concerto – Page 13

Worlds Old and New, from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on 02/12/201214/12/2012 by Peter Mechen

WELLINGTON CHAMBER ORCHESTRA PRESENTS:

PRUDEN – Westland: A Back-Country Overture

MENDELSSOHN – Violin Concerto in E Minor / Symphony No.1

RITCHIE – Remember Parihaka

Michael Joel (conductor)

Kate Oswin (violin)

Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday 2nd December, 2012

There’s nothing quite like an encounter (preferably “live”) with an unfamiliar piece of music that rocks one’s socks off! This happened for me right at the beginning of this Wellington Chamber Orchestra concert, with Larry Pruden’s Westland: A Back-Country Overture, a work I’d not heard before. True, the rather cramped St.Andrew’s venue heightened the music’s (and the playing’s!) raw impact, not altogether helpfully; but there was no denying the impression made by all these factors of orchestral writing which brought out the South Island’s rugged landscape grandeur in this music.

Right from the very beginning, vibrant and spacious Vaughan-Williams-like opening chords and figurations blew out the building’s walls, opened up the textures, and suffused our senses with all the trappings of the great New Zealand Outdoors. The playing had both energy and vision, giving the music’s alternating episodes plenty of room to establish their different characters and place themselves accordingly, cheeky wind episodes rubbing shoulders with gracefully melodic strings and epic gestures from the brass and percussion. The fallible orchestral moments tended to be in the quieter, more exposed sections of the score, where a few vagaries of pitch and some mis-hits sun-spotted what were generally sterling efforts by the winds and brass throughout.

Ultimately, the performance by conductor Michael Joel and his players caught what seemed to be for me the music’s essentials – a big-boned kind of “wild places” character festooned with detail and artfully shaped to make the most of contrasts of mood, reflecting in turn human response ranging from excitement and awe to quiet contemplation of beauty.

Pruden’s music made quite a contrast with the Mendelssohn that followed – no less than the E Minor Violin Concerto, played by Kate Oswin, whose playing of this work I had previously encountered in sections, with piano accompaniment. I thought her performance on this occasion sweet-toned, accurately pitched in all but the most demanding places, and graced with moments of what came across as deep feeling alternated with a true sense of the music’s classical proportions. Michael Joel’s accompaniment featured orchestral playing of whole-hearted commitment, and strongly-realised melodic and rhythmic expression, supporting the soloist at every turn.

For her part, Kate Oswin’s approach to melodic lines and vigorous passage work sang and danced with the orchestra’s throughout – not all of her exposed lines were pitched absolutely truly, but she would make amends a few moments afterwards with some particularly felicitous detail. An example was in the cadenza, when she teetered precariously going up to one of those high notes which the composer uses so affectingly to cap off several phrases, only to then give us a top note of the utmost beauty at the climax of the following ascent. I liked also the way she “dug into” the phrases leading up to the coda, her concentration and energy surviving a mis-hit high note, and carrying the day with great conviction through the music’s agitations and into the bassoon-led slow movement.

Strangely, a slight lack of poise seemed to unsettle the violinist’s opening phrase here, but she quickly settled down, and subsequently handled the reprise of the opening far more mellifluously. Altogether, the slow movement was a delight, the orchestra again and again reminding us of the same composer’s “Scottish” Symphony by dint of the music’s ebb and flow of like-textured intensities. By contrast, the finale’s opening brought out the fairy-like delicacies of the music, beautifully realized, with stunning fingerwork from the soloist and charming detailing from the winds. The movement’s counter-subject which flowed beneath the music’s impish scampering at the reprise of the opening was here realized with fine judgement, and Kate Oswin and the players caught the music’s growing excitement as the ending approached, with plenty of élan and a sense of a journey being completed.

Enterprisingly, the orchestra had programmed two New Zealand works for this concert, the second being Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka. As with the Pruden work this was music of considerable evocation, if more emotional and psychological than physical and pictorial. Ritchie wrote the work in response to his feelings about the incidents which took place during the 1880s at Parihaka, in Taranaki, when the iwi and followers of the paramount chief Te Whiti were forced off tribal lands at gunpoint by soldiers acting on Government orders, in response to European settlement demands. Te Whiti and many of his followers were subsequently imprisoned for their “passive resistance” to the Crown in this matter.

Though there was a raw quality to the wind-playing in the piece’s early stages, the tuning a shade or two awry during the more forceful moments, the ambience wasn’t inappropriate to the music’s theme of unease and burgeoning conflict. Different strands of feeling were represented by chanting winds, supported by thrumming strings, as opposed to the sounds of a folk-fiddle accompanied by a field-drum. MIchael Joel and his players brought these opposing strands together in conflict with great skill, the orchestral string playing in particular impressing with its power and incisiveness. The players also realized the numbness and unease of the aftermath (helped by a beautifully-presented horn-solo), the strings allowing their ambient tones to gradually dissolve and disappear. A very satisfying performance.

So to the concert’s final work, the Mendelssohn First Symphony, its place in the composer’s output (rather like Bizet’s similarly early C Major work) deceptive, as parts of the work are extremely demanding to bring off well. This was something of a curate’s egg of a performance, with the somewhat relentless technical demands of the music producing in places a rawness of sound that seemed at odds with the work’s classically-conceived lines. I was reminded of a phrase from JC Beaglehole’s notorious review of the National Orchestra’s first-ever concert in 1947 – “the playing was notable for enthusiasm and vigour rather than refinement”. The first movement was sturdy, no-nonsense “sturm-und-drang” stuff that took no prisoners, and the strings seemed to be struggling in places to keep their tone amid the rushing plethora of notes. It was all somewhat dour, I fear.

Better was the Andante, with great work by the winds at the outset (a lovely second subject, nicely-phrased). Though the ‘cellos had trouble keeping their tone in places when playing high in their register, the rest of the strings warmly came to the rescue. Some doubtful tuning took the shine off some of the close-knit wind harmonies towards the end. However, I liked the big, black scherzo, with the strings revelling in the music’s physicality, the players bending their backs to the task in realizing these swirling, energetic sounds. Though their sounds were a bit raw in places (and they also had to put up with a strange repeated extraneous noise outside the church, completely unmusical in effect!) the players fronted up wholeheartedly to the trio’s long, lyrical wind lines and sinuous string figurations.

The finale fared better than the work’s opening movement, the orchestra’s vigorous, enthusiastic playing driving the music forward, while allowing some felicitous detailing – some poised pizzicato playing, and a lovely clarinet solo. I thought the strings made a good fist of each of the fugal passages before the end, and I suspect the celebratory joy which came across at the music’s sudden change to the major key for the brief coda was infused with as much relief on the players’ part – certainly not an easy work to bring off!

This was the final concert of the Orchestra’s fortieth anniversary season – I would guess that orchestra members and associates can look back on what has been presented and achieved during 2012 with several degrees of satisfaction. And since the band occasionally presents repertoire that no other local band has tackled of late (eg. the Larry Pruden work we heard today) the value of what it does is greatly enhanced and appreciated all the more. I look forward to another year’s stimulating music-making from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra throughout 2013.

JS Bach and Mahler – worlds of sensibility from Inkinen and the NZSO

Posted on 10/11/201230/11/2012 by admin

MAHLER 7 – Mysteries of the Night

JS BACH – Double Violin Concerto in D Minor

MAHLER – Symphony No.7

Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Pietari Inkinen (violins)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 10th November, 2012

Guest review by Ben Booker

There is something distinctly summery about Bach’s D-minor Concerto for Two Violins, and the fairly full audience suggested that this particular programme was not at all disagreeable to Wellingtonians following one of the city’s rare but sparkling summery days.

Bach’s music seems to have fallen into comparative orchestral disuse in recent times, so it was refreshing to hear it live, by a condensed edition of the NZSO. And what spectacle it provided! Such beauty! Such elegance!

While the very opening of the Vivace may not have been quite as metrically precise as rehearsed, the orchestra quickly showed itself to be a force not of accompaniment, but of thoughtful and involved musical collaboration with the soloists. Orchestral cohesion thereafter was remarkable, and despite the use of less rubato than many historically-informed performances (something this writer’s Romantic tastes have a weakness for around internal cadences!), the soloists’ micro-changes to tempo made such unity of movement impressive, especially in the absence of a conductor.

The regular conductor, of course, was playing first violin. Pietari Inkinen demonstrated an incredibly expressive tone quality – clear and bell-like, but with a certain hint of melancholy and loneliness that is quite impossible to adequately describe here. The usual concertmaster, Vesa-Matti Leppänen, was the other soloist, and the effortlessly broad sounds in his superb playing provided a great contrast with Inkinen, really demonstrating the contrapuntal and conversational design of the concerto.

The famous Largo ma non troppo was introduced by a wonderfully timeless piece of internal musical ponderment from Leppänen, and the entire movement demonstrated such a clarity of texture, such deep concentration upon the unfurling melodic lines, that at times, it seemed as if Bach’s harmony was just an exquisitely happy coincidence amongst the matchless counterpoint and dialogue of the two players and amongst the orchestra.

Following that, the bustling Allegro provided much in the way of contrast to the preceding movement, though I could not help but wish for a touch more industriousness and volatility in the orchestral parts. The soloists’ articulation and dialogue, again, was excellent, and both made wonderful use of vibrato; it was used sparingly – less as a general seasoning, and more as a special spice, which made its expressive effect enormously more powerful.

The orchestra certainly found this elusive industrious sound in then opening of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, however. The brass, as throughout, was dark and clear, and the rather Enid Blytonesque sense of mischief and the unfamiliar was portrayed very well in the opening movement. During most of the movement, there was a sense of a solid sonic foundation, yet a more whimsical and explosive surface, which suited the music perfectly.

A common problem in performing Austro-German music of the later Romantic period is the temptation to lapse into ‘parade syndrome’ – where the music disintegrates into a passing parade of shallow effects. At times in the first movement, I was worried that this was about to occur, as there seemed to be a slight lack of hierarchy in the passagework: every passage was being treated as a very important section, and this was a little too much to digest easily.

Nevertheless, changes to momentum were handled well by conductor and orchestra, with sudden variations in colour and style bringing in other-worldly characters, leaving the listener only to wonder what might have happened had Mahler been a cinematic composer in the more recent past.

This all built up to a dreadfully thrilling climax before recapitulation. While I sometimes found Inkinen’s string-dominated textures a little too pretty for the music, there were excellent moments of brass interjections, including a very flatulent low F sharp from the tuba! A sense of despondency and internal struggle in the coda was captured well, making the slightly troubled march to conclude the movement all the more memorable.

The second movement began with a very expressive horn conversation, and Inkinen’s rock-solid tempos proved to be a real asset in this movement. The creepy eccentricities of the part writing were brought out hilariously well – isolated accents, portamento, sudden changes in dynamic, exaggerated entrances, and sarcastic ritenutos abounded, creating a personified atmosphere. Creepy and unsettled strings really pulled the spooky Scherzo off well, its title not referring so much to a literal ‘joke’ than to the post-Beethovenian connotations of dark amusement and fright. The solos were all first rate, as they had been the entire evening – my favourite had to be Julia Joyce’s precarious and eerie additions on the viola, played with exaggerated vibrato and dynamic mastery.

The second Nachtmusik movement had its share of quiet scherzo-like mutterings, but offered a complete change of aural scenery, quite in concordance with the amoroso instruction! Tension was nicely regulated by the returns to pastoral F-major sections, and the guitar and mandolin offered a nice touch, played by Doug de Vries and Dylan Lardelli respectively. While the concluding interjections were slightly too active for the nocturnal feel, the very end was as magical a moment as any.

And then the Rondo finale brought a celebratory awakening! Majestic in most places rather than overly extroverted, I could not decide whether the wonderfully-timed crescendos back to the main tune were satiric or if they were eccentric; either way, it was amusing and interesting. The movement provided much in the way of pandemonium and industry, and was just a jolly good time. Tubular bells rang bravely and wonderfully loud, and the finale just roared. I cannot recall seeing Inkinen so completely involved and immersed in the music, and his second bouquet of flowers for the evening was richly deserved. Bravo, NZSO!

* * * * * * * *

Another view: from Peter Mechen

One would immediately think that the only possible reasons for coupling Bach’s Double Violin Concerto with Mahler’s Seventh Symphony are, firstly, that each work is an absolutely wonderful piece of music, and, secondly, that because they are so different each piece acts as a kind of foil for the other – two very different worlds of sensibility, there to enjoy in splendid isolation, but to appreciate all the more when juxtaposed in the course of a single evening.

Considering further, one could regard the bringing-together of these two works as an extension of philosophies, both of the individual composers and of their respective eras. Bach’s music belongs to that inexhaustibly rich world of the Baroque, a world of inclusion and great flexibility, of gathering-together, of elaboration and increased complexity and extension of new techniques of playing, and the development of new modes of expression such as opera.

Mahler’s music, in the form of his symphonies and song-cycles, has a similar philosophy of inclusion and great flexibility, of a gathering-together, of elaboration and increasing complexity, of enormous scale and great drama, qualities that one associates with the theatre more than the abstract world of instrumental music. Mahler once described his symphonic philosophy in the words “Symphony is like the world – it should contain everything.” In a sense it’s a very “baroque-like” attitude, and one responsible for that fantastic diversity one finds in the composer’s output.

Beginning with the Bach work, this particular performance was a treat indeed, one of the violinists being the orchestra’s Music Director, Pietari Inkinen, here in partnership with his Concertmaster and fellow-Finn, Vesa-Matti Leppänen. Any suggestion of gimmickry in having one’s Music Director step into a soloist’s role in front of his or her own orchestra was here blown away by the sheer quality of the playing. What I noticed immediately was the sweetness of Inkinen’s tone as a violinist, quite different a sound to the more austere, grainier tones of his concertmaster, a difference which made for a fascinating dialogue between the two.

In terms of bowing and articulation they were a well-matched pair, with Vesa-Matti a trifle stronger and with more control when it came to keeping the bow on the strings for held notes in the midst of frenetic passages – undoubtedly one of the factors contributing to the difference in tone-quality between the two. But in most other respects they seemed to think and move as one in pursuit of the same ends, so that their separate characters met at the point of musical exchange – what one could call a creative partnership, here producing something unique and satisfying.

For the first two movements the focus seemed to be firmly upon the soloists, especially during the divine slow movement, where the “echoed” exchanges between their voices resulted in a truly affecting intensification of beauty, and the precisely “terraced” dynamics built up sequences of the figurations into beautifully-arched structures at once pure in their serenity and suffused with surrounding ambient feeling.

The finale brought the orchestra more obviously into the picture, the playing dynamic, detailed and sharply-etched; and sounding like a true partnership with the soloists rather than mere accompanying – the figurations were given terrific emphasis and point in places, and the lines seemed to really “speak” to one another and be responded to in a wonderful three-way interchange that had me on the edge of my seat throughout.

My “benchmark” for this concerto has always been the Oistrakhs, pere and fils, in a recorded performance that has come to sound increasingly romantic over the years with the rise of “authentic” string-playing. There’s a gorgeousness about it all which still melts my heart on the occasion of every “listen”, but apart from some unashamedly saturated string-tones in the finale, the orchestra does tend to stay in the background, seemingly to leave the two stellar soloists to “get on with it”, and be content with some dutiful accompanying. This NZSO partnership made more of things than that, to our great delight.

After a short interval we were back in the hall for Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the latest in what one hopes will prove to be a complete traversal of the composer’s works by these particular forces. With memories of last year’s stellar NZSO/Inkinen performance of the Sixth Symphony continuing to resonate in our memories, this performance from the orchestra of one of the most complex and enigmatic of Mahler’s works was awaited with great excitement.

My most recent “live” experience of the symphony was in this same Michael Fowler Centre in 2009, when guest conductor Paul Daniel led the NZSO National Youth Orchestra through an almost scarily vivid performance of the work. The young players (as is usually the case with the NYO ) rose magnificently to the occasion, coping even with the conductor’s almost manic tempi throughout much of the finale. There was certainly no chance of the work “sprawling” with such a high-octane approach, even if one felt that there was more light-and-shade in some of the music’s places than was realised.

That light-and-shade was given full dues on this occasion by Pietari Inkinen and his players, as part of taking their not-quite-capacity-audience on a fantastical and far-flung symphonic journey. As is well-known, Mahler had enormous trouble with this work’s first movement, getting inspiration for its main idea only after the two middle “Nightpiece” movements had been completed, and while being rowed across a lake on his way home, his imagination stirred by the rhythm of the oars in the water. What the composer came up with could be clearly heard in the work’s portentous opening bars, the euphonium solo most expressively played here by David Bremner (“Here nature roars” as Mahler told his wife, Alma). – incidentally, Mahler specified a “tenor horn” here, which, perhaps for reasons of unavailability, wasn’t used.

After the opening, Inkinen encouraged more momentum but avoided rushing things, allowing the music time and space in which to move – and even when feelings of urgency irrupted and the march began to flail and grimace, those distinctive Leviathan-like steps whose downward lurch recurs throughout the movement served as steadying ballast, keeping feelings of panic at bay.

Here one could register Mahler’s increasingly “unmoulded” orchestral style, instruments and instrumental blocks not so much “blended” as contrasted, as the composer increasingly sought to express a sense of life’s disillusionment and dissolution. But this was a journey of startling contrasts – and how beautifully conductor and players led us into the lyrical mid-movement interlude, harp glissandi drawing back a magic curtain of nostalgia and dream-like imaginings. And then, how disturbingly the radiant climax plunged downward into darkness! – taking everything right back to the leviathan’s lair, the tread as portentous and as baleful as at the work’s opening.

From here until the movement’s end there were further irruptions of energy, regretful backward glances at happier times and a no-nonsense concluding march, Inkinen and the players risking orchestral poise in rightly stressing the music’s somewhat manic excitement and desperation. And if not every instrumental detailing was perfectly dovetailed with its neighbour, what mattered far more was the real sense conveyed of great territories traversed and different emotions registered and explored.

The first of the two Nachtmusik movements was ushered in by beautiful horn-playing, and some initial instrumental flurries, before falling in with a dark and richly mysterious processional, its “tempo giusto” allowing sufficient momentum as well as room for things to blossom. By contrast, the Scherzo evoked a volatile set of impulses, its sinuous, half-lit world poised between mockery and unease, spectral lines alternating with moments of rumbustious glee, its spookiness creating a kind of “All Hallows’ Eve” for orchestra – great fun! As for the second Nachtmusik movement , it featured the evening’s most beautiful and heartwarming orchestral playing, the detailing from solo instruments (violin, mandolin, horn, harp) simply exquisite in places – and the ending of the movement was nothing short of celestial in its effect.

And so to the finale, a movement which continues to divide critical opinion and polarize interpretation – as befits a Symphony subtitled “Song of the NIght”, the last movement is thought of by some as a return to day, especially in the wake of those two “Nachtstücke”, and the spooky Scherzo. However, the music’s extreme volatility is interpreted by others as suggesting that the day is the real culprit regarding life, that the music’s colour, energy and celebration turns into something over-wrought and oppressive, something that, by the end of the movement, has turned into a kind of nightmare of its own, a portrayal of the sickness of the society in which Mahler lived at the time, and a precursor of the horrors of the century to come. In my view, one pays one’s money and one takes from the music what one wants to take.

When I heard the NYO’s performance with Paul Daniel I thought the finale on the edge of being a madcap scramble, the players having little or no space to do more than get their fingers around the notes. While I would still prefer to hear the greater amplitude and richer detailing that Inkinen and the NZSO gave us, I think more of Daniels’ approach now, having heard other recordings; and in fact wish that I could go back and hear and enjoy the performance again. How fascinating to have had two recent “live” experiences of this work, and each strongly and differently characterized!

Interpretatively, Inkinen’s was a riskier approach in its way than Daniels’ was, because of the music’s far-flung, episodic nature, but for me it worked – and this could be attributed to both the conductor’s overall grasp of where each detail fitted into the whole, and to the concentration and skill of his players in maintaining their playing-focus over such long spans. I thought the concert in overall terms a triumph for everybody concerned, and heartily recommend to people in both Auckland and in Christchurch that they make a priority out getting themselves to hear it when the concert comes to them.

Nicola Benedetti and the NZSO show their class

Posted on 13/10/201218/10/2012 by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents FORBIDDEN LOVE

YOUNG – Dance / BERNSTEIN – Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story”

TCHAIKOVSKY – Violin Concerto / Francesca da Rimini

Nicola Benedetti (violin)

Miguel Harth-Bedoya (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 13th October 2012

This NZSO concert was a show made up of various classy acts – perhaps the sum of its parts were greater than the whole, but those classy parts alone made it all memorable, if not perfect.

One of these classy acts was violinist Nicola Benedetti’s – she gave a beautifully warm and richly-toned performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Another was conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s inspired music-making with the orchestra throughout almost every moment of the evening. The latter were perfect partners for Benedetti in the concerto, and readily captured the warm nostalgia and heady exuberance of Kenneth Young’s Dance at the concert’s beginning. As for Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, the energy and brilliance of the playing was staggering, sounding as if the NZSO had been a pit orchestra for years in one of the Broadway music-theatres.

Only Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini didn’t for me exert its usual grip, though the winds and strings played their hearts out to wondrous effect throughout the work’s lyrical middle section, describing the awakening of attraction and deepening of love between the ill-fated, adulterous couple. I thought that, immediately after the Bernstein work, with its wonderful “instant-wow” quality, its tremendous exuberance, colour and visceral engagement, most nineteenth-century romantic music would sound terribly old-fashioned (as here), rhetorical and bombastic. We were being asked to suddenly take our sensibilities back a century, and to my ears the juxtaposition didn’t work, and especially in the case of poor old Francesca.

Had the order of the pieces been reversed, things would have been quite different – without the very twentieth-century jazzy excitement and cool sophistication of the West Side Story music in our ears, we could have more readily gone back to Tchaikovsky’s (and further back to Dante’s) worlds of sensibility and been more properly and deeply moved by the horror and pity of Francesca’s and her lover’s plight. The darkness of Tchaikovsky’s opening sequence, an evocation in music of the inscription over the Gates of Hell – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, and the ceaseless buffeting of the roaring tempests which engulf the damned souls who sinned adulterously, would have had sufficient ambient room for the music to establish itself on its own ground and properly take us there. The work is, I believe, a masterpiece of nineteenth-century romantic tone-painting – but it needed to be played in a more appropriate context than here, where it seemed a bit like a “tack-on”.

I would have had an all-Tchaikovsky first half had I been programming the concert (what better context than that for a composer’s music?), and in the second half would have ended the evening with Ken Young’s beautiful and brilliant work. I did wonder to what extent the orchestra management might have been influenced in their choice of program order by having extra players involved in the Bernstein work (extra percussion and brass players), not wanting them to be sitting around waiting for their turn to play. Interestingly, I thought the brass and percussion players who did remain for Francesca, after playing so brilliantly and with such wonderful energy during the Bernstein, came across as a bit flat and lacklustre in the vigorous parts of the Tchaikovsky – there were a couple of wrong percussion entries in the latter work, which suggested that the musicians had, in fact, given their all during the “West Side Story” Dances.

I don’t think any change in order would have impaired the “Forbidden Love” idea of the program’s theme. As to that, such promotions I think tend not to be taken too seriously by people with a real interest in music, and therefore don’t really “impinge” deeply – I do recognize their value in attracting people who might be new to or unfamiliar with classical music and who like the feeling of having some kind of unifying idea to go with a single concert. Having said that, immediately after the concert I bumped into a friend (who would readily align with the “not really familiar with classical music” description) who asked me first up what the event’s title “Forbidden Love” had to do with the music that was played! – “res ipsa loquitur” (the thing speaks for itself), as my Latin teacher used to say.

As I’ve already indicated, apart from the order of saying the music and its performance were pretty wonderful – Ken Young’s Dance began with beautiful wind solos (what a gorgeous tone Michael Austin’s cor anglais has!) and the most luscious of violin solos played by concertmaster Donald Armstrong with just the right strain of nostalgic feeling flecked here and there with astringent impulses. These awakened the music’s rhythmic undercurrents, which rose up to throw back the floodgates of joyous abandonment, suffusing our sensibilities with crackling energies. I always think of Messiaen in places in this music, and wonder to what extent Young’s own conducting of performances of that composer’s Turangalila Symphony influenced the outcomes of this piece. It’s by no means a carbon copy, but the uninhibited spirit of it all reminds me of both Joie du sang des etoiles and the finale from Messiaen’s wonderfully outlandish work.

Nicola Benedetti came, saw and conquered – from her very first note there was a beautiful and distinctive tone served up for us, rich and supple, and able to be fined down when required and still be heard. She played the work very sweetly and romantically, preferring to keep the line smooth rather than really point the dotted rhythms – her articulation was seamless in places, but always characterful and filled with nuancing, never bland and all-purpose – and she also had this quicksilver ability with the faster music, which really energized those passages that needed a higher voltage. Her performance of the finale wasn’t of the kind which evoked some sort of peasant folk-fiddle with all of the wild abandonment and raw, rough-edged excitement of that kind of playing; but it was exciting in a more aristocratic, finely-honed sort of way. You would be hard put to equate critic Eduard Hanslick’s famous put-down of the music after its Vienna premiere with what we heard Nicola Benedetti do – Hanslick complained that “the violin is not played, it is yanked, torn, beaten black and blue – we see savage, vulgar faces, we hear violent curses, we smell bad brandy – for the first time we are able to image music that stinks to the ear!” I somehow think Hanslick wasn’t terribly sympathetic to Tchaikovsky’s music.

Another thing that Benedetti did was open up the cuts which have plagued this work over the years and especially on record – they’re mostly in the finale, and they’re pretty pointless, a remnant of an age of cavalier treatment of music by violinists who actually thought they were “improving” the composer’s work. All these cuts did was make the music slightly shorter and throw the balance out between the orchestra and soloist during the finale’s opening – I think Tchaikovsky knew what he was doing in the first place (though like many composers, anxious for people to like their work, he possibly agreed to the incisions made by those first performers at the time). Anyway, Benedetti, as do most modern virtuosi (but not all!) restored these several passages of figurations for the soloist, and played them brilliantly.

As for the orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the playing was exciting, committed and brilliant, beautifully sounded and nobly proportioned, finding that balance between elegance and excitement that makes the music work. It was no wonder that, at the first movement’s exciting conclusion, the audience simply couldn’t help itself and burst into spontaneous applause, all seeming very natural and emotion-driven, so that no-one could possibly make a fuss of the “Oh, no, you don’t do that sort of thing at a concert!” variety. It would have seemed very unnatural to have sat there and done nothing in response to such fabulous music-making.

So, immediately after the interval we were taken to the world of the Jets and the Sharks and the hopeless love of two people torn apart by racial strife, all realized brilliantly and colourfully in Leonard Bernstein’s music – a set of Symphonic Dances from his 1957 Broadway show West Side Story. Right from the beginning Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s direction of the music had what sounded to my ears like an authentic rhythmic swagger, a mixture of “cool” and intensely physical, which underlined every moment of the score, even the quieter, lyrical moments. The original show has, of course a strong dance-drama aspect anyway, enabling some sequences to be lifted straight from the stage action – though some of the dances were complete “makeovers” by the original orchestrators, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, of famous tunes like “Somewhere” and “Maria”.

Harth-Bedoya and his players produced veritable oceans of galvanic energy, here, which caught all of us up in its excitement. It demonstrated what musicians such as those in the NZSO could produce when encouraged, or when avenues slightly outside the paradigm of classical performance were explored, to everybody’s advantage – with, of course, the proviso that one needed to be careful how one arranged programs with entirely different types of music in them. I loved the energy and exuberance the players brought to the Mambo, complete with finger-clicking and shouts of “Mambo” – so exhilarating.

Despite my reservations concerning the concert’s last item, Tchaikovsky’s Francesca, already discussed above, the performance generated enough visceral excitement right at the end to provoke enthusiastic shouts and plenty of applause – incidentally, I’ve always felt a bit ashamed regarding my enjoyment of the all-too-obvious orchestral thrills at the end of this work in the concert-hall, considering the pity and horror of the subject-matter (Dante, in his Divine Comedy writes, at the conclusion of Francesca’s tale of adulterous love, murder and eternal torment, “While the one spirit thus spoke the other’s crying / wailed on me with a sound so lamentable / I swooned for pity like as I were dying / and, as a dead man falling, down I fell.”). Shouldn’t one perhaps feel similarly horror-struck by it all at the end, instead of leaping to one’s feet cheering and applauding virtuoso orchestral playing? But let’s be reasonable about this – if somebody’s at fault here, it’s probably Tchaikovsky!

Triple the pleasure and more at St.Andrew’s

Posted on 01/07/201215/07/2012 by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

BEETHOVEN – Triple Concerto, for violin, ‘cello, piano and orchestra Op.56

KENNETH YOUNG – Douce Tristesse

HINDEMITH – Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra

BIZET – L’Arlesienne (Suite No.2)

with Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Andrew Joyce (‘cello), Diedre Irons (piano) and Julia Joyce (viola)

Wellington Chamber Orchestra (leader: Liz Pritchett)

Conducted by Peter van Drimmelen

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

Sunday, 1st July, 2012

Some people know how to celebrate in style, and the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, by way of marking their fortieth year of giving concerts certainly popped a goodly number of musical champagne corks on this truly heartwarming occasion.

Even before conductor Peter van Drimmelen made his delightfully tangental entrance (from the side door of the church) to ascend the podium and begin the concert, there was a sense of something slightly “charged” hovering about the auditorium and amongst the audience – a buzz of excitement and expectation, undoubtedly in view of the programme and the starry line-up of musicians brought together to play some of it with the orchestra.

I was surprised at the number of concerts the conductor told us he had taken with the orchestra over the years, as it was the first occasion on which I had seen him conduct. He told us about his first concert with the orchestra, during which he played Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K.364, with his wife as the other soloist, and then, surprisingly, after a few other brief reminiscences announced his intention to make the present concert his final one with the ensemble.

So, for a couple of good reasons the concert was something of a milestone event – interestingly, though the programme proclaimed on the cover “WCO in 2012: celebrating 40 years”, nothing was made of this during the actual course of the afternoon. Perhaps the first and/or last concerts of such an anniversary year are the most appropriate occasions to mark such anniversaries, though reminders in between times (such as on the front of the programme) help keep up a sense of something special.

Thus it was that, in truly festive style, the concert began with a kind of birthday present for the orchestra, a work commissioned by Peter van Drimmelen from one of the country’s finest contemporary composers, Kenneth Young. Himself a fine conductor (occasionally of this orchestra, along with a number of others), Young has produced a number of brilliant and energetic orchestral works over the years. For this commission, however, he came up with a beautifully and lyrically-wrought piece, called Douce Tristesse (Sweet Sadness).

The composer’s brief note about his work suggested the piece was something of a valediction – his words “…..like looking at a familiar and fond vista for the last time….” reflected the music’s intense beauty and nostalgic longing, wrought by his adroit use of orchestral colour and texture. I would think that the players loved performing this work as it gave so many of them significant things to do, the wind players particularly in evidence throughout.

The whole orchestra responded to Peter van Drimmelen’s direction with, I thought, considerable sensitivity, the strings especially giving us some lovely soft playing in places. In fact the string-writing had a lovely “wind-blown” ambience during these moments, contrasting appropriately with more juicy lyrical moments such as their exchanges with the harp – the latter instrument was heard also in tandem with winds to beguiling effect.

I couldn’t see the player responsible for the firmly-toned horn solo (a forest of music-stands obscured a whole row of brass-playing faces!), but I could clearly appreciate the work of the orchestral leader, Liz Pritchett, with her solos, which incorporated a sweetly-floated harmonic at one stage of the piece, a lovely effect, as well as her delivering of the piece’s final few notes. At the music’s end, the composer was called to the front to acknowledge some well-earned applause for an attractive orchestral evocation.

The delicacy of Young’s sound-world was thrown into abrupt relief by the opening strains of Bizet’s second L’Arlesienne Suite, with its grandly processional-like opening, weighty and brassy, giving way to some wind interludes featuring the strains of a saxophone, to my delight. Later, the wind playing brought out all the folkish strains of the writing with great gusto.

Saxophone and clarinet gave the second movement an attractive rustic melancholy, while the flute-playing in the following Minuet, was outstanding, first in tandem with the harp and saxophone variously, and then in a beautiful concluding solo, which rightly earned the player the conductor’s and the audience’s special acknowledgement.

The concluding Farandole, taken at a terrific lick once the return of the opening march-tune had done its thing, brought out incredibly exciting playing, one of the players I spoke with afterwards confessing that the orchestra had never done it “that fast” in rehearsal! There was great work from all concerned, with the percussion having a riotous time towards the end, and the counterpointed tunes roaring out uninhibitedly – I couldn’t help thinking that that devoted Francophile Sir Thomas Beecham would have heartily approved!

It was a concert of contrasts, with these heady festivities followed immediately afterwards by Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusic for solo viola and strings. There was actually a welcome luftpause after the Bizet while players not involved with the Hindemith got themselves off the stage, and a space for the viola soloist was configured. This was Julia Joyce, principal violist of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, a striking platform presence as well as a fine player, transfixing listeners’ ears with tones of intense focus and infinite nuance over the space of her first few notes, following a brief orchestra introduction.

Hindemith wrote the music while visiting London to play the British premiere of his Viola Concerto – after hearing of the death of King George V the composer produced within a day the Trauermusik, a piece for viola and string orchestra, and played this instead of his concerto at the concert. As well as quoting fragments of his own Mathis der Maler Symphony and the temporarily discarded concerto, Hindemith incorporated into the work the melody from a Bach chorale “Here I stand before Thy throne”, which was better-known in England as “The Old 100^th”.

Julia Joyce took us unerringly into the work’s intensely lyrical sound-world (at the outset, to my ears not unlike that created by English composers – Tippett, for example, in places in his “Corelli” Fantasia”), moving from the first part’s sorrowing sounds into a brief folkish dance-like interlude, before plunging with the orchestra into another intense, more tightly-wrought, vigorous section, solo instrument and ensemble exchanging strongly-figured lines. These descended into silence, from which grew the chorale, Joyce’s heartfelt viola declamations speaking as an individual soul reaching out towards a kind of ambiently murmuring peace – well-controlled by all, and very moving.

So, onto the Beethoven Triple Concerto, with three more star soloists, two more section leaders (one actually the concertmaster) from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, plus one of New Zealand’s finest pianists. I had heard violinist Vesa Matti Leppänen and ‘cellist Andrew Joyce play together in a concerto during last year’s Brahms Festival, when they played the Double Concerto; and of course our third soloist Diedre Irons had, during the same concert series, given us the titanic B-flat Piano Concerto. With these full-scale, no-holds-barred traversals by the same musicians in mind, I was eagerly awaiting their combination in the Beethoven.

As was often the case in a classical concerto the orchestra set the scene, the playing here bright-toned, lively and spare, the light textures allowing some nice detailing through, with noticeable ebb and flow, though the violins had an uncharacteristically scrappy moment just before the ‘cello’s first entry. What delight there was here in the discourse, firstly between the stringed instruments, and then including the piano, the orchestra all the while “playing to them” and stimulating even wider discoursings on the part of the three soloists.

From the very first ‘cello entry I loved the solo instruments’ different interactive voicings, with hardly a note, it seemed, taken for granted. Given the lead by the composer in most of the instrumental exchanges Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello set the tone, his eloquent phrasing by turns forthright and yielding, constantly “leading into” what his violinist colleague Vesa-Matti Leppänen was doing. In places the latter seemed like Horatio to the ‘cellist’s Hamlet, the violin-playing rather more upright and straightforward (a couple of awry end-of-phrase notes apart), and less inclined to expressive flights of fancy. But both players shared with pianist Diedre Irons a real sense of listening to what was going on both between them and with the orchestra. Diedre Irons’ piano-playing was a joy – bright-toned, and with plenty of tumbling warmth in her phrasing, bringing to the interactions that vital spark of energy which often sets performances alight. Thanks to these different expressions of give-and-take, the performance of the first movement sparkled with interest throughout, leading up to a coda that crackled with honest-to-goodness excitement.

Poetry and song filled the air with the slow movement’s performance – all three soloists responded to the orchestra’s rapt introduction with playing of great beauty – again, we experienced a sense of those musicians playing each others’ as well as their own music, in heart-warming accord.

The introduction to the finale felt like a gathering-up of tiny wisps of energy, each of the soloists adding his or her strand to the line, intensifying the mixture, and then spontaneously allowing the ‘cellist to impulsively take hold of the tendrils and swing into the open. At that point the performance became even more interesting, because the soloists and conductor seemed not to quite agree on a common pulse for the music. We heard the rhythmic strut of the polonaise-like gait richly pointed by the three soloists, but things were then moved along more resolutely, a shade impatiently, I thought in places, by conductor and orchestra.

Consequently, the ensemble had its not-quite-together moments, such as the strings accompanying of the ‘cello’s opening phrases – their droll chuggings were pushed along not quite in accordance with what Andrew Joyce was playing. As well, Peter van Drimmelen seemed not to want to give the loud orchestral chord that capped off a rush of concerted soloistic triplets any rhetorical space, but instead have it played “in tempo”, so that it too in the overall context had a sense of slightly undue haste. Of course, more sensation-mongering commentators would be glorying in the “creative tensions” that these discrepancies set up – but for me the orchestral tuttis didn’t quite have the sense of rhythmic enjoyment that the soloists had very obviously engendered. It was also (and more prosaically) true that any variations of pulse which either stretched out or squeezed the bar-or phrase-spaces were easily dealt with by the musicians.

An interesting hiatus occurred mid-movement when, after the three soloists had been musing on an amalgam of two-note phrases, tossing them back and forward with what seemed like great relish, and relaxing the pulse in doing so, the conductor, waiting to bring the orchestra in, actually turned around on the podium to look at them as if to say, “Well, have you three quite finished? – and can we get on, now?” All very professionally done, of course; and the music continued unabated.

Of course there was no great battle of wills, here, but it did seem that certain musical ideas weren’t quite in accord between those performing this work. I thought the big, A-minor “Polacca” episode didn’t “gell” sufficiently for those rhythms to have the proper “schwung” Still, Beethoven survived! – and there were things which gave great delight, such as Diedre Irons’ sudden pianistic plunge into the vortex of C Minor, everything black-browed and threatening for a few moments before a reprise of the opening brought things back on an even keel.

Interestingly enough, after giving almost all the important leads to the ‘cello throughout the work, Beethoven used the violin to introduce the finale’s coda (well, perhaps “Stage One” of the coda! – as things go back to “Tempo 1” right at the end!). Here, Vesa-Matti Leppänen threw caution to the proverbial winds and his violin skipped away, leaving the orchestral strings trailing (fortunately, Andrew Joyce allowed them to catch up!) . What a wonderfully “busy” and mischievously garrulous Allegro the three soloists made of it, Diedre Irons keeping an eagle eye on the conductor and orchestra to keep things rhythmically ship-shape at the return of the polonaise-rhythm, and Peter van Drimmelen getting a splendidly buoyant orchestral response right at the end. Those final ascending figurations and pay-off chords were despatched with real élan from all concerned.

Sheer delight at the end, and plaudits for all – in sum, a wonderful concert.

Dream team together on record – Trpčeski, Petrenko and Rachmaninov

Posted on 18/09/201121/09/2011 by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concertos 1-4 / Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini

Simon Trpčeski (piano)

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Avie Records

AV2191 (Concertos 1, 4 / Paganini Rhapsody)

AV2192 (Concertos 2, 3)

Avie Records and its NZ distributor Ode Records will have pleased Wellington concertgoers enormously with a recent pair of CD recordings (available separately) featuring pianist Simon Trpčeski and conductor Vasily Petrenko in the music of Rachmaninov – all four Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on Theme of Paganini. Of course, both Simon Trpčeski and Vasily Petrenko have been recent guest artists with the NZSO, though not performing together – Trpčeski gave us Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, and Petrenko conducted the orchestra in a recent concert featuring Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Michael Houstoun as soloist. So the CDs represent a “coming-together” of different strands of impulse from these concerts, pianist, conductor and composer. While the absolute stand-out performance of the set is that of the Fourth Concerto, these musicians bring plenty of feeling and enviable skills to each of the works on the two discs, if not quite emulating the performance-intensity levels which I enjoyed at each of the concerts I attended.

Trpčeski and Petrenko approach the First Concerto as though they’re making no allowances for its status as a relatively youthful work (Rachmaninov was 18 when the concerto was completed, in 1892, though he revised the work extensively in 1917, expressing some latter-day astonishment at the Concerto’s “youthful pretensions”). In fact Rachmaninov soon realized he couldn’t remain in Russia with the Communists in control, and therefore had to face the prospect of earning a living in exile as a virtuoso pianist – so reworking his concerto’s “youthful pretensions” gave him an extra piece to add to his projected concert repertoire.

Right from the start, Trpčeski and Petrenko stress the work’s big-boned contrasts – those boldly stated flourishes from orchestra and soloist at the beginning have real “bite”, throwing into bold relief both the liquid flow of the opening theme, and the rapid scherzando-like passages which follow. Trpčeski‘s playing has plenty of flint-like brilliance, if not as volatile and alchemic as the composer’s on his recording (but nobody else’s is!), and Petrenko conjures from his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic players gloriously Russian-sounding tones, rich and resplendent in one episode, elfin and volatile in the next, heart-rending and melancholic in a third. One senses, too, a piano-and-orchestra partnership of equals, with all of the creative interactions and tensions that such a relationship implies.

I liked Trpčeski‘s Scriabin-like fantasizing on the slow movement’s first page, the playing creating sounds borne upon the air, with Petrenko encouraging his players to evolve the sounds almost by osmosis, allowing the soloist to climb through the textures with his figurations. And scenes of Imperial Russia come to mind as the music’s rhythmic trajectories kick in with the clipped horses’ hooves, the jingling harnesses on the sleigh and the wind-flurried snow-flakes skirling as the string sing a soulful melody. Only in the finale did I feel Trpčeski‘s playing a trifle under-voltaged in places, lacking some of the electricity of Stephen Hough’s blistering fingerwork on a rival Hyperion set of the concertos (Hyperion CDA 67501/2). Petrenko’s is a darker orchestral sound for Trpčeski than Andrew Litton’s is for Hough, though the romance of the second subject group is beautifully realized on the newer recording, the canonic dialoging between instruments as tenderly lyrical as any. Finally, some whiplash-like irruptions of energy from the orchestra galvanize the soloist as the music races to its brilliant conclusion.

After the resplendent performance I heard Petrenko conduct of the Fourth Concerto with Michael Houstoun and the NZSO, I was surprised and fascinated to encounter a somewhat leaner orchestral sound from the Liverpool Orchestra as recorded by Avie – what remnants of romantic sweep Rachmaninov allowed to remain in his composer-armoury by this stage of his creative career were certainly brought out full-bloodedly in Wellington, but seem less in evidence on record. Instead, Petrenko keeps things lean and tightly-focused in Liverpool, details very much to the fore, the result being a steady steam of interactive dialoguing between orchestra and soloist, the attention on the musical thoughts and ideas rather than any guide’s exposition of it. It did make the big moments in which the soloist did dominate more telling, such as the archway of the big central climax, with its gorgeously bluesy Gershwin-like tune on the strings, though the subsequent mocking laughter of the brasses resonated all the more in such a climate of restraint. Trpčeski‘s playing throughout is of a piece with the orchestra’s, focused and flexible, taking a partnership role as often as seeking to dominate. The result is a strongly-balanced exposition of the music, the sensitivity of Trpčeski‘s dialoging with the winds in the melancholic epilogue to that big middle section a clue to the stature of this performance as a powerfully expressive partnership of equals.

Pianist, conductor and orchestra build the haunting, melancholic tread of the slow movement towards a climax whose pain and sorrow, though momentary, pierce the heart of the listener, as much for the heartbreak of the subsequent bars as for the shock of the sudden onslaught. As for the finale, again Trpčeski‘s playing may yield points to Stephen Hough’s performance in sheer vertiginous brilliance, but here it’s the interplay with Petrenko’s ever-responsive Liverpool players that catches the ear again and again. Critics who damned this music at its premiere on the grounds of Rachmaninov’s “old-fashioned” style must have made up their minds about the work before they even heard a note – for this is a composer who, despite his own distaste for the avant-garde and his omni-present inner resonances of Imperial Russia, was certainly listening to what was happening around him. Bartok, Stravinsky, Gershwin and Ravel are all there at the finale’s feast, even if the fare remains bitter to the taste, flavoured to the end with the composer’s own anguish in exile from his beloved native land. Rachmaninov’s trauma at the work’s reception by the critics was such that he cut the Concerto heavily, rewriting some passages and (ironically) lessening the work’s “new look” aspect – it’s worth tracking down either Alexander Ghindin’s or Yevgeny Sudbin’s recordings of the Concerto’s original version (respectively, on the Ondine and BIS labels) to experience the extent of the composer’s thwarted achievement.

By the time he came to write the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for piano and orchestra, Rachmaninov had, I feel, come to terms some of the way with his situation. His frequently-expressed grief at his refugee status had become less overt in his music than, perhaps by way of compensation, a delight in brilliantly sardonic, in places almost diabolical accents, though he would still produce incomparable episodes of melancholic lyricism (his Third Symphony, completed two years after the Rhapsody, is a kind of emotional counterweight in this regard). The Rhapsody was the first work he wrote in a new home, the villa called “Senar”, on the shores of Lake Lucerne. As befits its virtuoso leanings it uses a similar theme to that used by Brahms in HIS “Paganini” Variations, albeit for solo piano. Unlike the hapless Fourth Concerto, the work was an instant success with the public, the composer’s pleasure at this tempered with the worry of having to perform it. Oddly enough, there’s a tenuous New Zealand connection with this work through the famous choreographer Michel Fokine, who wrote to the composer from Auckland in 1939 (Fokine was touring the country with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet at the time) asking permission from Rachmaninov to adapt the work for a ballet to be called “Paganini” – the composer subsequently agreed, and “Paganini” received its first performance at Covent Garden that same year.

Trpčeski and Petrenko play the score, it seems to me, with ears for its structural qualities, rather than its surface brilliances and coruscations. Up to the first appearance of the “Dies Irae” theme (Variation 7 – Meno mosso,a tempo moderato) the music treads steadily, the orchestral colours dark and weighty, the piano having more “glint” than out-and-out brilliance – something of a contrast with Stephen Hough’s more elfin volatilities, matched with a brighter, more effervescent orchestral presence from Andrew Litton and his Dallas Symphony players. Trpčeski is chunkier and earthier, and his accompanying orchestral colours to my ears more Shostakovich-like (a nicely guttural clarinet in Variation 12, having more time, at Petrenko’s tempo, to “colour” its melody). One could hazard the comment that Trpčeski and Petrenko give the music a more Russian-sounding outlook, very like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan music in the splendidly swaggering Variation 14, though Stephen Hough again finds extra sparkle in the succeeding piano-only Allegro. I like the homage Rachmaninov pays to Prokofiev in Variation 16’s Allegretto (straight out of the latter’s ballet Romeo and Juliet), Andrew Litton encouraging particularly spectral shudders from his strings, while Petrenko’s Liverpudlians are robuster, fuller-bodied phantoms. In the lead-up to the famous Eighteenth Variation, I found myself preferring Hough’s and Litton’s rather more atmospheric Allegretto, more spacious and Gothic, the sostenuto winds almost ghoul-like, not unlike Respighi’s Catacomb phantoms in his Pines of Rome, though honours are pretty even when the big tune comes around (the “Paganini” theme simply inverted and slowed down, can you believe it?).

And so it goes on – Hough and Litton bring out the glitter and volatility of the concluding sequences with more quicksilver than Trpčeski and Petrenko, whose energies have a darker, more elemental quality. But both rides to the finish are madcap ones, risk-taking ventures, with alarming accents and angularities aplenty, as well as passages whose harmonic explorations leave those of the worlds of the Second and Third Concertos far behind. At the beginning of the last variation of all, Trpčeski and Petrenko out-point their rivals in deliciousness, but as the patternings intensify, it’s simply neck-and neck at the finish. Trpčeski throws away the last phrase deadpan, like a good poker-player, while Hough etches it in with just a hint of a raised eyebrow.

Turning to the second of the Avie discs, containing the aforementioned remaining concertos, the listener enters a world filled with multitudes of ghosts of past performances, whose resonances are liable to rise up and haunt and even overwhelm all but the most intrepid and determined new interpreters. Happily Trpčeski and Petrenko are adventurers of that cut and cloth, and the opening paragraph of the C Minor Concerto (No.2) is a strongly-wrought statement of intent, couched in deep, rich tones, and propelled with striding energy. Vasily Petrenko loses no chance to support his pianist with emphatic touches from his players that stress the depth of feeling and purpose of it all – his lower strings, for instance, sing a rich counter-line to Trpčeski‘s simply-voiced second subject melody, echoed beautifully by the oboe shortly afterwards. The musicians tend to make the music’s transitions flow, rather than go for high-contrast changes of tempo and mood – but the excitement nevertheless builds up impressively towards the movement’s “great moment”, the return of the opening theme on sweeping orchestral strings, the soloist reinforcing the music’s trajectories with a triumphal counter-melody.

The second movement opens enchantingly, strings, Trpčeski‘s piano and the winds taking turns to weave undulating patterns of finely-spun emotion, the music’s ebb and flow and brief irruption of energy easily and naturally brought into being. After Petrenko’s terse opening to the finale the music expands with explosive energies towards climaxes, furious piano playing initiating steadily growing momentums which the strings-and-piano fugato gathers up and races towards the release of the big tune’s reappearance.The scherzando passage is galvanized by Trpčeski each time he joins the fray, culminating in a spectacular keyboard flourish and a grand and forthright final statement of the tune – glorious!

And so we come to what many people regard as the greatest of all Romantic piano concertos, the “knuckle-breaker”, as pianist Gary Graffmann used to describe it – otherwise known in the business as “Rack 3”. For a time the territory of only the boldest and most fearless of pianists (the likes of Horowitz, Janis, Gilels, Malcuzynski, Lympany and Van Cliburn, as well as New Zealand’s Richard Farrell – but, unaccountably, NOT Sviatoslav Richter), the general rise in technical piano-playing standards (though not in actual musicianship) has seen many more pianists than one could have ever imagined taking the piece on, with, alas, generally unmemorable results – given that the work still remains an enormous challenge, so that anybody who actually attempts the piece really deserves Brownie points for trying.

At first, Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s way with the music seems small-scale, their delivery of the opening episode emphasizing the first theme’s beauty while playing down its rhythmic undercurrents. However, it’s part of the longer view – when the lower strings take up the tune, Trpčeski‘s increasingly insistent accompanying figurations awaken the music’s urgencies. And what a glorious sound Petrenko encourages from his strings, and how subtly both musicians build the music through the first appearance of the concerto’s most memorable melody, shared by the piano and the orchestra, in turn, to the grand, romantic sweep of the moment’s climax.

The central episode again relaxes the tension surrounding the opening tune’s reprise – those underlying energies are kept down by Petrenko, allowing chattering winds to interact with the pianist’s nervous utterances, and only encouraging the music’s pulses to beat with any edge and force when rising out of the ambient detail to match and contour the piano’s combatative intentions – impressive control, but lacking, I thought, that suggestion of abandonment which would have brought out the encounter’s sense of the participants risking all and plunging into the fray. Trpčeski chooses the heavier, more chordal of the two cadenzas Rachmaninov left, and builds up a splendidly majestic weight of tone and fury of purpose. Beautiful wind-playing answers the soloist’s near-exhausted ruminations, and my only real disappointment is that pianist and conductor don’t make something more “charged” of the “bells across the meadow” episode before the opening tune’s final reprise brings the movement to its expectant close.

At the slow movement’s beginning, I’m always reminded of my first recording of this concerto, Byron Janis’s with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony – still memorable for Janis’s coruscating pianism and for Munch’s fervent encouragement of his strings at this point in the work. Petrenko’s players sound just as committed, the dying fall as the strings awaken the piano one of the work’s most expressively full-blooded moments. Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s account of the dark waltz-like episode is poised and veiled, as though concealing feelings too candid to fully display, though the strings subsequently stress the underlying heartache just before the finale’s electrifying opening flourishes. Trpčeski is suitably volatile and impulsive, here, and the steady-ish pace adopted for the “galloping horse” motif allows the orchestral tutti more weight and cumulative force. I’ve heard the scherzando episode played more delicately and impishly by other pianists, but Trpčeski brings out its nocturnal aspect nicely, and the lead-in to the great moment of the first movement’s memorable second subject is as charged with emotion by the players as one would want – for me, a definite performance highlight.

Apart from what I thought sounded like a strangely “clipped” reprise of the orchestra’s “galloping horse” motive, the remainder of the concerto gets the utmost romantic treatment, with all the proverbial stops pulled out – Trpčeski‘s pianism has all the weight and brilliance required, and Petrenko draws from his players the full panoply of orchestral splendor, the sounds making handsome amends for those momentary “lean-and-hungry” equestrian impressions. In sum, though I didn’t find the music-making throughout these discs as consistently “electric” as I did in the concert-hall from this pianist and conductor, that’s as much a commentary on the nature of the “live-versus-recorded” music-listening experience. It’s one I’m glad to have had both ways with these truly splendid artists, here together playing such marvellous music.

On The Transmigration Of Souls – 9/11 Commemoration by John Adams presented by the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Posted on 11/09/201112/09/2011 by Peter Mechen

Vector Wellington Orchestra’s John Adams 9/11 Commemoration

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.5 in C Minor

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.25 in C Major

ADAMS – On the Transmigration of Souls

Orpheus Choir, Wellington / Choristers of the Cathedral of St.Paul, Wellington / Wellington Girls’ College Teal Voices

Diedre Irons (piano)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday September 11th, 2011

Review adapted – not a transcript – from a radio review for Radio New Zealand Concert’s”Upbeat”, with Eva Radich)

It was unusual for the Wellington Orchestra to be performing on a Sunday afternoon.

The 9/11 date gives a clue – and in fact it’s ten years to this very day since New York’s World Trade Centre was attacked and destroyed by two hi-jacked terrorist-controlled aircraft. American composer John Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write a piece to be performed on the first anniversary of the attack, in 2002. This performance was the New Zealand premiere of this work, which won for its composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003, and for the premiere recording in 2005 various Grammy Awards.

The orchestra usually performs in the Town Hall – but here they were in the Michael Fowler Centre on this occasion.

Acoustically, the Town Hall would have been great for the John Adams work – the music was gradually built up with many different textural strands that would have responded even more powerfully to a full, immediate and reverberant ambience, the kind of things that performers have to work harder to get in the MFC. But there were advantages gained from performing in the bigger venue, most obviously a bigger audience, and more space in which to place the various choirs that the work requires. Having said this in comparing the two venues, I have to say that I thought the sounds were beautifully managed all the way through – the taped sounds of city activity and the various voices reading the names of people who died in the attack and written tributes to them that were displayed in various places afterwards all came across with plenty of clarity and atmosphere, as did the heartfelt efforts of the different choirs and the power and beauty of the orchestral playing.

It must have been a pretty daunting commission for any composer, to commemorate such an earth-shattering event.

John Adams himself admitted to feeling, at first, a bit overawed by the range and scope of it all – he was quoted as saying “I had great difficulty imagining anything commemorating 9/11 that would not be an embarrassment” – but then he reckoned that any composer that was worth his salt wouldn’t shrink away from confronting something “profoundly intense” and conveying its essence by whatever means. Adams felt that this event had been so well documented and its images spread so widely, that his job as a composer wasn’t what he called “an exposition of the material” – he had no desire whatever to create any kind of narrative or description. Instead his intention was to create in sound a kind of “memory space” for human reflection, absolutely free from any statement about religion, patriotism or politics. Adams likened to the concept the feeling one gets when one visits an enormous cathedral – he cited the experience of going to Chartres Cathedral in France, saying that “you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot.”

So, how did he do it? – how did the piece begin and develop and make its impact?

Adams decided he would dispense with the usual texts composers used for commemorative works, poetry, liturgy or Scripture. Instead he decided to use words that had been scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by people searching for their missing loved ones. In this way the focus would be on the people who were left behind, on their expressions of hope mixed with gradual acceptance of the reality of loss. He began the piece with prerecorded tape sounds of a city, of people going about their everyday business, pedestrians and traffic noises. Then a voice begins repeating the word “missing” over and over, followed by the introduction of names of the dead. The choirs begin to sing, like angels singing halos of tones, the orchestra strings play soft tremolandos, the percussion begins to softly scintillate, the choirs repeat words with growing intensity, like a great tower or archway gradually lighting up all over. A solo trumpet (very American) reminiscent of Charles Ives and of Gershwin, paying homage to a kind of cultural history, suggests an on-going presence of the spirit, as the choirs continue their chanting (Orpheus Choir) and sustained tones (Choristers’ Choir) accompanied by woodwinds playing Straussian Rosenkavalier-like chords. The music grows and changes textures by osmosis, as different instruments add their timbres and colours, brasses introducing a deep,sombre aspect, the overall sounds gathering girth and variety. The heavy brasses, trombone and tubas, play the most sepulchral notes imaginable and the tape voice repeats the word “missing”, everything growing in intensity and focus until the orchestra, like some leviathan awakening, opens up its heavy batteries with brazen bell sounds, expressing anger, war, disaster and danger, before subsiding into an uneasy calm, with only the children’s voices repeating the messages of grief at first, then gradually joined by the adult choir, the voices like waves of sound, reinforced by the orchestra, canonic flurries from the strings, irruptions from brass and percussion expending tremendous energy. The choir repeats the word “Light” as the taped voices return repeating more names of the dead and the phrase “I see water and buildings” (which were the last words spoken by a flight attendant on her cell-phone) repeated, as the intensities narrow down to a few simple phrases, repeated by the taped voices, such as “my brother’, “my son” and “I love you”. And with these sounds the music gradually fades and dies.

What was the reaction of the audience at the end?

Certainly very respectful, enthusiastic, but at the same time, thoughtful, applause – obviously the “Mr Bravos” of the concert-going world weren’t going to have the chance to exercise their lungs at the end of this piece. I think the audience’s reaction was tempered by the solemnity of it all, and rightly so.

What was the effect of the piece on you? How much power did the piece have to move your emotions?

For me, the most moving section of the work was the last, reflective episode following the final altogether irruptions of sound and energy, impressive though the impact of these was. I found that, in a sense, the composer was requiring of me to “accumulate” emotion over the course of the piece, so that I felt the lump in my throat coming up when I heard the words at the end “My brother”, “my son”, and “I love you”. It’s interesting that, when I was listening to the first five minutes of the work on you-tube on the computer earlier in the day, I felt the emotion well up then, very palpably – but I think that was because the video clip I was watching contained images of the events of the tragedy, the buildings on fire, the rescue workers standing amid the rubble, the onlookers distraught, the people jumping to their deaths, the simply-written poster-messages – somehow the visual imagery worked with the music to activate my emotions far more overtly, which I didn’t experience during the actual performance in any way until those last few minutes. And I think, as I said, that this accumulated effect was what the composer had planned, that in the end it was the simplicity of utterance of these ordinary people who had been bereaved that was so extraordinarily moving.

This work was placed last on the program – did you think that was a good idea?

Yes, I think one was able to carry out of the concert hall an abiding impression of the commemoration of the day, because of hearing the Adams work last. Of course, to then have played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wouldn’t have actually “spoiled” the Adams piece – but it would’ve lessened its raw impact on the audience, going into the aftermath of the concert. It was a contemplative, rather than an earth-shattering piece, the realization of which the composer made quite clear was his intention all along.

Perhaps it would have upstaged anything that followed it?

Actually, no – I don’t think so – and again, I think the composer intended it to be that way. Hearing the piece was for me like connecting with some kind of collective human energy for a short while, and feeling a commonality of spirit and of impulse that was comforting in its way. I think it was a boldly-conceived and sensitively-constructed work. I wondered whether some simple visual production techniques, such as appropriately ambient lighting, might have enhanced the work’s overall impact.In one or two places I did imagine that something visual could have been brought into play with no violence done to the composer’s intentions. But there again, it was obvious Adams intended nothing more than a sound-picture, and for those sounds alone to have a cumulative effect upon his audiences.

So, what about the other two items? – were they put in the shade by the Adams work?

For me, not at all – and partly because it was very much a concert of two halves, with each creating its own unique world of feeling. The first half was absolutely splendid in a completely different way, featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (arguably the most famous of all symphonies in the classical literature) and a lesser-known, but still imposing work, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25, with Diedre Irons as the soloist. I was speaking with one of the ushers whom I know, during the interval, and who told me that the first concertgoer who came out of the auditorium a few minutes before had said to her, “World class – absolutely world class!” So, people were obviously impressed by what they were hearing.

Do you think it would be difficult for any conductor and orchestra to tackle something as well-known as Beethoven’s Fifth, something that almost everybody would have heard, and with so many great performances available on recordings? I would think it would be quite daunting a prospect.

I think you’re right about that – and in the face of such circumstances, the only way to tackle such a work is to do exactly what Marc Taddei and the orchestra did – which was to play the music almost as though they’d never heard anybody else’s performance, and instead make it their own. Interestingly, I reckoned it was only the second performance of the work I’d ever heard “live” – of course I’ve heard countless versions on record – but in the concert-hall the music’s still a relatively new experience for me, so I was really looking forward to hearing the work. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Under Marc Taddei’s direction the orchestral sounds blazed forth, all departments covering themselves with glory. One of the things that thrilled me was, despite this being the Michael Fowler Centre, and not the Wellington Orchestra’s usual home, the Town Hall, the playing had enough energy and tonal weight to fill the auditorium’s spaces and get across the music’s heroic qualities with plenty of gusto. Particularly successful in this respect was the first movement – great attack, right from the outset, with urgent, rather than monumental tempi, but with the rhythms given plenty of chunky, energetic emphasis. The strings were excellent, but the support from the brass and winds and timpani was also spot-on. Other highlights – one of them in this performance for me was the way Marc Taddei challenged his string players in the scherzo to keep the tempo steady for the rushing string figurations – you remember the lower strings come in first, followed gradually by other, higher voices. The skin and hair was flying as these players bent their backs to the task and kept the momentum of the music going – absolutely thrilling! Another great moment was in the finale when Taddei brought the players in for the repeat, at which point the playing seemed to leap forward all the more eagerly and propulsively.

I did think, in one or two places that the famous “motto” theme needed a touch more rhetoric, a bit more underlining, such as for its very last, grand, first movement statement – after all, it is an intensely dramatic as well as a structural motif. More serious, for me, was the nonappearance of the goblins in the third movement, where Taddei got his strings to play so quietly their pizzicati could hardly be heard against the winds – in fact at one point I thought they’d lost their way and stopped playing, so hushed were their sounds.

And who are these goblins, you might well ask? – Well, in Chapter Five of E.M.Forster’s novel Howard’s End there’s a wonderful description of the Symphony’s third movement, made by Helen, one of the novel’s characters – “….the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures – it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world…..Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push and they began to walk in a major key instead of a minor – and then he blew with his mouth and they were scattered……..The goblins really had been there. They might return–and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things….” Alas, the pizzicati were so quiet, and the tempi so swift, we couldn’t really register the goblins’ footfalls and their uncanny progress, or feel their ominous presence. And when Beethoven briefly returned to the scherzo just before the reprise of the finale’s triumphal theme, Taddei’s tempi were so quick there was no time for goblins and their ominous footfalls whatsoever!

If you hadn’t read “Howard’s End”, what would you have thought of the performance overall?

Oh, absolutely splendid (though with a touch more drama and rhetoric required for the “Fate” theme) – but you’ll appreciate that there are some episodes in one’s favorite music that have got to be done “just so”, otherwise they don’t work as well as they ought to. This is all terribly subjective, I’m sure you must be thinking!

Tell me about the Mozart concerto with Diedre Irons.

This,alas,was the last in the series of Mozart concertos played by Diedre Irons with the orchestra – such a pity that we’re not going to go as far as the last one of all, which I would love to hear her play. Still, this one, No.25 in C major, was suitably grand and ceremonial, as befits its key, and also a counterweight to the C Minor of the Beethoven Symphony that we heard. This is a big-boned concerto, with occasional touches of the exotic – trumpets and drums speaking with what I thought was a Turkish accent during the second subject group.

After these very grand, ritualistic beginnings the soloist’s first entry is, by contrast, somewhat rhapsodic, making us “stop and listen” – Diedre Irons’s playing has such character, such purpose, so that with each phrase we experience delight in the moment and satisfaction with the whole. I liked her piano sound – it seemed to my ears a more characterful, brighter and more sharply-focused sound she was getting, compared with the instrument in the Town Hall, enabling her to do more with the music.

Has it been a good combination, Diedre Irons with Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra?

I thought this concerto in particular interestingly set the music-making styles of two different musicians together in a very interesting and creative partnership – Diedre Irons’s playing detailed and momentous, able to expand the phrases for expressive effect while maintaining the music’s larger momentum, compared with Marc Taddei’s energetic, somewhat “driven” style, given to tauter inclinations, marshalling his rhythms and driving the lyrical lines. Here, those differences worked well upon one another, and helped to bring out the concerto’s variety of mood and colour, to the extent that, if one didn’t know the music well, one wasn’t sure what was going to happen next (Mozart at his most inventive).

I believe that the first movement cadenza was the work of none other than Kenneth Young, which I didn’t know until after the performance, thinking at the time that it was a wonderful window into a composer’s soul, exploring the music’s fundamental materials in different lights and from varied angles (no cadenzas by Mozart for this work have survived). The slow movement was one of Mozart’s “operatic” realizations – it seemed that the winds’ tender descending phrase had taken us to the world of “Le Nozze di Figaro”, to the Count’s garden in the fourth act, with beautiful al fresco horns alerting us to the wonders of the evening air. Despite a few momentary spills – one or two horn blurps, and, elsewhere, some pianistic sunspots (in somewhat ruminative passages) – Irons and the orchestral winds enjoyed some delicious dialogues throughout, particularly lovely in effect towards the movement’s end. The finale’s chirpy, but somewhat plain-sounding theme, gets a good going-over when triplets turn the tune into exciting rhythmic swirling and tumblings, and later there a lovely dovetailing of pianistic triplets against long string lines as part of the rich variation Mozart brings to the music – undoubtedly some of his most inventive and colourful for piano and orchestra. Soloist, conductor and players despatched it all with the utmost élan and enjoyment, for our enormous pleasure.