Tag: contemporary music

Jason Bae – an enterprising, exploratory and heroic performer

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music

A recital by Jason Bae

Debussy – Images oubliées
Esa-Pekka Salonen – Dichotomie (NZ Premiere)
Grieg – Ballade Op.24
Medtner – Piano Sonata No.11 Sonata tragica Op.39 No.5

Jason Bae (piano)

Adam Concert Room,
Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music,
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday, 13th April 2018

Korean-born NZ-adopted pianist Jason Bae made a welcome return a week ago to the Wellington region for a lunchtime recital at the School of Music’s Adam Concert Room, Victoria University. He brought with him a programme he’s taken to a number of venues around the country, one whose content suggested that there would be no compromises on an artistic level, despite the degree of informality and relaxation often associated with a “lunchtime concert”. This was a programme deserving of serious, five-star attention from start to finish, and received playing that fully realised the “serious” intent of the pianist’s enterprising choice of repertoire.

Bae has already made his mark in the world of piano-playing with many prize-giving performances and awards in various places around the world – according to his web-site, his recent activities include performing recitals in Helsinki, Finland and in Seoul, Korea, as well as currently in New Zealand.  The young pianist is also turning his attention to orchestral conducting, making his New Zealand conducting debut with the Westlake Symphony Orchestra in Auckland. He’s obviously one of those multi-talented musicians who has the aptitude to succeed at whatever he turns his hand to.

Judging from the programme we heard Bae perform at the Music School on Friday, there’s no ‘resting on his laurels”, no trotting out well-consolidated warhorses with which to impress audiences. These pieces required his listeners to come some of the way themselves towards the music, itself extremely varied in content and character, rather than simply let it all “wash over” the sensibilities in a generalised way. Perhaps the best-known of these works, albeit in a roundabout fashion, was that of Debussy’s “Images oubliées” (an earlier work than each of the two, better-known sets of “Images”, but one which, for some reason, wasn’t published in the composer’s lifetime). Recently,  though, there has been some recorded attention given both to Medtner’s solo piano works and to Grieg’s hitherto neglected output outside the “Lyric Pieces”. Certainly the remainder of Bae’s programme indicated there were treasures aplenty awaiting more widespread awareness and approval.

The opening of the Debussy work (Lent) brought forth exquisitely-voiced tones from the young pianist, the sounds resembling some kind of ethereal recitative, accompanied by the softest, most velvety of arpeggiations. This accorded with the composer’s own description of the pieces as “not for brilliantly-lit salons…..but rather, conversations between the piano and oneself”. Bae allowed a beautifully-appointed ebb-and-flow of colours and contours, a kind of nature-benediction in sound, allowing the tones at the end to breathtakingly mingle with the silences.

The second piece “Souvenir du Louvre” bore a close relationship with a movement from the composer’s later “Pour le piano”, a rather more fulsome version of what became the Sarabande from the latter work. Again, the pianist’s evocations were meticulously directed towards detailings of wondrous delicacy, with dialogues throughout sounded between the piano’s different registers, sculpted strength set against liquid movement. Debussy’s original was actually written for Yvonne Lerolle, the girl both Degas and Renoir painted at the piano, and for whom the composer described the piece with the words “slow and solemn, even a bit like an old portrait” (hence the title).

The title of the third piece betrays its inspiration even more candidly than does the later work it (only) occasionally resembles – “Jardins sous la pluie” from “Estampes” with its well-known folk-song quotations. Here it is somewhat teasingly called by the composer “Quelques aspects de ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois'” (Aspects of the song “We will not go to the woods”), with the added afterthought, for the benefit of his young dedicatee, “…because the weather is dreadful”…….Bae’s fleet-fingered playing evoked a game of chase through the woods, by turns lightly-brushed and hard-hitting, with some tolling bells sounding towards the end, the piece then disappearing literally into thin air.

By way of introducing the next work on the programme, Bae spent some time talking with us about his relationship with a composer who’s better known as a conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, after which the pianist performed Salonen’s work for solo piano “Dichotomy”. One of a select few of brilliant contemporary performing musicians who significantly compose, Salonen has a number of important works to his credit, for orchestra, two concerti (piano and violin), and a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus, “Karawane”, which premiered in 2014 in Zurich.

Salonen’s work isn’t exactly “hot off the press”, Dichotomie having received its premiere as far back as 2000, in Los Angeles. The composer wanted a short, encore-type piece as a present for a favourite soloist, Gloria Cheng, but, as he discovered, the material he wrote seemed to take on a life of its own,  and expand to proportions bearing little relation to its actual conception. Jason Bae explained to us, along with his account of a serendipitous encounter with Salonen that led to his espousal of the composer’s work, how the music came to be, its two-movement structure representing a relationship between the two “kinds” of music that Salonen seemed to create almost involuntarily. Thus the first movement of this work, Mechanisme, represented machine-like processes, while the second, Organisme, had a more naturalistic way of developing and extending created material. Salonen wanted to explore how these very different styles might, by dint of juxtaposition, “borrow” qualities from one another which could affect their development.

I confess to being fascinated by what I heard, which is a way of paying tribute to Jason Bae’s playing of it as well. The opening of Mechanisme was indeed motoric and Prokofiev-like, the rhythms growing and developing in dynamically varied ways, with different sequences taking on different and unpredictable characters, variously syncopated, symmetrical or angular. Bae’s playing built to almost frighteningly orchestral levels of volume and intensity, before abruptly adopting flowing, legato phrasing that suggested some kind of counter-impulse had been mysteriously, even covertly activated within the work’s being. It preluded a mercurial section where one sensed the creative process was in a kind of ferment of crisis (the machine, perhaps, trying to be human?), with the musical argument appearing to fragment under scrutiny, almost to the point of stasis. A final counter-burst of incendiary energy, notes swirling and figurations exploding in every direction, left the music almost insensible, with only a few legato-phrased, wider-spaced chords holding the centre, and pronouncing the “new order”.

The following Organisme brought forth shimmering, exploratory textures containing reiterating figurations attempting to secure their tentative foot-and finger-holds in the music’s fabric. I thought it Debussy-like in places in a textured sense, the basic materials gradually coalescing and producing a kind of ambient glow, with beautifully voiced fragments of melody floating by on wings of air. The trajectories were passed from hand to hand, thereby suggesting a kind of osmotic continuity of flow, one which inevitably built up tensions of a kind that saw the tones take on increasingly rhythmic and thrustful expression, becoming tumultuous in the sense of a storm, the pianist sending great arabesques of tone shooting upwards and into the ether. Having resisted the temptation to inhabit “the dark side” the music made a flourish of quiet triumph, and the piece ended enigmatically – all told, an enthralling listening experience, thanks in part to Bae’s brilliant advocacy.

Further explorations were furnished by the pianist with his programming of Edvard Grieg’s rarely-heard Ballade Op.24, in my view one of the composer’s greatest works. It was one of the pieces that the tragically short-lived New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell recorded (as part of an all-Grieg recital disc), but has yet to claim a regular place in the concert repertoire. Though part of this is due to the piece’s technical difficulty, my feeling is that Grieg is still regarded by many people as a “miniaturist”, able to turn out  pretty Scandivavian picture-postcards in the form of his numerous “Lyric Pieces”, but lacking the ability to handle larger forms (despite his magnificent Piano Concerto!). Debussy’s well-known swipe at Grieg (“a pink bonbon filled with snow” was his description of one of the latter’s “Elegiec Melodies”) hasn’t helped the latter’s cause – but less well-known is the remark made by Frederick Delius to Maurice Ravel, that “modern French music is simply Grieg, plus the third act of Tristan”, to which Ravel replied, “That is true – we are always unjust to Grieg.”

Justice was certainly done to Grieg by Jason Bae, here a rather more turbo-charged reading in places than that of Richard Farrell’s poetic soundscapings, one underlining the music’s virtuoso aspect, while giving the more ruminative passages enough space in which to breathe Grieg’s bracing air. The work is basically a theme-and-variations treatment of a Norwegian folk-song melody,  “Den Nordlanske Bondestand” (The Northland Peasantry), and ranges from extremely simple elaborations of the theme to full-scale, almost orchestral outbursts of expression, including some forward-looking, even daring excursions into harmonic conflict, particularly during the work’s final cataclysmic section, before the music suddenly dissolves all such conflicts and returns to the melancholy of the original theme. In general, I thought Bae most successfully brought out the music’s brilliance and sharply-etched contrasts, underlining in places the music’s debt towards and kinship with that of Liszt (Variations 11 and 12 are here particularly overwhelming in an orchestral sense!) but also paying ample tribute to Grieg’s own originality. The pianist’s playing of No.9 allowed the composer’s singular gift for melodic piquancy its full effect, while No.10 here vividly captured the music’s characteristic rustic charm and feeling for grass-roots expressions of energy. In the wake of this performance I’m sure Bae would have garnered in many listeners’ minds fresh respect for Grieg as a composer.

The recital concluded with a work from a figure whose music has only recently received the kind of mainstream espousal needed for it to flourish. Russian-born Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), a younger contemporary of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, received much the same acclaim as a result of his musical studies in Moscow, but then elected to devote himself entirely to composition rather than pursue a career as a pianist. However (and perhaps not surprisingly) the piano figured in practically all of his major compositions, both prior to and after leaving Russia in 1921. Altogether, Medtner completed fourteen piano sonatas, Jason Bae performing for us the eleventh (which the composer subtitled Sonata Tragica, possibly as a reaction to the aftermath of the Russian Revolution) The sonata, incidentally, was one of a set of pieces separately entitled “Forgotten Melodies” (Second Cycle) by the composer. Those who have a taste for idiosyncratic numbering methods of musical compositions will find much to enjoy in Medtner’s own various enumerations of these works.

None of which is relevant to Jason Bae’s performance of the music, which seemed to me to front up squarely to the piece’s overall character, with its big-boned, declamatory  aspect at the beginning and the war-like march that follows proclaiming a Slavic temperament, with the swirling textures obviously breathing the same air as did Rachmaninov’s music. Bae gave the flowing lyricism which followed plenty of “soul”, allowing the deeper textures to make their mark amid the frequent exchanges between the hands, then gradually building the excitement to almost fever pitch, before strongly arresting the flow of the music with a portentous left-hand, almost fugue-like version of the opening declamation – all very exciting! The pianist’s beautifully wrought filigree finger-work introduced further agitations, the music building inexorably towards a kind of breaking-point (Bae’s left hand performing miracles of transcendent articulation) at the apex of which the sonata’s main theme thundered out at us most resplendently and defiantly! It was music that, in this player’s expert hands, punched well above its own weight, with a bigness of utterance which belied its brief duration!

Very great acclaim greeted the young pianist, at the conclusion of this challenging, and in the event splendidly-achieved presentation of some monumental music.

Brilliance and feeling from the Mazzoli Trio at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:

MAZZOLI STRING TRIO

Julie Park (viola), Sally Kim (‘cello), Shauno Isomura (violin)

SCHUBERT –  Trio in B-flat Major D.471
A. RITCHIE – Spring String Trio (2013)
FRANCAIX – String Trio (1933)
MISSY MAZZOLI – Lies You Can Believe In (2006)
HAYDN – Trio in G Major Op.53/1
DOHNANYI – Serenade Op.10

Lower Hutt Little Theatre,

Monday, 26th March 2018

Formed in 2015 by students from the University of Auckland and the Pettman National Junior Academy of Music, the Mazzoli Trio, so the story goes, took its name from that of a composer of a piece of music which was one of the first the trio of musicians had prepared. They had fallen in love with the piece, one called “Lies You Can Believe In”, written by up-and-coming New York composer Missy Mazzoli, and thereupon contacted her to ask if she would allow the Trio to use her name, as well as perform her music. And so a new and vital ensemble was born, with its first major assignment in public an invitation to perform at a concert at the 2nd International Pacific Alliance of Music Schools’ Summit in Beijing, China, an occasion which brought them much acclaim regarding both their playing and the repertoire chosen.

Monday evening’s concert at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre was one of a number of appearances by the Trio throughout the North Island organised by Chamber Music New Zealand. The programme seemed a judiciously chosen selection of works both familiar and intriguing, with the Trio’s “signature work”, by Missy Mazzoli, promising to be one of the evening’s particular fascinations. Interestingly, both halves of the concert had their order as per programme changed, which left me to wonder whether there had been a simple misunderstanding between the musicians and the printers, or, alternatively represented a significant rethink by the musicians of a previously existing order. Whatever the case, it made not the slightest difference to our anticipated enjoyment and receptivity of the concert.

So, instead of beginning the evening’s music with Anthony Ritchie’s “Spring String Trio”, we heard instead Schubert’s B-flat Major Trio D.471, a work in a single movement, which was played with such freshness and simplicity of wide-eyed wonderment that our hearts were instantly captured. What struck me instantly about the playing was that, despite the Trio’s obvious youth the music-making was imbued with such character. Part of this came from the players’ awareness of the interactiveness of the different instruments, each ready to assert and then give way, beautifully dovetailing the various musical arguments, and delighting the ear in doing so. We enjoyed the “shape” of the piece, its vivid contourings through the opening’s lyricism and contrasting dynamism, and the music’s intensification throughout the development, before the eventual “unravelling” of these tensions, instigated by the opening’s reprise via its warmth and familiarity. I thought the playing most importantly caught that unique Schubertian mix of charm, sunniness and tension which characterises his music.

I must admit to being intrigued at Anthony Ritchie’s work having been, according to the programme, the result of a commission concerning none other than (Sir) Robert Jones, somebody about whom I have very few positive feelings – however, I suppose composers have to earn a living! Banishing all thoughts of the association from my mind I settled down to enjoy the music, and was straightaway drawn into a dark-browed world of almost Shostakovich-like angst, a kind of “charged calmness”, out of which grew structured, contrapuntal exchanges almost baroque-like in their ordering, with everything creating a real sense of expectation, both in a formal and emotional sense.

This feeling bore fruit with the players’ energetic launching of vigorous, almost hoe-down-like passages, which in places either “took to the road” or drew from the irresistible momentum of a steam train (the music’s motoric quality not surprising in a composer with avowed admiration for Shostakovich’s music), a sequence which, after taking us places most exhilaratingly suddenly ceased its physicalities and became thoughtful and even melancholic. By this time, I was completely at the mercy of the music-making, drawn in by these musicians’ concentration and focus, the instrumental tones here given increasing weight and strength as to achieve a splendid kind of apotheosis, with the composer seemingly bringing the work’s essential elements triumphantly together at the conclusion, before cheekily throwing the last bars to the four winds! – great stuff!

Even cheekier entertainment was provided by French composer Jean Francaix (1912-1997), whose music was described most aptly in the programme as having “wit, lightness and a conversational interplay”. Writing his first pieces at the age of six, he once remarked that he was “constantly composing” and over the course of his long life wrote over two hundred pieces in a variety of styles and genres. His String Trio of 1933 began with hide-and-seek scamperings expressed in largely will-o’the-wisp tones, the instruments occasionally showing their faces and striking attitudes in mock-seriousness, before grinning impudently and skipping out of reach once more, the movement finishing on a po-faced pizzicato note.

The Scherzo presented itself as a wild, lurching waltz, replete with impish mischief and surprising orchestral-like effects, such as sharp-edged pizzicati that made one jump! The musicians entered into the music’s spirit with great relish, bringing out both the contrasting episodes of melancholy hand-in-glove with their humorous undersides – at one stage the sounds resembled instruments duelling with pizzicato notes – “Take that! – and that! – and THAT!”. The Andante which followed made a wistful, melancholic impression, with the violinist’s instrument singing disconsolately, while being rocked and comforted by the viola and ‘cello.  The melody was taken over by the cello and counterpointed by the viola, giving rise to sounds and feelings of a great loveliness – for whatever reason I was put in mind of Vaughan Williams’ music, by way of imagining the music written with the viola as the leading voice.

The Rondo finale, marked “Vivo”, wasted no time in making its presence felt, with great dynamics at the outset, and the composer’s singular invention regarding the accompanying rhythms leaving us wondering what to expect and where to be taken next! A bout of upper-register exploration left the music momentarily frightened by its own angsts, before emerging, albeit a little cautiously, from its own melt-down, the viola taking the initiative and restoring control and morale, leading the music into and through a mock-march of triumph, with (one senses) no prisoners being taken!

After the interval, we were told of another “running order” change to the programme, the last being made first this time round, with the piece written by the Trio’s namesake, Missy Mazzoli, divertingly called “Lies You Can Believe In”, beginning the concert’s second half. Called by its composer “An improvisatory tale”, the music draws from what the composer calls “the violence, energy and rare calm one finds in a city”. Written in 2006 for a Milwaukee-based ensemble, Present Music, the piece seems to throw everything within reach at the listener by way of introduction, the rhythms fierce, driving and syncopated, the lines both focusing and blurring the laser-like unisons, which disconcert by unexpectedly melting into warm and fruity expressions of melancholy. The Trio’s total involvement with this material swept our sensibilities up into its maelstrom of variety, with all the aforementioned characteristics the composer required of the piece’s presentation.

In tandem with the driving rhythms and spiky accents come lyrical instrumental solos – one for the ‘cello at first and then another for the viola – contributing to the music’s volatility and echoing the ambiguities of the piece’s title. There’s even a “twilight-zone” sequence of eerie, other-worldly harmonics, as the instruments move the music through a kind of wasteland, one which suddenly explodes into life with “Grosse Fugue-like” driving syncopations, the cello playing a sinuously exotic, decadently sliding theme as its companions push the repeated notes along. In characteristic fashion it all comes to an end as the rhythms become disjointed and break up, taking their leave of us with a rhythmically curt unison gesture. Whether we’d made sense of what we’d been through suddenly seemed less to matter than the experience itself, as Alan Jay Lerner put it in “My Fair Lady”, a heady sample of “humanity’s mad, inhuman noise”.

Perhaps some eighteenth-century sensibilities thought much the same of some of Josef Haydn’s more original manifestations of creativity, such as with his String Trio Op.53 No.1 (actually a transcription of the Piano Sonata Hob.XV1:40/1). At the outset the music breathes out-of-doors country pleasures, the aristocracy amusing themselves at play, though the music’s minor-key change midway the first movement readily suggests “trouble at mill”, with its range of outward emotion, the players here making the most of the contrast between whole-hearted expressiveness and near-furtive withdrawal of tones. When the graceful dance returned I thought the cellist so very expressive in her music-making gestures, bringing it all so vividly to life, as did her companions during the music’s precipitious return to the previous agitations, and the gentle gathering-up of fraught sensibilities – wonderfully soft playing from all concerned!

The second movement’s scampering presto immediately reminded me of the finale of the composer’s C-Major ‘Cello Concerto, the musicians’ soft, rapid playing a tantalising joy! Of course these would have been brilliantly effective on the keyboard as well, but the extra colour and textural contrasts afforded by the trio brought special delight, with the rhythmic syncopations deliciously underlined. In this way, the work was brought to a rousing conclusion which we in the audience thoroughly relished.

There remained of this well-stocked programme a work by Ernst von Dohnanyi, best-known to an earlier generation by his work for piano and orchestra “Variations on a Nursery Theme”, but more recently for his chamber music. Feted as a virtuoso pianist in his youth, Dohnanyi soon took up composition, influenced mostly by the work of Brahms and the German romantics, though he was to promote the music and activities of his fellow Hungarian composers, Bartok and Kodaly while teaching at the Budapest Academy. Differences with both pre- and post-War regimes in Hungary forced him into exile, firstly in Argentina, and then in the United States, where he took out citizenship and remained for the rest of his life.

His five-movement Serenade for String Trio, dating from 1902/3, was one of the first works in which Dohnanyi felt his own voice had properly sounded, rather less in thrall to late-Romantic models, and with touches of the “real” Hungarian folk-music influence that Bartok and Kodaly would soon begin to explore in earnest. Right at the beginning of the opening March, the music sounded like a Hungarian Brahms, with rather more of the former than the latter, flavoursome folk-fiddle treatment of the material from violin and ‘cello, and a drone-accompaniment from the viola. A soft pizzicato dance accompanied a beautifully folkish, Kodaly-like melody from the viola, the instrument then accompanying its companions’ heartfelt dialogues with evocative arpeggio-like figurations  resembling those of the solo viola in Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy”.

Mischievous fugal-like scurryings of different lines from all three instruments began the scherzo, which occasionally brought the voices together in fierce unisons. The trio section’s graceful, song-like measures, reminiscent of Schubert’s music for “Rosamunde” in places featured some affectionately-sounded dovetailings, reflecting the music-making’s warmly co-operative aspect.

In the slow movement’s Theme and Variations, the opening was presented to us as “a special moment gone somehow wrong”, the melody attempting to keep its poise and grace, but darkening in mood at its end. The variations exhibited plenty of character and differently-focused purpose, seemingly running the emotional gamut from agitation and fright to tremulous melancholy. After these angsts we needed the jollity of the finale’s opening to return us to our lives – and here the playing brought out both the girth and the grace of the dancers, as well as excitingly varying the pulse and pace of the music. Eventually the sounds cycled all the way back to the work’s richly Magyar opening, thus binding the work and its singular ambiences of unique expression together. What playing from these people! – so very youthful and energetic, while commanding responses to the music of such warmth and understanding and character.

 

Remarkable integration of musical cultures in spite of documentation and presentation shortcomings

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Festival
‘Te Ao Hou; This New World’

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello); Rob Thorne (taonga pūoro)

Works by Rob Thorne, Selina Fisher, Gillian Whitehead, Gareth Farr

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Tuesday, 6 March 2018, 6pm

Of the skill manifest in this unusual concert there can be no doubt.  Regarding the audience’s involvement there are regrets: there were no notes about individual works in the brief three pages in the composite programme booklet; most of the information was about the players.  No spoken introductions were given, and no explanation of the taonga pūoro, as Richard Nunns gave at a Festival concert years ago.  I am sure this was to maintain a spiritual, non-material atmosphere, which was enhanced by the attractive greenery on the platform, that included an ponga..  (Wikipedia has an excellent article on taonga pūoro, with photographs.)

I beg leave for a little special pleading: I had had eye-drops administered at hospital a couple of hours prior to the concert, which in the dim lighting made it impossible to identify most of the instruments employed, and added to the confusion caused by there not being apparent breaks between works and thus no opportunity for the audience to applaud until the end of the concert.

The effect was of a continuous work, although individual styles could be detected.  It seemed that possible pauses were filled with improvisations by Rob Thorne on a great variety of instruments.

The programme gave the opening item as Rob Thorne’s ‘Improvisations for Taonga Pūoro’; it seems that these were interspersed throughout the concert, that began with the audience being greeted by extensive sounding of the conch shell and by a member of the flute family of taonga pūoro, the one into which the players blow into the middle of the instrument.  (There may have been others that I didn’t pick.  Most of this could not be seen from where I was seated.  This was a problem later, too, as the performances took place rather to the right of the platform; I was seated left.)

What was amply demonstrated already was the variety of tones and pitches that could be played; the conch shell particularly was hugely variable in pitch and timbre.

Poetry in English was read: Te Ao Hou; This New World.  Next came loud and emphatic Maori chants, from the rear of the church.  The instrument faded away and then returned.  The sounds varied from that of a cow bellowing to quieter tones like a French horn being stopped by the hand.  Squeaks, whistles and quieter notes were produced, and then one became aware that Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins were slowly approaching the platform from different sides, making notes on their instruments very similar in sound to the quieter notes of the conch.  They were soon followed by Gillian Ansell and Rolf Gjelsten.

This was a remarkable feature of the concert: how the strings could imitate the sounds of taonga pūoro, whether loud or soft, strident or sweet.  Throughout, the string players did not employ vibrato; the effect of this technique would have been foreign to the sound-world featured.

The more formal part of the programme began with Salina Fisher’s Tōrino: Echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne, premiered by NZSQ in 2016.  Notes interweaving sounded like karakia and other chants put together.  Bird songs were another feature, as were mournful tones.  The use of drone notes in the bass were effective, yet gave a sameness to some of the music.  Slurring between pitches was an interesting technique.

Among the taonga pūoro used was a long wooden wind instrument with a trumpet-like sound.  Dynamics varied, and the sound was focused   The instruments played a variety of pure notes, presumably pitched with the mouth, as with the natural brass trumpet.  The strings played repetitive notes, and then they were joined by another instrument, not so long, with less focused tone.  This was followed by a higher pitched instrument, then by the conch shell, playing solo.  Its doleful sounds were followed by whistled bird sounds from two different small instruments.

A stick tapping on a small wooden box contributed complex rhythms, and the strings joined in, making a sound almost identical to that of the conch shell.  The same happened with the violins making an almost identical sound to the whistle-like flutes.

Scoop web-site has this to say about Rob Thorne’s Tomokanga: ‘This was music that segued seamlessly between the various composers, imbued with the same sort of shimmering luminosity and glistening iridescence as a rain forest after thunderstorm. The interweaving of disparate sonorities created limpid, mesmerizing, and hypnotic motifs that lingered on the margins of the transcendental.’

Then came another repeat work from 2016: Dame Gillian Whitehead’s Poroporoaki.  An effective technique used in her work was the strings playing spiccato.

Gareth Farr’s He Poroporoaki followed, beginning with Helene Pohl playing little finger cymbals most effectively.  A tiny flute played, while the cello sounded a drone below varied string harmonies and lovely sonorities.  This work had more elements of European classical music in it than did the other pieces in the programme.  It includes the tune of the song we know in English as ‘Now is the Hour’.  (The Google note under Promethean Editions says the piece, written for Gallipoli commemorations in 2008, is a ‘deconstructed Now is the Hour’, significant of course for soldiers departing to war, and the families and friends on the wharf to see them off).  Rob Thorne was kept busy swapping between instruments: conch, flute, hammer on wood, whistles.  Gillian Ansell tapped the stones while Thorne was busy.

The final work was Gillian Whitehead’s Puhake ki te Rangi.  It was written in 2006.  It was amazing to hear Rob Thorne producing a variety of tones from the same instrument.

It was  remarkable concert that nevertheless left some in the a good-sized audience confused as to whether the concert was actually over at the end, since it was not easy to trace where we were in the programme at any point, and because the performance ended earlier than expected.  The quality of performance was astonishingly good.

 

 

Two resounding recordings from Rattle – classics and a feisty newcomer

Posted on by Peter Mechen


DAVID FARQUHAR – RING ROUND THE MOON
Sonatina – piano (1960) / Three Pieces – violin and piano (1967)
Black, White and Coloured – solo piano (selections – 1999/2002)
Swan Songs for voice and guitar (1983)
Dance Suite from “Ring Round the Moon” (1957 arr. 2002)
Jian Liu (piano) / Martin Riseley (violin)
Jenny Wollerman (soprano) / Jane Curry (guitar)
Rattle RAT-D062 2015

PICTURES
MODEST MUSSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition
EVE De CASTRO ROBINSON – A Zigzagged Gaze
Henry Wong Doe (piano)
Rattle RAT-D072 2017

How best does one describe a “classic” in art, and specifically in music?

Taking the contents of both CDs listed above, one might argue that there are two “classic” compositions to be found among these works, one recognised internationally and the other locally, each defined as such by its popularity and general recognition as a notable piece of work. If this suggests a kind of facile populist judgement, one might reflect that posterity does eventually take over, either continuing to further enhance or consigning to relative neglect and near-oblivion the pieces’ existence in the scheme of things.

Though hardly rivalling the reputation and impact in global terms of Modest Mussorgsky’s remarkable Pictures at an Exhibition on the sensibilities of listeners and concert-goers, it could safely be said that New Zealand composer David Farquhar’ s 1957 incidental music for the play Ring Round the Moon has caught the imagination of local classical music-lovers to an extent unrivalled by any of the composer’s other works, and, indeed by many other New Zealand compositions. I would guess that, at present, only certain pieces by Farquhar’s colleague Douglas Lilburn would match Ring Round the Moon in popularity in this country, amongst classical music aficionados.

The presence of each of these works on these recordings undoubtedly gives the latter added general interest of a kind which I think surely benefits the lesser-known pieces making up each of the programmes. In both cases the combinations are beautifully thought-out and judiciously placed to show everything to its best possible advantage. And visually, there’s similar accord on show, the art-work and general layout of each of the two discs having its own delight and distinction, in the best tradition previously established by the Rattle label.

So enamoured am I still with Farquhar’s original RIng Round the Moon for small orchestra (that first recording featuring the Alex Lindsay Orchestra can be found by intrepid collectors on Kiwi-Pacific Records CD SLD-107), I thought I would give myself more time to get used to the idea of a violin-and-piano version (arranged by the composer in 1992). I therefore began my listening with the more recent disc, Pictures, featuring pianist Henry Wong Doe’s enterprising coupling of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and a 2016 work by Auckland composer Eve de Castro-Robinson, A zigzagged gaze, one which similarly presents a series of musical responses to a group of visual artworks.

Mussorgsky’s collection of pieces commemorated the work of a single artist, Victor Hartmann, a close friend of the composer, whereas de Castro-Robinson’s series of pieces, commissioned by the pianist, were inspired by work from different artists in a single collection, that of the Wallace Arts Trust. In the booklet notes accompanying the CD the composer describes the process of selecting artworks from the collection as “a gleeful trawling through riches”. And not only does she offer a series of brief but illuminating commentaries regarding the inspirational effect of each of the pictures, but includes for each one a self-written haiku, so that we get a series of delightfully-wrought responses in music, poetry and prose.

Henry Wong Doe premiered de Castro Robinson’s work, along with the Mussorgsky, at a “Music on Madison Series” concert in New York on March 5th 2017, and a month later repeated the combination for the New Zealand premiere in Auckland at the School of Music Theatre. His experience of playing this music “live” would have almost certainly informed the sharpness of his characterisations of the individual pieces, and their almost theatrical contrasts. For the most part, everything lives and breathes, especially the de Castro Robinson pieces, which, of course, carry no interpretative “baggage” for listeners, unlike in the Mussorgsky work, which has become a staple of the virtuoso pianist repertoire.

While not effacing memories of some of the stellar recorded performances of the latter work I’ve encountered throughout the years, Wong Doe creates his own distinctive views of many of the music’s sequences. He begins strongly, the opening “Promenade” bright, forthright, optimistic and forward-looking, evoking the composer’s excitement and determination to get to grips with the business of paying tribute to his artist friend, Viktor Hartmann whose untimely death was commemorated by an exhibition of his work.

The pianist relishes the contrasts afforded by the cycle, such as between the charm of the Tuileries scene with the children, and the momentously lumbering and crunching “Bydlo” which immediately follows. He also characterises the interactive subjects beautifully – the accents of the gossipping women in “The Market-Place at Limoges” tumble over one another frenetically, while the piteous cries of the poor Jew in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” are sternly rebuffed by his well-heeled, uncaring contemporary.

I liked Wong Doe’s sense of spaciousness in many places, such as in the spectral “Catacombs”, and in the following “Con Mortuis in lingua mortua” (the composer’s schoolboy Latin still manages to convey a sense of the transcendence he wanted) – the first, imposing part delineating darkness and deathly finality, while the second part creating a communion of spirits between the composer and his dead artist friend – Wong Doe’s playing throughout the latter properly evoked breathless beauty and an almost Lisztian transcendence generated by the right hand’s figurations.)

Only in a couple of places I wanted him to further sustain this spaciousness – steadying a few slightly rushed repeated notes at the opening of the middle section of “Baba Yaga”, and holding for a heartbeat or so longer onto what seemed to me a slightly truncated final tremolando cadence right at the end of “The Great Gate of Kiev”. But the rest was pure delight, with the fearful witch’s ride generating both properly razor-sharp cries and eerie chromatic mutterings along its course, and the imposing “Great Gate” creating as magnificent and atmospheric a structure of fanciful intent as one would wish for.

Following Mussorgsky’s classic depiction of diverse works of art in music with another such creation might seem to many a foolhardy venture, one destined to be overshadowed. However, after listening to Wong Doe’s playing of Auckland composer Eve de Castro Robinson’s 2016 work, A Zigzagged Gaze, I’m bound to say that, between them, composer and pianist have brought into being something that can, I think, stand upright, both on its own terms and in such company. I listened without a break to all ten pieces first time up, and, like Mussorgsky at Viktor Hartmann’s exhibition, found myself in a tantalising network of connection and diversity between objects and sounds all wanting to tell their stories.

The work and its performance here seems to me to be a kind of celebration of the place of things in existence – the ordinary and the fabulous, the everyday and the special, the surface of things and the inner workings or constituents. As with Mussorgsky’s reactions to his artist friend Hartmann’s creations, there’s both a “possessing” of each work’s essence on de Castro-Robinson’s part and a leap into the kind of transcendence that music gives to things, be they objects, actions or emotions, allowing we listeners to participate in our own flights of fancy and push out our own limits of awareness.

As I live with this music I’m sure I’ll develop each of the composer’s explorations within my own capabilities, and still be surprised where and how far some of them take me. On first hearing I’m struck by the range of responses, and mightily diverted by the whimsy of some of the visual/musical combinations – the “gargantual millefiori paperweight” response to artist Rohan Wealleans’ “Tingler” in sound, for example. I’m entertained by the persistent refrains of Philip Trusttum’s “The Troubadour”, the vital drollery of Miranda Parkes’ “Trick-or-Treater” and the rousing strains of Jacqueline Fahey’s “The Passion Flower”. But in other moods I’ll relish the gentle whimsicalities inspired by Josephine Cachemaille’s “Diviner and Minder” with its delight in human reaction to small, inert things, and the warm/cool beauties of Jim Speers’ “White Interior”, a study of simply being.

Most haunting for me, on first acquaintance, however, are “Return”, with Vincent Ward’s psychic interior depiction beautifully reflected in de Castro Robinson’s deep resonances and cosmos-like spaces between light and darkness, and the concluding tranquilities of the initially riotous and unequivocal rendering of Judy Miller’s “Big Pink Shimmering One”, where the composer allows the listener at the end space alone with oneself to ponder imponderables, the moment almost Rimbaud-like in its powerful “Après le déluge, c’est moi!” realisation.

Henry Wong Doe’s playing is, here, beyond reproach to my ears – it all seems to me a captivating fusion of recreativity and execution, the whole beautifully realised by producer Kenneth Young and the Rattle engineers. I can’t recommend the disc more highly on the score of Eve de Castro-Robinson’s work alone, though Wong Doe’s performance of the Mussorgsky is an enticing bonus.

Turning to the other disc for review, one featuring David Farquhar’s music (as one might expect of a production entitled “Ring Round the Moon”) I noted with some pleasure that the album’s title work was placed last in the programme, as a kind of “all roads lead to” gesture, perhaps to encourage in listeners the thought that, on the face of things, the journey through a diverse range of Farquhar’s music would bring sure-fire pleasure at the traversal’s end.

Interestingly, the programme replicates a “Remembering David Farquhar” concert on the latter’s seventh anniversary in 2014, at Wellington’s NZSM, curated by Jack Body and featuring the same performers – so wonderful to have that occasion replicated here in preserved form. The disc is packaged in one of Rattle’s sumptuously-presented booklet gatefold containers, which also features details from one of artist Toss Woolaston’s well-known Erua series of works, and a biography of the artist.

Beginning the disc is Sonatina, a work for solo piano from 1950, which gives the listener an absorbing encounter with a young (and extremely promising) composer’s music. Three strongly characterised movements give ample notice of an exciting talent already exploring his creativity in depth. Seventeen years later, Farquhar could confidently venture into experimental territory with a Sonata for violin and piano which from the outset challenged his listeners to make something of opposing forces within a work struggling to connect in diverse ways. A second movement dealt in unconventionalities such as manipulating piano strings with both fingers and percussion sticks, after which a final movement again set the instruments as much as combatants as voices in easy accord.

The Black, White and Coloured pieces for piano, from 1999-2002, are represented in two selections on the disc – they represent a fascination Farquhar expressed concerning the layout of the piano keyboard, that of two modal sets of keys, five black and seven white. By limiting each hand to one mode Farquhar created a kind of “double” keyboard, with many opportunities for colour through interaction between the two “modes”. Altogether, Farquhar had twenty-five such pieces published in 2003.

I remember at the NZSM concert being less than enamoured of these works, thinking then that some of the pieces seemed too skeletal and bloodless compared with the originals, especially the settings of Negro Spirituals – but this time round I thought them enchanting, the “double harmonied” effect producing an effect not unlike Benjamin Britten’s treatment of various English folk-songs. A second bracket of these pieces were inspired by diverse sources, among them a Chopin Mazurka, a Landler from a Mahler Symphony, and a theme from a Schubert piano sonata, among others. Again I thought more highly of these evocations this time round, especially enjoying “Clouds”, a Debussy-like recreation of stillness, stunningly effective in its freedom and sense of far-flung purpose.

Swan Songs is a collection of settings which examines feelings and attitudes relating to existence and death, ranging from fear and anxiety through bitter irony to philosophical acceptance, using texts from various sources. Written originally for baritone voice and guitar in 1983, the performances I’ve been able to document have been mostly by women, with only David Griffiths raising his voice for the baritonal record. Here, as in the NZSM Memorial concert, the singer is Jenny Wollerman, as dignified and eloquent in speech as she is in song when delivering the opening “The Silver Swan” by Orlando Gibbons (it’s unclear whether Gibbons himself wrote the song’s words or if they were penned by someone else). Throughout the cycle, Jane Curry’s beautiful guitar-playing provides the “other half” of a mellifluous partnership with both voice and guitar gorgeously captured by producer Wayne Laird’s microphones.

Along with reiterations of parts of Gibbons’ work and a kind of “Swan swan” tongue-twister, we’re treated to a setting by Farquhar of his own text “Anxieties and Hopes”, with guitarist and singer interspersing terse and urgent phrases of knotted-up fears and forebodings regarding the imminence of death. As well, we’re served up a setting of the well-known “Roasted Swan” sequence from “Carmina Burana”, Jenny Wollerman poignantly delineating the unfortunate bird’s fate on the roasting spit. As in the concert presentation I found the effect of these songs strangely moving, and beautifully realised by both musicians.

As for the “Ring Round the Moon” set of dances, I suspect that, if I had the chance, I would want to hear this music played on almost any combination of instruments, so very life-enhancing and instantly renewable are its energies and ambiences. I’m therefore delighted to have its beauties, charms and exhilarations served up via the combination of violin and piano, which, as I remember, brought the live concert to a high old state of excitement at the end! And there’s a lot to be said for the process of reinventing something in an unfamiliar format which one thinks one already knows well.

What comes across even more flavoursomely in this version are the music’s angularities – though popular dance-forms at the time, Farquhar’s genius was to impart the familiar rhythms and the easily accessible tunes with something individual and distinctive – and the many touches of piquant harmony, idiosyncratic trajectory and impish dovetailing of figuration between the two instruments mean that nothing is taken for granted. Martin Riseley and Jian Liu give masterly performances in this respect – listen, for example, to the ticking of the clock leading into the penultimate Waltz for a taste of these musicians’ strength of evocation! Only a slight rhythmic hesitation at a point midway through the finale denies this performance absolutely unreserved acclaim, but I’m still going to shout about it all from the rooftops, and challenge those people who think they “know” this music to try it in this guise and prepare to be astounded and delighted afresh.

A polished and scrupulously studied recital by male vocal quartet, Aurora IV

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Aurora IV: singing Renaissance to 20th century music
Toby Gee (alto counter-tenor), Richard Taylor (tenor), Julian Chu-Tan (tenor, Simon Christie (bass)

Music by Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson, Byrd, Jean Mouton, Richard Lloyd, Lasso, Ludovico da Viadano, Poulenc, Tallis, Andrew Smith

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 22 November 2017, 12:15 pm

I’m fairly sure that this was my first hearing of Aurora IV, a male vocal quartet whose repertoire stretches from the 16th to the 21st century, though I have long been familiar with Simon Christie’s voice and recall hearing Richard Taylor in other groups, particularly The Tudor Consort.

One of the characteristics of the recital was the choice of words and music from widely separate eras. Thus the opening piece was a two-year-old setting of a hymn by 13th century Icelandic poet Kolbeinn Tumason. The programme took the trouble of spelling the Icelandic names using authentic letters, using the voiced ‘þ’ and unvoiced ‘ð’ which in English, of course, are left undistinguished by ‘th’.*

The modern setting of Kolbeinn Tumason’s Heyr himna smiður by Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson made strong references to early Renaissance music, which these musically literate singers captured very convincingly; it provided, for me, a chance to be highly impressed by the effective blending and dynamic uniformity of their voices, without in the least avoiding illuminating particular voices where called for.

The first, ‘Kyrie eleison’, of three parts of Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices followed. Here bass Simon Christie as well as male alto Toby Gee, emerged prominently, though the two tenors were obviously important in filling the rich polyphony. Neither ‘Gloria’ nor ‘Credo’ were performed here, and the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Benedictus’ followed later: the former an interesting contrapuntal piece in which, again, the quality of each voice was conspicuous.

Tenor Richard Taylor seemed to take the lead at the start of the calmer, devotional ‘Benedictus’. The recital ended with the quartet singing the ‘Agnus Dei’, full of pain; till then I had not been particularly aware of second tenor, Julian Chu-Tan, as I was on the right while he faced left. But here I became more aware of him, slightly less robust that Taylor, but perhaps even more finely attuned to the character of the quartet as a whole which presented such a finely nuanced and spiritually persuasive presentation that it’s quite unreasonable to attempt to characterise individual voices.

To resume the order of the programme: Jean Mouton, one of the leading French composers of the 15th-16th centuries, his ‘Quis dabit oculis nostris’; in spite of my hesitation above, here were prominent and moving offerings by Taylor and Gee, in this beautiful lament on the death of his patron Anna of Brittany in 1514. It captured a uniquely idiomatic French style with integrity.

Then a modern English setting of a lyric by 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas, ‘Adoro te devote’. The composer is Richard Lloyd, composed, as with the Icelandic piece, in 2013, and similarly embracing an authentic Renaissance sound, though with a melodic and harmonic character that rather gives away it more recent origin.

The variety of spellings of Lassus’s name (Orlande de Lassus, Roland de Lassus, Orlando di Lasso, Orlandus Lassus and many others) arises partly from his peripatetic earlier life, born in the Netherlands – in Hainaut, now in Belgium – travelled and worked in France and Italy, but eventually settled in Munich; contemporary of Palestina, Tallis, Byrd….

His ‘Matona, mia caro’ lends itself to a variety of approaches, sometimes by women, sometimes by mixed voices, and by large choirs; these singers adopted a lively, crisp rendition that stressed its exuberance and light-heartedness, even music to dance to. I’ve heard it sung in very differently ways, sometimes like a religious motet; Aurora IV carried the folk, onomatopoeic character ‘don don don…’ excellently.

Ludovico da Viadano who composed ‘Exultate iusti in Domino’, the words from Psalm 33, might be a relatively obscure composer, but his motet seems to be widely popular judging by the number of performances to be found on YouTube. It’s spirited, almost dancing in its energy, starting and ending in triple time, while the main central part is in solid common time. Here was another delightful late Renaissance song that should be popular with young choirs.

Poulenc seemed an abnormal phenomenon in the midst of Renaissance or pseudo-Renaissance song. Two of his ‘Four Prayers’ (Quatre petites prières de Saint François d’Assise) served to sharpen musical receptivity, though presenting a spirit that seemed ambivalent, outside the mainstream. Toby Gee introduced them. They were composed at Poulenc’s Loire Valley refuge, Noizay, in 1948. ‘Tout puisant’ (‘All Powerful’), the second of them, in somewhat ardent, laudatory spirit, was in a distinctively 20th century idiom, faintly coloured by an earlier style, vaguely Renaissance     not easily definable     . The third Prayer is Seigneur, je vous en prie (‘Lord, I implore you’); it presented itself with more sobriety, in a minor key, with a striking passage from Richard Taylor towards the end.

One had been waiting for Tallis in this company. ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ fulfilled the Tallis need, with its restraint, its sombre, exquisite tone, seeming to suggest that Tallis had found a balance between the religious conflicts of the age (it was published in 1560, just after Elizabeth had come to the throne, meaning an abrupt shift from the ruthless Catholicism of Mary).  A beautiful performance of a beautiful motet.

Another recent Biblical setting by Norwegian composer Andrew Smith (born in Liverpool, moved to Norway in his teens) picked up on a pattern common in the recital. I didn’t record remarks about the version sung here, which was based on an anonymous 13th century English motet, of words from Isaiah. Presumably, the striking, spare harmonies, infusing the recent arrangement, reflected the original setting (or was it wholly recomposed, in a sympathetic style?).

And it ended with the Byrd’s Agnus Dei which I touched on above, concluding an intelligent, seriously well-studied and polished recital of four-part polyphony.

 

* I was familiar with these Icelandic letters since they were used for the same sounds in Anglo-Saxon, which was a compulsory element in university English language and literature studies in my day. A paper in Icelandic, including readings in the sagas, some originating in the 9th century, but recorded from the 13th century, was an optional paper at master’s level. Further trivia: the Sagas, e.g the Saga of the Volsungs, and the Poetic Edda, were important sources for Wagner in the Ring cycle.

Stroma’s “Spectral Electric” concert at City Art Gallery

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: “SPECTRAL ELECTRIC” CONCERT

Jonny Marks (throatsinger), Ed Allen (horn), Bridget Douglas (flutes), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Shannon Pittaway (bass trombone), Leonard Sakofsky and Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Michelle Velvin (harp), Catherine Norton (piano), Anna van der See and Alan Molina (violin), Andrew Thomson (viola), Ken Ichinose and Robert Ibell (cello), Matthew Cave (contrabass): conductor Mark Carter

Luigi Ceccarelli: Respiri (1999)
Kaija Saariaho: Ciel Etiole (1999)
Salvatore Sciarrino: Fauno che fischia a un Merlo (1980)
Kaija Saariaho: Cendres (1998)
Annea Lockwood: Immersion (2001)
Michael Norris: Sygyt (2017)

City Art Gallery, Wellington, 16 November 2017

Large and flexible contemporary music ensemble Stroma subdivided into smaller units for most of their “Spectral Electric” concert. Founder member Ed Allen, using a mechanically and electrically modified horn, got to demonstrate aspects of virtuosity not typically heard in his work with the NZSO and Orchestra Wellington. In Luigi Ceccarelli’s Respiri, there were raindrop staccatos, deep pedal notes and plaintive keening. Horn calls were echoed and blended, acoustic sounds extended and processed in a manner similar to “granular synthesis”. Moment to moment the performance was very well paced, but in the end I did not feel that the moments – intriguing as they were – coalesced to form a coherent piece.

No such problem with fellow Italian Salvatore Sciarrino’s Fauno che fischia a un Merlo. Bridget Douglas’ flute and Michelle Velvin’s harp created a consistent sound world of high register trills and tremolos, like a dialogue between two birds, punctuated by occasional glissandos and palm-slaps on the harp.

New Zealand born, U. S. resident composer Annea Lockwood is known for her installations featuring recordings of natural sounds (as in Sound Map of the Hudson River), and for activities involving the burning, burying or drowning of pianos. A title like Immersion, then, had to be a bit of a worry. As it turned out, duo percussionists Leonard Sakofsky and Thomas Guldborg showed it to be a well made, almost conventionally structured piece, exploiting two different kinds of sustain: bowed or rubbed metal (bowl, cymbals and tam-tam), and rapid marimba tremolandos. It built up to a powerful climax on mysterious deep marimba and roaring tam-tam, before returning to its rarefied beginning.

Finland’s Kaija Saariaho also utilised the delicate effects of bowed metal (cymbals, crotales). In her Ciel Etoile (“Starry Sky”), percussionists Sakofsky and Guldborg were joined by contrabassist Matthew Cave, who provided dark low notes and high harmonics. Pizzicatos marked a more rhythmic section, before the piece evaporated into the stillness with which it began.

Saariaho’s Cendres was more varied and driven. Subtle effects, such as Catherine Norton’s inside-piano, the fusing a piano tremolo with Ken Ichinose’s cello harmonics and with Bridget Douglas’ flute, were contrasted with more conventional instrumental flourishes. These made beautiful intrusions, but also diluted the work’ stylistic integrity a little.

Saariaho was somewhat on the edge of the Spectralist movement, which began in 1970s France. Ironically then, the most spectral work in the concert was composed in 2017 Wellington. The full Stroma ensemble under conductor Mark Carter joined the remarkable throatsinger Jonny Marks for Sygyt by Michael Norris. Wellingtonian Marks studied in China/Mongolia, and performs with the All Seeing Hand, and at the Pyramid Club.

As a score with wordless voice, Sygyt joins a select list of vocalises that includes concertos by Gliere, New Zealand’s Lyell Cresswell, and English quarter-tone pioneer John Foulds (Lyra Celtica), and the small-group Preludio a Colon by Mexican microtonalist Julian Carrillo. These all used the female voice. Sygyt requires Marks to traverse his commanding range, from the gravelly, visceral, sub-bass kargyraa style, to the exquisitely ethereal harmonics (all the way up to the fourteenth) of the eponymous sygyt. Norris (and Marks) seamlessly integrated these ethnically Mongolian and Tuvan ways of singing into the language of Western music – or perhaps what Western music might have been like if it had followed the trajectory implied by Renaissance just intonation and meantone, instead of reverting to the modified form of mediaeval Pythagorean tuning that is Equal Temperament. Rich, resonant chords are built from the harmonic series (a preoccupation of the Spectralists), and the series itself is employed as a melody on instruments and on the voice. In the last section melodic lines are created from selected disjunct notes of the series.

Marks used a microphone to achieve balance with the ensemble. But he didn’t need it to produce the sounds, as he demonstrated dramatically at the end, leaving the room to sing in the echoing, reverberant spaces of the City Gallery.

Stroma will be performing in the New Zealand Festival (Mechanical Ballet, 16 and 17 March 2018), and taking part in the 2018 Chamber Music New Zealand series with The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross (Wellington, 26 May).

Outstanding concert to mark disasters at Aberfan and the Pike River: music by Schubert and Karl Jenkins

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Youth Orchestra conducted by Simon Brew and Jonathan Griffith

Massed adult choir, children’s choir and screen projections
Solo voices: Jenny Wollerman (soprano) and James Clayton (baritone)
Solo instrumentalists: Ingrid Bauer (harp), Monique Lapins (violin), Buzz Newton (euphonium), Lavinnia Rae (cello)

Schubert: Symphony No 8 in B minor, ‘Unfinished’
Karl Jenkins: the Benedictus from The Armed Man and Cantata Memoria for the children of Aberfan

Michael Fowler Centre

Monday (Labour Day) 23 October. 2 pm

Concerts by the Wellington Youth Orchestra in the past, in my experience, have been poorly promoted and have played to an audience numbering just a few score.

This one was very different. Hand-bills had been thrust into the hand at most concerts in the previous fortnight and there were interviews on radio and in the press drawing attention to the tragedies that the orchestra had decided to commemorate.

The concert came about through the conjunction of separate elements. Last year a concert in New York had performed a cantata by Karl Jenkins commissioned by, among others, a Welsh Television channel, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster.

The result was Jenkins’s Cantata Memoria: for the children of Aberfan. It was performed by United States conductor Jonathan Griffith, the conductor of Distinguished Concerts International New York. Among the performers there was Wellington resident Wim Oosterhoff who conceived the idea of bringing the work to New Zealand. The project was a formidable one; Oosterhoff persuaded Griffith to come to Wellington to conduct the Wellington Youth Orchestra and a 300-strong choir that included 60 children, arrayed behind the orchestra.

It was to combine the work in memory of Aberfan, Cantata Memoria, with music to mark the Pike River disaster seven years ago: a movement, the Benedictus, from Jenkins’s choral work, The Armed Man, a mass for Peace (which had been written to mark the advent of the new millennium in 2000).

The Unfinished Symphony
The concert began however, with Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, chosen no doubt because of its focus on a work that the composer left incomplete; a composer whose life too was incomplete: it is hard to think of a composer, even among the many who have died young, of such genius that he would probably have produced the greatest music written since Beethoven, having already come close to that point when he died.

The symphony was conducted by the orchestra’s permanent conductor Simon Brew who had also rehearsed the Aberfan oratorio and the piece from The Armed Man.  It was a fine performance of the Schubert, one that could well have come from a totally professional orchestra, such was the remarkable elegance and pathos of the conception. And there was strikingly beautiful playing by violins, then cellos, horns, choruses of majestic trombones and each woodwind section in turn. The contrast in spirit between the sombre opening and the more sanguine Andante con moto second movement, marked a performance of real sophistication.

Benedictus for Pike River
Jonathan Griffith took over after the interval with the Benedictus from The Armed Man, employed sympathetically to commemorate the Pike River disaster. It is dominated by one of Jenkins’s most gorgeous creations, the solo cello episode which was played exquisitely by Lavinnia Rae; lovely children’s voices. The massive attack by brass and percussion towards the end had the required shock impact.

Curiously, unlike a reference in the Aberfan work later, no context was found to refer to the culpability of the Pike River mine owners whose guilt and prosecution seems quietly to have been forgotten.

The Cantata Memoria for Aberfan 
The Cantata Memoria was strikingly accompanied by images projected on a large screen behind the performers, and they were successfully related to the subject of the relevant passages. Rain rippled down a window to the delicate accompaniment of Ingrid Bauer’s harp; there were landscape scenes from the air which seemed to be a mixture of New Zealand and Wales.

The two soloists, James Clayton and Jenny Wollerman delivered important and moving passages; after the baritone’s grief-laden lament, the children’s choir (impressively, they sang their parts without the score) turned to face a photo of Aberfan engulfed by the collapsed mountain of mine tailings.

As choir members chanted the names of the victims of the catastrophe which were also projected on the screen one by one, with a pointed reference to a culpable National Coal Board (what about the private owners of the coal mines?). Later the euphonium, played by Buzz Newton, accompanied Clayton, in a telling sonic association, and the euphonium had several significant later episodes. Elsewhere, Monique Lapins’ violin led the emotional journey, along with the children’s choirs repeating the Agnus Dei, with Wollerman and Clayton repeating some of the most powerful words from the Latin Mass, ‘qui tollis peccata mundi’.

Then the Lacrymosa from the Requiem Mass, was accompanied alternately and impressively by euphonium and James Clayton’s voice, though the impact to my ears was not especially grief-laden.

Jenny Wollerman’s major part in the performance arrived with the bright, consoling words, ‘Did I hear a bird?’, the orchestra accompanying onomatopoeically as swans flew across the screen and that spirit was sustained as the two solo singers shared the singing of a Welsh folk song in a calm, reflective manner.

In a school playground, as children played hot-scotch and other games, harpist Ingrid Bauer accompanied, tapping the wood sounding board of her harp.

The concert attracted a good-sized audience, probably among the biggest I can recall for a WYO concert, and a standing ovation greeted the highly impressive performances by adult and children’s choirs, the Wellington Youth Orchestra, special involvement by singers Jenny Wollerman and James Clayton and by instrumentalists Ingrid Bauer, Monique Lapins, Buzz Newton and Lavinnia Rae; plus the thorough preparation and leadership by Simon Brew and Jonathan Griffith.

 

Maximum Minimalism – simple, state-of-the-art complexities from Stroma

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: “MAXIMUM MINIMALISM”

Bridget Douglas (flutes), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Reuben Chin (saxophone), Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion), Leonard Sakofsky (vibraphone), Emma Sayers (piano), Anna van der See , Rebecca Struthers (violins), Giles Francis (viola), Ken Ichinose(cello), Matthew Cave (contrabass), conducted by Mark Carter.

Steve Reich: Double Sextet (2007)

Alison Isadora: ALT (2017)

Julia Wolfe: Lick (1994)

Terry Riley: In C (1964)

City Gallery, Wellington,

Thursday, 19 October 2017

“Maximum Minimalism” was the wittily oxymoronic title for this concert by Wellington’s (New Zealand’s?) premiere contemporary music ensemble, Stroma. “Minimalism” was the name bestowed on a group of American composers who, in the 1960s, reacted against the forbidding complexity of atonal and serial music and began (largely independently of each other) employing the extended repetition of simple elements. Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley were the pioneers (La Monte Young is sometimes included, but this is confusing, because his work explores indefinitely sustained sounds, tuned to ratios from the harmonic series, rather than rhythmic repetitions).

Steve Reich preferred the term “process music”. His early compositions were as rigorous in their way as anything in the preceding period of modernism: tapes which went gradually out of phase (Come Out, 1966), or chirping chords progressively lengthened until they became an oceanic swell (Four Organs, 1970). Later, he started making composerly interventions into these strict procedures. In Double Sextet the forward driving momentum was interrupted by slower chordal sections, and the whole piece included a slow movement. The live instrumentalists (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano) played with precision against a recorded version of themselves (hence the “Double”), producing a dense, busy texture. This, and the interaction between Emma Sayers’ high piano and the piquancy of Leonard Sakofsky’s vibraphone, created an edgy, astringent world of sound.

If Double Sextet represented late minimalism, Terry Riley’s In C stood right at the beginning. His approach was very different from Reich’s. Here the complex counterpoint was the result, not of careful calculation, but of giving the performers freedom progress through a series of short melodic fragments, each at their own pace. I was impressed by how these classically trained musicians handled the improvisatory elements. While there was no particular overall shape, Stroma created the dynamic ebb and flow that could be expected from experienced improvisers. There were even segments of long notes where the tempo seemed to slow down, despite the persisting pulse of the high C’s on piano and percussion.

American cross-genre composer Julia Wolfe’s Lick began with short, arresting phrases before the syncopated rhythms kicked in. Reuben Chin’s saxophone and Nick Granville’s electric guitar contributed to the jazz-rock ambience. Again I felt the absence of a clear overall structure, but was engaged by the well-paced contrasts of texture and rhythm.

For me, the highlight of a Stroma concert is often the premiere of a New Zealand work, and this was no exception. Victoria University graduate Alison Isadora has spent much of her life in The Netherlands, but maintains her connections with New Zealand, and held the 2016-17 Lilburn House Residency. Many of her compositions have involved mixed media, often with a political undertone (“agitator-prop”, perhaps – one piece included an onstage washing machine). Her recent scores have been more introverted however, the string quartet ALT notably so. Ethereal and understated, ALT wove its texture almost exclusively from string harmonics, sometimes near the top of musical pitch-perception. But its quietly seductive surface was underpinned by a well-formed musical structure, propelled to a subtle climax by a gentle pulse in the cello, before resolving into a sustained sense of suspended time. It could almost have merited a place in Stroma’s next concert (“Spectral Electric”, City Gallery, Thursday 16 November), which will be a tribute to the Spectralist composers who base their sonorities on the harmonic series: this will feature a new concerto by Michael Norris for Wellington’s own, Mongolian trained, throatsinger, Jonny Marks.

China/New Zealand Ode to the Moon concert with a radiant Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

China Cultural Centre in New Zealand presents:
ODE TO THE MOON
Celebration of the 2017 Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival

Music by A.Ke-Jian, Zheng De-Ren, Ding Shan-De, David Farquhar,
Zhou Long, Bao Yuan-Kai, Huang Kiao Zhi, Anthony Ritchie,
Shi Yong-Kang and Zu Jian-Er

The Aroha Quartet
Haihong Lu and Ursula Evans (violins)
Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

St Andrew’s-on -The-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday October 1st, 2017

This was one of those concerts that, had I been an ordinary audience member I would have looked forward to immensely! However, being a reviewer and facing the prospect of commenting on a genre of music about which I knew very little, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation about what I might encounter! As it turned out I need not have worried, as the music written and arranged by the Chinese composers listed above possessed strength, energy and beauty as I could easily relate to – the sounds communicated to my ears something essentially meaningful, however “unfamiliar” the actual pieces themselves might have been.

Of course the music was refracted here through the medium of the string quartet, one wholly familiar and identifiable to my ears. Having said this, I was amazed by the extent to which the instrumental timbres were made by the players to sound exotic, especially those conjured up by the quartet’s leader, violinist Haihong Lu, whose instrument at times sounded thoroughly “folk-traditional”, not at all like the tones and timbres of a conventional violin.

The programme began with an adaptation of a folk-melody by composer A Ke-Jian and jazz musician Zheng De-Ren into a Song of Emancipation given the title “Fan Shen Dao Qing”, here a forthright and energetic statement of bold intent, its direct and vigorous manner not unlike that of Dvorak in some of his chamber pieces. The piece included a contrasting “slow” middle section, notable for the instruments’ used of “slides” between notes, creating to my ears a wondrously exotic character, while the return to a more vigorous manner included a lovely “dancing on tip-toe” effect, and a brief valedictory sequence with folksy violin to the fore once again, the whole concluding with an exciting stretto.

The life of Hua Yan-Jun, or “A-Bing” as he was known to his family, seems like the stuff of racy novels, albeit with a tragic, premature conclusion due to ill health. Regarded as one of the most important Chinese musicians of the 20th Century, his legacy includes a work for erhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle) “Reflection of the moon in the Er-quan spring”, which has become one of the most-loved pieces of Chinese music, arranged for many combinations of instruments. The Aroha played a quartet arrangment made by Ding Shan-De, a prominent composer and pianist who studied at the Paris Conservatoire and afterwards taught at the Shanghai Conservatory.

The arrangement by Ding Shan-De gave all of the instruments opportunities to express their characteristics, the violins playing very much in the Chinese style, a mournfully affecting, lump-in-the throat-inducing effect, as befitted the music’s nature, for me – a kind of lament / prayer / invocation expressing in music the beauties of the moon’s interaction with the waters of a spring amid life’s joys and tragedies.

Though whole worlds apart in style and content, David Farquhar’s “Ring Round the Moon” music seemed to fit like a glove in this company. As was the previous piece to its composer, Hua Yan-Jun, Farquhar’s is easily his best-known work, its genesis a commission by the New Zealand Players for their 1953 production of Jean Anouilh/Christopher Fry’s play “Ring Round the Moon”. Though what the quartet played for us was described as a “Waltz Suite” only two of the three movements could have been characterised thus, as the concluding “finale” was a boisterous galop! Each of the other movements was also “quick”, which denied us an effective contrast during the course of this otherwise attractive music – a pity we weren’t treated to at least one of the two beautiful slow waltzes from the full work. Incidentally I’ve not been able to find details of which movements Farquhar used in his versions of either the complete “Waltz Suite” or in his transcription for strings commissioned by Nova Strings in 1989.

Evoking reminiscences of Anatoly Liadov’s “Eight Russian Folk Songs”, the next item gave us a comparable overview of Chinese folk-music from the composer Zhou Long, in the form of his “Eight Chinese Folk Songs”, published in 2002. Having completed both traditional Chinese and formal music studies at Beijing University the composer then relocated to the United States, there continuing to write and arrange music in the traditional Chinese style for both folk- and western instruments, and promoting performances of this repertoire. He currently works as Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

I was taken by the emotional range of this music, almost Janacek-like in places in its direct, heartfelt use of the instruments’ full capacities, the opening of the first song “Lan hua-hua” demonstrating the sweep of feeling across vistas of anxiety, loneliness and grim determination, the original work concerning a girl escaping from an arranged marriage to be with the man she really loves.

Each of the song arrangements delivered a similar kind of strength and focus, while covering a wide range of human activity. The music abounded both in exquisite detailings as well as broader sweeping gestures – the second song, “Driving the mule team”, demonstrated, for instance, the composer’s exceptional ear for evocative rhythms in its combination of arco and pizzicato scoring, the resulting textures mimicking the sounds of the team’s harness bells.
The third song “The flowing stream” readily depicted a watery delicacy as a backdrop to what was originally a love song, while the fourth song “Jasmine flower”contrasted the rhythm of the dance with the performer’s awareness of the jasmine’s scent in the music’s more contemplative sequences. The remaining four songs continued with these kinds of evocations, mingling the ordinary with the fabulous in delightful and sometimes unexpected ways, as witness the hearty shouts of the quartet members-cum-herdsmen in the final jaunty “A horseherd’s mountain song”.

The programme’s second half again judiciously presented a New Zealand work amid music by Chinese composers, with the same resonantly positive outcomes. Three arrangements of traditional songs from various parts of China came first, followed by a depiction of an iconic New Zealand landscape via the music of Anthony Ritchie, a work evoking the countryside around Lake Wakatipu. The scheuled programme then concluded with an arrangement of music from a work called “The White-Haired Girl” – music originally cast in operatic form in 1945 before being reworked as a ballet, in which guise it has achieved the most popularity. This adaptation was the work of Shi Yong-Kang and Zhu Jian-Er, completed in 1972 at the time of American President Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking visit to China.

The three folk-song arrangements were played without a break – the first, poignantly called ‘Little Cabbage” actually enshrined a pitiable lament of a child (some sources say a girl, others a boy) who was ill-treated by her/his stepmother, and longed to be reunited with her/his mother. The music was appropriately wistful and played with great feeling (beautiful solos for both violin and viola) with an exquisite passage in thirds for both violins, with pizzicato accompaniment from the lower instruments. The second, “Camel Bell”, featured a great variety of exchange and dovetailing between the instruments to a jogtrot rhythm, in places freely modulating, the effect rather like a rapid-fire theme and variations treatment – as promised by the group’s second violinist, Ursula Evans, who introduced the group of pieces, we heard the actual “camel bell” at the end played softly on her instrument. The final song, “Happy Harvest” delivered what its title promised, after a “ready – steady – go!” kind of beginning – headlong tempi, real hoedown stuff, contrast brought about by an almost sentimental, more reflective section, in which the gestures reminded me of ritualistic happenings, with the instruments having turns to lead, and sliding notes of the most expressive kind figuring largely. A return to the stamping rhythms then brought about an appropriately bountiful conclusion!

Anthony Ritchie’s work “Whakatipua” came next, a single-movement work whose slow-fast-slow structure set the scene at the piece’s beginning – music of open, isolated spaces, with an almost lullabic character conveying a sense of nostalgia. Rather more matter-of-fact by contrast was a descending phrase heard at the outset and then returned to, suggesting a certain degree of depth and solidity, something enduring over time. A more active, urgent spirit awoke within the music, throbbing viola notes bringing ready responses from the other instruments, outdoor, angular figurations breathing copious draughts of fresh air, the sounds not unlike Douglas Lilburn’s “Drysdale” Overture in overall feeling. After the running exchanges between instruments had worked off some of the music’s energies, I liked the way in which everything gradually settled back into the serenity and spaciousness of the landscape, re-establishing a sense of isolation and distance (was that a hint of the erhu in one of Haihong Liu’s phrases?), the long-held notes at the end gradually dissolving into memory.

The final work on the programme carried with it something of a history, having been first set as an opera, then adapted to being a ballet, and in that form achieving classic status in China. This was a piece titled “The White-Haired Girl”, the story depicting the bravery and fortitude of a young girl who triumphs over adversity in difficult times. The music shared some thematic material with the folk-melody, “Little Cabbage”, which we heard earlier in the concert, and which link was demonstrated by one of the players.

A strong, forceful opening, achieved by vigorous bowing from the quartet members, opened the piece, followed almost immediately by a lyrical romantic theme, perhaps one which characterised the girl in the story, Xi’er. It was but one of many attractive, lyrical themes which provided a foil for subsequent sequences depicting conflict and struggle, the music making determined efforts to win through adversity through vigorous action – all very like Tchaikovsky in its heart-on-sleeve emotion, and requiring full-blooded responses from all four musicians! None were found wanting, as the piece took both players and audience through a gamut of feeling, the music freely ranging from hushed expectation to grand declamation at the piece’s end, rounded off by a brilliant running finish!

As if the players hadn’t given their all, they chose to entertain us with a stunningly brilliant encore which, to my ears sounded like gypsy music with eastern influences, something which I thought somebody like the Roumanian composer Enescu might have written, inspired by folk-themes depicting the utmost in visceral excitement. I subsequently found out that the piece (called Sa Li Ha, a girl’s name) was connected with Kazakhstan ethnic groups of the Xingjiang Uyghur Autonymous Region in northwest China. My informant told me I had been on the right track, but needed to go a little further eastwards! Still, the most important thing was what I thought of it all as music – to which I could reply unequivocally, “What a piece, and what a performance!”

Breaths of fresh air – the Imani Winds hit Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
IMANI WINDS
Valerie Coleman (flute) / Toyin Spellman-Diaz (oboe)
Mark Dover (clarinet) / Jeff Scott (horn) /Monica Ellis (bassoon)

VALERIE COLEMAN – Red Clay and Mississippi Delta
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (arr. Jonathan Russell) – Scheherazade
PIAZZOLLA (arr.Jeff Scott) – Contrabajissimo
NATALIE HUNT – Snapshots (CMNZ Commission)
PAQUITO D’RIVIERA – A Farewell Mambo
SIMON SHAHEEN (arr. Jeff Scott) – Dance Mediterranea

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Monday 26th September 2017

This was the New York-based ensemble Imani Winds’ first concert in New Zealand as part of a 10-venue tour organised by CMNZ. Every member of the group during their introductions for each of the concert’s items conveyed considerable pleasure and excitement at being part of this inaugural visit by the ensemble to New Zealand. They’ve come with something of a reputation for being innovative and adventurous in their programming, as well as devoting considerable energies in developing outreach and education programmes, one of which makes up part of their touring schedule in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, a special “Musical Journey Around the World” concert.

The ensemble has two recognised composers in its ranks, flutist Valerie Coleman and horn-player Jeff Scott, both of whose efforts figured on this evening’s programme, an original work by Valerie Coleman, “Red Clay and Mississippi Delta”, and two arrangements by Jeff Scott, firstly of Astor Piazzolla’s “Contrabajissimo” (originally a work for double-bass and jazz ensemble, here recast for bassoon and winds), and then of Simon Shaleen’s “Dance Mediterranea”. Whether originally written for an ensemble featuring the oud, a short-necked lute-like instrument, Middle-Eastern in origin, which Shaheen learned to play in his youth, or for the violin (an instrument the composer later took up as well), it’s unclear – Scott’s arrangement here gives the opening solo passage to the flute, before sharing the material between the other instruments – I particularly liked the oboe’s exotic-sounding pitch-bending sequence at one point in the dance.

Another avowed commitment of the ensemble’s is to new music, of particular interest being works by composers of diverse backgrounds, part of Imani’s interest in bringing together European, American, African and Latin music traditions. In keeping with this philosophy the ensemble programmed a new work by New Zealand composer Natalie Hunt, a commission by Professor Jack Richards – itself something of a cross-cultural work, a three-part piece called “Snapshots” containing impressions of the composer’s first visit to Africa.

Mention must be made of a curiosity which the Imanis served up for us – composer/arranger and horn player Jeff Scott during the course of the evening had bemoaned to us the fact that the wind ensemble repertoire simply couldn’t compare with that for string ensembles in terms of quality and variety, and that ensembles therefore had turned to arrangements for winds of various pieces for “other” instruments, an example being an “arrangement” of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” for winds by a London-based clarinettist, conductor, composer and arranger Jonathan Russell. From the point of view of cleverness of adaptation, the exercise would, for some, have had its merits and its interest, but in my opinion the adaptation all but destroyed the original work through extensive cutting of the material, removing much of the narrative aspect and severely reducing the dramatic range and emotional scope of the music, and its ability to deliver. There must be any number of shorter pieces “out there” (some by Rimsky himself, come to think of it), which could have served the purpose just as well, and able to have been played more-or-less in full, rather than bowdlerised so savagely, as here. Yes, I’m missing the point of the exercise, I know – but even despite the presence of a few incidental delights of adaptation, I didn’t REALLY enjoy hearing one of my favourite pieces of orchestral music mutilated thus in public!

Enough of my tub-thumping! – time to turn to the other individual pieces in the concert! The Imanis began with the wind version of a hiss and a roar, Valerie Coleman’s work, “Red Clay and Mississippi Delta” opening with wild, raunchy declamations which then settled into a swinging, sultry rhythm, one that allowed lots of melismatic detailings within a relaxed pulse. There were forthright virtuoso clarinet irruptions, rapidly-fingered and skilfully-tongued bassoon passages, and numerous sly detailings from flute, oboe and horn, all with distinctive and ear-catching instrumental timbres. We were even invited to join in at one stage of the piece during a finger-clicking sequence, the composer turning to us and saying “You can help!” as the music insinuated its way forwards, our “cool” aspect by turns backed up with atmospheric solos, and colourfully decorated by sequences of riotous, swirling activity.

Astor Piazzolla’s “Contrabajissimo” was introduced by horn player Jeff Scott who had arranged the piece for wind quintet. He outlined the piece’s original genesis for us, how Piazzolla had been asked by the bass player in his quintet to write a piece that, for a change, gave his instrument some of the “limelight” instead of being relegated to its usual accompanying role, and how the composer wrote a work that he came to regard as his favourite – in fact “Contrabajissimo” was the only music played at the composer’s funeral! There was no doubt, Scott told us, that the only wind instrument capable of doing a string bass justice was the bassoon! Judging from the opening bars alone, with the bassoon immediately taking the soloist’s role in a kind of free-ranging dialogue with the clarinet, the work would have taxed Piazzolla’s double-bass player to the utmost! The dance that followed slyly and suggestively pushed the syncopated rhythms along and encouraged more and more excitement until the flute spearheaded a rallying call to which everyone was suddenly listening, and wanting to contribute. When the mischievous rhythms resumed I like the way the bassoon “spoke” to the rest of the ensemble via the player, Monica Ellis, who pointed her instrument every which way when she played her solos, like someone obviously wanting their voice to be heard, be it in tones of poetic wistfulness or with sharp bursts or assertive vigour!

We then heard the music of New Zealand composer Natalie Hunt, winner of the NZSO/Todd Foundation Young Composer Award in 2009, and the recipient of various commissions from groups such as the New Zealand String Quartet and The Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson. This was a work called “Snapshots”, commissioned by CMNZ for the Imani’s New Zealand tour, and written by the composer while travelling through Africa last year. In three parts, each of the individual pieces sought to capture the aspect and mood of a specific place, the first, Namib, evoking for us the Namibian Desert, where, in the composer’s words, “the landscape creeps and morphs, the rocks glow in the evening sun, and the night sky is brilliantly clear”. This first piece was, for me, the most focused of the three, its precision of detail and beautifully-contoured shape placing us vividly in a specific and spell-binding soundscape. The other two pieces seemed not quite on this level of focus, with details (the “extra” instruments) seeming to me appropriately ambient, but not having the same instinctive surety of placement I experienced throughout the opening piece.

In “Mosi-oya-Tunya” (presumably Swahili for “The Smoke Which Thunders”, the African name for the Victoria Falls) we heard the exotic sounds of the “thunder drum” (a brightly-decorated drum with a kind of rachet-tail, able to make a surprising amount of deep noise) and the “rain stick” (a hollow tube which contains rice or some such grain, or else small stones, and which can be turned on its end or otherwise moved to produce a kind of white ambient noise) adding their disparate tones to the ensemble’s wind roulades and the oboe’s splendidly isolated solo line – something of the awe and mystery of the place was conveyed to us by the ensemble, despite moments where I thought the players of the “special” instruments seemed a little uncertain of their dynamics or durations.

The third part, “Delta Dreams” I thought a kind of African “road music” , going somewhere in an engaging fashion, via syncopated rhythms and angular melodies. Jeff Scott forwent his horn in this movement to “play” a wine glass, supporting ostinati by clarinet and oboe, as the flute improvised, the players rolling the sounds jazzily and euphorically towards a “point” where the experience seemed to breast a peak and die away, with only the sound of the thunder drum left, a kind of resonance of departure, again I thought, a detail that would be stronger with some “firming up” of its actual place in the scheme of things.

Clarinettist Mark Dover described the next piece, “A Farewell Mambo (to Willy)” by Pasquito D’Riviera, as a kind of “melting-pot” of local ethnic and established classical traditions. D’Riviera is both a jazz- and Latin-music-performer (his autobiography sports the engaging title, “My Sax Life”) and his piece reflected these disparate, yet interactive strands of his creativity – I was reminded of Hindemith’s music in places by the droll, quasi-academism of some of the instrumental interactions within the framework of those mambo rhythms. The music allowed the instrumental timbres to ring out in places – we heard things like piccolo and clarinet arguing over primacy before the latter plunged into a riff-like kind of apoplexy, reducing the basssoon and horn to a kind of awed accompanying ostinato. The music resembled to my ears interaction between strong-willed individuals vying for their voices to be heard in getting across a particular aspect of the eponymous tribute “to Willy” (Guillermo Alvarez Guedes, a singer, stand-up comedian and record procducer, and obviously an iconic figure in the world of Latin American culture).

Concluding the programmed part of the concert was the aforementioned work “Dance Mediterranea”, by Palestinian-born American composer Simon Shaheen, in an arrangement by Jeff Scott for wind quintet. Shaheen himself plays the violin on a Facebook clip of a version of the “Dance Mediterranea”, showing the violin taking the lead in the work’s introduction, which was here given to the solo flute. Shaheen wanted a synthesis of styles from different parts of the Mediterranean world, hence the piece’s title (something of an “Arab Spring” in music!). After a sultry, evocative opening, the music gathered momentum and brought the other instruments into the picture, to sometimes volatile effect – there are lines with bending pitches, swirling melismas, whispered concourses and sudden sforzandi – these wild expressions of freedom came together most excitingly in a kind of amalgam of riotous energies at the piece’s conclusion.

We were sent home with the strains of a Negro Spiritual resounding in our ears, “Go, tell it on the mountain”, the music laid back at its very beginning, touching on different stylish references along the way (even Klezmer-like at one point), and then with everybody increasingly “playing out” towards the culminative “Yes, Lord! Alleluiah!” kind of gesture, without which salvation might not seem assured! Here, there was simply no doubt!