Tag: chamber music

The phenomenon of Beethoven – celebrated here by Wellington Chamber Music with Te Kōkī Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:

BEETHOVEN – Sonata for Violin and Piano in C minor Op.30 No. 2
Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano in A Op.69
Three Duets for Violin and ‘Cello WoO 27
Piano Trio in E-flat Major Op.70 No.2

Te Kōkī Trio – Martin Riseley (violin) / Inbal Megiddo (‘cello) / Jian Liu (piano)

St.Andrew’s -on-The-Terrace

Sunday, 9th August 2020

It’s a bit of a truism to say that Beethoven and his music represent a kind of apex of enduring creative expression for modern-day humankind; and while such pronouncements can be literally questioned in terms of world-wide demographics and cultural bias, they still carry weight in a kind of “perceived-by-many” fashion – it would be difficult to think of another composer whose music has penetrated such widespread spheres of human awareness, however deep or superficial. Certainly, there’s a ready and ongoing perception of Beethoven’s “everyman” quality, which, aided and abetted by popular legend regarding many aspects of his life with all of its struggles, and setbacks, has resulted in widespread “identification” with what’s regarded as his essential character, one of wholehearted and unquenchable energy and purpose, and emergence from it all as a figure of the utmost inspiration. His music triumphantly supports  this “wholeness”, its many-faceted characters having, it seems, something to say to all peoples engaged in the business of simply being human.

At this point I could exclaim “Goodness! – I don’t know what came over me!” – or even whisper as an aside, “Sorry! – that just slipped out!”, having stepped down from my self-proclaimed orator’s dais and realised what pompous utterances I’d just finished making. But the concert I attended on Sunday at St.Andrew’s of Beethoven’s music was so very replete with human personality and engagement I could straightaway concur with those words that I had read in the afternoon’s printed programme by none other than Igor Stravinsky (expressed much more simply and effectively than my high-flown observations!) – and felt “inspired” on re-reading them at this point, unaccountably enough to add my above two cents’ worth!

One of the intentions of the musicians in presenting this concert was to, as per programme, “demonstrate many facets of Beethoven’s craft”, which aim they succeeded brilliantly in doing. Most democratically the items chosen featured three appearances by each of the afternoon’s performers, and even included a work I wasn’t familiar with – the first of Three Duets for Violin and ‘Cello, WoO 27, a work whose actual authorship is still being contested in some circles, but whose energy, wit and grace certainly resulted in some “Beethoven-like” sounds! I thought the “creative contrast at the outset between Martin Riseley’s violin’s bright, silvery tones and Inbal Megiddo’s  ‘cello’s warmer, richer resonances created a fascinating kind of process throughout these three movements of the sounds from both players gradually “connecting” – whether that process of frequency-sharing was unique to my peculiar “listening sensibility” I’m not certain, but by the time the pair had plunged into the opening piece’s “second episode” I felt their different sounds had begun to resonate more surely together – and the dovetailing of detail was certainly exciting!

The work’s Larghetto second movement featured a dialogue between violin (so very graceful) and ‘cello (sonorous and romantic) which together developed into a kind of “communion” in the quieter exchanges, again demonstrating  a kind of “opposites attract” concourse of sensibilities from both players – but in no time at all, the sounds had energised into the Rondo-finale, the ‘cello breaking off from the lively opening exchanges to sing an “out-of-doors” theme with the violin continuing to dance in attendance, with some minor-key wistfulness along the way creating some distinctly Beethovenish moments, a forthright unison episode notably among them!

Having jumped precipitately into a description of the music that began the concert’s second half, I feel I owe it to the reader to introduce a semblance of order and backtrack to the first half’s beginning, which featured Martin Riseley and pianist Jian Liu in one of Beethoven’s characteristically up-front C Minor works, the Op.30 No, 2 Violin Sonata. How directly this music speaks! – the terse opening piano figure descending into darkness, the violin’s reply intensified by keyboard agitations, and a brief confrontation between the two instruments suddenly transforming into playfulness! – as Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote in a poem about the flight of a kestrel, “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing…” – meaning that here, exposition and development are made to the composer’s own specifications, the “playfulness” evident in the music, for example, drawing on darker, more serious elements which extended the emotional capacities of the sounds beyond where we might have expected. Riseley and Liu generate terrific tension in places, their sharply-honed teamwork focusing on the music’s volatility of invention in a way that left us disconcertingly breathless after only the first movement!

The piano’s troubadour-like song which began the slow movement was here echoed almost privately by the violin, the players musing their way through the melody’s second half, the instruments then taking turns to “augment’ their partner’s reprises of the theme, the violin contributing decorative birdsong counterpoints, to which the piano replied with swirling counterpoints above and below the music’s surface. A couple of disruptive outbursts apart, the music enchanted in this performance, Liu’s gossamer fingerwork the perfect foil for Riseley’s silvery tones. The Scherzo galvanised these realms of poetic utterance into places of action, playfully at first, but with sudden intent to sting, the piano in response effecting to try and  “swot’ the offending violin! – again such surety of contrast on the composer’s part! Without being too pronounced a contrast, the Trio’s rumbustion was delightfully enabled, Liu’s nimble reflexes and Riseley’s silvery lines carrying the day.

The finale’s brief but characterful repeated opening crescendo here made me think of a train bursting out of a tunnel and into the open, the biting accents having their moment before exchanging  grimaces for grins as the players launched into the dancing measures that followed, even though the minor key sequences furrowed the brows once again. With the train’s every re-emergence came a different mood, a sunny rondo whose performance brought smiles to listeners’ faces, a darker, more purposeful venture into the light in search of a resting-place, and, finally, a wistful remembrance of times past, until a burst of no-holds-barred energy seized both performers and their instruments and drove the music home!

It was then Inbal Megiddo’s ‘cello’s turn to take us on a different creative strand’s exploration, in the composer’s Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano No. 3 in A Major – here, the exposition began lyrically instead of tersely, the ‘cello singing its opening phrase, and the piano replying as would a sweetheart, with equally fond sentiments, and a show of gallantry, before each “exchanged” blandishments with comparable gestures. After some shared minor-key complainings, Mediggo’s ‘cello began the first of those wondrous ascending phrases that seemed to lift our sensibilities to a higher plane of feeling, Liu’s piano following suit before joining in with the ‘cello in a heartwarming affirmation of shared purpose. The turn towards the darker regions of the development brought out, by turns, plaintive and passionate playing, Beethoven presenting us with impulsive, but organically-flowing contrasts of light and energy,  Megiddo and Liu then beautifully returning us from the depths of one of these exchanges us to the recapitulation’s reaffirming light. A jumpy scherzo, filled with syncopation, followed – Liu’s piano was away first, vaulting over hedges and other obstacles, the ‘cello drawing level in time for both to board the contrasting Trio’s droll roundabout, each instrument lending a hand to the music’s droning momentums and self-satisfied ditties.

A punchy “tutti” and a mysterious, sotto voce conclusion to this brought us to the final movement, one containing an Andante Cantabile introduction – what a melody! – and here, made into such a beautiful moment by these musicians! –  Megiddo’s ‘cello so lovingly preparing the way for the piano’s delightful energisings, Liu’s nimble-fingered tattoo of repeated notes buoying the ‘cello’s lyrical pronouncements along and giving rise to exhilarating exchanges, major key effervescence alternating with darker insinuations – again one marvelled at the music’s sheer articulateness of interchange, generating such momentums while maintaining a play of light and dark, strength and lyricism in the ebb and flow of it all.

Following the aforementioned Duos it was “all on stage” for the concert’s finale, The Op.70 No.2 Piano Trio in E-flat Major, a work somewhat in the shadow of its “Ghost” companion, but nevertheless having a definite character of its own. The programme-note writer particularly mentioned Schubert in connection with this work, a kinship which particularly resonated for me in the piano writing throughout the Minuet and Trio, but which was evident in the freedom of the work’s treatment of contrasting moods. At the work’s beginning, Megiddo’s cello led the way into exquisitely-shaped portals of melody, the outpourings unexpectedly galvanised by a sudden irruption of energy which served notice that anything could happen during the work’s course! The players brought out the Allegro ma non tanto’s attractive swaying motion, making the rhythm’s sweep central to the argument, fitting the motifs (including the dreamy second subject) into the music’s rounded corners with grace and ease, but also with plenty of forthright energy as those same motifs in other places jostled for position – I would have thought Brahms’s sturdy treatment of his themes in his chamber music owed something to this work as well.

The courtly grace of the second movement’s opening proved deceptive as the music served up variation after differently-characterised variation, hugely enjoyed by the players, and ranging from impish scamperings to vigorous Cossack like stampings! Eventually, the music’s inventive energies dissipating as quickly and po-facedly at the end as surely as the final forthright payoff suddenly slammed the last word home! The third movement’s gentle lyricism maintained the work’s varied character, Beethoven (somewhat surprisingly on first hearing) opting for a kind of old-world grace as a contrast to what had gone before, instead of giving us one of his physically trenchant scherzi – but in view of the finale’s unbridled exuberance and the players’ astonishing “give-it-all-you’ve-got”, response to the writing, things couldn’t have gotten much more involved or exciting as here! Those incredibly “orchestral” upward rushes repeatedly essayed by the piano crackled with firework-like energy in Jian Liu’s hands, inspiring his companions to generate their own versions of brilliant, coruscated response, leaving us at the work’s end both exhilarated and exhausted, though at the very end we greedily implored them for more, and were rewarded for our acclamations by a repeat of the graceful Minuet and Trio – a judicious “return to our lives” epilogue to an exhilarating concert experience !

Violin and piano recital in a new concert hall makes life worth living again

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music New Zealand

Amalia Hall (violin) and Stephen de Pledge (piano)

Beethoven: Violin Sonata No 5 in F, Op 24 “Spring”
Gao Ping: Bitter Cold Night
Gershwin (arr.Heifetz): Three Preludes
Mozart: Violin Sonata No 19 in E flat, K 302
Saint-Saëns: Violin Sonata No 1 in D minor, op 75

Public Trust Hall, Corner Lambton Quay and Stout Street

Thursday 6 August, 7:30 pm

The first concert, post-Covid-19 lock-down from Chamber Music New Zealand was held in a new auditorium which was opened in September last year: in the former Public Trust Office headquarters. The hall, presumably the former public area, with ceiling decoration that survived in banks half a century ago; a well-proportioned, elegant space. It seats 300 people, about the same size as the Ilott Theatre in the old Wellington Town Hall (and what, exactly, is planned for the Town Hall?).*

The concert attracted a full house. It was the second to last in a 12-concert tour of the country.

The Spring Sonata
I was sitting in the front row, rather too close for a balanced impression of both the players and the acoustic of the space. It began with Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, and at once the acoustic had the effect of amplifying the piano to the disadvantage of the violin’s voice, particularly in the opening Allegro. My seat, to the left of the players, with the violinist’s back towards me, didn’t help. The result was that subtleties of both instruments were somewhat diminished, while a bit too much of the ‘mechanics’ of hammers and bows on strings was audible.

Nevertheless, the happy rapport between the two players and their feeling for the music were clear enough. Balance between them seemed more normal in the lovely second movement, Adagio molto espressivo; and the brief Scherzo too, with sparkling staccato playing from both, handled the spatial conditions well.

Gao Ping and George Gershwin
Bitter Cold Night, the piece by Gao Ping, who lectured for some years at Canterbury University, had its genesis with the pandemic. Gao composed this bleak piece in memory of the Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, who broke his government’s silence about the Corona virus, was punished and he subsequently died of it. There was a brief, sunnier episode led by the violin, discreetly supported by the piano, but then came a burst of anger. It spoke clearly and movingly, as music can often do, better than other arts; let’s hope that Gao Ping will not be treated as was Li Wenliang.

I hadn’t come across Jascha Heifetz’s arrangement for violin and piano of Gershwin’s three Preludes for piano. Not only were they so successfully modified, but they were played with a delightful naturalness, with almost more sophistication and musicality than the plain piano versions, as if that had been the way Gershwin had conceived them.

Mozart
The second half comprised two more sonatas: Mozart’s No 19, in E flat. I don’t suppose it’s too embarrassing to confess that I couldn’t recall hearing this before: just two movements: Allegro and Andante grazioso, as De Pledge told us, along with remarks about Mozart’s relationship with the Elector Palatine’s court and the musicians, based in Mannheim through the middle of the 18th century. (His interest flowed partly from the Elector’s excellent orchestra, particularly its clarinets, and his unrequited love for Aloysia Weber – the fall-back position was her sister Constanze whom he did later marry).

I might remark that the programme, A4 size, had a striking cover, a message from the chief executive of CMNZ, another from Anne Rodda, the executive director of the Michael Hill Violin Competition, large photos and brief biographical notes about the two performers, and the back page filled with logos of the sponsors; but no information about the music.

The music gives more equal attention to both instruments than was normal at the time. It’s a charming piece, especially the second movement; and I enjoyed it better since a friend, seeing where I was sitting, had offered to exchange seats so I might enjoy a better balanced experience, in the fourth row. I was grateful, for the balance and coherence were distinctly better, in particular exposing properly Amalia’s warm, lyrical playing.

Saint-Saëns
The final work was Saint-Saëns’s first violin sonata, of 1885 when the composer was 50: I suspect it’s probably unfamiliar, but I knew it from a performance that had stuck in my heard thirty years ago. The Japanese violinist, Midori had played it in a recital at the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts in 1990 or 1992. The last movement is a splendid, endless bravura experience of demi-semi quavers, and Midori’s playing had, naturally, remained in my head over the years, when I may have heard it no more than a couple of times on Concert FM.

I suppose the sonata’s unfamiliarity is a result of the common tendency to denigrate Saint-Saëns as conservative and unadventurous; not a view I share. Happily, many of us have long felt that such intellectual pretentions are not a sensible way to pass one’s life. There’s an infectious melody in the first movement, and it presaged the warm, melodic character of the entire piece. It moves without a break into the second movement, Adagio, which they played thoughtfully, with touches of whimsy. The third movement, an Allegretto moderato, Scherzo in triple time which fades and then suddenly bursts into the moto-perpetuo kind of Finale. Perhaps it looks more difficult than it actually is but it served as a splendid conclusion. I hope it has had a joyous effect on the hundreds of audience members in the eleven towns where it’s been heard so far.

So it proved a splendid way to help restore a sort of normality to the fortunate few who go to chamber music concerts. The music and its performance by these two genial and highly musical players, as well as the feel of the new venue that has been transformed so effectively into a concert hall, must have done something to make life worth living again.

*The Public Trust Office dates from 1908, designed by the then Government Architect, John Campbell, who designed many state buildings such as the General Post Office in Wellington (sensibly! replaced by the Intercontinental Hotel on Featherston Street), and the Central Post Office in Auckland which survives at the bottom of Queen Street, and the House of Parliament, which disappointed the architect when the south wing, a mirror image of the existing building was never built.

The Wellington Architecture Centre describes the building as “possibly the most architecturally elaborate façade in the capital – if not the entire country, and is without doubt … Government Architect John Campbell’s finest work outside of his design for Parliament House.”

After the Seddon Earthquake in 2013 the Public Trust building was sold to Maurice Clark whose firm McKee Fehl and architects Warren & Mahoney carried out its strengthening and renovation. It is a Category 1 Historic Building.

Mr Clark spoke at the Interval, noting that the hall’s use for classical music was free – a stark contrast to the cost of venues owned by the city council which are widely known to be the dearest in the country: as you’d expect from a city that boasts of being ‘the cultural capital’.  

Two less familiar cello masterpieces from Lavinnia Rae and Gabriela Glapska at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

Lavinnia Rae (cello) and Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Beethoven: Cello Sonata No 5 in D, Op 102 No 2
Britten: Cello Sonata in C, Op 65 (movements 1, 3, 4, 5)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Thursday 30 July, 12:15 pm

Although this recital offered a good opportunity to hear two significant cello sonatas, not often played, the audience at St Andrew’s was a lot smaller than it had been for New Zealand School of Music vocal students the day before. Two lunchtime concerts a week might seem excessive; no doubt it’s an effort to meet the expectations of players whose concerts were scheduled in the months of silence: it’s a shame if audiences don’t respond to these free concerts by being as generous with their time as the musicians themselves are.

The players
Gabriela Glapska has been heard recently with the Ghost Trio at St Andrew’s and later at the Adam Concert Room at Victoria University. She’s also been involved in recent months in concerts by the SMP Ensemble and Stroma, as well as other ensembles and in an accompanying role. She was prominent in the performances of Poulenc’s La voix humaine in the Festival in February.

Lavinnia Rae has not been so conspicuous in the last year or so as she’s been a post-graduate student at the Royal College of Music in London. But her name appears in many of Middle C’s reviews in earlier years.

Both musicians played in the NZSM orchestra accompanying Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen in 2017.

Beethoven Cello Sonata in D
Though the Op 69 cello sonata (No 3) seems to be more often played, neither the early pair, Op 5, nor the two of Op 102, written in Beethoven’s last decade, are to be denigrated. The last of Beethoven’s five cello sonatas is the only one of the five in the conventional three-movement shape; three others have only two movements while Op 69 has three which are somewhat unusual in character. The Op 102 sonatas probably need to be heard as foreshadowing the piano sonatas and string quartets of his Late period.

Its opening is straight away marked by the vivid contrast between Glapska’s arresting piano and Rae’s quiet, legato cello playing, and it continues to draw attention to the essential differences between the percussive piano and the quiet, more lyrical cello, though now and again, the two merge; there’s no doubt that Beethoven intended it to be heard like this.

The second movement might have been some kind of reminiscence of the Ghost movement of the piano trio carrying that name. There was a mysterious character in the duo’s playing, and they adhered to Beethoven’s clear intention to use this movement to emphasise a musical affinity between piano and cello, in contrast to the first movement. The third movement again challenges the conventions with a densely created fugue that, with only a brief, unexpected, calm respite, resumes its relentless passage. These were indeed the characteristics of this performance that left one with a strong understanding of the composer’s intentions and genius.

Britten’s Cello Sonata
I have to confess to not being a total devotee of Britten, apart from a hand-full of what I guess are his more popular works. Much of his cello sonata however, is moving, and though I didn’t warm to most of it at my first hearing some years ago, more hearings have given me a distinctly greater appreciation. Perhaps it’s unfortunate that the skill and musicality of performers are rather important in inducing real enjoyment. My familiarity with the Britten/Rostropovich account has set the bar very high, bringing it to life with remarkable conviction, creating the feeling that it is indeed a masterpiece.

It’s in five movements, though the second was left out, the spikey, Scherzo-pizzicato.

This performance opened, Dialogo Allegro, imaginatively, with a sense of inevitability, evolving as a dialogue, such as would have come naturally from the warm friendship between composer and its dedicatee and first performer.

I enjoyed the next movement – the second, Elegia: the calm, secretive, impatience of its opening; with its enigmatic piano chords generating a melancholy, lugubrious spirit, as the cello meanders over its lower strings. The notes accurately described that fourth movement, the extravert Marcia energico: its menacing spirit generated by uncanny, fast harmonics.

The extended, scampering Finale sounds fiendishly difficult for both players. The notes defined the bowing technique, bouncing the bow on the strings in the Finale, as ‘saltando’. As a youthful cellist myself, I was embarrassed not to have known, or remembered, that name.

There were moments when I felt the composer was rather obsessively concerned to provide dedicatee Rostropovvich with a strikingly challenging work that he would turn into great, arresting music through his sheer performance and interpretive genius. I mean no criticism in observing that it’s hardly possible to expect lesser musicians successfully to uncover and give life to everything in this big five-movement work.

As so often with these lunchtime concerts, here were two minor (probably better than that) masterpieces that don’t get much played, and we must be grateful that so many professional – or near professional – musicians are ready to play without fees at St Andrew’s, and that Wellington has an amateur (read ‘unpaid’) entrepreneur, Marjan van Waardenberg, with the persuasive powers necessary to recruit them, to schedule and publicise their performances, as well as a central-city church happy to accommodate them.

 

Koru Trio – giving the St.Andrews’s audience its koha’s worth and more……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Koru Trio at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio No.5 in D Major Op.70 No. 1 “Ghost”
ZEMLINSKY – Piano Trio in D Minor Op, 3

The Koru Trio – Anne Loeser (violin) / Sally Isaac (‘cello) / Rachel Thomson (piano)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series, Wellington

Wednesday, 29th July, 2020

One of the largest lunchtime concert audiences I’ve seen at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace enthusiastically responded to two splendid performances by the Koru Trio, a group known to me up to now by reputation only – a quick check of the Middle C review archive confirmed that so far I’d not had the good fortune to review a single concert by the ensemble. I must record here that, long before the interval I was already bemoaning the opportunities I’d missed out on over the years, the Trio having been formed as long ago as 2011! In fact, to my astonishment and pleasure,  the concert replicated the excitement and interest of another I’d recently attended at the same venue, and had subsequently reviewed – that by the newly-formed Ghost Trio, coupling, as here, one of Beethoven’s masterly works in this genre with a lesser-known one by a different composer. On that earlier occasion it was the miraculous Op.1 Piano Trio of Andrzej Panufnik, while here, the Koru Trio after THEIR Beethoven performance gave us the no less remarkable, youthfully-conceived Op.3 Piano Trio of Alexander Von Zemlinsky.

First came the Beethoven Trio, Op.70 No.1, known popularly as the “Ghost”, a nickname attributed by most accounts to the composer’s former pupil Carl Czerny associating in later years the second movement’s evocative writing with the ghost of Hamlet’s father – interestingly enough, Beethoven was toying at the time of writing this trio with the idea of an opera about Macbeth, which accounts for the forgivable slip of association in the Koru’s otherwise excellent programme notes, which had Beethoven’s music recalling Hamlet’s encounter with his father “in Shakespeare’s Macbeth”! The work begins completely differently, of course with an exciting, energetic unison, here instantly grabbing the listeners’ attention with strong, focused playing, which continued throughout the lyrical response to the opening “helter-skelter”. The development began with “another way of doing the opening”, whimsical exchanges leading to major key exhortions and wonderful roller-coaster ride figurations, and left me relishing the thought of the composer’s chortling with exuberant glee at the “plunge” back into the recapitulated opening figure! As much as I loved the energy of the playing I was as much taken with the delicacy and feathery quality the players found in some of the writing, even if from where I was sitting the St.Andrew’s acoustic seemed to favour the piano at the strings’ expense.

Vibrato-less tones from the strings added to the slow movement’s “spooky” effect, the lines suitably eerie and suspenseful, punctuated by sudden bursts of tone and spidery keyboard descents and tremolandos – I thought pianist Rachel Thomson’s beautifully-sustained trilling and tremolandi helped create an almost Musorgsky-like atmosphere in places, with Anne Loeser’s and Sally Isaac’s string playing suitably spectral in attendance. The group marshalled the tensions to great effect – in places the tones were more “lament-like” than ghostly, with the two crescendi almost unnerving in their lack of inhibition. I thought that, as the movement’s end approached, the instrumental sounds in places became “as from the earth”, the music a mere conduit through which mysterious impulses were giving tongue.

A measure of relief was afforded by the first strains of the finale – a kind of “glad we’re out of there” feeling which burgeoned into exuberance in places, every player contributing to the buzz of activity, and sharing the bouts of momentary bemusement at the lines occasionally spinning upwards and disappearing in Houdini-like fashion, only to reappear as if descending by parachute! It made for a thoroughly invigorating entertainment, bristling with good humour and well-being, just the stuff needed! – a lovely performance!

Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Piano Trio made up the rest of the concert, the work exerting no less a fascination on an audience by this time in thrall to the blandishments of the music-making. The work’s Schumannesque opening – darkly passionate, as if its composer was “wrestling with ghosts” – alternated with contrasting sequences, a wistful longing which transforms into a feeling for the German woods with characteristic horn-calls evoking the romance of darkness and mystery. We heard long-breathed lines whose harmonies modulated in and out of the shadows in fine Romantic style, the influence of Brahms, who encouraged the younger composer, readily apparent (Brahms, incidentally, insisted that his own publisher print Zemlinsky’s work). A grand romantic summation ended the first movement, brought off here with great style and panache!

A warm, richly upholstered piano solo (in places bringing to my mind Janacek’s piano writing) began the slow movement, before violin and ‘cello joined in, and so initiated a most passionately-voiced threesome, bristling with impulsive sequences (amid which I caught an echo of Dvorak’s ‘Cello Concerto!) and reaching a kind of fever-pitch before subsiding, exhausted, into gentleness and rapture. By contrast the finale was all skitterish urgency and al fresco energy to begin with, accompanied by redolent hunting sounds from the piano, which fought a rearguard action to keep the strings on the move – I enjoyed the lively interplay between the opposing camps, Zemlinsky’s writing never predictable, and, in fact, saving a brightly-gleaming frisson of surprise and delight for the very end – a work I enjoyed getting to know, and through which the Trio made a lot of fun in sharing with us so joyously!

 

 

Goldberg Variations from NZSO musicians with Stephen De Pledge – “a journey of life with its full gamut of emotions”

Posted on by Steven Sedley

J.S.Bach – Goldberg Variations

(arranged for ensemble by Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Heribert Breuer)

Vesa-Matti Leppänen Director/Violin
Stephen De Pledge Fortepiano

Members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Wednesday, 22nd July 2020

Bach’s Goldberg Variations is one of the greatest, if not the greatest set of variations in the keyboard repertoire. Count Kaiserling, Elector of Saxony, commissioned Bach to write it for his protege, the young keyboard player, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. The work consists of thirty variations on a theme, an Aria, that Bach might have heard or found in his wife’s, Anna Magdalena’s, notebook. Playing this great work in an arrangement for harp, strings and wind players was challenging and perhaps controversial programming. For the purist meddling with such an iconic work is sacrilege. Over the years, however, there were many arrangements of these variations, for the modern piano, very different from the two keyboard harpsichord that Bach wrote the piece for, and for different combinations of instruments. Vesa-Matti Leppȁnen used a selection of arrangements for strings by the Russian violinist, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, and for other instruments of the orchestra by the German conductor Heribert Breuer.

This entailed re-imagining the work, employing sounds, timbres, that were outside the scope of a keyboard instrument. Right from the beginning, the beautiful Aria played by flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon, harp and strings was a haunting introduction to an amazing musical journey. Following the Aria, the first variation was played by Stephen de Pledge on a forte-piano, bringing out the phrasing and dynamic possibilities of the fortepiano, a new instrument in Bach’s time and not much to Bach’s liking. After the next two variations, a solo harp (Carolyn Mills)  introduced an entirely different and unexpected bell like sound. Variation 4 was a light-hearted dance movement played by the winds. This was followed by a wind chorale, demonstrating what striking beautiful sounds a combination of four wind instruments can produce. Then strings played a Gigue, a foot stomping dance that was never far from Bach’s world. Fugal passages were played by various of combinations of instruments, but always keeping the joyful spirit in mind. A slow gentle richly decorated Sarabande was played as a violin solo with string accompaniment, which was followed by a quirky fast variation. The fifteenth variation, played by the winds, was a slow melancholy passage, a stark contrast to the previous one. Then all the musicians disappeared into the shadows at the back of the stage and harpist Carolyn Mills played a magical repetition of the the opening theme.

During a brief break Stephen de Pledge talked about the instrument he was playing, the fortepiano, and its development.

After the break the reiteration of the theme was followed by a grand French Overture played by winds and a selection of strings. In contrast, the next variation, a canon, was played on the fortepiano alone. Then all the strings came back and played a delightful dance-like variation. Following that, the next variation was played on fortepiano alone, giving Stephen de Pledge a chance to demonstrate the subtleties possible on the newly developed keyboard instrument. Then a sombre canon was played by winds and strings. A fugal passage by the whole ensemble was followed by a virtuosic variation on the fortepiano. A light-hearted canon for bassoon, clarinet and violin led to a beautiful dark Adagio, the emotional high point of the piece. This was contrasted by a virtuoso toccata on the fortepiano. Then came a bright interplay among the strings and a jolly resolution of what went on in the previous variations, played with gusto by the whole ensemble. Finally we arrived at the concluding piece, the Quodlibet, based on popular songs, probably sung by Bach and his brothers when they got together. To conclude the work the opening Aria returned with an emotionally charged rendition by violins and then the keyboard alone.

Throughout the performance the various musicians walked on and off the stage like ghosts, as they were needed. The MFC stage provided a theatrical setting with subtle blue lighting in the background setting the mood. At the end of the performance all the musicians retreated into the dark, leaving the fortepiano playing on his own, the lights were dimmed and the audience was left to reflect on a journey that was not a mere musical experience but a journey of life with its full gamut of emotions.

Performing this vast work in the large space of the Michael Fowler Centre presented problems. At times the strings, particularly the violins were overshadowed by the more penetrating sound of the winds, but this is a mere quibble. We should be grateful to the musicians, mostly principals of the NZSO, for their meticulous, inspired playing and particular to Vesa-Matti Leppȁnen for putting it all together from different sources.

To record the concert on https://live.nzso.co.nz/concerts/, available on YouTube, so that people could enjoy it in their living rooms from Kaitaia to the Bluff, is a wonderful initiative of the NZSO. It is exactly what a publicly funded organization like the NZSO should do.

Ghost Trio haunts sensibilities long after final notes in concert sounded

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A remarkable lunchtime concert by the Ghost Trio at the Adam Concert Room….

Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello), Gabriela Glapska (piano)

BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio In C Minor Op. 1 No.3
MARTIN LODGE – Summer Music (2001)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio in C Minor No.1  Op.8

Adam Concert Room, Te Kōkī NZ School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington

Friday, 17th July 2020

I had heard the Ghost Trio perform the same Beethoven work more than a fortnight previously (a concert reviewed below by my colleague, Steven Sedley), though this time round it was coupled to a different programme. Instead of the remarkable Piano Trio Op.1 by Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik (which I would have liked to hear again), the musicians chose to branch out in a different direction,  with each of the accompanying works expressing what I thought was a certain affinity with Beethoven’s music. We heard Kiwi composer Martin Lodge’s engaging “Summer Music”, whose effect was a kind of miniature out-of-doors, “Pastoral Symphony-like” sound-adventure, interlacing both natural and human noises. This was followed with a Piano Trio written by the then sixteen year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, a work whose Beethovenian “charge” of emotion alarmed the young composer’s professors at the Petrograd Conservatory as profoundly as was Josef Haydn disturbed by the boldness of his most famous pupil’s Op.1 C Minor Piano Trio.

As with the St.Andrew’s performance, the players drew their listeners into the composer’s world of dark and serious purpose from the very opening phrases, the sequences generating a disturbing quality throughout the instrumental interactions which never relinquished its grip. Sitting closer to the players in the Adam Concert Room this time round I felt involved all the more in the constant flow and ebb of  intensities, the explosive nature of the music’s dramatic contrasts, and the disconcerting upward\downward semitone shifts of the opening theme in places. Though the gloom was occasionally leavened by a contrasting, if briefly-wrought lyrical theme, any sunnier prospect was quickly clouded over again in no uncertain terms, the first-movement repeat emphasising the thrall in which we were held – and the development was similarly charged with tensions, light and darkness unceasingly pushing and shoving one another to one side – it was quite a ride!

The theme-and variations second movement promised some relief from Beethovenian brow-beating, and the players responded at the opening with some nobly-wrought sounds – perhaps it was partly due to the music’s playfulness but I found myself listening as much to the playing’s solo lines as to the concerted effect of the music-making throughout, the dialogues and “trialogues” as involving as the ensembled sounds – I relished the playful pizzicati of the third variation, the soulful cello solo of the fourth, and the sparkling chromatic keyboard runs of the fifth (all beautifully executed and characterfully dovetailed), to mention but a few ear-catching features.

As much scherzo as minuet, the third movement fused a certain wistful quality with playfulness, the piano’s frequent decorative figurations making a marked contrast with the occasional emphasised accent – again, the musicians gave the music’s angularities full scope to proclaim the work’s character, while allowing a fantastic element (those strangely-echoed resonances which suggested in places hidden voices directing the ebb and flow of things) some treasurable moments of sleight-of-hand, even magic.  As for the prestissimo finale, the players found more character than mere “virtuoso roar” with which to give voice to the music’s agitations, their nimble articulations (the pianist especially fleet-fingered!) creating wonderment and delicious anticipation as well as excitement, with the composer reserving the biggest surprise for the hushed, somewhat “spooked” coda, the musicians voicing the mystery and unease of it all to perfection at the end.

I hadn’t heard Martin Lodge’s “Summer Music” for some time but thought its appeal as instantly-involving as ever, with “hit the ground running” energies at the outset leading the listener into a world of vividly-wrought happenings. Both music and performance came across as remarkably organic, with swirling piano figurations and swinging thematic lines eventually giving way to sequences of stillness, the world stopping to listen to itself and inviting us to eavesdrop. Out of these breath-catching pointillistic etchings returned those same songs, a yearning for the natural world amid “humanity’s mad inhuman noise”, perhaps? – all very “Scene by the Brook”-like in its rediscovered innocence –  and leading into and through various undercurrents of pulse  to a beautiful and wistful blending of action, nature and memory at the end. The performance here caught me up in its vivid response to the music’s “story” and its accompanying array of alternating bustle and beauty.

So to the Shostakovich Trio, an equally remarkable evocation of the sixteen year-old composer’s thrall to a young woman, Tatyana Glivenko, whom he had met on holiday in 1923 in the Crimea (he was actually convalescing from tuberculosis at the time) – the music grew partly out of material he’d written for other works he had since abandoned, a Piano Sonata and a Quintet. Though nothing serious developed from the encounter with Tatyana, Shostakovich kept in touch with her by correspondence for many years. Two years after completing the Trio, the youthful composer performed the work as part of his application to continue his musical studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and was actually accepted, though his continuing ill health in the end forced him to remain at the Conservatory in Petrograd.

This single-movement work owed much of its bold, almost cinematic character to the composer’s part-time job as a cinema pianist playing the accompaniment for silent films. Shostakovich’s sister Zoya remembered that her brother and two of his friends actually used the cinema accompaniment as a rehearsal for the Piano Trio on one occasion, remarking that “the people whistled and booed!” But Shostakovich’s music from an early age seemed to revel in these characteristics, a family friend, the novelist Konstantin Fedin recalling hearing the boy playing his own compositions to guests at the family home – “….unexpected works which forced one to listen as if one were in the theatre, where everything is so clear that one must either laugh or weep.” Despite, or perhaps because of this ready accessibility, the Trio wasn’t published during Shostakovich’s lifetime, and had to be reconstructed from various sources, the missing last twenty or so bars of the piano part in fact “recomposed” by his pupil Boris Tishchenko.

Again, this was a remarkably involving performance, the players at full stretch in the more virtuoso, densely-woven ensemble passages, but “owning” their full-blooded expressionist character as great-heartedly as they did the more lyrical and unashamedly romantic passages, the whole almost Mahlerian in its all-embracing fervour. To comment on this or that individually-wrought passage seems of less importance than marvelling at the concerted “sweep’ of the music’s realisation by the ensemble – long may the Ghost Trio’s efforts continue to thrillingly haunt their audience’s sensibilities thus!

Wellington Chamber Music attracts full house for its first post-Covid appearance at Sunday concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Music

Vesa and Friends: horns and strings
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Andrew Thomson (violin and viola), Andrew Joyce (cello), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Samuel Jacobs and Ian Wildsmith (French horn)

Beethoven: String Trio in E-flat, Op 3
Mozart; Horn Quintet in E-flat K 407
Beethoven: Sextet in E-flat major Op 81b

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 12 July, 3 pm

The first in Wellington Chamber Music’s 2020 concert series attracted a near full house (though without the gallery open), for a programme that looked very attractive. Though, in the event, neither of the two Beethoven works would have been familiar to most.

How appropriate that the group’s first post-lock-down concert should be music by two of the world’s very greatest composers.

Throughout his earlier years Beethoven wrote several ‘miscellaneous’ chamber works. Some are familiar because they are so engaging, such as the Octet Op 103, reworked as a string quintet; and the Quintet for piano and winds; Op 16 probably inspired by Mozart’s Quintet K 452, for those instruments; and a Septet in E flat, Op 20 for strings and winds, which probably inspired Schubert’s Octet. Not forgetting the delightful Sextet, Op 71 is for winds alone. I used to have a cassette tape with some of these on it which was much played on car journeys years ago, alternating with Mozart’s Posthorn and the Haffner serenades; two young sons rarely complained.

Beethoven’s first string trio 
But neither of the Beethoven pieces this afternoon was quite as familiar or were in the class of Mozart’s wonderful Divertimento, K 563, which had been published the year Beethoven before wrote his Op 3. One knows the charming Serenade for string trio Op 8 and perhaps the three trios of Op 9, but I was surprised to realise I didn’t know Op 3.

Viola and cello seemed to lead the way at the beginning and indeed throughout the first movement, their weight seemed to dominate, which may have been produced mainly by Andrew Joyce’s particularly rich and warm instrument. It was not a matter of balance, but rather the fact that Beethoven provided music in which equality between the three was unusually conspicuous. The Andante was similarly democratically distributed among the three players; and again the rather low-lying, delicate, triple-time music created an unusually serious feeling. The Trio is in six movements, like the Mozart Divertimento, with two minuets separated by an Adagio. There’s a feeling of unusual uniformity of spirit in the work, even as the movements change tempo, sometimes key, and whether it’s a Menuetto or a gently paced Adagio.

Mozart’s horn quintet, K 407, was one of several remarkable pieces that he wrote for long-standing family friend, horn player Joseph Leutgeb. Instead of the conventional string quartet (plus Samuel Jacobs’ horn), the second violin is replaced by a second viola (Andrew Thomson), which naturally tended to subdue some exuberance. But the horn flourished in the church acoustic, perhaps rather too much at times, though that’s the result of our ears having been seduced by the engineered sound during the recording process: the normal imbalance is suppressed. The Andante, middle movement, was seductive, while the last, Allegro, revealed the nature of the challenges the Mozart threw at his friend (as he also did with the four horn concertos), such that even on a horn equipped with valves, and played by a superb executant, one could be rather filled with wonder – and delight.

Beethoven Sextet Op 81b 
Beethoven’s Sextet for string quartet and two horns (Jacobs of the NZSO and Orchestra Wellington principal horn, Shadley van Wyk), is also a somewhat less familiar work; it’s again in the key of E flat (a favourite for horn players). The sounds produced by the pair of horns was so enchanting in itself that their tendency to outpace the strings was hardly noticeable, and it was certainly a nice partnership. The pair of horns dominated the quietly lyrical slow movement too and again they demonstrated how a beautifully composed horn duet can rather capture the attention, though the in-between remarks by the strings seemed perfectly appropriate and they remained true to themselves.

So by the end, one could reflect that neither Mozart nor Beethoven had failed to recognise that way winds, and especially horns could enhance the delight that’s already plentiful with a plain string quartet.

Wellington Chamber Music can be well satisfied with their break-out from lock-down, both musically and with a numerous audience; and many, particularly Samuel Jacobs, introducing the Sextet, exclaimed at the delight of being at a real, excellent chamber music concert again.

 

Ghost Trio makes an auspicious debut at St.Andrew’s with music by Beethoven and Panufnik

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Ghost Trio: Gabriela Glapska, piano, Monique Lapins, violin, Ken Ichinose, cello

Sir Andrzej Panufnik: Piano Trio Op.1

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op.1 No3

St. Andrews on the Terrace

Wednesday 1 July, 12.15 pm

 

This was a concert of music by two young composers living more than a century apart, still finding their musical language, but already foreshadowing the great works they were to produce later. Panufnik is hardly a household name. He was a prolific composer of 10 symphonies and other orchestral works, songs, chamber music and piano pieces. He was not yet twenty when he wrote the  Piano Trio in C minor as an ‘Exercise’. The piece opens with a dramatic piano solo with the violin and cello picking up motifs, elaborating and expanding them. The opening movement is an exercise in sonata form. The stormy beginning devolves into a beautiful lyrical passage. The second movement, Largo is a song with a tinge of sadness. The final movement, Presto is a Rondo, with a manic dance theme. To me the piece sounded like Debussy, rather the works of the young Panufnik’s great contemporary composers like Schoenberg, Hindemith or Prokofiev. This piece, like all of Panufnik’s music written before the war was lost during the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and Panufnik recreated it from memory in 1945, after the war and revised it again many years later. It is a very agreeable introduction to the music of one of the last century’s significant composers.

Beethoven’s three Piano Trios, Op. 1, were played at Count Lichnowsky’s palace probably in 1793. Beethoven was 23. He had learned from Haydn, had recently moved to Vienna, and these pieces were his calling card. Haydn considered the C minor Trio problematic, hard to understand, but the work gained popularity when published.  It heralded that here was a new, important musical voice, with powerful things to say about the turbulent world that Beethoven would later explore in works such as the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata or his Fifth Symphony. The first movement is built on a profound gorgeous melody developed in the interplay of the three instruments. The second movement, Andante Cantabile is an extended set of variations on a song-like melody that is at the heart of the piece. This is followed by a jolly Menuetto and Trio. The finale is a forceful Presto with a playful theme and a spectacular piano part that would have given Beethoven an opportunity to display his virtuosity.

This was an outstanding performance. The three musicians formed a cohesive ensemble. The pianist, Gabriela Glapska came from Poland to complete a PhD in performance at the NZ School of Music and now works there as an accompanist. She played with a natural ease and fluency, that she shared with the other two musicians. Monique Lapins  joined the NZ String Quartet last year. Her playing was notable for a beautiful tone and sensitivity. Ken Ichinose is the Associate Principal Cello of the NZ Symphony Orchestra and a very experienced chamber musician. He provided a secure clear and beautiful base line for the ensemble.

It was great to be back at the St, Andrews regular Wednesday lunch time concerts. These are such a feature of Wellington’s musical life. The audience was much larger than usual, perhaps because people were starved for live music, but almost certainly because they had anticipated an exceptionally fine concert.

Musical voyages to distant places – Jenny Wollerman with the New Zealand String Quartet

Posted on by Calvin Scott

Secrets of Sea and Space – a New Zealand Festival concert

Arnold Schönberg – String Quartet No. 2 (1908)
Alban Berg – Lyric Suite (1926)
Ross Harris – The Abiding Tides (2010)

The New Zealand String Quartet with soprano Jenny Wollerman

Saint Mary of the Angels, Boulcott Street, Wellington

Tuesday 10th March 2020

On Tuesday evening a very large congregation of music-followers assembled in the church of Saint Mary of the Angels to ascend into the stars and probe the depths of the sea. Saint Mary herself – in her capacity as Stella Maris (star of the sea) – seemed a well-suited hostess and patron for such an endeavour. Many young people were also present (noted here for the benefit of Radio New Zealand’s senior management). The concert, a highlight of the New Zealand Festival, offered us an opportunity to expand our listening horizons and engage with some rarely performed works that all combine, in some way, a vocal line with the established genre of the string quartet. The New Zealand String Quartet, together with soprano Jenny Wollerman, presented this concert with great energy, strength, and concentration, leading the listener through the intricate musical design of the works and contouring the musical gestures that make up their striking originality and expressiveness. The group’s approach to performance succeeded in drawing out the dark sonorities and sensuality of works that otherwise have a reputation for their cerebral rigour and association with prickly theoretical terms such as “dodecaphonic”, “atonal”, or “serialism”. Sometimes, however, in louder and intense passages, the performers’ efforts to make the music’s complex interwoven lines more transparent were compromised by the resonant acoustics of the church.

Arnold Schönberg’s ground-breaking second string quartet was first performed in Vienna in December 1908, provoking a riot that was even reported in New York newspapers as “an uproar such as no concert hall in the Austrian capital ever before had known”. The poems Litany (Litanei) and Rapture (Entrückung) that feature in the quartet’s third and fourth movements are taken from a cycle of poems by Stefan George who at the time was a distinctly contemporary voice in German poetry, thought of by his contemporaries as a kind of prophet and priest for whom poetry was a disciplined, performing art with a particular incantatory power. The quartet’s opening two instrumental movements were presented with great command and attention to detail, the players as a group clearly articulating Schönberg’s extended harmonic language, bold rhythmic gestures and making the most of the second movement’s reference to the old and sarcastic Viennese folksong “My dear Augustin, all is lost!” Jenny Wollerman then joined the quartet for the third and fourth movements. George’s poem Litany replicates the church liturgy consisting of a line of nine or ten syllables with a break between the fifth and the sixth (for example: Sacta Maria / ora pro nobis; Tief ist die Trauer / die mich umdüstert). The church setting for the concert contributed to the effect too: what better place to hear a litany than in a Catholic church! The climax of the movement occurs in the Litany’s last imploring phrase “ease me of passion!” (“nimm mir die Liebe!”) which is portrayed very strikingly in the music by a precipitously scary downward leap in the vocal part of over two octaves. Jenny Wollerman performed this leap with great athletic prowess. The ‘secrets of space’, from which the concert took its title, then became apparent as the fourth movement began with its very quiet, weightless rising figures in the violins that eerily adumbrate a new atmosphere. Lift off occurred gently with the entry of the soprano voice: “I sense the air of another planet”, she sings, announcing the quartet’s entry into an ‘extraterrestrial’ tonality-free soundscape. The visions of Stefan George’s poem Rapture correspond to the way the music liberates itself from the gravitational pull of any tonal centre. Jenny Wollerman sang George’s verses with marvellously ecstatic intensity: “I am dissolving into sound” (ich löse mich in tönen) she exclaimed, triggering a collective frisson in the audience. Perhaps in this moment, we were no longer concert-goers, but a grouping of devotees, converts, and disciples, sitting there mesmerised as she described her ascension, higher and higher into new ethereal  realms into which she was then completely and rapturously absorbed as “a spark of the holy fire” and as “a resonance of the holy voice.” After lifting poetry and music to new heights of “rapture”, Schönberg concludes the movement and the quartet (somewhat bizarrely) with a prosaic F-sharp major chord. Despite this offending major chord, the applause was, as to be expected, wild and as rapturous as ever.

Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite has been described as a “latent opera” in six acts, arranged in a fan-like formation that unfolds in a dramatic crescendo. Before playing the work, members of the quartet introduced the latent opera’s cast of characters and the general gist of its story (typical operatic themes of an impossible romance, unstilled longing, obsession, torment and despair). In the 1970s an American musicologist discovered a hidden vocal line in the composer’s draft of the work’s final movement – Largo desolato, finding it to be a setting of Stefan George’s German translation of Charles Baudelaire’s De profundis clamavi, the poet’s own dark version of Psalm 130. The six movements outline a psychographic curve of singularly powerful and contrasting emotional states. The New Zealand String Quartet masterfully showed how the Lyric Suite captures and expresses Berg’s intensification of moods in so many different ways: by the lasciviously descending harmonic progressions in the Andante amoroso for example; the grotesque scuffling in the Allegro misterioso; and the frenzied angular gestures of the Presto delirando. Jenny Wollerman joined the quartet for the Largo desolato to sing the secret libretto of the latent opera’s final act. Here the voice and the quartet convincingly conveyed the opera’s main protagonist’s (that is, the composer’s) sense of hopelessness, renunciation and desolation.

Ross Harris’s work The Abiding Tides is comprised of eight settings of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan mainly about ships sinking at sea. Although the work was introduced to the audience as relating specifically to the sinking of the RMS Titanic in the Northern Atlantic in 1912, the themes of sea voyage and shipwreck resonate very strongly much closer to home: 2,300 vessels have met their demise in New Zealand waters since the 1790s. Our forebears too all risked long voyages across vast oceans in canoes and sailing ships and burials at sea were frequent. O’Sullivan’s poems do not share the emphasis of Stefan George’s verses on form and metre, drawing more on qualities of prose poetry and the use of metaphors and imagery. The music is programmatic, following and reflecting the sentiments, images and (often very bleak) narratives of the poems. The quartet, with Jenny Wollerman at the helm, navigated the settings excellently, again capturing and conveying the mood of each. With the instrumental interludes between each setting the overall effect of the work was one of an extended rhapsody, floating, sinking, looking up at the moon and the sky (sometimes from beneath the water), watching the way light glitters on the ocean’s surface, or gazing at the ever present horizon. Harris covers a range of idioms in these settings from free canonic forms, waltz and Webernesque textures. It was very helpful as a listener to have the printed words: the acoustic of the church made it difficult at times to hear the sung words clearly. The work’s final text setting “Nox perpetua”, echoing Schönberg’s Litanei and Berg’s De profundis, was almost like a liturgical chant about the impenetrable darkness at the ocean floor.  It reminded me of the final images in Jane Campion’s celebrated 1993 New Zealand film The Piano where she cites the lines of Scottish poet Thomas Hood: “There is a silence where hath been no sound, / There is a silence where no sound may be, / In the cold grave – under the deep deep sea.”

The silence at the end was banished by continuous, loud and enthusiastic applause from an enraptured audience. On leaving the church, some audience members commented on the church’s bare wooden pews and how dreadfully uncomfortable they are. Uncomfortable pews are usually a specialist feature of Protestant churches, I thought, but even they often have upholstery nowadays: Beata Virgo Maria, audi verba mea.

Wanganui Music Society 75th Jubilee Concert includes Wellington guest musicians

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wanganui Music Society 75th Jubilee Concert

Vocal and instrumental music
Various Artists

The Concert Chamber, War Memorial Centre,
Queen’s Park, Watt St,. Whanganui

Sunday, 8th March 2020

Every now and then (and without warning) a “Middle C” reviewer will be overcome by a “questing s

pirit” which will result in the same reviewer popping up somewhere unexpected and writing about an event whose location, on the face of things, seems somewhat outside the parameters of the usual prescription for “Middle C’”s coverage – vis-à-vis, “concerts in the Greater Wellington region”. In this case mitigating circumstances brought a kind of “Capital connection” to a Whanganui occasion, and certainly one that, when I heard about the details beforehand, was (a) eager and (b) pleased to be able to take advantage of the chance to attend and enjoy!

This was the 75th Jubilee Concert given by the Wanganui Music Society in the city’s magnificent Concert Chamber, part of the superbly-appointed War Memorial Centre. The concert was one which brought together musicians who were either members of the Society or who had previously contributed to past programmes – so there was a real sense of appropriateness concerning the event’s overall essence and presentation of community performance and guest participation. And though my own connections with the city and its cultural activities were more tenuous,  I felt here a kind of “once-removed” kinship with the efforts of the Society and its artists, being a Palmerstonian by origin and in the past having taken part in similar events in that not-too-far-away sister-city.

To be honest, however, my presence at the concert was largely to do with a particular piece of music being performed that afternoon – Douglas Lilburn’s song-cycle, Sings Harry must be one of the most quintessential Kiwi artistic creations of singular expression ever made, bringing together, as it does, words and music formed out of the flesh and blood, sinews and bones of two this country’s most archetypal creative spirits, Lilburn himself and poet Denis Glover. The Sings Harry poems were the poet’s homespun observations about life made by a once-vigorous old man looking back on his experiences for better or for worse – and six of these poems were taken by the composer and set to music that seemed to many to fit the words like a second skin.

Glover, at first enthused by his friend Lilburn’s settings, gradually came to disapprove of them, at one low point famously and disparagingly characterising the music as “icing on my rock cakes!”. The work has survived all such vicissitudes, but still today doesn’t get performed as often as I, for one, would like to hear it. Which is where this concert came in, offering the chance to hear one of the piece’s most respected and widely-acknowledged exponents, Wellington baritone Roger Wilson, bring it all to life once more, rock-cake, icing and all, for the edification of those who attended this Jubilee event.

Another Wellington connection was afforded by a second singer, mezzo-soprano Linden Loader, who’s been in the past a familiar performer in the Capital’s busy round of concerts, if mostly, in my experience, as a member of a vocal ensemble rather than as soloist. Here, though, she took both roles, firstly as a soloist in two of Elgar’s adorable Sea Pictures and a folksong arrangement, My Lagen Love by Hamilton Harty, and then joining Roger Wilson for three vocal duets, one by Brahms and two by Mahler, the latter calling for some “characterful” expression which both singers appeared to relish to the utmost!

The only other performer whose name I knew, having seen and heard her play in Wellington as well, was flutist-cum-pianist Ingrid Culliford, whose prowess as a flutist I’d often seen demonstrated in concert, but not her pianistic skills, which made for a pleasant surprise – her partnership with ‘cellist Annie Hunt created a winning “ebb-and-flow” of emotion in Faure’s Elegy; and while not particularly “appassionato” the playing of Saint-Saens’s work Allegro appassionato by the pair had plenty of wry mischief – an affectionate performance! She also collaborated as a pianist with the excellent young flutist Gerard Burgstaller, in a movement from a Mozart Flute Concerto, and then as a flutist herself with soprano Winifred Livesay in beautifully-voiced and -phrased renderings of American composer Katherine Hoover’s evocative Seven Haiku.

Other performers brought to life what was in sum a varied and colourful amalgam of music, among them being pianist Kathryn Ennis, possibly the afternoon’s busiest performer! As well as partnering both Linden Loader in music by Elgar and Hamilton Harty, with Roger Wilson joining the pair for vocal duets by Brahms and Mahler, Ennis then later returned with Wilson for Lilburn’s Sings Harry, and, finally, closed the concert with two piano solos, pieces by Liszt and Khachaturian. I though her a sensitive and reliable player, very much enjoying her evocations with Loader of the differing oceanic characters in the Elgar Songs, singer and pianist rich and deep in their response to “Sea Slumber Song”, and creating a bard-like kind of exotic wonderment with “Where Corals Lie”. Harty’s My Lagen Love also teased out the best in singer and pianist, here a winning mix of lyricism and candid expression, with a nicely-moulded piano postscript.

Piano duettists Alison Safey and Alton Rogers brought flow and ear-catching variety of tone to their performance of the first movement of a Mozart Sonatina K.240, before further treating us to Matyas Seiber’s Three Short Dances, each one given an appropriate “character” (I liked the slow-motion Habanera-like aspect of the opening “Tango” a good deal!). Afterwards came violinist Jim Chesswas, most sensitively accompanied, I thought, by pianist Leonard Cave, the two recalling for me childhood memories of listening to Gracie Fields’ voice on the radio, with a strong, sweetly-voiced rendition of The Holy City, giving me a lot of unexpected pleasure!

Roger Wilson’s and Linden Loader’s “Duets” bracket both charmed (Brahms) and entertained (Mahler) us, the singers collaborating with pianist Kathryn Ennis in Brahms’s “Es rauschet das Wasser” to bring out moments of true magic in the lines’ interaction (ardent, steadfast tones from Loader, and tenderly-phrased responses from Wilson, the two voices blending beautifully towards the song’s end, with everything admirably echoed by Ennis’s resonant piano evocations). After this the Mahler duets were riotous fun, each singer a vivid foil for the other, the characterisations almost larger-than-life, but readily conveying the texts’ none-too-subtle directness.

Soprano Marie Brooks began the concert’s second half, her sweet, soubrettish-like tones well-suited to Faure’s Après Un Rêve, her line secure, somewhat tremulous of character, but well-focused – her pianist, Joanna Love, proved an admirable collaborator, whose sounds blended happily with the voice. Flutist Gerard Burgstaller then impressed with his control and command of line and breath in Mozart’s opening movement of K313, as did soprano Winifred Livesay in Katherine Hoover’s Seven Haiku, her partnership with Ingrid Culliford as mentioned above, distilling some memorable moments of loveliness.

Sings Harry was a focal point for me, of course, Roger Wilson here admirably characterising the work’s unique qualities in his brief spoken introduction, remarking on its essential “elusiveness” for the performer, and nicely characterising his “journey” of involvement with the work. Here I thought singer and pianist effectively evoked “Harry and guitar” at the outset, and caught the whimsicality of the character’s “sunset mind” which followed, in a suitably harlequinesque manner. Of course, Glover and Lilburn whirl us almost disconcertingly through such moments before setting us down in deserts/oases of aching reflection – firstly “Once the days”, and even more tellingly, after the whirlwind of “Come mint me up the golden gorse”, leaving us almost bereft in the following “Flowers of the Sea”, The latter sequence here palpably grew in poignant resignation with each utterance, leaving us at the end “broken open” and completely at the mercy of those ceaseless tides. I thought Wilson’s and Ennis’s presenting of both this and the concluding “I remember” totally “inside” the words and music, and felt somewhat “lump-in-the-throat” transfixed by the ending – Harry, with his guitar, was left as we had found him, but with so much understanding and intense wonderment by then imparted to us……

Kathryn Ennis concluded the concert with two piano solos, firstly Franz Liszt’s well-known Liebestraum No. 3 and then a work new to me, a Toccata by Aram Khachaturian. While I thought the Liszt technically well-managed I thought everything simply too reined-in as the piece gathered in intensity, the expression held back as if the player was fearful of provoking that often-voiced criticism of “vulgarity” made by detractors of the composer and his work, but which in committed hands can, of course, produce such an overwhelming effect! Better was the Khachaturian, presented like some kind of impressionistic “whirl” here, to great and memorable effect – happily, a fitting conclusion to the proceedings!