Tag: chamber music

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winner’s tour for Nikki Chooi, 2013 Michael Hill Violin Competition: a finished artist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nikki Chooi – violin, Stephen de Pledge – piano and Ashley Brown – cello
(Chamber Music New Zealand and the Michael Hill International Violin Competition)

Mozart: Sonata for piano and violin in E flat, K 302
Smetana: Piano Trio in G minor, Op 15
Beethoven: Violin Sonata in E flat, Op 12 No 3
Jack Body: Caravan
Ravel: Tsigane

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 June, 7:30 pm

Canadian Nikki Chooi won the 2013 Michael Hill International Violin Competition and this concert was in the middle of a series of sixteen concerts and recitals around New Zealand, which forms part of the prize.

Oddly, the biographical notes in the programme only listed the competitions in which he’s had success, orchestras with which and places where he has played. It neglected to say where and when he was born and had his early music education. Almost all the concerto engagements mentioned, like those in New Zealand, seem to have followed competition successes, mainly in Canada and Belgium.

He was born in Victoria, British Columbia, to parents of Chinese descent, began to learn the violin at the Victoria Conservatory at the age of four, and at  fourteen entered the Mount Royal University in Calgary. In 2012, he graduated Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music and was awarded the Milka Violin Artist Prize upon graduation. Though no website discloses his date of birth, he was under 28 when he won the Michael Hill Competition. He now studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, under Ida Kavafian and Donald Weilerstein.

Chooi played three programmes round the country, the common pieces throughout being Ravel’s Tsigane and the piece Jack Body was commissioned to compose for the competition itself.

Wellington’s allocation began with one of Mozart’s two-movement sonatas (in E flat, K 302) that he wrote for his ill-fated Paris tour of 1778.  The players eschewed any attempt at ‘historical practice’ since, after all, few halls are equipped with a fortepiano or harpsichord and one such as the Michael Fowler Centre would lose a lot of the sound. In truth, the character of Chooi’s playing seems to flourish with the music of the 19th century, with its warm, voluptuous tone and his genuine instinct for expressive ‘Romantic’ music.

These sonatas are titled with the piano first and the violin seeming to be the accompanying instrument. But there was no sign here of the violin being secondary, their contributions were equal and in accord. The two movements are not strongly contrasted, as the second, Andante grazioso, though different in rhythm and mood, was not markedly different in tempo.

Chooi’s violin was flawless, its tone opulent. It might have been a Beethoven of 20 years later.

After the interval, they did play Beethoven of 20 years later: the last of Beethoven’s first three violin sonatas, Op 12. It is common to approach Beethoven’s early, pre-1800 music as if it was more like Mozart and Haydn than his own later music. But the current broadcasts by RNZ Concert of Michael Houstoun’s piano ‘re-cycle’ series of all the piano sonatas last year has illuminated the gulf that exists between even his early works and his predecessors.

This E flat sonata was evidence. Again, the two musicians were in total sympathy in this, the most sophisticated of the set, with its combination of bravura and melodic inventiveness. In the slow movement, with charming quavers rippling from the piano, there was delightful ease and gentleness quite without self-attention. Can musicians who produce music of such evenness, tonal beauty and fluency really get to the heart of Beethoven? Well, yes, in this instance.

I became familiar with Smetana’s piano trio when it seemed to be quite frequently played, twenty years or so ago – perhaps in the days when Czech musicians used to visit more often; perhaps it was coincidence that led me to think it was somewhat central to the trio repertoire. But what prompted its inclusion here? It flows from the piano trio phase of the competition, in which cellist Ashley Brown was involved.

The Romantic character of the piece seemed to suit the players, especially the violinist for whom Smetana’s elegiac and tempestuous music offered broad scope. Opening with the violin, alone, in a strong, sombre announcement of the work’s prevailing character, even the first movement develops in various ways after cello and piano enter.

The Trio section of the second movement is divided into two distinct parts, continuing the quixotic mood changes that characterize the whole work, and which the players handled with aplomb. Often passionately rhetorical, occasionally calm, then agitated, this music offered the players scope for more passionate and grieving performance than they actually embraced, especially the violinist, whose commitment to producing beautiful sounds played down the pain in the music.

The last two pieces fall into the class of bravura, designed to tax the player(s) to the utmost. Caravan, for solo violin, might have seemed a little out of character for Jack Body for, in spite of its origin as a Persian song, there seemed little Persian in the style of the ‘arrangement’, as it was rather overwhelmed by the flamboyant music that proved ideal for its purpose. Chooi had its measure and delivered a spectacular performance. The same went for Ravel’s Tsigane in which the violin has a long, virtuosic, solo introduction before the piano entry. The piece is no mere aural spectacle however; it has musical substance and both musicians handled its pianissimo phrases and subtlety with considerable musical discretion.

Beautiful Britten, sterling Brahms – a heartfelt tribute to Norbert Heuser

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Old St. Pauls, Thorndon Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
Peter Barber (viola) / Catherine McKay (piano)

BRITTEN – Lachrymae, for viola and piano (after John Dowland)
BRAHMS – Viola Sonata No.2 in E-flat Op.120/2

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday, 17th June 2014

What would have been planned originally by violist Peter Barber and pianist Catherine McKay as an occasion featuring a richly-wrought and most gratifying pair of contrasting works for viola and piano took on an additional note of elegiac sadness by the time the two musicians came to present their concert. Two days before, the death had occurred of a former NZSO colleague of Barber’s – in fact, a fellow-violist, and a prominent member of the orchestra for no less than thirty-eight years, Norbert Heuser.

How appropriate and moving, then, to hear Peter Barber speak of his esteemed colleague and friend before the concert, in effect dedicating the performances to Heuser’s memory. Fittingly, the music we heard featured the viola, the instrument that each of these musicians played, of course – but even more appropriately, the venue (the exquisite and richly-appointed Old St.Paul’s Church in Thorndon) was that which was to be used the following day for the memorial service – a circumstance which obviously carried its own particular poignancy.

And what music had been chosen! – unwittingly, of course, as regards making any specific commemorative gesture, but with an unerring instinct on the part of both players for focusing on love and its power to heal all sorrows and restore what could be held fast of “this worlde’s joye”. The Britten work, which I had not heard previously, was particularly enthralling in this respect, though the Brahms sonata had, too, the capacity to express a kind of fierce joy occasionally tinged with loss and regret.

What power music which one encounters for the very first time can sometimes have! – and especially so when the performances are proper, flesh-and-blood, live, here-and-now experiences, delivered with skill, focus and rapt concentration! True, in situations such as these one’s critical responses are perhaps coloured (I very nearly wrote the word “clouded”!) by the delight of first sensations – rather, in fact, like falling in love! Thus it was here with me, upon hearing the Britten work.

A rich, sombre opening brought forth sounds that seemed to be wrung and resonated from the depths of feeling – in places tremulous and almost Mahlerian in effect (reminiscent of the finale of that composer’s angst-ridden Sixth Symphony). Here, the piano constantly oscillated with tremolando-laden emotion while the viola sounded Aeolian-like strands which were stretched across the vistas as if to resonate in sympathy.

More angular and quixotic, the following sequence exchanged ascending/descending figurations between piano and viola, before halting the vertiginous flow and setting viola pizzicati against richly-sounded piano chords – for all the world the sounds to my ears conveying the sense of a beating heart…..the string textures graduated towards rich double-stoppings as the piano’s chordings climbed, explored and intensified.

Britten was reputed to be no lover of the music of Brahms – in fact he’s on record somewhere as remarking to an acquaintance: – “I make a point of playing one Brahms recording a year, just to remind myself how awful the music is!”……such anecdotes are often relished more for their wit and outrageous sentiment than for veracity, and perhaps aren’t as such to be trusted. In point of fact, the very next exchange between the instruments – the piano stern and commanding, the viola dogged and determined – sounded to my surprised ears extremely Brahmsian, especially the way the piano chords were echoed and resonated by the viola’s energetic figurations.

Piano chords turned into flowing rivulets under Catherine McKay’s fingers, along with string figures coalescing into melody, seeming to want by this time to clothe the gestures in less angular and disparate utterances – though the night ride had a little way to go still, before the sunrise. The muse was yet to show her hand, waiting for her moment while still more quixotic gestures mockingly returned to the piano, Peter Barber’s viola dancing to the mood, though impishly punctuating the phrase-ends with pizzicato notes.

And then it was as though worlds gradually began to intertwine – at first through the gloom, then through coruscation and upheaval, and finally through rapture and ecstasy! Firstly pianistic tintinabulations sought to comfort the viola’s sorrowful sighings, but then tried a different tack, building huge blocks of sound with progressive portentous chords, the viola running between the great columns of sound towards the growing light, becoming more and more excited, and finally throwing itself into the piano’s open arms in a passionately-voiced embrace, an unashamed love-song!

From this it seemed at first something of a Brahmsian (sorry, Ben!) take on an Elizabethan melody, rich and pulsating! But both musicians were inspired at this stage, moving with ease and fluency into those leaner, sparser, more focused realms of Elizabethan sensibility – Peter Barber’s viola “centered” the melody as if it were a prayer, and Catherine McKay’s piano song resounded like a lute paying homage to love. How touching it all seemed by the end – more powerfully so, I think, by Britten’s deconstruction of his own sound world to connect with Dowland’s.

My apologies to the reader for indulging thus far in what seems far more like a fanciful commentary on the music itself rather than the performance of it – though having never seen nor heard the music previously, my remarks above can be taken as a set of reflections on the way it was played and interpreted, just as relevantly as regarding the actual work.

I almost needed somewhere to go and lie down after such an intense listening experience – but there was no rest for the wicked, as, after a short re-alignment of things we were off again, this time into a world of expression the previous composer loved to hate! The work by Brahms was a transcription by the composer of a sonata originally written for clarinet, one of two such pieces (incidentally both have been thus transcribed, to my great delight!).

The string timbres really make the sonata a freshly-minted work, more youthful, immediate and “striving” I think than does the rather more serene, somewhat Wordsworthian clarinet. Thus it was that, despite its opus number it seemed in places a young man’s work, borne out especially by the piano part. In places, it’s really of an order of difficulty which another pianist at the concert with me confirmed afterwards, by laughingly describing a certain sequence on the opening pages as “a pianist’s graveyard”!

Catherine McKay’s playing was, however, seized with such purposeful focus that the music, spills and all, leapt off the page most satisfyingly!  Neither player emerged completely unscathed from the more agitated of the opening exchanges, but the energy and teamwork was of an order that carried the music’s message with all the élan and presence that one would want for these sounds.

No let-up for the second movement’s Allegro appassionato – at the outset a dark, impetuous waltz-like trajectory gripped the music’s order, Peter Barber’s playing digging deeply into the instrument’s tones, and Catherine McKay’s in turn responding with real heft and passionate utterance. What a gorgeous hynm-like middle section this work has! – part ceremony, part deep forest mythology music, the Old St.Paul’s piano speaking in suitably nostalgic, somewhat forte-piano-like tones in places, charming and even rustic in effect. Processional-like, too, was the Andante con moto opening of the finale, in these players’ hands sounding like a “turn for home”, the tones and phrasings speaking to this listener of places “where the heart is”.

The variations that followed explored both according and contrasting exchanges between the instruments, with the players barely able to contain themselves in the excitable fifth variation, piano, then viola tearing into the fray, pulling the melody about every which way!  Finally the sounds were allowed a brief few moments of composure before a brilliant and emphatic coda gave us an ending we acclaimed with enthusiasm.

Rare and strange to find oneself within what seemed a matter of hours back in that same building, with the previous day’s concert’s tribute to Norbert Heuser still faintly resonating as people gathered for the memorial service. Came spoken tributes and more music from family and friends and ex-colleagues – daughter Brigitte Heuser sang JS Bach’s Erbarme dich mein Gott from the St.Matthew Passion, and a quartet of string-players performed Haydn, the “Emperor” Quartet’s well-known Adagio cantabile – and we watched projected images and heard recordings of other music that, with the spoken reminiscences very properly brought both laughter and tears. Life, as with music-making and concert-giving, is what happens when you’re planning something else. What happened here – sadly, not the life’s “something else” that was originally planned – was instead a response to the unforeseen that was on all sides affecting and memorable.

 

 

 

 

Trio launches Hutt Valley’s Chamber Music season with élan

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
LEPPÄNEN / JOYCE / IRONS TRIO

BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio in E-flat major Op. 70 No.2
DEBUSSY – Sonata for violin and piano in G minor (1917)
Sonata for ‘cello and piano in D minor (1915)
BRAHMS – Piano Trio in C Major Op.87

Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin) / Andrew Joyce (‘cello
Diedre Irons (piano)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Monday 26th May, 2014

That singular personality, Sir Thomas Beecham, renowned for his witticisms and droll observations, once remarked that music’s greatest gift to the world was “to free the human mind from the tyranny of conscious thought”. I couldn’t help thinking how profoundly this process was demonstrated by the first few bars of Beethoven’s beautiful E-flat Piano Trio, with which Vesa-Matti Leppänen, Andrew Joyce and Diedre Irons began their Lower Hutt concert on Monday evening.

Here were sounds devised and played with a spontaneity and wonderment which seemed to disarm everyday preoccupations and conjure up realms of beauty and fancy, simply for our delight and pleasure. As it began, so the music continued – apart from a brief minor-key episode in the Trio’s slow movement there was almost nothing of the darkness and drama conjured up by this work’s opus-partner, the renowned “Ghost” Trio.

From those opening, air-borne sounds, and the gently-insinuating rhythms propelling the first movement’s allegro, the players were able to explore a good deal of mood-variation, enjoying episodes of poised, classically-wrought beauty well as the more forthright rhythmic exchanges. In the second movement allegretto, the players preserved the charm of the major-key sequences (Diedre Irons’ piano by turns graceful and skitterish as required!) but wonderfully presided over the theme’s minor-key darkenings and sudden enlarging of the music’s expressive force, before delivering the soft/loud, somewhat Janus-faced ending.

After the somewhat Schubert-like, soulfully-played third movement (those major/minor piano-chord sequences surely must have resonated for the younger composer when devising HIS piano trios), the finale’s rushing energies properly re-invigorated things, the pianist having a wonderful time whirling through the figurations, and showing the way for her colleagues with great élan and vigour. I enjoyed the musicians’ vivid characterizations of the music’s different moods, the heroic merging with the poetic, the angular vying with the graceful, and the whole delivered with infectious enjoyment.

What a treat to have both of Debussy’s solo string-instrument sonatas (for violin and for ‘cello) presented within the same programme! These were among the last pieces (the Violin Sonata was actually the very last!) written by the composer, while in the throes of a final illness – they were planned as part of a series of six instrumental works, of which only three were completed (the third was a trio for flute, harp and viola).

In places in both sonatas one could hear the Debussy of old, with deft brush-strokes leaving behind the evocatively-hued harmonies and textures of a music style loosely called “impressionism”.  Right at the beginning of the Violin Sonata the pianist conjured magic from the air as it were with some simple chords to which the violin added an expressive, melancholy line, though later both instruments occasionally took up the dance, with coloristic sounds derived perhaps from gamelan, perhaps from Moorish influences – the vioiin’s exotic “bending” of its line at a couple of points, for example.

In the succeeding movements the hues became more pointillistic, as the violin tossed a couple of acerbic flourishes skyward, before taking up a droll “cakewalk-like” posture, the music’s gait by turns spiky and delicate in between moments of melancholy. Violinist Vesa-Matti Leppänen revelled in the music’s volatility, adroitly throwing off flourishes and as quickly gathering his tones in, nicely maintaining the music’s “light-and-shadow’ character. And Diedre Irons’ piano rippled like air “stirred and shaken”, matching the violinistic scamperings with irruptions and momentums leading to an exuberant close.

More forthright at the outset than its companion, the shorter ‘Cello Sonata mused in almost bardic response to the opening piano chords, with more than a hint of cool jazz coming out in Diedre Irons’ playing, both players firing off one another as the music’s agitations gathered weight and energy. What drolleries then, animated the pizzicato exchanges between the players in the second-movement Serenade! – the lines seemingly on the point of singing, occasionally,  but then breaking into dance-steps instead (a lovely, choreographed vibrato from Andrew Joyce and his instrument  at one point!).

And the spontaneous burst of energy from both players really made those opening dance figures of the finale hop! But what incredible changes of mood these two players were then required to realize, which they did, triumphantly – the Sargasso-Sea-like driftings of the textures, weighty- opaque oscillations somehow shed their bulk and built towards the dance figures once again…and then, fantastically adroit staccato exchanges positively scintillated amid verve-filled, dangerously-timed cadence-points, whose rhythmic precision at the music’s end made for exhilarating results.

How will Brahms sound next to all of this? I wondered, just before the concert’s final item, the C Major Piano Trio Op.87. Well, his music came through, thanks to some mightily “orchestral” playing from the Trio, which, throughout the first movement, helped to “grow” the music towards a wonderfully diversive and complex transformation.

In the second, theme-and-variations movement I was reminded here and there of Dvorak in his “gypsy” mode, a vein of melancholy threading its way through the various textures, the playing in places boldly and dramatically bringing out the feeling, while elsewhere quietly following its contourings.

I liked the scherzo’s deft touch of dark malevolence, the players also relishing the contrasting Trio’s ironic sense of well-being, before plunging back into the reprise of the mischief! Diedre Irons’ playing I thought superb, here, bringing both delicacy and glint to bear within the textures and rhythms, controlling the music’s volatilities with terrific gusto.

And the finale’s Allegro giocoso  marking could have been thought of at first as a Brahmsian joke, here, with spookily “gothic” effects in places (almost Lisztian, I thought – what was this “champion of the conservatives” thinking of?) – all very exciting! The players brilliantly caught the music’s sense of headlong flight, beautifully placing the near-obsessive three-note descending motif sequence and the more reflective nostalgic episode in the scheme of things, then completing the joke by almost brusquely rounding things off with a spectacular flourish. What a work and what a performance!

Innovative and balanced programme from Aroha Quartet at Waikanae

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Waikanae Music Society

Mozart: String Quartet no.1 in G, K.80
Sam Piper: Dance of the Sidhe
Zhou Long: Eight Chinese Folk Songs
Schubert: String Quartet no.15 in G, D.887

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

Waikanae Memorial Hall

18 May 2014, 2.30 pm

What immediately struck me was not that Mozart should have written such a quartet at the age of 14, remarkable as that is, but rather the beauty of the playing by the Aroha Quartet.  Their tone, subtle gradation of dynamics, their blend and balance were utterly disarming.  Unafraid of playing real pianissimos, these musicians brought much light and shade, and delicacy, to this, the first of Mozart’s string quartets.

The allegro second movement provided a considerable contrast, its fast tempi and lively expression taken together made it utterly unlike the almost dreamy first movement.  Juvenile high spirits were disciplined, however.

A precise minuet was full of graceful poetry, while its trio was a charmer, constrasting with the slightly more robust minuet.  Rondeau was quite a rollicking movement. Naturally, compared with Mozart’s later compositions, there was not the range of musical ideas here. Nevertheless it was well worth hearing, especially at the hands of these accomplished players.

I have heard works by young New Zealand composer Sam Piper before, but I rather think they were all choral.  Dance of the Sidhe (Irish ‘little people’) was made up of three short pieces.  The first, marked ‘furioso’ was sparkling and tuneful, mainly for violin with innovative accompaniment for the other instrumentalists, including clapping, finger-snapping, and tapping the instruments.  The second, “Dance of the Elder: largo con molto rubato’ began with a melody for cello, beautifully played, followed by the same on viola, while the others shimmered on repeated two note motifs.  There were lovely modal harmonies. The third piece, a presto, was more folksy in manner.  A spirited violin melody was accompanied by staccato from the other players.  This was fine playing of entertaining music.

It was very appropriate to have some Chinese music, with two Chinese musicians in the Quartet’s make-up.  The settings of eight folk songs, for which the titles were given in the programme were delightful, and as a description in the programme notes stated the composer’s music was ‘embedding elements of two cultures in a consistent, seamless, and original musical language’.  This was certainly true of the first one – a fine fusion.

The pieces were played without breaks.  The second, ‘Driving the mule team’ was very pictorial, the second violin creating the sound of the animal’s hooves by playing pizzicato on two strings together, while the others played legato melodies.

The third, ‘ The flowing stream’ was very descriptive of flowing water, and wistful longing.  ‘Jasmine flower’ was quite a spiky piece, in which the use of the pentatonic scale was very prominent. ‘A horseherd’s mountain song’ was a very rhythmic work song, in which the workmen uttered vocalisations.  Uncertainty or even querulousness entered into ‘When will the acacia bloom?’ about the young woman embarrassed at being caught waiting for her lover; the musicians treated it with sensitivity.  There were interesting cross-rhythms in the pizzicato parts.

Number 7, ‘A single bamboo can easily bend’ featured very sonorous cello, while the final ‘Leaving home’ was a busy piece that seemed to be more about travelling and work than any sadness at parting. This was a well-constructed sequence of pieces which the audience patently enjoyed.

Schubert’s long quartet is so full of change and variety that sustaining interest was not a problem.  Excellent programme notes aided the listening.

The power of expression that Schubert had, and the poetry of his utterance in chamber music and song is peerless.  In the first movement, the dark opening, full of dram, gives way to a sprightly melody, almost like folksong, on viola.  It is followed in turn by a beautiful first violin and viola duet on a  brief, ethereal theme.  The cello then takes the place of the viola.  The change of key that follows sounds almost brutal.  One marvels at the creativity that brought forth a work of such diversity.

The second movement’s opening melody on cello is full of nuances and warmth.  Schubert’s sudden fortissimos, characteristic not only here but in much of his music other than chamber music, serve to command attention.  Much beauty resided in this movement, and the music was always moving somewhere; the players had a good idea of the shape and structure of the movement.

The third movement scherzo was pleasantly busy, like birds chattering, while the melodious trio featured cello followed by first violin in exposing the tuneful and animated melody.  The finale was described in the programme note as ‘full of sudden dynamic contrasts, and rhythmic complexities.  This harmonic and rhythmic tension carries the movement in an exhilarating ride to the finish’.  I could hardly believe through the lively opening section that the same composer wrote the opening lines of the quartet.  Yet soon, we were plunged into minor harmonies again.  Towards the end, song-like themes emerged once more.

The innovative programming and skilled playing made for a thoroughly enjoyable concert.  Not every note was perfectly in place, but the musicality of the playing, the sense of unified approach and tone, and the delight of the music performed completely overcame any thought of aberrations.  It was a marvelous experience to hear such great music so well played.

A familiar, brief Shostakovich piece, mainly pizzicato, was played as a humorous encore, to send the audience away with smiles on their faces.

 

Diverting woodwinds a delight from first to last at St Andrew’s

Posted on by admin

New Zealand Music for Woodwind

Natalie Hunt (b. 1985)  Winter (Winter is dedicated to Debbie Rawson and the saxophone students of the New Zealand School of Music)
               Reuben Chin (alto saxophone) and Ben Hoadley (piano)
Philip Brownlee (b. 1971)  Stolen Time
Kamala Bain (recorder) and Ben Hoadley (dulcian)
Kenneth Young (b. 1955)  Elegy for Saxophone Quartet
               Saxcess: Debbie Rawson (soprano saxophone), Reuben Chin (alto saxophone), Simon Brew (tenor saxophone), Graham Hanify (baritone saxophone)
Gillian Whitehead (b. 1941)  Venetian Mornings
The Donizetti Trio: Luca Manghi (flute), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), David Kelly (piano)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 14 May 2014, 12:15 pm

This was a concert I headed to with simply no idea of what to expect. It proved to be a delight from first to last. All the works explored the less frequently heard registers and timbres of the various instruments involved, and all evoked moods of reflection and introspection that are not often associated with music for instruments like the saxophone family. It has always baffled me why “classical” composers should have so seldom used the delicious possibilities that these lovely instruments offer, and likewise the matchless grace and individuality of the cor anglais. But that’s another story; there were no cor anglais works here.

Natalie Hunt’s brief Winter piece saw the alto sax floating above the piano with lyrical, almost modal melodic lines that rose and fell in pitch and intensity like the in- and out-breaths of sudden fright followed by relief. Reuben Chin’s playing was beautifully tailored to the moods of the music, and Ben Hoadley’s accompaniment perfectly balanced to the solo line.

Stolen Time was given its first performance at this concert. “Philip Brownlee is a composer and sound artist based in Wellington. His musical interests include forming connections between recorded sound and instrumental performance, and between composed and improvised musics.” (Programme Notes). It was interesting to hear a modern work for two medieval instruments, particularly the lesser known dulcian. This is a Renaissance woodwind instrument with double reed and folded conical bore, more often called ‘curtal’ in English.

The predecessor of the modern bassoon, it flourished between 1550 and 1700, though it was probably invented earlier.  The piece unfolded as a delicate counterpoint between the two solo voices, opening with a spare unison melody that evoked, for me, images of Fiordland bush in the dead of night. There we can indeed steal time from our over-busy urban lives, and listen to the enquiring bird calls that cut into the matchless silence of the rainforest.  The recorder floated on top with light, trilling, fluid lines, over intermittent calls from a Kiwi exploring a few notes outside its normal range, and the occasional honk of a bittern. All closed into the night time silence with another spare, fading unison line…… I was left hoping that we will hear more of Philip Brownlee’s wind writing in future.

Kenneth Young provided some notes for the next work in the programme: “My Elegy for Saxophone Quartet was written especially for my good friends and colleagues of long-standing, Debbie Rawson and Graham Hanify. The melancholy and elegiac nature of saxophones, in general, had always been something I wanted to investigate and base a work on, so when Debbie asked me to pen a work for Saxcess this was very much on my mind as a concept. The real impetus came in 2010 when our family suffered the passing of a much-loved and valued member. It was a truly sad time and that sadness would seem to have found its way into this piece.”

The work opened with a melody from the soprano sax, where Debbie Rawson’s exquisite dulcet tone set the contemplative mood for the whole piece. This developed as a series of conversations between solo melodic lines for the various instruments, and solos accompanied by the rich warmth of the ensemble harmonies. Sadly we heard only a brief snatch from the solo baritone, whose rich warm timbre merits a whole solo work in its own right. The performance was marked by most sensitive playing, beautiful phrasing and the artistry of superb dynamic control. It closed with a final soprano line that faded into breathless silence……..

“Venetian Mornings”, writes Gillian Whitehead, “is dedicated to my dear friend Jack Body as a celebration of this 70th birthday. We first met while visiting Venice independently in the 1960’s. One night we went to hear Peter Maxwell Davies’s new work Vesalii Icones performed by Davies’s group the Pierrot Players. It was a very humid evening; we could hear continuous distant rumblings of thunder as we went into the concert hall and eventually a huge storm broke. We went onto emergency lighting during the piece. Jack introduced himself after the piece. When we left the hall, we discovered Venice had been cut off from the world, a tornado had come out of the sea, overturned a ferry and destroyed a camping ground. A number of people were killed – 12, maybe – but if it had been earlier or later, many more would have died. After that concert Jack and I would meet for breakfast each morning, and have been friends ever since.”  (Programme notes).

The work opened with a very beautiful baritone solo which passed to a pianissimo flute line as one imagined the city barely emerging from the morning mists of the lagoon. It became briefly more lively, but again retreated into soporific silence. The second episode was marked by more animated repetitive rhythms and see-sawing harmonies from the Trio, with melodic writing that was full of beautiful exchanges between the instruments. But the mists finally triumphed as the ending retreated into a fading pianissimo. I’m not sure this work would have been particularly meaningful without the programme notes; but with that background provided, the music vividly recalled all those long-forgotten memories of one’s OE in Venice years ago, when it really was mist over the awakening lagoon and not the stench of thick smog.

This event offered a wonderful opportunity to hear some very special Kiwi work, and I can do no better than to quote my colleague Lindis Taylor, who remarked: “I thought it was a lovely, adventurous little concert, particularly the Whitehead.” (though he would like to add that he found each of the pieces thoroughly diverting in totally disparate ways).

 

 

Remembering David – a Farquhar tribute from the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REMEMBERING DAVID
A concert of music by David Farquhar (1928-2007)

Presentation curated by Jack Body
Music performed by staff of
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Jenny Wollerman (soprano) / Martin Riseley (violin)
Jane Curry (guitar) / Jian Liu (piano)

Works:
Sonatina for piano (1950) / Three PIeces for Violin and Piano (1967)
Eleven Pieces from Black, White and Coloured for piano (1999-2002)
Swan Songs for voice and guitar (1983)
Six Movements from Ring Round the Moon for violin and piano (1953 arr. 1992)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Kelburn

Thursday 8th May

This extremely timely concert was organized by Jack Body as a tribute to one of his former teaching and composing colleagues, David Farquhar, on the seventh anniversary of the latter’s death.

Born in Cambridge in 1928, David Farquhar was one of a group of fledgling composers which included Larry Pruden, Edwin Carr, Dorothea Franchi and Robert Burch who studied composition with Douglas Lilburn at the renowned Cambridge Summer Music School during the late 1940s. Afterwards, on completing his degree in Wellington at Victoria University, Farquhar then took himself to England, joining Burch, Carr and Pruden for two years of further composition studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London under the tutelage of Benjamin Frankel.

Returning to New Zealand in 1953, Farquhar joined Professor Frederick Page’s Music Department at Victoria University, managing to balance teaching duties with composition, and producing at least one landmark piece of home-grown music along the way – the Dance Suite for small orchestra, “RIng Round the Moon” written to accompany a stage production by the New Zealand Players. Another work which achieved something of a public profile, albeit briefly, was the 1962 opera “A Unicorn For Christmas”, performed for Queen Elizabeth during a 1963 Royal Visit.

Of course, “Ring Round the Moon” in its various guises has captured people’s affections like none other of Farquhar’s works – I think partly because it doesn’t have any of the slight austerity that seems to me, rightly or wrongly, to be hung about the neck of much of the composer’s output. Even so, there’s so much more of Farquhar’s music which ought to be better-known, some of which we were able to hear performed in this concert.

Other pieces – the most shamefully-neglected of which I think is the First Symphony – await their turn in the scheme of things. Farquhar wasn’t a self-promoter of his music, unlike his contemporary, Ted Carr, though the music of both has entered that realm of curious neglect which composers Ross Harris and Jack Body touched upon in a radio interview prior to the Farquhar concert.

There’s grown up a kind of “lost generation” of New Zealand music, being the work of composers who came immediately after Douglas Lilburn, a list including, of course, David Farquhar, and (as Jack Body pointed out) that of HIS teacher, Ronald Tremain.  Yes, one or two works by these people did “cut through” the Sleeping-Beauty-like thicket and get themselves established – besides “Ring Round the Moon” one thinks of Larry Pruden’s “Harbour Nocturne” as a kind of “Kiwi classic”. And one remembers both Farquhar’s Third Symphony and Pruden’s String Trio being performed in Wellington, well, relatively recently.

But apart from these good deeds shining out like candlelight in a naughty world, the gloom that’s here overtaken the compositional output of people such as the aforementioned Ted Carr and Ronald Tremain, as well as that of Robert Burch and Dorothea Franchi, not to mention slightly later figures like John Rimmer and Kit Powell, has been pretty London-foggish. Another figure whom I’d include is Christchurch’s John Ritchie, whose music seems to get little more than parochial attention, when there are pieces by him which should be well established in our regular concert programs.

Perhaps, as Ross Harris seemed to me to suggest, this process of neglect has a kind of inevitability – like T.S. Eliot’s cat, “The Rum Tum Tugger”, who ” will do what he do do, and there’s no doing anything about it!” In which case, the same process obviously creates in time a kind of need to fill the void, which in turn propagates concerts like the present one – thanks, of course, here, to that “nurseryman extraordinaire”, Jack Body.

As well, there’s a current crop of performers who are ready, willing and certainly able to assist with whatever rehabilitation process is mooted, as was demonstrated to us in the Adam Concert Room on this occasion. After Jack Body’s welcoming speech, the concert proper began with a Sonatina for piano, dating from 1950, written by Farquhar after he’d left New Zealand to take up studies in the UK at Cambridge University. A note in the program told us the the work was published only in 2009 by Waiteata Music Press!

In this three-movement work, pianist Jian Liu revelled in the first part’s explorations of keyboard timbres – at first, brief phrases created a somewhat restless feeling, though the colourings held the angularities together. Then the music gravitated towards the lower piano registers, less agitated in effect, but deeper and slower, almost leviathan-like – not menacing, but sombre and sonorous, with upward irruptions of impulse keeping a kind of spatial awareness of things alive. These bright, glint-like sequences led to a quiet, enigmatic coda.

The second movement, marked Andante, I found almost ritual-like in its step-wise aspect, with an accompanying flourish, the latter following the melody as a train follows a bride’s dress – counterpointing voices played hide-and-seek, the pursuers then throwing their victims in the air to sparkle and scintillate before coming to earth and taking up the stepwise gait again, the flourish somehow detaching itself and leaving us with a piquant impression. The finale’s running, angular figurations were brilliantly activated by Liu, whose energies exuberantly realized the toccata-like middle section, and, after a breath-holding pause, signalled the end with a grand flourish.

I scribbled lots of notes during the next item, the 1967 Three Pieces for Violin and Piano – however, the marking for the first movement, “Improvisando”, says it all, really. I was reminded here of my own youthful, awkwardly shy attempts to engage girls I fancied in conversation, by the piano’s fitful, broken fanfare-like figurations, to which the violin responded with edgy, distant held notes, frequently with harmonics and occasionally punctuating its iciness with impatient, dismissive gestures.

I’m not sure whether the second movement’s “Pizzicato” represented a kind of thawing-out of relations, but the pianist’s plucking of the strings in the piano’s body and activating the lowest ones with a timpanist’s stick seemed to accord more readily with the violinist’s pizzicato notes at first, the increased engagement continuing with the violinist’s fly-buzzing sonorities enjoying the pianist’s strumming of the instrument’s strings. The final piece, “Risoluto” had fanfares (violin) and strumming harps (piano) each player demonstrating a kind of determination suggested by the music’s title, the pianist at one point knocking on the instrument’s body with his knuckles, and the violinist amplifying the fanfare figures before skittishly delivering an abrupt payoff.

Then came the first of two exerpted brackets from a piano solo collection called “Black, White and Coloured” – a typical Farquhar-ish exploration of the different characteristics of music written using either white or black piano keys and their treble/bass/inverted combinations. The first “bracket” was dominated by song, realizations of Negro Spirituals and of songs by Gershwin amongst the items. While finding the idea interesting, I thought some of the pieces too skeletal and bloodless compared with the originals, especially the Negro Spirituals – had I not known the pieces’ origins, I wouldn’t have missed those bluesy intensities put across by various great singers I could recall in my memory, and perhaps given the composer more credit for his relative austerities.

Similarly in the second set I thought the idea worked better the more obscure the music – so while I thought the opening “Silver-grey moonlight” too simplistic in its treatment of Clair de lune, the famous folk-melody, some of the others worked well, though there seemed a reluctance on the composer’s part to do very much with the basic thematic material. I thought the most successful realizations in the second set were “Chorale Prelude” and “Clouds”, in particular, the latter, which brought from Farquhar’s sensitivity to detail some timeless, floating ambiences of beauty and nostalgia.

More successful – in fact, spell-binding in effect – was the song-cycle “Swan Songs”, a 1983 work for voice and guitar, performed here by soprano Jenny Wollerman and guitarist Jane Curry. Framing the cycle at its beginning, middle and end were quotations from Orlando Gibbons’ well-known madrigal “The Silver Swan”, hand-in-glove with traditional song, and texts from Carmina Burana as well as by the composer. On the face of things, a kind of hotchpotch, but in performance, a magical evocation of worlds within worlds, bringing together instances of creative impulses leapfrogging over centuries to make heartfelt connections, one I found delightful, piquant and extremely moving.

With sonorous and evocative guitar-playing from Jane Curry setting the scene, Orlando Gibbons’ evocation of beauty brought forth spoken exclamation at first from the singer, and then, briefly, melody. Together with limpid guitar notes  the singer continued through through a section of the traditional “Swan swam”, evoking stillness and grave beauty. The third section, “Anxieties and Hopes” used the composer’s own text, a setting urgent and anxious, with darting impulses and broken figurations, guitar and voice overlapping, breaking off for a sequence of soaring, impassioned beauty before returning to the previous agitated state of things.

Gibbons’ music returned as a kind of “quiet centre” of things, before the work took a somewhat bizarre turn, quoting the “roasted swan” text from Carmina Burana (also famously used by Carl Orff in you-know-which-work!) – a droll lament for the sweetness of times past, affectingly sung and played by Jenny Wollerman and Jane Curry. After a brief reprise of the singer’s call to the swan, over a guitar ostinato, Gibbons’ music made its concluding appearance, the singer arching the voice over a lovely guitar solo with the words “Farewell, joy……” – brief, and ambient, and beautiful.

Before the programme’s final music item, composer Ross Harris contributed a brief but moving reminiscence of David Farquhar, constructing an engaging picture of a colleague with a number of distinctive traits – a concise and ordered thinker and creative spirit, responsive to challenges, (fiercely competitive especially when playing tennis, which was a great love – in fact the end of tennis for Farquhar seemed to symbolize the end of life…..). Ross Harris talked about a composing legacy of finely crafted music, describing its composer as “ultimately modest”.

The evening’s final, appropriately-chosen item (how COULD it have been left out?) was the violin-and-piano transcription of “Ring Round the Moon”, an arrangement made by the composer for the concertmaster of the NZSO, Isador Saslav, in 1992. I remember, a goodly number of  years ago, introducing myself to David Farquhar as an “admirer” of the work, and the composer graciously acknowledging the gesture by way of seizing his then wife Raydia D’Elsa around the waist and dancing a few steps with her in front of me, explaining that they would dance their way through the music he composed at the time to “try it out”. I’m sure the composer would, had he been present, have relished the playing of violinist Martin Riesley and pianist Jian Liu, despite his well-documented frustration at what he considered the piece’s disproportionate popularity.

Somehow, the immediacy of the violin-and-piano textures brought this memory of our meeting back to me more readily than did any of the orchestral versions of the dances – everything came across as more flavoursome than I ever before remembered, the violin’s piquant re-echoings of the linking motif at the conclusions of some of the pieces, the crunchy harmonies of the Galop, the bar-room atmosphere of the Tango, complete with exhausted-on-their-feet couples, the contrariwise harmonies in the Trio of the Polka, and the alterations between instruments in the Two-Step, complete with the link-motif’s lovely “falling-down-the-slope” effect. To finish, the Finale was encored, the music in this performance as angular, chunky, exuberant and wonderful as ever.

For those people who’ve read to this point, my humble apologies for the lengthy review! – but I hope you’ll conclude from all of this that Jack Body’s and the musicians’ efforts on behalf of David Farquhar’s music were eminently worthwhile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MFC proves fine venue for superb string quartet plus clarinet concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Chamber Music New Zealand

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman, violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello), James Campbell, clarinet

Weber: Clarinet Quintet in B flat, Op. 34
Brahms: String Quartet no.3 in B flat, Op. 67
Tabea Squire: ‘Jet lag’ for string quartet
Mozart: Quintet in A for clarinet and strings, K. 581

Michael Fowler Centre

Tuesday, 6 May 2014, 7:30 pm

The gorgeous opening of the Weber quintet told the audience that we were in for a treat of mellifluous tonalities and contrasting sonorities.  Here was a wonderful programme of music by clarinet-loving composers.

Any concerns I had about chamber music in the Michael Fowler Centre were quickly dissipated.  Admittedly, I was seated only seven rows from the front; a colleague seated elsewhere did not find the acoustic as satisfactory.  The use of a lower platform in front of the stage assisted considerably in projecting the sound.  Upstairs and the extreme sides of the downstairs were closed off, concentrating the good-sized audience in the remaining areas, providing a more intimate ‘chamber’ than would otherwise be the case.  However, others told me that they, like me, find the seats too low, the arm-rests too high and hard, and the low backs to the seats frustrating to the wish to stretch one’s legs out in front.

The sparkling allegro that followed the slow opening of the Weber work had each instrument showing what it could do, but especially the athletic clarinet of James Campbell.  Weber certainly demonstrates the range of the instrument.  The normally utterly reliable New Zealand String Quartet lapsed a little in intonation early on but this was most unusual.

The second movement, Fantasia: adagio, revealed the subtlety of tone that Campbell could obtain from his instrument; his pianissimo playing was quite remarkable.  I don’t believe I have ever heard such quiet, yet warm tones from the clarinet.

The Menuetto that followed was by turns gracious and lively, and gave plenty of opportunity for the clarinet to shine in a variety of delightful melodies, supported by rich harmonies from the strings.  Rapid passage work from the clarinet was replete with excitement.

The final movement, Rondo: allegro gave Campbell the chance for virtuosic display as he traversed the wide range of his instrument. In an interview on radio earlier in the week he had described the Weber work as being operatic.  It is music he has played with the New Zealand String Quartet off and on over quite a long period.  It was a thoroughly masterful and enjoyable performance.

Brahms followed: not the clarinet quintet described in the notes I had been sent by email (they were the notes for concerts in some other centres; Weber was not included either), but his third string quartet.  It was introduced by Gillian Ansell, who remarked on how unusual it was for them to play two succeeding works in the same key, and told us that this had been Brahms’s own favourite of his chamber works.

The superb balance between the instruments was very apparent in the first movement, especially.  This had not been so much the case in the Weber, which was more like a mini-concerto for clarinet and strings much of the time.  Yet the Brahms was full of melody.  After the vivace came the sombre yet calm andante, at first featuring opulent harmonies underpinning a felicitous violin solo, and later a sublime ending.

There followed a third movement agitato (allegretto non troppo) and trio, that began with strong, warm-toned viola playing.  There were many musical ideas; the trio was lyrical and slightly bittersweet.  The poco allegretto con variazioni finale was based on a folksy theme.  The variations’ intricacies made a wonderful tapestry of delicate threads interweaving.  Their inventive qualities ran through a gamut of moods.

A surprise short item before the Mozart quintet brought us a piece commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet that might have been topical for the visiting clarinettist: Jet lag by talented young violinist and composer Tabea Squire.  It began quite percussively, and moved through passages using much pizzicato and harmonics.  Much of the writing seemed dislocated – as you would feel when jetlagged.   The effect was quite amusing, and showed considerable skill and confidence.

Now to the pièce de resistance.  In introducing the Mozart, James Campbell said it was one of the greatest works for clarinet.  He told us that Stadler, for whom it was written, liked playing in the lower register, and was not an egotist like Baermann, for whom Weber wrote his work.  The programme note informed us that Weber was the cousin of Constanza, Mozart’s wife, and that he was inspired by this work.

The phrasing of the opening theme on the strings was varied in the repetition of the passage; an enchanting feature.  The wonderful melody that follows, first on violin and then on clarinet, creates a tug at the heart-strings.  The harmonies from the other instruments are equally delicious.  There is something intensely satisfying about this music.  Campbell’s control of timbre and dynamics is most impressive, and produces a thoroughly musical result.  Here is a musician who gets to the core of the music.  His playing reveals wonderful nuances, not only of his technique, but more importantly of the character of the composers’ writing.

The calm beauty of the apparently simple Larghetto second movement is nevertheless quite overwhelming.  Words, after all, cannot describe music adequately.  The long phrases are akin to perfection.  The muted violins acted as a foil for the beautifully controlled clarinet.  The strings were played with a minimum of vibrato; they sounded just right for the mood as well as for the period.  Despite the sotto voce nature of the movement, it was full of character.

The Menuetto introduced a livelier element, though it was still a gracious eighteenth century dance.  The allegretto con variazioni finale was sprightly, and classically proportioned, but certainly not formulaic.  Lovely legato passages continued until the clarinet jumped in with some gymnastic jollifications.  Again, all was controlled and exquisitely phrased.  The clarinet was never shrill, and blended supremely well with the other instruments.  The joyous ending completed a concert that was a fulfilling musical highlight.

 

Lower Hutt Little Theatre gets new Steinway, but several much cheaper improvements still needed

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

A new Steinway for Lower Hutt

Welcome reception and concert for the new piano at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Sunday 4 May, 2014

On Sunday friends of the piano were invited to see and hear the new Steinway that had been bought for the Lower Hutt Little Theatre. Replacing the earlier Steinway which had been used in the Little Theatre since the 1950s, it had arrived and been run-in.

Ten years ago at the urging of players, teachers and audiences the Hutt City Council set about building up a fund for the purchase of a new piano, and a charitable trust was set up in parallel to encourage individual contributions. Committee members of Chamber Music Hutt Valley have been vigorous and prominent in promoting the whole exercise.

Among other contributions were a large number of small donations from individuals and small businesses; and particular value was placed on a ‘Kids for Keys’ piano playing initiative, organised by local music teachers. And individual keys were up for purchase: there are still some for sale.

Concerts by the Hutt Valley Orchestra, Chamber Music Hutt Valley and the newly established Chopin Club also yielded funds for the piano.

While the old model D piano continued to serve pretty well, and most professional pianists tended to be discreetly charitable about its sound and the problems of producing top-class performances, there was little dispute about the need for a new instrument.

The target has nearly been reached through the $60,000 raised by donations to the Trust and most of the balance from the City Council with the proceeds of the sale of the old piano, to meet the $170,000 cost of the new piano.

However, the Trust still needs $7000 to meet its commitment.

After a formal welcome with speeches from Mayor Ray Wallace and the Chair of the Trust, Joy Baird, a varied programme was presented. Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano, four hands, began the concert, with Diedre Irons and Richard Mapp at the keyboard. It was an excellent demonstration of the piano’s dynamic and tonal range, and sensitivity. A virtually unknown piece by Alfred Hill followed: his early Miniature Trio for violin, cello and piano, the violin and piano parts taken by pupils at Hutt Valley High School, Hayden Nickel and Nicholas Kovacev.

Two students of piano teacher and composer Susan Beresford, Thomas Minot and Hannah Louis, played three of her compositions plus a remarkably ebullient piece, Carnival, by Thomas. Pianist Ludwig Treviranus who was a high school student in the Hutt Valley, studied music with Rae de Lisle at Auckland University and took his doctorate at Florida State University, has been a loyal friend of music in both Upper and Lower Hutt. He and his jazz group played a set of jazz pieces as well as the Alla Turca movement from Mozart’s Sonata in A major.

Finally, Diedre Irons showed the piano’s responsiveness to Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ Polonaise (Op 53).

So far, so good.

But in spite of the upgrade of the auditorium and back-stage a year or so ago, and now the new piano, the ambience of the foyer remains bleak and unwelcoming, even though a café has been created and doors now give access to the Library. There are no comfortable seats for the audience before, during the interval and after a concert.

There is no décor of any kind, not even places on which posters about forthcoming concerts could be fixed. The walls could well be used to illustrate aspects of musical activities in the valley since the Little Theatre was built, making use of archival photographs which I’m sure could be unearthed.  And racks could be provided for brochures and flyers advertising future concerts and cultural activities in the Hutt Valley, and in the wider Wellington region.

Given an attractive venue, music lovers will come from far and wide for good concerts: I am just one case, living in Tawa and having been a regular at concerts in both Lower and Upper Hutt for many years. Though one hesitates to make a point that might strike a parochial note, city officials could well take a look at the most attractive environment that has been created and maintained in the Arts and Entertainment Centre in Upper Hutt.

Incidentally, I gather the city council is contemplating acoustic enhancement. In the light of the several much easier and cheaper enhancements that still cry out for attention, the professional services of acoustic engineers would be just a little ridiculous. No auditorium is perfect, and one of the first tasks that a performer new to a hall undertakes is to listen to the acoustic and to ensure that he or she obtains the most rewarding sounds. As it stands, I can see (or hear) no justification for such needless extravagance.

 

Piano trios in sparkling performances by Waikato-based ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Chamber Soloists (Katherine Austin – piano, Amalia Hall – violin, James Tennant – cello)
(Wellington Chamber Music)

Piano Trio in D minor, H 327 (Martinů)
Corybas and Aegean (Psathas)
Piano Trio in F minor, Op 65 (Dvořák) 

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 27 April, 3 pm

I was surprised to discover how long it seems to be since I heard either Katherine Austin or James Tennant in concert. In fact, a search of Middle C back to October 2008 throws up neither name. However, we’ve reviewed three or four recitals involving Amalia Hall.

Most of my experience of Austin and Tennant in earlier years has been in the chamber music series in Wellington or Lower Hutt and at the Chamber Music Festival in Nelson, though I don’t think they have performed there in the last two or three festivals, at least.

So this recital was a pleasure; additionally spiced by Katherine Austin’s ebullient remarks about the music.

I have come to enjoy Martinů’s music over the years and so I found myself feeling much more receptive to this piano trio than I think some of the audience was.

His music is idiosyncratic and I can envisage performances that fail to grasp his spirit. Here however, the trio did not try to make too much of the opening passages: there was a discreet reticence in their approach, though the insistent rhythm, in the shape of motifs of two quavers and a crotchet and the opposite, and the energy that is always present was there, but waiting in the wings, as it were.

Though the melodic ideas are not as strong as in some of Martinů’s music, by the end of the first movement – less than five minutes, it had planted itself very satisfactorily in my head. The second movement starts secretively, on violin and piano though the cello later to enjoy some lovely duetting with the violin. The players didn’t allow the drifting mood of the Adagio to lose its way, though it did seem to take its time to find the exit. The finale found the more characteristic Martinů voice, with its typical ostinato-like motifs and motoric rhythms.

But I await a performance of Martinů’s Nonet from an enterprising ensemble; not to mention one of our orchestras programming one of his six symphonies.

A colleague has observed that the acoustic in St Andrew’s has become a little harder for chamber music since the refurbishment; I’m not sure, as each of the instruments spoke clearly and were always well balanced, even though the piano’s lid was on the long stick and the writing could have tempted the pianist to a more dominant role. (My colleague, Rosemary Collier, told me later that it was probably a rug under the piano that had tempered its sound).

The trio had commissioned Corybas from John Psathas, and he had been inspired to add a short additional piece called Aegean, as an envoi (in the sense of a concluding strophe to, usually, an Elizabethan poem; Psathas called it a postlude).

The pair of pieces had been premiered in Crete in 2011; Corybas had several interlinked references, but was based on a Macedonian dance in complex rhythm; Aegean was in part inspired by the view of the Aegean from his parents’ house high above the sea on the coast of below Mount Olympus.  But Katherine told us that they had decided to play in first, and that seemed very fitting. A complex pattern seemed to lie beneath it but that did not create a barrier for the listener. Its impact was of calm though not, for me, of a seascape. There were long-drawn lines for violin and cello over a busier piano part, and it proved a happy prelude for Corybas.

Strangely, there seemed to be a real affinity between it and the Martinů trio.

The piano opened Corybas with a deliberate exposition of the rhythm, as a serialist might do with a tone-row. But this was no serial or any other kind of avant-garde composition. Though the rhythm was complex, there were quite long passages with a strong and insistent beat; the piece sounded very danceable, at least for someone born in Greece.  I enjoyed the way the energy slowly dissipated as the end approached, though without any loss of spirit. Teasingly, it just got slower and more engaging. The trio has played it a number of times, and their familiarity and affinity added hugely to its acceptance and enjoyment.

Finally, Dvořák’s piano trio: No 3, but the first to make a real mark. Though the programme note linked its character with the recent death of the composer’s mother, there was little, for my ears, that suggested sadness, let alone grief. In a minor key, to be sure, but written with such maturity and confidence (after all he’d written his sixth symphony by this time, 1883; he was 42) that it is the melodic richness, life-affirming vigour and its compositional skill that animates it and gives it stature.

The first movement is the most important, almost a quarter hour and a tour de force given to sudden dynamic changes, a variety of tone and metre and dealing fluently with its fertile thematic material. These players took every chance to exploit all these opportunities, producing a mood of profound contentment. I noted earlier the happy balance maintained between the three instruments; here, perhaps more than before, I was conscious of more than just a feeling of restraint with the cello part, but a view of it as secondary; it may have been where I was sitting, on the left side. Nevertheless, when I turned my attention to the cello, Tennant’s playing was always deeply expressive. And that quality became particularly evident in the slow movement which opens, elegiacally indeed, with a lovely cello melody.

But before that, the scherzo-like second movement, Allegretto grazioso, arrested the ear through the teasing rhythm that seemed to suggest various time signatures, broken by a trio section of quite different and more pensive character.

Both the third and fourth movements, each of round ten minutes, seem to maintain the level of melodic inspiration, as the cello’s melody at the beginning of the Poco adagio is followed by a mirroring melody on the violin that was comparably engaging. And the last movement returned to the serious energy of the first movement where the Katherine Austin’s extrovert piano often led the way in dramatizing the abrupt tempo changes, the accelerandos, the little emphatic outbursts that held the attention even when one, secretly, felt that the composer was prolonging the end somewhat unduly.

So this was a splendid concert, giving a fine exposure to one of Dvořák’s chamber music masterpieces as well as rewarding and successful works of the past half century.