Tag: chamber music

Mulled Wine at Paekakariki: singing with cello and piano

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Handel arias: ‘Cara speme’ (Giulio Cesare), ‘Credete al mio dolore’ (Alcina); Schubert: ‘Du bist die Ruh’, Suleika and Suleika’s 2nd Song;

Dorothy Buchanan: The Man who sold goldfinches (to words by Jeremy Commons);

Fauré: ‘Après un rêve’ for cello and piano, songs ‘Clair de lune, Nell’, ‘C’est l’extase’. ‘Notre amour’; Duparc: ‘Chanson triste’, ‘Extase’, L’invitation au voyage; Poulenc: ‘C’, ‘Fêtes galantes’.

Rhona Fraser (soprano), Richard Mapp (piano), Paul Mitchell (cello)

Paekakariki Memorial Hall; Sunday 29 March 2009

Once a railway township and down-market beach settlement, Paekakariki has become an artists’ haven in recent decades, with good reason, for it has most of the virtues sought by those for whom material goodies are not a priority. The sea, wide coastal open spaces, mountains to the east, the home of a railway preservation society and a nearby tramway museum, both with functioning trains and trams together with a bravely preserved and restored railway station, perhaps the last survivor of the grand refreshment stations from the tragically devastated passenger network that we now need more than ever; and of course, the presence in the village of others of like minds and values.

Let’s focus on the music.

At the concert’s heart was a newly written collaboration between opera historian and occasional impresario and librettist Jeremy Commons and composer Dorothy Buchanan. They have worked together before, notably in another Mansfield opera, an opera trilogy based on three of her stories. This time Commons combed the Wellington stories for words, impressions, events and the very words of the stories and on which she may have reflected in her last days in the institute run by the probable charlatan (though her biographer Anthony Alpers thought not) Gurdjieff, near Fontainebleau.

The result was a sort of prose poem, The Man who Sold Goldfinches, that Buchanan set to music that I felt rather failed to ignite, to achieve memorableness: perhaps the emphasis on the obvious phrase about the goldfinches rather revealed a struggle to find musical inspiration.

Yet the setting had its integrity, accompanied sensitively, appropriately, by Paul Mitchell’s cello (Katherine herself played the cello), and it was that, as much as the perceptive singing of Rhona Fraser that sustained interest through the performance.

The rest of the concert was a happy opportunity to hear an under-exposed singer whose career has included singing with English National Opera and elsewhere in Europe. Since returning to New Zealand I’ve heard her, notably, as Galatea in New Zealand Opera’s production of Handel’s masque Acis and Galatea a few years ago. 

It indeed included a couple of dramatically sung Handel arias: ‘Cara speme’ from Giulio Cesare and ‘Credete al mio dolore’ from Alcina, drawing some too strident high notes not well treated in the hard acoustic of the hall. The other songs – Schubert, Fauré, Duparc, Poulenc – were beautifully sung, with considerable dynamic variety and tonal colour, none more brilliant than Poulenc’s Fêtes galantes. Her encore, the lovely ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi, simply posed the question why she is not in high demand by our opera companies.

 

 

 

The Eroica Trio’s seductive Town Hall concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CHAMBER MUSIC NEW ZEALAND – THE EROICA TRIO

Music by Lalo, Villa-Lobos, Schoenfield and Mendelssohn

Erika Nikrenz (piano) / Suzie Park (violin) / Sara Sant’Ambrogio (‘cello)

Wellington Town Hall,

Tuesday 24th March

Described in a preview to the group’s recent Wellington concert as “three Sassy women who put the sex back into symphony”, the Eroica Trio, here in New Zealand on its second tour, charmed a Town Hall audience with its familiar combination of visual glamour and a winning stage presence, playing a sprightly, easy-on-the-ear programme of music by Lalo, Villa-Lobos, Paul Schoenfield and Mendelssohn. I thought the three musicians had to work quite hard to sufficiently project this largely affable, and for the listener, relatively undemanding programme of music throughout the venue’s voluminous spaces, a feat that to their credit they managed to achieve by beautifully-tailored teamwork and impressively sustained concentration upon the task. In none of these works were those grand, impassioned gestures that one finds in the trios of Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak or Shostakovich, statements whose melodies, accents and rhythms leap from the instruments and pin back audiences’ ears, making for unforgettable listening experiences – even the D minor storms and stresses of the finale of Mendelssohn’s work didn’t explore much outside the realm of a drawing-room sensibility.

The concert began with Edouard Lalo’s C minor Trio, an early work (1850), and one of three written for this instrumental combination by the composer. This was a work that, perhaps unfairly, considering its place in the composer’s output, reinforced my opinion of Lalo’s music in general – pleasant, well-crafted stuff, designed to charm and entertain an audience without ruffling anybody’s sense of well-being or delving into recesses suggesting disturbances below the surface. When one turns to the music of Lalo’s almost exact contemporary, Cesar Franck, one is in a diametrically different sound-world of expressive depth of feeling, joyful, passionate and mystical. However, to be fair one would need to hear more of Lalo’s work in this genre, such as the Third, and much later (1880) Piano Trio, before indulging in such grandiloquent comparative judgements! The Eroica brought out the music’s charm and craftsmanship with some beautifully dove-tailed teamwork set against many a beguiling solo, with the ‘cello invariably given the thematic ‘lead-in’ to each movement by the composer.

The Villa-Lobos work is probably better-known as a piece for eight ‘cellos and soprano voice, though it’s been arranged for many an instrumental combination over the years. The composer adored the music of Bach, and paid homage to that great genius by writing nine pieces entitled Bachianas Brasilieras, of which the work played this evening was the fifth. I thought the arrangement (by Brazilian composer Raimundo Penaforte) worked better and better as the piece progressed, particularly the ‘cello’s contributions, and with beautifully expressive work from the strings at the piece’s end.

Café Music was described somewhat disarmingly by its composer, American-born Paul Schoenfield, as “high-class dinner music…which might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall”. This performance began with a roar and continued with a swing, with plenty of leaning-into and -away-from beats, slurring of notes for expressive effect and high-kicking, hip-swinging momentum – music marked by energetic drive throughout, though one could imagine that more variation in tempo would characterise different episodes of the music more tellingly, such as with the characterful and languid violin solo just before the end of the movement.

A ‘bluesy’ piano solo at the next movement’s beginning invited a similarly sultry response from the strings, which didn’t quite happen – I could imagine the response being several shades ‘dirtier’ than the sweet, relative innocence of Suzie Park’s violin playing, though her duetting with ‘cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio at the reprise of the movement’s ‘big tune’ was lovely, heartfelt stuff. The finale was little short of a full-frontal assault, with the instruments scrubbed, yanked, stretched and twisted, made to sound at their extremes, and the piano scampering along keystone-cops style, occasionally calling the strings to attention before dashing headlong into another orgy of wild exhilaration, everybody hugely enjoying themselves, listeners included!

Mendelssohn’s D Minor Piano Trio promised much, with markings such as the first movement’s Molto allegro ed agitato and the finale’s allegro assai appassionato suggesting something of the dynamism and sharply-etched focus of parts of the composer’s symphonies. Apart from a somewhat rigidly-phrased first rhetorical climax which needed a touch more amplitude to properly tell, the players realised the movement’s ebb and flow skilfully, rescuing the second subject’s initial melodic sentimentality with a finely-judged surge of burgeoning activity. Some of Mendelssohn’s themes, perhaps due to the composer’s amazing technical facility, seem too easily wrought, this aforementioned second subject being a particularly smug example until the dramatic coda, where the theme is spiked with a minor strain, changing its character to one of great agitation.

A sensitive treatment of the ‘song without words’ ambience of the slow movement was followed by a scherzo in the composer’s distinctive tradition, elfin scamperings and insistent patternings keeping the players instruments whispering, bubbling, chattering and occasionally trumpeting (to spontaneous applause from the audience at the end). The finale brought some Sturm und Drang to bear on the proceedings, even if the demons weren’t quite of the disturbing order of, for example, Schumann’s. The music’s drive through various agitations towards the work’s G Major resolution brought out the evening’s best playing from the Trio, committed and thrustful on all fronts. And if I would have rather they’d left the evening’s music-making at that, instead of giving us a somewhat syrupy trio arrangement of Saint-Saëns’ ubiquitous Le Cygne as an encore, it was a view that wasn’t shared by the audience. Anyway, by now the unfortunate bird ought to be well used to such treatment – what price fame!

Adam Chamber Music Festival at Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival (A selection of events from the Festival)

Nelson, Marborough, Motueka, Golden Bay  

23 January to 7 February 2009

Cynics often remark, a propos of the hoo-hah surrounding ‘world premieres’, that second performances, like second editions of novels, are much rarer than first ones. So the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson has already entered the sphere of the remarkable by reaching its tenth.

It began in 1992, the brainchild of New Zealand String Quartet second violin Doug Beilman and NZSO violinist, the late Stephen Managh, and cellist James Tennant. The ambition then was for annual festivals but after the second festival, in 1993, it has prospered as a biennial event with the continued huge support from the Adam Foundation.

The artistic management has now moved to two of Beilman’s colleagues, Helene Pohl and Gillian Ansell. In the past there have been some famous and exciting ensembles and soloists from around the world: few more so than the Prazak Quartet, one of the world’s greatest string quartets; it also remains an important date in the diaries of many leading New Zealand, Australian, American and other musicians.

The festival’s administration, at first in the hands of Cindy Flook with logistic support from her husband, landscape architect Ron, has been assumed this year by Wellington music administrator Roger Lloyd. It is also necessary to acknowledge the many years of dedicated guidance by chair of the Festival’s Trust, Colleen Marshall.

 

Mendelssohn and More II

Beethoven and Mendelssohn Quartets: respectively Op 132 and Op 13, in A minor

New Zealand String Quartet, Prazhak Quartet

St John’s Methodist Church, Monday 2 February

The 1pm concert at St John’s on Monday featured both quartets in a special programme offering an example of Mendelssohn’s devotion to his predecessors. Having heard the first quartet, Op 12, on the Sunday, a work in which Beethoven’s influence is clear enough, this concert was specifically devoted to playing Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op 132 on which Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No 2, Op 13 was modelled.

Gillian Ansell spoke about the thematic and spiritual relationship between the two works and the New Zealand String Quartet began with the Mendelssohn. It couldn’t have been written by Beethoven even though only a year or so younger than Beethoven’s, in 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death. But it was by an 18-year-old, a composer 40 years younger, and its spirit was of a later era. In place of the great slow movement in Beethoven’s quartet, Mendelssohn’s Adagio has a somewhat sentimental feel, even though there is weight and it is meditative in a way that few young men of his age would manage. In the NZSQ’s hands it was affecting nevertheless. It’s as if the young composer whose compositional skills were already astonishingly mature, knew what it should be like but lacked the years of disillusion and frustration, and spiritual ecstasy, that fed Beethoven’s late works.

Given all that, this was a very significant performance by the New Zealand String Quartet, the fruit of some years devoted to study of Mendelssohn’s chamber music. It was generous to give the Beethoven to the Prazak Quartet, for it gave the audience the chance to hear them in one of the great masterpieces, in a performance that was a study in Beethoven’s expression of unimaginable emotion: the wit, flippancy, torment, spiritual power equalled by hardly any other composer before or since.

Mendelssohn hardly scratched the surface of all that, and the Prazak Quartet had the key to it. It was yet another Nelson concert that ended with the audience, emerging into the midday sun, bemused and many without words.

Coda

There was a concert at Motueka on Monday afternoon, 2 February, by American guitarist, David Tanenbaum. It was the most disappointing concert of my festival and I concluded that he was having a bad day.

I left Nelson on the Tuesday of the second week; the festival continued till Saturday, 7 February, with several great concerts to come: Mendelssohn’s Octet and his Quartet Op 18; another Piers Lane concert, repeating in part his Blenheim one; the Prazak in Blenheim repeating the Dvorak Quintet plus Haydn’s Emperor Quartet; the Prazak Quartet and others in Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, and York Bowen, Schubert, Webern; a New Zealand programme with Farr, Whitehead, Rimmer and Ian Whalley featuring Richard Nunns on taonga puoro; Schubert’s String Quintet in C and a grand finale including Tchaikovsky, Kenneth Young, Haydn and Bartok.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mendelssohn and More I: Music by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and Schumann

Prazhak Quartet, Piers Lane (piano), Rolf Gjelsten (cello), Jenny Wollerman (soprano)

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 1 February

The first phase of the mini-Mendelssohn festival featured the Prazak Quartet, Piers Lane and other musicians. Cellist Rolf Gjelsten was the first of the others, playing Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata, Op 38, with Piers Lane; it’s a wonderful, ripe, joyous work of fearful difficulty. Mendelssohn is in his characteristic scherzo vein right from start; the score, filled with melody, drives both players through high-speed, finger-breaking gymnastics. The quintessential Romantic, even with its Bachian echoes, appears in the Adagio where the players met the sonata’s demands, not exactly with ease, but leaving both audience and themselves breathless.

Piers then played four Songs Without Words, perhaps to recover his composure, with sparkle and affection. The concert was as much about Mendelssohn’s musical milieu as about him, and we next heard Jenny Wollerman singing three songs each by Felix and his sister Fanny. Her songs were charming enough, as sung with simple clarity by Wollerman, but they lacked the assurance and polished melodic and expressive genius of her brother.

They included Frage, Die Liebende schreibt and ended with the very fine Sukeika, the ecstatic quality of which Wollerman expressed with conviction. The String Quartet, Op 12, was played by the Prazak Quartet. It’s the mark of the most gifted players that they can infuse a work that is not in the ‘great’ class with a depth of feeling and sense of the inevitable that seems to raise it almost to the level of Mozart and Beethoven whose influence in this work is overt. That they did from its very opening phrases: glorious ensemble, each instrument lending its own colour and exact weight to the balance of the whole.

Schumann’s most inspired chamber work, the Piano Quintet, Op 44, had its connection with Mendelssohn through his playing the piano part at its premiere, when Clara, who would have played it, was pregnant. This too was performed by the Prazak Quartet with Piers Lane and, to my prejudiced ears, demonstrated Schumann’s superior creative gifts, through the strength and individuality of melody, driven by a rare musical impulse that was also guided by sure feeling for shape and all the elements that hold an extended structure together.

This performance left me with the confirmation that its finale is simply one of the most thrilling things in the chamber music repertoire.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Floating Bride

Songs, violin sonata and piano trio by Fauré, Harris, Elgar, Brahms

Jenny Wollerman, Piers Lane, Douglas Beilman, Helene Pohl, Rolf Gjelsten

Nelson School of Music, Saturday 31 January

Piers Lane is a top international pianist and he should fill a house of reasonable size anywhere in the world. Here he did not play solo and was happy to be simply a collegial musician: he accompanied singers, a violinist and took the piano part in a trio. But his presence, his modesty and ready collaboration as equal partner with other musicians were a constant delight.

It opened with Jenny Wollerman singing, first, three Fauré songs: Les roses d’Ispahan, Au bord de l’eau and Après un rêve. There was a little much graininess in Wollerman’s voice in the first but her normal purity of tone returned in the second; for the third, her voice was perhaps a bit too wide awake to portray her state on waking from a dream.

Then came Ross Harris’s new song cycle, The Floating Bride, The Crimson Village, settings of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan that were inspired by paintings of Chagall; a project that Harris had himself suggested to O’Sullivan. They were sung most skillfully and imaginatively by Jenny Wollerman whose discreet gestures and body movement – in The Dancer for example – helped her interpretation: and though the settings did not always aim to reflect the sense or feeling of the words, they often created visual images that were surprisingly evocative of Chagall’s paintings.

The piano part was quite elaborate, sometimes even, as in The Ladder to the Moon or Give me a Green Horse, drawing the attention away from the voice and Lane did them proud with careful, detailed handling.

Piers Lane’s next job was to play Elgar’s Violin Sonata with Douglas Beilman. This late piece, of the vintage of Elgar’s Piano Quintet and the String Quartet, demands warm and passionate playing and it flourished with Beilman’s flawless performance on his opulently-toned instrument and Lane’s fluent and commanding playing, from the dramatic to the feathery and lyrical. The thoroughly prepared, beautifully balanced partnership made it something of a revelation both to those familiar with it and to others.

In Brahms’s Second Piano Trio Lane was joined by Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten; the opening passage was magically subdued but there was full-blooded playing later in the movement and a sparkling, quirky Scherzo. For all Brahms’s alleged antipathy to the Romantics around him, this work proves he’s a fully paid-up composer of his age of high Romanticism.

The riches of the entire concert reinforced the disappointment that it had not attracted the full house that it deserved.

Blenheim concert by Piers Lane for Adam Chamber Music Festival

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Piers Lane in Blenheim

Beethoven (Andante favori), Brahms (Piano Sonata Op 5), Chopin (Preludes Op 28)

Brancott Winery, Blenheim,

Thursday 29 January 2009

At lunchtime in the Nelson School of Music there was a charming recital from Swedish soprano Catrin Johnsson and New Zealand pianist Rachel Fuller in songs by Mozart, Sibelius, Stenhammer and from less-than-familiar Broadway sources.

The scene changed in the evening, with a 2-hour drive to the Montana Brancott Winery, out of Blenheim, for a 6.30pm recital of Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin from pianist Piers Lane. Here the setting might have been a little too intimate for the good of the piano, a vintage Steinway that has been refurbished but whose somewhat uneven articulation was audible. The capacity of the recital room was suitable but the low ceiling provided very little space for the sound to expand. Thus we heard Lane under slightly less than perfect conditions.

What he played was unexceptionable. He began with Beethoven’s Andante favori (an early try at a slow movement for the Waldstein Sonata): piano album Beethoven if you like, but a well crafted and very attractive piece which Lane treated with rhythmic and dynamic subtlety.

Brahms Third Piano Sonata, his first great work, Op 5, was different; it demonstrate the rugged side of Brahms which is never far absent from most of his later output. It is not often included in concert programmes and is thus a true festival piece. Lane’s brief introduction for an audience not necessarily well-acquainted with the repertoire was well judged, and he thus felt justified in giving them a performance that made no concessions to the faint-hearted. The care he was able to take with the subtleties, both lyrical and rhetorical, was of course tempered by the shortcomings of the piano, but it did not affected in any real way the drama and tonal variety, the careful dynamic and tempo changes.

The second half was given over to Chopin’s complete 24 Preludes which were an even better opportunity to observe Lane’s poetic sensitivity, a myriad of colours and emotions, though the wayward action of the piano did cause unevenness in weight and regularity in fast runs and passagework.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Janacek (Quartet No 2 – The Kreutzer Sonata), Martinu (Quartet No 7), Dvorak (String Quintet, Op 97)

Prazak Quartet

Nelson Cathedral, Wednesday 28 January

On the sixth day of the festival came the concert that many of the committed chamber music passionnées had most looked forward to. The superb Prazak Quartet had their own concert, and played music entirely from their homeland. It followed the pattern of all good concerts, with one very familiar, ravishingly beautiful work, one slightly less known but one which has attained masterpiece stature more recently, and a more modern but very accessible piece that scarcely anyone would know.

In the Cathedral again (this festival used the Cathedral more than previous festivals have), the quartet opened with Janacek’s first quartet, named The Kreutzer Sonata, because Janacek was moved by the fate of the heroine in Tolstoi’s novella. Many in Wellington will recall the intriguing theatrical adaptation of the story, presented at Bats Theatre early last year with the Nevine Quartet playing Janacek’s music,. There is a tendency to allow the character of the work to translate into somewhat harsh expression, with bows tugging violently on the strings.

These players approached it as if it was Beethoven or perhaps Dvorak, with tone that was rich and sensuous, not even allowing the anguished little motif that appears first on the cello to sound other than beautiful. They seemed to be telling the audience to find the emotion in the music itself and not by having it driven into their ears by the players’ insistent interpretations. It struck me as a lesson that composers who exploit the ugly extremes of instrumental sounds to depict anger, nastiness or tragedy might do well to think about.

The result was a performance that went to the heart, yet missed nothing of the complex emotions by which Janacek responded to the tragic tale with which he could so well identify. Martinu’s 7th String Quartet was composed just after the Second World War when he harboured the hope that he might be able to return from the United States to his country; it uses Czech-flavoured themes and reflects optimism.

That it is not a great work cannot be ascribed to the fact that it shuns the avant-garde styles of the time. There is vitality and melodic charm, especially in the second movement, but Martinu’s distinctive fingerprints are not as marked as usual. Its spirit flowed from his hopeful mood after the war and seems to have more in common with the early 19th century than with a century later. Regardless of its character, I cannot imagine a performance more persuasive than what we heard from the Prazak Quartet.

The Cathedral had fallen into darkness during the first half so that by the time Dvorak’s String Quintet, Op 97, began, the players were silhouetted in front of the back wall of the sanctuary, beautifully lit in deep blue. This is one of the two or three best-loved of Dvorak’s chamber music works, overflowing with rich melodies that evolve, interweave and relate to each other in the most engrossing way.

It is scored for two violas, like Mozart’s string quintets, and the violist of the New Zealand String Quartet, Gillian Ansell, took the other viola part. It meant that she played the striking opening phrase of the first movement and also that of the third movement. In fact, this piece gives unusually prominent and beautiful music to the two violas and cello, allowing those players especially to shine and to delight in the special richness afforded by an extra low instrument.

As far as one could tell from the point of view of a mere onlooker, Gillian’s rapport with her colleagues was warm and musically intimate and her contribution was beautifully integrated with that of the Czech players. It was a performance of unequalled splendour and intensity of an especially inspired work from one of the richest eras of music-making in history.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Schubert for all

Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887

New Zealand String Quartet

St John’s Methodist Church, Tuesday 27 January

At 1pm the festival broke ground by presenting a free concert in St John’s Methodist Church and Nelson responded by filling it. It was no miscellany of pop classics: the New Zealand String quartet was determined to give the people the real thing, Schubert’s String Quartet in G, D887 – his last quartet and a piece that cellist Rolf Gjelsten, in his introductory comments, placed together with Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op 131, as the greatest masterpiece in the quartet repertoire. It’s a ranking I support, in spite of the popularity of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and A minor quartets.

It was a revelatory, emotionally powerful performance of the almost hour-long work that indeed illustrated the mixture of despair, anger, resignation and joy that Gjelsten had bid the audience to listen for.

Though free concerts can send out the wrong messages to the masses about professionalism and actual the costs of presenting good music, isolated and well-judged excursions can awaken to great music those whom it has somehow bypassed.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Flights of Fancy: music by Handel, Falla, Piazolla, Persichetti, De Castro Robinson, Grenfell, Andres, Fauré, Ravel, Ibert

Flight: Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp)

Chanel Arts Centre, Motueka, Sunday 25 January

At 2pm a Family Concert entitled Animal Antics took place in the School of Music. It featured Carnival of the Animals and Poulenc’s Babar the Elephant, with accompaniment from four of New Zealand’s finest pianists – Michael Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp and Emma Sayers, and the narratives, Ogden Nash in the case of the Carnival, were spoken by Helen Moulder.

It clashed however with a concert at Motueka called Flights of Fancy, from Flight, the flute and harp duo of Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills: that’s what I chose. Reports of the Animals concert from those who’d been there made me regret being unable to spirit myself from Nelson to Motueka at 4pm.

Flights of Fancy met with a rather small audience, possibly because some people wonder if the two instruments can sustain their delight for two hours. The concert began with one of Handel’s flute sonatas, the harpsichord part nicely transferred to the harp.

The balance of the concert was slightly skewed however because an arm injury that has afflicted Carolyn Mills, stopped her playing one of the De Falla pieces, a piece by American, John Thomas, as well as Bach’s Flute Sonata in C. The rest of the programme consisted of fairly recent music, both New Zealand and foreign, plus a final set of three happy and familiar French pieces that left the audience content.

The unfamiliar pieces were chosen with a certain flair. Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Pearls of the Sea called for the novel sound of the bass flute, and for a variety of unorthodox sounds – glissandi, tapping the harp’s soundboard and the keys of the flute. Four Pooh Stories came from a second New Zealand composer, Maria Grenfell, again creating an original sound world that was often droll and perhaps trite but evocative of A A Milne.

Serenade No 10 by American composer Persichetti comprised eight very brief and very different movements that seemed to call for a visual programme of some kind. But I most enjoyed a suite of pieces by Bernard Andres called Narthex, depictions of stained glass in French churches of Cluny and Saint Lazare, with their evocation of medieval Christian imagery through clear, vivid melodies: refreshing, straightforward stuff…

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Saturday Clash

Concertante: Clarinet Quintet (Anthony Ritchie), String Trio (Jindrich Feld), Caligraphy (Edward Ware), Sonata for flute, viola and harp (Debussy), Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, for violin and viola, K 364 (Mozart) 

New Zealand String Quartet; Prazak Quartet; Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills (Flight); Philip Green (clarinet)

Nelson Cathedral, Saturday 24 January

The festival’s second concert was blighted by the sort of misadventure that is familiar in a big city but ought not to happen in Nelson.

A major clash.

The Sealord Opera in the Park has been a major fixture in February each year for more than a decade. This time it moved, reportedly on account of the availability of certain singers, to Saturday 24 January, and thousands filled Trafalgar Park .It must have impacted on the size of the audience in the Cathedral: a great pity, for this was an exceptional concert.

Again, it employed both string quartets as well as the three other instrumentalists, in music that is almost never played in ordinary chamber music concerts. New music of an engaging character was again prominent.

First was a Clarinet Quintet (Op 124, no less!) by Anthony Ritchie, written for Christchurch arts patron Christopher Marshall in 2006: this was its third performance. If there were few reminders of its predecessors by Mozart and Brahms, there was a comparable sense of musical inevitability, of a composition that has arisen from genuine musical impulses rather than non-musical ideas, concepts, technical considerations. It feels as if conceived in purely music terms in large bites, with a structure that suggested a strong sense of shape, giving no impression of note-spinning or routine passage-work.

Clarinettist Philip Green opened with playing that was remote, disembodied, suddenly displaced by ethereal string harmonics, and players of the New Zealand String Quartet then entered, leading without pause to an Allegro energico: sanguine, jazzy, very grounded and carrying hints of the famous Clarinet Concertino by Ritchie’s father, John. The slow movement employed a quotation from Ritchie’s opera, The God Boy, first on the clarinet, expressing anxiety according to the programme notes.

The Prazak Quartet then played, without second violinist, a String Trio by Jindrich Feld, a Czech composer who died in 2007. This work supports one’s impression that mainstream music has largely broken free of the complex, the intellectual, the disdaining of melody or delight that blighted it through the mid and late 20th century. An unpretentious piece in four pithy, engaging movements, with hints of Martinu in the second movement, motoric quavers expressing an optimistic mood in the last movement.

The third contemporary piece was Caligraphy for solo cello by Wellington-born composer Edward Ware, now living in Barcelona. This too held no terrors either for the audience or for cellist Rolf Gjelsten who gave it a compelling performance. The music’s idiom might have been of the 19th century, but by the end, there was no doubt that it was essentially closer in spirit to Bach.

The third of Debussy’s wartime sonatas, and the last to be completed, is for flute, viola and harp. Harpist Carolyn Mills confessed that it was her favourite piece for her instrument, and that was clear. I am less moved by Debussy’s big orchestral works than by his chamber and piano music and songs; and these players (Gillian Ansell was the violist) made it easy to be convinced by this sonata’s unique flavour and sonorities, its undiminished musical inspiration.

And the concert ended with a novelty: an arrangement published in 1817 for string sextet of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. No great violence was done to its character.

The sextet comprised both string quartets minus the two second violinists; the front desks were occupied by violinist Vaclav Remes and violist Josef Kluson, but they by no means dominated the solo parts. The orchestral parts are compressed to single string parts and the solo parts distributed among the other players, often the cellist instead of the violist.

Especially for anyone new to it, it sounded authentic, for the greatness of the work easily survives this sort of sympathetic treatment. My first exposure to it, aged round 20, was from a recording from the Casals Festival of 1951 at Perpignan, with soloists Isaac Stern and William Primrose. Ever since, most performances fall short. I was enchanted by this performance however, in spite of certain ensemble looseness, and had no problem with the reallocation of some of the music even though the solo passages hardly matched that ideal performance that resides in my soul.