Tag: contemporary music

NZSQ Storytellers 2026 Concert Three’s enthralling vibrancies from home and worldwide

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSQ Storytellers 2026 Concert Three

SARA ARAIN – The Internal Eclipse
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No.11 in F Minor Op.95
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – String Quartet No. 3 in G Major Op.94
CLAIRE COWAN – Sweet Suite : Hansel & Gretel – highlights for String Quartet

New Zealand String Quartet
Martin Riseley, Peter Clark – violins
Gillian Ansell – viola
Martin Smith –  ‘cello

Prefab Hall, Jessie St, Mt. Cook, Wellington
Wednesday, 28th October 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

I unfortunately missed the NZSQ’s second concert in this series, thus depriving myself of the chance of hearing all three of Benjamin Britten’s string Quartets “live” this year – the two I did manage to catch were the First (1941) and Third (1975) Quartets, works that spanned much of the composer’s creative life. Britten wrote these works in a century dominated by the string quartets of Bela Bartok and Dmitri Shostakovich, and though he was the least prolific of the three his stand with those by the two other giants regarding their creative fluency and (particularly the two later works) astonishing emotional power.

The NZSQ’s 2026 programme was given the evocative title “Storytellers”, with each of the three concerts presenting, alongside a Britten Quartet, a different kind of exploration of the transformation of stories into musical sounds across the ages. As befitted its title, each  programme drew from archetypal sources such as folk tales, different cultural practices and iconic classical pieces, including the distinctive voices of Aotearoa represented by works from our own composers past and present.

On the two occasions I was able to attend, I was enthralled by the variety of the presentations and with the players’ wholehearted responses to the various composers’ depictions in sound of the essences of these representations – while such descriptions of music-making might seem overtly cerebral, one couldn’t help one’s sensibilities falling prey to the enthralling vibrancies by which the different items captivated us.  Over the two concerts these included such esoteric explorations as the osmotic growth processes of fungi (a 2025 award-winning work by Auckland-born composer Mika Cornelius entitled “Universal Veil”), and a depiction of human interaction with one of the natural world’s harshest environments (American composer Missy Mazzoli’s 2010  “Death Valley Junction”), contrasted  further with an exploratory Beethoven “Middle Period” String Quartet (the Op.94 “Serioso” Quartet), and an ultra-exotic setting for a paradoxical journey of the self from another NZ composer Sara Arain with her 2026 work “The Internal Eclipse”, a piece drawing from an ancient Persian mythical tale.

This third concert began with that last-named work, “The Internal Eclipse”, selected by the Quartet from a number of student entries in a competition at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University to write a work for the ensemble to take on tour over the oncoming weeks. The winner was Wellington-based  composer Sara Arain, whose Persian, Turkish and Islamic heritage blends together Middle Eastern, European and South Asian cultures. Currently in her fourth year of study with honours papers in composition, her works have already been performed in professional and tertiary-professional concerts such as the 2025 Lilburn Composers’ Competition, where her String Quartet Bridging Silences was a finalist – an extraordinary work in itself, as witness this Lilburn Trust Competition performance  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE2pN0wapMs&t=77s).

While this piece expressed what the composer herself calls a “fragility of identity”. a kind of dialogue between past and present, Eastern and Western musical languages, and forces such as memory, resistance, acknowledgement and celebration, Sara Arain’s more recent work The Internal Eclipse took us further into her own heritage’s uniqueness, with a sonorously-crafted musical narrative connecting us with an ancient Persian mythical tale of birds in flight whose journey becomes an unexpectedly inward odyssey towards a kind of self-realisation.  From the outset I felt the music quietly drawing back a veil and revealing to us a realm where time seemed to almost stand still, It was the viola who then took our attention, its timeless, archetypal-sounding theme suggesting age-old mystery,– here, beautifully illustrated by the instruments’  “fantasia-like” sequences, the folkish-sounding “bent” notes hinting at impulses being “guided” towards destinations that paradoxically seemed like the beginnings rather than new territories. This seemed suggestive of the Persian legend’s persuasive recounting of the birds’ flight into realms of self-discovery – the music had, I felt, this attractive “warmth of recognition” in its trajectories and exchanges.

I couldn’t, on a first-time listen, accurately pinpoint whether the intensified animations represented a continuation of the birds’ legend or marked the of the piece’s next section, to which the composer had given the title “The Observer” – but the music underwent an absorbing intensification at that point, ostinato-like patternings and elaborate fantasy-like renderings, with shifting harmonies creating  wondrous colour- and texture- changes, all spontaneously wrought via illumination and fantasy, before coming to a sudden stop with a pizzicato chord. Arain’s idea of “The Observer” being  “a self beyond the physical” enabling a more dispassionate self-judgement had an almost Dr.Seussian affinity with the latter’s famous “Watcher of the Bee-Watcher” sequence (in Dr. Seuss’s Did I ever tell You how lucky You are?), where, in Arain’s creative imaginings “The Observer” itself became the observed and could no longer act freely!

In Arain’s music the rebegun music “freely-floating” at first, began to connect with the ostinato passages once again, with the intensities growing and then receding,, and with the listener shifting one’s receptivities between the “prominent’ and the “background” until the distinctions  began to blur, the result being a kind of involuntary “liberation” from passing judgement upon the status of the sonic terrain. Again, I wasn’t sure as a listener whether a kind of “crossing the bar” moment was that realisation that “prominent’ and “background” were simply two different ways of viewing the same kind of substance, and that this was the work’s “Crossing”, a fusion of “identity, imagination and creative practice” stemming from the raw composition material, with the composer fashioning what she described as ”…. my Persian, Turkish and Islamic heritage, my connection to Aotearoa New Zealand and the musical legacy of my Turkish great-grandfather Abdülkadir Töre…” (the latter was a significant pedagogic figure in Turkish classical music and its interaction with Western traditions). It all gave the impression of being a huge and varied meditation upon the nature and meaning of sounds, with the viola having the final word, a characteristic phrase tailing into the silences. Afterwards, it was a pleasure to be able to directly acknowledge the composer herself and her work, in tandem with our appreciation of the Quartet’s riveting performance!

After this was more familiar territory, represented by  Beethoven’s comparably distinctive “Serioso” String Quartet op.95, a work whose energies and meditations readily conjure up the composer’s conflicts between his ever-expanding creative powers and the disturbing onset of his deafness at this time, a scenario in the throes of which he had also made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to establish an emotional relationship with at least one woman, the well-documented affair with Therese Malfatti (possibly the object of the composer’s single most famous piano piece Für Elise.

Beethoven’s emotional state at this time was such that the quartet’s composition was accompanied by his firm declaration that it was written “for a small set of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public”. Its overall character, however,still spoke volumes regarding his emotional state – the quartet’s opening brusque eleven-note unison, followed by vigorous octave leapings from the first violin set the tone for the rest of the movement, the NZSQ players waging the battle on the composer’s behalf with tireless energies and glint-eyed resolve. The group  balanced the vigorous outbursts with more heartfelt, though still despairing moments – everything very compressed and to the point, so that it seemed as if almost no time at all had passed  before the movement, exhausted by the exertions, drifted towards its brooding close.

We got for a second movement  a songful theme given heartfelt expression by the ensemble before turning into a fugue-like display whose intensities led us back to the theme in fascinatingly exploratory ways – not the least of which was the almost spectral “unexpected visitor” chord which announced the scherzo (a deliciously chilling moment! – and I loved the way the ensemble  “bounced” those dotted rhythms along beneath the opening theme!). Uncanny, too was the uneasy hymn-like calm which sought to quell the ferocities of the Allegro assai vivace, whose energies remained unimpaired upon its repeated return, to the point of having the last word! The Larghetto expressivo which introduced the finale also didn’t quell Beethoven’s tempestuous mood for long, with everything more agitato than allegretto.And how wonderful was that moment when, for whatever reason, that whole attitude undergoes a kind of “sea-change”, as if the composer has suddenly decided that life can not only be a tragedy to the heart but a comedy to the intellect! – the light, bouncy, comic-opera ending has been called by a commentator “the true Shakespearean touch that provides final confirmation regarding the truth of the rest!”

Interestingly, the concert’s second half trajectories, in a strange way, almost “mirrored” the final movement of the “Serioso” Quartet, beginning as it did with Benjamin Britten’s heartfelt Third String Quartet, and concluding with New Zealand composer Claire Cowan’s diametrically-counterweighted suite of dances, both energetic and piquant, from her ballet “Hansel and Gretel” – as with all storytellings, a soupcon of light serves to better define the extent of the darkness!

Britten wrote this Quartet at the same time he was finishing the composition drafts of his final opera “Death in Venice” – his friend Hans Keller had suggested that chamber music might be less taxing to write than a full orchestral manuscript, and Britten had long promised Keller he would return to the string quartet medium. The Amadeus Quartet, to whom Britten had promised the work, gave the composer a private performance of the finished Quartet in September 1975 – however he did not live to hear the quartet give the work’s first public performance in December of that year at Snape Maltings.

The first of the five movements, true to its subtitle “Duets” explored different pairings of quartet voices, with the lines closely entwined, the instrument pairs nudging one another gently at first, and then in more adversarial ways – the cello’s vigorous interaction with the viola, for instance was punctuated by jagged sforzandi from the violins, with the “pairs” alternating the different modes.  The wandering, exploratory quality returned, the players “connecting” their phrases gratefully, partnering each other differently for various sequences, and all briefly coming together for a final questioning phrase.

The second movement, “Ostinato) began excitingly with a jaggedly insistent repeated 4-note phrase driving the music forward, and continuing to “haunt” its overall momentums. until relief descended upon the ambiences in the form of beautiful open-air chordings and scented phrases, which melted into the textures. Back came the vigorous ostinato for a final fling! – though the more mellifluous textures and ambiences re-emerged at the end.

The solo violin plsyed a “voice in the wilderness” role in the third movement, with the cello its circumspect companion, and  the viola  contributing a passing phrase or two, which the second violin extended into a beautiful counter-melody  – all this seemed more like solemn ritual than nature at first, until a quixotic outburst of bright and animated impulses blossomed like birdsong! – the music ‘s almost “escapist” mode suggested something of a fairy-tale world, one whose manifestations were as short-lived as they were enchanting! – what a change with the fourth-movement “Burlesque”, whose initial rough-hewn, buffoon-like accents suddenly took on a semi-skeletal aspect, a “dance macabre”, with the viola playing startling “above the bridge” phrases, and the others insistently rustic to the end!

Another sea-change accompanied the final movement,”La Serenissima”, with its reference to Venice, the sounds Aeolian-harp-like, with “water-droplet” viola pizzicato, and cello recitative containing echoes of the opera “Death in Venice” Britten had just completed, leading up to the movement’s Passacaglia, which used the key of E Major, which had frequently accompanied the opera’s main character Aeschenbach’s music in the opera. The intensities grew as the players reiterated the Passacaglia melody (based on the melody Britten had himself heard when in Venice), the music becoming almost celebratory at its climax, before slowly dying away, the solo violin playing the Passacaglia theme while the rest murmured the harmonies,  eventually “dissolving” their tones into the silences following the work’s final chord – Britten’s comment was simply – “I wanted the work to end with a question”.

Auckland composer Claire Cowan’s Suite of Dances from her highly successful full-length ballet “Hansel and Gretel” consisted of three movements which she formed into a “Sweet Suite” – the first of these, from Act One of the ballet, was “King and Queen Fairy Tango”, from the scene in the First Act where Hansel and Gretel are lost in the woods but are protected by the Sandman who scatters them with magic sleep-dust, bringing out the fairies to dance beneath the moon – the King and Queen enter and dance a tango as the children sleep, the music begun by the solo cello, with the other players clapping their hands before joining in with the sultry rhythms, And, at the end, there was a wonderfully “splurgy” final chord!

Next came  “The Food People”, with its wonderfully deep-and-drowsy opening, featuring gorgeous drooping glissandi as the children help themselves to the witch’s food!  But suddenly, the music itself “steps out” and the food itself dances a digestively-syncopated waltz, life-sized ice-cream figures “melting into” and then “jamming up” the rhythms!  And more was to come, with the Witch herself  concocting a grotesque meal – “The Witch’s Baking-Charleston” – the dance itself skeletal and bone-dry, eye glinting, and then accelerating into a madcap galop – lots of bows bouncing on the strings, and the spontaneous-sounding improvisatory lines skidding about atop the trajectories! – unashamedly silent-movie stuff, with the dance adding to the era’s characteristic abandonment to pleasure – and hang the consequences! We heartily consumed it all and were consumed ourselves – storytelling that simply couldn’t be beat! – and all of it such a delicious pleasure!

 

 

Nature and art, architecture and philosophy – Orchestra Wellington’s epic 2026 “Revelations”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON 2026 – “Revelations”

NATALIE HUNT – Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket
CLAUDE DEBUSSY – Nocturnes
FERRUCCIO BUSONI – Piano Concerto
The concert also included items by the Sistema Group Arohanui Strings

Jian Liu (piano)
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Arohanui Strings Sistema Youth Orchestra
and associated players
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 24th October 2026

This latest Orchestra Wellington concert, even during such an enterprising presentation year as 2026, will resonate in the memory as a special event for a long time to come – it was conductor Marc Taddei’s inspirational idea to invite the city’s foremost resident pianist, Jian Liu, to perform Ferruccio Busoni’s massive five-movement Piano Concerto, generally considered the longest and most physically demanding of all piano concertos! Even when the orchestra’s initial claim that this performance would be a “first” for Aotearoa New Zealand was found to be incorrect (British pianist John Ogdon performed the concerto in both Auckland and Wellington with the NZSO and conductor Juan Matteucci in March 1968), the prospect for a new generation of listeners of hearing such a distinctive work had no difficulty in maintained its currency as a true “blue moon” event.

Appropriately enough, the concert’s titled “Revelations” were by no means confined to the Busoni Concerto, thanks to a number of varied delights of association which enriched the evening’s listening experience. It began with a work which was receiving its premiere performance – Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket – written by a New Zealand composer, Natalie Hunt, whose music I had -previously encountered (and reviewed) on a number of occasions. According to my “Middle C” record of concerts the first work of hers I wrote about was one in 2009 at a special NZSO National Youth Orchestra 50th Anniversary concert, when the orchestra performed her “Only to the Highest Mountain” –  (review at https://middle-c.org/2009/07/521/)  – and there have been several others at various times since then.

Her intention with this most recent work was to make a special connection with the orchestras performing this evening’s concert, Wellington’s Sistema Youth Orchestra Arohanui Strings, and Orchestra Wellington, as well as the presentation’s wider programme which brought into play further influences – the music of Claude Debussy we were to hear tonight, the Trois Nocturnes, was inspired by the “Nocturne” paintings of James McNeill Whistler, with the latter’s painting “Nocturne in Black and Gold – the Falling Rocket”  directly inspiring Natalie Hunt’s eponymously-titled composition.

Hunt’s work was a visual as well as an aural treat, introduced by a pūrerehua, a traditional taonga puoro known elsewhere as a “bullroarer”, though in Te Reo it’s the word for “butterfly”, as the sound made by the instrument (a flat, blade-like piece of wood or bone attached to a long cord and swung in a circle around the single player’s head) represents the gentle whirring of insect wings. This action, reinforced with a gentle timpani roll and the toneless “blowing” of brass players’ breath through the instruments’ tubes and bells brought into being a magical sense of spiritual “presences” being given voice in an “other-worldly” kind of manifestation from other orchestral instruments. It’s not actually dissimilar in effect to the opening of Debussy’s work, his first-movement Nuages (Clouds), a work with particular connections to Whistler’s visual evocations of light and shade, and which Hunt referred to admiringly in the programme note to her own work.

The writing made use of deft touches for atmospheric percussion leading to similarly sensitive brass colourations which vibrantly emerged from their somewhat grisaille-like shades of monochrome as the music gathered urgencies and momentums towards joyously exuberant outpourings. This was exemplified by a wild and fantastic trumpet solo that spurred the orchestral ambiences to generate an all-embracing panoply of sound whose impact then just as magically dissipated as it announced its presence at the piece’s beginnings. I thought it was a piece that entirely sure-footed its way into and through its composer’s suggestively referenced interests and purposes, while maintaining its own singular identity, the audience reaction at the piece’s end warmly expressing appreciation for the work and acclaim for the composer upon her appearance.

Marc Taddei then brought onto the platform the “Tui Ensemble”, comprising the younger members of the Arohanui Strings’ Sistema group whose older representatives had taken part in the first item. The youngsters delighted us with their participation in strings-only performances of Bizet’s “Carillion” from L’Arlesienne, along with a couple of other unidentified but similarly jolly pieces. Our attention then turned to Debussy’s Trois Nocturnes,  pieces which reflected the composer’s fascination with the impressionistic sensibilities of his own time, and of the cross-fertilisation between art-forms, expressed in music such as these orchestral pieces and in the Piano Preludes with their suggestively-evocative titles.

The work’s beginning, Nuages, brought exquisite textural balancings from Taddei and his the players in realising that particular grisaille quality of monochromatic colouring (grey, black and white with occasional earth-tones of brown or green, though with a preponderance of grey – “gris”).It had that peculiarly bitter-sweet quality, exemplified by the mournful tones of the cor anglais, whose repetitive ascending phrase dominated the movement’s ambivalently veiled, but still expressive solemnities, with immutable colourings and hauntingly soft phrasings at the end. Fetes, the middle movement, made for a properly startling contrast, with sharply-projected rhythms and flashings of light, the opening surveying for us the overall atmosphere of excitement and celebration, before gathering the strands into a near-ominously approaching processional (what stunningly-controlled brass-playing here, as if “from a great distance” as the sounds moved irrevocably closer to us before bursting out in full orgiastic splendour!) – in short, a remarkable sequence of hushed expectation building up to exuberant incandescence, and then gradually dissolving into thin air (superb playing from the winds and the soft trumpets at the end!)

Most enigmatic-sounding was the third-movement Sirènes, with which Debussy had struggled to get from the women’s voices the blended instrumental quality he wanted, and which here sounded as atmospheric as any I’d previously heard – the more forthright vocal phrases at the beginning can be difficult to make properly alluring-sounding, but the softer, more suggestive notes from the voices had all the enticement of promise and captivation of distance, here superbly set-off by the sensitivity of the orchestral playing. And the crescendo-like blossomings from the voices brought near-rapturous responses from the orchestral forces in the work’s central sections, imparting to the dying-fall encapsulations of longing which resonated long afterwards in the memory.

After re-savouring these delights throughout the concert’s interval we were freshly reminded of what was in store by the centre-stage presence of the piano, obviously the primary focus of the Busoni concerto which was to follow. This work, too, had extra-musical aspects relating to other art-forms  which had influenced the composer in terms of both the work’s structure and content, most obviously with the inclusion of a fifth movement featuring a male chorus, with the tenors and basses of Wellington’s Orpheus Choir intoning verses written by the Danish poet and playwright Adam Oehlenschläger for a verse-drama Aladdin, based on the well-known story from the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights. Oehlenschläger’s verses are taken from the hero Aladdin’s “Hymn to Allah” in the play, and for Busoni had something of the mystical character of the concluding stanzas of Goethe’s Faust, hence his desire to use male voices rather than a mixed-voice choir. The composer had actually already fallen under the spell of Oehlenschläger’s play and had set this final chorus to music – when he came to write the concerto, he realised this existing work fitted the concerto’s overall scheme perfectly, both as an augmentation of existing sonorities “like a body of soft trombones added to the orchestra” and a philosophical statement of spiritual awareness and growth via maturity and transformation.

Though the work requires a virtuoso soloist for the extremely challenging solo part, the writing is rarely virtuosic for its own sake, with even the most intricately-scored passages incorporated into the work’s overall design. And while the keyboard writing echoes practically every nineteenth-century romantic piano style, the composer performs miracles of integration of these differing pianistic characters into an irrepressible whole. Opinions have differed about the work’s efficacy, with comments including the description “monstrously overwritten” and “a hymn to immoderation” balanced by the words of an earlier commentator, the British critic Edward Dent, who remarked of the piano part, “Busoni sits at the pianoforte, listens, comments, decorates and dreams”.

Busoni himself regarded the work as a kind of variegated temple of sounds and structures with an over-riding symmetry featuring a massive central slow movement flanked by two vigorous scherzo-like pieces, and great, solemn outer edifices at each end (he drew a visualisation of this which found its way onto the front of the published score – groups of temple-like buildings flanked by trees and exotic bird-life, and with a volcano erupting in the background!) – an amalgam of (in the composer’s own words) architecture, landscape and symbolism!

All of this would have gone for little had it not been for the performing zeal of the musicians who had gathered to do what Alex Ross of “The Rest is Noise” fame called “this monster concerto” proper justice. The Orchestra Wellington players, the Orpheus Choir tenors and basses, the intrepid and irrepressible piano soloist Jian Liu, and the uncompromisingly motivational conductor Marc Taddei together made what seemed the insurmountable possible through sheer persistence of application whose momentums and reflections vividly brought out, activated and relished the music’s many and varied features. Across the work’s huge span each of the concerto’s movements by turns proclaimed its distinctive character within the framework of a steadily built-up through-line which led, apotheosis-wise, to the final movement and its appropriately mystical male-voiced chorus.

The work’s ultra-Brahmsian orchestra-only opening glowed with ambient warmth and occasional surges of excitement as Marc Taddei and his players steadily unfurled the welcoming banners for the soloist Jian Liu’s first splendid, almost Tchaikovskian entry, which underpinned the music’s ceremonial character, all confidently and assuredly delivered. The pianist relaxed into a kind of “lyrical overdrive” delivery-mode for the second subject, one whose continuance “grew” the intensities, marked by cascades of increasingly tumultuous and differently-modulated figurations – a more fanciful episode then involved the soloist in dancingly vertiginous, often stratospheric figurations, delightfully jaw-dropping in their filigree dexterities!

The flickering, volatile scherzo (Its pezzo giocoso  heading subtitled “vivacissimamente”!) began atmospherically with diaphanous “sprites-at-play” keyboard figurations that invited the orchestra’s vigorous dotted-rhythm dance to burst in and whirl the interactions along with its “living, nature-play” representations. We enjoyed a characterful clarinet solo after a pizzicato-led introduction to a middle section which built up to a rollicking piano-and-orchestra frenzy , leading to a mordant danse-macabre coda from the piano and enigmatic end-of-day brass soundings.

Then came the pezzo serioso middle movement, the “inner shrine” of the piece with its spacious outlines and broad architectural spans. I loved the violas’ playing of the opening melody, bringing to mind Shostakovich’s similarly “laden” epic melodies, as did the winds with their answering lines. And Jian Liu’s attractively Scriabin-like phrasings brought forth noble tones from the brass as preparation for another of this movement’s widely-spaced themes. This was a movement which simply kept on giving, with piano and orchestra bringing back the same themes subject to near-infinite variation, and combining brilliance and profundity, as in a stormy middle section that grew out of the theme’s originally noble and profound beginnings!

No rest, however, for these wanderers after such a journey in itself, with the fourth-movement All’Italiana tarantella waiting, like the eponymous spider itself, ready to pounce! This was surely, however, Busoni’s “Vesuvius-vision”, a volcanic eruption transfixing our sensibilities as we were drawn trance-like into the dance – Jian Liu’s hands and fingers seemed entirely possessed as wave followed tumultuous wave of energy building each time to greater abandonment, the final dance incorporating the work’s most cadenza-like solo sequences, the pianist like a soul possessed to the point where music and musician became one with the whirlwind energies of white-hot spontaneous recreation!

How apocalyptic, then, those massive chords and eerie silences which introduced the final movement Cantico, with its poco sostenuto direction, the piano gently rhapsodising with the orchestra as the  music prepared us for the entry of the male voice chorus – the composer instructed that the chorus be “hidden”  to emphasise the music’s mystical quality, but surely such a distant and muffled effect would have been counter-productive in securing the “transformative” effect sought. In any case the voices needed all the help they could get in the Michael Fowler Centre’s somewhat flat acoustic!)  – only in the later, more stirring passages of the Hymn to Allah did the voices sufficiently stir the blood for me, irrespective of what the composer might have wanted!  When the voices reached Hebt zu der ewigen Kraft eure Herzen (“Lift up your hearts to the power eternal”) I began to again feel “connected” with the sounds in the same way as with the rest of the concerto – and in the work’s brilliant coda, both Jian Liu’s flamboyant piano fanfares and the full orchestra’s fervent crashing final chords gave us a truly satisfying sense of heroes working at full stretch to bring about a true apotheosis!

NZ Trio with sonorous help from friends, continues to enchant

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio+ at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral

GARETH FARR – Ahi (for violin, ‘cello and piano) –
Amalia Hall (violin)  / Matthias Balzat (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

CAROLINE SHAW – Thousandth Orange (for violin, viola, ‘cello and piano)
with Alexander McFarlane (viola)

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Piano Quintet in A Major Op.114 D.667 “Trout”
(for violin, viola, ‘cello, double-bass and piano)
with Damien Eckersley (double-bass)

Old St.Paul’s Cathedral, Mulgrave St., Pipitea, Wellington
Thursday, 17th September, 2026

Though obviously pure coincidence, each of two consecutive Thursday concerts which I recently attended at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral in Mulgrave St, was beset by bad weather – the real pity was that the first of them –  Quang Hong Luu’s stupendous Liszt recital a week ago, –  was seriously compromised. with a mere handful of souls braving the torrential rain that would have kept most lunchtime concertgoers away. This more recent chamber music concert featuring the NZTrio and friends drew a much bigger audience for various reasons – it was part of a well-publicised tour, it contained better-known repertoire (including the ever-popular “Trout” Quintet of Schubert’s), and the weather conditions, though not ideal, were nowhere near as dire as for last week’s meteorologically-compromised event.

Having recently attended and enjoyed a trio-only concert given by this ensemble, I found myself here again engrossed by the same players’ remarkable identification with the many and varied “characters” of the music – not a note seemed to be unattended either on its own merits or in tandem with others in a harmony or a rhythmic phrase. I remember in particular loving their Schumann-playing on that occasion, and how well it captured the music’s unique amalgam of resolve and introspection peculiar to its composer. Something of that singularity was brought out here in Gareth Farr’s remarkable Trio “Ahi”, in which the composer’s opening theme was sounded in differing guises throughout the work, from the child-like playfulness of the piano-only opening to its final tug-at-the-heartstrings appearance in the last movement. I was pleased violinist Amalia Hall made reference to the late and much-lamented pianist Katherine Austin, whose association with this work’s performance included a memorable recording, with the heartfelt tones of the music’s principal theme a fitting tribute.

The word “Ahi” literally means “fire” in Te Reo, but is used in several cultural contexts like “the spark of life”, and “belonging to the land”, and “the warmth of hospitality” as well the “heat” that comes with energy, passion, conflict and rebirth.  Farr’s piece explored a number of these over the work’s different movements using a kind of motto theme in places throughout  – after the lyrical simplicity of the opening, we were plunged into a Shostakovich-like confrontation with relentless piano-initiated “slash-and-hammer barrages morphing into string-moanings and lamentings against swirling pianistic vortices! A third movement restored calm temporarily, with ‘cello and violin both intoning interactive recitative-like thoughts and impulses, before the reveries were shattered by wailing, beseeching tremolandi, the piano determinedly persisting with ostinati-like figure as the strings gently reiterated their lamentations. Finally, girding their respective loins violin and ‘cello plunged into a reprise of the work’s signature theme, which sang out defiantly, reawakening what might have represented the idea Te Ahi Kāroa  (the Spark of Life) and to which the piano joyously accorded the rapidly-rotating gamelan-derived carillon-like melody to near-abandoned and almost cathartic effect!

Next, the concert’s mystery object was the enigmatic title for one of the pieces, Thousandth Orange, which straightaway invoked the “all sensibilities opened” kind of response that anything with such a juicily (sorry!) Zen-like title might have had upon the average listener! Just as playfully enigmatic was the programme-note by the composer herself, American Caroline Shaw, at once revealing everything one perhaps needed to know about the piece without letting on about anything we might have wanted to know! – perhaps the NZTrio ‘cellist Mathias Balzat came closest to the mark by telling us that the group was “going to play the piece for us one thousand times”, adding  that “the experience should be as beautiful even after the thousandth playing!”

Violist Alexander Macfarlane (the NZSO’s current Associate Principal Viola) had joined the group for this piece, so that we had pianist Somi Kim and no less than three string players ready to convey to us the music’s many-sided, ostensibly inscrutable qualities. Pianist Somi Kim began the work, a series of four chords on the piano in a constantly-repeated pattern, and interpolated with entirely differently-constituted String Trio harmonies and rhythmic designs – almost Ivesian-like in effect! The strings then surreptitiously “took over” the four-chord pattern, leaving the piano to “extemporise”, and the strings to “play with” the chords and gradually “deconstruct” them, though the four-note “motif” remained discernable while being put under all kinds of strictures! The four-note pattern was arguably “the orange” on its way to its thousandth permutation! I liked the composer’s droll but significant comment regarding the process  – one which accorded “more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable”….. to the point where its perception was accompanied by a kind of mystique attitude, a heightened appreciation of ordinary things……the final statement of the “motif” on pizzicato strings at once both  “throwaway” and “significant”…..profound!

Obviously the more-than-usual atmosphere of camaraderie in the cathedral had encouraged people to leave their seats at the interval and engage in fellowship of all kinds, as the concert organisers were forced to make repeated calls to people to resume their places for the second half! This was duly done, and the performers plus yet ANOTHER additional musician, double bassist Damien Eckersley, (also an NZSO Associate Principal!) took up their places on the platform to perform Franz Schubert’s beloved “Trout” Quintet.

This was a splendid performance – I can honestly say I’ve not heard a better one, either “live” or on record! Obviously the “in situ” experience would have brought out whatever qualities there were in the music-making  more vividly than on a sound (or even on a video) recording – and these qualities, such as the technical brilliance, both individual and ensembled, allied to the ever-apparent sense of rapport between the players, and what seemed like an instinctive feeling for the music’s special “character” in these respects, made, I’m certain, this occasion one to readily “gather up” in the memory. For me, nothing seemed to stand in between or distort or dilute the impact made by the music – so, rather than meticulously  (and tiresomely) try and dot and cross all the “I”s and the “t”s of the performance I’d like to highlight a few moments that can serve to speak for the concert as a whole.

I liked the “perfect half-circle” of the string players, with the double-bass especially accorded a front-row place equal to the rest of the strings, instead of being relegated to a more backward position  – and this gave particular delight in the scherzo at some of the phrase ends when the’ cello and double bass had some unison repeated-note exclamations, and made certain each time that they were in accord (especially the final one to which they both amusingly gave some extra “oomph!”). Much earlier, in the first movement, the ensemble were able to achieve an amazingly fluid, nuanced sound which communicated so much expressiveness even when springing forward at a great pace! – as a result the first movement was an extra joy  – as well as making the development section all the more different and exciting.

The Andante second movement opened up vistas of such beauty (beguilingly-voiced lower strings!) making such a gorgeous contrast with the second “layabout” theme that came along later, like a “hands -in-the-pockets” whistling tune! Similar characterful contrasts were delivered in the theme-and-variations “Troutr” movement, during which we were all galvanised by the “helter-skelter” section, carried along by the music’s irresistible energies, then soothed by the ‘cello’s graceful phrasings. And I liked the way that violin and piano began the last variation when reverting to the composer’s “lieder” mode, each player variously giving us a taste of the hapless fish and the cruel fisherman – Amalia Hall and Somi Kim here, to my ears, made their instruments “talk” to one another so deliciously.

What a purposeful journey the ensemble made of the finale – so much energy and schwung in places, with double bassist Damien Eckersley grasping the mettle and giving his instrument plenty of “rumble” with his rapidly-repeated notes. But it was a concerted effort, and a more-than-fitting finish (one thought at this point!) to the concert – except that the ensemble reappeared mid-ovation at the end, and Damien Ecklersley himself had the task of introducing an encore, concerning which he spoke in particular reference to the joy of being a single double bassist playing with wonderful colleagues in chamber music, a change from his usual role as being part of the “bottom end” of a symphony orchestra!

This was a piece written by British composer Judith Weir for the UK’s Schubert Ensemble to commemorate the group’s farewell performance season in 2017, a work fittingly composed for a “Trout Quintet” performance group. Weir wrote the work with Schubert’s famous song Abschied from the song-cycle Schwanengesang in mind, describing the music as containing “goodbye waves in turn from viola, violin, ‘cello, bass and piano” – a perfect way for this evening’s ensemble to finish a truly memorable concert.

 

 

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “Colossal” triumphantly ticks all the descriptive and presentation boxes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Marc Taddei with Orchestra Wellington and Wellington District Brass Ensemblepresents “Colossal”
JOSHUA PEARSON – Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fau (world premiere)
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Requiem: Grand Messe des Morts
Kyle Stegall (tenor)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington (Brent Stewart, director)
Te Kōkī Orchestra / Wellington Brass Band / Trust Porirua City Brass
Hutt City Brass / Levin and Districts Brass
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, September 12th, 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

With the confidence, surety and irrepressible flair that has characterised his work with Orchestra Wellington over the past few years, conductor Marc Taddei brilliantly succeeded in both masterminding  and spearheading an event which  bounteously fulfilled the ineffably effable title “Colossal” for the concert itself. In every way it was an appropriate description of an event that in my experience has perhaps been recently matched for grandeur here in Wellington only by the performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” in 2010 when Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, together with a team of vocal soloists, the Orpheus Choir and various other choral groups in a similarly unforgettable occasion.

Of course pride of place in respect to the concert’s title was inevitably accorded French composer Hector Berlioz’s intrinsically prodigious “Grand Messe des Morts”, or “Requiem”, and borne out by the extent of musical forces employed by the composer. Such large-scale events were not uncommon in France of the composer’s time and before, being an expression of La Gloire, that source of pride, honour and distinction associated with one’s nation. From the era of Louis XIV (“the Sun King”) French composers would seek to emphasise and reflect in their music the earthly and divinely-appointed virtues of the monarch, bringing to the public spectacular musical depictions by such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau – and not forgetting, in more revolutionary times, the famous La Marseillaise of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Berlioz’s music was to serve a ceremonial, rather than a liturgical function, a reflection of the changed, post-Revolution place of the Church in French society (as was the use of the composer’s own setting of the words instead of the traditional “Dies Irae” Catholic liturgical setting, in use since the fourteenth century). The Requiem was in fact a commission from the French Government in 1837 for a work of remembrance honouring soldiers who fell in the July 1830 revolution – but due to the disapproval of various anti-revolutionary interests, the dedication was then changed to honour a hero (General Damrémont, the French Army’s commander-in-chief, killed during the country’s recent war efforts aimed at colonising parts of North Africa).

Though Berlioz’s music in general displays occasional touches of La Gloire his Requiem here paid singular attention to a number of varied influences, both musical and social, reflecting his individual feelings towards a “new Romanticism” in art and culture.  The work’s large and diverse forces produced a remarkable range of musical and aural responses, in particular a sensitivity and restraint in certain places, which of course made the almost seismic upheavals of parts of the Dies Irae all the more overwhelming in their effect. The composer described his initial enthusiasm for the text of the work in characteristically excitable tones – “I fell upon it with a kind of fury – my brain felt as though it would explode with the pressure of ideas!” – given these declarations of such creative ferment (here reproduced in the concert’s excellent programme notes), it continued to surprise with how much of the work was so introspective, delicate and ethereal. Here was a composer-sensibility capable of generating intensities at practically every place along such a spectrum, a kind of compendium of emotional response whose spontaneously-wrought effect compelled constant attention.

Along with this “Grande Messe des Morts”  and its historical and cultural associations, the concert brought to us the very great pleasure of an additional work, moreover, one from this part of the globe which nicely balanced things with the Berlioz work – this was the world premiere of a work by young Aotearoa New Zealand-born Samoan composer, Joshua Pearson, one whose title Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fou concerned the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and translated from the Tuvaluan language as “Navigating the changing Environment”. The issues facing Tuvalu have been exacerbated by climate change over recent years – they concern rising sea levels, coastal erosion, drinking water shortages and extreme weather patterns. Joshua Pearson’s astonishing and instantly impactful orchestrations plunged all of us into a series of swirling turbulences, with insistent chimes heralding the onset of currents and counter-currents of watery impulses, coloured by megaphonic vocalisations from different parts of the orchestra as strings sounded eerie harmonics and a solo violin floated a stratospheric solo line. Players alternated between conventional instrumental sounds and creative rustlings and crinklings from crumpling cellophane clusters (how onomatopoeic these description words themselves sound!) .

What could be taken on surface value for a magical fairytale sound-world of course had darker, bleaker and more ruinous implications, with Pearson’s evocative instrumentations graphically illustrating both the destabilising action and effects of increasingly confrontational weather-patterns and resulting conditions threatening present living environments with eventually uninhabitable conditions. Hand-in-hand with the ”thriil” of these near-virtuosic orchestrations came, of course, the realisation for us that these spectacular evocations were portents of doom in a sobering, “for whom the bell tolls” kind of way – all the more credit to the composer, therefore, in sounding so graphic a warning to humanity at large. The conclusion of the piece underlined its grim message with the players gradually enveloped in darkness as the sounds faded to silence. As befitted the piece, its presentation and performance, the reception at the end was overwhelming, with the composer making a warmly-acclaimed appearance!

There was no interval, but a kind of changeover process during which the Orpheus choir and brass band personnel filed respectively into their places, while Marc Taddei gave a brief outline of the freshly-published 2027 Orchestra Wellington concert prospectus – an exciting and stimulating season based upon “Dance” and affording all of us many a delightful listening prospect. That done, and a goodly proportion of the composer’s requirements regarding voices and instrumentalists having been brought into the performing arena, the stage was set for the “Requiem” to be set in its “leviathanic” motion.

The work’s mournfully-phrased opening gave notice of its proverbial “depths”, with lower and higher voices in tandem properly emphasising their “polar opposite” tones, the singing,  with variously deep and pure tones combining with strings and winds to make an immense “carpet of sound”,  as the cries of “Requiem” vied with the winds’ piercing, downwardly-cascading  phrases  After the tersely-delivered “Kyrie Eleisons” came the “Dies Irae”, introduced by black-toned double-basses, with Berlioz again using his sopranos, this time in tandem with winds, as a dramatic contrast, before bringing in the other voice-lines. Each group of verses was given its own level of purposeful intensity by agitated string passages, the “Quantus tremor” passages urgent and vigorous, leading up to the first of the work’s truly monumental passages, with brass choir antiphonally following and exchanging phrases with brass choir, two upper groups interacting with two lower groups and leading to the thunderous entrance of the percussion – a scalp-prickling moment, to which the men’s voices then added their stentorian cries of “Tuba mirum” as part of an enormous crescendo of sound, one which resorted to hushed tones for “Mors stupebit” but which then flared up excitingly once more at “Liber scriptus proferetur”. And how pathetic, energy-drained and fearfully wonderful was “Quid sum miser”, with its bleakly forlorn cor-anglais and bassoon accompaniments!

The tumultuous “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” outbursts, followed by the increasingly urgent ‘Recordare, Jesu Pie”, leading into “Confutatis maledictis” made for episodes of great and desperate excitement, the “prayer” becoming a compelling “theatre of supplication” before returning to “Rex Tremendae” amid piteous cries of  “Salva Me”.  The following “Quaerens Me” brought us some of the evening’s loveliest singing, the voices in unaccompanied . lyrical mode, pleading for forgiveness as was accorded Mary Magdalene and the Good Thief at Christ’s crucifixion, and a necessary respite when considering what was to follow.

This was the mighty “Lacrimosa”, the “day of tears”, Berlioz unsparingly giving the verses a harsh, jagged syncopated accompaniment from strings, winds and brass in rugged 9/8 time – two quieter passages gave some respite, but soon returned to the merciless onslaught with additional brass and percussion joining the fray as the choir wass spared nothing!   The prayer rose towards its punishing finality, with every singer and player in the hall, it seemed, hanging onto those final utterances for all they were worth – a transfiguring moment, leaving at the end an exhausted, but still reverberating  silence!

Into this “void left by a maelstrom” came the Offertorium, a deeply-moving  work whose obsessively-repeated and anxiously unresolved vocal lines representing a kind of great anxiety, with the voices seemingly left abandoned in a wilderness, intoning a figure that oscillated between two notes without settlement or deliverance – meanwhile all around these voices the instrumental lines “wandered” as if enchanted or bewildered, the strings and winds aware of and responding to the text’s invocations of the “promise” made by God to “Abraham and his seed” – the beautiful moment at the words “promisisti et semini ejus” was here like balm for our senses, the music moving into the major key and generating a flowering of hope for deliverance into light and warmth – wonderfully and superbly-delivered!   The following “Hostias”, with its hauntingly celestial key-changes  generated by angelic winds (always reminding me of – and, of course, pre-dating – “Lohengrin”!) gave even further hope for salvation (but what creepily sepulchral brass-playing was sounded here at the end, affording scary glimpses into the abyss!).

Then came the equally spell-binding sequence with solo tenor Kyle Stegall, the single voice resplendently furthering Berlioz’s transfiguring fusion of the ordinary and the fabulous, backed up by celestial echoes and resonances from the choir (apart from a brief moment of strain for the sopranos in their “Gloria” utterances) – their “Hosannas” here joyously danced and exalted in response, as did the adjoining brasses at the end!

It was left for the “Agnus Dei” to usher in the drama’s final moments, with magical wind and brass chordings underpinned by strings giving the choir’s heartfelt utterances a kind of enduring luminosity, as did in contrasting ways the succeeding, entirely characteristic exchanges between the lighter strings and winds and the darker, more sinister brasses. More grounding was the return to the work’s opening, with the cries of “Requiem” punctuated once more by those well-remembered descending wind chords, but reaching a finality with the voices’ utterances resolving into “Quia pius es, in aeternum, Domine” (Because thou art forever merciful, Lord) and a series of heart-easing “Amens” with blissfully rising-and-falling string roulades underpinned by gently-throbbing timpani and string pizzicati which together concluded the work.

Such an accolade-exhausting achievement left one grasping vainly for further acclamations! To all the performers, enablers and organisers one needs must bestow very great gratitude at being presented with such a work brought off with all the elan, brilliance depth and variety that it needed to succeed. It takes its honorable place in the growing pantheon of memorable presentations by Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir, here enriched by the stellar contributions of so many local musicians who obviously relished their integral part in the proceedings. Both Marc Taddei’s and Orpheus Choir director Brent Stewart’s stewardship of this historic event will be remembered and appreciated for a long time to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dolfin-Lin Duo – positively tingling with spontaneous re-discovery!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Dolfin-Lin Duo – Balazs Dolfin (‘cello) / Tony Chen Lin (piano)

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY  –  Magyar Rondo (Hungarian Rondo) (1917)
ANTON WEBERN  –  Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano (1914)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH  –  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Major  BWV 1028
GAO PING  –  Sonata No. 2 for ‘Cello and Piano “Departure” (2001)
BÉLA BARTÓK – Rhapsody No. 1 for ‘Cello and Piano (1928-9)
NATHANAEL DEJONG – Abandoned Voices (2021)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Sonata No.1 for ‘Cello and Piano in E Minor Op.38

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday,, 30th August 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

This partnership of ‘cello and piano made a profound impression with the Duo’s strongly-projected, in places “larger-than-life” realisations of the works chosen, with those I’d heard before (the Bartok and Brahms pieces) giving a remarkably singular impression to my ears of hearing the music for the first time! I’d heard Tony Chen Lin’s playing on several occasions previously as well as on recordings, and found myself often remarking upon his boldly-characterised view of both detailings and overall trajectorial and colouristic character, playing which unhesitatingly “addresses” more than merely “coaxes out” the music’s manifold moods. On this occasion, of course, his partner was Hungarian cellist Balazs Dolfin ( their Duo was formed in Italy in 2021) whose similarly arresting and whole-hearted approach to his instrument and its sound-world in general seemed to me to fit like a glove with the pianist’s aforementioned qualities  – so that the music-making throughout the concert positively tingled with spontaneously-generated re-discovery!

First up was Zoltan Kodaly’s Magyar Rondo, written in 1917, and drawn from incidental music the composer had written for a play by Zsigmond Móricz called Pacsirtaszó (Lark’s Song), a folk-style drama but  with “social realism” themes – this version for ‘cello and piano brought out the piece’s soulful folk-character at the outset, before breaking into a dance variation, angular and quixotic! A deeper, more baritonal tone came with the next, slower variation, the piano contrasting the cello’s sombre voice with full, assertive treatment accorded the melody’s refrain, though the music returned to more intimate realms for a wistful, harmonics-like cello passage, almost ghostly in effect! A far more helter-skelter mood overtook the next variation’s minor-key mood-change, the music abandoning itself to a burst of high-spirited display before the cello took us suddenly along a pizzicato-strewn pathway, the piano playing bagpipelike figurations as the dance swirled and swayed up and down – but how wistful and redolent were the dream-like moments of remembrance, compared with the wildness of the duo’s concluding high-spiurited flourishes!

Nothing further from the opening could have been devised than what we next experienced, Anton Webern’s ‘Cello Sonata, a work written in 1914, and intended as a present for his father, who loved the ‘cello! For whatever reason the composer broke off working on the piece and decided he would give his father the “Three Little Pieces for ‘Cello and Piano” Op.11 instead, abandoning the Sonata, which wasn’t rediscovered until 1965, twenty years after t3he composer’s death. Though roughly contemporaneous with the Kodaly piece we heard  at the concert’s beginning, the Sonata seemed to inhabit an entirely different creative sphere,  Though not twelve-tone music. Webern’s Sonata features fractured phrases and angularly-pointed rhythms whose contrasts are often explosive and even disturbing, with “sehr bewegt” (very animated) suddenly giving way to (“zart bewegt”) gently animated, before reverting without warning to the original marking for the piece’s final gesturings.

Not inappropriately, the players then took up, after a moments’s pause, the programme’s next item Johann Sebastian Bach’s  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Minor, with the first-movement Adagio in our minds seeming almost to “sort out” the still-resonating strains of the Webern piece, almost as if giving credence to Webern’s teacher Schoenberg’s dictum that “there are no dissonances in music, just more remote consonances…”. I thought the playing so very exquisitely dovetailed, bringing out as much the character as well as the beauty of the lines’ interactions during the following Allegro. The soulfulness of the minor-key Siciliano rhythm throughout the Andante brought out the expressiveness, the depth of feeling, the grief inherent in this music that awaited release in a finale that danced like thistledown in the wind, joyously freed from earthly constraint as the composer evoked the prospect of life’s fulfilment in expectation of heavenly reward.

Sixth-generation Chinese composer Gao Ping’s music is well-known to New Zealand audiences due to his significant working associations with various educational institutions in this country, such as Christchurch’s University of Canterbury and Te Koki New Zealand School of Music in Wellington. He’s developed long-term relationships with local musicians such as Michael Houstoun  and  the New Zealand String Quartet – the fifteen year-old association with Houstoun has resulted in a recent recording “Outside the Window” of Gao Ping;s music, released on the Rattle label. By way of acknowledging a New Zealand influence upon his own music he is currently planning an opera set in this country, one whose setting (Central Otago) will draw from storytelling traditions present in classic stories from both Chinese and Western cultures. This has been, he has said

Gao Ping’s Cello Sonata No. 2 was written on 2001 – its title, “Departure” was taken from the subject of a Chinese poet of the “Song Dynasty” one writing in times parallel to western medieval times (10TH-13TH century), the Song Dynbasty poet Su Dongpo. The poet relates the work’s title to the cyclical meaning of the Chinese  word shi meaning “departure” which incorporates both an end and a beginning, an idea elaborated upon by Geo Ping’s music which ends the piece with the notes of its beginning. Its sounds also give voice to the composer’s inclination to blend Western and Chinese music, reminding the listener in places of the inclinations of Janacek, Kodaly and Bartok in their similar “seedings” of various pieces with folk-inspired impulses and gestures.

There are five sections to the work  which play continuously, and whose flow emphasise that same “end is my beginning” concept. The cello underlines traditional colours and timbres of traditional Chisese instruments such as the Guqin and Erhu, as well as having recourse to vocal inflections of traditional speech-styles, stemming from an era of personal expression and introspective inclinations. The ‘cello emphasised these associations at the beginning, now and then “bending’ the notes, and employing freely ranging dynamic levels, with eerie, other-worldly harmonics that invited the piano’s first entry. A sustained note slowly developed more elaborate configurations which grew to  allowing ever-increasing freedom of expression – the instrumental sounds could be described as reaching for speech inflections, suggesting the full human range of tones, timbres, colours and dynamics.  Whole episodes then gave themselves over to contrasting depictions of emotion and purpose, often alarmingly confrontational, then reverting to introspective moods, the tones becoming increasingly disembodied as a sense of overriding timelessness crept into the sound-worlds and gradually silenced the remaining impulses and counter-impulses in spell-binding fashion!

An interval of discussion made the time pass quickly before we were off again with the dauntless duo, this time a folk-flavoured work by Bartok, the Rhapsody No.1, originally composed for violin and piano but arranged by the composer for ‘cello and piano – here, ‘cellist and pianist gave a remarkable display, giving full measure to both the physical and lyrical aspects of the Rhapsody, tearing into the well-known contrasted pairing of the traditional Lassú (slow) and Friss  (fast) sections of the Hungarian verbunkos (recruiting) dance with tremendous physicality, precision and plaintive lyricism, the soft-playing as arresting as the excitement generated by the more brilliant sections.

An entirely new name to me was New Zealand composer Nathanael Dejong (b.1988) whose work reflects his training as both a pianist and violinist as well as composition, but directly focuses on his interest as a parent in childhood development relating to teaching and learning in an age he considers overshadowed  by electronic media devices –  the “Abandoned Voices” title reflected this dominance of digital media at the expense of human interaction. Consequently the work we heard presented sombre exchanges between the instruments, deep, serious and heartfelt utterances punctuated by long silences and wide dynamic ranges, both piano and cello employing delicate, winsome sets of gestures representing a plethora of sounds to make sense of, both of their own volition and in responsive contexts to one another – the cello playing unworldly harmonics and the pianist reaching into the body of the piano to dampen notes and chordings. It all makes for a variety of impulse and intent awaiting definition and associated meaning, the “small voices, waiting to be heard” presence embodied in newly-emergent human form.

Though there was nothing “small voiced” about Johannes Brahms, the young composer’s rabid perfectionist nature resulted in his destroying many youthful compositions before allowing his innermost creative thoughts to remain, an inclination which for some years dogged his compositional efforts – indeed, some scholars suggest that probably only one-third of Brahms’s entire compositional input has survived. The earliest “official” works were for solo piano and song collections, the young composer’s meetings with the violinist Joseph Joachim and Robert and Clara Schumann gained him invaluable advice, example and confidence, though he maintained his rigorous self-critical attitudes to his work throughout his compositional career. His two ‘cello sonatas interestingly “reverse” their composer’s expected compositional trajectories, with the earlier First (played today) very much connected to the past, the deep-throated melody that opens the work frequently “changing places” with the piano, so that the harmonic structure of the work is richly varied in texture and tone. The “fusing” of the two leads strengthened the discourse between the two voices, both performers here scarcely holding back in terms of full-blooded expressiveness – I simply loved it!

For whatever reason, Brahms removed an Adagio movement originally composed, leaving the “Allegretto quasi Menuetto”  to fend for itself as a foil to the outer movements, a charming theme, sharing the opening section with a sinuous second theme, also in a minor key – the trio was even more suggestive in intent, with both instruments tying the melodic strands closely together, before returning to the opening dance. The finale  plunged into a whirling dervish-like opening, (commentators cite Bachian influences here relating to “the Art of the Fugue” at the beginning, which took on a more playful aspect in places, and with Brahms broadening the trajectories into momentary illusions of adventurous impulse (shades of the D Minor Piano Concerto’s great “questing” theme at one point!) and disarmingly charming dance-like manoeuverings, all swept away by the return of the opening “whirling” figures, concluding with a furious, cataclysmic stretto leaving us all deliciously dishevelled by the music’s wonderfully conclusive sound and fury!

 

SPACE JUMP – An exhilarating listening leap from NZTrio into firmament-like territories

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FAZIL SAY – Space Jump for Piano Trio (2013)
REENA ESMAIL – Piano Trio (2019)
KEITH MOSS – Field Notes in Autumn (2026 – NZ Trio commisssion)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No 2 in F Major

NZTrio  (He taonga wairere)
Amalia Hall (violin), Matthias Balzat (cello), Somi Kim (piano)
Wellington Central Library – Te Matapihi te Ao Nui
Sunday 23rd August, 2026

Composers over the course of time have often demonstrated a fondness, and, indeed, a facility, for writing descriptive music representing people, animals, objects or events. As early as the Renaissance, there was a penchant for imitating the sounds and movements of wildlife, with voices mimicking birds and animals, as well as human activity involving both warfare and daily life in large cities. Throughout the Baroque and Classical periods composers such as Vivaldi, Biber, Haydn and Couperin enthusiastically wrote music to tell stories or imitate different sound-worlds in nature and in human society. The Romantic period which followed saw the rise of “programme music” and sparked both debate and conflict between the conservative and progressive elements, each advancing the respective merits of “absolute” and “descriptive” music right into the twentieth century, where modernist techniques further advanced and diversified the music that described all kinds of life-forms and mechanised objects, blurring the absolute/descriptive classifications of music.

With this potted history in mind, it was interesting to encounter in this concert a number of  works by contemporary composers that had been inspired by both modernist and traditional trends and conceived from different physical, national and cultural standpoints, and representing a kind of global interest in and acceptance of regional perspectives of the individual pieces and their respective preoccupations. And binding the whole exploratory process of performing and experiencing these different works was one central to the essences of the instrumental medium – Robert Schumann’s iconic Second Piano Trio of 1847, one representing a kind of apex of joyous expression and fulfilment, and to which each of the preceding works in the concert had aspired in their own ways.

The NZTrio boldly began these intriguing presentations with a remarkably tactile work “Space Jump” written by the Turkish composer/pianist Fazil Say, the result of the composer’s fascination with the daredevil exploits of Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian extreme sports pioneer famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space after being lifted by a helium balloon to a height of almost 40 km, before free-falling for most of his descent, and breaking the sound barrier in the process! Fazil Say was among the 8 million viewers who watched the Jump on You Tube, his music depicting every aspect of the jump including the safe landing on earth. (Baumgartner, incidentally, was killed last year in a paragliding accident in Italy – he was 56 years old.)

The music was nothing if not vertiginous in places, though the life-threatening nature of the exercise was, for much of the music’s length masked by the situation’s “suspended unrealities” as the adventurer seemed almost to “float” for a lot of the downward journey in relative solitude and loneliness. However, in places towards the end the hazardous nature of the undertaking became more and more apparent in the music, leaving behind the initial violin ostinati (which had been borne along by the ‘cello’s counterpointing figures and the ambient piano chordings) and plunging into a sudden jazzy piano irruption of energies  –  the driving trajectories of the stuntman’s “fall”!  Violin and piano ”hewed” at syncopations attempting to turn the trajectories different ways, the instrumental swirlings and impassioned tones conveying the out-and-out physicalities of the free-faller holding his course steady. Then, a sudden cessation of trenchant movement was ”filled in” by more settled and lyrical figures, with occasional scintillating “swirls” augmented by piano glistenings, and a couple of strange, discordant harmonies which sounded and then drifted into silence. Whew! – exhausting stuff!

Then came a work by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, her 2019 Piano Trio, sounds which thankfully kept its trajectories a good deal closer to terra firma, though covering vast distances of a different kind. Here, the composer’s music took us to a world of vibrant fusion between Eastern and Western composition, in which European tonal and harmonic systems could interact with her own heritage’s rather more ancient North Indian (Hindustani) traditions. Esmail had studied as a student at the Juilliard and Yale Schools of Music, but then won a scholarship through a Fulbright/Nehru grant to enable her to undertake explorations of Hindustani (north Indian) classical music.

As a student pianist she had become enamoured of the piano trio tradition begun by Josef Haydn and further advanced by figures such as Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Ravel, the latter having a particular influence upon her penchant for colour and texture in her own music. Thus her own 2019 Piano Trio reflects such early Western music influences as well as drawing from the storehouse of musical tradition found in the complex patterns and pitches organised around the ancient patterns and constructions known as raga, or raags found in traditional Hindustani music.

Straightaway, in the Trio’s opening movement, a shimmering, repeated-note pattern appeared, led by the piano and echoed by the violin and ‘cello, echoing the spirit of Ravel in the evocative piano figurations,  the strings later quoting an ancient Monsoon season raag Megh, violin and ‘cello harmonising the melodic lines, then decorating the piano’s reiteration of the melody,  and building the melody’s intensities in canonic fashion. The second movement opened with the strings repeating single-note and slow-trilled gestures against a beautiful choral-like piano melody, violin and ‘cello exchanging dialogue-like phrases, evocatively “bending” the occasional note in sitar-like fashion, as the piano gently and softly voiced a shimmering accompaniment, incorporating a raag Des (the latter word meaning “country” or “land”). For the listener this sounded like a retold or shared reminiscence or description of a particular place, one whose reiterations brought forth a surge of intensity, a deeply-felt sequence of expressive emotion.

The third, Scherzo-movement was all nervous intensity, the strings’s rapidly-exchanged tremolandi passages dancing to an ostinato  piano accompaniment, then building in excitement, with spectacular piano glissandi shooting across the soundscapes like meteorities, before the trio returns to the opening dance, repeating those electrifying piano glissandi to scintillating effect before the energies died down, brought to a droll conclusion by a single piano note!

Beseeching piano chords and lament-like cries from the strings began the finale, the music seeming to be ensnared in its own trance-like evocations, tremolando strings and rhapsodic arpeggiations from the piano leading to a heartfelt, song-like section with a filigree piano accompaniment – beautiful and almost tragic-sounding! The music became almost Rachmaninov-like, with passionate piano chordings and full-voiced string unisons reaching a point where some great thought, emotion or realisation was uncovered or confronted and squared up to – the mood was savoured and elevated to a point of great release and resolution, so that all that were left were haunting piano chords and ever-diminishing string harmonics, fading away to silence. At the end, the departing tones remained an indelible, lingering memory…….

In the wake of such high-impact presentations, South African-born, Wellington-based Keith Moss’s Field Notes in Autumn provided some welcome relief! – we were charmed to find the composer was actually present, and spoke briefly about his work, a piece which was derived from an earlier work for flugelhorn and piano, one presumably written almost exactly a year previously, if the title was to be taken literally!

A fresh, open piano sound began the work, establishing a “New World” kind of ambience, with the ensuing violin solo (repeated by the ‘cello) richly-wrought and nostalgic. The music’s ongoing, almost supercharged nostalgic quality put me in mind of those English pastoral works by Vaughan Williams and Butterworth in feeling, with, as the composer put it, “explorations of place, people and memory”. I sat listening and thinking how gratifying such music would be for performers, giving back such beauties to their efforts, and enjoying, as here, the appreciative audience response both during and at the end of the piece.

In concluding this delightfully singular foray into piano-trio possibilities this gifted ensemble gave us what surely counted as a cornerstone of the repertoire – Robert Schumann’s Second Piano Trio in F Major, for once a work by this composer whose opening would have kept the listener guessing as to its provenance for a few more bars longer than usual, as so much of his output almost immediately does! Here, in contrast to his G Minor Trio whose opening straightway proclaimed its “time of gloomy moods”, was, in the NZTrio’s hands music of joyous and energetic vigour right from the outset, inspired as Schumann was by his love for Clara, and the feelings her devotion to him awakened. It was actually the tenth anniversary of the couple’s secret engagement, which accounts for the music’s frequent allusions to Clara – the first two movements of the work here quoted the song “in the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you” from Schumann’s own song-cycle Liederkreis, and the third movement contains a quote from another song-cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, a work influenced by  Schumann’s courtship of Clara at the time.

A sinuous melody shared between the strings began the second movement, which coursed between this and various impulse-driven episodes – soulful recitative-like exchanges given all the room needed for the players to fill out the phrase-turns, and wistful minor-key asides which surprise with impulsive, spontaneous-sounding irruptions that just as suddenly fall back to treasurable moments of exquisite dovetailing of detail – memorable music-making! The third movement was a piquant waltz, violin and piano in canon with the melody, with the cello a dark-browed accompanist, the three players elaborating their lines in the graceful Trio, then returning to the dance, and nudging the harmonies into and out of the major key during the coda.

Nowhere is Schumann more beguiling in this work than in the finale – energetic, whimsical and good-humoured, the music and its performance readily teased and delighted us, building towards the end to what seemed like a near-euphoric state of elation, enabling us all to share in the effervescent-sounding exclamations of pleasure in the playing.  Small wonder that Clara Schumann’s verdict on the work – “(it) delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end” resonated in our responses at the concert’s conclusion!

 

A feast of classic and contemporary Finnish music – from Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  – Myths and Legends 2026

Pietari Inkinen conducts the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  – Photo, Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

SIBELIUS _ Pohjola’s Daughter
MAGNUS LINDBERG – Violin Concerto No.2
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin)
SIBELIUS – Four Legends (Lemminkäinen Suite)

  1. Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari
  2. Lemminkäinen in Tuonela
  3. The Swan of Tuonela
  4. Lemminkäinen’s Return

Pietari Inkinen – conductor
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 15th August, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

I’d already become reacquainted with Pietari Inkinen’s rostrum presence in front of the NZSO the previous evening in the orchestra’s spectacularly-delivered  Wagner concert “Radiance” –  so this evening’s “Myths and Legends” concert was certainly an added pleasure. It was heightened by Inkinen choosing a programme which featured the music of perhaps his most illustrious countryman, Jean Sibelius, as, during the conductor’s earlier, seven-year tenure with the NZSO ( from2008 to 2015) he had programmed in concert and recorded all seven of the composer’s symphonies, as well as also presenting in that concert series tonight’s Lemminkäinen Suite, (though, sadly, I wasn’t the Middle C reviewer for THAT concert!). So, learning that Inkinen was proposing to repeat these Four Legends  (as they’re also often called)  was an added fillip to the occasion for me this time round!

There was more! – along with the Legends another of the composer’s tone-poems, one which hardly ever gets performed here in Wellington, was promised, the atmospheric, superbly-crafted “Pohjola’s Daughter” long a favourite work of mine due to its presence as an “extra” on the first recording I ever owned of a Sibelius Symphony, the magnificent Fifth. So as far as this composer was concerned it was a case for me of a cup that “runneth over”, making the occasion unmissable!

I could have, of course, lamented the choice of an ostensibly unrelated work to “fill out” this concert’s contents – I would of course have opted, had I been given the power to choose, for some of the incidental music the composer had written for either  “Festivo” or “The Tempest”, both of which suites contain some fabulous and rarely-performed music.  However, it seemed apposite for all sorts of reasons for Inkinen to opt on this occasion not for more Sibelius, but for a violin concerto by a well-known contemporary Finnish composer, Magnus Lindberg, and to employ the services as a soloist of another countryman, the wonderful Vesa-Matti Leppänen, long-time Finnish-born concertmaster of the NZSO, and one who had of course previously worked with Inkinen during the latter’s tenure as the orchestra’s principal conductor.

So it was decreed – and many of us thus found ourselves attending the Michael Fowler Centre on two nights running, here filled with expectations already fuelled by the previous evening’s musical riches ( see https://middle-c.org/2026/08/radiance-from-the-nzso-with-simon-oneill-tenor-and-pietari-inkinen-conductor-two-glimpses-of-richard-wagners-youth-to-maturity-journey-as-an-innovative-opera-com/)  and more than ready for further pleasures.

Inkinen was warmly welcomed to the platform to begin the concert – straightaway I liked the sense of “purpose” that seemed to emanate from the figure on the podium, highlighted by his patient, immobile stance before a note of the music was played – when it came, its darkly-focused tones created a world at once removed from time and place but at the same time “present” in the hall’s ambiences as the music filled the spaces. This was the world of a Finnish hero, Väinämöinen, he of the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, an adventurer advanced in years but still attracted to female beauty, one who on his travels encounters the beautiful “daughter of the North” a region known as “Pohjola”. We heard Väinämöinen’s steadfast and determined “adventuring” theme on the orchestral brasses, and then, suddenly came the beautiful theme associated with “Pohjola’s Daughter”, who in the story was depicted sitting on a rainbow weaving a cloth of gold. Her charms attracted Väinämöinen, who invited her to join him in his travels homeward – however she told him that he needed to perform certain magical tasks before she would agree to accompany him, so he set to work to perform his part of the bargain. We were drawn by focused, evocative instrumental lines into the interplay of Väinämöinen’s and the Maiden’s dialogues as the venerable hero steadfastly undertook his labours – however with the final task ( that of using his magic to build a boat from the distaff of the maiden’s spinning-wheel), Väinämöinen faltered and sustained an injury, causing him to renounce his quest (to the sounds of the maiden’s mocking laughter!) and sadly continue his homeward journey. The playing-out of this tale’s retelling was brilliantly graphic, the instrumental evocations palpable and moving, especially those regarding the sense of failure and ultimate resignation of the hero towards the end of this, possibly (with the exception of Tapiola)  the composer’s most accomplished single orchestral work outside the great symphonies.

We next welcomed a popular audience favourite to the platform, violinist Vesa-Matti Leppänen, normally the orchestra’s Concertmaster, to perform a work described by one critic as “a romantic violin concerto in disguise”.  Magnus Lindberg’s Second Violin Concerto came across as a thickly-woven, luscious-sounding work which has hyper-charged energy fields connecting order out of seeming cross-referencing chaos to produce various impressive focal points which I found could inspire, excite and disconcert simultaneously. The composer wrote the work for Frank Peter Zimmermann, one of the foremost German violinists of today, who gave the work’s premiere in 2015 – in a talk Lindberg gave about the work before a New York performance he aptly described the concerto as “a lot of things boiling”, and this performance by Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Pietari Inkenen bore out that notion of several simultaneously-percolating elements during the work, confusingly so throughout this performance for a reviewer new to the work!

Beginning with a three-note phrase from the soloist that recurred in various elongated form throughout the work, this  theme found its way via various instrumental echoings and developments to an exciting, full-toned orchestra sonority. Then, to the accompaniment of a dancing violin solo the orchestra traced a rich panoply of sounds, in places trading dance-trajectories with the soloist while in others giving different voices tongue, as with some delighted/irascible swirls from the piccolo along with the other winds in one frisson-dominated moment! Whether dancing or soaring, soloist and orchestra complemented one another’s preoccupations (including some interactions between soloist and the orchestral first violin!) and afterwards there were beautiful stratospheric notes from Vesa-Matti’s violin mingling with harp arpeggios, and then leading  to the orchestral vaults being grandly thrown open as if some stupendous visitation was being heralded by the music.

The solo cadenza, towards the end of the slow movement, followed some Korngold-like gestures from the orchestra. Vesa-Matti mixed arco and pizzicato notes among other explorations, including some spectacularly high harmonic-like sounds, almost a string-playing fireworks display, with occasional three-note motif-references thrown in for effect! Near the movement’s end the luscious late-romantic sound-world was again evoked, with another, briefer solo cadenza – we heard due pomp and ceremony in some concluding orchestral phrases, with the solo violin in places almost beside itself with excitement, allowing the orchestra its “grand peroration” before unexpectedly handing the work’s ending back to the soloist for a wry three-note concluding gesture! It was a work whose complexities of detailing both fascinated and overwhelmed this listener! – for me a definitely candidate for a wish-list of further listening opportunities!

After the interval, we were returned to Sibelius’s world of myth and legend by way of the composer’s “Lemminkäinen Suite”, with the eponymous hero’s adventures drawn, like Väinämöinen’s in the earlier Pohjola’s Daughter, from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The hero, Lemminkäinen, is something of a Maui-like character, described variously in the Kalevala epic as young, good-looking, heroic and reckless, but with numerous other folk-lore versions of his exploits. Sibelius’s sequence of events in the story doesn’t follow the Kalevala’s – in the epic his return home at the end was not from Tuonela, but from a reprisal against the people from Pohjola, who had burnt his village to the ground while he was carousing with the Maidens on Saari. Consequently the suite is more absolute music than narrative, and whose separate evocations can be equally enjoyed as such.

Sibelius here has him firstly travelling to the island of Saari (Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Saari), where he seduces as many women as he can before fleeing to escape the vengeance of the men of the island. The music, built around two groups of themes presents firstly the young man’s longing for the excitement of adventure, and his journeying to the island, and his encounters with various women  – “Then, the minstrel, Lemminkainen/ roamed throughout the island hamlets/ to the joy of all the virgins/all the maids of braided tresses”  (Kalevala – Rune 15). There’s an almost Tristanesque Wagnerian quality expressed by the seduction music as it builds towards a suggestively orgasmic kind of release at the end, the brass signalling a final consummation of desire in returning to the home key as the energies of the piece subside. Inkinen and his players capture it all, at a tempo which enables the detailing of both the hero’s journeyings and his carousings to be fully savoured.

The composer changed the order of the two middle movements at various times, resulting in differences in recorded versions – my first recording (Thomas Jensen and the Danish Radio Orchestra) put “The Swan of Tuonela” first but others have since reversed the order, as did Inkinen on this occasion. Either seemed to fit the story (which we’re told doesn’t follow the Kalevala anyway!) – here we were plunged eerily and scarily into the “Land of the Dead” with music that was malevolent in character and obsessive in its repetitions. Such was the playing’s  concentration and focus we were irrevocably gripped and held by the spectral tones and harsh textures, though respite eventually came from a sudden and transformative episode of unearthly calm, strings and winds magically and uncannily countering the evil with some kind of strangely “healing” textures, representing the mother of the hero in search of her son, entering Tuonela, retrieving his dismembered body and sewing the different parts together as per the Kalevala’s story.

As if proclaiming the dominion of Tuonela’s embodiment of death, the following movement featured the suite’s easily most celebrated section, The Swan of Tuonela, here given the most sublime performance I could ever imagine hearing from all concerned, and especially from the orchestra’s cor anglais player, Michael Austin. Inkinen got his strings in the latter stages to “dig into” the phrasings in classic Barbirolli-style (the conductor of my long-time favourite recording of this work!), steadily and patiently maintaining the macabrely beautiful ambiences right through to the piece’s resounding silences at the end.

After this, some sort of deliverance was urgently needed as a “return to life”  metamorphosis, and duly provided in surgings of renewed energies with the work’s concluding movement, Lemminkainen’s Homecoming, the playing replete with feelings of both release and anticipation, as well returning to life our own beleagued sensibilities in the wake of such gruesome adventurings into and through a Finnish version of a dismal Underworld, from which emancipation was a truly joyous experience.  Indeed, such it also was in general terms for me with the reappearance here in Wellington of Pietari Inkinen, whose music making seemed for this listener to have a new surety of confidence that brought an extra dimension of the music’s “release” to his ever-vigilant “control” – he seemed well-pleased to have made his return as did his warmly-appreciative audience.

New Zealand String Quartet bring to us music with “the beauty of loneliness, pain, strength and freedom”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet – Storytellers

Music by Henry Purcell, Anthony Ritchie, Fanny Mendelssohn, Salina Fisher and Benjamin Britten

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Mt.Cook, Wellington

Wednesday 12th August

Review by Leila Lois, for “Middle C”

We are seated in the glowing wooden wood panelled warehouse structure of Prefab Hall, ensconced down a laneway in Wellington’s Mt.Cook, a full audience for the New Zealand’s String Quartet’s second chapter of their Storytellers tour. The night promises to showcase both classical masterworks and contemporary commissions, each piece to guide and delight through sonic narrative.

The night is introduced by an address from Martin Smith on cello, who reminds us of the fateful words of the classical poster-boy of the series, Benjamin Britten: . He wrote, “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain: of strength and freedom.” A perfect epigraph to an evening of music with such a breadth of emotional registers and composition styles.

First up is Chacony in G minor Z.730 by Henry Purcell, (c. 1680) (arranged by Britten in 1947). The piece, as the quartet accentuates, encapsulates the seventeenth century Baroque style of Purcell, with the expressive reimagining of Purcell. The Chacony is a glittering celebration of admiration of one composer for another, alive with playfulness and colour. The repetition and transformation and vibrant way the quartet plays really delights the ears and embraces us with warmth. It is, as Smith tells us, the 50 year anniversary of Britten’s death, and as such a marvellous moment to hear the piece. Various amusing asides are given relating to Britten and his unyielding genius, himself professing that he was “an arrogant and impatient listener” to other masters’ work. These are welcome and uplifting, and remind us of the strength of obsession and devotion in classical music.

The second piece for the evening is New Zealand composer, Anthony Ritchie’s String Quartet No.3, ‘In Time’ Op. 221 (2023). The programme notes describe the work as “a meditation on the passing of time” and exploring “the temporal nature of our existence”. It certainly feels like a journey through the two movements, Perpetual Motion and Last Dance, which have a giddying tarrantism to them, and demonstrate the toil of the quartet’s artistry, as the bow of Peter Clark’s violin loses quite a few strings by the end. It’s mesmerising and rather frenetic, in contrast to the rest of the programme, a necessary tonal shift perhaps.

Next, a too rarely celebrated work by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, forever in her time behind her renowned composer brother’s shadow.

The String Quartet in E flat major, H.277 (1834) is a perfect antidote to the tempo of the previous piece, with a lyrical slow build and an ephemeral scherzo, building into a vivacious finale. It is so refreshing to see these historical female composers at last getting their dues in contemporary bills.

Interval, and then a rare treat from young Kiwi composer, Salina Fisher, who wrote the piece Heal during the internationally fateful year of 2020, when the world was reeling from the shock of COVID-19 lockdowns. It is a hugely tender piece, really resonating in the body through the yearning of the cello and overlapping notes. A gorgeous experience to hear this live in Fisher’s hometown, Wellington.

The final piece for the evening was  Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2, in C major, Op. 36 (1945) which was written as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations of Henry Purcell’s death. The piece truly  reflects Britten’s deep admiration for the composer he adored, and the quartet perform this to a breathtaking degree.

The work was composed after Britten returned from Germany, where he accompanied Yehudi Menuhin in concerts for survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and it bears the mark of deep emotional intensity. The quartet held audiences in rapture with this final piece.

A wonderful meditation on peace and healing (Britten having been famously a pacifist and conscientious objector). This lyrical programme, with some excellent storytelling by the quartet members themselves is surely a highlight of the New Zealand chamber music calendar for this year, an extraordinary tour of timely works, played with nothing but devotion.

 

Classics and commemoratives from the splendid Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents the Aroha String Quartet

The Aroha Quartet: Eli Vincent (viola), Konstanze Artmann (violin), Haihong Liu (leader), Robert Ibell (‘cello)  – photo, Wellington Chamber Music

HAYDN – String Quartet Op. 64 No,6
BARBER – String Quartet Op.11
ROSS CAREY – Toccatina (Elegy – 2010)
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No. 10 “Harp” Op.74

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 2nd August

This was a beautiful and revelatory concert from the Aroha String Quartet,as near to a “something for everybody” presentation as one might reasonably wish for!

First of all, there was a String Quartet by Josef Haydn, as delightfully self-explanatory and satisfying as any work from the string quartet repertoire could be to as wide a range of tastes as might be imagined. Following this we heard a work by American composer Samuel Barber, his single most well-known piece of music, popularly known as Barber’s Adagio for Strings, but here brought to us in its original context as part of a three-movement string quartet.

After the interval the focus was shifted to some “closer to home” music, not as indigenous in origin as might have been possible, but whose human interest connection resonated sufficiently for us to register its proximity and relevance to our part of the world.   This was music by Lower-Hutt-born Ross Carey, written in 2010 to commemorate the death of Ruby Hunter (1955-2010), the indigenous Australian singer-songwriter, Carey having been inspired by what he considered as “the profound personal struggles and triumphs of the dedicatee”, one of Australia’s “Stolen Generation” who was taken from her birth family and placed in foster care from the age of eight. She became the first indigenous Australian woman to record and release a solo rock album. Carey in his  work Toccatina – Elegy wanted to reflect something of that eventful journey.

A different and no less eventful kind of life-journey was that of the composer of the concert’s concluding work, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose String Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, Op.74.has long become identified with its nickname, “The Harp” (given not by the composer, incidentally, but by a publisher!), and earning the sobriquet through its opening movement’s passages of plucked arpeggiated notes .Beethoven dedicated this work to the Archduke Rudolf, one of his most loyal supporters in Vienna. Written against the background of battles in and all around Vienna between the Austrian and French armies, the quartet was able to be premiered towards the end of 1809 after the French had left!

So to the music and its performance – and, to begin, we heard the last of Haydn’s six Quartets Op, 64, in E-flat , a group dedicated to Johann Tost, a virtuoso violinist of the composer’s acquaintance. What a glorious E-flat opening of the work we enjoyed! – with the refulgent warmth of the tones spreading through the ambient spaces of St.Andrew’s, a combination of elegance and playfulness with the sonorous opening set against those filigree impulses of playfulness. The development was treated as a kind of “fantasia” on the opening, before the second violinist presided over a kind of “triologue” between the other three players, a delightful sequence of conversational exchanges, each with a personable kind of opinionated quality, and seeming to come to concerted agreement before returning to the opening – the revisitations added enrichments and feelings of increased satisfaction to the exchanges in their sense of a shared, and obviously relished experience. The slow movement had its own surprise in store – after a serenely lullabic, beautifully “arching-over” melodic opening, the  music\.s central section abruptly changes, depicting what the programme note calls a ”tantrum” from the first violinist (terrific playing from Haihong Liu, here!) – one wonders how “personal” an utterance this episode depicted, as the composer’s marriage was reputedly not a happy one! On the other hand, its volatility could be nothing more than an instance of “gypsy-like” character Haydn had frequent recourse to in his music.

I adored the Menuet’s performance – here, lively and somewhat pesante in character, with the aristocracy depicted as “kicking up its heels” in places, stepping outside the traditionally “courtly” nature of such interactions. The Trio is a gentler “landler” which employs occasional glissandi figurations – a mannerism deemed too “vulgar” by nineteenth-century editors, “smoothing out” the scoops in the lines, but here restored, giving the music an engaging folkish character! And what a joy was the finale! – real “Keystone Cops” stuff which a later composer given also to such headlong dashings, Dmitri Shostakovich, would have relished all the more had he been a violinist!  The whirling, almost vertiginous figurations enacted a stop/start manner whose theatricality added to the pleasures of the entertainment, complete with teasing tempo variants towards the end, and capped off with a furious presto finish that had us on the edges of our seats for the final flourish.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has long been the American equivalent of Elgar’s “Nimrod”, taken from the latter’s “Enigma Variations”, music whose strands in both cases readily conjure up a sense of shared emotion involving either commemoration or loss on the part of a whole nation and in many cases across boundaries. Both pieces are parts of larger works, in Barber’s case a string quartet Op.11 from 1936, one whose second movement Adagio the composer quickly made into an arrangement for string orchestra, one which has virtually gone around the world, leaving the remainder of the hapless parent work languishing in the wings of largely unheralded appreciation!

Now was our chance to hear the actual “source” from which the work was drawn. It was the first time I had heard the string quartet version of the work, and, in fact, my first experience of the complete quartet! Barber was content with completing three movements, the familiar Adagio here flanked by an opening  “molto allegro e appassionato” movement, and a concluding “molto allegro (come prima)” sequence, He began work on the piece in 1935 while living in Austria with his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, intending to have the work finished for performance by the Curtis Quartet – however, the finale gave Barber a good deal of trouble, and after the first, delayed, performance of the work, Berber rewrote the movement several times, eventually settling for a kind of reprise of the beginning movement, music of spiky textures featuring colourful contrasts of mood, much shorter than the two movements preceeding it.

The first movement  opened intensely and passionately – music that seemed in a hurry to take us somewhere. A dramatic pause introduced a more lyrical second theme, refreshingly open and song-like, until the tempo was impulsively switched back to the opening urgencies, though retreating again for a gorgeous violin solo, prompting the ensemble to take up the lyrical lines, the cello enjoying a moment of rapturous expression as well – the players then remembered their allegiances to the opening urgencies once again, but couldn’t resist the nostalgic beauties of the more lyrical sequences, which they returned to most affectingly – the music seemed to want to have its cake and eat it too, reminding the players of the music’s need for further fervent gesturings before enigmatically concluding the movement with a few abruptly dismissive shrugs.

The Adagio which followed needed no detailed description, except that its long lines of expression engulfed our  sensibilities in a timeless world, seemingly endless “stretches of sound” which created their own breathing-patterns and impulses, out of normal time, and reminiscent of something like an ancient chant drawing inexhaustible energies from some kind of life-force, and prompting those listening to attune their own biorhythms accordingly – the viola in the ensemble held what seemed like a central note, while the surrounding instruments both stratospherically and metamorphically harmonised to mesmerising effect.  in the midst of the silences that followed, the heartfelt epilogue brought violin and viola together to sound the opening theme’s concluding voice – a superb, deeply affecting performance!

Was a finale necessary after such an utterance? I think so – some kind of “closure” was actually welcomed after the rawness of the Adagio’s conclusion, and the sense of continuation from the first movement brought us back to a world from which we had escaped, and perhaps needed to be re-reminded of, however enriched by the revelations of the Adagio’s other-worldliness. The famous stand-alone Adagio wasn’t at all diminished by its quartet companions, but its impact was sharpened and  made more  multi-dimensional in its original context.

The interval’s breathing-space prepared us for something different, a work whose composer was present in the audience! This was New Zealand-born Ross Carey’s work Toccatina (Elegy), though its subject was more Trans-Tasman than home-grown, and was written while Carey was in Australia. The composer talked with us briefly about the work’s subject-matter before we got down to grips with the actual music – here in three sections, the first an energetically restless “perpetuum mobile” with the lower strings providing rock-steady “hocket” accompaniment to the violins’ soaring and swooping overhead lines, the first violin at first taking the lead with some heart-stopping stratospheric lines, but increasingly joined by the second violin, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint!  In the second section the ‘cello took the lead with a poignant-sounding repeatedly descending figure (lovely voicings from the ‘cello!), supported by a tapestried networking of triplet-like lines from the other instruments, handing over to the violin in places, with the figurations from both instruments seeming to dance to their own music in places….before we knew what was happening the first movement’s ostinato-like movement had crept back, this time with more resolve in the music’s sights, the rhythms giving way gradually to what became increasingly self-affirming statements of quiet fruition at the end – in its way, profound and moving.

And so we reached the concert’s last item – I remember the distinctive first-movement concluding “motif” of Beethoven’s “Harp” string quartet being used as the theme of a televised programme series about famous works of art, long before I started getting to know the quartets properly. Having been television-less now for nigh-on forty years, the aural spaces that were created in my life by such a blessed liberation left room for music of all kinds, and inevitably brought those remarkable works swimming into my ken – so that the reappearance of the aforementioned motif, with its genesis long since identified, continued to give special pleasure!

So it was, naturally, that the Aroha’s voyage through this quartet’s opening, truly venturesome movement enabled me to enjoy that sense of returning from afar all over again, though of course the intermittent journeyings between the aural milestones were as rewarding in their own way, and especially in this intensely committed performance – the opening poco adagio took us into a world of wonderment with those occasional sforzandi chordings reminding us not to tarry overmuch amid incidental beauties, but to keep our intents and purposes on the journey! With the allegro came those delicately-placed pizzicati notes which earned the quartet the sobriquet of “Harp”, along with amazing will-o-the-wisp figurations whose vertiginous quality (here, brilliantly executed) whirled through our sensibilities up to the moment of my “great works of art” revisitation passage, forever fresh and nostalgic at one and the same time! The work’s middle section varied between amazingly “busy’ variants of  the movement’s first allegro subject, and rapid-fire pizzicato exchanges, taking us on a whirlwind kind of ride to the recapitulation, in which all the movement’s elements returned in “same-but-different” guises, and an extended kind of “coda” which managed to integrate those same elements in a spirited confrontation-like summation AND re-echo my “motif” of  cherished memory!

The programme note mentioned the second movement’s ”tender love aria” description, which the performance straightaway brought out, possibly a reflection of an “amour” of the composer’s, though one which perhaps didn’t work as planned due to the near-despair of the minor key mood that suddenly clouded the music, and the almost palpable “hesitancy” which takes over the exchanges! The violin determinedly took the initiative, supported by the cello, before the mood darkened once again (and with the violin dropping into a register that resembled a viola or even a ’cello while its violin partner took the higher ground! Again the instruments mused between hope and despair, though one sensed as much a feeling of resignation in the softly-whispered concluding chords.

What a startling difference wrought by the vigorously-propelled Scherzo, here! Bitingly-precise ensembled attack depicted a fierce kind of exultation, the playing part exhilarating, part fearsome in its physicality, quite overwhelming in its impact, its four-note repetitive phrase modelled on the opening of the Fifth Symphony, premiered just a few months before. The “Trio” sections didn’t let up, but whirled like dervishes around and about chant-like figures, ostensibly used by the composer as counterpoint exercises for his pupils. The scherzo’s “third-time round” was then delivered in increasingly whispered tones, coming to an unresolved halt, and allowing the first strains of the finale to sound from the exhausted silences – an engagingly repeated three-note Allegretto theme!

The first of the variations on this theme, a dancing, canonic celebration of gaiety providing further welcome relief from the scherzo’s punishingly relentless drive. was led by the ‘cello, as was the following graceful triplet variation. Then came a contrasting running variant of the theme, followed variously by a slower, wistful sequence, a sprightlier violin-led dance, and a chugging ’cello triplet accompaniment a cross-rhythmed song – this grew in intensity and pace until it changed to an allegro stretto with all the instruments excitingly in unison, and racing towards the work’s end, finishing, somewhat disconcertingly, on two soft chords!

What a finish, and what a performance, as evidenced by warm appreciation from all parts of the auditorium!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NSZO’S Let There Be Light illuminates Saariaho, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shan Liu (piano) with Jaime Martín and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – photo, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

KALJA SAARIAHO (1952-2023) – Lumiere et Pesanteur
SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891-1953 – Piano Concerto No. 3 In C Major Op.26
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893 – Symphony No. 4 in F Minor Op.36

Shan Liu (piano)
Jaime Martín (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara)
Friday, 24th July 2026

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C / Seen and Heard International)

This concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was given the title “Let There Be Light”, a quotation from Genesis 1:3 in the Bible, depicting the creation of light upon the earth and its division from darkness – a theme which took different manifestations in the three works given in this evening’s concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and its guest conductor Jaime Martín, along with a major contribution in one of the items from the remarkable sixteen year-old New Zealand pianist Shan Liu, here making his mainstage debut with the orchestra.

Beginning the concert was a piece by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Lumière et Pesanteur  (Light and Gravity) – the composer’s own notes regarding this work referred to it as a ”gift” from her to fellow Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to honour his advocacy as an interpreter of an earlier work by Saariaho, the oratorio La Passion de Simone, which was inspired by the works of 20th Century philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). The music of Lumière et Pesanteur  was reworked by the composer from part of that same oratorio, the “Eighth Station”, described by one commentator as the piece’s “most orchestral and least-defined“ section.

Saariaho’s work here  began with the merest murmur of a percussion twinkle from celeste and strings, an evocation of space into which joined a lone trumpeter, sounding a fantastical line with the utmost freedom – this gave way to various wind instruments whose floating tones spontaneously interacted, forming delightfully speculative colouristic and textural ambiences, with brasses playing ever so softly! Over the top of these iridescences piped a piccolo, a foil for the occasional subterranean growlings welling up from beneath, but countered by the continued effusions of wind tone supported by the harp and the softest and most mysterious of brass sonorities.

One could have supposed some kind of narrative at work – my feeling, being new to this music,  was a fairytale-like scenario, one in what seemed in a constant state of sublime and seamless coalescence.  It felt for me as if existence itself here was portrayed in the act of emitting hugely all-embracing sighs of pleasure from the various instrumental groups, occasionally led or spearheaded by specific lines.

Throughout, these tones seemed poly-harmonic, giving us hardly any consciousness of specific keys or modes – instead, opening our imaginations to scenarios of sonorities, textures and timbres engaged in some kind of cosmic interaction, and at which we were spectators mesmerised by the phenomenon’s inception, its growing to various stages of fruition and its equally enigmatic departure! – one in which the sounds didn’t cease as such but seemed to play on at the end beyond what we could actually hear……

After this came the Prokofiev Concerto, a different kind of journey, with its volatility and “take-it-as-it-comes” attitudes towards darkness and light, bestowing insights upon both players and listeners via an experience akin to something of a roller-coaster ride! Such a process seemed all the more Herculean a scenario here through the work in question being undertaken in our presence by such a youthful soloist! Of course Shan Liu had by this time demonstrated his exceptional qualities as a pianist on both the home and international pianistic arenas, even though he was here tackling repertoire that one would think was the preserve of the super-virtuosi (I had, for instance, seen none other than Martha Argerich play this concerto – so I was hedging my bets as to how this young man would in my mind fare against that memory!)…..

Anyway, what a concerto! The opening Andante featured  firstly a clarinet, and a second soon joining in, with the strings then sounding that characteristic sweet-and-sour quality of Prokofiev’s in the opening melody – then in came the strings again with the Allegro – such terrific energy and momentum announcing the pianist’s first entry – could Shan Liu do it? My goodness, could he what! – straightaway, such sparkling, clear and brilliantly fluent fingerwork – and then he really opened up the pianistic throttle for the toccata-like exchanges with swirling winds and slashing strings and tremendous orchestral support in general!  And so it went on – the military-like dotted march rhythms shared between the piano and mischievous instrumental detailing brought out humour aplenty – the march rhythms turned to scampering ones, with each upward-thrusting  gesture eliciting cataclysmic cries from the orchestra, the last of which featured  a return of the opening theme as a full-throated kind of “hymn-tune” – Shan Liu took up the cantabile mood, interacting with the waves of orchestral sound and producing a kind of ethereal, almost mystical sea-change in the music, until the return of the urgent allegro rhythms which recommenced the argument.  And so it went on, through various succeeding episodes too numerous to describe, except to say that the last sortie set the seal on the movement, with the pianist’s running two handed unisons gathering up the orchestral forces in the tremendous and excitingly irresistible propulsions that took the music to a triumphal final chord – at which point the Michael Fowler audience simply exploded with delight and pent-up exhilaration, deservedly giving the musicians their due!

The slow movement was all wistfulness and charm at the outset, the soloist completely at one with conductor and orchestra in the music’s bitter-sweet lyricism, until a sudden outburst brought a wild dance, which the cellos and basses helped along, giving plenty of “hoof to the swing” – as they also did with the succeeding triplet rhythms. By contrast a sequence of pure magic then meandered into and over the sound-vistas, everybody in a kind of drifting dream -a moment of fantastic, other-worldly music-making!  And how spontaneously the rhythmic impulses seemed to come to life again, with dancing impulses sprouting from all about the orchestra – those amazingly jaunty passages then fused their energies with the return of the wistful melody that began the movement – what seemed like opposites enjoying a perfect partnership!

The winds had done a superb job of introducing most of this work’s themes thus far – and the finale was no exception, with the bassoon setting a wry, insouciant opening tone for the movement’s beginning, the piano joining in the fun with big-boned dance measures and playful competition with the orchestra via several glissandi-like skirling phrases added to the “quick-march” exchanges.  There was so much to enjoy, with the winds (again) initiating a plaintive, bitter-sweet melody,  the piano nonchalantly replying with a “walking” theme, taken up by the winds, and a full-blooded return to the bitter-sweet theme on the strings – this was both voiced and embellished until the theme here got the gloriously “full Rachmaninov” treatment from soloist and orchestra (though I’m certain that neither composer would thank me for THAT heartfelt observation!). Those ubiquitous winds then bumptiously reintroduced the opening theme – by now sounding positively turbo-charged! – and with soloist, conductor and players working up to full stretch in alternating the music’s heightened momentums, the concerto by the end had simply overwhelmed us with its power and brilliance!

We couldn’t let Shan Liu go for a while after this! – not until conductor Jaime Martín visibly INSISTED the young pianist play an encore! – most appropriately we were given Schumann’s Traumerei from Kinderszenen, an appropriate antidote to the concerto performance’s intoxication in its simplicity and naturalness of utterance – even though it inhibited not a whit of animated discussion throughout the interval regarding what we’d heard!

Surprisingly, and as it turned out, delightfully, conductor Jaime Martín made a gracious and entertaining “guest’s speech” for us at the second half’s beginning, firstly praising Shan Liu’s remarkable performance, and then properly introducing himself, by way of amusingly recounting his first interactions upon his arrival with various New Zealanders who, upon learning that he was Spanish, acceded, to his utter amazement, fulsome congratulations upon him in relation to the recent Football World Cup Spanish victory!  –  “..almost as if” he said “I myself had played in the final!”. He then talked about his own impressions of the Tchaikovsky Symphony he and the orchestra were about to play,  actually getting the players to sound a few of the work’s themes and motifs by way of highlighting them for us – all this was done in a perfectly straightforward and unpatronising way – a further amusing moment was when the conductor mentioned the word “fate” in his description of the symphony’s main recurring motif, and paused for dramatic effect – in the silence one of the cellists dropped their bow on the floor!

All such byplays done with, Martín began the symphony, getting truly spine-tingling brass-playing and dramatic whiplash-chordings from the full orchestra in the work’s introduction. The strings expressively and plaintively took up their own “first subject”, handing over to the winds and helping to further build up the tensions which became a kind of “pitched battle’ between the “fate” theme and the orchestra’s lamentations! It was a properly dramatic and sonorous journey throughout, the eloquent orchestral detailing in every section by turns confronting (the “fate” music and its insistent accompanying theme) and consoling (the folksy second subject theme and its major-key variant) right to the tumultuous conclusion of the first movement.)

Martín had asked his strings beforehand to play the accompaniments alone to the long oboe solo that distinguishes the second movement, encouraging his audience to “register” the simplicity and loneliness of these pizzicato passages, adding to the beauty of oboist Robert Orr’s actual performance – listening to this movement I was freshly taken aback by the qppeql of Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations, especially the many interactions between strings and winds so gorgeously and heartfeltly realised in this performance. Likewise in the famous pizzicato-led third movement the impact of the instrumental contrasts between strings, winds and brass were positively flavoursome (Johanna Gruskin’s piccolo in particular picturing a superbly loquacious “beastie”!).

Martín then introduced the finale almost as attacca (not marked in the score), conveying the music’s tremendous urgency, the playing marked by fierce exchanges and great brilliance – similarly, the conductor brought the contrasting “Birch tree” melody in almost in tempo. maintaining the music’s delicacy but enhancing the excitement! Later in the movement this melody led with increasing intensity to the final, tumultuous statement of the “fate” motif, momentarily halting the music’s headlong flow, but leading to a quiet reiteration of the festive-like music which represented the composer’s words “If you cannot discover the reasons for happiness in yourself, look to others…” The orchestral frenzy unleashed for us at the conclusion of this movement tonight embodied that fatalism with the utmost euphoria and excitement. Since then, my memory has been wandering back to my first encounter with this work via the legendary Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, whom I saw give what seemed like a cataclysmic-sounding performance with the then NZBC Symphony Orchestra here in Wellington in 1973 – his shade would, I think, have relished tonight’s equally memorable presentation.