Tag: chamber music

Brilliant violin and piano recital from Blythe Press and Richard Mapp

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music by Bach, Brahms, Chausson, Bowater and Ravel

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 16 November 2011, 12.15pm

Though it has become conventional not to perform individual movements of extended works of music, it often works quite well. This admirable recital did that very successfully, with the first movement – the Adagio – from Bach’s solo Violin Sonata No 1 in G minor, and again with the first two movements – Allegro and Adagio – from Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata. Only those quite familiar with the works would have felt a little unfulfilled when the music failed to continue as expected.

The compensation was the singularly thoughtful and musically sensitive performances from the young Blythe Press and accompanist Richard Mapp. Press is only 22, grew up in the Kapiti area, began studies at Victoria University but, getting a scholarship to study in Graz, Austria, graduated there earlier this year with a master’s degree with distinction. There he has distinguished himself in European competitions and as soloist with the Styrian Youth Orchestra. He toured New Zealand last year with the Cook Strait Trio (see the review in Middle C of 22 August 2010), and also played for the NZSO on their European tour.

The first movement of Bach’s first solo violin sonata (played without the score) was both an intelligent and imaginative move, for it made the audience attend to the careful and painstaking approach that guided his performance; it was unhurried, with slightly prolonged pauses between phrases, that put his stamp on the music’s profound meditative character. It stood on its own with no hint of self-indulgence.

The two movements of Brahms’s last violin sonata were equally impressive. The first might be marked Allegro but Press captured the pervasive feeling of calm and deliberation; with the piano lid on the long stick, which can allow an accompaniment to dominate the textures, Mapp maintained the pace and dynamic levels that the violin adopted: the two were in perfect sympathy, especially arresting in the more animated central section. The Adagio presented Press with the chance to revel in the beautiful warmth of his instrument, expressing a world-weary spirit with sensitivity.

Perhaps the centre-piece was Chausson’s lovely Poème, which is usually heard in full orchestral dress where it is easier to envelope it in a romantic and impressionist spirit. The two players handled it with a profound familiarity and confidence and with a deep affection, all the decorative features appearing intrinsic rather than pasted on merely for display.

Helen Bowater’s piece for solo violin may have been chosen to complement Ravel’s Tsigane, for Lautari denotes a class of Romanian gypsy musicians. I had not heard it before and was attracted both by its idiom, clearly derived from Eastern European folk music, and the confident personal touches that placed it pretty firmly in today’s musical context, though not in a vein given over to excessive experimental devices and gestures. Nevertheless, its writing (he played with the score before him) clearly presented challenges that Press overcame effortlessly.

It was a nice prelude to the Ravel in which the violin plays a long, unaccompanied, flamboyant cadenza. The Liszt of the Hungarian Rhapsodies is never far away, as the technical difficulties present the violin with comparable terrors. Press dealt with its two-handed pizzicato dashes and its full repertoire of impossibilities, never losing sight of the music itself which is not merely flashy virtuosity.

The recital was essential St Andrew’s stuff, offering the audience a chance to hear a young prodigy of whom we’ll hear much more.

e

A bevy of intensities – Ensemble Liaison with Wilma Smith

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand 2011

HAYDN – Piano Trio in G Major “Gypsy Rondo”

BRAHMS – Clarinet Trio in A Minor Op.114

MESSIAEN – Quartet for the End of Time

Ensemble Liaison:

Timothy Young (piano) / Svetlana Bogosavljevic (‘cello) / David Griffiths (clarinet)

– with Wilma Smith (violin)

Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 29th October 2011

Contrast was very much the going order for this concert, given by the Australian group Ensemble Liaison, with violinist Wilma Smith, in the Wellington Town Hall. The group made light of the rather over-generous acoustic and voluminous spaces of the venue, with some extremely focused and well-projected playing throughout the varied program. As well, the ear soon adjusted to the prevailing ambience, so that the sounds soon became as “normal” as at any concert.

One comes to expect certain levels of musicianship and technical proficiency from visiting artists, and the members of Ensemble Liaison delivered handsomely on all counts. Timothy Young’s piano-playing combined a soloist’s presence and focus with a chamber musician’s sensitivity throughout the evening. He was admirably partnered in all three works by ‘cellist Svetlana Bogosavljevic, sonorous and supple-toned, from the largely continuo-like underpinnings of the Haydn Trio to the fractured intensities of Messiaen’s work. And clarinettist David Griffiths charmed us at first with his expressive sensitivities in Brahms, before pinning back our ears with playing of searing surety in the Messiaen Quartet.

Joining them for this series of performances in New Zealand was Wilma Smith, well-known here for her work as concertmaster with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and as leader and a founding member of the New Zealand String Quartet. She brought what a friend of mine described at the interval as “warmth and clarity” to the music, as well as an experienced chamber musician’s sensibility to the interactions with her colleagues.

Before the concert began Chamber Music New Zealand boss Euan Murdoch welcomed the audience and highlighted some aspects of next year’s programme, making particular reference to the visit by illustrious Italian ensemble I Musici, as well as that by the equally renowned Takács Quartet. A further announcement came from Wilma Smith, telling us of her wish to dedicate the concert to the memory of a recently deceased former colleague of hers from the NZSO, veteran trumpeter Gil Evans.

Haydn’s well-known G Major Piano Trio, named “Gypsy Rondo” on account of its exotically-rhythmed finale, enabled musicians and audience to”get the pitch of the hall”, the resonances bringing out Haydn’s delightful “al fresco” echoes of the forest and the hunt throughout the first movement’s variations – I wanted the opening major-key sequence repeated, so felicitous was the playing and the sense of delightful rapport between the musicians. Though the ‘cello had practically nothing thematic to do throughout, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s playing warmed the harmonies beautifully, enabling the violin to sing and the piano to sparkle with even more sweetness and élan. Only in parts of the finale did I feel the acoustic robbed the playing of some of its finesse of detail – some of the rapidly moving figurations were but a blur, though the skin-and-hair “gypsy” sequences came across with plenty of temperament, the whole delightfully paprika-flavoured.

From rustic exuberance we moved to a more autumnal mood with Brahms’s Op.114 Clarinet Trio, the first of several works written for the famed clarinettist Richard Mühlefeld, whom the composer had heard play in the Meiningen Orchestra. David Griffiths introduced the work, making reference to Mühlefeld and his skills, and to the beauties of these later works. On the showing of his subsequent playing in the Trio I would have been happy to have heard Griffiths play all of them, including the two sonatas, in a single concert – perhaps another time! What impressed me was the beautiful transparency of his tone, the playing catching the music’s “wind-blown” quality in a number of places. With Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s dulcet ‘cello tones leading the way into many of the melodic contourings, the music’s emotive impulse was constantly maintained, Timothy Young’s piano-playing contributing a nice sense of fantastical suggestion to the proceedings.

The Adagio here delivered a beautifully-voiced dialogue between clarinet and ‘cello . Griffiths had pointed out beforehand that he and the ‘cellist were a married couple – but even Oscar Wilde, with his “washing one’s clean linen in public” remark, couldn’t have helped but approve, with such felicitous music-making on display! As well, the third movement’s ritualistic waltz-like impulses produced in this performance something at once stirring (those wonderfully ‘”arched” phrases, like uplifted festoons of roses) and surprisingly tender. True, there were passionately-expressed moments in the finale, here given full voice by the performers, but the over-riding impression was one of light-and-shade, the composer seeming more readily to trust his lyrical instincts in these later works than in much of his earlier chamber music. Upholder of the classical tradition he may have been, but the aspect and mood of some of Brahms’ later works present more lines of connection with Romanticism than perhaps the composer himself might have cared to admit.

Naturally most of the concert’s focus fell on the second half’s single work, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Though by now a twentieth-century chamber music classic, the work had eluded me up to the time of this concert, so I had no previous experiences, save some knowledge of the composer’s other music, to bring to the occasion. Reading some of the background to the work’s composition certainly heightened my expectation of hearing something that was uniquely special – and on that score I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Even so, there was for me something unsettling about it all which took me a while to come to grips with, more of which anon.

As is well known, the work was written while Messiaen was interned in a German prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, in the Eastern German province of Silesia. Thanks to a fortuitous amalgam of humanity and circumstance on the part of both the composer’s fellow prisoners and some of his German captors, Messiaen was able to write a work that gave a lasting voice to both his own creative personality and to a representation of a moment in time interwoven by numerous strands of indomitable human spirit. In later years the composer tended to “mythologize” the circumstances surrounding the work’s first performance, exaggerating the audience numbers and the parlous state of the musical instruments. Evidence from other sources suggests that the work’s gestation and completion was as much the result of collective co-operation as of individual genius. In fact the composer’s German captors went out of their way to facilitate the work’s composition and performance, giving the music a kind of wider reference to collective human empathy, alongside the composer’s own purposes.

The “End of Time” reference by the composer in the title, while relating to to the Apocalyptic imagery contained in the Revelations of St.John seems also to illustrate in musical language the composer’s own attitude towards time – “…not as flow, but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in a series of brilliant unalike instants…”. We therefore got not a Berlioz-like or Verdi-like Apocalypse, but a more abstractly-conceived and quirkily-expressed outpouring involving elements of plainchant, birdsong and ambient resonance. In between episodes of transcendent stillness and beauty there were occasionally fierce irruptions, and dances that swung along irregular rhythmic trajectories in disarmingly unexpected ways.

It was challenging as a “long-music” concept – ironically, perhaps less so in today’s world, where the constantly-changing mini-byte is the expected mode of communication – but especially to those of us brought up on Aristotelian-like unities of dramatic action and narrative flow within a time-framework. This music simply didn’t do any of that – each of the Quartet’s eight movements had an almost stand-alone independence which had little to do with flow within time. To me there seemed at the time (!) an undermining lack of ostensible organic unity about the piece, completely at odds with the idea of the whole being greater than the sum, etc….later, after my brain had had time to catch up and reorganize its expectations, I began to feel more comfortable in retrospect with what I’d heard, accepting more readily the composer’s idea of time as “pre-existing being” encompassing our “human temporality”.

What I instantly appreciated was the playing of each musician – true, my being able to say that I thought the third-movement clarinet solo “Abyss of the Birds” was a performance highlight, in a sense defines my problem with the piece’s overall unity, but perhaps it equally points to a deficiency of analytical brain-power on my part. In any case, the movement seemed the “dark centre” of the work, the solo instrument contrasting the deep “sadness and weariness” of the ages with the “stars and rainbows and songs” of the birds. Incredible playing from David Griffiths – his instrument produced sounds from the bowels of being, as it were. Comparable moments included the fifth movement ‘cello solo, “In praise of the eternity of Jesus”, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s beautifully rapt ‘cello playing matching intensities with her husband’s, right to the piece’s held-note conclusion. And though a couple of Wilma Smith’s violin notes weren’t pitched at exactly their mark, her playing’s overall purity and sweetness carried the day to breathtaking effect throughout the work’s final “In praise of the immortality of Jesus”. Here, as in the other movements requiring piano, Timothy Young provided all the delicacy, energy and deep sonority the music asked for.

We in the audience were, by the end, properly caught by the music’s power of communication and enthrallment, and showed our appreciation of the ensemble’s achievement accordingly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Zealand School of Music and Symphony Orchestra players join in rapturous performances

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZSM Hunter Concert Series: Schubert’s String Quintet in C, D 956  and Tchaikovsky’s sextet, Souvenir de Florence, Op 70

Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Martin Riseley (violins), Julia Joyce and Donald Maurice (violas), Andrew Joyce and Inbal Megiddo (cellos)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Thursday 20 October, 7.30pm

I often feel, as I sit at the computer after getting home from a concert, that all I want to say is something like: ‘this evening several gifted musicians, after conscientious rehearsing, gave beautiful performances of marvellous music – perhaps an acknowledged masterpiece – that has been handed down to us by scores of music lovers, composed 100, 200, 300 ago by gifted composers who were intent above all on giving musical stimulation and pleasure to their audiences”.

And it often seems churlish and inappropriate to have listened with such deliberate critical attention, seeking flaws, that I would feel the need to remark on some minor defect, possibly merely a difference in tempo, in dynamic shifts or emphasis, or some aspect that could perhaps be compared unfavourably with another performance.

Schubert’s Quintet in C is such a sublime piece that it can withstand quite a wide variety of approaches to its performance, even performances that have distinct shortcomings. The music is that much greater than any individual performance.

The music that one heard early in one’s life tends to remain clearly connected with the place and circumstances of its hearing, and that is probably true for most people’s first hearing of this quintet. For me it was at the house of a friend I’d made in Stage I Latin classes at Victoria University in 1953. Though it moved me deeply, I didn’t then have enough breadth of musical experience really to realize what a masterpiece it was, an understanding that has arisen over many years.

On Thursday evening, the performance by these musicians – three NZSO principals and three leading School of Music faculty members, arguably among the finest players of their instruments in the country – was so deeply felt and generally so technically admirable that the very minor smudges had no impact on me at all; in fact in the face of such beautiful playing, it seemed an impertinence even to have registered them.

Schubert’s greatest works are full of melody that seems to flow endlessly, and in such a natural, organic manner to create music whose structural complexity seems to have sprung fully formed from the mind of the composer, yet at the same time it is of breathtaking simplicity. One of its features is the equality accorded to each of the five instruments. In earlier chamber music, the first violin usually had a leading role, enjoyed most of the tunes in their shapeliest state and was given most of the opportunities for virtuosity. But with Schubert the tunes move from one player to another, reflecting the French Revolution’s égalité, and the tunes themselves seem easily confused with what might otherwise be called accompaniments.

The Adagio is the most wondrous movement where, after several minutes of intense elegiac beauty, an agitated phase arises, led by tormented pulses from the two cellos that seems to express determination, against all grief,  to live life to the full.

The Scherzo gives prominence to some hard bowing by the two cellos, and strong rhythms, but the Trio, which usually offers something of a rhythmic and tonal contrast returned the music to the deeply melancholy spirit of the Adagio, interesting that the main theme is played by viola and cello – Julia and Andrew Joyce – in a duet that one felt, by just listening to the rapturous beauty that the pair produced, was to be intruding on a very private communion.

I always wonder why we need a last movement, usually fast and happy, of a deeply meditative piece like this; is Schubert merely conforming with convention? But, apart from providing the structural counterweight to the first movement, it justifies its place by means of its spirited energy and the accomplished fugal passages that somehow produce a sense of intellectual and emotional depth.

The concert was given the title, 3+2+1. What did this mean? I guess, the three NZSO players, plus the two instrumental teachers from the School of Music who took part in the Schubert and finally, the addition of violist and professor at the school, Donald Maurice, as the sixth voice in the Tchaikovsky.

The front of the programme was the striking reproduction of a make-believe scene, a painting by Domenico Mileto called Trompe l’oeil, depicting Florence, through a Renaissance arch with the Duomo prominent in the middle distance.

Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence suffers somewhat, especially in the minds of chamber music devotees, from the lingering notion that Tchaikovsky’s melodic fecundity has to indicate a less serious composer, and less capable of complex, deep musical manipulations.  But its performance in the company of Schubert ought to dispel such ideas, for in Schubert’s no more than 15 years, not even Tchaikovsky created such a huge body of beautiful, melodious music.

Players changed places for this: Martin Riseley now took the first violin position and Inbal Megiddo and Andrew Joyce changed places. The Souvenir is indeed so replete with gorgeous lyrical melody that at times seems almost surreal, but it certainly reflects the composer’s love of Italy.

This piece seemed to lend itself more to solo highlights, some long-breathed melodies like Julia Joyce’s big tune in the first movement, some more in the nature of accompanying motifs such as Donald Maurice’s a little later. Martin Riseley’s vigorous and delightful playing of a prominent melody enlivened the first movement; his playing was showcased again in the second movement, against pizzicato from the other instruments, who soon pick up their bows. Andrew Joyce had another beautiful solo melody to himself before it was taken up by Riseley and Maurice again. The third movement, marked Allegretto rather than Scherzo till a sudden Vivace episode, was played brilliantly, in high spirits; but the dance-like music was in the Finale – Allegro con brio e vivace – which offered lively solo opportunities to all players. This was so brilliantly delivered that the audience erupted with long applause and even some shouting, that recalled the six players four times.

 

 

Intelligent programme of well played chamber music at Lower hutt

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wieniawski: Reverie for viola and piano
Bruch: Nos. 1, 5 (Rumanian Melody), 6 (Nocturne) and 2 from Eight Pieces, Op.83 (originally for clarinet, viola and piano)
Brahms: Sonata for viola and piano, Op.120 no.2, in E flat major
Piazolla: Tango Primavera Portena

Victoria Jaenecke, viola; Martin Jaenecke, violin; Rachel Thomson, piano

St. Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 19 October, 12.15pm

A superb concert by professional musicians, with an interesting and varied programme greeted those who attended at St. Mark’s Church.  It was a considerably smaller attendance than that at Upper Hutt the previous lunchtime.

One of the features was the perfect balance between the instruments.  The lid of the piano was fully up, but there was carpet on the floor.  Whether it was the carpet, the skill of the pianist, or a bit of both, the larger instrument never dominated the others, but neither was it too reticent.

Victoria Jaenecke and Rachel Thomson started proceedings with the Reverie.  It began slowly, in the minor key.  This was an attractive piece, exceedingly well played with great sonority.  A lovely middle section led to a return to the sombre tones of the opening.

The players were joined by Martin Jaenecke for the series of Bruch pieces.  Martin’s violin tone is warm and seductive, and matches the viola well.  The second piece had figures of separated chords on the piano, against a low, solemn melody on viola, before moving into a more lilting section for all three instruments.  Here, as elsewhere, the players demonstrated superb ensemble.

The Nocturne, no.6, commenced with viola and piano.  This movement was much more square in form, but tuneful and pleasing, becoming passionate as it progressed, finally subsiding into a dreamy ending.

The final piece played (no.2) began with the piano, then the viola entered.  The music became faster, yet it was still eloquent.

Brahms’s sonata may be more familiar in the version for clarinet, but the viola version was very attractive in these hands.  The sunny opening movement, allegro amabile, featured a complex piano part, ably performed by Rachel Thomson, and a lovely coda.

The second movement, appassionato ma non troppo – allegro, was faster than I have previously heard it, but did not seem to suffer for that.  The solemn middle section transposed the opening theme most effectively.   The finale, andante con moto – allegro non troppo, delivered an imposing opening theme, with chords.  Rapid lilting passages followed.  The allegro seemed somewhat troppo to me, especially for the piano, but this gave a brilliant ending.

Throughout the entire concert I may have heard four or five ‘bum’ notes.  This was music-making of a high order.

The final item was an arrangement of a tango by Piazolla.  Beginning with a violin solo accompanied by pizzicato on the viola, it was lively, with off-beat rhythms and interesting harmonies.  Pizzicato ended the first section, then a more serious melody was introduced on the viola, soon to be joined by the violin.  Harmonic uncertainties and chromaticism led to a sprightly, even jazzy section to conclude.  It evoked the whirling, twirling dancers, and their final gesture and pose.

Apart from the Brahms sonata, the music was unfamiliar to me.  The programme was so intelligently constructed and the items so unfailingly well played, that it maintained the attention and enjoyment throughout.

The audience was informed that next Wednesday’s recital will see eight musicians perform Mendelssohn’s wonderful Octet (although that is not what is advertised in the flyer circulated early in the year); something to look forward to.

 

 

Accomplished recitals from student violists of New Zealand School of Music

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Music for Strings – Students of the NZSM

Music by Bloch, Penderecki, Stamitz, Schumann, Bach, Walton

Instrumentalists: Alice McIvor, Vincent Hardaker, Megan Ward, Leoni Wittchou (violas), accompanied by Douglas Mews (piano)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 12 October 2011, 12.15pm

Despite its billing, this was a concert comprising only viola students – those studying with Gillian Ansell, violist in the New Zealand String Quartet.

It began with an additional item, not in the printed programme: Rhapsody by Ernest Bloch (which I conclude must be a movement from his Suite of 1919).  It was played by Alice McIvor, with Douglas Mews accompanying.  This was quite a passionate work, and the performers gave it plenty of expression.  There was strong bowing, a few intonation lapses, but splendidly rich tone.  This was a very accomplished performance, played from the score.

Next to perform was Vincent Hardaker, whose piece was Penderecki’s Cadenza per Viola Sola of 1984.  It was unaccompanied, and played from memory – a considerable achievement, given the complexity and idiom of the music.  Techniques included double-stopping and harmonics played alongside ‘straight’ notes. The fast middle section provided contrast, before the return to the falling motif and sadder mood of the opening.  As well as being demanding, the performance was thoughtful, competent and convincing.

Megan Ward’s dark-coloured instrument produced a dark sound, though not as rich in tone as McIvor’s.  She gave a very persuasive performance of Stamitz’s Viola Concerto in D major.  Her technique was good, but this was not so difficult a piece as those played by the two previous violists.

She followed it with two pieces from Schumann’s Märchenbilder (Fairytale Pictures): 1. Nicht Schnell, and 3. Rasch.

Like the Stamitz, these were accompanied, but the score was used, whereas the Stamitz was played from memory.  These song-like pieces suffered quite a few minor intonation wobbles, especially no.3.  The playing did not have the tone or the accuracy to bring me completely into the pictures implied by the programme note (the first movement “…dark and mysterious, perhaps set deep within an enchanted forest…”; the second: “…fast and …possibly a dance featuring sprites or pixies”), despite their being played with considerable facility.

Next up was Leoni Wittchou, with Douglas Mews providing impeccable accompaniment.   Leoni played (on the viola) the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no.4, BWV 1010.  The piece began a little slower than is usual, and there was suspect intonation at times, but the player had a good, full tone.  Playing from memory, she gave an excellent account of this classic piece.

She continued with the Andante first movement from Walton’s Viola Concerto, but unfortunately another engagement prevented me from staying to hear it.

Programme notes were good, notwithstanding a couple of careless spelling errors in composers’ names, and a horrendous multiple misspelling of ‘mischievous’ in the description of the second Schumann piece.

To have four viola players at this level of accomplishment bodes well for the future of chamber music particularly.

 

 

Polished recital by Aeolian Players at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Marin Marais: Suite in G minor; Telemann: Trio Sonata for oboe, viola da gamba and basso continuo in G minor; Psathas: Waiting for the Aeroplane; Bach: Trio Sonata No 4 in E minor, BWV 528

The Aeolian Players:  Calvin Scott (oboe), Peter Garrity (viola), Ariana Odermatt (piano), Margaret Guldborg (cello)

St Mark’s church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 12 October, 12.15pm

Our last reference to the Aeolian Ensemble is in a review by my colleague Rosemary Collier of their concert in the Mulled Wine series at Paekakariki, where the same Telemann sonata was played but otherwise, a different Bach work, plus pieces by Buxtehude, Hotteterre and Forqueray.

I was a couple of minutes late and missed the first and some of the second movement of the Marais Suite in G minor. It is one of the Pièces en trio pour les flutes, violon, et dessus de viole, published in 1692.  It’s only a short step from flute to oboe, though one could argue that the shift has a significant effect on the mood of the music.

My first impression, as always, was of the way this church so enhances the sounds of instruments (it does as well with voices). So that all four instruments were clear as individuals, yet the composition had the effect of according equal status to them all, and no one dominated the melodic line. Margaret Guldborg’s cello had a warmth that brought it closer to the sound of viola da gamba (on which Marais was one of the greatest exponents) and the sound of the piano in the hands of Ariana Odermatt detracted not the least from the feeling of baroque music.

This was an altogether charming piece, played with an admirable feeling for style and with the interest of the whole placed above that of the individual.

The Telemann sonata (originally for violin, viola and basso continuo) created a quite different impression. Here the indivual instruments carried more distinct lines, each taking turns with the tunes so that the characteristics of each could be enjoyed, as for the most part they could.  The presence of the oboe in place of the violin always has an emotional effect – giving a touch of plangency or sadness – and in most cases is not out of place, and it certainly wasn’t here, even in the brighter Allegro.  As for the piano v. harpsichord issue, the character of the ensemble  did seem to call up in my mind an expectation of the lighter, non-sustaining sound of the latter, though Odermatt’s playing was crisp and sensitive to the idiom.

The inclusion of a modern piano solo was not the least bothersome. Psathas’s early piece, Waiting for the Aeroplane has become a small New Zealand classic; there is nothing difficult about its style or harmonies and it pointed, very early in Psathas’s career, to a refreshing independence of mind, removed from the sort of academic and, shall we say, pretentious music that tended to flow from aspiring student composers 20 years ago (and still does to some extent). Odermatt’s playing was most interesting, handling the rocking fourth that persists hypnotically throughout, is dreamlike; the two notes are uneven in character, the upper note fluctuating in strength while the occasional outbursts produced a quite unsettling effect.

The Bach Trio Sonata
This is one of a set of six so-called ‘trio sonatas’ for organ which Bach compiled in the late 1720s. His manuscript for the six sonatas, BWV 525-30, prescribes two keyboards and pedal.

The Oxford Bach Companion suggests the six sonatas show Bach’s frequent interest in transferring styles and idioms from one instrument or ensemble to another (particularly the keyboard). Thus it can be inferred that it is not an outrageous step for musicians to make arrangements in the reverse direction – back from a score for the organ to the original ‘trio sonata’ concept, that involved two high register instruments and a bass, or basso continuo.

To indulge further erudition, the Bach Companion also notes that the three-instrument form relates more to the concerto than to the church sonata form; and it surmises that the technical difficulty of these six sonatas, and their distance from the most common idioms for the organ, suggest a pedagogical intention (for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann who became a distinguished organist), and that they might be considered a corollary to the collected works for unaccompanied violin and cello.

Earlier versions of all movements of this sonata exist. The opening movement began life as the Sinfonia to the second part of Cantata No 76 – and significantly, it is scored for oboe d’amore, viola da gamba and continuo, composed at the beginning of his Leipzig years. That suggests, further, that other movements may also have been composed originally for instrumental trio. The Andante may date from his earliest years as it betrays the short-breathed motivic style of 17th century German music, as well as some of the ‘pathetic’ gestures of contemporary Italian opera, notably the chord of the Neapolitan Sixth.

The oboe part is again without direct authority apart from the oboe d’amore part in the sinfonia mentioned above, but it easily assumes the leading role, and in Calvin Scott’s hands fully justifies the adaptation. As the oboe and viola pass the theme of the Andante back and forth they create quite a strong and attractive emotional quality. The last movement, Un poco allegro, in triple time, creates a lovely curving line and I could again conjure a viola da gamba, together with a harpsichord in this movement, but the two talented players on cello and piano quickly dispelled any real hankering after a more historical interpretation.

 

Seven Strings by Candlelight: New Zealand String Quartet plus 3 at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

John Psathas: Kartsigar (2004); Dvořák: String Quintet in G, Op 77; Strauss: Metamorphosen for string septet

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman, Gillian Ansell, Rolf Gjelsten) plus Julia Joyce (viola), Andrew Joyce (cello), Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass).

Church of St Mary of the Angels

Friday 30 September, 6.30pm

Imaginative programming can often bring surprising results.

Candlelight in a beautiful church is a certain winner through producing a spiritual atmosphere, especially if timed so that the evanescent sunlight through the stained glass fades in the course of the first half hour. As for the programme, all three pieces had been played before by the quartet; Metamorphosen at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson in February this year, and Kartsigar at a 2005 Sunday concert from the Wellington Chamber Music Society (who had commissioned the work). The Dvořák String Quintet was played in a Sunday afternoon concert in May 2009.

Together they were an interesting collection of out-of-the-way chamber music, either on account of the instrumentation or the composer.

Psathas’s two-part piece has an unusual provenance – by origin a transcription of recorded performances by two Greek musicians, Manos Achalinotopoulos and Vangelis Karipis. (Psathas’s own programme note refers to the first surname which can be translated as ‘he who cannot be bridled’ – I find the adjective ‘achalinotos’,  in my Modern Greek dictionary, meaning unbridled or uncontrolled). That quality could hardly apply to this piece which is a very finely crafted composition with nothing outlandish or out of control.

Those, like myself, who have had a long love affair with the popular music of Greece, which I think pinnacled in the 1960s, would not have recognized those characteristics in this piece which has its roots, I imagine, in sources that may be much older, more primitive and at the same time more sophisticated than the music of Theodorakis, Hajidakis or Xacharchos.

It starts with deliberate cello pizzicato, quickly joined by second violin and viola playing a distinctly Anatolian, modal melody, in unison or at the octave. All four instruments soon become involved, each with a distinct role, and these distinctions were sharply delineated by the quartet, Gillian’s viola often throaty, suggesting a Greek folk instrument perhaps, Douglas Beilman’s second violin luxuriating in seductively warm sounds, each contributing a strand of the hypnotic, meandering chant that continued underpinned by Gjelsten’s cello throughout.

Psathas’s note points to an ostinato motif that opens the second movement, which in the hands of the violins floats higher and more freely than the first movement, free of the cello’s grip that had anchored the first movement.

Since my first hearing, the piece, through its performance, has gained a focus and conviction that I do not recall sensing before; the acoustic, too, offered a gorgeous background which did the music so harm at all and made it an altogether more enveloping experience than I get from the (excellent) CD of Psathas’s music, Helix, for Rattle Records.

Dvořák’s String Quintet – the only one that employs the double bass – is an attractive piece, but not one of his masterpieces. Its engaging handling of the five instruments, its quasi folk-song character, particularly in the first movement, forgives any lack of gravity.

That doesn’t altogether overcome the feeling that for all its lighthearted charm, the tripping tune of the Scherzo doesn’t return once too often. But the slow movement avoided that problem, and the performance captured its pensiveness. One might suppose that the double bass part, being unusual, might have led the composer to have highlighted its sonic capacities and whatever virtuoso skills might have been at the disposal of the first performer, that seems not the case. Its presence was always conspicuous however, and Hiroshi Ikematsu’s intensely musical contributions were always arresting and beguiling.

Strauss was moved to write Metamorphosen after Allied bombing destroyed the Bavarian National Opera in Munich in 1943 and so much else in the following years. Strauss’s first draft was discovered in 1990; it was found to have been scored at first for string septet. It was Paul Sacher, the famous Swiss musician and patron, who commissioned Strauss in 1945 to produce the version for 23 solo strings.  After the septet’s discovery Rudolf Leopold used the 23-string work as the basis for a re-creation of a version for string septet. Even for one who is very familiar with the big version, the impact of this, which I heard at the Nelson performance in February, was extremely persuasive; it expanded richly and opulently in response to the church’s acoustic which once again contributed very powerfully to the effect of this profoundly felt music.

Oddly, I do not hear this music as expressing unmitigated grief, and I find it extraordinary that the composer, in the face of such wanton and needless destruction, could have written music that is first of all so beautiful. But its character aligns very much with my own belief that tragedy, violence, cruelty, evil are most convincingly handled, not in music that is violent, abrasive, aurally disagreeable, employing distorting articulations, but through sounds that express pain or grief or even anger by using voices and instruments in orthodox ways that are above all beautiful.

Strauss does this by building a powerful climax which is easily heard as a sort of ecstasy of grief and which has a more profound impact because it envelops the listener in sounds that are moving and beautiful.

Often I’m uncomfortable drawing attention to individual performances in an ensemble, because like so much else in the arts, it draws attention away from the important thing – the music – and towards personalities; but the voice I heard most strongly and musically was that of cellist Andrew Joyce. All others emerged with distinction, either alone or in ensemble that was simply transcendent, and in which there could be no mistaking the anguish Strauss felt as he contemplated the destruction of a civilization that had been so remarkable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A horn trio wins converts at Wellington Chamber Music recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nautilus Trio: Wilma Smith (violin), Andrew Bain (horn), Amin Farid (piano)

Mozart: Violin Sonata in A, K 305; Beethoven: Horn sonata, Op 17; Koechlin: Four Little Pieces; Brahms: Horn Trio, Op 40

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

Sunday 18 September 3pm

Wilma Smith, a former NZSO concertmaster, has been returning to New Zealand every year or so since she became co-concertmaster with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: usually with a strings and/or piano ensemble. This time, inspired by the urge to play Brahms’s Horn Trio, an appropriate trio was put together, comprising the Melbourne Orchestra’s principal horn and pianist Amir Farid.

Why Nautilus? Nautilus is a mollusc with a spiral shell divided into compartments. Is that the connection with the character of the French horn? In a subsequent exchange with Wilma, she confirmed that this was indeed the significance.

Putting together a programme for the somewhat rare combination of piano, violin and horn would not have been easy, though their encore showed other pieces do exist. They found one written for just those instruments in Koechlin’s short pieces which were attractive even if a bit insubstantial, and they didn’t do much to induce one to explore this interesting composer, some of whose other music I had met. Nevertheless, the writing for the three instruments was subtle and charming, offering the horn a very nice environment in which to work with the two stringed instruments.

The solution to fleshing out the first half was to play sonatas that used violin and horn separately. No trouble with the former, and the one they chose – Mozart’s in A, K 305 – was a good choice: neither well known, nor insignificant. Unusual in shape – two movements (as was not unusual at the time), the second, a theme and variations, rather slower than the first. The galloping rhythm of the first movement was a splendid opener while the Andante grazioso was an interesting set of variations with an unexpected modulation towards the end. It was a most successful opener, the two players demonstrating a rapport that was not just a matter of keeping perfectly together, but combining the voices of violin and piano rather beautifully.

Beethoven’s rather routine sonata (published with the reassurance that a cellist could handle it) is the sort of piece that is only played in circumstances like this. It calls for the horn to launch forth in military-sounding arpeggios in stentorian style, which does not usually bring out the horn’s most engaging sound. But as soon as lyrical passages arrived the player’s skills became more evident, unexpectedly perhaps, in accord with the piano. Individually the two players explored its character carefully, making as good a case as possible for it. By playing the second movement rather more poco than the tempo marking, poco adagio, might have indicated, they sustained its lines – and the slow breaths for the hornist – as well as exposing the somewhat vacuous musical content.

After the interval came the reason for the concert. The remarkable thing about this unique piece is the way in which you never feel that Brahms is going out of his way to write for the particular qualities of the horn. Yet nothing seems to be lie more naturally for the three instruments, either together or individually, at least from the listener’s point of view, than Brahms’s imaginative handling of the ideas; his unmistakable voice is present throughout. Most strikingly in the most passionate passages, the three instruments produced a blend that was sheer delight. Here, more than elsewhere in the recital, the horn’s lyrical qualities were conspicuous, handling the long melodies beautifully.

There is a view that the work might have been composed in response to the recent death of Brahms’s mother, and the third movement, Adagio mesto, might have endorsed this, the tones of violin and horn delivering poised, restrained music reflecting grief.

However, the second movement, Scherzo, and the Finale dispelled any real belief in the work’s general elegiac character. The Scherzo boisterous and extrovert and the Finale marked by the whoops of successive fourths that suggested well enough the activity that the horn was originally used to accompany.

A word about the pianist, Amir Farid. Throughout, his playing was marked by real individual distinction which would clearly make him a superb solo player, but his precise, carefully shaded, acutely pedaled performances in the various pieces, and his collaborative role in a richly sympathetic trio was quite admirable.

They played an encore after applause laced with bravos; it used the three instruments most happily, in an arrangement by one Ernst Naumann (I think Wilma said; he was a 19th century German musicologist/composer/arranger) of the last movement from the quintet in E flat for horn, violin, 2 violas and cello by Mozart, KV 407 (obviously written about the same time as the four horn concertos, which were for Mozart’s friend Ignaz Leutgeb) . This most convincing and delightful performance proved it a work of considerable charm which would, in this arrangement, have been an excellent companion in this concert. I suspect there could be a rush to find the piece on Amazon.com now (try Parsons first).

Boris Pigovat’s Requiem – a stunning CD presentation

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REQUIEM

Works by BORIS PIGOVAT

– Requiem “The Holocaust” / Prayer for Violin and Piano / Silent Music for viola and harp / Nigun for String Quartet

Donald Maurice (viola)

Vector Wellington Orchestra / Marc Taddei

also with Richard Mapp (piano) / Carolyn Mills (harp) / Dominion String Quartet

Atoll ACD 114

This recording commemorates the first performance outside the Ukraine of Boris Pigovat’s Requiem, given by violist Donald Maurice, with the Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, on November 9th, 2008 at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington. The composer, whose grandparents and aunt were victims of the Babiy Yar tragedy in 1941, when thousands of German Jews were massacred in cold blood by the Nazis, had wanted for a number of years to write a work dedicated to the Holocaust, thinking originally of the standard Requiem format, with soloists, choir and orchestra. Then Yuri Gandelsman, the then principal violist of the Israel Philharmonic asked Pigovat to write a work for him, and the composer decided he would tackle a piece for viola and orchestra, writing in the style of a Requiem. He completed the work in 1995, but it wasn’t premiered until 2001, as Gandelsman, who intended to give the first performance, was prevented by circumstances from doing so. However, the situation was eventually resolved, most appropriately, by a concert planned in Kiev commemorating the Babiy Yar tragedy, to which Pigovat successfully offered his score for performance.

The composer regarded the cancellation of the original performances in Israel as “the will of Providence”, as it meant the work would be performed for the first time in Kiev, near the tomb of his family members who were killed at BabiyYar. Added poignancy was generated by the co-operation between the Israeli Cultural Attache in Kiev and the city’s Goethe Institute which resulted in the famous German violist, Rainer Moog, being asked to play the solo viola part. This concert took place in October 2001. Eight years later, the work was performed here in New Zealand at a “Concert of Remembrance” (commemorating the 70th anniversary of “Kristallnacht” – The Night of Broken Glass – a pogrom carried out against German and Austrian Jews in retaliation for the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young German/Polish Jew in November 1938). The concert featured, along with Pigovat’s work, a performance of Brahm’s German Requiem, and was sponsored by a number of groups, among which were the respective Embassies of the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel. As well, Boris Pigovat himself was able to attend the concert, thanks to the support of the Israeli Embassy.

Now, there’s a further chapter in what has become an ongoing story – this features the recent invitation made to violist Donald Maurice to give the work’s first-ever performance in Germany, on October 15th at the final gala concert of the International Viola Congress in Wuerzburg. The performance commemorates, in turn, the 70th anniversary of the Babiy Yar massacre, and will be given by Maurice with an orchestra from Duesseldorf.

However, before making this journey, Maurice will again perform the work on the actual day of the tragedy, September 29th, in the Wellington Town Hall with Kenneth Young and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra.  Also performing will be Israeli ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo, playing Bloch’s Schelomo. As well, John Psathas’s Luminous and Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka will give a New Zealand flavour to this commemorative program. I believe the concert is included under the umbrella of a “Rugby World Cup Event” – if so, one salutes the organizers’ enterprise!

Atoll Records deserves the heartfelt thanks of people like myself who weren’t able to attend that Wellington performance of the Requiem in 2008 for making the recording commercially available. It was at the time splendidly captured by Radio New Zealand’s David McCaw and his engineer Graham Kennedy – as one might expect, the music generated plenty of visceral impact, all of which comes across with startling force in Wayne Laird’s transfer to CD. It presents soloist Donald Maurice, with conductor Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra  working at what can only be described as white heat – the coruscations of parts of the Dies Irae movement are searing, to say the least – and the effects upon listeners in the hall must have been profoundly disturbing in their impact.

The Requiem has four movements, each of them given Latin subtitles, a ready context, despite their non-Jewish origins, for listeners accustomed to pieces which use similar kinds of headings for individual movements (works by Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and Faure for example) – the four movements are Requiem Aeternam, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa and Lux Eterna. Pigovat considered these parts the most suitable for his overall purpose in writing what he called “a tragic orchestral piece”. Despite his work being completely instrumental, some of the composer’s motifs and themes in the work are derived directly from the words of texts – for example, the first theme of the Dies Irae on trombones fits with the words of the first verse of this famous thirteenth-century Latin poem; while the Jewish Prayer, Shma Israel, Adonoi Elokeinu, Adonoi Ehad inspired a recurring theme in the work, first appearing in the epilogue of the Dies Irae, and in subsequent places, such as in the viola solo at the very end of the work.

The opening measures of Requiem Aeternam bring about vistas of space and eons of time, into the centre of which swirls an irruption of dark, threatening unease. But the solo viola takes up the chant-like line, by turns declamatory and meditative, its discourse supported by various orchestral motifs and atmospheric textures. Donald Maurice’s solo playing vividly captures the music’s gamut of supplicatory emotion, while Marc Taddei and the orchestra provide an accompaniment richly-mixed with ambiences of faith and trust, doubt and fear. From Ligeti-like string-clusters come sudden intrusions of light and energy, menacing, gutteral-throated strings and ghoulish figures on what sounds like a bass clarinet. Deep, seismic percussion ignites an outburst that galvanizes the whole orchestra, and brings the solo viola into conflict with forces of darkness. A portentous, doom-laden motif rises in the orchestra, challenged further by the viola, which is soon overwhelmed by a rising tide of pitiless-sounding, all-enveloping brutality, reinforced by crushing hammer-blows. Stoically, the viola remains steadfast, giving vent to its anguish, but still raising its voice to heaven at the close.

There are some famously apocalyptic settings by composers of the “Dies Irae” poem, and Pigovat, though not employing the actual words, certainly aligns himself with the movers and shakers of heaven and earth, such as Berlioz and Verdi. Slashing string lines introduce the “Dies Irae” movement, leading to orchestral outpourings whose force and vehemence will, later in the movement, readily suggest the imagery suggested by the term “holocaust”. After the initial maelstrom abates, the solo viola attempts to plead with the forces of darkness, but is repeatedly beaten down, its desperate energies to no avail. Pigovat was strongly influenced by a novel Life and Destiny by the Russian-Jewish writer Vasiliy Grossman, containing passages describing Jews’ last train journey from imprisonment to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Some of Shostakovich’s more harrowing motoric orchestral sequences come to mind in places, over the top of which the brass shout cruel repetitive utterances. Out of a searing, incandescent chord-cluster thrusts a beating rhythm, the composer suggesting the pulsing of a great number of human hearts, a rhythm which loses strength and dies.

Harsh, strident bells sound the beginning of Lacrimosa, the viola sharing in the pain and horror of what has just been experienced. The composer notes, most appositely, that “It is possible to shout with strong anger, or to groan powerlessly, or to go mad, and only then appear tears……” and Maurice’s virtuosic playing at this point conveys all of these feelings and more besides. A timpani-led processional begins the process of ritualizing the grief, somewhat, but underlines the bleak nihilism of the scenario, reinforced by a doom-laden tam-tam stroke. Then the orchestral strings offer consolation amid the despair, horns as well paying tribute to those destroyed as well as acknowledging those left behind. As the music slips without a break into the Lux Eterna, lights softly begin to glow amid the sound-textures, and there’s an almost lullabyic feel to the music’s trajectories.The viola speaks again, its voice dark-toned and grief-tainted, but calling for a renewal of faith in the human spirit, and a rekindling of hope for the future. The instrument re-establishes connections and interactions with various orchestral voices, their tones no longer expressing fear, hate, and cruelty, but intertwining with the soloist’s voice in search of a better, more understanding place for everybody in the world (the final exchanges between viola and dark-browed brass and percussion speak volumes, as the work closes).

The three pieces accompanying the Requiem on this disc all have connections or commonalities of some kind with the major work. The first, Prayer, for viola and piano, probably has the closest relationship with Requiem, as it was written when the composer had finished the latter’s Lacrimosa and was preparing materials for the fourth part, Lux Eterna. The music thus breathes much the same air as does the Requiem, with one of its themes actually used in the Shma Israel section of Lux Eterna. Donald Maurice again plays the viola, and, together with pianist Richard Mapp, gives an extraordinarily intense reading of the work. Its opening measures are meditative and hypnotic, the piano resembling a tolling bell at the outset, beneath the viola’s quiet song of lament. From the darkest depths of their interaction spring impulses of lyrical flow, gentle and undulating at first, then more impassioned, Maurice’s bow biting into his strings and Mapp’s monumental chords imparting an epic quality to the mood of grief and suffering. The undulations return, their tones gradually dissolving into mists of quiet resignation and fortitude – altogether, a beautiful and moving work.

Silent Music is scored for viola and harp, a felicitous combination of complementary tones and timbres, one I’d never before imagined. Written in 1997, after the Requiem, the piece commemorates the practice in Israel of people lighting candles for burning at places where there have been fatal terrorist attacks, one such occasioning this piece. The music’s beauty almost belies the composer’s sombre intent, though towards the end of the piece some repeated agglomerations of notes on Carolyn Mills’s harp grow through a disturbing crescendo towards a moment of intense pain, whose feeling resonates throughout the concluding silences.

Intensities of a different order are unashamedly displayed throughout the final work on the CD, Nigun, for String Quartet, though the piece finished far more quickly than I expected, due presumably to an error of timing recorded with the track listings (instead of a nine-minute work, the music came to an end, a tad abruptly, at 5’00”.  Boris Pigovat originally wrote this work for string orchestra, the string quartet version appearing for the first time on this CD. The composer’s intention was “to give expression to the tragic spirit which I feel in traditional Jewish music”. It’s certainly not a happy work, being, in psychological terms, assailed by anxieties at an early stage in its progress, the composer using the quartet’s antiphonal voicings to create a kind of overlying effect, as textures pile on top of, or slide beneath, other textures. Figurations and tempi intensify as the piece proceeds, the Dominion Quartet’s players “blocking” their sounds together for some marvellously massive-sounding chords, before continuing what feels like a fraught interaction, mercifully worked-out in the time-honored manner, but leaving one or two sostenuto voices to gradually expel their last reserves of breath and melt their tones into the stillness of the ending.

Not only does this recording deserve to be heard and savored, but the oncoming Town Hall concert (September 29th – see above) featuring the Requiem, should be an entry on everybody’s calendar. If something of the spirit of this recording can be replicated (albeit with a different orchestra and conductor) the occasion will be stunning, unmissably spectacular.

A new generation’s Lilburn, from Atoll Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DOUGLAS LILBURN – Violin and Piano Works

Elizabeth Holowell (violin)

Dean Sky-Lucas (piano)

Cameron Rhodes (speaker)

Atoll ACD 941

(….apologies for the length of this review! – PM)

If there’s ever a composer who seems to have been “rediscovered” by a fresh generation of performers, then Douglas Lilburn is the one, his music seeming to appeal as readily to today’s young players as it did to many of the composer’s similarly delighted and steadfast contemporary champions.

New recordings of many of Lilburn’s major works have appeared over the last few years, a couple of these projects containing substantial returns (Dan Poynton’s landmark survey of the composer’s piano music with Trust Records, for example). No less an important body of the composer’s work consisted of music for violin and piano, much of which recorded by the musicians for whom the works were written at the time. Now, thanks to a brilliant recently-released disc on the Atoll label featuring Australian violinist Elizabeth Holowell (currently living and working in Auckland) and her fellow-countryman, the multi-talented Dean Sky-Lucas displaying his skills as a pianist, a group of these works have been brought together on a single recording for the first time. With the help of New Zealand actor Cameron Rhodes, the musicians were able to perform Lilburn’s musical tribute to a number of New Zealand poets who were his contemporaries, Salutes to Seven Poets, in conjunction with readings of exerpts from those poems which provided the original inspiration for the composer.

Previous recordings of all of these works include violinist Ruth Pearl and pianist Margaret Nielsen’s recording for Kiwi Records of the 1950 Violin Sonata. Ruth Pearl was the work’s original dedicatee, along with pianist Frederick Page, with whom she performed the music for the first time. Unfortunately, this is but one of many landmark recordings of New Zealand music locked in the limbo that is Kiwi Pacific Records, at present, awaiting some kind of saviour – considering the unique heritage value of these historic sound-documents, I think they’re worthy of urgent attention at the highest level. The Douglas Lilburn recordings in this particular archive are but one of the many which desperately need reactivation.

Other recordings can be found among broadcast archives of this and other works, the 1950 Violin Sonata, well represented by partnerships such as Ronald Woodcock (violin) and John Wells (piano) in 1976, Peter Walls and Margaret Nielsen in 1982, David Nalden and Bryan Sayer in 1984, Tim Deighton, also with Margaret Nielsen in 1989, and Natalie Tantrum and Stephen de Pledge in 1992 (and there are probably others).  Salutes to Seven Poets has been well-championed by violinist Dean Major (see also the Waiteata Music Press listing below), broadcast performances featuring partnerships with Rae de Lisle (1989), and David Guerin (1990), while the earlier Violin Sonata in E-flat (1943) was recorded for radio by Dean Major and Rae de Lisle in 1985. Incidentally, the same artists recorded in the studio (the date isn’t listed) another of Lilburn’s Violin Sonatas, in C Major, which the composer completed in 1943 before he tackled his E-flat Sonata of the same year.

On Jack Body’s Waiteata Music Press Label (the disc’s catalogue number WTA 009), violinist Dean Major and pianist Rae de Lisle can be found performing Salutes to Seven Poets with a compelling generosity of spirit and feeling for atmosphere and colour. On this recording there are spoken commentaries by the composer, quoting but a few lines of each of the poems, as well as recording some brief impressions of the work and creative personality of each poet, unlike on the new Atoll recording, where reader Cameron Rhodes gives us part of the text of each poem.  Only some momentary less-than-ideally steady intonation in No.4, the Salute to M.K.Joseph, breaks the confidently-woven spell of Dean Major’s playing, while Rae de Lisle’s keyboard conjurings of feeling and imagery via rhythm and colour remain treasurable. The recording pronounces itself essential for the composer’s contribution alone, however more “complete” a performance concept the newer Atoll disc might present. The disc is available for a song from the Waiteata Music Press at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, or from the Centre for New Zealand Music (SOUNZ), both in Wellington.

The new Atoll disc begins with Salutes, so that the first sounds we hear are the mellifluous tones of actor Cameron Rhodes’ voice. The business of marrying speech with music on record seems in most cases I’ve heard to be problematic, the stumbling-block invariably being a lack of commonality of ambience between what’s spoken and what’s played (a particularly alienating example of this was the recent NZSO Naxos disc of Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the melodrama actors’ voices really did sound as if they had been recorded in a completely different “space” to that of the orchestra). For me, it’s important when listening to something like this to feel (however illusory, in fact) a sense of unity, of spaces being shared and contact between impulses being made – and the Atoll recording, though registering a slightly warmer “background” for the musicians, makes the connections between speaker and players as satisfyingly as anything I’ve heard. These are powerful realizations, with Rhodes’ intense readings of the poetry followed by Elizabeth Holowell’s richly-committed string tones intermeshed with Dean Sky-Lucas’s fantastic keyboard work. It all makes rather more concentrated and focused a unity than the Waiteata Music Press performance, LIlburn’s own commentaries and wider-ranging interpolations wryly leavening the intensities of Dean Major’s and Rae de Lisle’s equally committed playing. A pity the booklet-notes writer for the Atoll CD slightly fudges poet A.R.D.Fairburn’s name by interpolating his more familiar “Rex” (one or the other format would have done) – but then to apply the same treatment to an unfamiliar-sounding “Ronald A.K.Mason” borders on the pedantic.

What’s important is that a sense of the composer’s involvement with poets he knew personally is captured by the performances, the result, of course, being a kind of synthesis of such impressions formed by Lilburn’s own personality – and Holowell and Sky-Lucas are both able to command an attractive “balladic” quality about their playing which speaks both of vivid recollection of treasured interaction, and a parallel sense of time having passed on. Listening to both performances alerts one to different intensities sought by the players – Dean Major and Rae de Lisle project a focus suggesting an all-consuming immediacy (listening to the opening of the Andante tribute to Keith Sinclair, following his Although you have floated the land, one can feel how those latent intensities are brought out – searingly by Major, in places, compared to Elizabeth Holowell’s richly-toned but more dispassionate view). Following Michael Joseph’s A shepherd on a bicycle, a delicious amalgam of the ordinary and the fabulous, Holowell and Sky-Lucas concentrate on pastoral beauty rather than rustic energies, the violin-playing more secure than Dean Major’s in places, though he and Rae de Lisle conjure up a stronger rhythmic sense of a mustering, the day-to-day business of the farmer. As for the Copland-esque tribute to James K.Baxter – Upon the upland road I find myself going between Holowell’s and Sky-Lucas’s more easy-going wayfarer, who takes things pretty much as they come, in true Kiwi fashion; and Major and de Lisle’s more impulsive wanderer, given to bouts of day-dreaming and spontaneous irruptions of energy.

Most characteristic of all in a compositional sense are the repeated-note patterns with which the piano begins the Allegro commode tribute to Kendrick Smithyman. Dean Sky-Lucas fashions a beautifully pulsating piano trajectory along which the haunting repetitions flow, and over which Elizabeth Holowell’s violin can soar, sometimes spectacularly, as with her confidently-addressed octave ascent, giving rise to thoughts of other poetry – “…as a skeet’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind….” – the way Holowell’s line sweeps and soars at that point would do justice to the greatest verses. At first, I didn’t like Cameron Rhodes’ somewhat jerky, limp-rhythmic delivery of R.A.K. Mason’s Song of Allegiance, preferring in my mind’s ear an ironic vain-glorious display of goose-stepping bravado, with imaginary drums flailing as if in mockery of the poet’s presumption. But subsequent hearings have suggested other kinds of ironies, more slowly, but surely appreciated, and the musical tribute’s evocation of a kind of “man alone” aspect, suggests artistic fortitude and stoic control, and allowing only towards the end of the piece a brief display of furrowed-brow emotion.

Holowell and Sky-Lucas plot this course unerringly, again, managing to suggest whole worlds more of words and ideas, were tongues to be allowed to utter thoughts. Those who knew the struggles Lilburn experienced as a composer in a land largely unresponsive to such efforts would have recognized, in the ritualized lament of the music, the voice of one crying in the wilderness (“…toil I on, with bloody knees…”), dignity giving way only briefly to anger and despair at the very end. Dean Major and Rae de Lisle are more direct, harsher and sharper, but in a way that ironically gives the almost Mahlerian concluding cry of anguish somewhat less impact upon the whole, despite its agglomerated weight of utterance.

The final, overall “Salute” to all of the poets has a different spoken prelude in each performance. On the Waiteata disc, the composer acknowledges in a few words the overall contribution of all seven poets to his creative inspiration; while the new Atoll features Cameron Rhodes’ reading of Allen Curnow’s poem To Douglas Lilburn at Fifty. Each is perfectly in accord with its own overall performance ethos, Curnow’s poem laconically exploring the implications of a milestone in the life of a creative artist, which the music then succinctly parallels with out-of-doors tones so dear to the composer’s heart. Holowell and Sky-Lucas are lighter-footed, even airborne in places, the violin-playing a touch more elegant, somewhat less laden than Major’s “wrung” notes, though he and de Lisle, true to their overall interpretative focus, project an intensely visionary quality whose resonances aren’t easily forgotten. We listeners are enriched in having both performances to experience and enjoy.

The other works on the Atoll disc have no commercially available alternative versions, though many people will remember Ruth Pearl’s recording with Margaret Nielsen of the 1950 Violin Sonata on a Kiwi LP (SLD-32), the disc still kicking around second-hand shops, awaiting adventurous explorings by enthusiasts.  This still sounds well, the violin and piano images a bit more left-and-right than on the newer recording, but with the instrumental timbres nicely intact. Ruth Pearl was a powerful player, and her lyrical lines soar with plenty of heft, deftly supported by Margaret Nielsen’s warm, flexible piano sound – a lighter touch than Dean Sky-Lucas’, but capable of summoning up reserves of tone when needed. Pearl and Nielsen are more quixotic and volatile throughout the allegro, occasionally tightening the pace and creating whirls of energized excitement. Margaret Nielsen’s chords at the beginning of the largamente episode are glittering stalagtites of suspended sound, the mood dramatic,and the detailing ruggedly etched. There’s no release of tension with the allegro, which drives forward irresistibly in Pearl’s and Nielsen’s hands, the focus firmly fixed, the goal unequivocal, Pearl’s violin occasionally under a bit of strain, but realizing the drama and intensity of it all. Her and Nielsen make something almost sacramental out of the lyricism of the last couple of pages.

On Atoll, Dean Sky-Lucas’s opening unfurls a spacious ambience, one into which Elizabeth Holowell’s violin projects a rhapsodic and varied line, the players beautifully etching in the colour and texture changes as the music enlarges its picture. Bucolic energies bubble forth with an allegro whose inventiveness leads the ear on through a rhythmic and thematic garden of open-air delights, the playing delightfully alfresco in both its energy and its resonance – a beautiful sound. The largamente section that follows is notable for Holowell’s eloquently-realised line (so many felicitous detailings) shining like a sea-bird’s wings over the top of a deeply-hued oceanic blue-green, the line dipping and soaring, spreading widely and closing up into a fine thread, moving now towards, now with, now away from its surrounding ambient body. When the allegro returns violin and piano play a game of hide-and seek in different guises, an attractive, genial folkish element energizing the themes before sinking into a realm of repose and reflection, the piano’s hymn-like foundation drawing elegant flourishes of an almost ritualistic kind from the violin, the instruments forging a sound-discourse of nostalgia-tinted instinctive wisdom. I played both versions all again, immediately I’d finished first time through, and was moved as profoundly each time, as much by the emotional surety of the argument as its beauty and variety.

And for the rest, Holowell and Sky-Lucas have the field to themselves, at least for the moment. The biggest surprise is the Othello incidental music, accompanied by a few exerpts from the play, read with great verve and emotional variety by Cameron Rhodes. The violin-and-piano combination works well as a “dramatic” vehicle, the violin having enough bright resonance to convey fanfare-like ceremony, and the piano limitless resources of colour and ambient warmth. After Cameron Rhodes’ savagely sardonic exposition of Iago’s plans to bring about Othello’s downfall, the somewhat chiruppy Allegro risoluto seems an inappropriate response, but all is made good by the melancholy beauty of the playing of Lilburn’s remarkable Willow Song. Distinctive in a different way is the following Interlude, emotionally ambivalent and unsettled, its ruffled poise mirroring the turmoil of the tragedy about to be enacted. Rhodes puts his everything into Othello’s final speech – “….of one that loved not wisely but too well….”, a fraught moment which the Finale (andante) distils in gravely circumspect tones. Rarely do repetitions of theatrical lines wear as well as does music, however expertly delivered – and the separate tracks on the CD enable the listener to enjoy the music alone for its own sake.

Finally, another big, richly satisfying listen – Lilburn’s Sonata in E-flat for violin and piano, dating from 1943. Does the key bring out the best in composers, I wonder? – it’s certainly a sound that gets the blood flowing, as is the case here, with a juicily-voiced opening violin statement supported by rich piano undulations, the mood both heroic and rhapsodic. On first hearing I was swooping and soaring with Elizabeth Holowell’s violin in a kind of ecstasy, and therefore disappointed to hear the instrument break off its discursive flight (none too elegantly, at 2’07” – as though Orpheus had momentarily dropped his lyre…), considering the rest of the movement’s wonderfully-spun lyrical flow. But what worlds the composer subsequently takes us to – Holowell may have played the hushed stratospheric figurations leading up to the luftpause at 5’54” with more purity of tone on other occasions, but surely never with quite such “innigkeit” as here. Lilburn’s characteristic “modal” harmonies time and again disarm our sense of place, the air about us bringing, by turns Debussy-like fragrances, then surges of earthier impulse, the musicians’ generous outpourings enabling we listeners to share a richly-detailed emotional journey. Throughout this movement I had the sense of sharing the sound-world of a young composer with a great deal of both accumulated and on-going thought and emotion to let out to the world.

We exchange warmth for cool melancholy at the slow movement’s beginning, though there’s warmth welling up from the instruments’ lower reaches as the music proceeds. Holowell brings out the folksiness in places in the writing, her fiddle double-stopping and droning with flavorsome focus, then expanding and soaring over Dean Sky-Lucas’s resonantly grumbling and tintinabulating keyboard voices. The folk-lament flavour carries the music to the finale’s beginning, a call to action from the piano, Sky-Lucas’s sparking finger-work gathering up Holowell’s responsive tones in a dancing web of interactive strands (the same dancing delight Lilburn was to give to the finale of his first Symphony a half-dozen years later). But Lilburn widens the music’s scope as he proceeds, revisiting the first movement’s rhapsodic gesturings with enviable exploratory flair, string harmonics vying in places with explosive piano irruptions, the young composer revelling all the while in his kaleidoscopic shifts of harmony, the energies and impulses of the playing gathering up and carrying one’s sensibilities along quite irresistibly to the pay-off – an exhilarating listening experience.

I enjoyed such a great deal about this disc, from the quirky attractiveness of the frontispiece illustration (a painting, The Four Kings, by Auckland artist Chuck Joseph) to the wholeheartedness of actor Cameron Rhodes’ evocations of both the various New Zealand poems and the Shakespeare Othello exerpts – but my overriding feeling is gratitude to Atoll Records for capturing in true-to-life, state-of-the-art sound such an inspired partnership between two wonderful musicians, enabling a number of important works by New Zealand’s greatest composer to be heard to their inestimable advantage.