Tag: chamber music

An overview of Josef Haydn’s String Quartets

New Zealand String Quartet

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Tuesday 25th August, 2009

“Music begins where words leave off” as the old saying goes, suggesting that the two media are sometimes best left to their own devices, and that their combination needs to be handled with surety and skill. However, by using both spoken words and music (more easefully as the evening progressed) the New Zealand String Quartet managed in their presentation “Josef Haydn and the String Quartet” to bring the composer to life as the author of one of the most life-enhancing creative endeavours to grace the civilised world. Had there been any complete CD sets of the quartets for sale at the door afterwards, I would have compulsively bartered what resources I could have mustered, in order to leave with one, as a result of the NZSQ’s advocacy.

Haydn began composing String Quartets with his Op.1 set in the late 1750s, and for the best part of the next fifty years continued to produce an unsurpassed body of work in the genre. His efforts concluded with his final, unfinished quartet in 1803, intended to be the third of a set of six, but whose completion at that stage of his life was beyond his powers. The quartet members patiently and skilfully delineated this progression by the composer through various stages of his career with precise biographical information, anecdotes and quotes in tandem with quartet movements used as musical “signposts”. The players’ spoken delivery soon lost a certain “stiffness” at the outset, as they warmed to the ambience of both the auditorium and the audience, their story-telling and detailing in words and music exerting an ever-increasing fascination throughout the evening.

There was so much to take in thoughout – from the incidental anecdotes relating to specific movements (the “fleeing from a whipping” aspect of the Presto of Op.1 No.3, and the interaction with fellow-composer and performer Dittersdorf at a beer-hall where a scherzo of Haydn’s is being played – Op.33 No.5 – to the latter’s mock-dismay), the composer’s sense of humour (righteous indignation from historian Charles Burney at Haydn’s flouting the rules of composition in works like the finale of “The Joke” Quartet Op.33 No.2, and Haydn’s own attitude to these rules, writing “con licenza” over the Allegro of Op.55 No.2, with its catchy dotted rhythm and closely-worked contrapuntal development set against unexpected rhythmic irregularities), as well as general observations such as regarding the composer’s religious beliefs (the beautiful hymn-like Affetuoso of Op.20 No.1).

All of these musical realisations the NZSQ took in its stride; and while not all detailing was perfect, the playing was consistently characterful and engaging. We were able to feel the composer’s discomfiture in his unhappy marriage by dint of the almost Straussian solo violin part in the Adagio of  Op.54 No.2, which combines recitative and lyricism in a startlingly candid way; and at the other end of the human interaction scale we felt the warmth of the regard between Haydn and Mozart, characterised by the Presto finale of  Op.55 No.3. There was, too, the liberation of the composer from Esterházy, and an encounter in London with Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, and Haydn’s scientific initiation into the vastness of the cosmos, and the resulting awe of creation, expressed in the adagio of Op.71 No.2. Towards the end we heard the Andante grazioso from the composer’s final unfinished quartet, and then the bizarre post-mortem odyssey of Haydn’s head, a black-humoured tale suitably capped with the high-jinks of another marvellous movement from the composer’s oeuvre, the Presto from Op.76 No.5.

This was great work from the New Zealand String Quartet – a well-rounded and affectionate salute to a composer whose work, despite its popularity, seems inexhaustible in what it brings to us for our continued pleasure.

Frances Moore (voice), Anna McGregor (clarinet), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), Pia Palme (contrabass recorder), Dylan Lardelli (guitar), Nell Thomas (accordion), Takumi Motokawa (percussion), Charlotte Fetherston (viola), King Pan Ng (erhu).
CAROL MICALLEF: “Cigarettes for Ping Pong”;
HERMIONE JOHNSON: “The Deep Blue Sky”;
ALEXANDRA HAY: “Moon Song”;
KING PAN NG: “ExtremeLand”.

Massey University Theatrette, 21-22 August 2009

“Extreme Lands” was an event incorporating sound (live and recorded), words, and images, imaginatively curated by Wellington composer Alexandra Hay.

There were four items on the programme, beginning with “Cigarettes for Ping Pong” by experimental singer-songwriter Carol Micallef, which she sang in her attractive voice, accompanying herself on a tiny retro synth, with the aid of erstwhile guitarist Dylan Lardelli on viola.

Alexandra Hay’s own work, “Moon Song”, utilized a text by Branwen Millar, ingeniously presented as an interplay between words projected onto a screen, and words vocalized by Frances Moore. Each section was associated with a different aspect of water, for instance The Harbour, Ice, Tap, and Open Bodies. Hay’s use of electroacoustic sound files, such as the warm enveloping introduction, and the undulating filtered white noise underlying the voice in “The Harbour”, were reminiscent of the use of electronics in her atmospheric “White Rain” for amplified flute (which won the Victoria University composition competition in 2006). On the other hand, the exploitation of extended techniques on the live instruments (down to transferring the conventional western violin tremolando onto Ng’s traditional Chinese erhu), reminded me of her daring demands on the NZSO in the quietly powerful “Bellum Nocturnis” (winner of the 2008 NZSO/Todd Corporation Award).

Hay’s fellow graduate from the Victoria University NZ School of Music, Hermione Johnson, has been interested in very low sounds, and very high sounds. In “The Deep Blue Sky”, she joined Hay in exploring very soft sounds, and non-standard ways of playing instruments. Intense concentration on the barely audible world of the bellows-breath of Nell Thomas’s accordion, the bowed bridge of Dylan Lardelli’s guitar, and the key clicks of Ben Hoadley’s bassoon, drew the listener in, until the first tentative notes of definite pitch began to emerge towards the end of the piece.

King Pan Ng’s “ExtremeLand” relied mainly on projected images and recorded sound files to carry its message (encompassing the ends of a geographic spectrum, from Burmese refugees to icy landscapes). The performers seemed to have little to play: for them, it might have been “avant karaoke”. The images, however, stayed on in the mind, particularly those of the victims of the Myanmar junta.

Beethoven: Violin Sonata No 1 in D, Op 12 No 1; Ravel: Tsigane, rapsodie de concert; Sarasate: Two Spanish Dances; Fauré: Violin Sonata No 1 in A, Op 13

Amalia Hall (violin) and John-Paul Muir (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Sunday 16 August 2009

It is a little disturbing that the sort of concerts that the Wellington Chamber Music Society particularly wanted to promote when their fine Sunday afternoon series began in 1983, concerts by young musicians, the likely stars of tomorrow who needed encouragement today, seem to attract smaller audiences.

Audience numbers were down on expectations and down on the crowd who came to hear John Chen and the T’ang Quartet a fortnight before.

No excuse could be found in fine weather, and there are always many other concerts competing for our time and money, though no direct clashes that day. Nor was there any reason to scorn the programme just because it included Sarasate, who is much more than a mere encore composer, and a famous piece of fireworks by Ravel: both are works of genius that proved excellent punctuation points in an attractive programme.

The hundred who weren’t there simply missed a recital of great delight, of music that is central to the violin repertoire and rewarding it its own right.

Beethoven’s first violin sonata is the work of a composer who was fully fledged, naturally drawing on the examples of Haydn and Mozart but already in a voice that was identifiably his own. Though there were occasional inconsequential smudges in the piano part, much more remarkable were the pianist’s vivacity and easy accommodation to the dynamic shading that the violin took such pains to achieve. The two demonstrated right from the start how well they had learned the lessons of chamber music playing, attention to the other player that calls for instantaneous sympathetic reaction.

So the two instruments seemed to be instinctively in balance, in full rapport.

Ravel’s Tsigane cannot be dismissed as no more than a flashy show-piece; it is a remarkable composition that could only have been penned by a great composer. And for sure, it is a pretty formidable challenge to (both) players. The piano part is a splendid homage to Liszt while the violin reflects the qualities of Wieniawski and Sarasate, and this was an exciting, totally commanding performance.

The two Spanish Dances, not identified in the programme, were the familiar ones, probably the Malagueña and Habanera of Op 21, which combine melodic and rhythmic charm and brilliance with musical value, products of a highly trained and talented composer of the era of Dvorak, Grieg and Fauré (to name three disparate contemporaries). Their playing was infectious, and one would rather liked to have heard a couple of the other Spanish dances that he wrote.

Fauré himself ended the concert: the first of his two violin sonatas written, like the Beethoven, before he was 30. The programme note quoted a perceptive and generous critique by Saint-Saëns, ten years his senior, from the first performance. It is hard to go past his description of it as combining “a profound musical knowledge and great melodic wealth, with a kind of naïveté that is irresistible;” describing its “delicacy and charm, novelty of form, resourceful modulations, unusual sonorities and unexpected rhythms. Over all,” it continued, “hovers an allure that envelopes the entire work and makes the most unanticipated touches of boldness seem natural.”

This performance delighted in all these qualities, revealing two players who, perhaps because they are young, could respond with spontaneity and gaiety, without affectation, to the originality and youthful confidence of the young Fauré.

Works by George Crumb, Boccherini, Halvorsen, Beethoven and Chopin
Mok-hyun Gibson-Lane (‘cello)
Vesa-Matti Leppanen (violin) / Catherine McKay (piano)

Central Baptist Church, Boulcott St., Wellington

Sunday 16th August, 2009

Mok-hyun Gibson-Lane is currently based in Berlin, where she plays ‘cello as a contract musician with the Berlin Staatskapelle (whose musical director is Daniel Barenboim). She is also a member of the Stabrawa Ensemble Berlin, led by the Berlin Philharmonic concertmaster, Daniel Stabrawa. Recently she took time out from her European commitments to come back home to New Zealand for a visit, and give a recital in Wellington with pianist Catherine McKay and violinist Vesa-Matti Leppanen.

Moky, as she’s widely known, has studied with a number of eminent musicians, among them Lyn Harrell at Rice University in Texas, Alexander Ivaskin at Canterbury University and Rolf Gjelsten of the NZ String Quartet in Wellington. She has won numerous awards, among them the Alex Lindsay Memorial Award and the Barbara Finlayson Scholarship. A glance at her list of career achievements thus far would indicate that she’s certainly made the most of her opportunities; and her playing throughout this concert confirmed that she’s a highly gifted and totally committed musician.

Her recital programme, extending from Boccherini to George Crumb, and including a mixture of original ‘cello works and transcriptions for the instrument, indicated something of the range and scope of her interpretative sympathies. The opening work, a sonata for solo ’cello by Crumb widened my appreciation of a composer chiefly known for his iconic work “Ancient Voices of Children”. The sonata’s first movement, a Fantasia, used pizzicato and arco passages in the manner of a troubadour telling a story, the dialogue becoming more and more insistent and intense as the telling reached its climax. The second movement was a “theme and variations”, featuring episodes containing different moods and contrasts, most memorably some excitingly full-blooded pizzicati chords put next to delicately-spread figurations. Lastly, in the final Toccata Mok-hyun threw down the gauntlet at the beginning with strong and monumental double-stopping, which gave way to toccata-like figurations and a contrasting running triplet theme, played by the ‘cellist with terrific élan, before finishing the performance as it began, with a forthright,well-focused statement of serious intent.

For a long time the word I most readily associated with  Luigi Boccherini was “minuet” –  so the composer’s Sonata No.3 in G for ‘cello and continuo caused something of a surprise, albeit a pleasant one, and all the more so in Mok-Hyun’s and pianist Catherine McKay’s hands. The opening allegro militaire was a jolly jog-trot at the outset, with the minor key development section both sappy and mock-sombre, relieved by the players’ charming and stylish way with balancing both the music’s rhythmic and lyrical qualities. A limpid Largo followed, with Catherine McKay’s piano-playing artfully matching and mirroring the ‘cellist’s limpid textures; while the finale’s kind of “rocking-horse minuet” rhythms nicely enlivened things, the players both demonstrating that they knew the secret of generating momentum without resorting to excessive speed. Before the interval we were treated to something of a curiosity in both music and performance, Halvorsen’s impassioned meditation on Handel’s Harpsichord Suite No.7 in G minor – a Passacaglia Duo, no less, for violin and ‘cello, here brilliantly played by Mok-hyun and Vesa-Matti Leppanen (violin), bringing out both the piece’s fireworks and the more circumspect moods, the writing allowing the musicians to play satisfyingly into each others’ hands.

The second half featured music by Beethoven and Chopin, the first item being a particularly lovely and penetrative exploration by the former for ‘cello and piano of Mozart’s Bei Mannern, Welche Liebe Fuhlen duo from Die Zauberflöte. While Mok-hyun’s playing wasn’t entirely blemish-free in some of the more virtuosic moments, there was no doubting the stylish character and depth of feeling of her playing, both musicians  relishing the contrasts of the variations as well as the dance-like conclusion to the work. Cellist and pianist were again a combination to be reckoned with in Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante Op.3 (wrongly labelled Op.8 in the programme), the opening’s big, lyrical flourishes from the piano answered with eloquent simplicity by the ‘cello, while the Polonaise itself was danced with a winning amalgam of rhythmic girth and lyrical expression, Mok-hyun risking all by fearlessly attacking the melismatic figurations that punctuated the ‘cello line, and Catherine McKay in turn providing the required rhythmic drive and pointed phrasing that helped give the performance its ardent romantic flavour.

175 EAST AT ST.ANDREW’S
Works by Michael Norris, Richard Barrett. Rachael Morgan,
Christian Wolff and James Gardner

175 East : Richard Haynes (clarinet), Andrew Uren (bass clarinet)
Ingrid Culliford (flute), Tim Sutton (bass trombone), Carl Wells (horn)
Katherine Hebley (‘cello), Lachlan Radford (bass), James Gardner (laptop)
Conducted by Hamish McKeich

St Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington, Saturday 15th August

175 East, a contemporary music ensemble based in Auckland, prides itself on presenting new, cutting-edge music from both New Zealand and overseas via high-quality professional performances. The group’s recent Wellington concert at St.Andrew’s on the Terrace, which was a repeat of a presentation in Auckland a few days previously, bore ample witness to this stated philosophy – three of the six works played were by New Zealand composers, with the remainder coming from Welsh composer Richard Barrett and the French-born German-American Christian Wolff. The whole was delivered with the skill, panache and commitment to the cause that we’ve come to expect from these uniquely assorted musicians with their idiosyncratic instrumental combinations that composers seem to hugely enjoy writing for.

Two of the works played in the concert were “old friends” in that I’d seen and heard both performed before by the group – given that many pieces of contemporary music receive their premiere performances and nothing more, it was gratifying to have a second chance to hear both pieces, Michael Norris’s Vitus and James Gardner’s A study for voicing doubts. I’d previously encountered both of these works in a 2001 concert – again in Wellington –  which happened to be the first time I’d heard the ensemble play.

Michael Norris’s Vitus made as thoughtful and involved an impact upon me this time round as it did all those years ago. Its subject, the Christian saint Vitus who underwent torture and death for his religious beliefs at the hands of the Romans, is tied up with both the saint’s patronage of dance and dancers and his association with a medical condition known as Choreia, more commonly called St.Vitus’s Dance, one involving involuntary jerking bodily movements resulting from a temporary disorder of the brain. I remembered the music’s broad brush-strokes –  the pungent opening notes of the piece created a kind of “melting-time” impression, into which violent dissonances rushed now and then, gradually screwing up tensions and goading the music into a mock-heroic grand unison, whose riotous dissolution depicted a St.Vitus’ Dance episode. I also recalled the clarinets at the end quietly delineating what sounded like a mind’s inner workings, the instruments tremulously and haltingly answering one another across lonely, and somewhat fraught psychological soundscapes.

The other piece I’d heard previously was Jim Gardner’s A study for voicing doubts, a chamber concerto for clarinet whose title seems to encourage explorations of discords and disagreements between soloist and ensemble, exemplified by scalp-prickling counter-sonorities such as clarinet playing in its high register against bass trombone, and intriguing antiphonal rearrangements of soloist and ensemble mid-stream – political statements in music performance! I liked, then as now, the effects of the change on the music, the “distanced” soloist (or, alternatively “distanced” ensemble) embodying a number of relationship context possibilities, from impasse through compromise to acquiescence. Intriguing.

In Gardner’s work, as in Richard Barrett’s confrontational piece for solo clarinet knospend-gespaltene which featured earlier in the programme, the player was Richard Haynes, demonstrating what seemed like superhuman abilities (including the art of  seeming not to need to take breath for minutes on end) in realizing the composer’s idea of the instrument’s possibilities being able to realize a fixed “theatre” instead of a linear structure. This process of layered enactment took the listeners into a soundworld which seemed to transcend conventional considerations of pitch, timbre and rhythm, and , in the composer’s words, “lay bare” the piece’s and the instrument’s inner structure. Haynes’ virtuoso playing seemed to encapsulate these different states of being simultaneously, giving the effect of something with surprisingly layered and paralleled existences.

Barrett’s other work on the programme, Codex I, was for an ensemble of “improvising musicians”, a kind of re-enactment of the creative process by which the players take their cues from fragments of notation or musical memory which serves as a foundation for an entirely new work being created in performance. Sustained pitches run haphazardly through the piece, but their lines are punctuated by ”improvised divergences”, and numbers of instruments, but not precisely which ones, are specified by the piece, enabling the musicians to “re-enact” a tradition of musical inspiration, including, at the piece’s end, timbral gesturings of a kind which centred on no actual pitching of notes, merely breath- and movement-sounds, bringing to mind Keats’ words “Heard melodies are sweet, but unheard sweeter”…..

Rachael Morgan currently holds the Edwin Carr Foundation Scholarship, and received funding from Creative New Zealand for her most recent work from a fixed point (2009), which received what I assumed was its second performance after the Auckland concert.
The “fixed points” referred to by the composer are manifestations of the nature of sound, so that from within a single-pitch note can emerge all kinds of timbral and rhythmic variations, different instruments exploring the ramifications of the “fixed point”. The music was a journey undertaken into and through such possibilities, the ensemble gathering timbral weight, fortifying and energizing soundscapes, then underbellying the sounds, stretching away from and returning to the pitch-points like elastic, and adopting ethereal, disembodied tones, ‘cello and double bass having the last, skeletal-like say.

What was described as “added Wolff” to the concert in some of the publicity was Christian Wolff’s Two Players, a work that has surprisingly received only three performances in thirteen years – surprising because of the music’s accessibility, brought about by an attractive, almost ritualistic interplay between the two soloists playing horn and ‘cello, in this case Carl Wells and Katherine Hebley, respectively. The composer himself wrote about the importance for the work of the interplay and interdependence between the performers as an essential ingredient, and the two performers vividly realized the “character” of each of the three movements. The first was a night-piece, with long-held notes evoking a dark processional, the second a “dance macabre”, with ‘cello pizzicati leading the horn as a more circumspect partner, while the third used cryptic, almost elliptical gesturings in an almost speechless manner, a “Why don’t you listen to what I mean instead of what I say?” piece, one whose sense of underlying fun lightened the otherwise serious aspect of a marvellous concert.

ENSEMBLE SELISIH

Elizabeth Farrell (flute), Mathias Trapp (piano), Daniela Wahler and Markus Rombach (saxophones)
DIETER MACK: “Selisih”, “Trio III”;
CHANG-SOON RYU: “Quartett”;
DYLAN LARDELLI: “Two Bells”;
ROBIN TOAN: “Twitter”;
MICHAEL NORRIS: “BADB”;
GILLIAN WHITEHEAD: “Taurangi”.

NZ School of Music Adam Concert Room, 12 August 2009

“Selisih”, an Indonesian word meaning “argumentative discussion”, was the name given by German composer Dieter Mack to his duo for alto and baritone saxophones. Mack, now on his third visit to New Zealand in a professional capacity, has lived in Indonesia studying gamelan performance practice, and (partly inspired by this) has made the interactions between players, one of the fundamental principles of his music. The name was subsequently adopted by this ensemble of four individualists – two saxophonists, a flautist and a pianist.

Mack’s 2003 composition “Selisih” itself formed part of the programme. The duo began with Wahler’s querulous alto sax answered by Rombach’s staid baritone, which in turn was to respond with increased nervous energy. The conversation turned to treat a serious topic with mysterious multiphonics, before they joined together in rapid unisono figures and a perfectly united vibrato.

The 2005 “Trio III” reflected Mack’s more recent concern with creating new timbres using multiphonics, incidental microtones and, especially, by blending together instrumental sounds (analogous to an organ’s mixture stop, and sharing some similar concerns with the French Spectralists). Flute (and sometimes piccolo) melded with alto sax to produce unison lines in novel, Messiaen-like colours, while the discreetly prepared piano added a quietly dark commentary.

Korean-born Chang-soon Ryu has studied with Dieter Mack in Lubeck. His 2007 “Quartett” for the Ensemble Selisih showed some of Mack’s interest in timbre-building, and also a feeling of stasis that those of us who have grown up with the thematic development, metrical pulse and harmonic motion of the western tradition, tend to associate with East Asian music.

Wellingtonian Dylan Lardelli’s 2009 “Two Bells” displayed a similar sense of static time, and for good reason: it was inspired in part by the stately unfolding of classical Japanese Noh drama. As with his 2008 “four scenes” for Stroma, and more successfully than in his earlier “Sent into Silence” at the 2007 Asia Pacific Festival, Lardelli here suspended any need for forward direction or climax. The poised, spare texture incorporated judicious special effects: muffled prepared-piano notes illumined by a halo of resonance; throbbing close-interval sustains; slap-tonguing and key clicks on the baritone sax.

“Two Bells” was commissioned by Selisih (with Creative NZ) to increase the repertoire for this unconventional ensemble. So too was Aucklander Robin Toan’s 2009 “Twitter”, a set of three short character-pieces “about” birds (not micro-blogging). The first – perky, cheeky, syncopated – was reminiscent of the “Aquarium” and “Puppets” movements from her 2005 “Barcelona Postcards”. The second was pensive, with a plangent melody on the soprano sax, some contrapuntal complexity and cadenza passages. The third was motoric (rather than syncopated like the first), featuring rapid ostinati on the baritone sax and chirping runs and trills on the piccolo, building up to an sudden end.

Michael Norris’ “BADB” was named after a shape-shifting Celtic goddess. It opened with Farrell singing into her flute, with crystalline high piano runs from Trapp. However, the goddess’s fearsome side was soon made evident with fortissimo crow-calls.

Gillian Whitehead’s “Taurangi” was premiered by Bridget Douglas and Rachel Thomson during the 2000 International Festival of the Arts. It made my list of highlights in the retrospective of that year that I wrote for the “NZ Listener”. This was a most elegant rendition from New Zealand-born flautist Elizabeth Farrell and pianist Mathias Trapp: the flute’s subtle pitch-bends and the closing, barely audible inside-piano glissandi still had the magic to send tingles up the spine.

Paekakariki Mulled Wine Concert Series 2009

Zephyr Winds (NZSO Principals): Bridget Douglas (flute) / Robert Orr (oboe) / Phil Green (clarinet) / Robert Weeks (bassoon) / Ed Allen (horn) – with Diedre Irons (piano)

MOZART – Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat K.452

BARBER – Summer Music Op.31

BERIO – Opus Number Zoo

POULENC – Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet

Paekakariki Memorial Hall, Sunday 2^nd August 2009

We were packed in with a vengeance at the Paekakariki Memorial Hall on Sunday afternoon, our seats almost at the very back and with little or no sight-lines extending to the musicians (the floor has no raised platform for the performers), causing me some anxieties regarding being able to fully “connect” with the music-making. I needn’t have worried – over the heads of the shoulder-to-shoulder throng came the opening measures of the Mozart, gloriously sounded (a combination of lively acoustic and brightly-focused projection from the players) and instantly engaging, quickly putting to rest the rustling ambiences of an audience settling down. The Largo introduction blossomed into an allegro moderato, the playing achieving such felicities of articulation, buoyancy and balance between the instruments as to bring constant pricklings of pleasure to the listener. Diedre Irons’s playing made the piano sound almost like a wind instrument, its strength, agility, flexibility and singing tone blending with what the other players were doing in subtle give-and-take interplay. The full-throated wind choir at the slow movement’s beginning again engaged the piano in a beautifully-written conversation of equals, with lovely explorations of different harmonies in a middle section where the music goes in and out of the sunlight, the tensions resolved in a way that perhaps reflected its creator’s desire for both diversity and order in the world.

In the Rondo Allegretto finale, the music continued its philosophical bent, its poised, at times liquid rhythms incorporating a lyrical and in places melancholic aspect within the same pulse, especially in a somewhat restless middle section. The playing continued to delight, no more than at a lovely concerto-like cadence point of questioning, after which the winds were able to diffuse the tension nicely and return the argument to the poise and urbanity of the opening.

By way of attempting to brighten up our recent wintry Wellington woes, Zephyr undertook Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music”, a lovely, indolent-sounding work enlivened by chirruping energies, conveying a “nature-at-play” ambience against which passages of gentle melancholy perhaps reflect the feelings of the beholder experiencing such seasonal rites. The players took us through a number of beautifully-characterised episodes, at one point the oboe instigating a quasi-oriental dance joined by flute and bassoon, the latter trying the same steps later on his own, to the delight of flute and oboe, whose amused riposte rippled through the ensemble. Just before the end, the music began a kind of journeying aspect, whose rhythmic tread briefly suggested a railway adventure, but with the return of the languid opening music, the impetus was lost, and the bassoon’s final attempt to dance again provoked another tantalising outbreak of mirth whose elfin disappearance came as quickly as its ready laughter.

People not normally drawn to contemporary classical music might have initially swallowed uncomfortably at seeing the name of Luciano Berio on the programme, a well-known experimental composer and pioneer of electronic music. They need not have worried – “Opus Number Zoo” demonstrates a lighter, more playful side of the composer’s activities, the four pieces settings with multiple narrators of allegorical texts whose parallels can be found in the Aesop Fables. Its musical equivalents inhabit a world not unlike that of Stravinsky, in “The Soldier’s Tale”, though there’s also a Waltonesque whimsy in some of the narrations that remind one of “Façade”. The first “Barn Dance” tells the tale of the poor silly chick who danced with a fox (flutist Bridget Douglas demonstrating hitherto unrevealed Thespian skills of an advanced order, here, with her vivid vocal characterisations!), the droll “That’s all, folks!” at the end occasioning a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. “The Fawn” is a bleak meditation on armaments and war-mongering, with ascending, expressive wind-textures highlighting the apocalyptic nature of the scenario; while ”The Grey Mouse” is a droll commentary on youth and age, the musician-speakers demonstrating a wonderfully precise vocal ensemble. Finally, in “Tom Cats”, a confrontational tale of greed and envy, Bridget Douglas’s voice was again to the fore, with the players engaging in “stand and deliver” antics with their instruments at cardinal points – all very entertaining!

After these tongue-in-cheek coruscations it was left to Francis Poulenc to restore some equanimity to our sensibilities with his Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet. The attention-grabbing opening plunged us into a carnival atmosphere, with scenes involving trick-cyclists, jugglers and clowns, everything vividly depicted with sharply-etched playing from Diedre Irons and Zephyr. The bassoon called a halt with an eloquent recitative, answered by the piano, and then evolving into one of those wonderfully “bitter-sweet” melodies beloved of twentieth-century French composers, the mood becoming impassioned, then becalmed, before plunging back into the festive energetics of the opening. Throughout all of this, the ensemble took each different episode in its stride, delivering the music’s variegated moods with tremendous élan. The slow movement, with its oboe-led song-like opening had a dreamlike “drifting-harmonic” aspect, which a burst of jog-trot energy momentarily and cheekily overlaid; while the players threw themselves into the finale’s almost Dadaist energies at the outset with plenty of manic vigour, sanities restored by several of Poulenc’s wonderful astringent melodic episodes, and a surprisingly rhetorical , almost chorale-like ending, delivered by the Zephyr players and Diedre Irons with just the right amount of mock-seriousness.

Occasionally reviewers have experiences which cause them to doubt their own listening abilities and capacities, one such for me being the small encore piece given us by the ensemble at the concert’s end – it turned out to be the animated section of the Poulenc Sextet’s slow movement, which I did think I’d “heard before somewhere” but didn’t recognise! Bridget Douglas comforted me by telling me that people had been caught out before by Zephyr’s repetition of that section of the music: “Out of context it sounds quite different” she told me. That, and the fact that I’d not heard the work before, did give me some comfort, but nevertheless I was abashed at not recognising it for what it was at the time – zut alors!

 

 

Wellington Chamber Music Society concert

Schnittke: Quintet for piano and strings, Gao Ping: Piano Quintet, Dvořák: Piano Quintet No 2 in A, Op 81

T’ang Quartet (Wilma Smith and Ang Chek Meng – violins, Han Oh – viola, Leslie Tan – cello) and John Chen (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Sunday 2 August 2009

Though it is fair to say that Wellington’s taste for new music is probably more adventurous than that of other major cities, it may well have been the pulling power of musicians of such distinction as these that attracted an around 80 percent audience to a programme containing two contemporary works, one newly commissioned and the other probably unfamiliar to 95 percent of the audience.

There were two changes in the quartet’s personnel for this tour. The regular leader, Ng Yu-Ying, was replaced by Wilma Smith and violist Lionel Tan by Han Oh.

Schnittke can hardly be described in terms of other composers of his generation, except in fairly general and unhelpful ways. One might be to say music of the time this piece was composed – the mid 1970s – was still heavily in thrall to the avant-garde, with its conviction that the widening gap between composers and audiences was the latter’s problem. Some of it, from composers of genuine genius, has gained a place in our auditory hard-drive, some has disappeared without trace, while some cling to a raft becoming crowded with more interesting and congenial makers of music of recent years, but may survive:

I think Schnittke is in this last class. While there is a core of music lovers sympathetic to his music on account of his personal situation vis a vis the Soviet Union and his persistent ill-health, there are as many who are sceptical of his aesthetic and the validity of his musical impulses.

This piano quintet, however, seems to spring from a genuine creative inspiration, with less of the trade-mark poly-stylism that strikes many as a gimmick or as a way of masking a lack of melodic invention. It clearly describes a time of personal loss through its spare, bleak textures, long-sustained single notes, the emptiness of the mocking waltz of the second movement, the Andante with its microtones laced with little glissandi, finally closing in a mood of timid hope. John Chen’s role was conspicuously in command of the piano’s striking, sometimes eccentric contribution; the string players clearly understood its emotions and the musical means by which they were expressed, eventually finding some kind of peace in the last movement.

Gao Ping’s piece was commissioned by the Christchurch Arts Festival where it was played, in fact, the day after the Wellington performance.

A piece rather more typical of the current musical climate, music that does not sound so disturbed; in fact, presenting a sunny scene, Though each of the four movements is some sort of reflection on the four qualities that are significant in ancient Chinese literary life, efforts to bear them in mind through the performance seemed superfluous, even irrelevant.

The flow of the music and the rewarding writing for individual instruments, the cello in particular in the third part (Bamboo), made any concerns with non-musical ideas fade away. In the last section, the viola (Han Oh, seemingly perfectly in accord with his colleagues) took charge of a beguiling tune that, teasingly, refrained from evolving as it wanted to. Leader Wilma Smith was notably comfortable in the quartet, in this work, capturing the tone of the Chinese violin, such as the erhu, idiomatically.

The second piano quintet by Dvořák is one of the most loved in the repertoire. Its hearing does, unfortunately, prompt the question in the mind, ‘why is it not possible for today’s composers, some of whom must be comparably gifted with melodic fecundity, to write such music built on beautiful melody that is worked out with such impulsive delight’.

Wilma Smith again sounded in full command of the piece, responding to the style of her colleagues with great warmth; and cellist Leslie Tan took full advantage of his opportunities both at the start of the first movement and the passages of lovely, sustained lyricism in the second movement. Though John Chen was very much a star of the concert, his fluent and interesting playing never drew attention to itself even though one’s ear was constantly enchanted by his perfectly judged role, and contributed to a wonderful unity of spirit through the joyful Finale.