Tag: choral

The Sixteen’s second concert, a cappella, a benchmark performance

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand International Arts Festival

The Sixteen  conducted by Harry Christophers

A cappella music by Tallis, Morley, Gibbons, Byrd, Sheppard, Tippett, Britten and James MacMillan

The Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 3 March 7.30pm

The second concert by The Sixteen was devoted to music by composers born in Britain, not simply one who spent most of his life in the country, as was the first of The Sixteen’s concerts.

Two groups of Tallis’s ‘Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter’ were sung, four at the beginning and four at the end of the concert. They were a sort of purifying wash to introduce the audience to singing that was not too complex – in fact the first began with four men singing in unison – allowing the unprepared ear to adjust to the acoustic of the hall and to sample the sounds of many individual voices.

The choir is perhaps a little unusual in having more men than women, though that is because parts otherwise sung by female altos are here sung by male altos (or counter-tenors). It lent the ensemble a quality that set the exemplary sopranos in marked contrast to the weight of males singing the other parts.

Tallis’s ‘Salvator mundi’, in Latin, was a striking illustration of Tallis’s versatility, coping with the dangers of religious dogma as the country moved back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism. And the choir demonstrated the contrast between Tallis’s setting of English and Latin texts as clearly as his shift from the vertical harmony of English music to traditional Latin polyphony.

The Latin element was very temporary and it was followed by English part-songs: Morley’s ‘April is in my Mistress’ Face’ and Gibbons’s very beautiful ‘The Silver Swan’; the weight and warmth of the men’s voices kept the mood from becoming too ‘hey-nonny-nonny’ in Byrd’s ‘This sweet and merry Month of May’. John Sheppard’s ‘In Manus Tuas III’ returned to a Latin text, opening with a demonstration of men’s voices in unison, and then a strong counter-tenor solo.

The first half finished in the 20th century however with, first, James MacMillan’s ‘Sedebit Dominus Rex’, given a subtle Scottish accent (it’s one of his Strathclyde Motets), an attractive separation of men’s and women’s roles, to produce singing of very great emotion.

There was a second piece from MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets later: a striking contribution by women’s voices as well as the gentle opening section by basses, marked his ‘Mitte manum tuum’, again quite short and technically approachable.

The best known part of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time – the five spirituals – brought the first half to an end, with several opportunities for strong solo voices, particularly female.

Yet, what is it about a composer’s fundamental well-spring of invention and emotional power that consigns almost all of his music – apart from arrangements of existing melodies – to museum status almost within his own lifetime? No want of trying on my part, yet I feel impelled to revisit almost nothing even of the music I have on my own CDs.

The second half was also a satisfying mixture of the 16th and the 20th centuries; It began with three more Latin motets by Tallis, each with its distinct character, reflected in the tempo, in the varying amounts of legato singing, and the vocal colours produced by the choir.

The curious little dissonances (remarked in the programme notes) gave ‘O nata lux’ vitality; the next, ‘O sacrum convivium’, was by contrast sombre, calm and quite extended. The third motet, ‘Loquebantur variis linguis’, cleverly simulated a complex tissue of disparate languages through elaborate counterpoint: even those without Latin could have worked it out.

There was another Byrd motet, his masterpiece ‘Laudibus in sanctis Dominum’, that seemed to mark him as an English composer, set to song-like music in which vertical harmonies were as audible as the elaborate counterpoint.

The other major contribution from the modern repertoire were the Choral Dances from Britten’s opera Gloriana. For long, these were about all that was much performed from an opera that was inexplicably felt to be a ritual occasional piece, but is now firmly placed among Britten’s greatest operas. I was delighted to catch a performance a couple of years ago in the Ruhr, in Germany. Britten himself arranged this unaccompanied version of the dances, and I have to say, heretically, they did not make quite the impression on me that the original operatic ones did. They emerged, for me, somewhat affected and bloodless; but the performance of them was far from that.

The choir presented an encore: an arrangement by choral composer Bob Chilcott of a Tallis anthem.

Finally, the programme booklet was a model. It provided a wealth of rich and informative material about the choir and its director, but also writings about the composers and their social and political situation, and evocative thoughts about the nature of the music itself, all of which might deepen listeners’ knowledge.

Not enough of the audience bought the programme however.

From time to time I express my view that programmes for concerts – and other performing arts too – should be provided free. For a year or so New Zealand Opera did that, but later reverted to the practice of confining them to those who could pay the fairly high price for them. That is to sacrifice a valuable opportunity to deepen and broaden the audience’s knowledge of what it is hearing, a matter of even more importance now that most of the population under 50 is approaching the more serious arts without the benefit of any formal exposure to them at school where the sounds of good music (and poetry and foreign languages) can be implanted, perhaps subliminally, in the minds of the young – when that faculty is at its most receptive.

The major cost of programmes lies in the preparation of the texts and the design and formatting of the printing; for the fruits of those efforts to be restricted to a minority of the audience is a sad lost opportunity to educate.

The programme also took the trouble to ask the audience to refrain from clapping between the items in a group; the fact that few on the audience had programmes meant that there was applause between the numbers in Tippett’s Five Spirituals.

Truly festive Handel with The Sixteen

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Coronation Anthem “Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened”

Motet: “Silete Venti” / Psalms: Nisi Dominus / Dixit Dominus

The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra / Conductor: Harry Christophers

Soloist (Silete Venti): Gilian Keith (soprano)

NZ International Festival of the Arts

Wellington Town Hall

Thursday 1st March, 2012

Now, this is the kind of concert in terms of impact and quality that helps make a festival worth remembering. The trappings were, in fact, few – there were no bugles, no drums, just people-generated excitement, right from the initial “buzz” of queuing outside to actually get into the Town Hall, and up to the moment that these world-famous musicians walked onto the platform in front of us to begin their concert.

I wonder if people who attend concerts actually realize what a treasure the WellingtonTown Hall is in respect of providing experiences whose memory seems to embrace the “occasion” as well as the performance – it’s partly my being a bit of an event junkie that squeezes these remarks out of me, but I couldn’t help reflecting on the difference in atmosphere between this concert and last week’s in the Michael Fowler Centre which opened the Festival. The Stravinsky performances were themselves terrific – but I feel the MFC needs a LOT of extraneous help for any event to really “buzz”, whereas the Town Hall simply reflects and enhances what’s already going on.

This was one of two concerts offered by The Sixteen (my concert companion nudged me fiercely at one point and hissed, “I think there are seventeen” (of them)! – shades of “The Sound of Music”?….). One could have had, as here, Handel in a grandly ceremonial manner, readily encompassing all manner of structures and emotions as befits the work of a composer writing for public occasions; or one could have turned, instead, to the rather more circumspect a capella world of various native British composers over a period of several centuries.

I would imagine that, after experiencing the group’s performances of Handel, there would be a number of concertgoers who, like myself, wished they had purchased tickets to both concerts. In the words of Shakespeare’s Henry V, we such unfortunates will on Saturday evening be as those “gentlemen of England now a-bed” who “shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here”. One must, however, thank one’s stars that one heard the group on at least one of the occasions. And after all, pleasure can still be had from imagining how wonderful a second concert WOULD be, having already enjoyed one (a case of “Heard melodies are sweet, but….”, perhaps)…

For those who enjoy chancing their arm with the prospect of picking up last-minute cancelled tickets, The Sixteen is indeed performing again on Saturday, 3rd March at the Town Hall at 7:30pm, a program of British a capella music, ranging from works by Thomas Tallis to those by James MacMillan. In the meantime one can enjoy recalling the highlights of the group’s Handel presentation, involving various soloists, choir and orchestra.

One noticed immediately the intense focus of the sound, both from singers and players, obviously steeped in a performing tradition which has undergone a considerable revolution over the last fifty years. The modus operandi of such groups as The Sixteen sits firmly upon using the forces that the composer would have expected, and producing the sounds in a style that corresponds with period musicologists’ findings. Happily, these strictures were accompanied in this case by a performing style that set great store on sounds with a variety of tone, colour and nuance (emanating from, or else mirrored by, the expressive gestures of conductor Harry Christophers, as non-metrical as one could ever hope to find) – though all within the parameters of accepted baroque practice.

Beginning with the Coronation Anthem “Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened”, orchestra and voices commanded the hall’s sound-vistas, the phrases having at once discernible focus but an ear-catching “bloom”, with everything precisely balanced – one could set one’s ear to “find” any line or texture it wanted and follow its course. The fugal character of the section “Let justice and judgement…” found the composer employing sounds of structures and balances, suggesting the power of law and order. Here, the individual lines took on plenty of character, the timbres being allowed to “sound” instead of subjected to a homogenous blend, so that one was always aware of a quartet-like texture. The lively “Alleluia” had a sensuous feel in the dovetailing of the lines, tied together with an appropriately celebratory concluding note.

Gillian Keith was the soprano soloist for the motet Silete Venti, the text a colorful and descriptive evocation of the bliss which comes with faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The soloist had pure, bell-like tones and flexible energy aplenty to do the music justice, though I thought in places a slightly “kittenish ” aspect crept into her singing, one rather at odds with the subject matter of the motet. The text, I thought, wasn’t without its idiosyncrasies – e.g. “If you strike you cause no wound, your blows are as caresses….” – pardon? Set against her slightly-less-than-crisp articulation of the words in places was a freedom and flexibility of impulse and movement which the singer used to negotiate her runs throughout “Date serta” with such winning ease and grace as to disarm other criticism. And her breathtaking energies in tackling the flourishes at the repeat of “Veni, vein transfige me” in the first part was matched in excitement by her feathery, stratospheric vocal dancings throughout the conclusion’s gigue-like “Alleluiahs”, singer and instrumentalists particularly enjoying things like the effervescent exchange of triplet figurations just before the end.

After the interval we were rejoined by the choir for the two psalm settings, Dixit Dominus and Nisi Dominus, both youthful works (Handel was in his early twenties), but displaying their composer’s great precocity, not only in choral writing, but in his use of the orchestra. The more spectacular of the works, the slightly earlier Dixit Dominus, was wisely left to the end. It would be tiresome to reproduce all of my scribbled notes, inspired by the performances’ many felicities, but certain things deserved to be savored, such as the quality of the contributions from the solo voices within the choir. In the first of the Psalm settings, Nisi Dominus, both tenor and bass made a telling impression, the former’s “Vanum set” a pleasingly-shaped vocal arch of flexible tones, and the latter’s fiery, properly warlike “Sicut sagittae in manu potentis” (As arrows in the hand of the mighty) properly pinning back our ears. Throughout, I liked the bringing forward to the front of the platform the soloists from the choir, making for an almost operatic effect, and giving each voice’s utterance its proper focus.

Dixit Dominus made for an exciting and sonorous conclusion to the evening in this performance – muscular energy at the outset from the orchestra and incisive lines from the choir launched the work with a will – the brief occasional solo lines, with the voices remaining within the choir, struggled in places to be properly heard, though a couple of the more brightly-focused voices managed to make their tones “tell” in the midst of the music’s cut-and-thrust activity. The more extended, out-the front solos were superbly done, and beautifully accompanied. I particularly liked the teamwork of soloists, choir and orchestra at “Dominus a dextris tuis”, the solo voices overlapping and interchanging words and phrases with almost operatic excitement, followed by the unleashing of tremendous tensions at the words “die irae” from choir and orchestra. Among other ear-catching moments was the choir’s pointed staccato treatment of “conquassabit capita in terra”, the words spat out like machine-gun fire, their effect made to sting! Following this the soprano duet “De torrent in via bibet” was of soothing balm, two differently-toned voices blending to great effect.

Impossible to do justice to everything, here – in general, I thought Handel’s music magnificently served throughout, the music’s energies liberated, the textures enlivened, the beauties savoured. The Town Hall’s acoustic gave the performances all the immediacy they deserved, enabling us to enjoy to the full the talents of The Sixteen, their orchestra and their obviously charismatic director. It wasn’t surprising to find people on their their feet applauding at the end, demonstrating their appreciation and enjoyment.

 

 

‘Does a cappella singing get better than this?’ – Wellington members of the New Zealand Youth Choir

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Choral songs and anthems by Handl, Bruckner, Pearsall, Bàrdos, Richard Madden, Stephen Lange, Anthony Ritchie, Andrew Baldwin, Helen Caskie, George Shearing, with arrangements by Douglas Mews, Christopher Marshall, Stephen Chatman

Wellington Members of the New Zealand Youth Choir, conducted by David Squire

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace church

Wednesday 29 February 2012, 12.15pm

It was gratifying to see the church nearly full for the thirteen members of the choir who sang an interesting and varied programme.

Immediately they began, the choir had a wonderful, confident sound.  The opening item, ‘Resonet in laudibus’ was by Jacob Handl, a sixteenth century Slovenian composer also known as Gallus.  The pure sounds in this sympathetic acoustic made it hard to believe that there were so few performers.  Balance between the parts was excellent throughout the concert.

A long-term favourite of the Choir followed: Bruckner’s beautiful ‘Locus Iste’.  The singers’ start was not quite together, but that could hardly spoil such a supreme pearl of choral writing.

Another chestnut for this choir was sung: Pearsall’s madrigal ‘Who shall win my lady fair?’, a nineteenth century composition.  Its performance demonstrated how well the choir sings out to the audience, but also, as elsewhere in the programme,  how the singers vary tone, expression and word style as appropriate for each item.  To me, this is the mark of a really good, flexible choir.  It is not just a matter of dynamics.  The expression in this song exhibited both charm and subtlety.  Stresses on important words were carefully observed.

The Hungarian composer Lajos Bàrdos’s ‘Libera me’ was next.  The men opened a shade sharp in pitch, but overwhelmingly, the a capella singing was impressively secure, even, as in this piece, when singing intervals of a second.  The piece traverses various pitches, moods and dynamics.  It is in several sections: first declamatory, then low-voiced and sombre, then gentle and melismatic.

We now turned to New Zealand compositions.  Richard Madden’s ‘I sing of a maiden’ has been around for a while now, and has lost none of its exquisite beauty and delicious clashes that resolve so mellifluously.  The piece featured soprano and tenor soloists.  The breath control was remarkable.  If the singers are as good as this under-rehearsed (as David Squire described it), they must certainly be New Zealand’s top choir when fully prepared.  It must not be forgotten that the New Zealand Youth Choir of 1999 won ‘Choir of the World’ in Cardiff.

Stephen Lange’s ‘The cloths of heaven’, composed to words of John Keats, was a difficult piece, with many enchanting discords.

Another NZYC favourite: Douglas Mews’s ‘Sea songs’, an arrangement of early New Zealand folk songs about whaling.  This was rollicking and characterful music on a subject distasteful to us today, but an important industry in the early days of colonisation, and before.

Christopher Marshall’s arrangement of the traditional Samoan ‘Minoi, minoi’ is one of the most delightfully rhythmic songs one will ever hear.  It reminds us how music and dance are all one in many parts of the world.  It was sung more lightly than I have sometimes heard it, which is appropriate to the words of the love-song.

Jeffrey Chang, tenor, sang two solos, giving the choir a rest, with Michael Stewart (former choir member) accompanying on the piano.  Chang announced the songs in a clear voice, loud enough to be easily heard (take note, New Zealand School of Music lecturers and students!).  David Squire’s announcements of the other items were made using a microphone.

The first solo was ‘Song’ by Anthony Ritchie, with wonderful words by James K. Baxter, speaking of Jesus as a human, and his characteristic of mercy.  It was beautifully sung: expressive, effective, with very clear words.  Both songs were sung from memory.

The second was an arrangement by former choir member Andrew Baldwin, of the spiritual ‘Deep River’.  This did not come off quite so well.  The performance did not sufficiently express the emotions of a slave in southern USA – it was too matter-of-fact in places, although there were some lovely moments.  The register was a little too low for this singer.

The choir returned with a traditional Newfoundland folk song, ‘She’s like the swallow’, arranged by Stephen Chatman.  It began with women’s voices only, then the men joined in.  Once again, the clarity of the words was notable.

New Zealand composer Helen Caskie has written a three-movement work ‘Ten Cent Mixture’, to amusing poems by Fiona Farrell.  The first tells the story of a sun-burnt kiwifruit.  Here I heard the first harsh tone in the concert; perhaps this was the result of introducing humour into the voices.  Next was a song about leaving your dreams behind when you go to school (oh dear!), and the third was about going to see Mr Prasad at the dairy to buy lollies.

These were lively and ingratiating settings, sung with animation.  The last song particularly was very funny, and sung in appropriate humorous style.

The concert wound up with an arrangement by Andrew Carter of George Shearing’s ‘Lullaby of Birdland’.  Just as the Caskie songs were sung in a suitably childish style, so this swing number was rendered in the proper style, American accent and all.

Most of this repertoire is to be presented in Hawke’s Bay in April, with all 48 members of the full choir; the audiences there are in for a treat.  Does a cappella singing get better than this?  I ask this as someone who has just heard the King’s Singers live, in the splendid acoustic of Hamilton’s Performing Arts Centre at the University of Waikato.

 

 

Stravinsky at the Festival: Distinguished performances of powerful works heard by too few

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand International Arts Festival

Stravinsky:   Symphony of Psalms and Oedipus Rex

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus (Michael Vinten, chorus master), Joana Carneiro (conductor), Stuart Skelton (Oedipus, tenor), Margaret Medlyn (Jocasta, mezzo-soprano), Daniel Sumegi (Creon; Messenger, bass-baritone), Martin Snell (Tiresias, bass), Virgilio Marino (shepherd, tenor), Rawiri Paratene (narrator, speaker)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 24 February 2012, 8pm

As a Festival opener, this programme obviously did not have the appeal of the Mahler Symphony no.8 performed at the last Festival, when the hall was packed, and there were people sitting out in Civic Square watching the performance on a huge screen and hearing it relayed on loudspeakers.  Another draw-card on that occasion was the presence of the famous Vladimir Ashkenazy as conductor.

This time, by no means all the seats in the hall were filled, which was a pity, because these were fine and powerful performances.

My first reaction was pleasure at the appearance of the programmes.  The printed programmes in 2010 had a ghostly pallor, and the letters so skinny you could have driven a bus between them.  This time, the font was Times New Roman or similar, there was plenty of ink, no back-grounding of text, and they could be read even during the performance – most important when full libretti and translations into English were generously provided.

The other feature of the programmes were the copious and detailed notes provided.  There was far too much to read before or during the concert, but they make very interesting reading afterwards.  The New Zealand Opera Company has in the past sent programmes ahead of the season to those who book in advance; this practice could have been adopted here, with benefit to the audience’s understanding and appreciation.

The Chapman Tripp opera chorus was obviously augmented; some familiar faces that one doesn’t usually see in the chorus, graced it on this occasion.  My first impression at the opening of the Symphony of Psalms was that the choir was too far distant from the orchestra and the audience, making the sound likewise distant, and therefore the words did not have the clarity they should have.  We got volume at times, but seldom clarity.  This was the fault of the hall and the placement of the choir, not directly of inadequacy on the choir’s part.  If the performance had been in the Town Hall, the problem would not have existed; there would have been more impact.   The problem did not exist with the Mahler two years ago, because the choir was very much bigger, though so too was the orchestra.

Stravinsky’s unusual orchestration for this work provides plenty of wind players, and cellos and basses plus harp, two pianos, and percussion, but no violins or violas.  Therefore there was lots of rich, resonant low bass sound, while the incisiveness and wonderful colours of the winds were more apparent than usual, especially in the delicious melodies with cross-rhythms, played between Psalm 38 and Psalm 39.

Psalm 38 opened with spiky rhythms but they didn’t continue.  Instead, the effect was of long melismatic lines, like old Russian chants, though the work was sung in Latin.

The verses from Psalm 39 were given gentler treatment than the incisive previous psalm.  Sonorities built up; there were dense harmonies and clashes providing a rich sound – although some of the sopranos were a little too strident.  The final verse, ‘He put a new song in my mouth…’ was thunderous in its praise to God.

An Alleluia preceded Psalm 150.  These passages were quiet; the distance between choir and orchestra didn’t matter so much here, and there was some lovely singing. However, the choir, while good, and obviously very well rehearsed, sounded rather pedestrian in the psalm itself.   It again emphasised that a bigger choir would have coped better.

The psalm speaks of trumpets and other instruments; the NZSO instrumentalists fulfilled their parts radiantly, especially the ‘loud clashing cymbals’.  Despite their presence, this was a very lyrical verse, with the last section, ‘Let everything that breathes praise the Lord’ having an ethereal quality.

The pianists, Donald Nicolson and Rachel Thomson, had a very busy part in this last psalm. It ended with another Alleluia – quiet and exultant in tone. The growing woodwind tone against the choir’s soft intoning, along with piano and strings, was magical.  Stravinsky’s constantly shifting chords and soundscapes provided an experience unlike that to be had from any other composer; the result, satisfyingly unique.

Joana Carneiro is petite and very youthful in appearance, yet she conducts with energy and commitment.  In a radio interview prior to the performance, she remarked how good it was to have the narration in Oedipus Rex, since the music was so intense, complicated, yet direct, that time to breathe was needed.  She stressed that the music was not indulgent of the tragedies in the story; rather it was ‘about’ the story and characters.

One suspects that Festival Director Lissa Twomey (an Australian) programmed Oedipus Rex based on the success of this work at the Sydney Festival a couple of years ago, with the same conductor.  But with a much smaller population to draw on, and no full-time opera company here, its drawing power could not be relied on to be the same as in the much bigger city.  Maybe a semi-stage performance would have been more appealing – and it certainly would have conveyed the story in a more meaningful way.

Carneiro also said, and we experienced, that the choir was well-prepared.  The music of Oedipus Rex, she felt, was a pre-cursor of minimalism through its economy of means, but also employed leitmotif.  The latter helped to tie the story together musically, and gave something of a guide to the hearers.

Oedipus Rex, an opera-oratorio, was something completely different from the Symphony of Psalms, composed three years later.  Its similarity to the latter was probably confined to its reference back to polyphony, in the form of breaking up of the words, and the long lines.

Outstanding here, aside from the astonishing music, was the singing of tenor Stuart Skelton, as Oedipus.  This Australian singer has had great international success, and we were fortunate to hear him at the height of his powers.  His voice is  quite brilliant, and he has a wide range.  It cut through the textures without difficulty – strong, with great carrying quality, but never harsh or strident.  When he sang the words translated as ‘Your silence accuses you: you are the murderer! (to Tiresias), there was drama in every syllable.  His further accusation of Tiresias ‘Envy hates good fortune…’ featured high notes that were quite lovely, poignant and eloquent.

The other soloists could not measure up to Skelton, which is not to deny that they were good.  Their roles were all much smaller than that of Skelton.  Daniel Sumegi had the two roles of Creon and the Messenger, and his robust bass-baritone was effective and expressive, with wonderful low notes.  He had a very powerful passage in Act Two, singing ‘Jocasta the Queen is dead!’

Margaret Medlyn sang the mezzo role of the queen with perhaps less force at times than the part required, but nevertheless with appropriate levels of dramatic intensity.  Sometimes her music had echoes of the cabarets of Berlin.  The small part of the Shepherd was well sung by tenor Virgilio Marino.  (Was it really necessary to bring someone from Australia for a role with so little singing?).  He was particularly noteworthy for the duet with the Messenger, where they explain in Act Two that as a baby, Oedipus was found in the mountains.

Martin Snell’s smallish role as Tiresias was confidently and expressively sung, with lustrous resonance and deep, rich tones, but he did not always cut through the orchestra sufficiently.  However, his words were excellent.

An important role was that of the narrator, taken by well-known actor Rawiri Paratene.  He fulfilled it extremely well.  As Rachel Hyde said in her radio review, he was controlled and dignified.  His amplified words were very clear, his tone rich, and neither pompous nor intimate.  He struck the right note in giving the background commentary.

The male chorus sang for all they were worth in their demanding music, but occasionally were out of synch with the orchestra; more often the problem was that the words could not be sufficiently conveyed because the volume of the orchestra overwhelmed them.  At the distance the singers were, it was surprising that they kept together with the orchestra as much as they did; a tribute to their thorough preparation which meant they could keep eyes on the conductor much of the time.  Perhaps the conductor should have done more to tone down the dynamism of the orchestra.  However, it is really more a matter of the size and placement of the choir.  As Rachel Hyde said, the music in this work is really driven by the chorus, which has a large part, but too much in the background in this performance.

The orchestra was returned to its full glory with violins and violas, for this work.  The opening sound from choir and orchestra was tremendous.  Everywhere, we heard Stravinsky’s intriguing and innovative orchestrations brought out relentlessly; his invention knew no bounds.  The orchestra has a major role in Oedipus Rex, compared with its role in most operas or oratorios.

The chorus had its very effective moments, too: when they cry to Oedipus to solve the riddle of who murdered the king, Laius, their intoning of ‘Solve! Solve, Oedipus, solve!’ was startling.  It was strong again in the appeal to the goddesses that followed soon after; here, there was little accompaniment, allowing them to shine.  Soon incessant drumming was heard, adding to the doom-laden atmosphere, as they spoke of the many dead in Thebes, from the plague.

Again with incessant drumming, and with cymbal crashes, the chorus ‘Glory! Glory! Glory!’ sung in praise of the queen Jocasta (Margaret Medlyn) at the end of Act I was very fine, with tremendous unity in declamation.

In the second Act Margaret Medlyn had a long aria with piano – a most difficult part sung in very queenly fashion, and ending with swoops of agitation from the clarinet.  The chorus followed with a beautifully quiet entry, the singing continuing very smoothly over wonderful strumming on the strings.

One of Oedipus’s many notable moments came when he finally confessed to his crimes.  A fanfare followed this despairing utterance.  Skelton was a tremendous and very worthy Oedipus.

More good moments for the chorus: a very incisive short burst stating ‘The shepherd who knows all is here’, and strong, accurate and rhythmic singing of ‘He was not the true father of Oedipus’ (referring to Polybus).  Later, the difficult music for ‘The woman in the chamber…’ was rendered heartily and with precision.  The final chorus ‘Behold!  Oedipus the King!’ spilt out into immense noise from orchestra and chorus, but when full orchestra was employed, the chorus was overwhelmed.

Despite all, the chorus covered itself with glory, especially as amateurs amongst a stage full of professionals.

The performance of Oedipus Rex gave us a tremendous work, brought off with distinction.  It was powerful, shocking and complex, and a triumph (despite its flaws) for the performers and their unassuming young conductor, who held everything in suspense for an appreciable time at the end, so that the impact was not immediately lost in applause.

 

 

A Britten Christmas from Nota Bene

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

A Britten Christmas: Alla Marcia; A Hymn to the Virgin; Simple Symphony; Rosa Mystica; Sweet was the Song; The Sycamore Tree; Saint Nicolas cantata.

Nota Bene Chamber Choir, conducted by Michael Vinten, with soloists, and orchestra, Amber Rainey and Ken Ryan (piano) and Douglas Mews (organ) in Saint Nicolas.

Sacred Heart Mary Cathedral, Hill Street

Sunday, 11 December, 2.30pm

Hearing two programmes of Britten’s choral music in two days (less than 24 hours) may be some kind of record, apart from at Aldeburgh perhaps.   Saturday evening’s concert by the Tudor Consort in the same venue featured two major choral works; Sunday’s a third: Saint Nicolas, Op. 42.  Not as many people attended this concert as were at the previous evening’s, but for a sunny Sunday approaching Christmas it was a good-sized audience.

Sunday’s concert interspersed choral items with movements from the composer’s Simple Symphony in the first half, while the second half consisted of the cantata Saint Nicolas, written in 1948, to marvellously beautiful, musical and evocative words by Eric Crozier, who also wrote opera libretti for Britten.  It was written for the centennial celebrations of Lancing College in Sussex.   The saint is co-patron saint of the College, and of children, sailors and scholars.  He flourished in the fourth century, in what is now Turkey, being Bishop of Myra.

As I said in a review in April, Nota Bene’s performances are marked by accuracy, finesse and elegance.  One could add commitment, and dramatic qualities where required.

The programme commenced with the rather inconsequential Alla Marcia, an early work of Britten’s.  I found it rather dull, and poorly played by the scratch orchestra.  However, there were hints in Britten’s writing of greater felicities to come.

The choir, with semi-chorus behind the audience, under the gallery, performed A Hymn to the Virgin.  Especially for those of sitting towards the back of the church, this was very resonant.  The choir generally produced lovely tone; Sacred Heart is particularly good acoustically for voices, but perhaps not so fine for stringed instruments.  It is astonishing that Britten wrote this quite complex work, based on a medieval poem, when he was only 17 years of age.   The antiphonal words in Latin (the remainder being in English) were extremely effective.

The Simple Symphony Op. 4 is a joyous work, each movement having its own delightful character: Bourée; Pizzicato; Sarabande; Finale.  The movements were played separately between the short choral items.  The idea was, presumably, to divide up the latter from each other, thus giving both the singers and the audience breaks.  However, the performance lost both the continuity and the contrast of the symphony.  The start was ragged, but the playing improved as time wore on.

Rosa Mystica, written in 1939, was new to me.  To quote one of the choristers to whom I spoke later, “It’s like dabbing paint onto a canvas – a layered piece of different colours”.  The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is full of imagery – another illustration of Britten’s feeling for fine words.  Much of the work was quite monotone, yet with the parts in layers.  It was beautifully sung, but not as appealing to me as most of his other writing for choirs.

The pizzicato second movement of the symphony was played very well on the whole, and conveyed its charm, the emphases in the phrasing given due weight.

Following that, the choir sang Sweet was the song; short, and sweet indeed.  The evocative, floating music for choir over a fine, dramatic solo from choir alto Stephanie Gartrell offered an attractive contrast in timbres.  Much of the solo was quite low in the voice, but the soloist’s rich voice came through well.

The slow third movement of the symphony provided the best playing so far; the cello solo was very fine.

As with the previous choral item, The Sycamore Tree was an early piece of the composer’s choral writing from the 1930s that was revised for publication in the 1960s.  The words are better known (and set to music by other composers) as I saw three ships.  It is a very lively piece, with plenty of variety.  A wide range of dynamics gave energy to the wonderful writing for voices.

The Finale from the symphony ended the first half.  The contrasting moods were communicated well, but intonation was often suspect.  Nevertheless, the orchestra made a good showing overall, particularly later, in Saint Nicolas.

Having sung Saint Nicolas several times with the Orpheus Choir in the 1980s, I have a particular affection for the work.  By its nature it is a dramatic piece, so it was good to see Nota Bene branching out, with the help of one of its members, experienced opera producer Jacqueline Coats, into enacting scenes, moving around the auditorium, and singing parts of the cantata from memory.

While the orchestra played the short orchestral introduction, the choir came on in mufti, representing peasant people, singing.  Then St. Nicolas (Benjamin Makisi) appeared through the door from the foyer (i.e. amongst the audience) and sang with boldness, vigour and drama in his tenor voice.  His solo is filled with sensitive, imaginative settings of Crozier’s wonderful words.  The choir responds with a graceful yet forceful utterance, “Help us Lord! To find the hidden road…”

The second section is titled “The Birth of Nicolas”.  The women narrate details of the birth (which they sang from memory while performing movements that acted out the words), while young Nicolas (Mark Wigglesworth) sang, or perhaps intoned, on one note, the words “God be Glorified” after each little episode.  His voice was even, clear, and true.  The bouncy, even jolly nature of the writing for the women showed Nicolas to be a robust character, and contrasted with the plainsong-like nature of the boy’s part.

Section III, “Nicolas Devotes Himself to God” describes Nicolas’s life in more of Crozier’s elegant words (“The foolish toy of time, the darling of decay…”) until the fourth part: “He Journeys to Palestine”, in which a storm while Nicolas is on board ship is illustrated most graphically in the music, both for the men of the choir (who sang from memory) and for orchestra.  This was very well done for the most part, but one section was rather messy – I suspect the pitch there was too low for most of the men.  A women’s semi-chorus in the gallery added its onomatopoeic contributions most effectively, although the orchestra was a little too loud for the semi-chorus to be fully heard.

Makisi sang “O God!  We are weak, sinful, foolish men…” with feeling, while the following solo “The winds and waves lay down to rest…” echoes in the music the change of mood with the change of weather.

Part V, “Nicolas Comes to Myra and is Chosen Bishop” features the choir singing in harmony (as against much counterpoint and layered writing) with organ, in perhaps my favourite bit of the work: “Come, stranger sent from God!”  It did not disappoint – strong, warm singing and blazing organ tones. This section ends in complete contrast, with intricate counterpoint, including the exhilarating “Amen!  Serve the Faith and spurn His enemies!”

After the choir and congregation sang “All people that on earth do dwell”, came the sixth section: “Nicolas from prison”.  In places Ben Makisi seemed unrehearsed; incorrect words (there were a lot to sing) and poor diction marred his performance, also a lack of commitment to the character.  For example, he sings “Yet Christ is yours – yours!”  This brought forth no mood-change, no irradiation of the texture, no great evocation of heavenly love.  The following words concerning God’s mercy were reflected in a change of music to placid cadences, though that was less represented in Makisi’s singing.

“Nicolas and the Pickled Boys”, section VII, features brilliant writing for choir and orchestra.  The character of winter cold and famine is wonderfully evoked, as is the triumph of the boys springing back to life.  Mark Wigglesworth was joined by Roman Dunford and Marcus Millad to walk through the church hand-in-hand to sing their Alleluias.  This section was quite moving, the more so for being acted, and sung from memory.

The penultimate section is titled “His Piety and Marvellous Works”.  This is sung entirely by the choir (using scores), its broad sweep of sound encompassing the many years of Nicolas’s being Bishop of Myra and the events that marked them.  The benign tone from the choir was echoed in the orchestra.  The choir disposed itself on all four sides of the church, giving added emphasis to the breadth of Nicolas’s ministry, and the different manifestations of his influence and miracles.  The final phrases “Let the legends that we tell” were a marvel of both counterpoint and harmony.

Finally, we reached “The Death of Nicolas”.  This section was characterised by noble settings of Nicolas’s words in committing his life to God, while the choir sings the canticle “Nunc Dimittis”.  The choir and congregation sang “God moves in a mysterious way” to end a marvellous, thrilling performance.

Britten’s imaginative writing was always faithfully rendered by the choir – can one ask for more?  The contribution of the orchestra was very significant, and especial mention must be made of the organist (Douglas Mews), the pianists (Amber Rainey and Ken Ryan) and the percussion section (Grant Myhill and Ben Hunt) for their major parts in the cantata.  Britten’s writing for the piano is individual, and always crucial to the mood and importance of the overall sound and texture.

Throughout the concert Michael Vinten directed his diverse forces admirably.  They included the audience (“congregation” in the printed programme), who joined in the two hymns prescribed by Britten.

Jacqueline Coats justifiably took her bow with Michael Vinten and Ben Makisi; her efforts resulted in a more meaningful experience, and was in the tradition of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde – I’m sure he would have approved.

 

Wolcum Yole! from the Tudor Consort

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BRITTEN – A Ceremony of Carols / A Boy Was Born

The Tudor Consort

Carolyn Mills (harp)

Choristers of St.Mark’s Church School

Michael Stewart, director

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Wellington

Saturday, 10th December 2011

This was the first of two concerts given by separate choirs in the capital on different days of the same weekend and in the same venue, both featuring the music of Benjamin Britten. If, after reading this, you’re confused, I confess that I myself had to re-type the sentence a number of times to “fine-tune” and get it right. Fortunately, I was scheduled to attend both events, thus avoiding the likelihood of my turning up at the “wrong one”. Advent is a season which constantly balances delight and confusion, during which anything like that can happen to anybody.

Though Britten’s works are well-known and highly regarded, for some concertgoers he’s still a bit of a tough nut to crack, very much a “twentieth-century” composer, whose music has that edge and astringency which takes listeners out of their comfort-zone. Yet once these characteristics are accepted, rather as one might get used to (and begin to make sense of) a regional accent or an idiosyncratic speech pattern, one begins then to listen past these things to the content of what’s being expressed. Even in the works he wrote for amateur performance he kept a contemporary edge to melodies, harmonies and textures, enough to challenge performers without making too difficult what they were attempting to realize.

Interestingly, though an English composer, much of Britten’s music sounds more “international” than that by nearly all of his contemporaries, the exception being the work of William Walton.  That’s not to say that his music doesn’t connect with his cultural roots – as well as being a devotee of the compositions of his great countryman, Henry Purcell,  Britten made many voice-settings of medieval and Renaissance English carols and folksongs (as with the two works in this concert), as well as of the verses of a wide range of English poets. But his compositional voice is very much his own, his origins and influences well integrated in an intensely “human” way of expressing emotion in sound.

This “human” attitude towards his art is summed up in his own words: “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain; of strength and freedom – the beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony”. That Britten as a composer “grew” these thoughts from seeds within his very being is borne out by the quality of some of the music he wrote when very young. The Tudor Consort’s recent Britten concert gave listeners the chance to hear a live performance of the most significant work from the composer’s teenaged years – this was a set of choral variations with the title, A Boy was Born.

The work shared the Tudor Consort’s program with the more popular, often-performed A Ceremony of Carols. Written for boys’ treble voices, the work can be successfully (if not quite so characterfully) performed, as here, by a women’s choir – in fact Britten at an early stage of writing the work was seriously considering using women’s voices, and even, at a later stage, a mixed choir. This was a wartime work, much of which was composed during a crossing of the North Atlantic by the composer and his partner Peter Pears, the pair on their way back to a war-torn Europe in 1942 – a salutary demonstration of the “inner life” of art and its creation, though there are parts of the work which do express tensions and struggle between the forces of good and evil, paralleled at that time by the military forces of the free world striving in accord against the perceived Fascist threat.

I had previously heard the “Carols” performed in the same venue by the women’s voices of the Nota Bene Choir – and, as here, with Carolyn Mills as a peerless harpist, once again providing an accompaniment and solo interlude whose character and beauty one could easily die for. Reading between the lines of a review of that concert I wrote in December 2008, I would hazard a guess that there were critical swings and roundabouts regarding the singing in both older and newer performances – Nota Bene’s voices might have sounded a shade less refined in places than did the Tudor Consort’s, but the former may well have brought a bit more vocal “schwung” to appropriate places here and there (an instance being the last “Wolcum!” of the “Wolcum Yole!” opening carol, the earlier performance just that bit more lusty an exclamation of joy).

In places, especially when singing softly, the purity and refinement of the Tudor Consort did have a treble-like quality, which was most appealing. Michael Stewart’s direction brought out a wealth of detail, very “terraced” dynamics in “There is no Rose”, a lovely passage in octaves, and most characterful playing from Carolyn Mills. The solo singing, too, was wrought of magic in places, alto Andrea Cochrane’s beautiful, rock-steady purity  for “That Yongë Child” counterweighted by Anna Sedcole’s silvery soprano line in the following “Balulalow”. Britten’s biographer Humphrey Carter once described “This Little Babe” as having all the exuberance and muscularity of a good pillow-fight, an image I confess I couldn’t quite equate with the group’s poised dignity, even when their vocal energies joined in the fray with pin-pricking accuracy against Satan’s fold on the side of Christ and the Angels.

One of the most difficult of the carols to bring off, in a sense, is “In freezing Winter Night”, the piteous words a corrective to the homely kitsch of many of our popular examples of the genre. The music brings to mind T.S.Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” – “…the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter….” but such is the anguish of the music’s stark, uncompromising lines, one imagines Britten might also have in part been paying a tribute to the poet, Robert Southwell, a Jesuit priest brutally martyred in England during the reign of Elizabeth I.  This “dark centre” of the cycle properly chilled our sensibilities in this performance, soprano Anna Edgington surviving a moment of slight unsteadiness early on to deliver a beautifully soaring strand of tone, seconded by Megan Hurnard’s truly-placed alto. The latter also partnered soprano Erin King in a gracefully-wrought “Spring Carol” which followed, voices and harp providing a sunlit, heartwarming counterweight to the previous carol’s austerities.

The performers then took to the concluding “Deo Gracias” carol joyously and energetically, Michael Stewart encouraging both voices and harp to hurl their sounds up into and throughout the cathedral ambiences with infectious gusto. Had the choir, at this point, then done what Nota Bene did a few years ago, which was to gradually exit the nave completely, while singing the Recessional hymn “Hodie Christis natus est”, my delight would have resounded in the memory, like the voices’ departing echoes, to this moment. Alas, as with the opening “Processional” the Consort chose not to employ the extra distancing the church’s foyer would have given, and so we were, I felt, deprived in both instances of that true frisson of arrival and departure from and to “other realms”. My rapture was thus modified at the time, but fortunately the beauty and presence of the group’s singing made a more lasting impression.

Happily, no such qualification hindered in any way my delight at the Consort’s performance of the evening’s second work – A Boy was Born, first performed in 1934, and the nineteen year-old Britten’s most accomplished composition up to that time. Though, like the “Carols”, the work contains a number of settings of medieval poems and carols, alongside verses by two later poets, the writing here is far more virtuosic and demanding for singers. Britten in fact added an optional organ part a number of years afterwards, undoubtedly prompted by the difficulties groups had experienced in performance up to that time. Still, right from the beginning, and throughout the opening, Michael Stewart got from his voices such exquisite liquidity of tone and subtle gradations of colour, all seemed well for what was to follow.

Joining the Consort were a number of boy choristers from St.Mark’s Church School, whose ethereal voices set  one’s scalp a-tingling with their contributions to episodes such as “Lullay, Jesu”, “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the “Noel! Wassail!” finale. And the solo treble part in the serenely meditative “Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour” was beautifully sung by Shashwath Joji, except that the final, scarily stratospheric ascent was entrusted, most convincingly, to soprano Anna Sedcole. Throughout the final “Noel! Wassail!” section, the boys’ voices were also given extra, albeit unobtrusive, support by Melanie Newfield’s pure soprano, with pleasing, clearly-defined results.

In its command of detail coupled with a consistently-applied strength of purpose, the Consort’s performance was, I thought, a pretty stunning achievement.  Michael Stewart again and again drew from the group expressive moments, episodes and whole worlds which transcended time and place, from the hypnotic murmurings of “snow on snow on snow” in the setting of Christina Rosetti’s famous poem, to the energetic background roisterings of sixteenth-century poet Thomas Tusser’s “Get ivy and Hull, woman, deck up thine house” amid accompanying detailing suggesting joyous seasonal outpourings. It would, in fact, take a response beyond the scope of this review to do full justice to everything the Consort achieved with this music.

So, in conclusion a mere couple of impressions of things from A Boy was Born that have continued to play in my head since the concert – one of them being the group’s breathtaking terracings of trajectory and tone in “The Three Kings”. I loved those ethereal voices of wonderment floating over the lustier-voiced hill-and-dale travellers, relishing their coming-together in great washes of sound at “Gold, Incense and Myrrah-a”, before the sounds departed with the Kings, just as magically and mysteriously. Then, following on, came the contrasted austerities of “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”, with those boys and soprano voices singing their lament of loss against the patient murmurings of the falling snow, an exquisitely-etched moment. Finally there was  the volatile excitement of the Consort’s concluding “Noel! Wassail!”, which left we listeners at once both breathless and energized. And I was pleased the voices proceeded to make nonsense of my earlier assertions regarding a so-called lack of exuberance in the singing – here, the near-orgiastic abandonment of the “Welcome Yule” left our ears appropriately resounding with musical goodwill, which, at the end we took back to our lives to share with others, enriched by both music and its performance beyond measure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bach Choir – Where would we be without Messiah?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Messiah

Amelia Ryman (soprano) / Megan Hurnard (contralto) / Thomas Atkins (tenor)

David Morriss (bass)

The Chiesa Ensemble (Leader: Rebecca Struthers)

Douglas Mews – Continuo

The Bach Choir of Wellington

Stephen Rowley (conductor)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

Sunday 27th November 2011

Though associated by dint of its “Birth of Christ” references with Christmastime, Messiah has as many affinities with the other “big” Christian event of the Liturgical year, which is, of course, Easter. Conductor Stephen Rowley seemed to emphasize the latter connection at the very beginning of the work in the Bach Choir of Wellington’s recent performance. In fact, it could have been that “High Priest of the German classics” Otto Klemperer conducting, so solemn, grand and slow were those chords at the opening of the overture, though the succeeding Allegro was sprightly enough, with perhaps just a touch of heaviness here and there. It wasn’t a performance for “authenticists” – too full-toned, with an almost romantic sensibility about the music’s expressive unfolding (but in a more cosmic sense, its unique delivery very much in a spontaneously “baroque” tradition).

Having admired and enjoyed the Chiesa Ensemble’s playing on many past occasions, I was a little surprised at the number of noticeable instrumental spills I noticed along the way (insufficient rehearsal, perhaps?) – ensemble awry at the beginning of  the recitative “For Behold…” and again with the soprano in her recitative “And suddenly…..”  – as well as some ragged playing in “Since Man came by Death”. Against these moments were some magnificently buoyant and pin-precise episodes, great support for the choir in “For Unto Us a Child is Born”, as indeed there was throughout all the choruses, another highlight being “And With His stripes” where both singing and playing was excitingly vigorous and secure.

Certainly those big moments, where one wants the utmost glory and majesty, were brought off thrillingly – I actually couldn’t see whether it was Mark Carter or Tom Moyer playing the solo in “The Trumpet Shall Sound” so beautifully, but both gave their all during the final choruses, amply supported by Larry Reese’s scalp-tingling timpani-playing, and full-toned outpourings from strings, winds and continuo.

The Choir itself, somewhat compromised by the imbalance of women’s against men’s voices (an all-too common phenomenon among choral groups these days), performed honestly and reliably throughout, here and there actually touching realms of true sublimity. There were instances where those middle and lower voices were overpowered by the higher ones – though in live performances it’s amazing what the “eye” can imagine the “ear” is actually hearing, especially if one knows the music well. Thus a chorus like “And He shall purify” featured a more-than-usually gleaming soprano line, though one could sense the effort of projection on the part of the other strands, coming together splendidly at the words “That they may offer unto the Lord”.

I liked conductor Stephen Rowley’s emphasizing of some of the choruses’ expressive gestures – the chorus ‘HIs yoke is easy” was nicely modulated throughout, with the dynamics well-controlled, and the tones of the voices on the last word “light” nicely softened into a diminuendo. And the voices’ emphasizing of the word “Death” in “Since Man came by Death” made for a dramatic, breath-catching moment. The Choir also sustained splendidly the long lines of “Behold the Lamb of God” at the words “taken away”. In short, splendid moments, these and others, transcending the difficulties, also occasionally apparent, of the group’s varying strength in different sections.

Of the soloists tenor Thomas Atkins was the first to impress with a thrilling “Comfort Ye”, the recitative properly declamatory and prophet-like, and the aria “Ev’ry valley” joyously energetic (and supported by some lovely string-playing). Also, he made something distinctive, I thought, of his sequence beginning “All they that see Him laugh Him to scorn”, the singing powerful and sonorous, as it was through “Thy rebuke hath broken His heart” . I must confess to wondering, throughout the first half, whether the microphone in the church’s pulpit (from where each of the soloists sang) had been left switched “on” as the voice-tones seemed to have for a while a somewhat augmented and “directional” resonance – but I never got to the bottom of the mystery, except that throughout the second half the voices seemed to my ears more naturally projected.

Contralto Megan Hurnard gave reliable, centered renditions of her solos, the voice gravely beautiful throughout her centerpiece “He was despised”, even if some of the words sounded a shade inert, needing more emphasis in order to make them live and breathe. I thought, for example, that during “He gave his back” the singer could have risked a little roughness of tone to get something of the sting of words like “smiters”, and even “spitting” across to us.

Bass David Morriss gave us something of that vocal energy, interestingly poetic-sounding and beautiful where I expected him to be darker and more sepulchral in “For behold, darkness shall cover the earth”. But he nicely “grew” the phrase “……have seen a great light” with an unerring sense of what the music ought to be doing, as with the more hushed tones of “And they that dwell”. The dramatic “Why do the nations” went splendidly also, with the figurations generating plenty of agitated bluster; and perhaps the brief moment that went awry in “The kings of the earth rise up” was due to the same unaccustomed “lurch” we all felt, of tumbling straight afterwards into the “Halleluiah” Chorus (one gets so used to another chorus “Let us break their bonds” coming beforehand – we were, in fact, so caught up by surprise that nobody on this occasion stood up!).  As for “The trumpet shall sound”, the introduction was full of expectancy and growing excitement, and, one or two “ensemble” moments notwithstanding, the interchanges between singer and trumpet-player were nimble and enlivening.

I enjoyed soprano Amelia Ryman’s bright, silvery tones throughout, celestial and sparkling at “And lo, the angel of the Lord”, and surviving some out-of-sync moments with the orchestra at “And suddenly there was” (the string players making amends with some beautifully hushed work at the end). The spirited, but difficult “Rejoice greatly” was negotiated confidently and securely (breathing an issue in places, here, with such long and florid vocal runs). And her entry during”He shall feed His flock” was a highlight, like an unveiling, an irradiating of the musical textures. Of course, the soprano’s big moment is “I know that my Redeemer liveth” – and we got a heartfelt rendition balancing poise with impulsiveness in places, which I liked – one sensed the words here really meant something, such as at “And though worms destroy this body”. A lovely ascent at “For now is Christ risen” capped off a pleasingly-wrought performance.

I’m sure many people feel as I do, that the year’s concert-going wouldn’t be complete without hearing a live performance of Messiah. By dint of the various performing editions and the possible combinations arising from these, let alone the difference between singers, instrumentalists and conductors, the work for me invariably emerges newly-minted from each encounter. My preference (not necessarily with all works, but this is one of them) would be to hear a performance in the evening – for me there’s always been something about the interaction of music performance and darkness that creates extra frisson (but I am having therapy!). Seriously, I thought this was a presentation with its own distinctions and set of ambiences, one which contained some excellent performances, and which readily conveyed to us the work’s on-going greatness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Festival Singers’ Papa Haydn – a Man for All Seasons

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HAYDN – Oratorio “The Seasons”

Lesley Graham (soprano) / James Adams (tenor) / Roger Wilson (bass)

Festival Singers / Orchestra (Simon McLellan, leader)

Rosemary Russell (conductor)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 20th November, 2011

Of all the works produced by that exemplar of creative industry and longevity Josef Haydn (1732-1809), his oratorio “The Seasons” is surely one of the happiest on all counts. In the work the composer gives full expression to his delight in nature, his obvious relish for country pastimes (blood-sports and all), and his serene religious faith.

What strikes the listener at a first hearing is the work’s ceaseless flow of wonderful things, the composer’s imagination and powers of expression obviously undimmed by his advancing years, despite his complaints to his publisher, thus:

 “The world daily pays me many compliments, even on the fire of my last works; but no one would believe the strain and effort it cost me to produce these, in as much as many a day my feeble memory and the unstrung state of my nerves so completely crush me to the earth that I fall into the most melancholy condition, so much so that for days afterwards I am incapable of finding one single idea, until at length my heart is revived by Providence, when I seat myself at the piano and begin to hammer away at it. Then all goes well, again, God be praised!”

The work’s librettist, Baron Gottfried Von Swieten, has come in for some stick over the years, some of it from the composer himself, who was supposed to have exclaimed at one point that the libretto was “Frenchified trash”. Swieten adapted his verses from those of the Scottish poet James Thomson, whose epic, eponymous work in praise of nature had become one of the most popular texts of his age. Haydn and Swieten quarrelled over various aspects of the work (as happens with nearly all fruitful collaborations of this kind) – but the success of the finished product consigned such differences to the wake of musical history.

The work was here sung in English, the words a curious amalgam of Swieten’s re-translation of his own script back to the original language (losing most of Thompson’s poetry in the process) and various “improvements” made by different editors at diverse times. Some of the original numbers were cut, and others shortened, but nothing was lost which caused great violence to be done to the work as a whole.

Haydn begins with a dark, orchestra-only evocation of winter gloom – a few gravely-descending bars of darkness set the scene before conductor Rosemary Russell brought in the allegro strongly and sternly, placing winter in retreat-mode, and being more roundly dismissed by both bass and tenor (Roger Wilson stentorian and vivid, James Adams sturdy and poetical). Soprano Lesley Graham then welcomed the spring breezes from “southern skies” with true, lightly-floated tones, the cue for the chorus to properly ring the seasonal change with a lilting “Come gentle spring”….

The number I knew once as “With joy, th’ impatient husbandsman….” here became “At dawn the eager plowman”, given plenty of agrarian spirit by Roger Wilson, and relished by the counterpointing bassoon, nicely played by Oscar Laven. We enjoyed these things greatly, along with the “Surprise Symphony” orchestral quotations, and the singer’s slightly more decorative reprise vocals. James Adams impressed, also, with his golden-toned “The farmer now has done his work”, the following Trio giving the orchestral horns the chance to shine throughout a nicely-burnished moment of introduction, and bringing in the chorus, beautifully rapt at “Let warming air turn suddenly soft”, though with a bit of momentary strain when delivering the stratospheric “And let thy sun resplendent shine”.

Lesley Graham’s lovely “Our prayer is heard on high” set the tone for a nicely-poised duet “Spring, her lovely charms…” between the soprano and tenor, James Adams. And the “God of Light, God of Life!” chorus was stirringly done, the rapturous Beethoven-like mood amply and satisfyingly forwarded by the soloists. Apart from an uncertain initial entry by the men in the fugal chorus “Endless praise to Thee….” the vocal lines were woven together with strength and clarity, Rosemary Russell keeping her orchestra equally up to the mark right to the final cadence.

The remainder of the performance reinforced the above impressions, though particular moments remained in the listener’s memory, such as the sunrise sequence at the beginning of summer, a vivid and urgent introduction by Lesley Graham, followed by soloists and chorus making a marvellous refulgence.

The “Country Calendar” commentaries that followed were also characterfully delivered, Roger Wilson bringing alive the Breughel-like harvesting, and James Adams contrasting the hustle and bustle with a sun-drenched paean of idyllic indolence – all of which led naturally to Lesley Graham’s sweet-toned portrayal of a “haven for the weary”, with Jose Wilson giving us  some nicely-turned oboe-playing.

From this “Rural Roundup” kind of mode, we switched to full-on weather-forecasting, portentous announcements from Roger Wilson, with timpanist Doreen Douglas providing telling ambient support. James Adams’ warnings were no less dire, the pizzicato raindrops by now falling about Lesley Graham’s breathless, suspenseful utterances. A sudden lightning-flash, and chorus and orchestra hurled themselves into the maelstrom with great abandonment, a pleasing disorder of unsettling sounds resulting within the confines of the hall.

Autumn, too had its delights, even if the introductory string-playing had some ensemble problems – the Terzetto and Chorus which followed, praising industry and advocating its rewards, had something naughtily Haydn-esque about it, the droll wind figures decorating the soloists’ lines seeming to me to poke gentle fun at the seriousness of it all. The concluding chorus-and-orchestra fugue survived some “woolly” moments along the way towards some wonderfully chromatic upward modulations and a triumphal concluding marriage of honest labour with moral righteousness, soloists, chorus and orchestra shirking not their duties.

Sports of all kinds were celebrated, innocent, knowing and deadly purposeful – we enjoyed both James Adams’ singing and enjoyment in turn of his line “the orchard shades maidens large and small”, and Roger Wilson’s account of the spaniel’s hunting of the hapless bird, shot with a loud timpani retort! As for the deerhunt, the rousing horn-playing (Peter Sharman and Kevin Currie) led the way in grand style, matched in energy and vigour by the chorus, who were then called upon once more a after a short respite, this time for a rollicking drinking-song, “Joyfully, the wine flows free…” The voices did well to sustain their pitch as well as they did across the span of broken phrases, as required by the composer, besides keeping enough energy in reserve for the final “All hail to the wine!”.

Though there were occasional problems with both ensemble and intonation in places, the orchestral playing never lacked for atmosphere and colour throughout – and so it was with the opening of “Winter”, where a lovely, dark-toned instrumental colour at the opening used sombre strings and plaintive winds to suggest the grey mists and gloom, an evocation which the composer equated with his own mortality and failing powers. The Cavatina that followed taxed the strings’ ensemble at the beginning, but Lesley Graham focused our attentions with her tremulously-toned lament at autumn’s passing into darker climes. James Adams’ tale of a lost traveller was also dramatically told, even if the singer didn’t have quite enough breath to easily cap the ascending phrase at “to find comfort sweet”.

The chorus’s “Spinning Song” (surprisingly romantic, dark and dramatic, sounding almost like something out of Wagner!) went with a swing, making a piquant contrast with the saucy tale of the maid who extricated herself from the clutches of a lascivious nobleman. Lesley Graham pointed the detail with some relish throughout, if not with quite enough “heft” in places to be properly heard, though the chorus’s “ha! ha!’s” certainly demonstrated its appreciation of the entertainment.

Roger Wilson’s deep, rich tones saluted the icy grip of winter, imploring all to cling to virtue as a means of salvation – though the brass blooped their first notes in response they recovered to cap the concluding orchestral efforts, and support some fine, strong lines of singing in the fugal passage “Direct us in thy ways”. Everything became somewhat revivalist at the very end, the energy and fervour of the singing and playing filling the hall, and making for a most satisfying conclusion. All credit to the efforts of singers and instrumentalists, and to Rosemary Russell for her inspired and sterling direction, and for bringing such a delightful work to the fore once again, for our pleasure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listening to ourselves: Voices New Zealand

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents

VOICES OF AOTEAROA

Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir

Karen Grylls (director)

Horomona Horo (taonga puoro)

Music by Hildegard of Bingen, David Childs, Douglas Mews, Morten Lauridsen, Christopher Marshall,

Helen Fisher, David Griffiths, David Hamilton, Benjamin Britten, Henry Purcell (arr. Eriksson)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday, 19th November, 2011

The concert was brought into being by the sounds of a trumpet played by Horomona Horo, creating both a ceremonial and a haunting effect, and thus suggesting limitless possibilities. One of these, appropriately resembling a voice from long ago, was a Sequence composed by Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess, poet, composer and mystic. Growing beautifully from out of the expectant silence, the text O viridissimi Virga sung the praises of the Virgin Mary, hailing her as the “greenest branch” from which sprang “harvest ready for Man, and a great rejoicing of banqueters”. Hildegard’s unison lines were then interspersed among the choir’s voices, Pepe Becker’s beautifully stratospheric soprano tones prominent amongst them, to which was added the gentle counterpointing of another of the taonga puoro, on this occasion a flute. The presentation seemed like a kind of ritual of birth, of bringing the music into being by awakening the spirit within each and every voice – and on this occasion calling up a creative impulse to speak to us from half a Millennium away – all very impressive in a quiet and undemonstrative manner.

David Child’s lyrical Salve Regina followed, the vocal lines baroque-like in their detailing and deployment – solo, small group and whole ensemble interacting as a living organism, conductor Karen Grylls achieving with the voices a great haunting beauty at the concluding words, “O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria”, aided by a mesmeric repetition of the word “Maria” at the end.

From “Saints and Angels” (the works were bracketed thus throughout the concert) we moved to “Voices of Fire”, beginning with the coruscations of Douglas Mews’ Ghosts, Fire and Water,a work which made a huge impression on me when I heard it performed some years ago. Written in 1972, it was inspired by a poem by British author James Kirkup, his response, in turn to a series of paintings which became known as the “Hiroshima Panels”, and whose subject was the dropping of the first atomic bomb on that city in 1945. The opening lines “These are the ghosts of the unwilling dead” sets the sombre tone of the work, the stark vocal lines having no warmth, expressing only horror and shock at the effects of the carnage, sometimes bleak unisons, sometimes irruptions of biting repetitions of figurations. Spoken voices are powerfully set against the singing in places, the phrase “Love one another” in different languages over a hymn-like backdrop, the silence at the end as eloquent as the last utterances.

A different world of feeling, indeed, from Morten Lauridsen’s Madrigali, which followed – six settings of Renaissance verses by various poets, all in praise of “love’s fire” – hence the Six “Fire Songs” of the work’s full title. Each setting is informed by the composer’s initial “fire-chord”, a cluster of intensities, sizzling and coruscating, impulses that recur throughout the cycle. I liked the contrast between the lively and capricious No.3 “Amor, Io Sento L’alma”, a depiction of a growing conflagration of love, and the tearful despair of the following “Io piango”, the weeping underpinned by a mournful bass line. And the concluding “Se per Havervi, Ohime!” set a ground-swelling clustered-harmonied hymn at the beginning through to a rapt, rich sinking conclusion, enlivened by a brief upward impulse at the end, everything beautifully and robustly characterized by the voices.

Then came “Voices of the Earth and Sea”, Karen Grylls talking with us briefly about the works in this bracket being a “collage of landscape”. Helen Fisher’s Pounamu was the one that made the deepest impression on me, the flute-sounds conjured up by Horomono Horo in haunting accord with the long-breathed vocal lines, the Maori text a proverb from Tainui, beginning with the words “May the calm be widespread…..” and later evoking “the shimmer of summer” with constantly undulating lines and the flute’s cry riding the skies like a falcon in watchful flight – all of this was so beautifully realized.

Christopher Marshall’s Horizon 1 (part of a larger cycle of settings) briefly but effectively set words by Ian Wedde from a poem “Those Others’, referring to the Maori view of creation, and sounding the unceasing “breath of life” behind the alto’s beautiful but austere line. Then, David Griffiths’ two vignette-like pieces from the work Five Landscapes took us firstly to Southland’s Oreti Beach, and afterwards to Mount Iron, a Wanaka landmark – the first characterized by ceaselessly complaining winds, and the second filled out with hugely imposing blocks of tone, punctuated by quieter harmonic clusters.

A new and stirring work by David Hamilton rounded off the local content of the program – Karakia of the Stars. Here, voices were used instrumentally, along with Horo’s koauau patternings, the sounds of tapping stones, and the Arvo Pärt-like tintinabulations of little bells – the singers and instrumentalists having evoked the starry firmament, the chant welled up from terra firma, the mens’ voices counterpointing the womens’, underpinned by stampings and gesturing and resounding through the spaces. A note from the composer told us that the chant was part of a longer invocation to the stars “to provide a bountiful supply of food for the coming year” – a ‘between-the-lines” election-year message for our politicians, perhaps?

Lastly, “Voices of Nature” presented music from two of England’s greatest composers, Britten and Purcell – firstly, Britten’s beautiful Five Flower Songs, all but the last settings of English poetry, the exception being the traditional “Ballad of Green Broom”. From the madrigal-like realization of the opening “To Daffodils”, through the angularities of “Marsh Flowers” and the rapt hymnal of “The Evening Primrose”, these songs brought to our ears a wonderful synthesis of creative imagination and stunning performance evocation, ending with smiles at the wry wit of the composer’s “Green Broom” setting. Normally, such a bouncy, good-humored number would nicely round off a concert, but the ensemble chose instead to enchant us further with Purcell’s Music for a While, a song written for John Dryden’s tragedy “Oedipus”, here arranged for choir by Gunnar Eriksson. Pepe Becker’s pure, focused tones were very much to the fore, here, delivering the melody with searing beauty, the lines harmonized in places by women’s voices and the ground bass patterns vocalized by tenors and basses. It seemed for a few intensely lovely moments to tell us just why it is we listen to music and go to concerts.

Imaginative New Zealand choral music from innovative Tudor Consort

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Renaissance Influences IV: Made in New Zealand

Music by Gillian Whitehead, David Farquhar, Ross Harris, Douglas Mews sen., John Ritchie, Anna Griffiths and Jack Body

The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Saturday, 8 October 2011, 3pm

It was surprising to find the Tudor Consort performing works by New Zealand composers, and even more surprising to read the title of the concert.   However, there was no question, when one heard the works, about the influence of the renaissance composers on these down-under writers.  There was even less question, but rather joyful astonishment, at the skill of these works, and of The Tudor Consort in presenting them.  It was innovative to devise such a programme as this, and to commission two new works – the Ross Harris and Jack Body pieces.

The programme opened with the Kyrie from Missa Brevis by Gillian Whitehead.  The mass was performed section by section throughout the programme, interspersed with other items, as it would be in a church service, though of course there it would be interspersed through the liturgy.  Initially, this seemed odd, not to carry on the Gloria from the Kyrie, in a concert performance.  However, I think it worked well, giving each movement of the mass a freshness and pointing up the individual qualities of its parts better than would be the case if it had been sung through as a whole.

It was a most accomplished work for a composer who was still a student at university at the time of composition.  As the programme note said, “The unmistakeable influence of 16th century polyphony is clear from the outset…’   The full import of this influence grew as the various movements were presented.  But the skilled writing was apparent straight away.   There was much use of clashes of the interval of a second, and splendid dynamic contrasts.

The choir exhibited great attack and superb clarity of words.  In the Sanctus it was noticeable that some singers paid scant attention to the conductor, but the wonderful rise and fall of both pitch and contrapuntal complexity were well conveyed in spite of that.  This movement had a most rapturous ending.

Early on, the soprano tone was rather metallic at times, and one voice in that section had a tendency to dominate.  Nevertheless, in the main the choir’s balance was impeccable.  Only briefly at the end of the Agnus Dei was the choir not quite together.

Following the Kyrie, we heard Winter wakeneth all my care by David Farquhar, a setting of an anonymous 14th century English text.  This was a quite lovely setting of glorious words.  There was an interesting independence of parts, which gave frequent delicious clashes and juxtapositions.  The performance was magical.

The commissioned work from Ross Harris, Vobiscum in aeternum, was based on the well-known Tudor motet If ye love me.   Using the Latin version of the same words, this piece began with a gorgeous soft introduction.  The lattice-work of long-held notes in each part wove a beautiful, reverential solemnity in the fine acoustic of St. Mary of the Angels church.

The singing was beautiful blended, apart from one soprano who still dominated, from where I was sitting.  Otherwise, it exhibited the excellent attribute of carrying the sound and the words seamlessly forward, something the Australian judge of the recent Big Sing Secondary Students’ Choral Festival in Wellington commented on being absent from some of the otherwise excellent choirs that he heard perform.

Ross Harris could hardly have wished for a finer première performance.  The high standard continued in the adjoined Tallis original ‘If ye love me’ in English, that concluded the piece.  The brief for this and for the Jack Body commission was to take an ancient piece of music as a starting point.  I must admit to a sneaking feeling that it was a little pretentious that one composer used Latin instead of the English of St. John’s gospel in the King James version of the Bible, as used by Tallis, and the other to use Hebrew instead of the well-known and loved words, from the same version, for  Psalm 137 (or indeed the Russian of the introductory chant; see below).  However, this may have been the composers’ way of introducing an individuality that separated their compositions from the originals on which they were based – and it would be pretty difficult for a New Zealand composer to write for the Russian language.

Michael Stewart, in speaking to the audience, acknowledged that the next item, The Love Song of Rangipouri by Douglas Mews, did not have a Renaissance connection, but disarmingly stated that he liked it so much that he included it.  This work featured a soloist, Ken Ryan (baritone).  His facility with the Maori language and with the micro-tonality of the chant was astonishing, and his singing was very fine.   Based on a Maori chant recorded at Makara, the words are poetic and mystical; some of the lines were repeated in English.  I learned recently that even in the Far North, the pronunciation of ‘wh’ in Maori as ‘f’ was not traditional, if the early missionary Henry Williams is to be believed.  He wrote regretting the increasing tendency in his time for the ‘f’ sound to be used.

This was a difficult piece, but the choir brought it off, despite a few entries not being absolutely together.

The women of the choir sang two songs from John Ritchie’s Canary Wine song cycle: “I – Queene and Huntress”, and “III – Make Room for the bouncing Belly”.  The texts were by Ben Jonson.  I found it humorous to contemplate what now would be considered doggerel being written by the great Elizabethan playwright and poet: “Room! Room! Make room for the bouncing Belly, First father of sauce and deviser of jelly”.   There were unfamiliar words in the text, such as boulter and bavin, but thanks to a friendly pew-sharer and his I-pod, I now know that they all apply to domestic implements.

The music, good-humoured as is usual with Ritchie père, was utterly appropriate to the words.  It was good to have a lighter item in the middle of the programme; the singing was sparklingly accurate.

Anna Griffiths is a music graduate of the University of Auckland, and sings in The Tudor Consort.  She has won prizes for her compositions, and has had this and another choral piece performed overseas by the New Zealand Youth Choir.  Naseby is a setting of a poem by James K. Baxter, and depicts the Otago township.  I enjoyed the alliteration of the poem’s second-last line: “Then the dark peaks will hold their peace…”.  This was a very skilled and sympathetic setting, idiomatic with regard to the words.  The ending chord was not resolved, thus carrying through the music the timeless feel of the words.

Now for something completely different…  The men sang the Russian chant from the 17th century “Bogospod’i yavisya” (God, Lord, show yourself to us) which Jack Body used as the basis for his piece for full choir.  The men had a robust sound and relished the words, but perhaps could not obtain quite the resonant depth of tone of a Russian choir.

Psalm 137 was sung in Hebrew, influenced by the chant, but not in a Jewish style.  It began with three male voice parts interweaving “answered by a keening figure from the women” as the programme note stated.  It reached a climax at the end with the words “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (speaking of the daughter of Babylon) – words not usually incorporated in choral settings of the psalm.

The piece was very quiet in parts, yet there was plenty of volume when required.  Intonation was unassailable.  The whole was most effective.

We are fortunate to have composers of this level writing imaginative, highly skilled and effective music for choirs.  New Zealand composers certainly know how to write choral music!  The strong choral tradition in this country no doubt lends strong inspiration, and the fact that there are choirs capable of singing the complex, accomplished music we heard at this concert.

Some of the pieces were written for more than four parts, adding to the achievement for a choir of only 20 voices.  It was certainly different for this choir to perform New Zealand works; works that were difficult and very interesting, including a variety of languages.  They made for a most worthwhile concert.

All the works were well worth hearing, and it is to be hoped that other choirs will take them up – they should be heard again.  One or two only (the Ritchie and the Mews) I thought I had heard before.

The level of expert performance by this choir is all the more amazing considering the comparative frequency of its concerts.  This was only an hour-long concert, but it was a solid programme, and there was a great deal of concentrated and expert singing.   Bravo!