “touching in’ of darker hues before the final cadence. Then, a quicker tempo than I was normally used to for the Minuet made for the liveliest of contrasts, and some beautifully characterized sequences – for example the appropriately chalk-and-cheese Trios. First came a strings-only affair, sombre, edgy and unsettled, and a bit later the clarinet-led melody which is, of course, one of the world’s charmers.

From all of this one could presume that the theme-and-variations finale would go swimmingly – and so it proved, from the opening’s engaging “strut” of the strings, through the variants of rhythm, texture and mood presented by the different episodes, among which featured a kind of “lover’s complaint” from the viola. At the conclusion of the following “gurgling clarinet” section, whose playfulness between the instruments greatly delighted us all, a surprisingly strong and arresting modulatory swerve brought things to a sudden halt, allowing, after a luftpause, a beautifully-poised adagio to cast its spell, courtesy of Anna McGregor’s gorgeous tones. With such playing in mind one readily forgave the clarinettist a dropped note or two in the final phrases of the Allegro coda.

I’ll risk both chauvinism and ungraciousness by remarking that it was a pity we didn’t get to hear Anthony Ritchie’s other “programmed” piece (listed as a “possible” encore, but remaining a “might-have-been”) “Purakaunui at Dawn”. I think I would have preferred it to the somewhat bland Lindström work. Still, the two major quintets were the thing – and local audiences obviously owe Anna McGregor a debt of gratitude for hitting upon a way of getting around the troubles which befell the original tour arrangements, and enabling us to experience the work of such a fine group of musicians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stroma’s third “Mirror of Time” – thoroughly engaging fun

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – THE MIRROR OF TIME 3

Stroma
Vesa-Matti Leppänen, Rebecca Struthers (violins)
Andrew Thomson (viola), Rowan Prior (‘cello)
Rowena Simpson (soprano), Kamala Bain (recorders/percussion)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Michael Norris (artistic director/visuals/programme)

Sacred Heart Basilica, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 26th June, 2014

As I listened to this highly diverting and thoroughly engaging assemblage of music old and new, expertly put together by Stroma’s artistic director Michael Norris and stunningly performed by the ensemble and its conductor, Hamish McKeich, I was struck repeatedly by the profoundly unoriginal, but nevertheless compelling thought that this presentation was great fun!

Perhaps that observation might appear trite to some people, unworthy of inclusion in a “serious review”. But given that music of all kinds is performed for people to enjoy rather than endure, I imagined that for a good many concert-goers who regularly attend symphony, choral and chamber concerts, the thought of any encounters with “serious” music written after 1950, would straightaway come into the “endure” category. The idea of attending a contemporary music concert would be as remote for some as going to a lecture on, say, ancient Etruscan circumcision practices.

For a goodly number of years I’ve been going to exciting and innovative contemporary music concerts presented by both Stroma and Auckland’s 175 East, as a critic treading a fine line between being an enthusiast for new music and a representative of the general music-listening public. It’s certainly true that some of the works played by these groups are challenging and cutting-edge – but it’s good to keep in mind that so Beethoven’s music was to many music-lovers in the early 1800s!

For me part of the process of dealing with this music’s unfamiliarity was to accept it totally as a “new” experience, rather than try and unduly analyze or anatomize it – again and again I told myself that “these sounds are to be enjoyed”, and I reacted to them as wholeheartedly as I could on that basis. But to a greater extent than ever before, I think, during Stroma’s latest “The Mirror of Time” presentation, I found myself actually connecting with the music-performance as I would that of any of my favorite music – on a visceral, emotional and (I flatter myself!) intellectual level of response.

True, I didn’t go so far as race down to the library the following day and get a book out on the ancient Etruscans! But Stroma’s organization of the concert and wholehearted, skillful playing of these pieces of music, ancient and modern, convinced me, once and for all, that contemporary music can engage, excite, inspire, soothe, stimulate and satisfy as profoundly as can any music from any era. Of course, this was something I knew in theory, but was here enjoying as a practical, real-time, flesh-and-blood phenomenon. Exhilarating!

From the concert’s very beginning, we in the audience were made to feel as though we were part of the performance, encircled as we were by a quartet of string-players, each one positioned in a corner of the church’s nave. Stroma director Michael Norris put it well by remarking in the program note how “the spatialized position of the quartet gently sets in motion the resonance of the church”.

The “timelessness” of the sounds created by the musicians well reflected the music’s origins – a 1400BC Hurrian hymn to Nikkal, wife of the Moon God, a melody preserved for 3,500 years on clay tablets found in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit. Various attempts to “render” the melody, written in cuneiform, or “wedged script”, have been made by scholars, with one by Marcelle Duchense-Guillemin used here by Michael Norris, who reworked the tune for strings which play entirely in harmonics and in the form of a “prolation canon” – ie, one in which the individual voice-parts use variations of speeds and synchronizations. The result was totally mesmerizing.

Most of the subsequent pieces in the concert demonstrated different ways of presenting canonic treatment of music, the following Agnus Dei by Josquin des Prez being a particularly closely-worked example, with a delay of only one beat between the top two lines and a “crab-canon” (the same line, with one played BACKWARDS against the other!) taken by the two lower voices – wot larks! It must have helped that each of the higher voices was taken by a “pair”, but nevertheless it must have seemed for the performers like high-wire acrobatic work, at times! Soprano and recorder were interestingly paired, the singer (Rowena Simpson) bright- and shining-voiced, the recorder (played by Kamala Bain) mellow and dusky, but the timbres still coming through, the blendings with the strings in places exquisite.

Simon Eastwood’s work I had encountered previously at a 2008 NZSO/SOUNZ Readings Workshop, on that occasion a piece called Aurum, which I liked a lot. Here the composer’s starting-point was a quotation from Plato’s Republic, words describing a kind of journeying of souls to a point where universal structures of the cosmos are perceived as spheres and axes of light – the Spindle of Necessity is the thread-gatherer which collects and plays out these lines, enabling the revolutions of all the spheres and their orbits.

Ethereal, almost mystical in effect, the words were mirrored by the sounds of this work, the tones “analogizing” to and fro, up and down, stretching, bending binding, and loosening, growing in intensity and rising in pitch before falling away to almost nothing – subsequent irruptions, clusters, tensions, even a claustrophobic scream! – were all gathered in by the spindle, at the end a single note around which the sounds were safely bound. It was a case of new music that in some ways to my ears sounded strangely old.

14th-Century composer Johannes Ciconia provided some diversions from these play-for-keeps austerities with some lively, dance-like four-part (one part added by Michael Norris!) canonic interweaving, involving both pizzicato and arc strings accompanying voice and recorder in a song Le ray au soleyl, the words a kind of long-term medieval weather-forecast. The work’s exuberance in performance contrasted with the inner world evoked by Mary Binney’s work Enfance, which followed, a setting of haiku-like verses by Rimbaud dealing with past happiness and present disillusionment – spare music, whose silences serve to underline the focus of each note played and sung, a remarkable demonstration of “less is more”.

Another Agnus Dei, this time from Pierre De La Rue, who here demonstrated an almost Tom Lehrer-like mathematical exactitude in his setting of part of his L’homme arme Mass, by way of producing a richly-canopied, ritual-like processional. It was something whose textured framework provided a telling foil for Rachael Morgan’s Interiors II, which followed. Written for string quartet, these were sounds whose very fibres proclaimed their intent, from the opening solo violin’s initial single note through harmonics, octaves with gorgeously “bent” unisons and curdled timbres, the opening’s silvery tones wonderfully besmirched by later guttural, claustrophobic utterances, dying away as light and life were consumed.

The excitement continued with sixteenth-century composer Cipriano de Rore’s Calami sonum ferentes (The pipes that sound), a convoluted but hauntingly beautiful setting – one that might have temporarily unnerved soprano Rowena Simpson, who pitched her opening notes too high, and had to begin again! The music made an excellent match for the highly expressive manner of the author, the Roman poet Catullus – the poet’s weeping at the start was depicted graphically by the obsessive chromatic figures, as both voice and recorder in thirds and fourths firstly sounded the lament of loss, then at “Musa quae nemus incolis”, ravishingly invoked the Muse through whom the former’s grief could be expressed.

A different kind of Muse was summonsed by the recorder-playing of Kamala Bain during Maki Ishii’s anarchic Black Intention, a work that featured the gradual undermining of a Japanese folk-tune played on a single recorder by the introduction of a second recorder played by the same player, immediately striking a discordant note – like a disputation! As the second recorder attempted to “muscle in” on the first, player Kamala Bain firstly vocalized agitatedly while still playing, then suddenly roared at the top of her voice, and bared her teeth as she picked up a stick and furiously and resoundingly struck a nearby tam-tam!  We were thunderstruck – almost literally!

What better release after such demonstrations of frustration than to ride into battle and indulge in some sabre-rattling? Which is what the musicians did under the auspices of Heinrich Biber, with Die Schlacht (The Battle) from “Battalia”, a 17th Century equivalent to the 1812 Overture, strings angrily snapping and biting at the air. How different a scenario to that of Jack Body’s Bai whose sounds alternatively suggested playful “Make love, not war” energies, Andrew Thomson’s viola imitating a traditional Chinese “dragon-head” lute-sound in its characteristic ‘sliding” melodic aspect, supported by pizzicato violins and ‘cello.

And by way of refuting the “music should be heard and not seen” idea, the fourteenth-century French composer Baude Cordier provided us, by way of the musicians’ performance and a projected image of the manuscript – exquisitely “drawn” – with an example of “eye music”. This was a chanson whose words Tout par compas suy composes (With a compass I am composed) describe the notated layout of the music as well as its circular canonic motion – a refined and cultured game of chase, with the voice closely pursued by the recorder.

Chris Watson’s piece sundry good was a celebration of the musical device called the “ornament”, a kind of dissertation with gestural examples, instruments talking with one another in a playfully stylized way – in exchanges that varied both tempi and timbre, and which coalesced and deconstructed just as quickly – a middle sequence sounded to my ears like a kind of descent, from which tendrils began to push their way upwards and intertwine, before seeming to “take fright” with individual scamperings, patternings, and thrummings. It was as if the “ornaments” of the title were looking for love, but finding the dating sites a bit rough for comfort. As with Flanders and Swann’s famous Misalliance from their “At the Drop of a Hat” revue, I sadly feared a tragic end to the story (only to the heart, of course!) – the hushed tremolandi which concluded the piece suggested as much – a kind of ambient wilderness (or “what-you-will”) at the end.

Afterwards, it was all on deck for Carmina Burana with which to finish – the ensemble hove to with a lusty rendition, complete with handclapping, percussion and vocalizations, of a song from that famous manuscript, Tempus Transit Gelidum (The time of ice is passing), with the piccolo recorder “jigging” the rhythm, and giving a kind of medieval “hoe-down” feeling to the music. Verses and choruses enjoyed plenty of dynamic variation, and the strings’ harmonics most engagingly sang some of the accompanying lines, for all the world sounding like little piping wind instruments.

Yes, a good deal of “critical babble”, I know – but it all delighted me so much – I couldn’t have imagined a more enjoyable evening of music-listening.