Tag: concerto

Virtuosi – Orchestra Wellington’s celebration of the capital’s individual and interactive instrumental brilliance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

VIRTUOSI – Orchestra Wellington

ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra Op.47
ELGAR – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra in E Minor Op.85
BARTÓK – Concerto for Orchestra Sz116

New Zealand String Quartet : Peter Clark, Martin Riseley (guest player), violins;
Gillian Ansell, viola; Martin Smith, ‘cello
Inbal Megiddo, ‘cello
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei, conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 27th June 2026

This concert was replete with memories of formative music-listening experiences which have sung and danced throughout my musical life for almost fifty years – so the reader must forgive what seems like a self-indulgent bias regarding these works, and especially in the wake of such committed, heart-warming performances!

Originally a borrowed word from the Italian virtuoso (referring to both “virtue” and “skill”) the term “virtuosi” has “taken flight” in common usage, and is regularly used to denote skill and proficiency of the highest order in practically any human activity, and not just the performing arts. Here, it’s less fulsomely and more appositely applied to both individual and group distinction in musical performance, happily and resoundingly borne out by tonight’s stellar presentations.

One could go further and suggest that the term applied as readily to the creative and technical skills of each of the two “similar-but-different” composers whose music featured in tonight’s concert – on the face of things the “Englishness” of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) and the Hungarian “folkishness” of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) would seem to have little in common, even if their lifetimes partly coincided. Unlike his younger native contemporaries Holst and Vaughan Williams, Elgar showed little interest in ethnomusicology, whereas Bartók eagerly immersed himself in the folk-music of his native soil, both in his studies of comparative musical folklore in Hungary and his fusion of these elements with his own personal style of expression. Both composers were “countrymen” in their inclinations towards the “great outdoors” but it would seem the Malvern Hills near Worcester, beloved of Elgar, were probably somewhat removed in spirit from the isolated Carpathian Mountains of Hungary which Bartók explored, finding his most “authentic” Magyar folk music amongst those isolated communities.

Where Elgar and Bartók meet, I feel, is in the uniqueness and strength of each composer’s distinctive musical “character” – most of Elgar’s work has that instantly recognisable combination of nobility and introspectiveness which looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, in the manner of an artist at once confident and insecure, forthright and nostalgic, expressing a dichotomy that would reach its peak in the composer’s  ‘Cello Concerto played this evening. By contrast, Bartók’s music is characterised by asymmetrical themes and rhythms, modal scales, drones, and energetic folk-dance trajectories – as with Elgar, there are opposites at work, the “classical” structures expressed by “folk” music, the tonalities that contain dissonances, and the polarities of emotion which frequent the musical journey.

Coincidentally,  both Elgar pieces in tonight’s programme, though far-removed from one another in time,  began with similarly vigorous and trenchant opening  minor-key chords. First up was the composer’s earlier “Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra”, its opening straightaway proclaiming an almost Baroque-like splendour and severity of utterance, one that meant business right from the outset! How appropriate, then, that kicking off the evening’s “virtuosi” scenario in this music were members of the New Zealand String Quartet, taking the concertante role of the music’s solo quartet of strings. This ensemble has steadfastly continued  its activities with various guest players, following the departure early in 2025 of two of its long-time members – happily, one of the vacancies has been filled by recently-appointed  ‘cellist Martin Smith, while the second violinist role for this concert featured a distinguished guest, Martin Riseley, a member of the celebrated Te Koki Trio. Violinist Peter Clark did the honours as leader this evening, while, happily, the mainstay of the ensemble, violist Gillian Ansell continued as the rock-like fulcrum around which the group’s comings and goings have been deftly managed over the past two years.

Both the quartet and the accompanying Orchestra Wellington strings under conductor Marc Taddei brought off the  resonantly muscular opening of the work with great elan, leading into tantalising interchanges, baroque style, between solo strings and the ripieno (larger ensemble), with pre-echoes of the themes given ear-catching contrasts of emphasis and colour. Then came the famous “Welsh tune” (the composer reported as hearing this sung by a distant voice while on holiday in Wales) played here firstly by Gillian Ansell’s viola – so tenderly and heart-stoppingly – before being given the full-blooded ensemble treatment.

This sense of wonderment continued right up to the beginning of the Allegro (at Fig.7 in my Novello score), with a quietly-stated, flowing version of the theme first heard hinted at by the solo quartet just after the opening flourish – here, begun as simply and as straightforwardly as the first few steps of a momentous journey. This took us most excitingly to the work’s resplendent major-key all-together central statement of the opening theme, marked with Elgar’s favourite “Nobilmente” direction, and given plenty of ceremonial swagger, and vigorous energy.

After a tremulous reappearance of the “Welsh tune”  Marc Taddei took the players into what Elgar famously described as “a devil of a fugue”, one whose initial composure seemed to suddenly take fright halfway through its course and “spook” its own trajectories – fantastic playing, here, from the band, with hair, gut and resin given no quarter!  The eventual recapitulation of the Allegro led this time to a full-throated version of the “Welsh tune”, with solo strings and ripieno tossing parts of the reprised themes back and forth, before the coda bound up all the players in a compulsive concerted dash towards a resounding final pizzicato chord – great excitement!

The 1919 ‘Cello Concerto which followed inhabited a different world, the older Elgar having to lay bare his feelings regarding the ravages of the Great War (1914-18), while at the same time tormented with growing self-doubts as a composer as his music was gradually and increasingly regarded by critics as “old-fashioned”. As a consequence, the concerto took a long time to establish itself in the repertoire, especially after a disastrous premiere helped put paid to any of Elgar’s own hopes for the work as giving an impression of being “good and alive”. It turned out to be the last major work he created – a direct and honest statement of feelings regarding his place in a world forever changed, both in a public and private sense.

‘Cellist Inbal Megiddo had the measure of the work’s sombre mood right from the outset, her tones and phrasings circumspectly coloured, enough to convey the emotion without excess throughout the movement, though the orchestral tones in the first tutti were lovely, as was the soloist’s rhapsodic response. She allowed herself  greater warmth in the major key exchanges that followed, and rose to match the intensities of the orchestra’s subsequent climax, though falling away as quickly back into introspection for the pizzicato chords that heralded her accompanied recitative – here her ‘cello even cajoled the orchestra in places before initiating the scampering scherzo with its wry “catch me if you can” exchanges exhibiting a droll kind of mischief. With her all the way was Marc Taddei’s suitably reactive echoing of the solo instruments’s quixotic moods in the myriad orchestral detailings, earnest and intense in the opening movement and playful in the second (the slightly untidy final chord at the latter’s conclusion of little consequence….)

The third movement seemed at first almost reverential – here, from Megiddo and her fellow-participants, it was a superbly-controlled outpouring of nostalgic beauty, capturing both the music’s audible rapture and its central stillness – so much so, that I was surprised by the performers’ “bookending” this exquisite movement rather than letting its open-ended conclusion drift into ineffable space at the end and “give rise” to the finale as a matter of course – there’s no “attacca” instruction in the score, but we could have done without all the “next movement” rustling and re-adjusting (my only misgiving regarding the performance!)

The finale’s “swing” soon restored all through-lines, real or imagined, with this performance’s rumbustious girth, playful “hide-and-seek” routines and wry interchanges between the soloist and the groups putting  me in mind in places of the composer’s “Falstaff” to a never-before extent – particularly so in the almost tavern-like scene of inebriated jollity when the soloist joins the orchestral cellos for a mock-serious choral-like unison sequence, brief, but good-humoured! All the more heart-rending, then, was the “drifting -away” of this mood, as the composer emulated his Shakespearean alter ego, lamenting the passing of the “good times” with upward-thrusting phrases that descended, weeping unashamedly, on both ‘cello and strings….

A brief episode re-evoked a distant memory of the Adagio’s loveliness, before the soloist seized the mettle and, after the work’s heartbreak accepted the inevitable with a stirring and courageous gesture of grim acceptance! A sterling performance!

A different world awaited us after the interval, with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, written by the composer in 1943 in the United States at the invitation of the renowned conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky. Bartok was seriously ill by this time, and in exile from his homeland due to the Nazi threat throughout Europe, so the commission came as a much needed boost to his waning creative energies – he was able to write several other works  as well as the Concerto (its title referring to the “concerto grosso” aspect of the music, similar to Elgar’s work, but much larger in scale and across the whole orchestral spectrum.)

My introduction to this work was through Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, who was actually a pupil of Bartók’s in Budapest, and who recorded the Concerto several times, besides coming to New Zealand in 1973 and conducting the work with the NZSO in Wellington (for me an unforgettable concert experience!). Still, in line with my memory of Orchestra Wellington’s outstanding Shostakovich series from last year I was eager to hear what Marc Taddei would inspire his players to achieve with Bartók’s masterpiece – and I wasn’t disappointed. Again, as with the Elgar works of the first half, the most compelling quality of the music-making was the bringing out of the character of the work’s sound-world right from the beginning – the mysterious opening proclaimed kinship to the composer’s characteristic “night” pieces, the lower strings enunciating a series of fourths in response to which the upper strings and winds sounded similarly atmospheric undulating figures. Throughout the first movement these leaping fourths and their immediate inversions played an important thematic role, both in exciting fugal sequences for strings and stirring brass passages, as did gentler moments like the oboe’s lullabic mid-movement figure which echoed throughout the more lyrical sections. Everything was given the space it needed to proclaim its significance to the moment as well as to the whole.

The Concerto’s two Allegretto movements are the best-known to audiences and most readily remembered. Both were spectacularly presented here, the second being the famous Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Couples) with its sequence of folk-oriented melodies for pairs of instruments, each playing in finely-wrought parallel with its partner at different intervals; and the fourth a somewhat notorious Intermezzo interotto, whose fame rests on Bartok’s “lampooning” of a theme of Dmitri Shostakovich’s in his wartime “Leningrad” Symphony, a simple marching tune drawing forth cackling trills from woodwinds and vulgar sliding raspberries from the brass (on this occasion, from the trombones, easily the most gloriously blatant and visceral spoofings I’ve ever heard in concert or on record!), before being sent packing, with little more than a whimper!

The work’s two remaining movements were no less spell-binding – and I was simply and truly blown away by the orchestral response Taddei got from his players in the central palindromic Elegia, right from the ”night-music” ambiences of the opening (in which we seemed lifted up through the darkness and into extra-terrestrial regions), and through a coruscating series of searing cries from a string section playing well above its weight  and reinforced by full-blooded wind-descents  and biting brass chords with timpani – incredibly intense string-playing along with extraordinary timbral ambiences (and with lovely work from the violas at one point). But the intensities summoned up by the string-playing here in particular brought back to me something of what Dorati got from his NZSO players all those years ago – as then, with an extraordinary amalgam of incisiveness and eloquence!

After all of this, the finale represented something of a release, with plenty of ebullience from all the players, Taddei creating a veritable ferment of excitement  from all sections, the winds also enjoying their fugato-like passage before introducing a new theme which went like wildfire through the rest of the orchestra – such an infectious mood of exhilaration with the brass and timpani capping it off splendidly! The tongue-in-cheek string fugato got a querulous response from the winds, who took the argument into subaqueous regions, until what sounded like an orchestral dishwasher on rinse-cycle was suddenly thrown open and everything and everybody tumbled out, picked themselves up and skedaddled towards something of a well-deserved grandstand finish – a younger audience would have perhaps leapt to its feet after such a comprehensive orchestral display, but the ovation was still suitably warm-hearted and appreciative. I had a feeling that, in the midst of all the excitement Marc Taddei might have forgotten to acknowledge his horn section at the end – or perhaps its members simply missed their cue! Whatever the case, all the musicians were heroes – and my previous cheek-by-jowl memories of hearing this work performed will now have to be updated in the most positive and enduring way!

A world-encircling winter solstice concert compendium – from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra with Virginie Pacheco, Sam Zhu and Ewan Clark

CLAIRE COWAN* ( Aotearoa New Zealand) – Legend of the Trojan Bird (2008)
EDWARD GREGSON (England) – Concerto for Tuba (1978)
AMY BEACH (United States) – Symphony in E Minor “Gaelic” (1896)

Sam Zhu (tuba)
Virginie Pacheco* (assistant conductor)
Ewan Clark (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 21st June 2026

Winter Solstice day in Wellington! and with it a venturesome programme of music from the Wellington City Orchestra! True, there was little or no ostensible relationship as regards the pieces’ content to the Solstice date and its marking of the venue’s furthermost separation from the sun – but as the concert featured three pieces new to the orchestra’s schedules, the musical territories we were taken to today seemed to have an appropriate sense of something out of the ordinary. This was further underlined by the cosmopolitean nature of the works and their origins, almost as if the music-making was putting a kind of Shakespearean girdle about the earth, beginning very properly with homegrown sounds and straightaway circumventing the globe before returning to our south seas via the Americas!

I thought it all fell excitingly in line with the general adventurousness of the orchestra’s recent repertoire, in terms of the programme’s relative unfamiliarity, and its attendant technical and interpretative challenges. Each WCO concert over the last couple of seasons has sparked interest in what has seemed to me like an encouraging rejuvenation of Wellington’s concert-going scene – with an increased proportion of both new and less familiar works in concerts a stimulating feature

This concert was no exception, with a trio of works notable for its diversity as such, besides representing different eras of musical history, and a variety of genres, in this case a miniature version of an orchestral tone-poem (Claire Cowan’s 2008 ”Legend of the Trojan Bird”), a 1978 concerto for tuba and orchestra (from Englishman Edward Gregson) and a fully-fledged romantic symphony (1896) by the American composer Amy Cheney Beach. I’ve not been able to find any other instance of this latter work being performed in this country, which possibly gives the occasion the additional distinction of being an Aotearoa New Zealand premiere – though I would have thought the organisers would have made mentioned of such a circumstance had it been the case.

As with previous recent concerts, one of the items was assigned to the orchestra’s Assistant Conductor, Virginie Pacheco, in this case Claire Cowan’s concise and evocative work “Legend of the Trojan Bird”, one dating from Cowan’s student years, during which she wrote the piece for the Auckland Youth Orchestra in 2008. Though not printed in the programme, a poem, presumably written by the composer, outlines the music’s trajectories, the music in effect elaborating what the poem’s words describe – the coming of the bird to “the ancient city” bringing a “moving shadow” of darkness along with the visitor’s  “dangerous beauty”. The music by turns depicted both the bird’s obvious mechanical attributes  – “wooden wings flapping, squeaking, lurching and shuddering”  along with more transformative modes, resulting in trajectories of soaring flight. Here, the rhythmic mechanical aspects become more vertiginous as the sounds “swoop, hover, soar”, before achieving, in its song a lovely “conversation with the neighbourhood of stars”- after which it disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. In every sense the scoring was magically ambient and ear-catching, holding one’s attention right to the mystical “stellar conversation” at the piece’s end. Conductor and orchestra achieved, I thought, miracles of evocation throughout every moment of the piece – a wondrous experience.

A different, more down-to-earth encounter was enacted by the performers in the next item, bringing both tuba soloist Sam Zhu and conductor Ewan Clark to the platform.  This was English composer Edward Gregson’s 1978 concerto for tuba, a piece obviously indebted to the latter’s historic compatriot Ralph Vaughan Williams with his similarly-wrought work for the instrument – Gregson at one point in the first movement unashamedly quotes the earlier work in an appropriate act of tongue-in-cheek homage, bringing a smile to the faces of those “in the know”, though there were many more felicities to be enjoyed, such as the wondrously cavernous notes Sam Zhu coaxed out of the ambient depths slumbering within his instrument!

A second movement demonstrated in places the expressive range of the instrument, its lyrical, and, in places, somewhat anguished tones far removed from the humour and rumbustions of the opening, partnered by some haunting wind playing sequences, and featuring a great percussion-capped climax at one point before the music drew up its folds of sound and returned to its dark silences. We were given a “return to life” by the finale, with marching pizzicato at the outset accompanying some jolly “tuba-triplets” and which then morphed into a festive dance! Sam Zhu’s instrument then gave us an almost lullabic moment with some pendulous winds as well as a briefly-philosophical like cadenza, before being marched off triumphantly at the end by the band as if “spoils from a day’s successful tuba-watching” – a great success!

So to the concert’s much-awaited second half and a symphony by the remarkable Amy Beach,a work which, at the time caused quite a stir with its first performance in Boston in1896, as it was the first symphony composed by an American woman to be performed by a major orchestra. Beach  had begun her musical career primarily as a pianist, and had already appeared as a soloist with the Boston Symphony when just seventeen years of age. However her marriage shortly afterwards resulted in her giving up her performing career for a number of years and concentrating upon composition. Largely self-taught, she drew her inspiration from both the “classics” and from the music that was still new in the 1880s, Brahms, Wagner. Liszt and Dvorak. Her compositions beside the Symphony included a Piano Concerto, a Mass and many chamber works and songs, which, after a period of neglect, are finding their way back into recent concert schedules everywhere.

Beach was a member of a group of composers from New England whose goal was to develop a uniquely “American” style of composition through combining traditional classical structures and forms with indigenous melodies and rhythms (such as Afro-American spirituals and folk melodies (Antonin Dvorak, who lived and worked for a period in New York was a passionate advocate of this principle in his composition teaching at the American National Music Conservatory).  Beach’s contemporaries included George Whitfield Chadwick,  Horatio Parker, John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote and Edward MacDowell  – despite the esteem she was held in, she still had to overcome prevailing attitudes towards her “women composer” status, even when positively expressed – it was Chadwick who, when congratulating Beach on the success of her Symphony, described his “thrill of pride” that such a fine work had been produced by someone whom he considered had become “one of the boys”! However, Beach was determined also to advance women’s composition activities, helping to establish a Society of American Women Composers in 1925 and supporting the compositional careers of several who became known and admired, among them Margaret Ruthven Lang, and  Mabel W. Daniels, as well as the French-born Cecile Chaminade.

Beach’s Symphony in E-flat was given the name “Gaelic” because of her use of the technique of using “music of the people” for thematic and rhythmic inspiration as advocated by Dvorak, though with a significant difference – her “indigenous” affinities were with the folk-song and-dance material brought to America by her English, Scottish and Irish forbears, and the predominately ”irish” origins of the songs and dances quoted in the Symphony resulted in the work’s subtitle. She quoted the idea of the folk-themes expressing “the laments of a primitive people – their hopes and their dreams”.

Written between 1894 and 1896 this was Beach’s only Symphony, and fully expresses her determination to capture the flavour of the “music of the people” she knew best – the “Allegro con fuoco” opening of the work immediately expresses a rich, dark chromatic Romanticism, reminiscent of some of Liszt’s and Wagner’s music, mysterious swirlings punctuated by great calls and declamatory gestures. Solo winds then quoted from both Beach’s own music, a song “Dark is the Night” and from a Gaelic dance-tune, with solo clarinet, oboe, flute and horn splendidly doing the thematic honours, their traditional exposition, development and recapitulation roles coming to the fore throughout the movement, and with remarkably assured support from strings, brass and percussion in various sequences.

The second movement charmingly began “Alla Siciliana” before transforming itself into an Allegro vivace – lovely work at the outset from the solo horn, followed by the oboe quoting a beguiling Irish tune “The little field of barley” (along with other winds), after which the strings magically ushered in dancing, scampering and rumbusting textures to captivating effect! – a sudden  luftpause then brought horn, clarinet and flute as harbingers of a gorgeous cor anglais rendition of the “Little field” melody, to which the strings and brass addeed their voices, and the various winds “paired up” with fragments of the melody, until the scampering strings returned to round off the movement’s fairytale enchantment!!

The brasses announced the opening of the third movement’s “Lento”, which the winds carried on, before the solo violin presented a kind of recitative, joined by the solo cello – we then got an evocative  melody called “Cushlamachree” led by the ‘cello and joined by the oboe, and strings. This led to an epic, almost “Smetana/Ma Vlast-like” section featuring a series of “great views” from the whole orchestra, the solo horn leading the way in a series of wind and brass solos cycled about the orchestra! soundscape, with beautiful solos aplenty! The solo violin adroitly introduced a major-key melody – presumably one called “Which way did she go?” –  which built up to an almost angst-flavoured climax, before restating the first melody, Beach here displaying her compositional mastery with variants of the themes in major and minor, and with the interchanges brought to a particularly piquant conclusion.

I had found the symphony’s finale something of a protracted puzzle on first hearing a recording, but this performance held the structure together steadfastly and seemed to make everything work, right from its vigorous and declamatory “ready! – set!” introduction, indicating the onset of an adventurous journey – after this vigorous opening came a lyrical counter-subject in a major key, not unlike that in the finale of Sergei Rachmaninov’s E Minor Symphony, written a decade or so later. A strange, moodily restless passage followed, which took some time to build back the energies of the opening, the players keeping their heads and fiercely concentrating upon the music’s “search for redemption” which came with the horns sounding the alarm and rousing the brass and the rest of the orchestra to readiness! With that, and the major-key second subject’s return, the skies suddenly cleared, and the music raced to its close as jubilantly and decisively as might have been expected.

I thought, at the end of the work, that Ewan Clark and the WCO players had completed something of a major achievement, here   – such an enthusiastic and spankingly capable performance! We were left to all babble our way homewards at the joy of such a discovery, and of experiencing a whole afternoon’s feisty and absorbing listening!

NZSO reaches for Mahler’s “Titan” via Ades and Korngold

Posted on by Peter Mechen

James Ehnes (violin) and  Gemma New (conductor)  play Korngold’s Violin Concerto

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents “Titan”

THOMAS ADES –  The Origin of the Harp (NZ Premiere)
ERICH KORNGOLD – Violin Concerto in D Major
GUSTAV MAHLER – Symphony No. 1 “Titan”
James Ehnes (violin)
Gemma New (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday 22nd May 2026

Reviewed by Leila Lois
for Middle C

The evening opened with promise, with a bright and warm introduction from Gemma New, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s conductor and Artistic Advisor. As the first woman to hold the post of principal conductor at NZSO, New never fails to show charm and voracity. She beamingly announced the programme for the evening, which included the New Zealand premiere of Thomas Adès’ The Origin Of The Harp, Korngold’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the “Titan”.

The night’s selection was delightfully whimsical, the first piece following the tale – a Celtic water nymph (of Ondine proportions) who falls in love with a mortal and tragically struggles to leave behind the ocean. One might have expected something dark and turgid but instead, the piece shimmered with phrases that at first lapped like gentle waves, then writhed and tumbled. In this tone-poem, composed in four short parts, the harp itself was not featured but suggested, appearing at the start of the fourth and final section, as a surprise, melting into the symphony as an epic denouement.

For this piece, the programme notes told us Adès implies the harp by damping the strings of a piano with BluTack, a perfectly innovative and slightly off-kilter complement to Mahler’s inventiveness in the symphony to come. A short, soothing piece that opened the evening perfectly.

Next came the Violin Concerto in D Major by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Famous for creating Romantic style film scores, Korngold fled Nazi Germany for the Hollywood Hills in1934. The concerto found the perfect receptor in soloist James Ehnes, who realised the piece with rare care and attention, such that it was mesmeric to watch and hear. He is truly virtuoso in violin, his tone regal yet sweet – honeyed yet clean. His playing is also remarkably expressive. Beyond this, the connection between New and Ehnes was so compelling that it felt like they were the only two in the concert hall. New’s whole frame was tenderly tilted towards Ehnes, almost lovingly leaning into the melody. A synergistic moment. The piece ended with an encore where Ehnes played with feverish brilliance.

The focal piece of the night came last in the billing, Mahler’s First Symphony, also known as the “Titan”. The piece famously starts in a flood-lit forest, and the woodwind section spiralled through this deliciously on the night. Allegedly the inspiration for this first movement in the symphony came from Gustav Mahler’s childhood memory, where his father took and left him in the forest, and he spent the whole day immersed in the woodland world, enraptured.

In the second part of the opening this really shone through in the gorgeous wooden structure of the inside of the Michael Fowler Centre and exuded a sense of warmth, and calm, despite the notorious volume of Mahler’s scores. The next movement was more energetic, with the rustic party and raucous feel of the cheerful ‘ländler’ (a kind of folkloric waltz), somersaulting through the hall. The warmth of the strings and heartiness of the percussion in this section was led well – special kudos to those string players and percussionists respectively!

Onto the third movement – the emotional heart and most unnerving part of the symphony. The famous distorted solo double bass solo led expertly by Joan Perarnau Garriga played “Frère Jacques” in a minor key, giving it a grotesque, dirge-like quality. My friend, who went in “cold” to the symphony quickly picked up the unsettling familiarity of the melody, and so Mahler’s way of playing with our expectations was evident. The sardonic funeral march quality was well executed, with the famed drunken-sounding trumpets guided by section
principal, Michael Kirgan.

The final movement broke the strangeness of this with an anguished stormy brass-heavy sound, that roiled over the audience like a tempest. Again, the percussion was precise and impassioned, full of the unmistakable spirit of Mahler.

Overall a wonderfully curated night that left audiences inspired, with the Mahlerian counterpoints, tinges of the unexpected and whimsical, folkloric shades.

Music from the memory, in the air and on the wing – all from Wellington City Orchestra’s opening 2026 concert!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra’s 2026 concert series – a fresh and adventurous beginning!

LILI BOULANGER – D’un Matin de Printemps *
LOUISE WEBSTER – Violin Concerto (In Hollowed Bone I hear the Seas Roar)
LILI BOULANGER – D’un Soir Triste
SERGE PROKOFIEV – Ballet “Romeo and Juliet” – Suite No. 2

Helene Pohl (violin)
Justus Rozemond (conductor)
Virginie Pacheco (assistant conductor)*
Wellington City Orchestra

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday 28th March, 2026

This opening Wellington City Orchestra concert of 2026, brought to its audience a truly engaging and stimulating  programmme. Conductor Justus Rozemond and his WCO musicians here followed up their enterprising 2025 concert of works by Nicolai, Rachmaninov and Berlioz with an even more exploratory selection – two compositions by the tragically short-lived French composer Lili Boulanger (the first of which was directed by the WCO’s Assistant Conductor. Virginie Pacheco and which opened the concert), followed by a Violin Concerto from Auckland composer Louise Webster, here played by the work’s first performer in 2016, Helene Pohl – and with the composer in the audience! – and finally, a Suite of dances from one of the most beloved of twentieth-century ballets, Serge Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”.

Assistant Conductor, Virginie Pacheco (who had made such a positive first impression in last year’s concert series), took the rostrum for the concert’s beginning and launched her players enthusiastically into the opening wide-eyed spring-like strains of Lili Boulanger’s D’un Matin de Printemps, (A Spring Morning). This was one of the last works the composer completed before her untimely death in 1918 at the age of twenty-four – she had written several chamber versions of the piece for different instruments, but wanted its “full-orchestra” expression as the piece’s last word.

The music’s remarkably verdant textures were conveyed here throughout the “spring morning” opening section with a judicious amalgam of elan and delicacy – a more sombre set of sequences followed, featuring strings and wings in forest-murmur-like “nature-exchanges’, which built up through a splendid crescendo, becoming at the end a kind of exultant processional exuberantly capped by a splendid harp flourish – wonderful, atmospheric playing!

The front violin-desks were then moved back to make room for the concerto soloist – this was Helene Pohl, who had given the premiere performance of Louise Webster’s Violin Concerto as long ago as  2016 with Auckland’s St.Matthews’ Chamber Orchestra. The composer was originally going to write an “overture-like” piece for the concert with passages for a solo violinist, but when she discovered who the violinist was going to be, the present concerto simply “growed”, inspired by Webster’s regard for Pohl as a musician. Incidentally, Webster subtitled the work with the quotation from Ruth Dallas’s poem about the  sea – “In hollowed bone I hear the seas roar” – AFTER the music had been written, a truly organic, rather than “made-to-order” gestation!

The following year, Pohl was due to reperform the work with the NZSO as part of the SOUNZ readings of music by New Zealand composers, but conflicting schedules meant that NZSO violinist Yuka Eguchi had to step in to perform the work instead. Now, ten years after that first SMCO performance Pohl was delighted to have the chance to revisit the concerto in concert – she recalled being particularly struck by the work’s fusion of emotional expression with colourful pictorial detail, making the concerto all the more pleasurable a prospect to go back to.

The work’s beginning instantly arrested one’s attention – over a low orchestral pedal-point the solo violin entered with an ascending theme, the orchestra repeating the theme at a quicker pace. The violin’s “similar but different” wandering, soulful theme, joined by the flutes, gradually energised things, elaborating on certain phrases, rising to stratospheric heights – a beautiful sequence!  From there on the movement played host to sequences alternating tensions and exaltations, all joined in a kind of accord which  featured the soloist reacting to and interacting with both single/smaller groups and with larger orchestral forces – however, a brief confrontation sequence with the orchestra brought forth echoed phrases, sharp pizzicati, percussive “slaps”, and piled-up-note patterns, cautioning against easy conquest!

In other places the interactions of the violinist with smaller groups had an intimacy and candour that suggested something of a “friend in the wilderness” relationship – the soloist frequently parleyed with winds such as the flutes or piccolo, or tenderly mused with the clarinet, or larger groups of sostenuto strings, as well as gentle wind chorales with pizzicato accompaniment – the violinist soared above the winds’ ostinato -like figures in a beautiful passages reminiscent of Holst, sometimes echoing, and at other times supporting each of the soloists phrases and “frontings up” with similarly-derived figures. Another gorgeous “wind chorale” sequence encouraged the soloist to break into a kind of dance, joined in with by the orchestra – something which seemed for a few treasurable moments to unify the music’s questing spirit.

It came across to me as much as a kind of re-exploration or reassessment of deeply-felt experience and feeling.  various both tension and exultation.  The writing for the orchestra in places spare and uncompromising, seemed still  to respond to the soloist with things she already knew, echoing or elaborating phrases and impulses from the solo instrument’s own plethora of realities.  At the end  even the strings gave the soloist moments of reassurance in return to her oputpourings, however brief the rhythmic impulses and guarded sighings, leaving a solo ‘cello and then a viola to offer the soloist concluding impulses of companionship.

Conductor Justus Rozemond got the second movement to grasp the trajectories and flex plenty of orchestral muscle, bringing out a swinging theme that was punctuated by various wind, brass and percussion irruptions. The violin danced at first, then after letting the orchestra echo the dance, re-entered, soaring and swooning beguilingly as the winds amicably chattered away. Eventually the orchestra decided to join in with the violin, grasping the mettle with force and energy, trajectories riding upon surges of almost joyous collegial abandonment. Honour satisfied, the momentums sank to rest – so that when the violin tried to revitalise the dance the orchestra abruptly called a halt!

The third movement, written for soloist and strings alone, drifted into being like a half-realised dream, solo violin harmonics floating into and out of the bleak sostenuto orchestral string textures. The orchestral strings remained glacial as they built an impassioned climax (reminiscent in places of the slow movement of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony). The solo violin toyed with other solo lines, all wanting to fill the ambient soundscapes, all trying in places to break through a kind of expressive stranglehold, but constantly being brought back to order by the sheer intensity of the orchestra’s impassive response.  The solo violin returned briefly to its world of spectral, half-lit tones and muted impulse, so that the work proverbially ended “not with a bang but with a whimper”. Whew!

A delighted composer came onto the platform at the end to congratulate the musicians and acknowledge our applause – what a work, and what a committed performance! And what an inspiration Helene Pohl’s incredible mastery of the solo instrumental writing would have obviously been in terms of enabling the music to work its spell – all due credit to all concerned!

We needed an interval to take it all in sufficiently, of course, and especially in view of having another of Lili Boulanger’s heartfelt final compositions to give our attention to in the concert’s second half. I was wondering whether we would get Virginie Pacheco back to conduct the second Boulanger piece, D’un Soir Triste but it was Justus Rozemond’s turn as conductor to guide the players through the second of the composer’s pieces. It proved to be the diametrical opposite of the joyous “Spring Morning” piece we had enjoyed – though its title gave us some warning of what was to follow, the music unequivocally takes the word “Triste” in the title to near-unbearable depths of despair.

The piece began with a faint heartbeat rhythm whose trajectories awoke the senses with firstly the winds and then along with the strings beginning what seemed like a death-struggle with oncoming darkness. Each of the music’s upward-thrusting agitations took us towards a remorselessly grinding climax, in which percussion and brass savagely intoned their despairing message. The haunting throbbing of drums and a cello solo clothed in mourning delivered a scenario of intense sorrow, given tongue by the strings and winds. A harp and piano added to whatever consolation the music seemed capable of giving, though the brass and percussion didn’t hesitate to imbue the same themes with sterner, more fateful and sharper-edged accents. The strings aided by the winds continued their threnody of consolation, though the increased intensities led to tragic outcomes and eventual darkness.

The piece’s ending here seemed an incredible evocation of bravery and raw courage from a composer in the midst of the gathering darkness of impending death. Adding to the poignancy of it all was music-making from conductor and players which responded to the work’s heartfelt emotion with focus and commitment that was itself moving to experience at first hand.

Even so, after such rawly-unmitigated emotion, one was almost grateful for the relative distance and paradigmatic tragedy of the “Romeo and Juliet” story, as expressed by the variety of feeling, colour and action in Serge Prokofiev’s music for his famous eponymously-named 1935 ballet. Renowned as much for its initial neglect when first completed, the ballet had to wait until a 1938 production in Brno, Czechoslovakia, for its first public staging, and until 1940 for its first presentation on Russian soil by the Kirov Ballet. The composer meantime had resorted to compiling suites of dances from the complete work to be played in symphonic concerts, as well as extracting ten pieces arranged for solo piano, as a means of getting the music known.

We were given the composer’s arrangement of a second suite of dances from the work, beginning with the portentous “Montagues and Capulets” sequence of orchestral crescendi which serves as a prelude to the “Dance of the Knights” from the ballet’s first act. These famous crescendi were delivered with tremendous gusto by the brass and percussion here, with the sudden hushed ambiences leaving the string tones floating beautifully. Justus Rosamond took a wonderfully portentously tempo for the “Dance”, conveying the arrogance and brutality of the Capulet Knights and the contrasting minuet-like sequences depicting the disguised Montagues at the ball. And how wonderful to briefly hear the timbres of the saxophone taking up the resumption of the Knight’s Dance music towards the end.

The strings made an outstandingly nimble and winsome job of Juliet’s music, Rozamund allowing the clarinet no respite in the alternate sequence (beautifully played!), but relaxed expansively for the touching flute-and-solo-cello portrayals later. In his music Friar Lawrence was a younger, more vigorous priest than I’d been accustomed to, a refreshing alternative – the portrayal got lovely bassoon work, and was ably supported by the horn and the strings. A whimsical favourite of mine has been the “Dance of the Five Couples”, one in which the various players scampered about to great effect.

More expansive was the “Romeo and Juliet before Parting”, with gorgeous, lump-in-the-throat flute playing at the start, and beautiful replying strings, before the horn splendidly made its presence felt, along with the various winds, each “launching” the lines with real presence, such as with the viola solo, nicely animated and properly demonstrative.
The more concerted reprise of the “farewell” music was properly full-blooded, with the occasional “bloop” adding to the desperate, heartfelt nature of the scenario, setting in poignant relief the ostinato-like accompanying lines from the winds and strings as the lower instruments growled an ominous foretaste of the tragedy to come in the bass registers – a splendidly-wrought scenario!

More poignance was to be had with the old-fashioned-sounding “Dance of the Maids from the Antille”, here touchingly characterised by both solo and concerted violins, and contrasting clarinet and saxophone contributions. Came the  inevitable “Death of Romeo and Juliet”, the players digging into the rawly-wrought lines, and the brasses making a properly anguished array of tones, and the cellos and violins throwing out the lovers’ ill-fated theme with heart-wrenching resonance – the whole orchestra’s delivery of the “funeral procession” sequence made for a highlight of the afternoon’s presentation. All that was left at the end were the bleak, comfortless tones of the strings and piccolo, sounding without words the refrain – “for never was a tale of such woe/than that of Juliet and her Romeo”….

All in all, the concert made a truly memorable start to a year’s eagerly-awaited music-making, with every item representing and delivering “moments per minute”, rather than the other way round! A touching “extra” occasion-moment was the marking of Rowena Cullen’s retirement from ten years’ Presidency of the Wellington City Orchestra with a presentation and a warm-hearted ovation. But the afternoon’s music was splendid and special in many ways, not least of all due to composer Louise Webster and violinist Helene Pohl. And, to conductor Justus Rozemond, and his concert assistant conductor Virginie Pacheco, and to all the players, well done for a great beginning to 2026!

 

 

 

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS – Wellington City Orchestra’s congress of assorted realities

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, with Diedre Irons (piano), Brendan Agnew (conductor), and Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor)

SAI NATARAJAN – In This Corner Of The World
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor
DOUGLAS LILBURN – Symphony No. 2

Diedre Irons (piano)
Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor – Natarajan)
Brendan Agnew  (Conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 7th December, 2025

Now this was a treat for any concertgoer relishing the thought of something old and something new, combining an easeful kind of familiarity with more challenging musical terrain, as well as setting home-grown worlds in a wider context. Wellington City Orchestra’s programme enterprisingly opened up for us here-and-now impressions of creative forces at work in Aotearoa, before time-travelling us to Beethoven’s world and back again, and finally giving us a time-in-motion slice of “being” at a significant emerging point in our own colourful history. The sounds we heard spoke volumes for each of these times and places – it was something of a proverbial journey!

Different people participated in this process, and in different ways – we were welcomed to the concert at its beginning by Rowena Cullen, the orchestra’s President who’s also a member of the violin section, after which today’s conductor Brendan Agnew firstly paid tribute to a recently deceased orchestra member, Mark Hill, and then introduced today’s concert’s assistant conductor, Virginie Pacheco, who directed the concert’s opening performance, a heartwarming piece by youthful composer Sai Natarajan. At its conclusion Brendan Agnew then  bade us welcome pianist Diedre Irons to the stage to deliver her Beethoven concerto performance. Like the “players” in Shakespeare’s “Ages of Man” all of these individuals had, by their own lights, a special part to play in the panoply.

Beginning the concert charmingly  and sonorously was a work written by emerging freelance composer Sai Natarajan, from Palmerston North, one called “In This Corner of the World”. With Assistant Conductor Virginie Pacheco (the first to actually hold this title with the WCO) at the helm, we were transported at the beginning to the Manawatu plains, with Sibelius-like wind impulses sounding across the deeper murmurings of those open spaces, all the while engendering awakenings of activity, the thrustings and resoundings suggesting  iceberg-tips of the “absolute powerhouse of artistic and musical talent” that abides in the region.

The music gathers itself and epically “pushes out” this landscape, contrasting numerous “forest murmurings’ with attention-grabbing percussive scintillations, a recurring motif resounding in one’s attention as the brass give us some Lilburn-like reminiscences suggesting the inherent “musicality” of natural rhythms. My own experiences as a born-and-bred Palmerstonian responded to the composer’s recognition of “artistic toiling” in modestly-appointed, yet still-resonating hatcheries of human productivity in all fields of expression. I remember watching as my parents and their contemporaries set examples for us of partaking of things resulting for some of us in what Sai Natarajan calls  an artist’s “joys, struggles, disappointments and triumphs”, and from which modest origins still brought forth “beauty and joy”  in the doing, and occasionally even something enduring and worth celebrating – as this this great-hearted piece certainly was!

Happily, “In This Corner of the World”, after being premiered by the Manawatu Sinfonia in 2024, was recorded earlier this year by the NZSO as part of their annual NZ Composer Sessions initiative. I would imagine we haven’t heard the last of this intuitive, versatile, and delightfully communicative composer.

The programme’s suggestion of a wider context of human creativity was hinted at by the music of a composer whose output for many people epitomised a kind of universality  of utterance, Ludwig van Beethoven. His Third Piano Concerto is a kind of bridge-work between the classical and romantic eras, a realm which Mozart had also occasionally explored in music written in a similar key, but one more fully and dramatically furthered by this and other works by Beethoven.

Having splendidly recorded all of the composer’s piano concertos, and frequently played them in concert Diedre Irons was the ideal soloist to realise the “sturm und drang” of this work, aided by a suitably dark-browed accompaniment from the orchestra, with conductor Brendan Agnew on the podium. The opening was the orchestra’s alone, strongly-focused and well-detailed, to which the soloist responded with suitably dramatic contrasting gestures – it wasn’t all high drama and theatricality, with the second subject group almost playful in intent in places under Irons’ fingers, but leading back to a stern recapitulation by the players under Agnew’s direction and a properly virtuoso performance of the solo cadenza. Here, Irons was in complete command of the drama and volatility of the writing, bringing out the almost ghostly ambiences of the instrument’s return to the world of interaction in the movement’s darkly-enigmatic coda.

One of the most beautiful of Beethoven’s slow movements followed, with piano and orchestral passages delighting the ear, and the interchanges expressing a heartfelt “communal” sense of expression. Irons’ voicing of the decorative poetic utterances made every impulse a joy, and the winds and strings in particular matched her ardour – though the strings’ pizzicati could have been a tad firmer in places as they were near to inaudibility, so sensitive was their response! Particularly lovely were the last few interactions, the strings tender phrasings and the piano’s “haunted” chordings all underpinned by dark wind-and-brass murmurings before the latter echoed the piano’s final descending notes and brought in a final single chord – magical!

I loved the insouciance with which Irons then started the finale’s ball rolling – but the orchestra was ready for her, picking up the traces of the trajectories and ready to do its bit with the first big tutti – what great exchanges between orchestra and piano with those mighty chords and flourishes! A lovely clarinet solo introduced and elaborated on a new episode, and a string fugato followed, after a while beginning to loosen at the seams, but managing to complete the task as the pianist jumped in and steadied the rhythms! The recapitulation was strong and purposeful, as was Irons’ final grandstand solo flourish before the coda’s cheeky beginning, with truly spectacular piano-playing and a suitably vigorous audience response.

She was accorded a richly deserved tribute from all, but had not done with us yet! To our delight she sat back down at the piano and began the deliciously droll F Minor Allegro moderato dance from Schubert’s adorable Moments Musicaux. It was playing in which every note resonated and every impulse “choreographed” its own sound, inviting parts of us by turns to listen and sing and dance in our minds – and the moment towards the end when the final line impishly turned to F Major seemed as if the music was suddenly smiling at us and telling us to forget our troubles – magical piano playing!

An interval saw the piano further “magicked” to one side, leaving more space for the players to resound the strains of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant musical compositions, Douglas Lilburn’s Second Symphony. Completed in 1951, this iconic work had to wait until 1959 for its first public performance. Part of the problem was the country’s National Orchestra still being in its relative infancy (it gave its first concert in 1947) and its early conductors were certainly reluctant at that time to “take the plunge” with anything as off the beaten track as a locally-produced symphony – rather, they were set upon establishing the standard repertoire. The composer’s First Symphony had been an earlier casualty, completed in 1949, and premiered in 1951, to be then ignored for a further ten years. It wasn’t until the advent of John Hopkins as the National Orchestra’s Principal Conductor in the late 1950s that Lilburn’s music began to be performed more regularly – the composer’s gratitude was such that he went on to write a Third Symphony in 1961 and dedicate it to Hopkins!

The Second Symphony has always been associated with quintessential aspects of New Zealand life and landscape. What the composer referred to as “the imponderables” of the natural world feature strongly in the work – contrasts of light and shade and the vagaries of weather are prominent characteristics of the music’s different ambiences. Human influences are also a factor – in the second movement Lilburn immortalised what he described as the ”nasal and tangy” cry of Wellington’s Evening Post Paper-boy’s call, heard as he passed through the capital en route to or from the South Island. Others have commented upon the “search for identity” aspect of the music in the other movements, particularly in the third “Introduction”, where the “frontier” aspect of the environment seems somewhat remote and forbidding and essentially solitary. The music’s angst-like textures and ambiences seem to reflect struggles associated with a 1950s “coming of age” in artistic and other matters, one which the final movement translates into more positive and robust gesturings. I must here admit to a degree of dissatisfaction with the “Introduction” movement regarding its brevity – though expertly crafted, it doesn’t for me go far enough or even resound sufficiently within its existing parameters, eluding the feeling of a truly epic statement of being (it’s significantly shorter in scale than both the first or last movements!) – or have I been listening to too much Mahler or Bruckner or Shostakovich of late?

But to the beginning – beautifully and wistfully opened by the strings the first movement also featured buoyant solos from oboe, clarinet and flute, with the horns in atmospheric alignment. The strings, winds and brass raised us to the heights mid-movement with the horns having a wonderful “Carl Nielsen” moment (I once got taken to task by Lilburn himself for suggesting  the merest connection of him with that composer!), and the timpani adding to the music’s “epic” quality before the strings, with the oboe supported by the horns, bring the movement to a relatively placid close. A pity the St.Andrew’s acoustic had difficulty sorting  the dynamics, with the brass, to my ears sounding a bit lost in the mid-movement tuttis’ welter of sound!

Better-realised was the Scherzo, a more nimble, less weighty sound, the oboe doing a great job with the perky theme, and the brass and timpani lively at the climaxes. The other winds did splendid things with their variants of the theme, but the most nostalgic moments were the cellos’ introduction of the “paperboy” theme, and the strings in general joining in with its more extended moments. Elsewhere, the “snap” and “bite” of the rhythms was a joy.

The opening of the third movement  “Introduction” with its bleak and unremitting atmosphere was promising – strings and winds in tandem advanced the sobriety of it all, bringing out an almost Sibelius-like feeling of isolation to the textures. The strings pursued a “wandering” course underscored by the brass and counterpointed by the horns, and with the oboe and flute doggedly “lifting” the mood in places. The brass seemed warmer and more heroic when first entering, but their aspect quickly darkened in accord with the strings, the anguished chordings from both heightening the unease which the flute sought to console. At this point I wanted more, but for whatever reason the composer had decreed “enough”, and before we knew where we were, the finale was upon us and the clouds had dispersed …..

Though the composer might have given this marvellous finale more to react to in situ,  the energising warmth and freshness of the movement’s opening textures set the tone for what followed, impulses which seemed like a symbolic renewal of confidence following a dark night of the soul. Lilburn had already in words enjoined his fellow-composers to engage in what he called “a search for tradition” relating to the necessity of “writing our own music”, in his now-historic 1946 Cambridge Music School lecture written under the same title. Here, now, he practised his own dictum in the composition of this symphony, and to the extent he felt it necessary, whatever critics might say about the result! The work emphasised both challenge and possibility, and the results today spoke for themselves.

The coming-together of these things in this finale was a heady experience – moments in which the big ringing brass theme soared out gloriously, and the orchestra in other places seemed to pick up its skirts and dance were made the more memorable by a final peroration begun by stratospheric strings, and chiselled out of the texture by resounding brass and rolling timpani in glorious C Major! It had the effect of consuming everything at the concert’s conclusion in swathes of splendour and happiness!

 

 

 

NZSO’s Symphonic Dances concert explores Nature, Life and Love

Posted on by Peter Mechen

TABEA SQUIRE – Conversation of the Light-Ship and the Tide (World Premiere)
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Saxophone Concerto in E-flat Major Op 109
DARIUS MILHAUD – Scaramouche for saxophone and orchestra Op.165c
SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Symphonic Dances Op.45

Jess Gillam (alto saxophone)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Gemma New (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Thursday 20th November 2025

“Symphonic Dances” seemed an apt enough description of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s latest concert with inspirational Music Director Gemma New – however while listening to the concert  another title occurred to me, that of the well-known  “Nature, Life and Love” trilogy of orchestral Overtures completed by Antonin Dvorak. I thought it would make an apt key to characterising the programme we heard in the Michael Fowler Centre last evening, with star British saxophonist Jess Gillam taking a significant role in three of the four pieces we heard.

“Nature”, then, formed the basis of the concert’s opening item, a world premiere performance of music by Tabea Squire (b.1989 in Scotland, of Kiwi (NZ) and German parents). The work’s title “Conversation of the Light-ship and the Tide” reflected something of the composer’s multi-national origins, as it depicted the once-common practice of various Northern Hemisphere countries with coastlines too rugged and impassable for lighthouses to instead use “light-ships”, vessels containing warning lights who were moored close to any such hazards to warn any passing ships of the attendant dangers.

Tabea Squire’s music took us immediately to remote, unpeopled places, with sounds and impulses devoid of flesh-and-blood human activity – here were louring brass tones, percussive patternings and stark, almost pitiless wind-and-brass chords, made bleaker and more unremitting by undulating strings, whose occasional sul ponticello tones  further highlighted the isolation and loneliness of the seascape. Slowly the characters in this scenario emerged – the ship, bound, but patient and stoic, and the sea, with its near-limitless resources giving notice of its power while holding itself at first in reserve.

Clarinet and piccolo brought light and animation, the ship feeling the ocean’s all-encompassing but relatively static embrace and conveying its gratification, which the brasses at first seemed to confirm, though occasionally reminding the vessel of its tenuous grip upon oceanic tranquility – however, the winds’ ever-increasingly playful, and La Mer-like interactions with the strings which followed seemed to defy at first the disquiet of the increasingly baleful brass – but then, with the tocsin adding portentous soundings, the ocean finally voiced its displeasure and impatience, unleashing its dominance over the hapless ship. In the wake of the agitations a kind of cosmic balance seemed crucial and came with the winds’ restoration of serenity, with the strings’ stratospheric tones resounding in empathy as vessel and ocean retreated into silence.

With Jess Gillam’s superb alto saxophone playing “life” was definitely on the cards for both of the next two items, the Saxophone Concerto by Alexander Glazunov being a new piece for me, though I’d heard Darius Milhaud’s “Scaramouche” before played by two pianos. Glazunov wrote his concerto for Sigurd Rascher, a German-born American saxophonist, who, according to the composer “mercilessly hounded” the latter for the piece’s completion. He himself never heard a public performance of the work.

Though Jess Gillam “owned” the performance in a visual, “playing with her whole body”  sense, we were just as entranced by the exchanges between soloist and orchestra throughout – Glazunov didn’t seek to exploit the instrument’s more jazzily contemporary qualities, but instead expressed and shared with the orchestra an old-world romanticism, to which Gillam and the players responded with breath-bated beauty. Perhaps the gem from the piece was the fugal finale, which tossed the material around between soloist and orchestra before the saxophone skipped off on a kind of goose-chase of recycled material and then regaled us with a hilariously raucous fanfare finish!

Darius Milhaud’s Scaramouche was even more winning than I remembered in its saxophone-and-orchestra guise – a delightfully vertiginous opening, with the soloist’s whirling figurations buoyed up by strummed strings and bubbling winds and brass! We were regaled by a version of “Ten Green Bottles” which differed from the one I was taught at school but resonated just as strongly, its trajectory then deliciously interwoven with the opening! The middle movement’s dream-like processional took us to a graceful waltz sequence, then combined the two, before whirling us into a final Brazileira, a samba that produced toe-tapping activation all around and enthusiastic applause at the end. Gillam’s encore, Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”, couldn’t have rounded the life-vibe off better!

And what, then, of love? Sergei Rachmaninov’s music for many people embodies such a feeling, though with this, the concluding work of his creative career he would have pronounced his achievement as something of a failure, describing his composing self as “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien…..” and calling his Symphonic Dances, his Op.45, his “last spark”. However, the love Rachmaninov felt as an exile from his lost homeland, Russia, is manifest throughout all of this music. And it was a love that was greater and deeper for being unattainable – the Russia he knew and loved had gone.

Gemma New’s performance of the work with the NZSO was an extraordinary experience for me, due to the abiding sense I got from her realisation of the music with her players of this quality of love. It was expressed in many ways – in the players’ attack throughout the work, in the weight she accorded the phrasing of the main themes, in the variegated emphases she gave different phrases so that they sounded freshly-minted, and in her awareness of the specific character of each of the work’s episodes. Not the least of these achievements was her inspired collaboration with the same Jess Gillam as the “guest” orchestral saxophonist in the first movement’s great instrumental solo.

Only at the end of the first movement, when Rachmaninov relinquishes his iron grip on the music’s driving rhythm and allows a reminiscence of the “Dies Irae” theme from his First Symphony to make an appearance, did I experience a pang of disappointment – New took us straight into this moment without reflection upon its sudden reincarnation. whereas I wanted to be taken more tenderly to this “freshly disinterred” episode from a work whose ham-fisted premiere performance (conducted, ironically, by Alexander Glazunov!)  had given the young composer the most harrowing artistic experience of his career.  Of course it’s one of those instances of a different interpreter’s subjectivity having to be accepted and validated. But the rest brought ample compensation, with one of the most moving and exciting performances I’d ever heard for all the above reasons, and richly deserving of enduring memory.

ENEMY OF THE STATE – a multivaried concert experience with Psathas, Glazunov and Shostakovich

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
ENEMY OF THE STATE

JOHN PSATHAS – Next Planet
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Violin Concerto
DMITRI  SHOSTAKOVICH – Lady Macbeth of the Mstensk District –
(Suite from the Opera – arr. Marc Taddei)

Benjamin Baker (violin)
Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Hutt City Brass
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 18th October 2025

Concert programmes can be tricky things to put together, whatever the aims and objectives of those who consider what might best fulfil projected outcomes. Some will prioritise the idea of pleasing what would be considered a requisite amount of people for attendances’ sakes, looking to assemble repertoire that’s either tried and true, or novel in a sense of interest generated by reputation or even recent sensation. Others wanting to explore less well-worked vistas which however indicate sufficient potential for attracting interest will gradually build momentums of discovery and exploration for audiences to ease themselves into and hopefully relish such discoveries and thus be enthused all the more, developing a positive and lasting momentum of support.

Obviously my scenario descriptions show a bias in favour of the latter, mainly because it’s a scenario which I think Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington have followed throughout this present season with considerable success, and in their own distinctive way – Taddei could have alternatively “cherry-picked” Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s entire symphonic output over the six concerts, or presented an amalgam of symphonic and concertante works, but instead chose to concentrate on a specific era of the composer’s creative achievement, in this case (and quoting the title of one of the concert programmes)  very much “Under the Dictator’s Shadow”.

What it’s meant is that we’re being given an in-depth resume of a significant period of activity by one of twentieth century music’s most significant creative artists while in the throes of institutionalised disapproval almost to the point of persecution at the hands of the authorities, personified (and instigated) by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The final concert of the sequence will present to us a composer’s ostensible “giving way” to a dictator’s demands with what seems a public gesture of submission, while privately and through encoded musical gesturings, expressing and maintaining defiance. Some commentators continue to maintain that, despite such ambiguities the composer’s behaviour suggests an acquiescence to  the Soviet regime even after Stalin’s death, while others tend to disagree, a debate that continues to divide opinion.

This latest concert instalment of the sequence highlights a particular flashpoint in the dictator/ composer relationship, the latter’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, a work that had achieved popular success until Stalin took it upon himself to attend a performance, late in January 1936, and famously leaving the theatre before the work’s conclusion. Little time was wasted in expressing his displeasure at what he heard, via the Soviet newspaper Pravda’s notorious review of the work a couple of days afterwards, bringing down the dictator’s ire, along with that of his collection of toadies  that made up institutionalised Soviet officialdom, on the composer’s head.

Pravda’s resounding phrase “Muddle instead of Music” has since, along with similar  examples of critical invective levelled against Shostakovich,  triumphantly vindicated Oscar Wilde’s famous quip “There is only one thing worse in the world than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about”, Even though in situ there were , of course,  attendant dangers for artists in Stalin’s Russia in voicing any criticism of the regime, history has come out with firmly positive views regarding the opera’s artistic validations of life and culture for Russian people in the era of the time, set within its wider depictions of human universality.

Though even in its somewhat truncated form here “Lady Macbeth” simply dominated in almost every way its concert companions on this occasion, both offerings allowed us a modicum of “food for thought” of divergent kinds. The concert opened with a work by John Psathas, a superbly-ambient “spaced-out” orchestral experience whose title “Next Planet” nevertheless posed for me more questions than it answered by the time the music had run its unexpectedly brief inter-planetary course. Psathas’s work was jointly commissioned by the Tonnhalle Dusseldorf GmbH and the Dusseldorf Symphony as part of an extended environmental protection project whose theme was “sustainability within the concert experience” – “Next Planet” was one of twelve works, each assigned to different sustainability topics, though Psathas, who co-ordinated the project, was allowed to choose his own topic. His response was to write a piece about “the self-aggrandizing heroes…intent on spending billions in taking a few people to Mars, rather than invest that money in improving life here on Earth……”

On the face of things, the music depicted little more than what seemed like the outer-space equivalent of  “a short ride in a fast machine” – but I was taking the music at its face value instead of looking for clues suggesting hidden meanings and agendas. It may be that Psathas’s piece might perhaps have been more appropriately performed  in the orchestra’s finai concert along with the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, (as “coded” a piece of outwardly-optimistic composition as ever was conceived!) – Psathas’s contempt (heartily endorsed universally) for such inappropriately self-glorifying undertakings would have then made a splendidly fatuous-sounding adjunct to Shostakovich’s hollowed-out paeans of praise for an already brutal and repressive regime and its great leader!

Though I would have just as happily heard some examples of shamefully-neglected music by Rimsky-Korsakov (those splendid suites from “Tsar Saltan” or “Le Coq d’Or”) as examples of anti-establishment artistic expression, I took heart at reading about the supportive stances and various kindnesses shown to his fellow composers (including Shostakovich) at various times by Alexander Glazunov, whose Violin Concerto was here programmed. The only previous work I had heard of Glazunov’s was the delightful Ballet “The Seasons”, while his other, somewhat dubious claim to fame I’d encountered  was his much-reiterated ineptitude as a conductor when placed in charge of the ill-fated premiere of the young Sergei Rachmaninov’s First Symphony!

I had never heard the Violin Concerto before – a work notable for its late-Romantic nostalgic feeling and somewhat idiosyncratic structure, its three movements being  reorganised into two, with the usual slow movement “sandwiched” into the first as a kind of “interlude”, and the last movement entered without a break at the conclusion of a cadenza from the soloist. All of this fell most gratefully on the ear, and provided ample opportunity for the soloist, Ben Baker (whom we’d seen and heard at an earlier concert in Mozart’s gorgeous Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola) to display his  virtuosity and feeling for the music’s character.

Soloist and orchestra established a focused, sombre mood at the beginning, the work’s sequential passages then bringing us to the tender second subject, Baker’s tone pure and clean and delightful, with a gorgeous “silvery” aspect in places, though one that was sometimes “covered” by his accompaniments – in the scherzo-like section Baker was more assertive, leading from this into the cadenza with pin-drop concentration, and varied energies. Though one quickly tired of the rather trite fanfare theme of the finale, Baker put across great enjoyment of the more rustic of the variations, and the quickening of the tempi towards the ending brought excitement and daring to the concluding exchanges.

And so the stage was set for the performance of a Shostakovich work which in terms of range and scope and potential trouble from the ruling establishment for the composer, is almost a kind of “companion work” for the epic Fourth Symphony that featured in the orchestra’s previous Shostakovich concert,. The composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, was presented tonight in a truncated but still impactful version made up of various orchestral excepts (mostly “interludes” which the composer had crafted especially for the work) and various arias sonorously delivered throughout the story by the opera’s heroine.  Katerina is the bored wife of a merchant husband who spends most of his time away from her on business. She inevitably falls in love with somebody else, and her obsession with her new lover, Sergey, leads to the murders of both her father-in-law and her husband before she and her lover are eventually caught and sent to a labour camp, where Sergey, having grown tired of her, blames her for everything and rejects her, before forming an association with another woman prisoner – in the throes of despair, Katerina drowns both her rival and herself in a nearby lake.

Despite the dark savagery of much of the story, parts of it (Katerina’s arias especially) are genuinely moving, while other parts draw from Shostakovich’s gift for black comedy and irony (the picture drawn of the police force is of pure comic irony, Gilbertian, but with savage overtones). In a society where corruption is rife and brutality and misogyny are close to the surface, the story still readily resonates – to claim that it would lack basic box-office appeal (as does another reviewer, while nevertheless rhapsodising over Madeleine Pierard’s stunning vocal realisations of the aforementioned arias) is in my view a debatable point!

Music director Marc Taddei selected not only the existing orchestral interludes crafted for the opera by the composer, but excerpts from every scene of the opera, contriving, in his own words, “a concentrated symphonic portrait of her passion, independence, transgressions and tragic fate”. Certainly the juxtapositioning of charged, atmospheric orchestral narrative with Pierard’s straightaway arresting voice brought us into almost cheek-by jowl proximity with both the character and the circumstances that would shape Katerina and her destiny. As a “road map” of the opera I found it an incredibly full-on experience, though I felt it was somewhat less “of a piece” with Katerina herself when her character seemed to suddenly recede during the orchestral descriptions of the discovery of Katarina’s husband’s body, the wedding celebrations and the arrival of the police to arrest the lovers. We “connected” with her again when she returned to the front of the platform to deliver her two despairing final arias, here very properly running them into one single utterance so that the character’s opening lament is then subsumed into a nihilistic vision, giving her the only option available that makes sense – simply devastating!

Marc Taddei’s dauntless Orchestra Wellington and their sonorous cohorts, the Hutt City Brass, played their hearts out in bringing into being the composer’s extraordinarily vivid depictions of life under duress for the story’s characters. As with this orchestra’s quite extraordinary realisation of the demanding Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich a couple of months previously, the players seemed to revel in whatever demands the music made on ensemble, or tone production, with only a hiatus or two of trajectory which I noticed on the couple of occasions that conductor Marc Taddei introduced some kind of rallentando in heavily-scored passages where the ensemble seemed to have brief moments of less-than-unanimous response. For all the rest it seemed that conductor and players had again achieved something remarkable with this less-than-well-known but fascinatingly addictive and readily compelling music.

 

Wellington City Orchestra – a Matariki celebration of nature, legend and art

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JENNY McLEOD – Three Celebrations for Orchestra (1986)
ANTONIN DVORAK – The Noonday Witch B.196
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Triple Concerto for Violin, ‘Cello and Piano Op.56

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello) Gabriella Glapska (piano)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra (concertmaster, Paula Carryer)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Te Aro, Wellington

Sunday, 22nd June 2025

Why have I never before encountered Jenny McLeod’s cheekily iconic “Three Celebrations for Orchestra”? – particularly as the pieces are each so heartwarmingly “grounded” in atmospheres that readily recall my own childhood memories, of forests, beaches and rural celebrations that proclaim a uniqueness of experience with tradition that’s in danger of disappearing as life here becomes increasingly “global”. I thought also that it’s music that “connects” with other examples of composers’ depictions of environments and activities worldwide – the opening “Journey through Mountain Parklands” for me strongly echoed parts of Finnish composer Jan Sibelius’s “Legends”, as well as similar landscape evocations from American composer Aaron Copland – and the final ”A&P Show” was startlingly redolent in places of the latter’s ballet “Rodeo”.

As a sometimes-conductor of the Wellington contemporary music ensemble Stroma, today’s conductor Hamish McKeich was able to draw from his performing experience to recall for us Jenny McLeod’s earlier compositions as being “rather different” in style and flavour to what we were about to hear from this, a later period of her work. By then she had turned away from the avant-garde and towards more “populist” styles, declaring at one point that “both writing and performing music should definitely be enjoyable!” – a disarming attitude that has earned her compositions increasingly diverse interest and respect from audiences.

Here, we revelled in the epic, voyaging opening of the “Mountain Parklands” journey, the trajectories straightaway moving the ground beneath our feet as the textures pushed out the vistas and spectacularly opened up the scenarios – exhilarating! Those Copland-like impulses further detailed our responses, the saxophone bringing to the ambiences shimmerings of romantic allure and the piccolo chirruping its delightful birdsong, before the Sibelius-like brasses brought a renewal of the adventurous nature of our journeying, accompanied by “music blasting away on the car stereo” – (the composer’s own down-to-earth comment on the proceedings at that point!). It all made for something terribly nostalgic for me – at times I was flashbacking to those family holidays in the car again, following railway lines, traversing hills, crossing bridges and catching sight of those, my own, mountains of memory……..

Next we found ourselves “At the Bay”, the cor anglais setting a different scene, with mellow winds dancing a slow waltz with a ‘cello – such lovely wind decorations and with the horns adding beautiful colours. Strings and percussion and then horns poured out the emotion, the mood enlivening gradually and spreading though the orchestra – the brass seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely, while the percussionists kept things rolling. As the mood quietens a slow dance ensued, coloured by wood-block-like beats – everything had a relaxed “by the sea” feel, with the winds encouraging a solo cello then joining in themselves with counter-themes and decorations. it all built up to a burst of emotion from strings, brass and percussion, and then, like memory sometimes does, slipped almost mischievously back into hiding with piano-and bassoon-notes, a sliver of percussion and wind, all as elusive as a dream….

To finish, how wonderful to have an A&P Show here documented! – I loved them so much! Like one’s own pent-up youthful excitements, the music was full-on, right from the start – a big, striding theme,  buoyed by strutting brass and a sinuous saxophone (the latter, incidentally, played superbly throughout by Tessa Frazer, whose name unfortunately wasn’t listed in my programme’s orchestra personnel lineup!). The winds played a kind of chirpy cakewalk, and we caught the sounds of a distant hoe-down, but here, mixing in with cameo-like episodes of different side-shows, we had a kaleidoscopic experience of images as well as sounds, everything very “outdoor” and mixing fairground excitements with more pastoral ambiences. But, like the real thing, it was all over too soon, as a percussion flourish steered us excitingly into and through that world of fantastic entertainment, everything working like a well-drilled whole – ha! – another hoedown! –  taking our sensibilities for a final ride with a wind-and-orchestra gesture of all-too-familiar satisfaction and regret!

Having had our own national identities reaffirmed we were then transported to the diametrically opposite realms  of Central Europe, and to a world of folkloric atmosphere marked largely by unease, superstition and brutality  – Antonin Dvořák spent the last few years of his compositional life returning his attentions almost exclusively to the folklore of his native Bohemia, writing orchestral music inspired by verses from the nationalistic poet Karel Jaromir, who had published a collection called Kytice (Bouquet), one of which was Polednice (The Noon Witch). a tale which, if not exactly bloodthirsty in a visceral sense was still blood-curdling!

Though all of Dvořák’s orchestral music has a readily recognisably Bohemian character, he hadn’t before fully exploited a penchant for descriptive orchestral writing in the manner of his fellow Czech composer Bedrich Smetana with his out-and-out nationalistic work Ma Vlast  (“My Country”) – it was only after Dvořák had completed his From the New World Ninth Symphony that he turned to the musical form of the “tone poem” that had been introduced by Franz Liszt and then ceaselessly pilloried by conservative critics such as the notorious Eduard Hanslick, who, up until this time had praised Dvořák’s “pure, absolute music” compositions.

In fact Polednice (“The Noon Witch”) is a masterpiece of musical description! – it’s basically, a “cautionary tale” of a mother whose child is so badly behaves she threatens him with the spectre of a witch who traditionally appears during the hour before midday to steal naughty children away. Inevitably, the Polednice DOES appear, and a battle ensues between the mother and the witch over the child, which ceases when the midday bell sounds and the witch disappears. But when the father returns home he finds his child lifeless, smothered in the arms of his unconscious wife.

The orchestral winds opened the story in deceptively charming folk-tale style, with firstly the clarinet and then the oboe depicting the naughty child and his toy cockerel. The mother’s anger burst forth from the strings, agitating in fine style, the whole orchestra then plunging into a splendidly vivid evocation of what the Polednice would do to the boy if she came to claim him! Seemingly undeterred the child sounded his toy cockerel again and the mother reiterated her anger and frustration at his naughtiness, further describing what sounded like a veritable “witch’s ride” in the orchestra.

Suddenly an ominous note on the lower brass introduced a sinister passage as the witch DID enter! – the splendid lower brass playing sounded uncannily like the dragon, Fafner, in Wagner’s “Siegfried” emerging from his cave! A kind of “fate” motif was ominously sounded by the orchestra as the witch advanced on the mother and child, the strains repeated by the clarinet and strings, and further hurled out by the brasses. We held onto ourselves or to each other as the witch came closer, orchestral momentums scarily depicting the mother’s struggles to keep hold of her child – until the noon-bell sounded and the spectral figure vanished.

In the wake of all of this, how carefree the homecoming father’s music sounded at first! And how uneasily the oboe and clarinet put the questions in his mind as to why his house seemed so silent! A brief moment of relieved recognition was followed by the unfortunate man’s rapidly escalating anxiety at finding his wife unconscious and then his ultimate horror to discover his child was dead! The orchestra’s whiplash-like concluding chords were here merciless, brooking no help or pity!

The interval provided extra entertainment for those who chose merely to stay put/or to stand and stretch their legs in front of their seats, enabling a life-enhancing view of various orchestral members and “behind-the-scenes” helpers “moving” the piano from its place up on the next platform down to a central front position for the Beethoven Concerto which was to follow – an operation performed with the utmost aplomb on the part of all concerned.

Something of the concert’s opening “holiday” mood had returned, now that the strictures of the Dvorak piece had passed, with the arrival on the platform of the soloists for Beethoven’s adorable “Triple” Concerto (violin, ‘cello and piano) one of the composer’s happiest creations! Though not ideally spacious as a performing venue (underlined by the extra space required for the three soloists!) the church’s layout ensured an extra “intimacy” of music-making, an almost “cheek-by-jowl” performer/audience situation, which gave the experience a uniquely treasurable flavour for the memory to lock away!

The first two movements gave me, quite simply, undiluted pleasure! Hamish McKeich’s direction brought forth an exciting and ear-catching range of dynamics at the beginning, getting the lower strings to “murmur” the opening phrase as if all the players were awakening the music from a dream, sounding the brief crescendo just before the top of the phrase, falling back to a whisper, and then springing the sounds forth with a start at the “rise and shine” call of the horns! All was then galvanic action, as the music snowballed into the first tutti, the energies joyous, the interplay delightful! As for the soloists, Ken Ichinose’s cello and Monique Lapins’ violin by turns sang their opening lines as irresistible invitations to “come and play”, to which pianist Gabriela Glapska responded in kind with gleeful eagerness, the three dovetailing their parts winningly in their concerted passages.

In response, the second orchestral tutti, though brief, was all whole-hearted agreement, as well as introducing a new theme, on which the soloists pounced with glee, Ichinose’s cello (as per usual in this work) leading the way, Lapins’s violin following with a winning  “anything you can play I can play higher!” kind of aspect, and Glapska’s piano retorting with a “Well, I’m going to play something else – follow me if you dare!” kind of spirit! It was such a celebration of teamwork, both in the accepted “trio” sense and in the interplay of the soloists with the orchestra. I loved, too, the ebb and flow of the work’s intensities, how the lines and figurations could express something so simply and beautifully, and yet within a few seconds be pushing the musicians’ fingers into and through intensely-wrought variants of the same and emerge still in tandem at the end!

The slow movement brought lovely “covered” tones from the orchestral strings at the outset, and playing to “die for” from the soloists – firstly Ichinose’s particularly radiant lines throughout his extended opening solo, and properly concomitant responses from firstly Glapska and then Lapins, in duet with Ichinose. The movement’s a remarkably short one, and part of its time is spent “shaping up” towards the finale, which, here was taken at what could be described as a “good lick” – I even wrote down the phrase, “a “devil-may-care” tempo”, at the time! This was followed by another phrase, hastily scribbled – “Wow! – they (the soloists) are flying along in those running passages! – Very exciting!” Which was true in places, though being “The Ghost Trio” they were always in remarkable, and often enchanting accord, as with the “whose turn is it?” passages where they toss pairs of notes between each other in what seem like delightfully random “first to pick up” fashion!

The orchestra played along suitably in the exchanges as well, but at times I felt Hamish McKeich and the band would noticeably move the finale’s various tutti along, rather than pick up the soloists’ way with those delicious polacca rhythms – Ichinose, Lapins and Glapska gave the movement plenty of delicious “schwung” in their solos and ensembles (and which Beethoven actually seems to indicate for the orchestra as well by including a grace-note “kick” in their descending figure that leads to the minor-key beginning of the Polacca section). It’s a small point, but I always enjoy, as here, soloists in this work who give those trajectories in the finale something of a playful character which the orchestra can respond to in kind. But hey! – far more important was all of the acclaim, such happiness and such bubbling excitement both throughout and at the concert’s end (I sat next to two people I didn’t know at all, and soon found myself chatting enthusiastically with them about the music and the playing in between each of the items!) – it was that sort of occasion, and one that the orchestra and its members and organisers and friends should definitely consider a great and resounding success!

 

 

 

John Psathas’s “Leviathan” – genre-defying and irresistible

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN PSATHAS – Leviathan
Four Percussion Concertos
The All-Seeing Sky (with Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffelbach)
Call of the Wild (with Adam Page)
Leviathan (with Alexej Gerassimez)
Dijnn (with Yoshiko Tsuruta)

All with Orchestra Wellington and Musical Director Marc Taddei
Orchestra Wellington OW 23CD

Hailed as “genre-defying music”, four of New Zealand/Greek composer John Psathas’s percussion concertos have made a spectacular appearance on Orchestra Wellington’s own label, a release appropriately gathered together under the name of “Leviathan”, the title of one of these concertos. The “genre-defying” aspect reflects Psathas’s intense feelings concerning the role of a contemporary composer, which he feels is a matter of “connection” across all genres and boundaries, one which reaches out to all audiences. For him this “outward” energy conveys that connection, and it has come to inform works such as the four presented on this album. Significantly, Psathas regards Beethoven’s music as an exemplar of such “reaching out” to people, music that embodies, in his words, “that desire to reach another human being”.

All four of these concertos were recorded during Psathas’s “composer-in residency” tenure with Orchestra Wellington, a circumstance that has given him a good deal of joy – “we had these incredible soloists and we had fantastic performances, and we’ve captured them”. As well, the venture is obviously a tribute to the staunch support for Psathas’s music from the orchestra’s Music Director, Marc Taddei.  I’ve not been able to comment on the vinyl format of this release as I’ve only seen the CD format (which, in terms of my own reactionary sensibilities regarding recordings in general, has what I would call the “minimalist” approach to presentation, with no accompanying documentation regarding either the works or their performers, save a QR code which you scan for access to liner notes (“Not I, but some child, born in a marvellous year….” etc.! – however, my own “marvellous child” was able to guide me through these personal “portals of Dis” with nary as much as a backward glance!).

The first of the set’s four percussion concerti, “The All-Seeing Sky” is dedicated to the soloists in the recording, Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffelbach. A “double concerto”, it has three movements – The Portals of Dis, The Upper World, and the titular The All-Seeing Sky  – and it entrances the listener at the outset with its almost subconsciously-heard impulses, a process characterised by the composer as “a very subdued oh wow, this is actually happening kind of feeling”. Of course, the opening movement’s title “The Portals of Dis” suggests something dismal and dark,  a kind of penetration of an Underworld (as suggested by Psathas’s reference to Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” which he had read, and which characterised for him a sense of antiquity and ancient times, furthered for him by artist Gustav Dore’s nineteenth-century visualisations of the poet’s journeyings through the Inferno – and yet the opening paragraphs of the music evoke more mystery and eeriness than fear and dread as the travellers in the boat in Dante’s poem cross the River Styx, the sounds of the orchestra detailing the almost limitless wonderment of these adventurers amid their surroundings, as the two soloists – Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffenbach – gradually but inexorably advance the sense of a “journey” with their increasingly compulsive and addictive patternings on, respectively, the marimba and xylophone. Whole sequences of minimalist patternings alternate with newly-wrought material from both the soloists and the orchestral musicians, gradually intensifying the ambiences with extra percussion – timpani and cymbals – and achieving what Psathas describes as a “welcoming fanfare” to the Gates of Dis. It’s one where the traditionally spectral “abandon hope all ye who enter here” mindset of antiquity is leavened by a more modernist view of one’s mind being “its own heaven and hell” (Psathas suggests in so many words a similarly updated view.).

The following movement, “The Upper World” delivers a new kind of eeriness, with the soloists floating and arpeggiating over a series of deeply-voiced slowly-undulating gestures from the orchestra’s lower instruments, striking an occasionally more forceful, and by turns an exquisitely-flowing air with winds and strings, the atmosphere more claustrophobic than free, as if further reminding us that our “Upper World” can take on similar threatening propensities to that of antiquity’s visionary horrors, with the dismissal of a traditional God plus the trappings creating a vacuum filled by any number of entities bent upon dominance of peoples’ minds. This is further explored by the freewheeling third movement “The All-Seeing Sky” – a kind of “juggernaut” through the void, for much of its length, with the kind of energy that freedom brings, along with a price that has to be paid for that “freedom” – it isn’t long before the exhilaration develops an obsessive, hectoring note, breaking off at the climax to sound a warning – the orchestra builds frightening vortices against whose sides the percussionists hammer until the reality of a new kind of imprisonment hits home. In a tremendous crescendo, begun quietly and almost innocently, both soloists define the formidable slopes that have to be climbed and the spaces that must be filled with new resolve, building the sonorities in a do-or-die effort which awakens the entire orchestral forces who play above their weight, reaching a hammering climax of renewed hope – Psathas elaborates here on his idea drawn from his Greek ancestry of a “gladdening sorrow” – in his own words “gratitude for being alive, and sorrow for understanding all that’s ill in the world!”

Following this on the set’s first disc is Psathas’s “Call of the Wild”, a concerto for tenor saxophone and orchestra commissioned jointly by Orchestral Wellington and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, the recording here presenting the work’s actual 2021 premiere given on July 17th by saxophonist Adam Paige and Orchestra Wellington. My “Middle C” colleague, critic Lindis Taylor, reviewed this concert in glowing terms, struck as much by the work’s “vividly individual” nature as by the brilliance of the performance by soloist Adam Page, and of the orchestra under Marc Taddei’s direction. Taylor highlighted the soloist’s “flamboyant confidence” and noted the latter’s use of a “wide range of techniques” as the music unfolded. The instrument itself, while not a standard symphonic orchestral instrument, has long enjoyed imaginative instances of use by various composers – I would have added Vaughan Williams’s name to the list my colleague proffered (for the review see https://middle-c.org/2021/07/orchestra-wellington-under-taddei-with-adam-page-triumphant-in-psathass-saxophone-concerto/).

Solo saxophonist Adam Page describes in his accompanying notes how musical collaboration often has a kind of “jewel in the crown” quality for artists, even though these experiences are sometimes isolated and short-lived – but with the “Psathas/Page” partnership a true friendship (Page calls it “a lifelong connection”) evolved from the pair’s first collaboration in 2012 when co-writing “The Harvest Suite”– consequently Page “jumped/bomb-dived” at the chance of renewing his creative association with Psathas via a new tenor saxophone concerto the composer was formulating.

Psathas’s description of this work’s genesis encompasses a good deal of his family history, dealing with events that left an indelible and continuing mark on both the twentieth and the present century, but more immediately on his own family – his grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to relocate between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s in what could only be described as devastating and denaturalising circumstances – in the wake of genocidal activities between various racial and religious groups exacerbated by the 1914-18 war in Europe, the governments of both Greece and Turkey deemed it necessary to forcibly relocate ethnic groups whose religious beliefs and cultural mores had become regarded as incompatible with the respective majorities of their citizens, despite the long-established (in many cases) native and indigenous ties these people had created over centuries within what they considered their homelands. There had already been genocidal massacres of non-Turkish Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians both before and after the war and by the time the Governments had signed the 1923 Convention Exchange (called The Asia Minor Catastrophe in Greece), resulting in about one-and-a-quarter million people arriving in Greece from Turkey and over 300,000 Muslims expelled to Turkey by 1923. A Muslim Professor, forced from his home in Crete, to Turkey, expressed in an interview every migrant’s tragedy – “Born in one place, growing old in another place – and feeling a stranger in both places”.

Psathas’s grandparents and great-grandparents experienced the forced marches sustained by people expelled from Turkey during this early 1920s period, resettling in Greece, only to experience a second World War and a subsequent civil war, from which their children (Psathas’s parents) left to emigrate to New Zealand to begin a new life in 1960.. Though he was born in Wellington, most of John’s childhood, along with a sister, was spent in Taumarunui, after which he attended college in Napier. His interest in music developed throughout this time, resulting in his entering University to study piano and composition at Victoria University of Wellington. John’s parents and sister Tania returned to Greece to live in 1988, but apart from trips back to Europe to reconnect, John has remained in Wellington, and he and Carla, his wife, have two children, Emmanuel and Zoe.

Unusual as it is to explore the biographical aspect of a composer to such an extent in a review as here, the works on this CD recording each relate singularly to Psathas’s life experience and familial ties, none more directly that this work “Call of the Wild”. In three movements, Psathas by turns characterises and meditates upon the salient features which define each of his parents, and their heritage and life-experience as embodied in Psathas’s own children and their attitudes and impulses.

Call of the Wild begins with a piece of music dedicated to John Psathas’s mother, Anastasia given the title by the composer “She stands at the edge of the incomprehensible” – a saxophone solo at the beginning, an opening up of a sonic world with which the soloist can play, dominate, integrate, lead or dissolve into. The orchestra becomes the world, giving the energetic impulses of the soloist a sense of direction and unlimited purpose, resonances that seem to have the capacity that resound for all time, in places demonstrating a determination above all else, unquenchable energy of the kind that seems to feed itself – though an almost heart-stopping moment is when the saxophone seems to challenge the limitations of existence itself, sending out a call whose reach is as high as its compass suggests it would allow before pushing even further. Even the surrounding resonances are amazed, perhaps agog at the temerity of this instrument, this single entity pitting its capabilities against the business of being. And then, as if some kind of reassuring synthesis is needed, the saxophone and orchestra come together, surging towards a corelated kind of ecstatic outpouring, then setting an inexorable course towards continuance.

How different is the following, opening with slow, dreamy oscillations of some kind of prenatal nature, Psathas’s father Emmanuel perhaps waiting in the womb to be born, or else meditating the nature of the circumstances of that event in later life. The music suggests a time for reflection upon things that are important to know, feel and conceptualise – in a way it could be characterised as the inner life of the first movement’s outer being, an idea of fusion having different though accessible natures, and each giving to and feeling from the other, Psathas stressing unity of different personalities, spirits, souls. Or it could claim its independence from the outset (Psathas’s title “He can worship it without believing it” suggests this), elaborating upon what the composer considered to be his father’s “staggering force of will” in being “inflexible in his principles of decency and fairness”. Throughout this piece the sounds are unwavering in their constancy and disarming in their quiet persistence and surety. Something of the depth of emotion this piece explores by association is the quoting by a solo violin of a vocal line from the composer’s 2016 work “No Man’s Land”,

From the outset of the third movement (“Tramontane”) there’s a restlessness, both in the setting of different (three-against four) time-signatures for the soloist and the orchestra, which, after a confrontational build-up fuses energies and begins a more concerted exploration – dramatically reducing the pace and the dynamics brings the piece’s elements together, agreeing on the agenda, and setting off again with near-irresistible resolve. This is Psathas’s and his children’s heritage (the name Tramontane literally means “From the other side of the mountains”, and refers to a particular Mediterranean wind which frequently blows up a storm), the composer characterising the energised impulse within his family “to fight for what we needed in life” after his relocation in small-town New Zealand and having to endure being “outsiders” in terms of heritage, custom and religion. What emerges is an incredibly wild ride on the part of the music’s various elements, the soloist’s giving vent to a contemporary “Call of the Wild” in his instrument’s at times frenzied tessitura against the orchestra’s similarly restless soundscapes. In conclusion Psathas comments on the near-inevitability of his children having inherited the same impulsive desire to express what he calls “that nomadic gypsy impulse” and take it to who knows where?

Turning to the set’s second disc, first up is the piece that gives the collection its overall name “Leviathan”. This work, completed by Psathas in 2020, was commissioned as part of an international project with the title “Beethoven Pastoral”, an initiative by the UN Climate Change and BTHVN2020  to promote action on climate change and the environment during the 250th anniversary year of the birth of Beethoven. The Project represented a “determination to be part of the solutions to current planetary challenges’ and the desire “to inspire and be part of that change”. Psathas wrote this work for and dedicated it to Alexej Gerassimez, the soloist in this recording.

“Leviathan” has three movements, summarised as follows – the opening Hightailin’ to Hell crystallises both the composer’s introductory remarks and the feelings generated by the music – “Our planet is in a very bad way, and it seems that we can’t wait to get to the “finish line”. To this end, the human race’s “out-of-control race to environmental disaster” is depicted by the use of “junk-percussion” – The trajectorial impulses are remorseless – the pulsatings never let up as the journey takes the listener through what seems like a thankless and unforgiving, almost lifeless kind of terrain, an experience that gives a feeling of being driven rather than driving – I was put in mind of connections with similarly “driven” music such as Hector Berlioz’s “Ride to the Abyss” from La Damnation de Faust, and (during  the most frantically virtuosic sequences)  parts of the first movement of Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony during which a solo side-drummer is instructed to try and halt the orchestra’s progress at all costs with savage interjections and disruptive counter-rhythms!

The Final Brook , a homage to Beethoven, comes next – a complete contrast, limpid, shimmering, effusions of light and sensation with instruments that suggest the play of light on and through water, a sound-world I to which one can give one’s sensibilities over to entirely and feel refreshed and renewed, while at the back of these instruments the strings are beginning to playing the actual music of Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” in a dream-like, trance-like way – a “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?’ kind of sensation, one which puts Beethoven’s hymn of praise to nature to the forefront of the madness of today’s polluted world.

A single plastic water-bottle used as an “instrument” by the soloist centres our attention throughout Soon We’ll All Walk On Water – a movement one cross-furrowed with dippings, splashings and “impingings” on our sensibilities, with an eerie cosmic circle of sound sensation revolving around the dancing plastic object – a symbol of the madness threatening our world with ruin.

Finally, there’s A falcon, a storm or a great song – (a quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke) – a determined tattoo-like pulsating over luminous orchestra chordings which come and go like fog lights in the gloom, and a grand brass statement reinforced by percussion and driving  tones – a held chord, and jagged rhythmic slashings indicate that action is being called for and, indeed demonstrated by the vigorous rhythmic patternings and the long-breathed calls across the sound-spectrum. The sounds make a stirring impression, even though they can at times tremulously fall back as if lacking certainty,  but then gather and plunge onwards after a dramatic pause – obstacles appear out of nowhere and are subdued and conquered – it can be done, and human beings, whether falcons, storms or great songs, can be inspired to act with such purpose! – in the composer’s words, “of steel and drums and momentum and drive!” Percussionist Alexej Gerassimez and the orchestra players are heroes, every one, under Marc Taddei’s unswervingly focused direction!

Rather more elusive, mercurial and mysterious as a creation is Djinn, a 2009 work which Psathas first crafted as a marimba concerto for Pedro Carneiro, but which has since appeared in various other guises. The soloist here, Yoshiko Tsuruta, remembered the premiere of this concerto well, and was honoured to be invited to present this work in 2024 – in her words,  “an exciting and deeply-rewarding experience”.

Djinn is a marimba concerto in three movements – 1. Pandora – 2. Labyrinth – 3. Out-dreaming the Genie. The first movement is a meditative dialogue between soloist and orchestra depicting the legend of Pandora, who opened a box containing all the evils of the world, leaving only hope inside for humankind. – though distinctive, the movements are interconnected by a common mythological resonance where consciousness and mystery can interact and colour both our individual and collective imaginings. The second, Labyrinth, is perhaps the most profound as it symbolises a journey of self-discovery and has the capacity to surprise and astonish us, despite our expectations. The final movement, Out-dreaming the Genie offers a kind of interpretation of these previous experiences as
sources of hope, confidence and freedom as one might imagine it could be. The soloist, Yoshiko Tsuruta, gives an extraordinary performance,  never missing a beat or nuance, and Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington lead us through the proverbial maze of exploration, entanglement and eventual realisation with single-minded resolve and a degree of hope bolstered by determination – the music  in both its performance and symbolic power becominga synonym for human perseverance.

So, what feelings am I left with  about what I’ve been listening to? Mainly that, to go into and through these pieces, either separately or together, is to undertake a journey that puts one in touch with things that ebb and flow, and helps one crystallise one’s feelings about music in general and about humanity and ITS relationship with music. After listening to these works by John Psathas on this recording, the most resounding thing I’m feeling is to equate music all the more with being human, and reinforce that quality of sharing something that’s about continuance – as someone put it so succinctly, like ”a journey on an overgrown path”. To be thus presented with such a simple yet profound idea is a wondrous achievement – one that I urge people who haven’t yet done so to try through this splendid set of recordings of John Psathas’s music.

 

 

 

 

Musical Prodigy Night for Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “PRODIGY”

Georges BIZET – Symphony No. 1 in C Major
Felix MENDELSSOHN – Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 1 in F Minor Op.10

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington  (Peter Clark – acting Concertmaster)

Saturday 12th April, 2025
Michael Fowler Centre
Wellington

(pictured at right – Georges Bizet; below, Felix Mendelssohn-Barthody; and further below,  Dmitri Shostakovich)

Orchestra Wellington spectacularly lived up to its long-established reputation for innovative concert programming with the first presentation in its latest series “The Dictator’s Shadow”, one doing rich justice to the youthful creative achievements of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose fiftieth anniversary is being celebrated world-wide this year. This opening concert showcases Shostakovich’s remarkable First Symphony, written during 1925 while still a teenaged student at the Leningrad Music Conservatory, and achieving a sensational success, both at home with its Leningrad premiere (May 1926)  and abroad, with the work receiving performances as far afield as Berlin and the United States the following year.

As a concert in itself, the scheme based on the idea of “Prodigy” could hardly have done better, even if any of the last three of the teenaged Mozart’s Violin Concerti could just as easily (and appositely) have been substituted for Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Op.64 work as a vehicle for the gifted Amalia Hall to play – I must sneakily admit that I, for one, would have relished even more the opportunity to hear her play any of those last three Mozart masterpieces!). Still, the idea of using the Mendelssohn work (apart from the happy availability of such an accomplished soloist) was to bring to notice the composer’s own prodigious creativities with earlier works such as the Octet and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both of which were completed during Mendelssohn’s teens.

To complete the picture there was no happier way of demonstrating a young composer’s talent, inspiration and versatile technique than presenting the youthful (1855) Symphony of Georges Bizet – and though there were only the merest touches of greatness approaching the order of “Carmen” or “Les pêcheurs de perles” in this seventeen year-old’s enthusiastic concoctions of youthful endeavour, the overall impression of the music is that of a nature by turns vivacious and dreamily melancholic, equally at home in the town or the country, as portrayed by turns, in the various movements.

Marc Taddei’s spirited direction appropriately bounced the opening along, the high-spirited trajectories providing a lovely foil for the plangent beauty of the oboe’s floating second-subject lines soaring above the strings undulating patterns, then playing with the fanfare-like figures which frame the more lyrical sections, and the horn calls that both introduce and bid farewell to the movement’s development. After this, the slow movement’s dreamy, somewhat quasi-oriental meanderings were hauntingly voiced by the oboe after the most enchanting of openings (where did the young genius conjure up this mood from?) had been brought in by the strings. Just as engrossing was the ensuing string fugato with which the oboe then adroitly wove a reprise of the opening melody – had Robert Schumann been alive to hear this sequence, he might have uttered a judgement to rival his famous appraisal of one of Chopin’s youthful words many years before –  “Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!”.

I’ve always loved the Trio section of the charmingly rustic Menuetto-Scherzo which follows, not least because of what I’ve always thought was Bizet’s “gently poking fun in a Beethoven-like way” gesture at the wind players who have the Trio’s melody and repeat it a fourth higher at Fig.8 (in my score). Oboe and clarinet on all the recordings I’ve heard except for one play a delightfully astringent-sounding B-natural in that phrase instead of a B-flat, perhaps to indicate (as Beethoven did with his village band music in the “Pastoral” Symphony), that the players might not be fully up to the music’s demands! Here, I seemed to hear (if my ears were serving me correctly), that the wind-players were playing a B-flat, which of course sounded a lot more mellifluous, but not nearly so tangy and rustic! I have, as I’ve said, recorded evidence for both versions being acceptable, but I do wonder what the composer ACTUALLY wrote!

The finale was an exhilarating, momentum-plus performance, Taddei and his players bringing out the music’s fleet-fingered energies in a toe-tapping way, but giving attention to the shapes and trajectories of the melodies as well, contrasting the “perpetuum mobile” of the opening with the grander, more ceremonial second theme, and a more sinuous refrain, a more vulnerably human, song-like tune with which to “people” the soundscape (the “melodic gift” already strongly in evidence in the young composer!)

Oddly enough Bizet seemed to never give the work another thought as an entity, confining his interest to “cherry-picking” bits of it for use in more “serious” works, such as the opera Les pêcheurs de perles and his music for the play LArlesienne. Thanks to the French musicologist Jean Chantavoine who in 1933 published an article regarding the work’s existence, the symphony came to the attention of the conductor Felix Weingartner, who gave the work its belated premiere performance in 1935, earning for it a “wunderkind” status in league with the efforts of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Shostakovich.

But next was Mendelssohn – and if the work chosen this evening was definitely not a “wunderkind” work in terms of years, it still evoked memories of hearing for oneself at another time those two outrageously precocious pieces which have for all time identified their then teenaged composer as one of nature’s creative marvels, the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. This was the E Minor Violin Concerto, for many listeners the work that epitomises the romantic instrumental concerto with its manifest qualities, and one for which tonight’s soloist. Amalia Hall (the orchestra’s regular Concertmaster), seemed a near-ideal choice as its performer.

I’ve certainly not heard a more silvery-toned performance, one whose gossamer finish seemed in places almost unearthly, especially so in the rapid figurations when the notes seemed to “spill out” from the instrument like stardust from a comet arching across a firmament, with the couple of minor intonation stresses deserving the description (coined by a similarly entranced commentator in another, different context) “spots on the sun”. One might also occasionally have wanted a shade more tonal projection in places from the soloist; but to look for something different would be to besmirch the magic we were fortunate to find ourselves caught up in on this occasion  – and so we contented ourselves with the integral state of things as part of the excitement and wonder from both soloist and orchestra.

The music itself is too well-known to annotate at length – enough to say that the musicians here aptly probed the “character” of each of the work’s movements,  filling the ambient spaces with appropriately vibrant tones and gesturings across the instrumental spectrum, More of a dialogue than a contest throughout, the interaction between Hall and her conductor and players transmuted the first movement’s questings, proposings and              bargainings into concordance with the enticing sweetness of the slow movement’s exchanges before giving the exuberance of the finale its head,  violinist, conductor and orchestra revelling in the freely-shared elation of the work’s full expression.

Our readily-wrought appreciation of Amelia Hall’s playing was further enhanced by an encore item she performed with Peter Clark, her stand-in this evening as Concertmaster. This was a duo written by the Polish composer-virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski, his Etude-Caprice Op.18 No,4, in which the playing of both musicians was as remarkable for its delicacy and finesse as for its brilliance – a true sweetmeat of a bonus!

Casting about for ways to characterise the very “two different worlds”  kind of ambience which grew straightaway from the sounds of Dmitri Shostakovich’s singularly remarkable First Symphony, one has to find words for a “new era” of expression – and in this case, one with something of an almost hallucinatory quality in its music’s rapid-fire contrasts of atmosphere, outlook and motivation. One learns with no surprise that the composer spent much of this time earning a living as a cinema pianist, developing in the process a kind of penchant in his music for rapid movement and change, the introduction of disparate elements, and an almost expressionist delight in their surprising interactions.

These thoughts summed up something of the story of the Symphony’s first movement, presented here by Marc Taddei and his players with, in the wake of the concert’s first-half respectabilities, almost mind-boggling aplomb. It’s all superbly etched in, with the changes of pace and mood here nonchalantly and there explosively registered (though clearly articulated, whatever the voice), and the overall energies of the transitions driving one’s sensibilities on until reaching the droll  “did we dream you or you us?” fragments of out-and-out wonderment at the end that had previously tumbled past us all through the plethora of incident carried by the music.

By contrast, the second movement was here kept constantly and brilliantly on the move, either in a helter-skelter or a trance-like, sleepwalking kind of trajectory, each of which abruptly changed as if Shostakovich was  following a private movie-showing (here, Rachel Thomson relishing her occasional “cinema-pianist” role with gusto!). Or, perhaps, we were being asked to reimagine something grimmer – sequences of flight and agitation followed by funereal processions over desolate battlefields still resonating with crushing piano-chord hammerblows……

The music’s Lento mood darkened and deepened, with Taddei drawing from his players a remarkable soundscape of sorrow, with beautiful oboe and ‘cello-playing, taken up by the horns and strings, the repeated portentous brass call heightening the mood of tragedy – the performance brought out the music’s potent “funeral oration” character, moments of harshly unfettered despairing alternated with bleak, desolate voices, anticipating the Shostakovich of the great and harrowing symphonic adagios to come!

And so to the fourth movement, begun with a snare-drum crescendo which seemed at first an isolated, even fatuous gesture of promise, but which planted a rebellious seed in the Lento that returned, bearing its brass, wind and cello musings – suddenly, trumpets and lower strings were igniting the clarinets and upper strings, and whirling us away on a kaleidoscopic journey of contrasts too numerous and varied to fully describe,  but remarkable to experience in a single span of time! There seemed nothing which daunted these players and their valorous maestro – we were transported from the music’s deep recesses of gloom to its near-frenetic expression of exhilaration as the composer’s “end-game” imaginings were given their head in this engrossingly unpredictable but ultimately edifying ride!

If Orchestra Wellington continues to delight us with anything like the same adventurous spirit, emotional engagement and instrumental brilliance as we heard in this first “The Dictator’s Shadow” concert, the remainder of the series will, for me, be well-nigh unmissable! Full marks to all involved for such intelligent and innovative programming and for the sheer elan of execution (oops! – that word just slipped out, Comrade! – sorry!) of some glorious music!!