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.

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

The Cook Strait Trio (Blythe Press – violin, Paul van Houtte – cello, Amber Rainey – piano)

Turina: Piano Trio No 2 in B minor, Op76, Psathas: Island Songs, Dvořák: Piano Trio in F minor, Op 65

Lower Hutt Little Theatre, Thursday 30 July 2009

The Cook Strait Trio is just the kind of chamber music group that one hopes and expects Chamber Music New Zealand will promote in its Associated Societies series. That is, the mainly New Zealand groups that it takes under its wing to tour to the score of smaller chamber music societies that flourish – or least survive – in the towns that do not sustain concerts in the so-called Celebrity Series.

Just to remind you of the societies drawing on at least some of the groups in CMNZ’s stable that exist in Greater Wellington – the Waikanae Music Society, Chamber Music Hutt Valley and the Wellington Chamber Music Society (which, for promotional purposes, now drops the word ‘society’). This group had performed this programme at Waikanae on Sunday 26 July.

The three are Wellington-born and/or educated, though it would probably be risky to claim they will long remain working here. Only Amber Rainey has yet to undertake overseas training.

One longs to discover neglected works that prove substantial and beautiful and it was so with the Turina. He is the fourth of the notable Spanish composers born in the 30 years after 1860 and the least known and perhaps least important. Once upon a time his Canto a Sevilla was popular on account of Victoria de los Angeles’ performance.

Though it was most sympathetically played, this trio did not prove more than an agreeable salon piece of a superior kind. That generalization derives from the tone of the music rather than its formal structure which is sophisticated enough, as pointed out in the programme notes. The Spanish character of the music is not of the usual, strongly rhythmic kind, but derived from the more subtle kind of folk music that does fling itself at you. Its besetting sin perhaps is Turina’s excessive use of diminished harmonies that tend to impose a tonal anonymity on the music. The last movement revealed a stronger character, mainly through its piano part, spendidly played by Amber Rainey.

John Psathas’s Island Songs, now 14 years old, has by now attained the rank of a New Zealand classic. The islands are of Greece – not of New Zealand. However, the music, while carrying occasional suggestions of Greek land and seascapes, and sound such as bells chiming in the piano, does not evoke a conventional sound impression of Greece.

In the first movement, the piano underpinned the strings with ostinati reminiscent of Psathas’s early Waiting for the Aeroplane and he surprises those whose knowledge of Greek music is confined to Theodorakis’s music for Zorba and the bouzouki, with the sparest writing to depict the Zeibekiko in the second movement. In the third movement the piano, again moving through a narrow range of pitches, was a little out of step with its colleagues. 

Dvořák’s Piano Trio Op 65 has received some high praise. Some consider it his finest chamber work, but the competition from the Piano Quintet, and the Dumky Trio, the Quintet Op 97, and the American Quartet would seem to be quite strong.

To start with, it is as markedly Czech as one feels the Turina not to be so Spanish. That feeling might stem from its serious, minor key character in the first movement which is announced by the opening unison passage from violin and cello. However, there is a graciousness in the music which Blythe Press’s violin, in particular, caught beautifully, as he did again in the charming slow movement. The strong instruments here were the piano and violin which often tended to cast a shadow over the cello though it enjoyed some lovely solos early in the first movement, leaving no doubt about Paul van Houtte’s musicality.  

There was a certain loss of momentum in the middle section of the second movement: it felt rather more than the Meno mosso marking called for. Perhaps the trio offered the best of themselves through the fusing of their sounds in the Poco adagio, achieving a beautiful stillness at the movement’s end. In the last movement, they handled the many changes of rhythm with great naturalness engaging overdrive excitingly for the final peroration.

 

PESTOVA/MEYER PIANO DUO
Xenia Pestova, piano; Pascal Meyer, piano
STRAVINSKY: “The Rite of Spring”;
DUGAL MCKINNON: “Diktat, Ditty Half-Life”;
CHRIS WATSON: “Coffee Table Book”.

**STOCKHAUSEN: “Mantra”

NZ School of Music Adam Concert Room, 17 July 2009

**VUW Hunter Council Chamber, 19 July 2009

Is ballet music programme music when performed without the ballet? If it is, then is it “about” the dance action onstage, or is it, instead, more “about” the story and images that inspired the ballet’s  scenario in the first place? If so, then Stravinsky (famous for the dictum that music expresses only itself) may, paradoxically, have written one of the greatest tone poems of the twentieth century.

These were some of the thoughts going through my mind as I listened to duo pianists Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer playing “The Rite of Spring”. Their two-piano version provided more resonance and weight than the composer’s own arrangement for one-piano-four-hands, edging just a little closer to the power of the orchestra. At times Pestova and Meyer evoked familiar instrumental timbres (the opening bassoon, the dialogues of muted trumpets): at others they created something fresh and new – from washes of piano arpeggios, to sinister stalking rhythms.

Unexpectedly, rhythm also emerged as a crucial element in Stockhausen’s “Mantra”. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised: after all, “Piano Piece IX” began with a premonitory dose of pre-minimalist minimalism. However, in the 1956/61 piece, the regularly repeated chords were readily deconstructed into irregular flourishes at the extremes of the keyboard. In the 1969/70 “Mantra”, by contrast, a measured pulse recurred many times during the work – at one point with acerbic wit, as when Pestova’s peremptorily iterated high pitch “corrected” a “wrong” note written for Meyer’s part.

Pestova and Meyer’s intimate engagement with the piece enabled them to highlight episodes of lush romanticism and snatches of melody. Despite these, and the extended periods of metre, the 70-minute “Mantra” proved an epic marathon demanding concentration, commitment and stamina – and that was just for the listeners. The duo pianists themselves needed all these, plus exquisite coordination – especially in such instances as when Pestova’s microsecond woodblock had to coincide with Meyer’s attack. For the performers not only had the pianos, but also an array of small percussion instruments (woodblocks, tuned crotales), as well as dials to initiate ring-modulation (an electronic effect equivalent to Cage’s prepared piano, bringing the tone colour closer to that of the crotales).

Expertly controlled by sound projectionist Philip Brownlee, the ring modulation also offered an escape from the prison of twelve-equal temperament, notably in the form of arresting (all the more so for being sparingly deployed) sliding portamenti on piano sustains. With “Mantra”, Stockhausen had returned to more rigorously formulated composition after a period of experimentation with improvisation and chance: had he followed the precedent set by Markevitch, Ives and Wyschnegradsky and tuned one of the pianos a quarter-tone apart, he would have had even more scope for his procedure of expanding and contracting his intervallic material (a process pioneered in the 1920s by Mexican microtonalist Julian Carrillo).

After having been percussionists and vocalizing actors, Pestova and Meyer further heightened the excitement towards the end with a tour-de-force of rushing fugato passages.

Echoes of Stockhausen’s uncompromising modernism were present in Chris Watson’s “Coffee Table Book” in the earlier recital. Intended as the musical analogue of a pictorial volume (as opposed to the structured narrative of literary fiction), the piece was duly episodic, but retained Watson’s characteristic control of the flow of tension.

Xenia Pestova, a graduate of the Victoria University School of Music and pupil of Judith Clark, has always shown a commitment to contemporary (and New Zealand) music. With Luxembourg pianist Pascal Meyer, this seems set to continue with compositions for two pianos. Dugal McKinnon’s “Diktat, Ditty Half-Life”, with its neatly encapsulating concluding gesture, was the first of a series of miniatures for the duo. I look forward to hearing more.

Chamber music from east and west, Music Fair of Japan

Ilott Theatre, Saturday 11 July 2009

This was the fourth Japanese Festival which has included a concert by Japanese musicians. These are the result of collaboration between the Embassy, the Asia-New Zealand and the Japan Foundations and the Wellington City Council. Where the previous ones have featured only a couple of musicians, this time there were five, including, almost as the star turn, the principal double bass of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Hiroshi Ikematsu.

Those who saw him performing at a concert at St Mary of the Angels last year will have vivid memories of both his extraordinary skill and musical gifts and his virtuosity as comedian and musical acrobat. Here he took an early Italian soprano aria that has recently become popular – Caccini’s Ave Maria (my first encounter on Inessa Galante’s debut CD a decade or so ago); it merely displayed the way he refuses to be limited by the bass’s low register, competing with the violin’s range by playing beautiful legato lines.

What delighted and astonished the full house even more was his transformation of Monti’s famous Csardas from the normally impossible violin showpiece to the same on bass, with a few surprise comic stunts thrown in: some involving pianist Susumu Aoyagi as fall-guy.

Yet the rest were not merely excellent musicians. Violinist Ayoko Ishikawa, who graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium, acted as MC with a delightful playful manner and a joyous way with her phrase endings as she introduced colleagues and pieces of music.

As well as playing a couple of charming Japanese pieces, she played the Meditation from Thaïs, Saint-Saëns’s Dance Macabre and Libertango by Piazzola, with quite a swagger.

The concert had opened atmospherically – the lights went gently down and from the back the sound of the Japanese flute (shinobue) arose, playing the well-known piece from the Japanese highlands, Amazing Grace and it was taken up by the koto which was ready in the front and played by Lisa Kataoka in a beautiful kimono. She continued at the koto, singing charmingly, and was joined by the other instrumentalists in two other pieces. 

We saw the flute player, Takako Hagiwara, in the second half, also kimono-clad, again emerge from behind us and continue playing as she walked slowly down the right aisle. She played a composition of her own on the shinobue and with pianist Susumu Aoyagi played her arrangement from Carmen which was a most impressive virtuosic display.

Finally, the pianist. As well as accompanying many pieces, a model of discretion and sensitivity to the music’s character, he had opened the concert with two Nocturnes (Op Post. and Op 27 No 2) and an Etude (Op 25, No 11) of Chopin. Somewhat angular without much subtlety in the left hand, but his Japanese pieces sounded idiomatic and he left the audience somewhat overwhelmed by his tumultuous playing of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. 

The concert was free and while the style of music was essentially for popular consumption, we had a line up of superb or at least excellent musicians to demonstrate how a non-European nation with deep traditions of its own, can achieve world class standards and build up very large audiences for classical music.

A lesson that may be pertinent for New Zealand.

Old Saint Paul’s: Free lunchtime concert

Violin Sonatas by Elgar (E minor, Op 82) and Franck (A major)

Olya Curtis (violin) and David Vine (piano)

Tuesday 7 July 2009

The sphere of classical music seems more populated by immigrants than any other area, whether of the arts in general, education, or the public and business sectors. That was understandable in earlier times when no tertiary institutions offered musical performance teaching. But since around 1970, one would have imagined that the supply of New Zealand-born and trained musicians would have filled the demand. But note, I am applauding, not lamenting, the often more cultivated character of our immigrant populations.

I wonder if there have been any studies to discover whether the apparently high proportion of musicians from other countries in the industry is the result of positions that cannot be properly filled by New Zealanders, or whether the proportion of musically trained and inclined people is simply higher among those who seek to migrate here.

Violinist Olya Curtis was born and educated in Russia and now divides her time between teaching privately and at Wellington East Girls’ College, and playing in the Wellington Orchestra. She makes a valued contribution to our musical life.

The pairing of these two sonatas ought to have been a success. They have characteristics in common, but one is simply much more popular and loved than the other. The programme note pointed to the very marked difference which has led to the comparative neglect of Elgar’s somewhat sombre piece, but it omits the real reason – a reason which it is not fashionable to account for the essential popularity or neglect of music – the presence or not of beautiful, memorable melody.

It was cold in the church and it was tough to open with the Elgar. Olya Curtis tackled it with care and delivered a sincere account, but clearly she had not been won over by it and she simply did not display great affinity with it, its phrasing, not gauging well how to vary dynamics and tempi, or to find a legato expressiveness to make the most of its (limited) lyrical qualities. Those qualities were rather more evident in David Vine’s accompaniment.

César Franck’s sonata found her much more comfortable with its style and with the emotional content of the music and both players managed the technically testing score well until the last movement when there were a couple of slight mishaps.

But generally, Curtis’s intonation, which was a little wayward in the Elgar sonata, was more accurate and the very tone of her violin seemed to have become warmer and more musical in Franck’s beautiful sonata.

Nevertheless, the regular, free, Tuesday lunchtime concerts at Old St Paul’s are a happy feature of Wellington’s varied musical life offering a charming visual setting for music that is always worthwhile and well played.

Trio in E flat, K 498 (Mozart), Four pieces from Eight Pieces for violin, viola and piano, Op 83 (Bruch), Violin Sonata in E flat, Op 18 – first and second movements (Strauss), Three Russian Songs for violin, viola and piano (Glinka)

Cristina Vaszilcsin (violin), Peter Garrity (viola), Catherine McKay (piano)

Paekakariki Memorial Hall, Sunday 5 July 2009

There’s not a large repertoire for a piano trio that involves viola instead of cello: though there ought to be. For along with the viola’s delicious C string that provides an opulent, legato bass line, the piano can, after all, supply most of the bass quality below that. 

The violin version of Mozart’s Clarinet Trio (Kegelstatt) provides one fine example; unfortunately, the eight pieces that Bruch wrote late in life for the combination, while agreeable, are not in the same class at all; the unpretentious Glinka pieces were at least their equal in simple musical charm.

Though I remember clearly my first hearing of the enchanting Mozart piece, in the record department of a Wellington department store in the 1970s, I have always been disappointed with the premature ending of the first movement whose richness of inspiration seems to me to be worth at least ten minutes. Nothing could have been more ravishing that the warmth of these three instruments in the lively acoustic of the Paekakariki hall, with its very acceptable piano. One of the benefits of the violin transcription is the prominence of the viola, given at least equal status with the clarinet in the original version; Peter Garrity took full advantage of the beautiful writing in the second movement, relishing the extensive passages in its low register.

For the clarinet part, Mozart seeks to demonstrate its tonal beauty as much as the skill of the player – his friend Stadler – and Cristina Vaszilcsin’s violin simply matched the viola’s voice: the two were so at one.

The piano was in equally happy accord, and Catherine McKay’s bell-like contributions in the Finale created such a joyous experience.

Four of Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces for these instruments (Nos 1, 2, 4 and 5), filled out the first half: pleasant, well-made but, apart from the characteristic No 5, Romanian melody, hardly memorable.

The last piece in the concert was another somewhat slight work – Glinka’s transcriptions of three Russian songs – tastefully crafted transcriptions, to which the trio brought the same idiomatic care that they had to the other pieces in the programme. 

The second half had opened with Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata, a somewhat discursive, richly decorative work, but convincing evidence of Strauss’s ability to create and sustain interest in an extended form.  Violinist and pianist moved readily to Strauss’s late romantic opulence – two thirds of it anyway, as Cristina Vaszilcsin begged the audience’s forgiveness for omitting the sonata’s last movement, suggesting a visit to Greytown where she and Catherine McKay would play it all.

Such a cut would only have been a problem for those who knew it well enough for the sound of the tantalizing start of the Finale to come into their heads at the end of the Andante cantabile. Nevertheless, all would have been grateful for the romantically seductive performance of the two movements, so much at home with the yearning arpeggiated motifs of the Allegro and the seductive Andante with its pretty, Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos)-like little tune, and ending on a quiet note. The odd blemish in the piano passed almost unnoticed, such was the charm and rapport shown by the two. Nevertheless, it did leave the little question, as we were left rather wanting more Strauss, why its last movement was cut and the little Glinka pieces put in its place.

 

Serenade No 10, Op 79 (Persichetti), three movements of String Quartet in E minor, Op 44 No 2 (Mendelssohn), Introduction and Allegro (Ravel)

NZSO National Youth Orchestra principals

St Andrew’s on The Terrace, lunchtime Wednesday 1st July

The long-standing, free lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s on The Terrace, most Wednesdays, present a great variety of music: jazz, brass and military bands, student groups, ethnic ensembles, as well as conventional, classical music – solo singers, piano, chamber groups, choirs.

This was the week that the National Youth Orchestra gathered for rehearsals in preparation for their major concert at the weekend; eight section principals took time out to play chamber music.

The result was a most rewarding concert.

A few years ago a composer like Vincent Persichetti would have been slightly disparaged, for music that was rather traditional in form and tonal character, failing to exploit the latest academic fashions. Happily, his music can now be enjoyed without apology; in any case, no one could mistake its idiom as anything but of the past 40 years. It employed Lucy Anderson on flute and Ingrid Bauer on harp who played it with sensitivity and alacrity. It consisted of eight very short movements, starting with an Andante prelude that involved some pitchless strumming by the harp. The following sections alternated between allegros and slow pieces, in clearly delineated moods, rhythms. The third section – Andante Grazioso – giving the flute some charming, diatonic, legato music, was nevertheless keen-edged and pithy, and the fourth section, even slower, was more warm-toned, with subtle flute vibrato, echoing Debussy and Ravel.

In the penultimate movement – Adagietto – flute and harp randomly dropped languid notes with tact and musicality.

The Mendelssohn string quartet was without its short Scherzo, second movement; we heard the best of it, one of his finest, deeply felt chamber works. The playing by these four young musicians made me think of the way many a famous string quartet has begun, with four gifted conservatorium students finding an affinity and a determination to devote themselves to the most refined and sophisticated of musical genres.

Leader Amalia Hall has been in the eye of the musical public for some years and Ben Morrison, second violin, has already gained something of a soloist’s reputation: their playing respectively subdued or emphatically vivid or dynamically subtle. Violist Nicholas Hancox was heard in beautifully calm, meandering passages in the Andante, while one was always aware of cellist Edward King’s attentive underpinning of the textures and musical lines as well as on his own.

The performance held the attention throughout.

A rare chance to hear, live, Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro was, for me, the main draw of this concert. (I indulge myself remembering my first hearing with an Air Force friend, musically more educated than I, during a Sunday off during CMT at Taieri Air Base in 1956).

It involved, in addition to the string quartet, flutist Hannah Darroch, clarinettist Hayden Sinclair and again, Ingrid Bauer. The placing of woodwinds to the left and the harp to the right of the four string players contributed to the sonic interest of the piece which danced and shimmered – echoes of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau of a few years before. Flute and clarinet listened to each other to find a beguiling tonal blend.

As explained in the interesting programme note, it was intended as a demonstration of the powers of the pedal harp, commissioned by the leading Paris piano house, Érard, in reaction to competition from Pleyel’s new chromatic harp for which Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane had been commissioned.

So it was to be expected that the harpist should make the most of her quasi-soloist role and there was no denying the arresting character of her cadenza with its perhaps exaggerated dynamic contrasts between her right and left hands.

The gathering of such a combination of instruments, permitting less familiar and often very beautiful chamber works to be played, is rare and the result, especially from such sensitive players, should never be missed.

 

Piano Quartet No 2 in A, Op 26 (Brahms), Piano Quartet (Schnittke), Piano Quartet No 1 in C minor, Op 15 (Fauré)

Michael Houstoun – piano, Wilma Smith – violin, Gillian Ansell – viola, Ashley Brown – cello 

Memorial Hall, Waikanae, Sunday 28 June

 

I gather that the impulse for this happy ensemble came from the Waikanae Music Society, and that its creation inspired other concert promoters to invite them to perform: the Wairarapa Music Group and Expressions Arts Centre in Upper Hutt. Wilma Smith, the first leader of the New Zealand String Quartet and now co-concert master of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; Gillian Ansell, her original quartet colleague – first second violinist, then violist in the quartet, and Ashley Brown, principal cello of the Auckland Philharmonia and cellist in the New Zealand Trio; and of course Michael Houstoun himself who needs no introduction. 

The second of Brahms’s two piano quartets, written in his twenties, is longer and less seductive (superficially anyway) than the first, even though it is in the happy key of A major. The performance itself expressed a warm unanimity of feeling and sensibility, as if the four had played together for many years (most of them had, though not continuously). The atmosphere they generated had a surprisingly intimate, domestic air, as if they were playing in a much smaller venue than the vast sports hall in which these concerts take place (it was needed for this concert that attracted over 500).

Where I was sitting, there was no reverberation at all, and I missed that a little, for the Brahms would have flourished better with a more opulent, spacious sound. The first movement was calm, capturing the vacillating emotions that the main theme suggests, though it didn’t provide the cello with as interesting a part as one might have expected in certain passages. Houstoun took full stock of the bold piano-led theme that comes unexpectedly in the middle of the Poco Adagio which slowly subsided into a more intimate phase with a richly harmonised, rhapsodic episode; it was the most beguiling of the four movements. There were a few blemishes in the dense piano octaves in the Scherzo and though the quartet captured the headlong, rhythmic, mid-sentence beginning of the Finale there were a few flaws here too.

Nevertheless, it was a very fine and persuasive performance of a piece that should be better known.

The Schnittke quartet was what one expects of him: it is not everyone’s taste, even for the adventurous, with its feeling of determined chaos tangling unnaturally (in my view at least) with short snatches of familiar music – here a theme from Mahler’s youthful piano quartet, hardly very familiar anyway. The performance defied any real possibility of judging its technical accuracy, for its demands were ferocious and just a little outlandish for all players and the energy and commitment with which these thoroughly rehearsed musicians tackled it left, to say the least, a feeling of total accomplishment, even triumph.

Fauré’s first piano quartet is one of the most charming in the repertoire. Here, the players’ skills were not subjected to such technically taxing music, but to the perhaps more rewarding challenge of creating from the most attractive and essential resources of the instruments, the most beguiling, beautiful music. So perfect was their unity of conception, that it was as if one mind was guiding all four players, through the muted trio section of the Scherzo, through the gentle, elegiac mood of the Adagio; as if the player were playing for each other before they were even thinking about the wider audience.

That is the essence of chamber music: an intimate communion among friends. The last movement reinforced all the virtues that had been audible earlier, the exquisitely judged rubato, wonderfully natural rise and fall of dynamics, but exercised on music of even more unpretentious beauty than they had available to them in the earlier pieces.