Tag: chamber music

Gorgeous concert of New Zealand commissions for voice and harp

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Te Koki New Zealand School of Music:
Pluck; a concert of New Zealand music for harp

Works by Anthony Ritchie, Graeme Downes, Pepe Becker, Lyell Cresswell, Gillian Whitehead, Chris Adams, Claire Cowan, Ross Carey and Mark Smythe.

Helen Webby (harp), Pepe Becker (voice)

Adam Concert Room, New Zealand School of Music

Friday, 13 September, 7.30pm

Everyone at ‘Pluck’ would have been delighted by what they heard.
The works were commissioned by an enterprising Helen Webby, with support from Creative New Zealand.  Most of the composers are New Zealand residents, but several are currently based
overseas.  All the works were written for full-size orchestral harp – pedal harp – unless otherwise stated below.

Anthony Ritchie’s Angels Flow was certainly apt to its title: evocative, misty, and at the end, feeling unfinished, as if it wafted off into spiritual worlds.  It was an appropriate piece to commence a recital of harp music, but more excitement was in store for the moderately-sized audience (there was musical competition elsewhere in the university precinct).

Also based at Otago University, Graeme Downes is an expert on Mahler, and on rock music.  I had not heard any of his compositions before, but despite the rather technical programme note, it proved to be an interesting and varied piece: Introduction and Scherzo.  It opened in a minor
mode, then changed quite abruptly.  There were many delicious moments of arpeggios and techniques of playing at varying levels from top to bottom of the strings. The tempi were quite fast, and the music was jazzy in places.  Towards the end, it struck me as pianistic in character.  Overall, it was a very attractive work.

We are certainly familiar with Pepe Becker as a singer; although I knew she composed also, I had not heard anything of hers for a long time. Her piece was titled  Capricorn I: Pluto in terra.  Knowing little of astrology, much of the programme note was over my head.

The work opened with the strings stopped by a piece of paper between them, giving a tonal quality
rather like pizzicato on a violin.  Then there were low wordless vocal tones from the harpist, and a melody for the left hand, while the pizzicato continued from the right hand.  The paper was removed (in an act of sleight of hand), but the same fast rhythms continued, as did the vocal tones, plus knocking on the soundboard.  All of this made for a dramatic and interesting piece – and difficulty for the performer, but nevertheless she succeeded without problems, it seemed.

Lyell Cresswell, who has lived in Edinburgh for many years, maintains his links with New Zealand.  He wrote his piece based on words by the poet Fiona Farrell, which were written after the February 2011 earthquake.  They had particular relevance, since the poet had been playing “with a harp ensemble under Helen’s tutelage”.  The words related the reaction of the harp and of the cups and plates when the earthquake happened.  Telling, and amusing were the lines about
harps making fine companions in disaster. “You can float on a harp as the ship goes down” and “You can hold onto a single string/ Find your way through a broken city.”

Pepe Becker’s singing was incisive yet smooth in this dramatic piece, which was played with great
panache and a range of fortes and pianos. The disaster was splendidly depicted.

Last in the first half of the concert was Gillian Whitehead’s Cicadas, the vocal part setting a text by Rachel Bush.  Naturally, the insects were depicted in the music, as Whitehead “focuses on the life cycle of the cicada and its mesmeric song.” Whitehead proved yet again to be superb at setting words to music, and also at bringing out the theme through the music.  We heard the cicadas emerging from the ground, and their rhythmic vibrations accompanied the words, epitomising the part that said “…say to themselves over and over.”  At one point Helen Webby used a kind of vibrato on the high notes, employing both hands to achieve this, then smoothed over the strings with both hands, giving an eerie effect.  Such ‘twentieth century harp techniques’ were credited in the programme note to great French-American harpist Carlo Salzedo, who died in 1961 at the age of 76.

I found the singing of the words rather shrill in the bright acoustic of the Adam Concert Room.  However, this was a very skilled composition, and performance.

Following the interval we heard Strata by Chris Adams (another composer with strong Otago University connections).  It employed, in addition to the harp, a ‘loop pedal’.  This is an electronic device, operated by the harpist using a pedal, which can play a loop of the music (the loop could be earlier recorded, or recorded during the performance, I learned later, and is much used by pop musicians). The performer could play with the loop as accompaniment, or without it, or activate the loop on its own, playing its part over and over, with no ‘live’ intervention.

The piece began with what sounded like a medieval melody, modal in nature.  The charming melody was played over a repetitive bass accompaniment.  The disadvantage of using the loop was the clicking noise as the pedal was depressed and the electronics started and stopped.

Claire Cowan’s piece was The Sleeping Keeper, for lap harp and pedal harp.  However, since Helen
Webby couldn’t play two harps at the same time, the loop pedal was employed again to activate the electronic version of the lap harp’s part.  At one point, she used the metal tuning key on the strings to produce a sustained metallic sound from them.  As the programme note said “the piece conjures up… the constant movement of water…”; the resonant sound in ACR was right for this evocative piece, full of the atmosphere of dreams.  However, I believe there was amplification in those piece employing the loop pedal.

The repetitive bass was most effective; the use of the loop pedal made for more complex, and louder, textures than the harp could conjure up on its own.

Ross Carey’s … valse oubliée… was for a wire-strung harp of 22 strings.  This small harp 22 metal strings was placed on a high padded stool and Helen Webby played it standing. What an incisive sound this harp has compared with the pedal harp!  Carey was the only composer to use this smaller instrument.  His piece was in an improvisatory style, with pleasing turns of phrase.

Finally, we heard Moto Mojo from Mark Smythe (Pepe Becker’s brother).  In tonality and rhythmically the piece was similar to Pepe’s composition.  It was true to the title, and to the note “to make the listener feel a sense of momentum” but it was certainly not without melody and charm.  I can believe in amplification used like this – it truly enhanced what can be a very quiet instrument.  The piece made a beautiful ending to a gorgeous concert.  It’s not always that you
can say that about a programme of totally new music.

 

NZ String Quartet – Britten alongside his heroes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand String Quartet presents:
BRAVO! BRITTEN (Programme One)

STRAVINSKY – Concertino for String Quartet (1920)
BRITTEN – String Quartet No.1 in D Op.25
BRIDGE – Idyll No.1 / Pieces Nos 2 and 3
MOZART – String Quartet in B-flat K.589 “Prussian No.2”

The New Zealand String Quartet:
Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 13th September 2013

The New Zealand String Quartet concluded their epic New Zealand Bravo! Britten tour with two Wellington concerts on the weekend, featuring separate programs, of which I was privileged to hear the first one on Friday evening. I feel almost abashed to admit that I would have gone to both concerts had I not been scheduled to attend the opening of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman’ the following evening!

Of course both Britten and Wagner are linked by birth centenaries this present year, give or take a hundred years’ difference. Britten was naturally aware of Wagner as a composer, but drew little from the latter’s work in his own music. Far more influential upon Britten and his creativity were the composers whose music the NZSQ chose to represent in each of their Bravo! Britten concerts this year.

In the first concert, which I heard, the quartet featured music by Stravinsky, Frank Bridge and Mozart, to partner Britten’s First String Quartet. The choices were largely predictable for anybody with an interest in Britten’s music – for example, the accompanying composers for Concert No.2 featured Purcell, Schubert and Ravel. I would have thought either or both Mahler and Shostakovich might have gotten a look in as well, and certainly had there been a third program.

The effect of juxtaposing these influences, at any rate during the first concert, was quite extraordinary – the other composers’ music suggested worlds that were both separate from and linked to Britten’s, and had a cumulative effect on what we heard of his own music. It was a kind of “Show me a person’s world and I will show you that person” kind of phenomenon – and as can happen in real life, some of the similarities were quite uncanny when things were brought together.

The concert began with Stravinsky’s shortish but characterful Concertino for String Quartet. Leader Helene Pohl introduced the work and talked about Britten’s youthful fascination with Stravinsky’s music, quoting the instance when the young Britten arrived on his first day at school to be greeted by the music master with the words, “Ah, this is the boy who likes Stravinsky!” More telling was the playing by the group of two musical exerpts, one from the Stravinsky and the other from the Britten Quartet, demonstrating the uncanny rhythmic similarities of the two fragments.

The Stravinsky piece itself was one of the composer’s relatively spare, neoclassical works, written in 1920 for the Flonzaley Quartet, who wanted to add a piece of contemporary music to their repertoire. The music is, by turns, terse, angular and tightly worked, then whimsical and lyrical – the quartet chose a phrase or two from the driving rhythmic sections that frame the music’s brief lyrical interlude for their composer-comparison. The title Concertino comes from the use of the first violin as a “solo” instrument throughout this lyrical sequence. There’s a brief Andante coda, which the composer directs the performers to play “like a sigh”.

After this came Britten’s First String Quartet, introduced by Douglas Beilman.  This work was written in 1941 in the United States, at the request of a prominent patroness of the arts, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and first performed there by the Coolidge Quartet. The quartet actually won Britten an award at that time, a Library of Congress Medal for services to Chamber Music.

Having gotten to know this work only from recordings I was anxious to hear what it sounded like “live”, and I was astonished at how much more varied and detailed the NZSQ’s playing was, compared to the rather more austere performance on record that I had gotten used to.

The opening consisted of lovely, haunting, ethereal lines played Andante sostenuto by the two violins and viola, a theme punctuated by recitative-like arpeggiated pizzicati notes from the ‘cello, and strongly contrasted with an explosive driving allegro vivo sequence, before the ethereal ambiences of the opening return, again with the violins and viola underpinned by ‘cello pizzicati.

A more subdued version of the allegro vivo included some attractive “folkish” figurations rising and falling, before the ethereal mood settles once again on the music, the instruments amazingly playing a couple of phrases an octave higher, heightening the other-worldliness of it all. There’s a brief flurry of the allegro and then a few spectral gestures of closure before the sounds disappear.

The NZSQ’s playing of the following con slancio movement again seemed much less “beefy” than what I’d gotten used to on record – with much more light and shade and variation of colour and texture, though still with plenty of “attitude” in the strutting rhythms, cheeky triplet sequences and running figures. The players relished the Peter Grimes-like “Moonlight” atmosphere which grew the third movement magically from out of the silences, the solo violin taking up the line from the opening ensemble, and joining with the second violin. I loved the fanfare figures begun by the ‘cello and then brought forth from each solo instrument, with the ambient echoes of these resonating beautifully. More hymn-like solo lines and more fanfare-like passages took the music to gentler, more ruminative realms and nicely-built cadence-points – from which the music sank to a crepuscular conclusion.

After this, what fun the finale was in these players’ hands! The cheeky opening figure was tossed around the group with a will, a two note motif played ducks and drakes with a repetitive rhythmic motif, and the music raced through the various twists and turns to its invention-strewn conclusion. For me this was again a performance of great enhancement of my perception of the music, one that demonstrated its enormous capacity for surprise, delight and fresh appraisal.

Gillian Ansell then told us a little about English conductor, chamber musician and  composer  Frank Bridge’s tutelage of the young Britten, repeating the story concerning Bridge’s encouraging of his pupil to “make every note count” in his composing. Britten certainly took Bridge’s advice to heart, judging by the fastidious “weighting” of his harmonic and colouristic textures at all times.

We then had an opportunity to hear some of Bridge’s own, seldom-played music, in a bracket of three items called “Idylls and Pieces”. The first, an Idyll by both name and by nature, oozed dark melancholy, but offered a consoling viola tune at the end. The second piece, a waltz with a lovely sighing melody, and the third, a brisk-rhythmed marching song with a beautifully sentimental trio section restored our equanimities. Throughout, Bridge’s music certainly seemed to know exactly what it was doing, and presented itself to us simply and concisely.

It fell finally to the Quartet’s playing of the music of Mozart to appropriately complete the evening’s commemorative picture of our composer. This was one of the three great “Prussian” Quartets, the second in B flat Major K.589. The Quartet’s ‘cellist, Rolf Gjelstan, enjoyed informing us that the King of Prussia, for whom Mozart wrote these works, was himself a ‘cellist, hence the profligacy of wonderful solo lines for the instrument.

By popular legend, Mozart was also a composer for whom not a note was wasted, though we have a more reliably-documented quote from this amazing genius regarding performance-style – namely, the words “It should flow like oil”. That’s what it did here, the players responding to the music’s uncanny quality of satisfying at many different levels of appreciation. Mozart himself was aware of this, writing to his father regarding a newly-composed set of piano concerti that “there are passages that will give pleasure to all, but only the connoisseurs will understand why”.

Though somewhat more gently and circumspectly configured as works of art than Beethoven’s comparable quartets, Mozart’s are as richly- and characterfully-wrought in their own way. These players had the knack of engaging and satisfying the gamut of our emotional responses to the music, coursing over a vast range of aesthetic impulses and spiritual responses. As with the Britten work earlier in the programme, I had never heard the music of this quartet projected in quite so detailed a way as with the NZSQ, and was grateful for such “enlargement” of a work’s range and scope through such an insightful performance.

If pressed to name a playing highlight from the latter work, I would here choose the Minuet and Trio movement, music filled with challenging incident for performers to surmount and listeners to take in. Not the least of this is a “Trio within a trio” kind of structure, complete with a few bars that actually reminded me of the music for that long-defunct television series “Doctor Finlay’s Casebook”!

Less self-indulgent and more pertinent an observation is that the composer’s mastery ensured that every detail which contributes to the complexities of the music literally “flowed like oil”, and that the NZSQ met the composer on common ground here and throughout the rest of the work, to give us a richly-wrought experience – one that enhanced my own appreciation of both Mozart and his devoted Benjamin Britten.

 

Sunny moods and bitter grief at lunchtime at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Koru Trio (Rachel Thomson – piano, Anne Loeser – violin, Sally Isaac – cello)

Schumann: Adagio and Allegro for cello and piano, Op 70
Shostakovich: Piano Trio No 2 in E minor, Op 67

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 11 September, 12:15 pm

When I reviewed the Koru Trio’s performance of Schubert’s B Flat piano trio last October, I exclaimed at the blessings that were available to the legions of public servants in the vicinity of St Andrew’s who could recover their sanity and humanity (words to that effect) in their lunch breaks at these wonderful lunchtime concerts. I was one of them till the late 1980s, but I see very few of my latter-day colleagues at the concerts now, even on days when an indoor sanctuary is necessary; it was a foul day outside. I suspect spiritual redemption would be ever-more essential in today’s political climate.

Schumann’s later compositions are commonly regarded as inferior to the wondrous inspirations for the piano and the Lieder that he produced up till 1840. This short piece, Adagio and Allegro, dated 1849, was originally scored for piano and horn, though the composer directed that it could also be played on violin or cello. Thank goodness! For the cello, certainly that played by Sally Isaac, was beautifully matched with the softly lyrical character of the music.  I don’t know how much these players work together, but the ensemble, the perfect unity of tone and expression between cello and piano seemed to speak of close affinity in their musical temperament. The one instrument was never obscured by the other, apart from the momentary sharpish attack from the piano at the start of the Allegro.

This was such a gorgeous performance of a little-known piece that I have to refrain from saying that it was the Shostakovich that was the real reason for being here. Both were simply wonderfully understood and eloquently expressed performances.

The opening of Shostakovich’s second piano trio is famously unique, and arresting; cello, violin and piano signaled, in succession, through those other-worldly harmonics, a deep understanding of this remarkable music and the capacity for its expression. Much as one was entranced by the technical mastery and scrupulous articulation, its real impact lay in the profound emotion that surfaced.

It would be easy for the more energetic second movement to deliver a very different mood, but it appeared simply as another facet of the sense of loss and pain that the composer felt both for the death of his friend Sollertinsky and for wartime suffering in general.

The Largo, starting with insistent piano chords, moves promptly to more extended, contrapuntal passages that lie at the funereal heart of the piece. Then, in the final movement, the players imposed a heavy rhythm, suggesting a dark, peasantish dance of death, as if stamping on the ground, venting anger at the blind cruelty of fate, or the State. The violin tone became brighter, even elegant, though it also served to raise the level of emotion which increased further with hard piano chords and insistent down-bow strokes on the violin and cello.

The way in which the trio comes to its end, in a mood of increasing quiet and calm actually speaks of the composer’s sense of despair, a conviction that nothing will change, and the way the players allowed the textures to thin out, diminuendo, to slow down without any actual rallentando was a memorable feat.

It’s not every lunchtime that one can be brought face-to-face with such musicianship and an utterance of such powerful politico-emotional despair.

 

 

Diverting variety in sparkling arrangements for reed quintet, Category Five

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Category Five – Chamber Music Hutt Valley

Wind ensemble: (Peter Dykes – oboe and cor anglais, Moira Hurst – clarinet, Mark Cookson – clarinet and bass clarinet, Oscar Lavën – bassoon, Simon Brew – alto and soprano saxophone)

Tchaikovsky: Overture to The Nutcracker; Mozart: Quintet in C minor, K 406 (adaptation of the adaptation of the Serenade, K 388); Ruud Roelofsen: Tides – a postcard from Zeeland; Rameau: La poule; Bach: ‘Jesu joy of man’s desiring’ (arr. Bryan Crump), from Cantata, BWV 147; Gershwin: Three Preludes; Byrd: Fantasia à 5 – The leaves bee greene; Debussy (Children’s Corner Suite)

The Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Sunday 1 September, 3:30 pm

The first thing that struck me as I sat down at this concert was the good sized audience: more, I think, than most of the evening concerts that I’ve attended in Lower Hutt recently. I guess the committee will be wondering about the wisdom of shifting their concert times, though that could lead to the risk of clashes with the increasing number of other concerts that are attaching themselves to Sunday afternoons. On this particular Sunday there were at least three concerts of classical music.

We heard this excellent ensemble after a couple of their concerts for Chamber Music New Zealand: so far, Te Awamutu and Whanganui with seven more stops around the North Island, and Blenheim and Motueka.

Eight distinct items are a lot; so many shortish pieces might have risked an impression of scrappiness but that was not at all the case for there was a substantial piece in each half, around which the smaller items offered interesting variety.

What is often called the miniature overture to Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker, is no more slight than many an opera or ballet prelude and the important wind parts in the original meant that there seemed little change to the sound, even given the presence of the more foreign alto saxophone in the mix. What the arrangement did for me was draw attention to the inner parts of the score which I had not been particularly aware of before, and the whole made a delightful start to the concert.

The major work in the programme was the piece that Mozart first wrote as a Serenade for wind octet,
carrying the Köchel number 388. It’s one of Mozart’s three serenades that comprise the greatest and most beautiful works in the entire repertoire for extended wind ensemble. When in 1788 Mozart needed a string quintet he arranged the piece which was, conveniently, in four movements, to fill that role, now given the catalogue number 406. This combination, particularly the strange timbre of Oscar Lavën’s bassoon and Simon Brew’s saxophone, gave rise to an odd husky throatiness in the opening phrases; though my ears soon became acclimatised.  Though it could be argued that the original scoring for eight wind instruments, pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns, produces a sound that Mozart has made his own and therefore carries an authentic feeling of inevitability, that was slightly missing from this reduction, and the presence of the saxophone, the sophisticated shape of this piece and its rich invention overcame any pedantic attitudes that might fleetingly have arisen.

A relationship with a young Dutch composer, Ruud Roelofsen, produced a piece, Tides, written for this group, linking the province of Zeeland with this country. There were maritime hints: the sounds bassoon and bass clarinet, from Mark Cookson, used atmospherically to suggest water undulating around wharf piles and lapping the hulls of ships; of ships’ horns; slithering effects, with microtones on the saxophone. An attractive, evocative piece well suited to a wintery harbour seascape.

The familiar La Poule is found in Rameau’s Suite in G minor, one of the two suites comprising the Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin published in 1728.  Given that a group of wind instruments can never replicate the staccato brilliance of a piano, let alone the pecking sound that the harpsichord could imitate even better, the oboe-led performance created an effect that was bright and comical.

The second half began with an arrangement by one Bryan Crump of the chorale known in English as ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ (Jesus bleibet meine Freude), from the Cantata ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147. It’s one of those pieces that survive almost any transcription; Peter Dykes’s oboe again led the way with a rapid accompanying motif, and although he remarked that the clarinet would be playing the part of the singers, it was his oboe that rather dominated the performance which was, nevertheless, most affecting.

Gershwin’s Three Preludes were written for the piano but his jazz-steeped spirit proved a real gift for Simon Brew’s alto saxophone, though the pieces lay no less well with the oboe, the bass clarinet or the bassoon, which provided quirky underpinning in the third Prelude.

William Byrd’s Fantasia, ‘The Leaves bee Greene’ was the reason for the presence by Brew’s chair
of the soprano saxophone, and for the cor anglais that Dykes had been nursing. They contrived to bring a thoroughly anchronistic yet delightful quality to the performance.

It proved an unlikely though musically apt prelude to Debussy’s Children’s Corner. This was the counterbalancing major work, against the Mozart in the first half, and its piquant, witty, charming variety was splendidly captured in this very effective arrangement of the piano original. There were aural surprises at every turn, and the turns in the course of the six movements were many. In the sly allusion to Clementi’s studies, the bane of every young pianist’s life, the liquid notes of Moira Hurst’s clarinet climbed from the depths to take on the treble lines of the alto sax and oboe. The Doll’s Serenade was lit by bell-like tones from sax, bassoon and bass clarinet. And this colourful ensemble treated the ever-popular Golliwog’s Cake Walk with great success in the very different sound world of reed instruments and, particularly, the saxophone.

In response to the audience’s delighted applause, they played a very unfamiliar piece by Duke Ellington, after some short remarks from Moira Hurst acknowledging the critical role of Chamber Music New Zealand in organising and supporting their tour, and supporting so much musical performance generally, throughout New Zealand.

 

Stroma – the Elemental and the Fabulous

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma New Music Ensemble presents:
GODDESS AND STORYTELLER

Music by IANNIS XENAKIS, GAO PING, and DOROTHY KER

Nicholas Isherwood (bass baritone)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Hunter Council Chamber,
Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday 1st September 2013

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned (those of us who read the program note before the concert, that is….)….short of resorting to an official rubber-stamped, or publicly-broadcast Government Health Warning, the accompanying note did made it quite clear regarding the salient characteristics of the two items written by Greek-born, French-naturalised composer Iannis Xenakis which framed this extraordinary Stroma concert: “….these works are unprecedented in their raw power and violence”.

Both pieces were late additions by the composer to an opera inspired by the classical Greek story known as The Oresteia (a work by Aeschylus, about Orestes, the son of Clytemnestera and Agamemnon, and the series of tragic events involving these characters). The first of these additional pieces was called Kassandra, and featured a series of dialogues between the Prophetess of the same name who had forseen these tragedies, and a chorus. The second, titled La Déesse Athena (The Goddess Athena) took the form of an accompanied monologue of declamation, the text a series of directives by the Goddess to the people of Athens to establish courts of law.

Despite each piece having a “stand-and-deliver” appearance on the part of the musicians that one might associate more with the concert platform than the stage, both made the kind of visceral impact one would expect from raw, graphic theatrical depictions of brutal violence and conflict. The theatricality of each piece was underscored by the remarkable vocal virtuosity of American bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, required to sing throughout both works alternating (sometimes rapidly) between baritonal and falsetto pitches. It was, one might say, a vocal tour de force.

In the first piece, the two differently-pitched voices represented both Kassandra, the Prophetess, and her exchanges with the chorus of elders. The singer’s voice was amplified (in both pieces), which for me contributed to the immediate “all-pervasiveness” of the sounds –  in Kassandra,  biting, dramatic exchanges between the prophetess and the chorus. Solo percussionist (Thomas Guldborg) activated both drums and wood-blocks, advancing both the declamatory style of the exchanges and remorselessly driving the trajectories of the narrative forward as the prophetess graphically described how Agamemnon would be murdered by his wife and her lover. As well, the singer occasionally activated a kind of psaltery, the sounds imitating an ancient Greek lyre (actually, the instrument was described as an Indian siter).

Just as engaging/harrowing was the second of Xenaxis’s pieces, La Déesse Athena, which concluded the concert – if anything, it was even more blistering an experience than was Kassandra, with the resources of a chamber ensemble put to immediate and confrontational effect. Everything was shrill and hard-edged, with the singer frequently changing from falsetto to baritonal pitch and back again, underlining Athena’s dualistic, male/female nature, and emphasising the implacable, all-encompassing nature of the directives.

From the stark, harrowing pterodactyl-imagined cries of the opening winds, through to the piece’s end, the intensities never really let up, the exchanges between the singer’s dual-voiced utterances and the raw insistence of the ensemble groups expressing sounds of the most elemental and uncompromising kind. Not for nothing was Xenakis quoted by the programme notes as saying that he felt he was born too late, and had nothing to do in the twentieth century – these sounds seemed at once ancient and anarchic, a kind of screaming and moaning from the underbelly of human existence. The archaic Greek texts of both pieces “placed” to an extent the composer’s creative focus, but the classical or pre-classical “statues” referred to in the excellent notes, and here given voice seemed to me, to “speak, sing and scream” to all ages.

The only thing that perhaps could have further advanced these sensational, no-holds-barred performances was to have performed them in a properly theatrical setting. As it was, the presentations were as confrontational and uncompromising as I think they could have been in normal concert surroundings – and, in a sense, the “neutrality” of the concert situation enabled we listeners to focus purely and directly upon the music, to memorable effect.

Thankfully, both Gao Ping’s and Dorothy Ker’s pieces inhabited somewhat different, less harrowing realms, although each had its own distinctive way with sonority and with its organisation of material. I thought Gao Ping’s work was the more overtly discursive and exploratory, as befitted the composer’s title for the piece – Shuo Shu Ren – The Storyteller. Naturally enough, as well as the stories themselves, the storyteller’s own personality and distinctive way of putting across his material were here presented, for our great delight.

One could extrapolate the scenario’s different elements from the sounds – the first section of the music strongly redolent of a “Once upon a time….”, with jaunty, angular winds setting the trajectories at the beginning, but giving way to a whole inventory of textural and rhythmic variations, the lines and timbres engaging us with the idea of a kind of “exposition” of characters, situations and contexts at the conclusion of the work’s first section.

Something of the composer’s idea of myth blending with reality seemed to haunt the wistful, remote opening of the second section, like impulses of a cold memory being stroked and brought back to a state of warmth. Lovely cello-playing by Rowan Prior helped give the sequence a Holst-like austerity, augmented in places with oriental-flavoured intervals and harmonies. The music then re-established its narrative flow, with many imaginative and interactive touches, incorporating both the storyteller’s entrancement and the listener’s rapture.  These interactions brought about a two-note figure of resolution, almost a shout of triumph and fulfilment, brought back by the solo ‘cello to the meditative realms .

A third section gave the wind players plenty of scope to galvanise the narrative and “flesh out” the protagonists – from birdsong beginnings, the figurations grew in animation and girth, underpinned by strings and harp.The kaleidoscopic texture-changes kept the pace keen and listener-sensibilities guessing, culminating in alarm-sounding squeals(winds), acamperings (strings) and flourishes (harp) – very exciting!

The epilogue began with dreamy responses to a perky oboe, strings and winds drifting their lines into harmonies which dovetailed into a cadential trill, then delicately sounded again, to gorgeous, somewhat disembodied effect, with notes sounding across silences and dissolving into them. We readily experienced the composer’s idea of the storyteller dispersing fragments “ephemeral as light”.

An even more interesting-looking assemblage of players trooped out for Dorothy Ker’s work (…and…11), continuing a kind of mushrooming of numbers effect with each succeeding item. Where Gao Ping’s descriptions of his music drew largely upon his childhood memories, Ker’s less overtly personalised language in her programme-note focused intently upon metaphor and imagery describing what she called in her music a “wave-like morphology”, and the resulting “cycles of accumulation and decay” stemming from her use of the word “and” in the piece’s title.

More concentrated, terser and in a sense “tougher” a work than Gao Ping’s, (…and…11)  held our interest in a more immediate, less hypnotic sense, rather as I remembered old radio serials of decective stories used to do, with music soundtracks generating as much imagined expectation and incident as did the voices. I liked Dorothy Ker’s use of a repeated kind of what I immediately thought of as a “radio chord” whose focal-points repeatedly interacted with instrumental incident – percussion rumbles, scintillations, breath-sounds and mutterings, rock-bottom brass sonorities – sequences to create, in the composer’s words, “anticipation, followed by a release energy”.

As with Gao Ping’s work, the sonorities led the ear ever onwards through these sequences – disparate sounds included slashing pizzicati, with strings stinging the fingerboards, chords eerily made by breath-sounds in tandem with deep brass,and recitative-like solos from flute, clarinet and trombone. And the concluding episode was entrancingly done, the dance all-too-briefly suggested before leaving the outcomes to the realms of our imagination.

One was left, at the concert’s end, marvelling at the range and scope of the Stroma musicians’ skills under Hamish McKeich’s clear-sighted direction, bringing into being such a far-flung range of musical realisations with terrific aplomb and conviction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZ Trio at the City Art Gallery with the typically multifaceted programme

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZ Trio (Justine Cormack – violin, Ashley Brown – cello, Sarah Watkins – piano)

Stuart Greenbaum: 800 Million Heartbeats
Samuel Holloway: Stapes (2005)
John Psathas: Corybas (2012)
Anton Arensky: Piano Trio in D minor, Op 32

City Gallery Wellington

Tuesday 27 August, 7pm

Against the background of Shane Cotton’s huge canvases depicting Maori heads and related images, the NZ Trio projected a distinctly more civilized impression. The lighting was vivid white, like the walls, and the air-conditioning, offering a hush that not inappropriately suggested a calm sea voyage, here, in one of the world’s most climatically dramatic capitals.

But the opening piece, by 47-year-old Australian Stuart Greenbaum, spoke nothing of the elements, nothing of the fractionated style of the new avant-garde (which was more emphatically represented by Samuel Holloway’s piece that followed). The title is taken from the notion that life can be measured by heartbeats; a normal life would be accompanied by far more than 800 million heartbeats, perhaps four times as many, but the composer remarks than the ‘actual figure is only nominal’; perhaps ‘artbitrary’ would be a better word.

It opened with quiet, rolling arpeggios on the piano, becoming a steady, quiet ostinato, varied as pianist Sarah Watkins, occasionally leaning into the piano, passed her fingers softly across the piano strings. Violin and cello added faster figurations but did not disturb the basic tempo. The music is unassertive, and gently romantic in character. Listening to music that is new to me, influences usually suggest themselves. The first to occur to me was fellow Australian Ross Edwards, whose humanly lyrical music is attractive and embracing; then there’s American George Rochberg who exiled himself from the then orthodoxy with his rejection of the avant-garde; and various minimalist composers such as the Latvian Georgs Pelecis whose Nevertheless is no doubt somewhat scorned by those of a more rigorous turn of mind.

There was a slow increase of intensity but not of tempo, assisted by canonic treatment, as a modest climax emerged. The trio has just laid down a recording of several of Greenbaum’s pieces, including this one.

Rather more challenging for players and audience was Samuel Holloway’s Stapes. Again, the programme note elucidates: ‘The Stapes (stirrup) is the smallest in the chain of three bones that transmit vibrations from the eardrum to the internal ear’. And it goes on to explain that ‘the players work both together and against each other, in individual and collective struggles for articulacy’.

Thus the sounds are inchoate pizzicati, rumbling tremolo in the piano, whispy harmonics and slithering glissandi that deal in microtones. There’s a ferocious, out-of-control triple forte that sounds like bees swarming; instruments get in each-other’s way, some kind of simulation of what might happen in the ear as chaotic sound gets sense imposed on its journey through the ear’s machinery.

But take away the programme, I wondered, and how does the music rate?  A great deal of today’s music seeks out esoteric concepts, images: non-musical things that might have sounds grafted on to them, but do they please, delight, satisfy through sounds that human beings of today? Even with the varied backgrounds that inform musical experiences of an era when more music of all sorts can be heard every hour of every day that before in history.

While admiring its imaginative sounds and the structures, often with some difficulty, I risk writing what I deplore in others – that further hearings might bring rewards, as I implied in my review of Holloway’s quartet played in Chamber Music New Zealand’s Einstein’s Universe concert in July.

The source of Psathas’s year-old Corybas lies closer to the sort of story or image that the average, reasonably experienced and broadminded musical listener can grasp. The fact that the rhythm was eleven beats to the bar was really of esoteric interest, as fitful attempts to count tended, at least for me, to hear a series of shorter, either three or four beats each. The more interesting and expressive aspect was the varied rhythms, hinting incongruously at tango (it’s based on Greek myth).

Psathas is fortunate in being able to draw on a mythology that was fairly familiar to the moderately well-educated till around the 1960s when the exposure of children to the classical languages, to English and other literatures, began to be banished from school curricula. So that references such as Psathas makes to Jason (Ioson) and Cybele demand recourse to Wikipedia just as most other historical references now do.

However, the music stands on its own feet without any background. It’s arresting and infectious, there are melodies that invite themselves into the musical compendium of the mind. The way the three instruments share the ideas is interesting and allow of being followed, and in often novel ways, a degree of excitement builds up: strings take a turn at handing a syncopated melody while the piano persists with repeated chords that don’t change or accelerate but rise to a pitch and then drops satisfyingly to end with a scrap of an earlier phrase.

Arensky’s well-known Piano Trio was one of the popular pieces played by the short-lived but gifted Turnovsky Trio in the 1990s.  It remains one of the few substantial works by Arensky that is much played. It was popular with the Turnovsky Trio for the same reason, I guess, that the NZ Trio likes to programme it. Melodic, well-made, it finds a way to communicate emotion, here in the form of an elegy in memory of a cellist friend, Karl Davidov (whom Tchaikovsky called the ‘tsar of cellists’. His Stradivarius cello was later owned by Jacqueline du Pré and now by Yo Yo Ma).

The trio played it with unusual power, the cello vibrant with feeling, the violin driving hard, and the piano sustaining a legato and coherent foundation as well as making pungent exclamations. Though this is an example of the arch-romantic in music, an abstract intellectualism was never far away; and this was the sort of performance that lifts a work not of the masterpiece class to a level that demands attention as a serious postulant at the highest of Dante’s circles.

 

NZSM tutors as composers and performers

Posted on by Alan Wells

PREMIERES CONCERT

Works written for New Zealand School of Music Staff

Stephan Prock: Stradivariazioni
Ross Harris: Sunt lacrimae rerum
Martin Riseley: Intermezzo for Lenny
Ross Harris: Three Sandcastle Songs / Shtiklekh

Adam Concert Room, NZSM

Friday, 23 August 2013

The New Zealand School of Music’s last lunchtime concert before the mid-semester break was a recital by NZSM staff members of works especially written for them by current and previous VUW and NZSM staff members.

Stephan Prock teaches composition at the School. His Stradivariazioni was commissioned by Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons for a 2011 Chamber Music New Zealand tour. In effect a suite of six movements, the initial themes (based on musical ciphers) were subjected to five variations, each bearing the name of a Stradivari violin. Le Rossignol (“The Nightingale”) was a contemplative nocturne, with bird-like turns and trills. Firebird was appropriately Stravinskyan. Le Messie (“The Messiah”), named after an instrument that was kept hidden and never seen (and now in a museum, still unplayed), began with a slow introduction, rich in open-pedal resonance, on Irons’s piano. Riseley took up his violin as if to play, then put it down again, and again, and again, tantalising us -will he play? Won’t he? (Did he? I’m not telling!)

Unlike the previous variations, the last two, Red Diamond and Alard, were run together without a break, which was somewhat disconcerting. This finale segment was attacked with great gusto, Riseley straining to get the most from his instrument.

Prock’s genial style here could easily have been that of the nineteenth century. Martin Riseley’s, in his Intermezzo for Lenny (from a violin sonata), was that of the twentieth, with hints of jazz in its witty phrases (a tribute to Leonard Bernstein). It was characterised by lean counterpoint between Riseley’s violin and Jian Liu’s piano, and built up to a strong, late climax.

Ross Harris’s musical language, though of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, seemed timeless in the 2013 Sunt lacrimae rerum. As with many of Harris’s other compositions, it was inspired by tragedy (the Virgil quote, “There are tears in things”, was found in a book on the Holocaust). Inbal Megiddo captured the sense of lament in the falling phrases of the long cello introduction, before Jian Liu added a spare counterpoint on piano. It built, hesitantly, towards a sub-climax before subsiding with a sigh to a bare piano line, the cello silent. This would have made a poignant ending, if it were the end of a shorter piece. This, however, was to prove something more substantial, leading on the a scherzo section with a fortissimo climax before returning, with assured pacing, to cello cantillation and an exquisite high harmonic on which to end.

Like Sunt…, Harris’s Shtiklekh gave the impression of several movements compressed into one, this time celebratory rather than sombre, as rollicking foot-stomping sections were interspersed with more pensive passages. Performed with great aplomb by the trio Galvanised, it was informed by Harris’s experience playing in a Klezmer band. Debbie Rawson’s earthy, pitch-bending soprano sax deputised for the Klezmer clarinet, amplifying Rebecca Steele’s introductory flute line, while Diedre Irons on piano had an almost Satiesque ‘Gymnopedie” moment.

The Three Sandcastle Songs set poems by the Nelson-based Panni Palasti, whose memories of wartime Budapest provided the texts that formed the heart of Harris’s Fifth Symphony (premiered in Auckland in August, and broadcast by Radio New Zealand Concert). These poems spoke of calmer times, of living in Kororareka (Russell) after she had emigrated to New Zealand. The songs were fresh, and sung by a seasoned and sensitive interpreter of Harris’s vocal music (notably The Floating Bride…), Jenny Wollerman.

The first song, Invitation (“Come with me/to the edge of the sea”) flowed and tripped along until it slowed to its elegiac conclusion (“the dead may know what we can’t guess”). The second, Manifesto, featured arpeggios and some discreet word-illustration (“the mad swirl/of deranged particles”) on Jian Liu’s piano. The third, Kororareka Ruins , was more declamatory, and I wondered why it was not placed between the two more melodious songs for the sake of balance and contrast. In Palasti’s book Taxi! Taxi! (Maitai River Press, 2008), the poems appear in the order in which they were performed, but that would not seem to be a compelling reason to keep them that way. Perhaps Harris (who has written some very dark compositions, such as Contra Music and As if there were no God) wanted to leave us with the image of “a cobweb/so ancient/it won’t catch a thing again”, rather than Manifesto’s “surge towards infinity” and the hint of transcendence that ends the Fifth Symphony.

 

 

Cellos galore at St. Andrew’s

Posted on by admin

St. Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series:
Cellos of the NZ School of Music

St. Andrew’s on the Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday, 21st August 2013.

 

This was the debut performance of the NZSM Cello Ensemble, a group of eight women students directed by Inbal Megiddo, cello lecturer at the school. It offered a new sound to Wellington concert goers, and the opportunity to hear both familiar and new works arranged for this interesting combination.

The opening item was the Prelude from Bach’s solo cello Suite no.5, played by Lucy Gijsbers, principal of the Ensemble. The thoughtful and lyrical opening section led into the lively and demanding fugue where her technical mastery of the instrument was immediately apparent. Unfortunately, however, the brio of the delivery was such that the shape of the phrasing and the intricate fugal patterns tended to get obscured in the rush of hectic passagework. Lucy has no need to prove her obvious technical competence; however, that competence must always be the servant of the music, particularly a masterpiece of such stature as this. The musicianship displayed in the opening simply needed to be extended right through to the powerful ending of the Prelude.

Next was Corelli’s well known Christmas Concerto Op.6, no.8 in a surprisingly successful realization for cello ensemble by Claude Kenneson. It largely overcame the limitations of  an unrelieved cello palette – the stylistic contrasts between the alternating slow and fast movements were well highlighted, with warmth and sensitivity marking the wonderful melodies, suspensions and rhythmic syncopation that distinguish the lyrical sections. Inner voices spoke well through the rich texture and highlighted the players’ clear emotional engagement with the work.

The spirited delivery of the contrasting fast movements was invigorating in all but the last Allegro –  it was in fact played at an exaggerated vivace that muddied the exciting passagework whose clarity is quintessential to these early concerti. However this, and the occasional patch of rocky intonation, were really the only drawbacks in this felicitous reading.

For the Requiem Op.66 by David Popper, the cello ensemble was joined by Jian Liu, piano lecturer at NZ School of Music. Popper was a Bohemian virtuoso cellist and prolific composer for his instrument, and this 1891 work was originally scored for three cellos and orchestra.

However, it came across very successfully in this piano-plus-cello-octet version, which gave ample opportunity for the players to relish its luscious romantic lyricism and brooding reflections.

The tonal contrast and clarity of Liu’s contribution from the piano was exquisitely sensitive to the mood of the ensemble and the nuances of the writing. He facilitated a wonderful conversation where all the players clearly revelled in the aching suspensions and dynamic shifts that particularly marked the central section. The audience was rapt from first note to last.

The final work was Bach’s Air on a G String, in an arrangement for cello ensemble by Aldo Parisot. The famous lyrical melody that is the lynchpin of this piece was beautifully expressed by the upper voices, but the supporting lines from the bass voices were sadly, barely audible. Even the middle parts were underpowered, leaving a serious imbalance in the acoustic. This was most apparent in the timid pizzicato of the lowest cello lines which cried out for the rich resonance of  the contrabass that normally plays this part. The sensitive dynamic contrasts offered by the upper voices were so emasculated by the absence of bass support, that the beauty of Bach’s writing was badly let down. If this arrangement is to work at all, it needs a lot more thought given to the balance of the ensemble.

It was a pity to end the recital with this sense of incompleteness, because the concert offered Wellington listeners an enriching experience in the chamber music medium that they have not enjoyed before. Inbal Megiddo is to be congratulated on establishing and nurturing the group, and I very much hope we will hear more of it in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

Worlds of experience and sensibility – the Antipodes String Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts Series:

Antipodes String Trio

LARRY PRUDEN – String Trio (1953-55)

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI – String Trio (1991)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – Divertimento for String Trio in E-Flat K.563

Antipodes String Trio:
Amalia Hall (violin) / Nicholas Hancox (viola)
Sarah Rommel (‘cello)

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

Sunday 18th August, 2013

This was a concert that looked interesting enough on paper, but then really caught fire in performance. Its disparate parts came together simply and directly to produced the kind of combustion whose glow remained long after the last notes had been played.

The Antipodes String Trio has changed its personnel over the last couple of years –  the 2011 line up which toured New Zealand included Christabel Lin (violin) and David Requiro (cello), along with the present violist, Nicholas Hancox. The group was originally formed as a result of connections between students who were attending different various music conservatories and institutes in New Zealand and the United States.

The present group has a different violinist, Amalia Hall, and ‘cellist, Sarah Rommel, who met while attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where both are currently doing postgraduate studies. Previously, Amelia Hall and Nicholas Hancox had played together in the NZSO National Youth Orchestra. Nicholas Hancox is presently based in Germany, as principal viola of the Lubeck Philharmonic Orchestra.

For a group whose members spend much of their time pursuing individual career pathways, their playing demonstrated a remarkable unity throughout. Undoubtedly a good deal of this “esprit de corps” comes from an avowed commitment to help promote what the group calls ‘‘the under-utilised repertoire of the string trio, which many great composers throughout music history have contributed to’’

To my ears they realised much of the essential character of each of the works they performed – the breezy, out-of-doors angularity of Larry Pruden’s work, the contrasting ferocity and ghostliness of Penderecki’s piece, and the noble energies and fluid graces of Mozart’s Divertimento.

The programme note for the Pruden work cited Bartok as one of the chief influences, though I kept on hearing Tippett-like impulses in places. Not that the composer borowed consciously from other music, as it’s entirely natural that resonances of past encounters with various works from other sources would crop up in anybody’s music.

Here, I enjoyed the first movement’s restless energies, with the few moments of repose allowing the shades of a marching song to peep around the corners in places, and bringing forth a lovely alternating interplay between violin and viola. The second-movement Serenade (separately transcribed by the composer for string orchestra, as “Night Song”) featured beguiling open-air harmonies and delicate, watery pizzicato sequences, including a full-throated,  superbly-focused mid-movement “tutti”, filled with feeling.

The third movement’s delightful interchanges again brought the Tippett of the Double String Orchestra Concerto to mind, high spirits giving way to beautifully inward-sounding ambiences, almost Aeolian in effect in places, thanks to the rapt, concentrated instrumental soundings from these players. I also liked the Trio, with its viola-sounded echoes of the opening Vivace, poised here to perfection.

Continuing the mood-contrasts, the finale’s Lento tranquillo brought austere beauties from each instrument, the slow, fugal character of the music allowing the intensities to build systematically and inexorably – perhaps more “tragico” than “Tranquillo” in places, though the purer, more “ritualised” tones of the strings after the full-throated lines had run their course did suggest a kind of “home is where the heart is” aspect at the end. I thought these players gave of themselves so wholeheartedly throughout – so much so that we in the audience felt the “wrench” at the end when the sounds were broken off and all spells ceased.

What a contrast with the ferocity of Krzysztof Penderecki’s slashing chords at the very beginning of his String Trio! These brutal, hammered-out episodes alternated with lyrical and whimsical sequences for each solo instrument making for an ambience harsh, volatile and surreal in effect, after the Pruden work. The players threw themselves and their instruments into these sequences with playing of great verve, relishing the contrasts of colour, tone and emphasis, and creating as powerful and telling an atmosphere with their muted, spectral realisations as during the more forceful moments.

Viola, then violin by turns introduced the fugue-like second movement, the intensities leading back into the ferocious chords of the work’s opening, the music motoric and insistent, like some of Shostakovich’s, expressed most excitingly with some trenchant playing.

When it was over, I thought of the worlds of difference between the two works we had just heard. I found myself thinking of Douglas Lilburn’s telling descriptions of Penderecki’s music in his landmark “A Search for a Language” talk, prompted by thoughts regarding the relationship of musical language to experience. And Lilburn goes on to point out that other creative minds have stressed the importance of finding universal truths in our own lives’ framework. The result? – a telling contrast here between the respective worlds of two composers.

A kind of synthesis of universal truth, life-experience and innate genius can readily be found in the music of Mozart, whose Divertimento for String Trio in E-flat K.563, which took up the programme’s remainder, seemed to somehow enrich the contexts suggested by both of those first-half works. Written in 1788, in the wake of financial difficulties for the composer, and from the same period as his last three symphonies, it’s a more serious and profound work than the title “Divertimento” suggests.

I thought the Trio’s playing had real “girth” throughout the first movement, bring out the music’s nobility – for me, only Beethoven, in works such as the “Eroica”, approaches Mozart in his wondrous “E-flat” mode. The group took us on a true voyage of exploration with the music’s development – from the golden, sun-drenched strains of the opening we were suddenly plunged into realms of mystery and unpredictability, the figurations containing such a variegated set of emphases – beautiful work, especially, from viola and ‘cello in thirds in places.

A dignified, heartfelt Adagio was followed by a “kicking-up-its-heels” Minuet, with each instrument given the chance to bend its back to the dance, then engage in expressive, even volatile exchanges with a partner in the Trio, before returning to the dance. The players enjoyed the Theme-and-Variations Andante, as well as the rather more rustic second Minuet, one with a delicious waltz-like first Trio – its “ready-steady-go” beginning was here pointed most engagingly – and a pretty, very feminine second Trio, again delightfully characterized.

Apart from a surprising single mis-hit from the violist at one point, the group’s delivery of the Allegro Finale was excitingly spot-on in terms of accuracy, flow, expression and interchange. It was playing that brought out the quote from musicologist Alfred Einstein, reproduced in the program – “Every note is significant – every note is a contribution to spiritual and sensuous fulfillment in sound”….the Antipodeans’ performance  here embodied that comment, playing into each other’s and into our hands, so that we in the audience were able to partake fully in the musical feast.

I do hope we shall hear much more from this talented and engaging trio of musicians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two masterpieces of the violin repertoire at Old St Paul’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Valerie Rigg (violin) and Mary Barber (piano)

Beethoven: Violin Sonata No 1 in D, Op 12 No 1
Brahms: Violin Sonata No 2 in A, Op 100
Sarasate: Malagueña 

Old Saint Paul’s, Mulgrave Street

Tuesday 13 August, 12:15 pm

Wellington’s music scene is generously endowed with musicians young and old who are prepared to give their time and devote some effort to enriching the lives of those disposed to be enriched by good music, music that had stood the test of time (which I think is the best way of defining the meaning of ‘classical’).

Though, as the education system no longer regards the furnishing of young minds and souls with music of this kind, as one of the most important functions, those who can tell the difference between the lasting and the ephemeral are disappearing.

I recently came across a quote that is pertinent: “Few people mind saying they have a bad memory but no one admits to having bad taste.” Guess that’s a bit meaningless to most of the educational and political establishment.

Valerie Rigg and Mary Barber know, however, and the few score who come to sit under the beautiful gothic timber arches of this most beautiful of New Zealand churches probably know why they’re there too.

In the past Valerie Rigg has explored some of the less familiar masterpieces of the repertoire such as violin sonatas by Janáček and Prokofiev. This week she and Mary Barber chose to get back to the very heartland of the violin repertoire, with Beethoven and Brahms, as well as a classic of the ‘encore’ variety by Spanish virtuoso Sarasate.

The first movement of Beethoven’s first violin sonata seems designed to provide the violinist with plenty of arresting, exhortatory pronouncements, much given to scales and arpeggios, and Rigg entered its spirit wholeheartedly. In the slow movement, an Andante and not an Adagio, in Theme and Variations form, the violinist’s playing matched the wide range of expressive variety, and the charming episodes for the piano were handled gracefully by Mary Barber. A similar spirited and confident tone brought the last happy, lyrical movement to life, with little sign of declining facility on the part of the violinist.

In Brahms second violin sonata there was a tendency for the violin to drive a bit hard though it never risked overwhelming the pianist’s part, which itself is so rewarding.  What was always clear was the
enjoyment felt by both players, perfectly self-effacing in their exploring the gentleness and modesty of the music.  What touched me particularly was the readiness of this retired, fine professional violinist to maintain her facility in the challenging music she tackles, and to perform freely in these enterprising
concerts for the edification of the faithful audiences. Many of her orchestral colleagues retire from their posts and abandon music almost entirely.

The players explored sensitively a certain hesitant air in the second movement, punctuated by sudden impulsive Vivace moments, which created a feeling of simplicity and affection; and again in the Allegretto last movement, a contemplative approach at the beginning was never quite banished. Even though there were blemishes in the piano part, rather more than one might have expected, the technical assurance and spirit of the violin carried it to happy conclusion.

The recital ended with the Malagueña of Sarasate, not one of the dances of huge energy from Andalusia, but one rather irregular in rhythm, though it does permit touches of flamboyance. So it began, decorously, but I had a 1pm date and had to leave after a minute or so.

The major pieces in the programme had been enough to make the journey worthwhile, and I look forward to Valerie Rigg’s next recital with whichever of her repertoire of pianists she invites to join her.