Tag: chamber music

Exotically-flavoured delights from the NZSQ and Péter Nagy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HUNGARIAN RHAPSODIES (Programme One)

The New Zealand String Quartet

with Péter Nagy (piano)

BARTÓK – String Quartet No.2 Sz.67

LIGETI – String Quartet No.1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes)

LISZT – Mephisto Waltz No. 4 (Bagatelle sans tonalité) / Csárdás in F-sharp minor / Csárdás obstinée

DOHNÁNYI – Piano Quintet No. 2 in E-flat Minor Op.26

Hunter Council Chamber,

Victoria University, Wellington

Sunday 4th September 2011

The publicity accompanying the New Zealand String Quartet’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies” set of concerts made a great thing of the “rhapsodies” designation, bringing into play synonyms such as ecstasy, rapture, bliss, enthusiasm and great joy – but upon hearing the first of the two programs I would have just as enthusiastically endorsed the “Hungarian” part of the description, especially in the context of the Quartet’s characterful and atmospheric playing. Particularly during the first half, we were, at any point, taken to worlds whose sounds, for me, were borne on a different kind of air to that which I normally breathed and listened to, something more tremulous and laden, creating expectancy and a degree of tension at the thought of whatever feelings, emotional and visceral, might be conjured up. What the group was doing, of course, was realizing some of the most interesting and absorbing chamber-music sounds ever to have been written, and bringing us as listeners into the world of those sounds.

And with the sounds came flavours and colours, those of the Bartok Second Quartet’s three movements strongly earthy and dark-hued, but here, keeping the music’s inherent lyricism close at hand. From the Quartet players came a warm, natural growth of sounds, beautifully-focused singing and shaping of the music’s contours, tones and silences alike, expressing the “soul” of the music and the earth from which it rose. Thus the folk-like singing lines over the ‘cello’s “strummed” accompaniment towards the end of the first movement made for a magical opening up of what we had already heard in “songs and snatches”, revealing the music as a kind of extended lullaby, rich and varied, both rustic and ghostly.

If song dominated the first movement, a fierce percussive energy inspired the quartet’s playing throughout  the second, marked allegro molto capriccioso. The composer’s recent travels in North Africa may have accounted for the exotic-sounding motifs, their slurrings and drummings fuelled by over-brimming peasant energies. The players nicely pointed the contrast of an angular gavotte-like trio section, before returning to the motoric energies of the opening.  We heard an almost “East-meets-West” blending of exotic patternings and relentless drive, before being taken on that spookily spectral abyss’s edge gallop towards what I thought came across as strangely reassuring folkish unisons at the movement’s end. The Lento finale resembled for me a huge slow-motion wave at the finale’s beginning, the performance creating impulsive swells that broke and arched up from the music’s undulating surfaces, before exhausting themselves and falling back into the prevailing contours via a couple of telling pizzicato notes.

Violinist Helene Pohl talked briefly about the Hungarian aspect of the program, and, helpfully, about Bartok in particular at the concert’s opening – and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten in turn spoke about Ligeti’s First String Quartet. He provided a brief but insightful overview of the music with the help of his colleagues, who demonstrated with great relish things like the composer’s “mocking” of his own themes in places, from instrument to instrument. The work was composed in 1953/54, from a time the composer was to later call “Prehistoric Ligeti”, those years before he fled Hungary as a result of the 1956 Uprising. The Bartok of the third and fourth Quartets was Ligeti’s model, here, the music at the outset colored by a lyricism, ingratiating tones set against spikiness, and delicacy against muscularity.

The composer’s four-note motto, which Rolf Gjelsten asked the players to demonstrate at the beginning, could be heard subjected to a bewildering variety of transformations, hence the “metamorphoses” of the work’s title. Memorable episodes abounded – a gig-like dotted-rhythm episode contrasted with sequences of haunted whisperings and harmonics, the dark, insidious-sounding Waltz, with its stricken pizzicati “curdling out” as arco phrasings (the poco capriccioso marking living up to its name), and the spectacularly hushed ostinati towards the work’s end set alongside the “mocking” repetitions of the motto theme. A totally engaging listening experience! – of the sort, it must be emphasized, that we’ve come to eagerly anticipate every time, from this ensemble.

Hungarian pianist Péter Nagy presented us with an all-too-brief glimpse into the world of Liszt’s late works for solo piano – I had to restrain myself from leaping to my feet when he’d finished, and proclaiming that it wasn’t enough – demanding that he play things like the Csárdás Macabre and Nuages Gris also, so that we could get a real sense of the composer as a visionary, “throwing a lance into the future”. What we heard barely scratched the surface of this somewhat bleak, atonal world of the composer’s, a true rejection of previous lives, activities, impulses and creations, in favour of what most of Liszt’s contemporaries would have certainly regarded as terra incognito. Still,in keeping with the concert’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies” title, we had to be content with those pieces linked to folk-dance, though the aforementioned Csárdás Macabre would have fitted the bill nicely, as well. The extremely chromatic Mephisto Waltz No.4 (subtitled “Bagatelle sans tonalité”) and the two Csárdás certainly gave notice of a creative sensibility looking to new worlds to explore.

Péter Nagy featured also in the concert’s final work, Ernő Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet No.2 in E-flat minor. Though it came across as much more of a drawing-room piece cheek-by-jowl with the Bartok and Ligeti Quartets, with an almost Borodin-like exoticism in places, the music still generated great sweepings of activity whose textures definitely sounded “gypsy” rather than Germanic. There was something very “fin de siécle” about those dying-fall sevenths and swooning harmonies – a touch, even, of Cesar Franck, perhaps, in some of the more fragrant harmonic modulations? Not quite what I expected – at this stage of the piece, anyway – though the playing gave the piece every chance to impress on its own terms.

The Intermezzo featured constant changes of mood between salon music, flashes of gypsy energy and formalized structuring, the players characterizing the music’s different courses with relish. Just as it was the viola’s turn to shine at this movement’s beginning, so the ‘cello took the lead in the finale, leading the other voices into a fugal working-out, which the piano further ritualized with solemn chords. However, rhapsodic feeling became paramount once again, the playing “digging in”, building the movement’s energies towards an inevitable intensification of feeling, the string lines wrapping themselves more and more tightly together, and stimulating from the piano massive sonorities. Then, at a slower tempo, the musicians regrouped their resources and brought off a fine climactic archway of romantic feeling, whose hushed coda’s strains brought a comparable sigh of audience pleasure at the very end.

Mêler Ensemble: programme changes but all is forgiven

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Sunday Concerts (Wellington Chamber Music)

Halvorsen: Passacaglia in G minor for violin and viola after Handel; Janáček: Pohádka (Fairy Tale); Piazzolla: The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires; Brahms Piano quartet in G minor, Op 25

Mêler Enesmble (Josef Špaček – violin, Amanda Verner – viola, Aleisha Verner – cello, Andrew Tyson – piano)

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 21 August 3pm

‘Mêler? Bien sûr; les instruments se mêlent parfaitement, avec bonheur’.

As there was with the Mêler Ensemble’s concert at Lower Hutt, there was some disappointment that the programme had been changed, caused ostensibly by the late replacement of the original pianist (Tanya Gabrielian). Waikanae too had their promised Schumann replaced by Dvořák’s Piano Quartet in E flat. At Wellington the music of the first half was changed, from Schubert and Brahms to pieces by Handel/Halvorsen, Janáček and Piazzolla. The reasons for these late changes can actually have had nothing to do with the change of pianist, as he was named along with the advertised programmes.

Comments I heard at the end of the first half, however, suggested that all had been forgiven, so unexpectedly delightful most had found the unheralded and largely unknown music.

At this year’s Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson I had heard the variations by Norwegian violinist and composer Johan Halvorsen, drawn from the last movement of Handel’s Harpsichord Suite in G minor. Then it was played in the version for violin and cello by two members of the Hermitage Trio, one of the overseas guest ensembles that adorned the festival throughout. It was the only piece that was common to the programme played at Lower Hutt on 11 August.

This afternoon it was played by violinist Špaček and violist Amanda Verner – Halvorsen’s original version. Such a hybrid piece calls for a compromise between the performance style of the high baroque and that of the late romantic period and I can imagine performances that lean too far in one or other direction. Here, using ordinary modern instruments, and acknowledging the musical conventions of the turn of the century, long before any serious thought was given to period authenticity in performance, it would probably have been deadly to adopt an 18th century style.

Handel’s splendid theme was only enhanced by the arrangement and especially by this performance which was filled with all the richness, power and tonal variety available to players on modern instruments. Both players also happen to be superb musicians who created gorgeous ensemble, brilliant virtuosity, as well as occasional surprise with earthy and passionate passages. In true Romantic fashion, the piece built up to an exciting climax at the end that was brilliantly executed.

Janáček’s Fairy Tale (strictly, just ‘Tale’) might be a story told in music, but even paying no attention to the story, the music, as idiosyncratic as the composer normally is, stands on its own feet. It’s in three movements. Here the two instruments, cello and piano, play almost entirely different roles, the roles of the lovers in the story whose fate rests in the balance for most of its duration; and in this lies a good deal of the interest of the music. In the opening movement the cello play pizzicato for a long time alongside the piano that ripples with a sort of hesitating impulsiveness.

Anyone familiar with Janáček’s piano music such as In the Mists or On an Overgrown Path would have no trouble identifying this, with its mood of uneasy ardour, even in the happier last movement where a happy resolution can be foreseen.

Even though the second section is lighter, sunnier in tone, each instrument retains its separateness; the dialogue is conducted by players of very striking technical panache and the ability to invest music with drama and personality.

The third, and another very different, piece was Astor Piazzolla’s impressions of the four seasons in Buenos Aires. None of the pieces in the first half called for all four instruments; the Piazzolla came close, in an arrangement by one José Bragato for violin, cello and piano. Though it would be interesting to hear it first in the clothes Piazzolla gave it – the bandoneon quartet – this more European model, if not much suggesting the inimitable sound of the bandoneon, carried the essentials in terms of rhythms and melodic accents, the little rolling, chromatic left-hand motifs at the piano for example. Thus I might have been misled in sensing the flavour of a perhaps French chamber piece, such as Milhaud. At many points I felt I could hear the influence of his Paris teacher Nadia Boulanger, though she was famous for leading her students to discover, to cultivate whatever was their own essential voice as composer. The arrangement offered moments for occasional bravura display, for example in a small-scale, brilliant cadenza for Špaček in the first movement.

Even in the slightly surprising, Schubertian melody in the third, Spring, movement, where Europe seemed close at hand, the tango was always there, and the players, each exhibiting both individuality and a fine spirit of ensemble, let us hear their own delight in it.

The one piece remaining from the original programme was Brahms’s first Piano Quartet. It’s one of the best loved of his works, containing the sort of melodies that are found in the first Piano Trio or the Op 18 Sextet.

Great delicacy distinguished the opening of the quartet, with teasing hints of the sort of tunes that follow and which soon emerged with full-blown magnificence.

The beauty of this work rests for the most part on the ensemble writing where individual instruments, or rather their players, rarely draw attention to themselves. That’s not to say that Brahms doesn’t employ them to offer contrasting feelings, as happens in the Intermezzo, where slightly disturbed strings underlie a sunnier, more spirited mood in the piano. The gypsy-style last movement drew attention to the close accord between the sisters on viola and cello, very naturally pitted at times against the piano or violin.

It was wise not to have changed this item in the programme as it was undoubtedly the most looked forward to and the performance fulfilled every hope for this concert, ending with a marvelous joyfulness.

There was long applause at the end and it was rewarded by part of the last movement from Dvořák’s Piano Quartet in E flat.

The Plight of the Dischords, aka, New Zealand Clarinet Quartet

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Music by Natalie Hunt, Iain Matheson, Evan Ware, Philip Brownlee, Jenö von Takács

The New Zealand Clarinet Quartet (or The Plight of the Dischords) (Debbie Rawson, Tui Clark, Hayden Sinclair, Nick Walshe)
(New Zealand School of Music)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Thursday 18 August, 7.30pm,

For the approximately 30 souls who braved yet another night of freezing temperatures, strong winds and driving rain, this was a rewarding occasion. The acoustics of the relatively intimate Council Chamber seemed just right for this combination of clarinets, played by such proficient performers. Despite the group’s subtitle, this was a demonstration of the euphonious and very flexible instruments that are clarinets.

Being a concert of contemporary music, with the oldest piece having been composed in 1975, a number of techniques were employed that were different from those one usually hears. The performances of works by New Zealand composers were premieres.

Interspersed through the programme in three groups were Natalie Hunt’s ten pieces named for birds – mainly New Zealand native birds. The composer, who was present, is herself a clarinettist, as well as an honours graduate in composition. The first, ‘Kawau’ [shag] was titled ‘Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar’. The printed programme did not divulge whether these phrases in quotation marks were written by Natalie Hunt, or by some other person.

This first piece began with breathing – the four players breathing through their instruments in contrasting rhythms. This was followed by a bird sound made through a clarinet mouthpiece only, and then all the players joined in. ‘Raven’ featured harmony; four clarinets in harmony, one being a bass clarinet, made a gorgeous sound.

The ‘Kaka’ began with a passage that interspersed vocal sound, breathing, and instrumental sounds. This time, the soprano clarinet was one of the instruments, and some delightfully unusual tones were emitted.

Iain Matheson is a Scotsman who studied with New Zealander Lyell Cresswell, in Edinburgh. His piece ‘And Another Thing’ was quirky, with bird-like sounds. There was great use of the various timbres the clarinet is capable of, but to my mind a little too much repetition.

We returned to Hunt’s ‘real’ birds, firstly ‘Flamingo’. This employed four ‘normal’ clarinets, one player making unusual sounds through his instrument rather than playing it in the usual fashion. These sounds were mysterious, rather like a marimba being played in the distance. ‘Toroa’ [albatross] featured breathing through the instruments once again, this time while two of the instruments, including the bass clarinet, playing conventionally, before all joined in. There were similarities with the ‘Raven’ piece heard earlier. The last in this group was ‘Piwkawaka’ [fantail]. The piece was appropriately flitty, with a jazzy rhythm.

The final piece in the first half was ‘Returnings’ by Evan Ware, an American composer influenced by John Adams, we were told. Apparently this composition was first created for Facebook – the medium becomes the message. It was certainly a minimalist work, but the sounds produced were enjoyable, including oscillations and high-pitched notes. The bass clarinettist conducted at several points – presumably when it was time to move on to the next section of music after reiterations of phrases.

After the interval, the first piece was ‘The stars like years’ by Wellington composer Philip Brownlee, who was present. The programme mentioned ‘an elongated sense of time and space’; certainly much of the music was reminiscent of the music used in space movies. The oscillations reminded me of ‘the music of the spheres’ which has inspired numbers of composers, based on the theories of the Greek philosophers up to and including Plato. Once or twice the instruments appeared not to be quite in tune with each other on unison notes – or was this deliberate? Certainly there were some very astringent discords. It is quite amazing what you can get out of a clarinet – not all of it easy on the ear. There was plenty of minimalist fabric in the piece, some of which was improvised ‘using sets of notated gestural materials’.

The programme returned to the last four of Natalie Hunt’s birds. ‘Swallow’ began with a solo that was evocative and attractive. The bass clarinet also had interesting and pleasing passages. The next bird was mythical: ‘Phoenix’. The phrase read ‘The rain washed you clean’ – was this from the ashes out of which the bird arose? This featured a solo also, and more oscillations (of which I was tiring by this time). Here, the bass clarinettist played an even smaller clarinet than Tui Clark’s soprano: sopranino?

The ‘Kahu’ (hawk) spoke in close harmony – and disharmony, while the last bird, ‘Kereru’ (pigeon) had a very active piece, with an authentic bird call, and fluffing sounds like the bird’s wings. This was a charming composition.

An Pan (To Pan) by Takács was in two movements: Pastorale and Bagpipes (Dudelsack). In this piece the four regular clarinets were used. Again there was oscillation, but also pastoral melodies, and shrieking discord on intervals of a second. The second movement carried the traits of the instrument described, being loud, even raucous.

It was an innovative concert, with a variety of new or nearly-new music performed with great skill and élan. The pieces by Natalie Hunt were particularly skilled, varied, descriptive, and thoroughly musical.

Overwhelmed by the splendour of it all – Latitude 37 in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STILE MODERNO – the genesis of the Baroque

Latitude 37

Julia Fredersdorff (baroque violin)

Laura Vaughan (viola da gamba/lirone)

Donald Nicolson (harpsichord)

Chamber Music New Zealand 2011

Ilott Theatre, Wellington

Monday 15th August 2011

Perhaps it was the fault of the snow that had been falling in Wellington for the first time in years – part of the extreme weather which had been causing all kinds of disruptions to musicians and their activities, with rehearsals having to be being cancelled and transport arrangements rethought. Even as Chamber Music CEO Euan Murdoch was introducing the concert (which was being broadcast nationally) the lights in the Ilott Theatre were flickering disconcertingly – of course the sounds of audience laughter had to be then explained to radio listeners, some of whom might have well been experiencing power surges and even failures of their own.

What about the snow, then, you may by now be thinking? Well, it must have transported a goodly proportion of my listening sensibilities to the state of “dreaming of a White Christmas”, because I simply couldn’t keep pace with the rapidity of change during the first half of Latitude 37’s richly-conceived and beautifully-played programme. I was following what I imagined was the order of listed items, and keeping up with things most satisfyingly (or so I thought) – when to my horror, after the three musicians had bowed and walked off the stage, up came the lights for the interval, leaving my expectations of more first-half music stranded somewhat at the Violin Sonata Seconda of Dario Castello, little more than halfway through the promised order!

When I looked around, nobody else in the audience seemed to be distressed or disconcerted or bewildered – everybody, it seemed, except for yours truly, was up with the play. Or were they? – I espied somebody I knew sitting a couple of rows away, somebody to whom I didn’t mind confessing a degree of appreciative ineptitude (I was hoping she wouldn’t spontaneously ejaculate the words, “Good heavens! – call yourself a critic?” or something similarly embarrassing). After furtively whispering my predicament to her, she reassured me by confessing that she, too, had gotten a bit lost with the order. I could have hugged her, but then that would have had to have been explained as well! – so I contented myself with a murmured “Well, thank goodness I’m not the only one….”

What the players had, in fact, done, was to run the endings and beginnings of different works so closely together as to make it difficult for the uninitiated ear to distinguish them from one another. As practically none of the music was familiar to me (though I thought I “knew” the baroque style sufficiently to be able to make distinctions between movements and, indeed, different works) I had gotten myself horribly lost, left behind in an ensnarement of lavishly-decorated and stunningly realized cornucopia of baroque splendor. I had taken notes on what I thought were individual works along the way, but upon reading them, realized that I had myself “run the movements together” and ascribed different strains of the music to the wrong works – and so on.

Why am I confessing up to this? Why would I want my incompetence as a listener, moreover, a self-appointed ANALYTICAL listener revealed to the world? Do I have some “hidden agenda” in mind, such as a kind of “did he fall or was he pushed” early retirement from “Middle C”? I must confess , it was, in retrospect, a delight of a concert from beginning to end, my confusion as to its exact provenance at any given time mattering not a whit to the spontaneous and incidental pleasure the musicians were generating around and about my receptive, if undiscriminating ears. Did I HAVE to know exactly where we were at any given point in order to appreciate the music’s and the performances’ qualities?

Sir Thomas Beecham was quoted once as saying that “The English may not like music, but they simply LOVE the noise it makes”.  After the experience of “losing my way” in both halves of this splendid-sounding concert of Baroque music, I’ve come to the conclusion that mine could well be a very Beechamesque appreciation of the same. Still, I figured that the experience of being “humbled” in a music appreciation sense, and confessing to it all in public is ultimately a valuable one for a critic. Apart from the “keeping me in my proper place”  process, it’s demonstrated at first hand to me what many people possibly feel when confronted with unfamiliar music at concerts in general. However much some concertgoers may “love” the sounds, they may simply not have the time for anything more than a cursory listen to music outside the live concert experience, so that the sounds do seem to run together for them, in a pleasing, but relatively undifferentiated way.

Enough of this self-flagellation – (my continuing in this vein might persuade some readers that I’m actually ENJOYING the experience!). So, what can I impart, in a critical sense, of what I heard in the Ilott Theatre that evening? This was one of two programs being toured by Latitude 37, as far as I was concerned, for me the more obscure of the two, as I knew not a single note of any of the composers’ music. The “other” concert featured music by Buxtehyde, Biber, JS Bach – to mention only one letter of the alphabet – and Pachelbel (yes, the Canon, but accompanied by its Gigue!), so Wellington was favored with the more esoteric-sounding program. Still, as I’d heard the group previously in concert, and knew just how inspiring and involving their music-making could be, I expected that, well-known or otherwise, the works featured would exert their own unique magic – and thus it proved.

On paper, what would one make of Canzon a due by somebody called Bartolome de Selma y Salverde, whose music began the concert? Apparently the composer’s only work ever published, it possessed an attractive initial melancholy before quickening in pulse, demonstrating plenty of flexibility and impulsive volatility (well, with a name like his, the composer was obviously a Spaniard). The players talked about the music – Laura Vaughan, who alternated between her viola da gamba and a smaller, more exotic-looking multi-stringed instrument called a sirone, talked about composers “freeing music from Renaissance polyphony, and expressing more individual emotion” as well as emphasizing the aspect of performer improvisation. This was a theme further developed by harpsichordist Donald Nicolson, who spoke about the phenomenon of much of the music we were to hear not actually having been written down – his own playing had a number of instances of seemingly-spontaneous impulses of melismatic energy, which invariably set the textures of the music fizzing and crackling. Violinist Julia Fredersdorff talked about the interchangeability of much Baroque music, citing Dario Castello’s Quarta Sonata a Due, Soprano e Trombon over Violetta as a work that was here transcribed for violin and bass viol, the different instruments bringing their own qualities to bear on the written (and improvised) notes.

Throughout the concert I was much taken by the music’s extraordinary freedom of expression within the prescribed boundaries of performance. The players were able to explore what seemed like vast potentialities of elaboration, but as individuals in dialogue with one another, not merely reproducing aimless, elaboration-for-its-own-sake activity. I could occasionally feel points of saturation being explored, which led me to imagine how such a style of playing and composing, if carried to extremes, could actually collapse under its own weight of elaboration – which, of course, was what happened to the Baroque style, eventually pushing succeeding composers in new, rather less over-laden directions.

I was perhaps more successful in “keeping up” with the item changes in this half of the concert, though finding that, towards the end, I couldn’t vouch for surety as to which item we’d reached (completing my humiliation). I like to think it was my survival instinct rather than a prurient streak in my makeup which, towards the end of the concert, quickened my interest in the music of one Tarquinio Merula, whose brief program bio-sketch had him “dismissed for indecency” from a position he held in Bergamo. His Ciaccona sounded anything but indecent, instead graceful and dance-like, featuring viola and violin playing in the same register to an interesting coloristic effect, the manoeuvres demonstrating great teamwork and beautifully-shared inflections of the music’s lines (mind you, I could have been describing either Claudio Merulo’s Toccata Terza or Maurizio Cazzati’s Balletto Quarto – but I hoped not).

Far more importantly than any self-consciously scholarly summation of the concert’s fine detail I might have pursued, I felt by the concert’s end as if I had been completely immersed in a whole era’s bevy of musical sounds and achieved a greater understanding of and love for the generous-cum-self-indulgent excesses of the baroque composer. No better advocates of a highly distinctive and inescapably grand period of music-making would I have wished for than Latitude 37, that evening.

Unfortunate programme change does ensemble no favours

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

Mozart: Piano quartet in G minor, K.478
Rachmaninov: Andante from cello sonata
Handel – Halvorsen: Passacaglia in G minor
Antony Verner: The hill where the wind dances
Dvořàk: Piano quartet in E flat

MELER ensemble: Josef Špaček (violin), Andrew Tyson (piano), Amanda Verner (viola), Aleisha Verner (cello)

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Thursday, 11 August 2011

There was much to delight in Chamber Music Hutt Valley’s last 2011 concert. Unfortunately, there were matters to be less pleased about, also.

The programme was changed without notice; the audience was told of the changed items just before they were played. If there were extenuating circumstances, we were not informed of them. I’m sure most of the audience were as displeased as I was not to hear the Turina piano quartet that was advertised. I was particularly disappointed not to be able to hear the Schumann piano quartet Op.47 played; I am particularly fond of it, and was looking forward to a rare opportunity to hear it live.

Coming on top of a radical change to the advertised programme this group was to play for the Wellington Chamber Music Society on 21 August (originally to have been with a different pianist), this seemed unprofessional.

The second problem affected the Mozart work particularly, but also others. The floor of the stage is varnished and quite highly polished, making the tone from the piano often far too percussive. The players didn’t adjust their sound to the small venue, and I found the piano really hard on the ears sometimes. This problem can occur at the Adam Concert Room and St. Andrew’s on The Terrace, too. In those two venues some performers (the more perceptive ones, in my view!) use a large cloth directly under the piano. Perhaps the problem could have been lessened in this bright, dry acoustic by having the piano lid lower.

The familiar Mozart quartet suffered from the piano being too dominant, meaning the ensemble frequently did not jell; the strings were too submissive to the piano. One could hear too much of the mechanics of the piano. Andrew Tyson could play quietly; when he did, the ensemble was fine, barring a few deviations in intonation from the strings in the first movement But the loud was too loud, even in the andante movement. Here, Josef Špaček had more opportunity to shine than in the first movement, and the ensemble was better.

This performance did not seize me with the beauty of Mozart’s music.

Rachmaninov’s andante proved to be very romantic, especially for the cello. Again the piano was clattery, detracting from the beauty of the music and from Aleisha Verner’s performance of it.

This was followed by Halvorsen’s Passacaglia on a theme from Handel’s Harpsichord Suite in G minor, HWV 432, for violin and viola duo. The work develops into a virtuoso effort for both instruments, incorporating double-stopping, spiccato, sul ponticello, and other techniques. Despite its brilliance, it does not lose the subject theme, and is always expressive. There was a strong, warm sound from the viola; in this acoustic, the violin sometimes sounded squeaky in the upper register. The accord between the two players was excellent (they played standing, which seemed to give them greater freedom), and strong chords in harmony towards the end were most striking. This was very fine playing from both performers. Of course, there were no programme notes for these two pieces, nor for the last item on the programme. The excellent notes on Turina and Schumann were wasted.

It was intriguing to have a piece from the brother of the two New Zealanders in the quartet (Antony Verner). Based on the experience of Wellington weather, as outlined in the elegant programme note by the composer, the piece was mainly gentle (now, don’t express surprise!). It opened with the strings describing the wind, then the piano joined in with raindrops. The string parts were quite adventurous, the piano less so. There were no piano chords, so is was neither percussive nor too loud. Tyson played with great delicacy. Although the notes described a “clima[c]tic point where you feel the wind buffeting all around you, before it dies away slowly moving back to the still calm after a storm”, the storm was very mild compared with some literal storms we have experienced recently. It was a very pleasing piece of music, superbly played.

The Dvořàk piano quartet was not a work I was familiar with. The mellow sound from the strings was again, from time to time, overcome by ear-shattering sounds from the piano. The second movement featured a beautiful cello solo with piano while the other instruments played pizzicato. When the other strings began their bowed passage, cello and piano played pianissimo. This was followed by an exciting fast passage, before the solo cello sequence returned. Here, there was great delicacy on the piano.

This was followed in turn by a very rhythmic passage of some complexity, with the piano playing forte again, before it all subsided at the end of the movement.

The third movement opened with a waltz-like dance, including some interesting passages with the instruments interspersing. The use of other than diatonic scales recalled the Czech folk music which the composer often incorporated in his compositions. Then the waltz was decorated on the piano, with pizzicato accompaniment from the strings. The dance changed to a jolly, rustic one, then returned to the original theme, with variations.

The finale was a fast and furious jig, incorporating much interplay between instruments, and some delightful piano passages. There was much variety, and some superb violin playing. A change to a minor key gave way to the bold, sparkling ending – again overwhelmed by the piano.

It is great to hear such young people as these playing at a high level of excellence. In another venue they will doubtless be heard to better advantage, and their true skill and excellence should reveal themselves fully.

A better attendance would have gratified both the players and Chamber Music Hutt Valley. The Melers play again on Sunday, 14 August in the Memorial Hall, Waikanae at 2.30pm, and in the Ilott Theatre in Wellington on Sunday, 21 August at 3pm.


NZSM woodwind students at diverting lunchtime concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Pieces by Poulenc, Enescu, Weber, A Marcello, Louis Ganne, Sutermeister, Hindemith, David Ernest and Demersseman

Players: Arielle Couraud, Jeewon Um, Hannah Sellars, Vanessa Adams, Monique Vossen, Patrick Hayes, Ashleigh Mowbray, Andreea Junc, Katherine Maciaszec; accompanied by Kirsten Simpson (piano)

St Andrews on the Terrace

Wednesday 10 August, 12.15pm

Recitals by woodwind players, and even more perhaps by brass players, draw on a range of music that is not very familiar to the run of ordinary classical music followers. For some that may be a disincentive. For lots of others, myself included, it’s very interesting and satisfying, for the music often offers a chance to hear composers who are no more than names out of dictionaries of music or music histories.

This concert featured mainly first and second year woodwind students from the New Zealand School of Music and was a part of the assessment process for their course requirements.

My impression overall was of a group of very talented students who had already reached a surprisingly good level of skill and of interpretive insight into the styles of music they were tackling.

There had been a mishap in the transmission of the programme details and so the audience were offered the bonus diversion of testing their recognition skills as to the music they were hearing; for although the players were encouraged to introduce themselves and their music, most were not loud or clear enough.

I was a minute late arriving and so missed Arielle Couraud’s introduction to her own arrangement for soprano saxophone of an Élégie by Poulenc – presumably the one originally for horn. It worked admirably on the saxophone and her playing of the member of the sax family that is closest in sound to the older woodwind instruments such as clarinet, was lyrical and fluent.

The identity of the Cantabile et Presto by Enescu had quite eluded me, I confess, as I do not have a very clear aural impression of Enescu’s varied music; flutist Jeewon Um’s playing of it was quite romantic and warm, and a contrasting piano part of arpeggios and quick-witted modulations increased its interest.

Next was the clarinet’s turn: Romanze from Weber’s second Clarinet Concerto played by Hannah Sellars. Weber’s instrumental writing can be chameleon-like and I discovered that I did not know this piece though it was clearly enough from the early years of the 19th century. Hannah played it as it would have been loved by audiences of the 1810s, her tone carefully controlled yet happily romantic in its freedom of movement.

Alessandro Marcello was one of two notable Venetian brothers (the other, Benedetto), composers, contemporaries of Vivaldi, Caldara and Albinoni; Vanessa Adams began, not displaying a great deal of animation in the Allegro from the Oboe Concerto in D minor, but it took on greater interest and variety of articulation as her confidence increased.

Another flute piece followed, played by Monique Vossen. It was an Andante and Scherzo by a once well-known French composer of operettas, Louis Ganne; though a contemporary of Debussy, the music showed little affinity with his somewhat better known colleague. Nevertheless, this was a charming, melodious piece which the flutist played with a lively sense of enjoyment.

Patrick Hayes played a Capriccio for solo clarinet by Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister who lived through almost the entire 20th century. Patrick was one of the few who had worked out how to project his own voice as well as he did his instrument; he told us the piece was written in 1946, and he played it with a true soloist’s confidence, with perceptive dynamic contrasts – his pianissimo was impressive, as was a later brassy outburst.

Andreea Junc played the Sehr Langsam movement from Hindemith’s Flute Sonata; not only was it slow: in her hands it was languid and particularly attractive with none of its composer’s usual astringency.

Hindemith’s French near-contemporary, was Francis Poulenc, and he too wrote excellently for woodwind instruments. The Allegro Tristemente from his Clarinet Sonata is a characterful movement which Athene Laws played very confidently, capturing Poulenc’s very individual, enigmatic, extrovert style with considerable skill and feeling.

Another oboist, Ashleigh Mowbray, played a Sonatine by one David J Ernest whose name I cannot trace in the usual sources. The piece had a certain modal quality; Ashleigh began a little hesitantly but as the music got faster her playing gained in fluency, showing good control of the instrument.

The last piece was a Fantaisie for alto saxophone by Jules Demersseman who lived in the mid 19th century, born within a year or so of Saint-Saëns but he died young. He was primarily a flutist but, according to saxophonist Katherine Maciaszec, was one of the first composers to write for the saxophone – Adolphe Saxe had invented the instrument about 1840. It was a melodic piece, suggesting the spirit of French comic opera of the period – Auber, Adam, Halévy, Delibes…; well written for the instrument, avoiding any suggestion of self-importance, but rather a comic vein in a cadenza-like series of arpeggios, and later in the distinctly Waldteufel style of waltz, ending in an opéra-comique sort of cabaletta. Maciaszec was thoroughly on top of its technical challenges and musical style.

The versatile and always supportive accompanist throughout was Kirsten Simpson.

Delightful violin sonatas end Mulled Wine series at Paekakariki

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mulled Wine Concerts
Violin and piano: Sonatas by Lilburn (in B minor played by Donald Armstrong and Mary Gow); Beethoven (in F, Op 24 ‘Spring’) and Fauré (in A, Op 13), both played by Donald Armstrong and Sarah Watkins

Paekakariki Memorial Hall

Sunday 7 August, 2.30pm

The last concert in this delightful beach-side concert series saw the unusual phenomenon of impresario turning pianist: Mary Gow. She had contributed as pianist to these concerts before but I had not heard them, and this audience was reminded again of her as a very fine pianist, playing Douglas Lilburn’s 1950 violin sonata with NZSO associate concert master Donald Armstrong.

The day was calm and sunny as we drove to Paekakariki, though the sea, at high water, was very rough. The concert began with sun pouring into the hall through the west windows, Kapiti Island floating out there. About an hour later eyes were drawn to the windows as they rattled and the sky suddenly darkened, and soon the sound of rain joined the sounds of violin and piano like brushes on a side drum.

Lilburn actually wrote three violin sonatas. In February 1943, he wrote one in E flat and later in the year, as a result of his association with Maurice Clare, who had been conductor of the Broadcasting Service String Orchestra, he composed another, in C, which was performed in December that year.

This was actually the second airing in two months of the third sonata, in B minor; it was played by Martin Riseley and Jian Liu at a St Andrew’s concert on 10 June marking the tenth anniversary of Lilburn’s death.

It was written in 1950, after Lilburn had become a lecturer at Victoria University College, for Frederick Page (pianist and head of the music department) and violinist Ruth Pearl; they premiered it at the university and then played it again three months later in Wigmore Hall in London.

This confident and resolute performance by Donald Armstrong and Mary Gow, alongside two famous and well-loved sonatas, revealed a mature work that seemed to have absorbed the character of European music of the time, tonal though with momentary dissident splashes. Cast in one movement, though with five distinct sections, it strikes me as interestingly different from the Lilburn who strives for an indigenous sound, or the one that remained too derivative of the English pastoral school. It is by no means avant-garde, nor is its lyrical character conservative; it is clearly a creation of the mid-century, comparable with the works of many other composers who stood aside from Darmstadt dogma. It is an impressive, vigorous, tightly argued work that should have become one of the leading chamber pieces of the New Zealand repertoire.

Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata was invested with similar energy, now with the piano part played by Sarah Watkins, pianist in the NZ Trio.  Its rising and accelerating phrases suggested a fast-emerging spring, blooming luxuriantly, as the sounds of the sea increased in sympathy with the performance. The two players made a highly attractive team, which could have suggested they’d been playing together for many years.

Fauré’s first violin sonata is one of his most lovely pieces, from the same vintage as the comparable, first piano quartet. It’s often compared to, and is almost as opulently romantic as, Franck’s violin sonata. It must be a joy for two good friends to play as the themes and motifs are tossed back and forth; the Andante, where the rhythm set up by pairs of quavers in four-beat time, seems to invite easy intimacy during a peaceful stroll. Then there’s the sparkling scherzo movement, Allegro vivo, in which both players’ dexterity, and especially Watkins’s, and ability to keep together was tested to the limit and not found wanting.

The biographical note reminded the audience of Armstrong’s role as director of the New Zealand (later the NZSO) Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1988 but, regrettably, disbanded few years ago: it was often recorded and the occasional broadcast of their recordings of 18th century works always strike me with their liveliness and polish. His talent for open, warm-hearted playing was very conspicuous in all three of the sonatas.

That is not to suggest that his was the dominant role, for Watkins playing is just as marked by its robustness and readiness to take the lead whenever it is called for.

The concert, and the series, ended with Mary Gow’s offering of one of Lilburn’s piano preludes which was followed by Armstrong and Watkins playing a quirky arrangement of the famous 1948 pop song, written by Ken Avery, Paekakariki (in the land of the tiki).

The audience at this concert was a little smaller than I’d expected. A pity, for it’s a long wait till the next season of concerts begins, which was outlined on the back of the programme. They start with the usual jazz concert in January and the five confirmed classical concerts start in March.

Two former schools chamber music contest winners return in international roles

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Chamber Music New Zealand

Alwyn Westbrooke: “?”, or: Why Gryphons Shouldn’t Dance
Ravel: Trio in A minor
Schubert: Piano Trio no.2 in E flat, Op.100, D929

Saguaro Trio (John Chen, piano, Luanne Homzy, violin, Peter Myers, cello)

Wellington Town Hall

Wednesday, 3 August 2011, 7.30pm

It cannot be too often that two young people who both played in the Schools Chamber Music Contest in the same year appear on the same top-flight CMNZ tour merely ten years later, one as pianist and the other as composer.

Yet that was the case in this CMNZ programme in Wellington, part of a tour of ten centres in New Zealand, to be followed by a five-city tour in Australia. In the local tour, the Saguaro Trio will perform in both the Taranaki and the Christchurch Music Festivals (good on Christchurch for going ahead with their Festival!)

The Trio has had great success since it formed in 2007, the very next year winning competitions in Japan, and in the USA, where all three were then based, and an important competition in Hamburg, where all three now live, in 2009. (The photograph in the CMNZ subscription brochure for this year shows a different cellist.)

In the Hamburg contest, eight different trios were required to be played – a very demanding programme. On this tour, six different works are being performed.

The work by Alwyn Westbrooke, who was a student at Burnside High School in Christchurch when he had success as both composer and performer in the Contest, and uniquely won both the performance first prize (as a violinist with his quartet) and the composition prize, was a commission by CMNZ. Its composer heard it for the first time at the beginning of this tour, in Invercargill.

His work opened the programme. It came over as an experiment in sounds, but with coherence. The word ‘beauty’ does not come to mind, however. Various unusual techniques were applied to the string instruments. I thought ‘There must be some plucking of the piano strings soon’, and sure enough! It seems to be obligatory these days. There was extraordinary playing from all three performers, but especially from John Chen. However, I did not find the work engaging.

The Ravel trio has a very gentle, vague opening, evoking thoughts of ‘Where are we? What key are we in?’ It received strong yet subtle playing. The delicious reverie, particularly in the piano part, summons idyllic thoughts and images. This movement calls on Basque folk dance, and evokes a mysterious atmosphere. As the programme note put it “…a wistful movement… dominated by rhythmic fluctuations and hypnotically shifting harmonies.”

The second movement was quite lively and exotic, yet enchanting. Then came the more contemplative Passacaille third. It was played with fluidity, fluency and finesse. It even became solemn, with use of the lower register of the piano. The final movement gradually livened up – but this is predominantly a mellow, graceful work.

These performers demonstrated first-class balance and blend. Their ensemble was near-perfect in timing, intonation, dynamics, expression and interpretation. Only a couple of times towards the end of the final work did I hear a couple of rum notes.

In the Ravel work the strings tend to work as a pair. The Canadian violinist was a semi-finalist in the Michael Hill Violin Competition in New Zealand last year; both she and the American cellist had thorough techniques and grasp of the music, but both were undemonstrative performers. The deft, accomplished playing of the whole trio made it clear why they had won in Hamburg – and why there was no second place-getter to rival their achievement.

However, the pianist has probably the greater say in the Ravel trio, and John Chen’s playing had assurance yet sensitivity.

Like all of Schubert’s major works the Trio in E flat is quite long – and quite delightful. It is full of fertile melodies and lovely harmonies. Its mood is happy, sombre and exultant by turns.

Listening to the Saguaro Trio, one would think that they had been playing this music together for years, and it reminded me of hearing the great Beaux Arts Trio play it in Wellington years ago; it left a permanent impression. (Menahem Pressler, the pianist in that group, was chair of the judging panel at the Hamburg competition that the Saguaro Trio won.)

A fiery, passionate, yet at times romantic allegro opens the work. ‘…Schubert managed to achieve balance between the instruments, never allowing the piano part to dominate’ as the writer of the programme note said; the performers achieved this equality.

The andante second movement opens with a sombre cello them which is then taken up by the piano; here and elsewhere in the movement the pianissimos were gorgeous. The vigorous scherzo is partnered by a chorale-like trio, of much heavier mood and expression, then the cheerful, extravert finale arrives, thoughtful as well as animated. It returns to the melody of the second movement, played lyrically with rich, sonorous tone by Peter Myers.

The Saguaro Trio is a consummate ensemble; a combination of superb musicians in complete accord. I will be most surprised if they don’t hit the ‘big time’ quite soon.

There was a reasonably good house, but I thought there would be more people come to hear well-known New Zealander John Chen play, and to experience the interesting programme. It was pleasing to see a considerable proportion of young people attending; appropriate, since the players themselves are all young.

New Zealand Trio in beautiful Upper Hutt recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Brahms: Piano Trio No 2 in C, Op 87; Chris Adams: Jekyl Rat; Kenji Bunch: Swing
Shift; Schubert: Piano Trio No 1 in B flat, D 898

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

Expressions Arts Centre, Upper Hutt

Thursday 28 July, 8pm

I have been sorry to miss the first two concerts in this year’s Classical Expressions series at Upper Hutt’s so agreeable arts centre.

Unfortunately, neither of my colleagues had been able to get to them either.

For the record the earlier concerts were by the Amici Ensemble, which comprises leading players from the NZSO, who played, inter alia, clarinet quintets by Brahms and Anthony Ritchie; and the violin and piano of Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons, whose recital included Schubert’s Fantasie in C (D 934 presumably) and Strauss’s Violin Sonata.

It was a calm and cool (not cold) evening and I’d have expected a big turn-out on account of the trio’s programming of two of the most glorious piano trios, by Brahms and Schubert. But the auditorium was little more than half filled; though one has to recognize that these concerts are a little more expensive than comparable concerts elsewhere.

Brahms
That didn’t lead to performances of any less warmth and richness however. Helped very significantly by the luxurious tone of the piano, this was music, from the very opening unison chords, in the high Romantic tradition, revealing all the emotion and profundity of spirit that Brahms had at his command: the players sounded fully in sympathy and  captured all its opulence and grandeur.

What intrigues me about the slow movement is Brahms’s rhythmic ambiguity which, if not handled with an unerring instinct, can sound uncertain and irregular, but the trio unraveled it all while not losing sight of Brahms’s pleasure in posing little enigmas throughout the course of the several variations which comprise the Andante. Ambiguity is one of the essentials of a work of art.

I was often struck by the happy blending of tone and spirit by violin and cello, and Sarah Watkins’s piano playing was the very essence of the chamber music style, both supportive and illuminating.

Naturally, there is some falling-off of profundity in a scherzo movement, and though the players threw themselves vigorously into it, the music becomes a bit routine (but in a sense that is strictly relative only to Schubert’s finest compositions); the more soulful trio section of the Scherzo, between outer tremolando passages, was played with particular relish. A deep contemplative spirit is replaced in the Finale by something Brahms does well –a certain daemonic flippancy, alternating light and shade, the full-bodied and the ghostly.

Schubert
Schubert’s B flat trio ended the concert. In this, more than in the Brahms, I felt, the players, while never faltering in their ensemble, found ways to differentiate their parts that made you pay particular attention to them as individual players. Though it is a remarkably balanced group in terms of musical skill and interpretive faculty, I found my attention drawn very often to Ashley Brown’s cello (perhaps through being a cellist of the 5th class myself); for example in the slow, emotionally strong crescendo bowings in the Allegro.

Schubert’s slow movements are usually at the heart of his music, and the impression is easy to conjure up in the late works, in this case, suffering advancing illness, just a year before his death. it seemed to dramatise the lyrical, the emphatic, the meditative, the
despairing even, with special force.

Again in the Scherzo I sense a certain striving for jollity that, on an uncharitable day, might seem a bit false, and I felt the players did hint at a little of that in the playing. The middle Trio section was allowed to be more soulful.

Music as politics
In between these two masterpieces were two contemporary pieces that reflected places and people in a very particular way, a way which might have raised eyebrows in earlier periods when music was expected to be mainly abstract, translating stories or characters through means that were formally and primarily musical. There seems to be no widespread disapproval of ‘programme’ music these days, and a great deal of music is conspicuously inspired by and intended to evoke extra-musical ideas, images, narratives.

Chris Adams’s Jekyll Rat, in spite of Ashley Brown’s elaborate avoidance of naming the MP hidden in the score, was pretty transparent, especially in the second section, Sycophant’s Dance, a sort of Tango in which one could easily conjure the deputé in a TV show dropping his partner on the floor.

It’s curious that so few composers of the past have felt inspired to represent political issues in music; some opera composers did, certainly – Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner in particular – but how many chamber music composers did?. One gets no impression of the political views of Bach, Haydn, Mozart or Schumann…

Having remarked on the ‘programmatic’ nature of the piece, one must observe the clear
marks of a careful and imaginative musical structure, with rather recognizable musical signposts. It was in three parts: ‘Me ne frego’ – ‘I don’t give a damn’; ‘Sycophant’s Dance’; and ‘Insanity represented by Mustard Yellow’ (a remarkably clear clue). The wit lay in the musical invention, as much as in the non-musical aspect: in the scoring for the three instruments, during which I was often conscious of a smile on my face. It led the listener along unexpected paths, to surprising conjunctions of ideas, and it concluded in a diminuendo, disappearing in a puff of smoke or, if you like, up the subject’s hidden orifice.

For all its splendidly overt political message, I felt it also stood on its own feet as a quite extensive piece of music.

Night Flight in New York
The other contemporary piece was by Kenji Bunch, an Oregon-born composer, said in the notes to have emerged as one of America’s most prominent composers of his generation (he’s in his late 30s), but this puzzled me as I could find no website devoted to him and only very odd references to his music: none at all to Swing Shift, which turns out to be the name of a 1984 film, an American big band, an album by an Australian pop group, and so on. No mention of Bunch.

However, the players have supplied interesting background. Sarah sent me Bunch’s website (don’t be led to think Google or Wikipedia are exhaustive reference sources). He’s written a symphony, a great variety of music for large and small forces, been commissioned, inter alia, by the English Chamber Orchestra, St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, the Naumburg Foundation, and has been broadcast on the BBC and NHK, Japan.

The trio played one movement, Night Flight, the second of the six-movement suite, Swing Shift, comprising three lively and three calmer movements, by Kenji Bunch. Last year they played the sixth movement, Grooveboxes, at Paekakariki. This year the trio are playing movements from Swing Shift at their Auckland Museum concerts this year and Justine says they might play the entire suite some time. Both the movements played so far have been feisty, jazzy and strongly rhythmic. Night Flight is written in a reasonably conventional idiom, strong four-in-a-bar rhythms, with stretches of piano arpeggios and ostinato-like motifs.

The piece was personable, lively and colourful and suggests that the opinions recorded about Bunch are just.

I can imagine a performance of the whole work in a venue like a museum. It’s a pity that none of Wellington’s museums appear to be aware of the common world-wide practice of presenting good music. Sure there is music, but very little evidence of its selection by people with cultivated musical taste or knowledge of the all-important classical repertoire.

A chamber ensemble’s environment
The NZ Trio is among the most accomplished full-time professional chamber groups in New Zealand. While there is a large repertoire for piano trio, much of the 18th century is domestic or salon music, even that of Haydn and Mozart; almost all the relatively few great works are of the 19th century. Thus a piano trio is right to devote a lot of effort to exploring contemporary repertoire, and particularly to commission New Zealand music.

All these things the NZ Trio does splendidly, and it’s to be hoped that the unhappy political and economic environment will not affect the survival of the group. The fresh decision by Radio New Zealand Concert to cease paying fees (forced by frozen funding from New Zealand on Air) to concert promoters for broadcasting rights will have a serious impact on most chamber music groups. However, in the meantime, it will not stop the recording and broadcasting of concerts, though reductions in their numbers might be imposed in due course, as political ill-will towards state-funding of the arts is like a cancer.

Delightful lunchtime recital from violin and guitar

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Unfamiliar music for violin and guitar works charms

Music by Almer Imamovic, Anthony Ritchie, Ciprian Porumbescu, and Ian Krouse

Duo Tapas (Rupa Maitra – violin; Owen Moriarty – guitar)

Old Saint Paul’s, Mulgrave Street

Tuesday 26 July, 12.15pm

A concert like this usually offers a variety of surprises: there’s the unexpected delight from particularly charming pieces of music, and there were several such instances; the experience of an unusual instrumental combination and the way music originally for others has adapted so well; and the realization that the world has never been so overflowing with beautiful, rewarding music – most of it, naturally, to be broadly labeled as ‘classical’.

The uncovering of hundreds of gifted composers of earlier times, who have come to be overshadowed by a handful of geniuses with names like Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, has given classical music a very different look over the past half century, with the realization that many of them sometimes produced better music than the ‘great’ ones did, on their off-days.

And in our age, there are so many talented composers in every country that no one could even claim familiarity with the names of many of the best of them.

Almer Imamovic is a good example: a guitarist and composer from Bosnia whom Owen Moriarty came to know when both were studying in Wales.

The pieces by Imamovic were originally written for flute and guitar, but the violin seemed the perfectly natural voice for the melodic lines. The Song for Marcus opened in up-beat style, bearing more sign of Turkish origin than of the Balkans, though of course most of the region was part of the Ottoman Empire for many centuries and there is a sizable Muslim minority in Bosnia. Based on two related tunes in the energetic opening section, then passing to a calmer middle section, the two instruments were in perfect balance and made one oblivious to the quite other character of the timbered gothic church where we sat.

Their final offerings were Theme for Caroline and Tapkalica, clearly from a similar source, the first a charming, simple melody which evolved very interestingly to subtly syncopated rhythms. In the second, the guitar began alone, with rhapsodic cadenzas which came to be a fine show-piece for the lovely musicality of violinist and the fleet-fingered guitarist.

The only piece from a dead composer, who came from the same part of the world, was that of Cyprian Porumbescu (from Romania: 1853-83). His Balada was filled with a Balkan nostalgia, exquisitely soulful but in music that found an equally captivating way to express quiet passion.

Ian Krouse is a Californian composer for guitar and other instruments (Wikipedia reveals an opera on Garcia Lorca); evidently eclectic, as his Air had an Irish tang in the lie of its melody; this too had its origin for flute and guitar and was more than comfortable in this perfectly idiomatic and charming account for violin and guitar.

Pieces by Anthony Ritchie occupied the rest of the programme. There are five parts to his Pas de deux, Op 51a, originally scored for two guitars; they chose Au revoir, evidently inspired by the end of a relationship which it described in lamenting but not lugubrious terms, using quite simple means to create an elegiac spirit; again, like the Balada, with a degree of suppressed passion.

It was not always easy to hear the remarks by the performers and I’m not sure whether it was pointed out that the Three Songs were a transcription of Ritchie’s Op 118 (Three pieces for viola and guitar). The title as given in the programme does not appear in his list of works.

Never mind.

Ritchie is one of those happy composers with sufficient self-confidence to allow tunes to appear in their music on a regular basis, and Au revoir and the Three Songs for Violin and Guitar (‘Song – Stone woman: a sculpture in Ilam Road, Christchurch’; ‘Tomahawk Sonnet’ and ‘Lovesong’) were so blessed. I had awaited a touch of Maori ferocity in the Tomahawk piece, but was later told it was the name of Ocean Grove, a suburb of Dunedin on the south coast of the Peninsula. It suggested a peaceful day. And the same went for Lovesong in which Ritchie seemed to be showing evidence of a heart repaired from the grief of Au revoir.

I’d heard none of this music before and the whole recital proved a delight, thanks to composers who knew their business and players who absolutely knew theirs.