Tag: chamber music

Violin Sonata, Op 24 ‘Spring’ (Beethoven); Sonata No 1 in E (Howells); Sonata No 2 in A, Op 100 (Brahms); Sonata in E, Op 82 (Elgar)

Jack Liebeck (violin) and Stephen De Pledge (piano)

Expressions Arts Centre, Upper Hutt. Monday 21 September

Chamber Music New Zealand have been promoting solo piano recitals by Stephen De Pledge, in their main concert series in the major centres, and violin and piano recitals involving De Pledge and English violinist Jack Liebeck in a series of concerts for the so-called ‘associated societies’ that exist in smaller centres.

When the tours were published I wondered why this arrangement had been decided upon in the light of the kind of attention Liebeck has been getting in concerts and recordings in Britain and elsewhere.

Fortunately, the proliferation of chamber music organizations in Greater Wellington makes it easy to enjoy both the piano alone (at the Wellington Town Hall and at Waikanae) and the duo at Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt where different programmes were being presented.

At Upper Hutt the emphasis was on English violin music, with an unfamiliar sonata by Herbert Howells and a somewhat better known sonata by Elgar. Before they began the Howells, Liebeck said a few words about his awakening to English music, and his keen advocacy of it was clear.

The Howells sonata has four connected parts that hardly follow the classical pattern. The opening movement spoke with a rather English voice, to be sure, in reflective elegiac tones which soon turned more lively, though hardly suggesting emotions that would have upset Victorian England (it was composed, I must point, out durng World War I). In the second movement the pace slowed again and my reaction was both to wonder at the insight shown by both musicians and their rapport, and to regret the absence of an anchor in the form of a melody or two.

The music evolved again, rather than making a distinct change, by means of emphatic piano chords into a third movement with rudiments of a dance-like tune. A fourth movement, assai tranquillo, seemed to be the composer’s most natural form of expression for it was here at last that there was a oneness between the music and the spirit of the two players.

I had heard Elgar’s violin sonata a few months ago played by a couple of local musicians; I did not know it well at that stage, and it remained something of an enigma. But in the hands of these two, it emerged as a work of considerable stature, a variety of moods and styles that Liebeck and De Pledge commanded with great conviction, both in the opening flourishes and as it settled into an attractive lyrical character and clearly structured shapes.

The first movement ended with a fine sense of power and authority. The last movement was coloured in the early stages by an ‘English light music’ quality that I find uninteresting, and its conclusion seemed to fall short in a sense of resolution and grandeur. It was the second movement with its two very distinct parts that I found most persuasive as the players exploited it melodic strengths and here, in its gorgeous muted tones, I was conscious of being in the presence of a considerable violin talent.

The other two works were familiar. Beethoven’s Spring Sonata was a delightful start to the concert, demonstrating the violin’s elegance and lyricism and the pianist’s flair for turning phrases in ear-catching ways, pointing to features and emphases that seemed somehow new.

The least interesting, most surprisingly, was Brahms Second Sonata. It was entirely flawless and unexceptionable, but perhaps as a result of the context, it seeming of rather less stature that it actually possesses, the last movement failing to rise to a finale of much consequence.

However, in spite of what was probably a personal response on my part, nothing detracted from the impact of this very fine artist, and enjoyment of the rapport that was always evident between the two musicians.

Haydn: String Quartet in G, Op 54 No 1; Szymanowski: String Quartet No 2, Op 56; Beethoven: String Quartet in E flat, Op 74 (Harp)

The Aroha Quartet: Haihong Liu and Beiyi Xue – violins, Zhongxian Jin – viola, Robert Ibell – cello

St Andrew’s on The Terrace, Saturday 5 September 2009

The Aroha Quartet, comprising four Chinese players, three of them in the NZSO, has been around since 2004. I heard what I think was their first public performance, at Old St Paul’s in Wellington, and was very impressed; I have heard them since then and have enjoyed their programmes and their performances. But the group has not really achieved what it might have if the players had been able to devote more time to playing together. They have now suffered a slight set-back with the loss of their cellist Jiaxin Cheng, after she married Julian Lloyd Webber; she has been replaced by NZSO cellist Robert Ibell, an experienced chamber musician, formerly cellist in the Nevine Quartet which has disbanded.

Once again, the quartet put together an excellent programme, of one of Haydn’s less often heard quartets, Beethoven’s splendid Harp Quartet (not for the harp), and Szymanowski’s second; that was the best thing in the concert.

The programme notes comment that Haydn’s Op 54 quartets are ground-breaking and that No 1 is among his most popular. If that is so, I have been neglectful, not having heard it played live before. But it is indeed an adventurous piece: lively, witty, varied, entertaining. I had mistaken the start time – 7pm – and missed the first and some of the second movement; the minuet was highly diverting, never mind an occasional slip, and the players made the finale a thing of teasing boisterousness.

The best known work was Beethoven’s Op 74. Here it was possible, in spite of the absence of the kind of polished ensemble and virtuosity that we are used to hearing on recordings by great quartets, simply to enjoy the frank and disarming enthusiasm that’s so infectious in players like these. If the somewhat startling dynamic outbursts in the open phase of the first movement sounded a bit unconvincing and there was some smudgy ensemble in the Scherzo, all it did was do highlight a musicianship and technical skill that was generally irreproachable; their grasp of the style and intellectual character of the music was of a high order.

It was in the Szymanowski quartet that these talents could best be enjoyed; most of us did not have the sounds of some famous recording in our ears and were therefore more ready to hear what the Aroha Quartet did as definitive. Its shape is unusual, the first and last movements, using folk-like tunes, quieter and more lyrical than the second movement which is marked Vivace, scherzando. The haunting effect of the opening passage, with its muted strings played at the octave, and tremolando violin and viola, caught the mysticism that had entered the composer’s imagination through his involvement with eastern philosophy. All changed in the second movement with a big extrovert melody that suddenly turns assertive, even violent.

Though the repertoire of the string quartet is probably even larger than that of the symphony, so there is no urgency for new works, the Aroha Quartet made a good case for the more frequent dusting off of Szymanowski’s two quartets.

Haydn String Quartets: Op 64 No 5 (The Lark), Op 74 No 3 (The Rider), Op 20 No 5, Op 77 No 1 (Compliments)

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman – violins, Gillian Ansell – viola, Rolf Gjelsten – cello)

St Mary of the Angels, Saturday 29 August 2009

Peter Mechen has written a review of the first of the two concerts by the New Zealand String Quartet on Tuesday 25 August, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the death of Haydn. That concert contained, not only 21 excerpts from the quartets, from Op 1 to Op 103, but also recitations by the four quartet members from letters and memoirs recorded by a number of biographers and commentators. (Admirably, the programme listed the references so that the audience could seek out some of the books the next morning at library or on internet).

That tour de force of musical adventure and theatrical entertainment was not repeated in the second concert which I heard on Saturday (it had been played first on Thursday 27 August in the Hunter Council Chamber).

This repeat of the second programme was held at 6pm, in part, presumably, to enjoy the evanescent light of day as it dimmed through the stained glass, allowing the church soon to be lit only by prolific candelabra (in the singular it’s ‘candelabrum’, by the way).

For this they chose four of their favourite quartets, and played them with profound affection, brilliance and insight.

Many of the popular quartets have acquired nick-names; three of the four were The Lark, The Rider and Compliments. The earliest was from Op 20, published in 1772, a group that was nick-named The Sun, presumably on account of the publisher’s engraving on the cover. Just as the earlier concert had been a revelation in terms of the growing maturity and the increasing complexity and sophistication of Haydn’s writing, so the comparison between the two quartets in the second half, Op 20 No 5 and the Op 77 No 1, 30 years apart was very striking.

The former is a serious work, in F minor, and the themes of the first movement lend themselves to imaginative development that evidences the compositional learning Haydn already commanded. Though it was the Op 33 set, ten years later, that inspired Mozart’s set that he dedicated to Haydn, it is easy to understand how the style, shape and melodic evolution of this earlier quartet would have impressed the younger composer.

The first movement impresses with a convoluting, ever-expanding theme, and the quartet managed to portray its unusual character without excessive minor-key sombreness; on the other hand the thoughtful, quite elaborate Minuet does not present the normal unbuttoned peasant dance; and the unusual Adagio, a Siciliano in triple time ends with typically Haydnesque flippancy. All of these unconventionalities the players handled with calm understatement. And then there’s the fugal, though quite short, last movement; just to show that he wasn’t simply a tunesmith.

The rapport and compatibility of the string quartet members and their marvellous command of the notes justified the performance of this relatively early quartet.

Op 77 No 1 (Compliments) has a far more varied and confident character, each instrument offered a great deal more individuality, all manner of original, vacillating rhythmic and melodic touches in the first movement ending with enchanting scales from Rolf Gjelsten’s cello. It was written, indeed, after the publication of Beethoven’s Op 18 set and in many ways it demonstrates an intellectual and artistic breadth that Ludwig would have embraced. I have rarely heard the quartet playing with greater accomplishment and in an accord so completely engaged.

The first half contained the more diverting works – familiar, brilliant, melodic: The Lark, clearly justifying its name, with Helene Pohl’s violin soaring beautifully in the first, too short, movement; with one of the loveliest of Haydn’s slow movements in a ravishing performance; and a vivace finale which they turned into a scintillating prestissimo.

The Rider was one of the quartet’s earliest Haydn quartets and for me, their handling remains unexcelled. They tackled the opening Allegro with such a carefree, open air spirit, in spite of its minor key (the common classification of major and minor modes as happy and sad really is nonsense). The slow movement, somewhat reminiscent of the great slow movement of the Emperor quartet, highly ornamented, so different in tone from the adjacent movements, was laid out exquisitely. The infectious galloping rhythms in both first and last movements faltered at none of the hurdles and the lower strings supported the sure-footed gallop: so fast, so ‘con brio’ in the final Allegro, that its excited breathlessness hinted at the mood of which Mozart was master in The Marriage of Figaro.

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.