Tag: contemporary music

Acclamation for Auckland Viva Voce’s remarkable performance of enthralling work on pilgrimage: Camino de Santiago de Compostela

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Viva Voce, conducted by John Rosser

Joby Talbot: Path of Miracles

St. Peter’s Church, Willis Street

Sunday, 4 June 2017, 4.30pm

The programme’’s sub-title for the work was “Joby Talbot’s stunning choral depiction of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage.”  The blurb was right; this was a truly remarkable work, of just over an hour’s almost constant unaccompanied singing (apart from the periodic use of 8 traditional small cymbals,or crotales), with no applause until the end.

Talbot is a 46-year-old British composer who has written in many genres, including opera and ballet, and for film and television.  This work was composed in 2005, a setting of a commissioned text from Robert Dickinson.  Although the printed programme has a photograph and note about Talbot, there is nothing about the poet, but John Rosser did tell us a little about him in his excellent introductory remarks.  The text is quite astonishing, not only for the fact that 7 different languages are used.  Rosser believes that the three performances by the choir (Auckland [the choir’s home city] and Napier before this one) are the first in the southern hemisphere.

Wikipedia gives little information about Dickinson, who is a British novelist.  The work traces both the story of St. James, who tradition says returned from martyrdom in Jerusalem to Galicia where he had previously preached, and that of walkers on the renowned (and now revived) walk to Santiago de Compostela, where the martyr’s bones were found 800 years later.  Dickinson created a brilliant text, printed in full in the programme – though not always easy to follow, due to the variety of languages, and much repetition, particularly of refrains.

Rosser informed us that there are now approximately a quarter of a million people walking the Camino each year; I know people who have done it, and I have stayed in an ancient village in southern France that was on one of the many routes through that part of the country, and bore on a wall the scallop shell symbol of the pilgrimage.

The men of the choir entered the church first, vocalising on low notes.  They walked to the front and stood in a circle, round a circle of stones.  The notes very gradually rose in pitch until they became high, reaching a scream as the women joined in from the back of the church, and the cymbals joined in.

The women advanced up the church, led by a solo voice.  The singing at this stage was quite loud, but dynamics varied throughout the work   The voices were very fine, and the resonance superb.  All were very precise both musically and in incisive enunciation of all the languages, in this sometimes intricate work.  The musical style in this early part was medieval. This first part was entitled Roncesvalles, the name of the place in northern Spain where the Camino starts, though many started in times past in southern France.  As the pilgrimage progresses, marked by the choir by numerous episodes of walking slowly around the church and into different positions on the platform.  The other parts are named Burgos, Leon and Santiago.

Walking and repositioning were not the only choreographed parts of the performance; part way through the first section the choir began swaying.  Then a bass with a very deep, fruity voice intoned from the pulpit while the choir sang pianissimo.  That was followed by a soprano and tenor duet.  The use of the cymbals was quite beautiful here.

In the second section there was a change to a modern style of composition.  The mood here was more conversational, as though the pilgrims were recounting to each other some of the trials of the journey (apparently ‘the English steal’), the tone being more mellow, with a prayerful quality.  Some of the more ghoulish sections of text conveyed a desolate sound, through both vocal tone and the intervals employed.

A reduced choir sang some of the text, and this produced an effective contrast.  Louder passages followed towards the end of the Burgos section and the deep bass made further utterances.

The women began the Leon movement (of which there was plenty) at the back of the church, intoning much repetition of the opening refrain.  Then the men, describing the land they walked through, sang loudly.  Rich harmony ended this section, at the words ‘We pause, as at the heart of a sun that dazzles and does not burn.’  Here as elsewhere there was consistent tone and pronunciation, and the blend was superb.

In Santiago there was more virtuosic singing  All of it was dynamically interesting and varied.  The first passage in Latin sounded like a chant, but was sung in harmony.  With the concluding words the choir faced and looked directly at the audience, singing ‘Holy St James, great St James, God help us now and evermore.’  The choir walked off, each picking up a stone from the stone circle and placing it with the others in a cairn at the foot of the platform.  They continued singing the last passages from memory, fading as they made a wonderful conclusion to the work as they continued to walk into the porch, still singing.

This was a real choir, unlike TV’s ‘Naked Choir’ contest, of which John Rosser is a judge.  What with mikes and costumes, they are not as naked as Viva Voce, which really does rely solely on its voices.

The choir returned to repeated enthusiastic acclamation, some in the audience rising to their feet in tribute to this outstanding and remarkable performance of this complex but enthralling work, which my mere words cannot hope to adequately describe.  This was a unique experience.

For a very cold late Sunday afternoon, there was quite a sizeable audience in the church.  There was some heating on, but it was insufficient on such a cold day.

 

Baroque Voices pay rich homage to NZ “Masters”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices presents:
Alleluia: a newë work! – “Memories of our Masters”

Music inspired by medieval/ancient songs or texts
by Anon, Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay –
Music by Jack Body, Ross Harris, and David Farquhar,
and some of their past students – Helen Bowater, Alison Isadora,
John Psathas, Pepe Becker, Mark Smythe, Michael Norris, and Ewan Clark

Baroque Voices: Pepe Becker (director), Jane McKinlay, Anna Sedcole, Katherine Hodge, Phillip Collins, Kenneth Trass, Jeffrey Chang, Timothy Hurd

Adam Concert Room, NZSM, Kelburn

Sunday, 28th May 2017

This concert was the eighth in the “Alleluia: a newë work” series by Baroque Voices, the idea being, in director Pepe Becker’s own words, to “present works from the early music era alongside modern compositions”, an undertaking which the group first instigated as long ago as 1995. Though the presentations have been consistent in their overall approach, the ensemble has managed to maintain an ever-fascinating and invariably rewarding range of repertoire for the delight of audiences over the duration, this latest undertaking being no exception.

In Pepe Becker’s programme note, she gave a brief resume of the group’s characteristic presentation aims and explorations, by way of reminding us of music’s capacities for both connectiveness and renewal in remarking on audience responses to what she calls “ageless connection” of old and new music in Baroque Voices’ past concerts.

Simply looking over the list of instrumental resources used at various times by a vocal group suggested to me the omniverous inclinations of its performing philosophy! The list’s diversity (hurdy-gurdy, didgeridoo, taonga puoro, electric guitar!) reminded me of similarly far-flung impulses expressed recently in her “Lilburn Lecture” by New Zealand composer Jenny McLeod, talking with her audience about what constituted her “creative heritage”. For her, it was practically a case of “anything goes!”, a kind of “all experience is valid” way of working, a statement of unique truth. If not from exactly the same cloth, the work of Baroque Voices demonstrates a similarly exploratory set of inclinations, a “this is who we are” way of performing and communicating.

Here in tonight’s concert were examples of most of the above performance principles – settings by contemporary and slightly older composers inspired by and set alongside “ancient” works, the latter from sources as diverse as Medieval Europe and 8th Century Japan, as well as creative responses to “modern” works (twentieth century poetry). While most of the works were “a capella” , two were piano-accompanied, and one was flavoured by strains from medieval instruments.

Where the concert’s “official record” above requires further elaboration is in the human inter-connectiveness of it all, a quality which Pepe Becker took some pains to set out in her written notes. It suggests a remarkable collegial quality among local (New Zealand) composers, one I’ve heard remarked upon in the past by people visiting this country, a willingness to interact, with all the teaching and learning that the process implies.

Of course there are and have been notable exceptions, here and there – but the rule is reflected in the willingness and readiness of the concert’s younger composers to pay tribute through their music to their teachers and colleagues, who were mentors and friends. One of the “teachers”, Ross Harris, was quoted as saying that “In the 80s with Jack (Body) and David (Farquhar) teaching…….it was a very good time to be a composition student”. Elsewhere, other tributes were paid to “the inimitable Jack”, as well as to Ross Harris himself.

There were too many “moments per minute” throughout the evening’s music-making for a reviewer to try and do them all full justice – enough for my descriptions to try and convey something of the music’s expressive range in tandem with the performers’ manifest skills and focused intensities. The concert’s first half seemed to me to have a slightly “older” feel, due, perhaps to a predominance of works from the “teachers” and “mentors”, as well as music from two of the earliest “named” composers featured on the programme, de Machaut and Dufay. After that, by and large, it was the pupils’ turn to pay their deeply-felt homages to the teachers.What better way to begin the evening than with a spirited and deeply-rooted rendition of the 15th Century carol Alleluia: a newë work! , a performance which combined beauty and earthiness in its purity of sound and heartfelt vocal energies.

Those same qualities informed the infectious Nowell: sing we, also from the 15th Century, with the vocal concertino/ripieno contrasts between smaller and larger groups characterfully differentiated in both dynamic and tonal variation. The group chose to bracket with this Jack Body’s Nowell in the Lithuanian Manner (1995), featuring four singers in pairs placed diagonally across the platform, singing “phrase-and-answer” in intervals of a second, the voices “leapfrogging” one another (to use the composer’s expression) most effectively.

Guillaume de Machaut’s Kyrie from La Messe de Nostre Dame was sung most sonorously and beautifully by the full ensemble, the lines concerning themselves for most of their contourings with the opening syllables of the words KY-rie and CHRI-ste, resolving each word’s remainder only towards the ends of the sequences – an extraordinary “suspended” effect, generating some tension as one waited for each contouring’s resolution, thus heightening the pleadings for “Mercy”.

This was followed by Pepe Becker’s own composition, Mass of the False Relation,  which I’d heard before, though not in such a context – the opening “Kyrie” featured two voices set at an interval of a second , before the textures were opened, to pleading and beseeching effect. The sequence had something of a “lyke-wake dirge” atmosphere, unsettling and unpeaceful, with high soprano lines effectively putting one in mind of a cry for mercy from an abyss! A calmer, more circumspect “Christe” gathered increasing emotional momentum, before reverting to a differently constituted “Kyrie” to finish, the singers clustering their lines together with great aplomb and considerable emotional focus – brief, but effective!

Relief of sorts was afforded by the beautiful hymn Ave Maris Stella, sung in its original unision throughout verses 1 and 3, but adopting Guillaume Dufay’s setting for the second verse in which the women’s voices break into three parts and beautifully and gracefully explore the firmament. Composer Ross Harris’s response to the original chant followed, originally a 2009 commission by Baroque Voices, here making a welcome and sonorous reappearance.

A striking opening featured a tenor solo soaring above a pedal-point, joined by other individual lines awakening their own impulses to soar, float and beautifully elaborate on the original. Thanks to the intensity and focus of the performance’s individual voice-strands, I felt a real sense of those lines filling their own spaces, but also wrapping their resonances around a kind of central impulse of thought and intention as the work unfolded.

The ensemble at Virgo singularis (Virgin all excelling), generated a tremendous upsurging of intensity, to dramatic, scalp-prickling effect, as did the salutations to the Trinity of the last verse, particularly those invocations to Spiritui Sancto (the Holy Spirit), a display of visceral intensity which contrasted tellingly with the hushed resignation and peace of all things at the final reiteration of the words Ave Maris Stella.

Further back in “teacherdom” than either Jack Body or Ross Harris was David Farquhar, whose 1990 setting of a characteristically quirky set of verses no one and anyone by American poet ee cummings was commissioned and first peformed by Jones and Co., the Australian vocal ensemble. Farquhar described cummings punctuation-less (!) poetry as “slow-moving and lyrical” and “ideal for singing”, and his own quirkily responsive set of creative impulses proved a fitting foil for the poet’s idiosyncrasies of expression.

The “once upon a time” introduction floated the words “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, with a dancing wordless rhythm augmenting the poet’s metre at “he sang his didn’t he danced his did”. Then there were gorgeous harmonies at “she laughed his joy she cried his grief”, and lovely differentiations of rhythm with the different groupings of “sequence” words, such as “sleep wake hope and then”, which danced; and “stars rain sun moon” which was spaced-out, the singers creating limpid pools of light floating over deeper-hued pedal points.

The somewhat matter-of-fact “one day anyone died I guess” began as something angular and dry, which slowly amplified into something more heroic and deeply felt, Baroque Voices splendidly resonating the lines “no one and anyone earth by april” with great stepwise progressions of singing. I loved the crepuscular feeling evoked towards the end, with the ensemble gorgeously resonating evening bells at “women and men (both dong and ding)”, etching detail along the lines to beguiling effect – definitely a work I would like to hear performed again, sometime!

Very different to the featherlight play of ee cummings word-music was Pepe Becker’s heartfelt, almost Tristanesque text for her 2010 work Remembering Now – “a reflection upon love and loss – personal and universal”. Two singers performed the work alongside a piano with its sustaining pedal activated, the instrument thus providing a sympathetic resonance activated by the sung tones, especially when the dynamic levels began to rise. The vocal lines of the singers had, to my ears, a pronounced medieval intertwining in places, with elsewhere, some great vocal leaps to characterise the extremes of emotion – “Eternal depth, exquisite pain, secret union, keep me safe”, and some tightly-woven intervals reflecting in certain places the pain of loss and the jarring tensions of uncertainty.

Known more of late as a film composer, Ewan Clark had previously written works in a wide range of genres, among which was this ballad-like setting of James K.Baxter’s poem Never no more, dating from 2007. With voices accompanied by two pianos, the music and words created a flow of detailed and varied remembrance, a plainer-spoken New Zealander’s version of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” with its aching lament for lost youth, the music here responsive to incident and ever-ready to wrap its evocations of “golden lads and lasses” in swathes of deep mourning and oblivion. Particularly desolate was the final “never no more never no more”, playing out to something hollow and empty.

Part Two of the concert began with rather more sardonic, grim-humoured tones, an energetic dance of death Ad mortem festinamus, a 14th Century composition linked to the time of the Black Death, and expressing fatalistic sentiments very much in accord with what must have been an everyday experience for many people. The dotted dance-rhythms had a kind of horrid glee, allied to an almost festive quality enhanced by the ambient instrumentations, a dulcian, drum and “shruti box”, the latter a kind of harmonium which supplied a drone, altogether creating a wry ritualistic statement.

Ritual of a different kind coloured the work of Michael Norris, a setting of a poem by one Pierre Reverdy, described by the composer as ‘a lesser-known French proto-surrealist’, whose creative work involved a “sublime simplicity of reality”, and whose words suggest a kind of transcendence of substance towards abstraction – for Norris, a process suggesting “an inevitable movement from presence to absence”, very much an underlying theme of this concert (for which this work was written).

To the names that have left is a line from the poem “The traits of the sky” which Norris used as his piece’s title, a reference to whom the composer described as “some important men in my life who left us in the last few years”. It was obviously a piece which suggested feelings of loss in its juxtapositioning of long-held tones and sudden, sharply-etched irruptions of either violent noise or silence – characterisations of the unexpected, either explosive or insinuating. We heard sliding (glissando) notes, voices overlapping, unison and harmonies, some magnificently rich modulations, then textures cut to pieces by confrontational thrusts. There were yelps, breathings, elongated word pronunciations, almost didgerie-doo-like textures. Eventually the voices seemed to gather girth and vocalise as with long slow breaths, until we became aware of the “dying fall” of the lines, a sense of something “running down” or drifting away. Women’s voices imitated high, sustained bird-calls (farewells?) after which the singers put their hands over their mouths to mute their tones at the end.

An anonymous 15th Century English Carol Lully, lullay: I saw – was next, featuring two groups of two voices placed opposite one another, immediately sounded its time, helped by some lovely singing, mostly interactive of phrasing, greating a gorgeous effect. The same text was then re-enacted in a work by John Psathas, entitled Baw my barne, an old favourite of Baroque Voices, having been commissioned and premiered by the group in its first “a newë work!” concert in November of 1995. Beginning with richly-wrought note-clusters over which the soprano soloist’s voice hovered, the clustered lines were reiterated one-by-one, depicting in sound a kind of burgeoning of motherly bliss with a newborn allied to a sense of “a blissful burd, a blossom bright” as creation wondered at the Saviour’s coming.

Helen Bowater’s setting of a Japanese poem from antiquity (found in an 8th-9th Century AD collection of Japanese poetry “Man’yoshu”) hoshi no hayashi (in the forest of stars) gave us some gorgeous word-painting, with some particularly evocative, almost other-worldly singing from Pepe Becker – as with the poetry, the impression of the music was a kind of “stream of consciousness” which belied the precision of the craftsmanship to remarkable effect. Something of the same spontaneous and on-going outpouring of tones characterised Jack Body’s fifth Lullaby from the set of Five Lullabies, a work which was first performed in full by the Tudor Consort. Having watched the performance by Baroque Voices on You Tube given at Jack Body’s memorial service, I thought this evening’s performance was less contained and reverential, more flowing and intense, with a more clearly-delineated shape of rise and fall – again, very beautiful, with the dreaming especially vivid.

I liked Eve de Castro-Robinson’s comment, quoted, and indeed affirmed, by Alison Isadora, the composer of the programme’s penultimate work Blessing (in memoriam Jack Body), regarding how memorial pieces often write themselves. Isadora described her work on this occasion as “the output of a grieving process”, by way of expressing her tribute to Jack in three languages, plus the translations, Maori, Latin and English. After expressing Maori, Latin and English texts in turn, the piece combined elements of all three blessings, in places bringing out contrasts whose different characters produced extraordinary sounds – insistent lower voices setting the Latin plainsong against the bell-like women’s voices with their Taize chant, and colouring the textures differently as the music moved forwards, the differently-constituted textures surging and breaking like ocean waves, before the sopranos guided the intensities towards gentler cadences and brought the music to a close.

A kind of “return to our lives” was in order at the point of conclusion, here supplied by Mark Smythe’s 2007 Alleluia, one which Pepe Becker described as a “signature tune” for Baroque Voices, while very much a stratospheric soprano display piece, with both singers, Pepe and Jane McKinlay in sure touch, even at the end of a long and demanding concert, resounding their “Alleluias” as steadily and ambiently as ever. Very great credit to the whole ensemble, both for the works which have been encouraged into “being”, and for the group’s inspired performances of them.

“Firebird” from Orchestra Wellington an incendiary experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.1 in C Major Op.21
JOHN ELMSLY – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
STRAVINSKY – The Firebird – (Ballet Suite 1911 – arranged by Jonathan McPhee)

Jun Hong Loh (violin)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 14th May, 2017

This was, in this best of all possible worlds, the best possible start to Orchestra Wellington’s “The Impresario” season, a beautifully-devised concert whose centrepiece was Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 Ballet “The Firebird”. This piece, commissioned by the Russian-born artistic entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in Paris, began a collaboration between composer and impresario which was to produce three of the most famous ballets of the 20th century, the other two being “Petrushka” and “Le Sacre du Printemps” – both, incidentally, to be performed by Orchestra Wellington as well, during the year.

This concert had other unities, however, which brought the evening’s other pieces into play, the first being the direct influence of the master-pupil relationship on the works we heard. In the case of “Firebird” the pupil was Stravinsky and the master was his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Renowned as one of the great orchestrators, the latter’s influence upon Stravinsky’s score was everywhere apparent, with the “pupil” obviously keen to exhibit his inventive prowess in that aspect of creation. In later years Stravinsky was to deride his own youthful largesse, calling his orchestrations “wasteful”, and, in the various “suites” for concert purposes that he compiled, significantly “paring down” the scoring.

Joining this work on the programme were two others, one by Beethoven and the other by New Zealand composer John Elmsly. Beethoven was represented by his First Symphony, a work which owed a great deal to the influence of HIS teacher, Joseph Haydn, in terms of the music’s irrepressible energy and adventuresome spirit. The words of Count Waldstein – that Beethoven would “receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn’s hands” were certainly made flesh in this symphony, even if the implication of the Count’s remark seemed to play down Haydn’s influence upon the young composer compared with Mozart’s. Certainly the most startling of the music’s features – its “wrong key” opening on wind instruments, its dynamic, scherzo-like Minuet and its teasingly playful finale – are indubitably Haydnesque touches.

As for John Elmsly’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, here was music by a seasoned composer who presently enjoys a reputation second to none in this country as a teacher of composition at the School of Music, at Auckland University. The process of the master-pupil relationship was thus presented here in reverse, with Elmsly’s music a focal point for what his students past and present could aspire towards in their work and creative thinking.

Another commonality shared by two of the three pieces was one of “breaking ground” – neither Beethoven nor Stravinsky had produced anything up to that time as significant or self-proclaiming as each of their works – Beethoven, his first symphony, and Stravinsky, his first full-scale ballet. Each was announcing to his respective world that he had truly “arrived” as a creative artist – and in each case the world sat up and took notice. Critical reaction to Beethoven’s work was invariably positive, with the words “masterpiece” and “originality” figuring prominently, though one critic complained of hearing “too much wind”, a remark the composer obviously reacted to strongly, as he increased the incidence of writing for winds in his Second Symphony!

Stravinsky’s work, according to dancer Tamara Karsavina, who danced the title role, met with what she called a “crescendo” of success, with both public acclaim and critical reaction at one – for one critic, the “shimmering web of the orchestra” reflected the “fantastic” stage-setting and the brilliant dancing. “Mark him well,” Diaghilev was reputed to have told his leading dancer – “he is a man on the eve of celebrity”. Another critic hailed Stravinsky as “the legitimate heir to the “Mighty Handful” – that group of Russian nationalist composers which included the composer’s former teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov.

What impressed most regarding the performance of the Beethoven Symphony we heard was its sheer focus, conductor Marc Taddei inspiring his players to produce direct, pin-pointed energies that brought out the essential “character” of each of the pieces movements. Everything was very up-front with clearly-terraced dynamics, the vigorous movements especially fast and challenging, and played with terrific point.

The timpani and brass were superb, making their presence felt throughout, and bringing their importance into prominence, rather than seeming merely like “extra reinforcements” as is sometimes the case. For some sequences the tempi were faster than I would have wanted – some passages, for me, took on a certain relentless aspect – but conductor and orchestra nevertheless made them work brilliantly. And the slow movement had a dance-like quality, but a singing kind of dancing! – the strings played their fugato-like passages as beautifully and crisply as one would want. The timpani came into its own during the scherzo-like Minuet, and then the Finale made us firstly hold our breath at the opening, with the “teasing” aspect of the strings’ scale passages, and then smile at the chattering, garrulous strings-and-winds exchanges elsewhere.

John Elmsly’s new Violin Concerto (2016-17) was given a spacious, free-spirited reading by the gifted Jun Hong Low, winner of the 2016 Gisborne International Music Competition. Certain parts of this work I loved unreservedly, practically the whole of the first movement, whose spacious, out-of-doors feeling was mirrored by the soloist, with his leaping and arching phrases, the music in places silky and sensuous (a quality that really appealed to me) and then leavened in other places by some playful vigour. But the music’s “lightness and delicacy” (to quote the programme note) with ambiences given breadth and depth by bell-chime sounds made the listening experience for me at once airborne and profound. The chimes sounded as if they could have been a kind of call to observance, something ritualistic and exotic and resonant.

The other two movements I enjoyed, but not as wholeheartedly – I didn’t feel a comparable oneness regarding the contributions of either the drum kit in the second movement or the bongo drums in the third, despite Brent Stewart’s advocacy in both cases. I’m sorry to say that I just didn’t “get it” – I couldn’t “connect” the percussion sounds with what the rest of the orchestra was doing. I continued to enjoy the soloist’s playing, and thought the orchestral strings and winds created some beautifully limpid textures in places during the “Meditation” movement – but I found the percussion “effects” something of a distraction. Obviously I needed to hear the work again , and “work harder” at aligning the different sound-spaces of each instrumental group, specifically that of the percussion. Having heard various raga over the years I thought I might respond more positively to the bongo drum rhythms as a variant of a tabla taal (rhythmic pattern) in the piece’s finale – but again I thought the sounds too disparate, even, to my ears, alienating – on the other hand the string- and wind-writing I greatly enjoyed, and was thrilled by the soloist’s response to the music’s intensities, especially during a somewhat trenchant cadenza, from which Jun Hong Loh emerged the victor!

The soloist obliged his audience with an encore which sounded familiar but ultimately eluded my recognition. I found out later that the piece was written by a friend of the violinist, a composer called Charles Yang, whose intention was to quote and rework a number of passages from various well-known violin concertos into a single piece for a solo violin – hence my “fled is that music – do I wake or sleep?” reaction to the material! The playing was virtuosic-plus-plus from Jun Hong Loh – spectacular double-stopping passages, fingerwork at breakneck speed, and counterpointed melodies in different registers between arpeggios. It was obviously a kind of “calling-card” for a virtuoso violinist, and as such enabled the performer to mightily impress!

After the interval came the Stravinsky work, here performed in a “reduced” version by the conductor/composer Jonathan McPhee. There’s obviously a demand world-wide for such versions, as I was able to read various on-line testimonials of praise for McPhee’s work made by artistic directors in various far-flung places. Usually the situation was that, without using McPhee’s “reductions”, these groups wouldn’t have been able to afford to hire extra players to be able to perform works like “Firebird” and “Le Sacre du Printemps” both of which are scored for larger-than-usual orchestras.

I was hard-pressed to notice much difference between the original and McPhee’s edition as performed here, even after my having heard several previous performances of the former “live” as well as a number of recordings. I hadn’t picked up from the programme anything concerning the “edition”, the only thing surprising me being the appearance of the spectacular brass glissandi during the “Infernal Dance of Kastchei’s Subjects”, which wasn’t in the original ballet score but which Stravinsky himself had added for one of the “suites” – but it could well be in the McPhee edition anyway. Obviously, when a performance is as intensely-focused and fully-committed as was this one, whatever reductions of numbers there are to orchestral personnel makes little or no difference to the outcome!

Thanks to the conductor’s and orchestra’s attention to detail and their expert pacing of the story’s ebb-and-flow, both the colourful and characterful theatricality of the ballet’s series of “tableaux” and the grip of the drama’s darker undercurrents kept our attentions riveted throughout. We were able to relish all the more the composer’s contrasting of the more folksong-like diatonic themes and cadences for the story’s human characters (Prince Ivan, and the thirteen captive Princesses) with the more chromatic and spectacularly iridescent music characterising the “supernatural” characters (the Firebird herself, and the ogre, Kastchei, and all of his followers.

It was certainly among the most spectacularly-realised performances by this orchestra that I’ve heard over the years, akin to that unforgettable concert a number of years back when Marc Taddei and his players almost lifted the roof off the Town Hall with their performance of Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta. Whilst not absolutely note-perfect in places, the glitches were like “spots on the sun”, and there were many more moments to figuratively die for, such as the horn solo beginning the final “General Rejoicing” concluding sequence, magically realised by a guest player, Shadley van Wyk, substituting for an indisposed Ed Allen.

This, and so much else seemed to unfold in Marc Taddei’s hands at what seemed to us like a completely natural pace, the players confidently at one with the sheer wealth of orchestral detail and bringing off its stunning realisation with tremendous elan. Roll on the remainder of Orchestra Wellington’s Diaghilev Season! – at present it promises to be a truly momentous and memorable undertaking!

Aotearoa Plus from the NZSO set alight by Gareth Farr premiere

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
AOTEAROA PLUS

PIERRE BOULEZ – Mémoriale (….explosante-fixe…Originel )
GARETH FARR – Cello Concerto “Chemin des Dames” (world premiere)
JOHN ADAMS – Naive and Sentimental Music
Sébastien Hurtaud (‘cello)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 5th May, 2017

A concert with the name “Aotearoa Plus” begs the question of how an orchestra might best support and present the music of native composers – the title is one which, in my artless way, I thought might have fairly been expected to accompany rather more homegrown examples of composition than were allowed for here.

Thank goodness, then, in my view, for Gareth Farr’s work, and its performance, which delivered a kind of visceral wallop and emotional candour that dominated the evening’s listening, putting even the quasi-Brucknerian symphonic-in-situ explorations of John Adams which took up the second half, in the shade. Before all of this, opening the concert was an ambient, beautifully-breathed work of Pierre Boulez’s, which might have surprised many people with its accessibility, considering the composer’s reputation as a once “stormy petrel” of the contemporary music world.

Boulez was a creative musician whose career followed a kind of predictable pattern – a firebrand in his youth, he presented an uncompromising anti-establishment series of stances marked by outrageous aphorisms seized upon by the media, such as “All opera houses should be blown up”, and “Anyone who has not felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic (12-tone)system is OF NO USE!”. Some of his contemporaries weren’t spared, either, when he remarked on a contemporary composition style that it “amounted to frenetic arithmetical masturbation”. Music for him had a “tainted past”, necessitating the creation of a “new world” of musical expression. As he got older Boulez seemed to mellow, and acknowledge that works like his own Le marteau sans maître DID owe a great deal to music of the past that he had previously railed against. He also forged a new career as a conductor, becoming known for his interpretations of Wagner (he actually directed Bayreuth’s own Centenary production of The Ring in 1976, to the musical world’s astonishment), Mahler and Bruckner, acknowledging the music of the last two composers as having a “real influence” on his own work.

There may have even been some kind of convoluted disappointment in the minds of some people expecting to be repelled by anything written by Boulez, invariably something which would be angular, discordant and downright unpleasant to listen to. We were, instead drawn into a world of beauty and whimsicality, rather like birdsong with many different variants (Bridget Douglas demonstrating her complete command of the flute’s textures and timbres, here). These variants were a series of exhalations, in which the solo instrument, the strings and two horns here and there breathed the most delicate and finely-wrought impulses, in between advancing engaging short-term rhythmic trajectories.

Basically the piece came about through the composer’s habit of re-working scores, and in the process generating what the programme note liked to call “a constellation of related satellite pieces”. In 1972, Boulez produced a work honouring the memory of Igor Stravinsky who had died the previous year, a work called explosante-fixe…Originel (“Exploding-fixed…original”). Written for solo flute, chamber ensemble and live electronics, the E-flat pitch with its German notation Es signified Stravinsky. In 1975 parts of the music resurfaced as a tribute to composer Bruno Maderna, entitled Rituel – and ten years later another reworking of the piece was published as a tribute to the flutist Laurence Beauregardflute, with whom Boulez had worked. The composer seemed to lose faith with the electronic-tape component of the piece due to the unreliability of the technology, and went on to produce an “acoustic” version of the music, one in which the flute dominated, and the accompanying sounds either mirrored or ambiently complemented what the flute did.

One of these “complementations” I really liked came from the horns, playing what I like to think sound like “electric lines,” an idea which came from my fascination with those marvellously evocative railway lines and accompanying lights, besides and along the main road just north of Huntly and between Meremere and Mercer. These lines and lights always seemed to me to “hum” their held notes with vibrant accord as if impulses were coursing up and down those tracks, watched over by those solicitous single-note sentinels. By way of variation, there were occasional flashes of increased prominence, but really little more than micro-versions of triple-time tip-toeing. And, just when things seemed to be getting more involved, the composer called a halt to the piece’s quiet irruptions, on a long, somewhat resigned note.

As the performing area needed to be re-organised for the increased numbers of players required by the next item on the programme, conductor Hamish McKeich took the opportunity given by the hiatus to bring its composer, Gareth Farr, onto the stage and talk with him about the oncoming performance (a world premiere, incidentally). This was a ‘Cello Concerto dedicated to three of Farr’s great-uncles who were killed in the First World War in France at a place known as “Chemin des Dames”, in 1917. Farr wanted to commemorate both their deaths and the effects of the loss of so many young lives upon families such as theirs. The name of the battle-place “Chemin des Dames” (Pathway of Women) underlined for Farr the involvement of women in such conflicts, both as casualties themselves and as bereaved sweethearts and wives, mothers and sisters, with their ongoing loss and grief over the years that followed.

It was an interview with “moments per minute” rather than the other way round, profound regarding the work’s subject matter, but also entertaining with Farr’s quicksilver responses to McKeich’s focused enquiries concerning the writing of the work. Farr praised his soloist, Sebastien Hurtaud, for the latter’s collaboration, telling us in no uncertain terms that, for this reason, a concerto was far easier to write than would have been a purely orchestral work because of the vibrancy of such an exchange, and the relief for the composer afforded by this “working together”, instead of the latter having to be a “dictator” with the musicians.

McKeich raised the question of Farr’s music being regarded as “loud”, which the latter agreed with! – stating by way of explanation that, as a percussionist, he had come from “the loud end of the band”! Again, Farr emphasised that when writing a concerto, the music is about the soloist and his/her instrument – in this case the ‘cello, whose tones approximated those of a baritone! Rather than make an impression via loudness, Farr sought to make a kind of “hole” in the orchestral texture for the soloist to fit into, therefore negating the possibility of any orchestral “loudness” cross-cancelling the soloist’s tones, and therefore preserving the musical argument’s clarity – most interesting!

I would have happily listened to these two conversing for longer, but things were obviously now “set to go” regarding the performance! – so, with the word about to be made flesh, the orchestra entered, followed by the soloist and conductor, and the work was begun.

A brief subterranean percussion rumble, followed by soft strings and arpeggiated keyboard (celeste?) notes prepared the way for the solo ‘cello, singing, lament-like around a single note, like a weeping voice in the middle of a barren landscape. Various orchestral detail – a brass chord, soft, chirruping winds, and longer brass notes led up to a huge percussion crescendo, music of devastation in the wake of some terrible event.

I was struck by the way the solo ‘cello dug into the notes in much the same way as at the opening of another work lamenting the tragedy of war, the Elgar “Cello Concerto, the solo intstrument here expressing a similar kind of amalgam of anguish and anger. Another composer evoked was Shostakovich, with a solo trumpet and side-drum suggesting militaristic activities – these evocations of other works didn’t, however, sound contrived or “tacked on”, but instead set up a thoughtful resonance of reference to similar responses to human conflict.

The work expressed so many different emotions, delineated by a number of figures which seemed to recur as motifs – determination and bravery (the ‘cello soaring upwards, answered by the strings and echoed by brass and percussion), excitement and fear (the ‘cello agitatedly playing running passages punctuated by energetic pizzicati and tremolandi, and the occasional roar of full percussion), and homesickness and nostalgia (tender, ruminative explorations from the ‘cello, lyrical birdsong-like figures from the winds). Then there was what sounded like music of conflict – the ‘cello energised with running, toccata-like figures, picked up by horns and winds, and augmented with motoric driving strings, and occasionally baleful brass, pushing a three-note figure repeatedly and mercilessly, with what sounded like woodblocks and tambourine sounds adding to the driving fray.

Then there were passages where conflict and lament seemed to coexist, as if the privations of warfare and grief seemed to intermingle and become as one single tragedy – the ‘cello agitations brought to my mind parts of Bloch’s “Schemolo” anguishing and lamenting amid the tumltuous orchestral irruptions, a relentless onslaught whose struggles left the soloist momentarily exhausted, though still imbued with sufficient life-force to renew the lament via a cadenza-like passage, filled with extremes of bitterness and deep sorrow, at the end of which the orchestra returned us to the work’s beginning, to a world where the futility of what had happened was demonstrated, and the cost was laid bare for all to experience.

I’ve given more attention to the work than to its performance, but with the proviso that, in this case, the work WAS its perfomance, very much so with the soloist and the orchestral and conductor being the ones the composer specifically had in mind when writing the work. Its overwhelming impact was a tribute to all concerned.

At this point, going back in my mind over the concert, I remembered asking myself both at the time (and beforehand), why, in a presentation entitled “Aotearoa Plus” the orchestra had then programmed so much non-New Zealand work…..had I read the programme’s title incorrectly? – Was it in fact “Aotearoa Plus-PLUS”? What was more, what we were about to hear was the SECOND work programmed by the orchestra of this particular contemporary composer’s work this season! Given Resident Music Director Edo de Waart’s historically significant association with American composer John Adams, I’m certainly prepared to accept that we might hear more than usual of his music….but why should so much figure in the one programme the orchestra specifically tags as having New Zealand content, one not even directed by de Waart?

In any case, after hearing Gareth Farr’s piece given such stunning advocacy, I really felt like connecting further with something else that was home-grown, something whose sound-world had been wrought from similarly cultivated and nurtured material, if of an earlier milieu. I thought of several works which would have easily fitted that prescription, music which deserves to be know better and played far more often (in one case almost embarrassingly so!). To tackle the mooted “embarrasment” first-up, I would have plumped for programming one of the finest pieces of exploratory orchestral writing (after all, THIS was the raison d’etre of the John Adams work we heard – Naive and Sentimental Music – parts of which, in my opinion, flirted with over-inflated bombast) to come out of this country, David Farquhar’s First Symphony. The awkward part is that the NZSO, after giving the public premiere of this work (and, most ironically, subsequently recording it TWICE!) has never performed it again at a concert. I wish somebody who knows would quietly take me aside, sit me down, and explain to me just why this remarkable music hasn’t been played by our National Orchestra in public for nearly sixty years!

Still, ours is not to reason why, or lament what didn’t happen, but, instead, as reviewers, to report on what actually took place when Hamish McKeich stood in front of the NZSO and set in motion this astonishing piece of music created by John Adams – Naive and Sentimental Music? Just what did the composer mean by it all? In a programme note, Adams himself outlined his self-described “tortured” reasonings, drawing from an eighteenth-century essay by Schiller, “Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”), in which all creative activity was characterised as either “naive” (natural, direct, unselfconscious, brought about for its own sake), or “sentimental” (seeking to restore something that has been lost, indulging in self-analysis in order to “find” an ideal, or resorting to parody or satire as a means of demonstrating the “chasm” that had opened up between sense and sensibility in artistic creation).

Adams further cited Anton Bruckner as an inspiration, when contemplating his approach to symphonic form in writing this present work, shortly after hearing a live performance of that composer’s Fourth Symphony. Of course, Bruckner was and still is popularly regarded as something of a “naif” in the ways of the world, though it’s a label the composer seems to triumphantly ride above with his music. I can’t imagine how anybody but a genius of staggering intellectual capacity could recast his symphonic material so readily in response to critical vituperation, which in itself would have poleaxed a lesser man! However, maybe Schiller in theory (and Adams in practice!) would each ascribe a “naive” set of impulses to the composer’s unique processes, thus keeping Bruckner on the side of those creatures of pure impulse, the angels!

So, in short, we got from Adams a symphonic work of near-Brucknerian proportions in three movements, one in which the composer seemed to use as a kind of creative theoretical workshop for processing different kinds of musical ideas. I found the journey pushed my sensitivities to their limits in places, most obviously in the first, eponymously-named movement, which for me outstayed its welcome in the long run, falling back upon itself towards the music’s end and reworking veins of exhausted paydirt. Up to a point I thought the music charming and fecund in how it treated the lyrical theme, which began the work, with the utmost freedom and variety of means. The orchestra most expertly dealt with everything Adams threw at the players, apart from an untypical “did we dream you or did you dream us?” sequence of uncertain syncopation between brass and strings at one point. Conductor Hamish McKeich was like an experienced campaigner controlling the ebb and flow of the various arguments, one minute encouraging a lyrical blending of strings and wind, and the next minute riding the footplate of what soulded like a great machine coming to life and moving onto the main line out of the siding!

The second movement “Mother of the Man” featured, along with murmuring strings and haunting percussion harmonics, a guitarist contributing piquant sounds to gentle, patient unfoldings and oscillations. I imagined flecks of light falling in gentle shoals onto a landscape, the players under Hamish McKeich’s firm control “drifting” their sounds with the utmost delicacy, creating miracles of stillness. Such was the rapt atmosphere that when the strings began their series of crescendi, the sudden change in dynamic intensity was almost knife-edged, repeated rising scale motifs piling on the upward pressures to a point where the strings suddenly silenced the tumult and allow things to wind down.

Church bells rang out over a galumphing bass at the finale’s beginning, the volatilities building through great glow-ball-like swathes of sound and strings and scintillating percussion racing along together, rushing up to the feet of great off-the-beat percussive crashes, and the heavy chortlings of big-boned brass. As the instruments took up the patternings and add their particular accented notes, the patterns kept changing, giving the listener the feeling of something beginning to cohere and fragment at one and the same time – so many voices, so many syncopations. One couldn’t think a composer could go any further – and then the rockets of sound began shooting up! Pandemonium! What a guy!

Very great credit to Hamish McKeich and the NZSO players for bringing such a saga off so resplendently – not so much in terms of length but of relentlessness of musical argument, the piece taking no prisoners and giving the performers nowhere to hide! Even so, I would have liked to have heard the work in a different context – it should be that, in our orchestral programmes, we don’t have to sacrifice our music to get to hear the rest of the world’s.

NZTrio at St.Andrew’s in Wellington – and homage to Justine Cormack

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concert Series presents:
The NZTrio – Justine Cormack (violin), Ashley Brown (‘cello) and Sarah Watkin (piano)

PIAZZOLLA – Tangos
CLAIRE COWAN – Subtle Dances (2013)
PENAFORTE – An Eroica Trio (1998)
SCHUBERT – Piano Trio No.1 in B-flat D.898

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

Sunday, 30th April, 2017

Outside of the brilliant performances of the music, the most stupendous revelation for some at the NZ Trio’s recent Wellington concert would have been the announcement, made at the concert’s end by local chamber music organiser Julie Coulson, that the trio’s violinist Justine Cormack would be leaving the group mid-2017 – of course for people who “keep abreast” of things like this by reading newsletters and the like (a particular failing of mine, I admit!), this wasn’t a surprise, as the Trio’s own newsletter had already published a February press release breaking the news.

So, after fifteen years of performing together, the group will be looking for a new violinist at the end of the current tour and after visiting and playing in China – the remaining players, ‘cellist Ashley Brown and pianist Sarah Watkins are promising us “some surprise guest violinists in the chair” as they cast around for somebody to fill the position on a more permanent basis. Meanwhile Justine Cormack is looking forward to some “space” in her life for the next little while, and, while waiting for whatever “new things” might arise, will be focusing on fulfilling what she has described as a “dream”, that of returning to the South Island to live, in particular to Central Otago, somewhere “close to Wanaka”.

Obviously nothing stays the same forever; and the group is confident that the next period will be “an extremely exciting one”, not the least feature being a re-establishment and continued development of “the legacy that Justine has helped establish”.  Evidence of that legacy as a living entity was in plentiful supply throughout the afternoon’s music-making at St.Andrew’s on this occasion, with Justine Cormack herself remarking how good it felt for her and her colleagues to be back and playing in the venue after so many years’ absence – in fact the last time the Trio had performed there was in 2002, at the very time the group was first established!

One of the hallmarks of the NZTrio’s activities over the years has been its espousal of New Zealand music – and this concert was no exception, featuring a work which had been commissioned by the group in 2013, Subtle Dances by Claire Cowan, and was now being taken on this final tour. Also included in the afternoon’s line-up was music whose roots had sprang up from a different tradition to that of Western classical music, though, thanks to one composer in particular, a genre finding more and more favour in concert halls. This was the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, and his work Tangos, featuring two vastly different examples of the form, was performed to great effect, the two dances diametrically opposed in manner, mode and mood, if not in overall effect.

Piazzolla always seems to employ plenty of variety in his music by way of depicting both the essence of the dance-movement trajectories and atmospheres, and the interaction between the dance-partners (at times extremely physical) – I thought the instrumentations dovetailed most deliciously, here sensuous and sultry, the ensuing interactions smokily suggestive. Along the way, the opening Primavera Porteria yielded for a few luscious moments to the Oblivion sequence (one perhaps needs the wit of a Beecham to properly characterise THAT sequence in words!) before the opening energies returned – thrusts and counter-thrusts built upon one another and brought the piece to almost fever-pitch by the very end.

Claire Cowan’s music has always appealed to me – perhaps it’s the “intuitive ” nature of her writing (which she speaks of in a programme note concerning this recent (2013) work, Subtle Dances) that connects so readily – what she conceives is always a “touching on all points” scenario, with impulses that always go somewhere. Described as “three short mood pieces”, the first, eponymously-named “subtle dances” began with deep pizzicati from the ‘cello and furtive impulses from the piano coming together, creating a shadowy, mysterious atmosphere of dark business which showed its hand only when sufficient momentum had established a kind of flywheel trajectory – the cellist knocked his fingerboard for a percussive effect as the vistas lightened and the road opened up, the strings pizzicato-ed, and the piano sang a song of freedom – the dance element swung along with the music, while the violin intoned an insinuating melody, before everything just stopped, allowing the echoes of those incredible rhythmic patternings some resonance-room, like the reverberation of a mighty chord.

The second dance “Be slow and lie low” was cool and dreamy, with a bluesy piano holding lovingly to its introductory notes before declaiming as if reading poetry – the strings rounded off the sentiments with some delicately-wrought harmonies and ambiently-floated sounds, into which world came “Nerve lines”, like something disturbing sleep, ostinato patterns from Sarah Watkins’ nimble fingers mirrored by the strings, both repeated notes and held lines, like nerve-pulsations, almost minimalist in accumulated effect, and occasionally exotically-flavoured, such as the two-note “sighing” motif from the ‘cello. The ebb-and-flow of string-tones here built up to fierce and fraught levels as the piano continued to chime its motifs in the bass, reaching a kind of apogee with a final, long-breathed note. At every stage of this work, I seemed to imagine and catch a kind of tingling quality, with each note, and every gesture having a resonance which continued in the memory long after the piece had run its course.

Where Claire Cowan’s work was interior, subtle and intensely psychological, Raimundo Penaforte’s work for piano trio was “out there” in full-blooded, visceral terms right from the beginning. Called “an Eroica Trio”, the work was intended by its composer to pay a kind of homage to three of his formative musical influences by way of sub-titling each of the movements with a name – “Astor”, the first, paid tribute to Piazzolla, and celebrated the iconic tango composer’s influence with big, physical gestures at the music’s start, set against sultry and romantic violin-and-‘cello sequences which followed, with numerous “cross-references” intended to bind the structures together – a nice idea, but one I thought towards the piece’s end crudely and repeatedly over-applied, as repetition seemed to follow repetition. Though the slow movement “Maurice” (inspired by Maurice Ravel’s “passacaglia” movement from his Piano Trio) began promisingly as a kind of phantom dance from a dark dream, and explored a number of evocative variations on the opening sequence, I again thought the music too lengthy and discursive for its material.

Only the finale seemed not to outstay its welcome, the lively and scampering piano figurations enlivening and setting a-tingling the textures, provoking strong, slashing chords over the scamperings, and even varying the mix with moments of delicacy! But for the most part it was the “wild side” of things which prevailed, establishing connections with “Capiba”, the nickname given to da Foncesca Barbosa, a fellow-Brazilian composer, and his music. The sequences leading up to the movement’s conclusion resembled a riot of physical movement, which got from the NZ Trio the full-blooded response it obviously needed – everybody at full stretch and convulsed with excitement and (speaking for myself!) exhaustion at the end.

Pianist Sarah Watkins introduced the Schubert work to us, quoting the familiar but entirely apposite epithet “smiling through tears” as a helpful characterisation of the composer’s work – though this B-flat Trio is perhaps more lyrical than tragic compared with its companion (No.2 in E-flat D.929). The Trio gave us a well-rounded opening, more ceremonial than big-boned, the gestures large in lyrical expression rather than physicality. The lines were all given full-voice, varying their dynamics when the contours required, everything bright-eyed and alert without being percussive – exuberance tempered by overall resolve and clearly-focused direction.

The musicians allowed the more lyrical episodes plenty of time and space, without sacrificing the kind of intensity that made one want to listen to their every delineation – some of the phrase-ends seemed to pivot for an instant on moments of cosmic stasis, making one hold one’s breath! – and this, cheek-by-jowl with music whose rhythmic trajectories can in places sound like young gods sporting in the Elysian Fields!

I thought the slow movement’s performance simply outstanding, with Ashley Brown’s ‘cello tones inflected so affectingly that one couldn’t imagine the notes better played, and Justine Cormack’s violin phrasings mirroring and further enriching the composer’s “divine utterances”. And Sarah Watkins bringing out of the “Hungarian” touches in the central section’s piano part gave the music a welcome touch of contrast, allowing a more flowing exchange between the instruments, and some exquisitely-wrought modulations – a beautifully-voiced return to the opening, for example, this time with Justine Cormack’s violin leading the way. After this, the scherzo provided even more contrast with its playful nonchalance, though the rhythms were never “square” or rum-ti-tum, but had enough crispness to their attack so that we were always kept on the move.

Schubert’s finales can be a shade garrulous in places if “let go”, but the NZTrio’s sweeping paragraphing of the different episodes carried all before it, allowing plenty of insoucient trotting of the piano figurations beneath the droll string lines, but constantly nudging this and that detail in a constantly engaging way, keeping the urgencies alive but on slow boil, along a kind of kaleidoscopic journey of different impressions – the coda, when it came, exploded almost orchestrally and caught us up in its exuberance in a most satisfying way.

No better finish to a concert and no more appropriate summing-up of fifteen years of a group’s committed and beautifully integrated music-making could, I think, have been devised.

Orpheus Choir’s “Chichester Psalms” concert terrific! – but James MacMillan has the last word……..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents:
CHICHESTER PSALMS

JAMES MacMILLAN – Seven Last Words From The Cross
LEONARD BERNSTEIN – Chichester Psalms

MacMillan: Pasquale Orchard (soprano) / Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby (soprano/alto)
Karishma Thanawala (alto) / Giancarlo Lisi, Peter Liley (tenors)
Stephen Clothier, Minto Fung (basses)

Bernstein: Liam Squire (treble) / Pasquale Orchard (soprano)
Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby (alto) / Giancarlo Lisi (tenor)
Joe Haddow (bass)

Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Brent Stewart (Music Director)
Thomas Gaynor (organ)

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul

Saturday, 29th April 2017

As with music and art in general, people’s responses to matters of spiritual belief seem to vary enormously from individual to individual. Despite what seems like an ever-increasing secularisation of everyday life, we’re still can’t help being either active or passive observers of institutionalised calendar commemorations based on matters of belief in God which affect various human activities – we’re regularly made aware of certain historical frameworks and structures brought forward from times when people in general rendered to a Deity things that were regarded as belonging to that Deity, with few questions asked. A pivotal event in this history is without doubt the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, one which continues to exert significant influence in the Western World along any point of the spectrum of faith, on believers and non-believers alike.

Still, however much belief and spirituality in general takes up people’s lives in the 21st century is well-nigh impossible to gauge, except in the most generalised of terms – it would seem far less than, say, a century ago, and that the unprecedented horrors of the previous century, including the escalation of the human race’s own self-destructive potentialities might suggest a growing crisis of belief in any kind of omnipotent being who might allow or oversee such universal catastrophes, from which advancement of humankind towards any kind of future seems increasingly unlikely.

Creative artists these days seem to me to either mirror or confront these present-day actualities in their work – a case in point regarding confrontation is the Scottish composer James MacMillan, whose compositions actively reflect an active and securely-held Christian faith – at the opposite end of such motivations (to contrast the work of two utterly different “visionaries” I’ve encountered recently) is British playwright Caryl Churchill whose latest work for the stage (Escaped Alone, recently performed at Circa Theatre, Wellington) presents frighteningly dystopian scenarios of the future, one in which God as he/she is presently known seems non-existent. Of course both the dystopian prophetess playwright and the social-justice-driven Catholic composer advocate in different ways strategies for countering certain trends before a point of no return is reached, and so in some respects there’s common ground. Perhaps a basic difference between MacMillan and Churchill is that, for the former, there’s always a sense of optimism for the future amid the struggle – whereas for the latter the proposed scenarios and nihilistic attitudes given voice in her most recent work seem matter-of-factly pessimistic.

As was the case with the great French composer Olivier Messiaen, MacMillan’s creativity is inextricably tied up with his religious beliefs – “For me, religious faith is rooted in the mess of real life” he once said in an interview. And though he may no longer be the Marxist revolutionary of days of yore, his work still has an occasional “firebrand” quality, a confrontational edge which sets him apart from the new-age “Holy Minimalist” school of composition, whose preoccupation is a kind of transcendence set largely above conflict. By contrast, music such as MacMillan’s “Seven Last Words from the Cross” expresses great swathes of anguish and explosions of anger, alongside a sense of grief and sorrow, all of which suggests that its creator is well aware of the pain and suffering of all mankind as articulated by the sacrificed Christ. MacMillan’s text in this work is somewhat more than merely the seven “scripture-gazetted” utterances of Jesus on the cross, but takes also from sources such as the Good Friday Responsaries for Tenebrae which quote from the Book of Lamentations: “All you who pass along this way take heed and consider if there is any sorrow like mine……” – an impassioned call across the ages for human empathy.

This 1993 work for voices and strings (performed here with the instrumental parts transcribed for organ) came across with considerable force within the vast Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul spaces – it was a fairly no-holds-barred setting of the seven finally-reckoned gospel-recorded statements uttered by Christ as he hung on the crucificxion cross in Jerusalem. I’m aware that my comments below are as much descriptive of the music as analytical of the performance – perhaps even more so the former! I hope the reader will forgive such self-indulgence at my delight in coming across such a magnificent piece of relatively “new” music for me, and be reassured that my descriptions inherently recognise the abilities of the musicians involved to “articulate” the music to the point where it was able to make the impressions on me that it did!

There were times when the lush ambiences of the Cathedral told against the music’s clarity, places which I’ve tried to pinpoint as best I’ve been able to. However, as there are usually roundabouts at hand where there are swings, the up-side of the venue was its incredible resonance, which in places “enlarged” the music’s expressive scope to awe-inspiring extents! With a work like MacMillan’s containing both grand and intimate statements, no one venue is going to be ideal, and Wellington Cathedral was certainly no exception. Conductor Brent Stewart certainly brought out the best of the venue’s interaction with the music, and the performers did the rest with their, by turns, sensitive and full-throated music-making.

The organ opened the work with a simple plaintive note, the sounds of deep and inward mourning – as the choir intoned the words “Father forgive them”, the organ became an enormous swinging pendulum over which movement the voices rose and climbed, the cathedral’s spacious acoustic allowing the voices to “float” and soar. As well the cavernous spaces gave the organ’s deepest notes enormous girth, the combination of “space above” and “depth below” making for an amazingly cosmic sound-experience. Much of the plainchant-like agitated exclamations which followed were unintelligible as words from where I sat, at about the halfway mark within the audience – those sounds jumbled in the huge spaces, but the choir’s magnificently-sustained intonings filled the building’s ambience with urgently prayerful impulses and piteous beseeching.

A raw, monumental quality resounded from the voices over the repeated statement “Woman, Behold thy Son”, the utterances underscored with great silences “surging softly backwards” in between each tumultuous command – at first a soft organ pedal measured the depths of the sea of each silence, stirrings and sproutings of energy which grew into sequential melodic patterns, and finally burst forth with bravura-like outpourings of a fantastical nature. Everything was superbly controlled as the voices continued to repeat the phrase, with the organ accompaniments becoming more frenetic and desperate-sounding until a kind of exhaustion-point was reached, the instrumental sounds whimpering and imploring, searching for some kind of resolution or answer – in the throes of these agitations the voices spoke to and for the son, naming the woman as his mother. With fewer words to decipher I found this movement simply overwhelming in its direct, almost confrontational attitude, and in its sense of journeying stepwise towards depictions of a spirit in extremis.

Beginning the third section, the men intoned in Latin a tribute to the wood of the Cross – “Ecce Lignum Crucis” – (Behold the Wood of the Cross..) – accompanied by a singing melody the men sang “Venite Adoramus” – “Come, let us adore him”. Women’s voices at first sounded earthier, almost medieval, as they repeated the “Ecce Lignum” salutation, then rhapsodised more freely with the organ, the voices overlapping and suffusing the acoustic with richly-upholstered tones of adoration.

A great outburst of agitation from the organ ( with the conductor, Brent Stewart, “conducting” the organist!) prepared the way for two women soloists, their voices positively stratospheric, giving voice to Christ’s radiant invitation to the “good thief” to join him in Paradise. Deep organ meditations followed (eight speakers and a sub-woofer, doing the “honours” with a smaller organ, I was told, proudly, before the concert began, by one of the organisers – I can vouch for the effectiveness of the arrangement as the result seemed even more sonorous and wide-ranging as we in the audience had a right to expect!), with the soloist, Thomas Gaynor, skilfully managing the transition from inchoate murmurings to full-blooded transcendent intensities of light and colour, as the men sang, with increasing agitated feeling “Eli, eli lama sabachtani” – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Again, I found it difficult to decipher some of the words in that cavernous acoustic, though such was the intensity of the music’s rise and fall and the musicians’ control, I was content to be borne along on a tide of pure emotion, unsure of exactly where I was going, but confident in the musicians’ ability to keep things afloat and buoyant. Whether slow or swift-moving, such was the fascination exerted by music and performance, that specific words mattered less than the sense of being caught up in somethingsignificant and deeply felt – The “I thirst” section featured men’s voices barely “registering” against a background of women’s voices by turns, whispering, chanting, and singing, in Latin “I gave you to drink of life-giving water….”, before organ and voices suddenly erupted, flooding the vistas with sonorous urgencies, and then withdrawing into the agitated resonances once again.

Jagged organ chords slashed their way across the sound vistas, occasioning a sudden lighting change, as if the world was suddenly drenched in blood – most effective! Over the agitations the women’s voices began a flowing passage based on the Good Friday Responses for Tenebrae, “My eyes were blind with weeping” joined by the rest of the choir, developing a sombre meditation on sorrow.

The instrumental slashings returned, but couldn’t quell the impassioned cry from the voices of “Father”, which the organ supported with a heartfelt meditation, generating some Janacek-like intensities in places before slowly allowing resignation and a kind of tingling tranquility to drift back and settle all around for what seemed like moments outside time. The performers requested before the concert that no applause should follow the performance, and this strange sense of something continuing to resonate stayed with us throughout the interval – a most telling strategy, and one that worked brilliantly!

The Cathedral’s voluminuous spaces brought out the arresting attack of the voices and the wonderfully percussive scintillations at the opening of the second item on the evening’s programme, Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms”, even if the resonances played havoc with the music’s more incisive, quick-moving sequences.
A dancing organ solo brought the soloists briefly to the platform, before some gently exotic percussive touches introduced the boy soprano, Liam Squire, singing the words of Psalm 23 – “The Lord is my Shepherd – I shall not want” – the melodic line characteristically mixed its composer’s penchant for sentimentality with slightly “grainier” sequences, bringing forth moments of rapt beauty from the young man’s voice, along with passages that seemed more effortful, perhaps too low-lying in places for the voice to properly expand and take flight.

Bernstein’s setting of Psalm 2 “Why do the nations” (the words familiar from Handel’s “Messiah” of course), galvanised the ensemble, with rhythmic passages that seemed to come straight from “West Side Story”, along with exciting percussion effects – even in this acoustic the trajectories of the music danced and enlivened the textures to spectacular effect.

A “grunty” organ solo with harmonic sequences and progressions reminding one of Reger’s music introduced the third section “Adonai, Adonai” (Lord, Lord), sung in the manner of a ballad, the melody graceful and warming, wrapping itself around and about one’s sensibilities, especially so in the wordless sections. The soloists tenderly and sensitively extended the mood with variants of the melodic line, until the sound’s “dying fall” imparted a rapt and devotional sense of valediction to the proceedings, the composer striving to impart the text’s sentiment of “brethren…together in unity” at the work’s very end.

Coming after James MacMillan’s direct and uncompromising exploration of grief and pain in “Seven Last Words From The Cross”, Bernstein’s far less demanding work might have been regarded by some people as a kind of emotional refurbishing in the wake of a series of debilitating meditations, and, in contrast, by others as something of an anticlimax. I inclined more to the latter than to the former view, thinking I would have preferred to leave the concert with those heartfelt gestures of compassion and empathy resounding in my head and playing on my sensibilities. Still, each of the pieces spoke its own particular truths and left the other more-or-less intact – and the performances by solo singers, instrumentalists and the choir, under Brent Stewart’s inspired leadership, along with organist Thomas Gaynor’s brilliant playing, certainly delivered the goods, enabling each work to make its own particular impact in grand style.

America: NZSO performances of brilliant new violin concerto plus Dvořák in New York and Reich in minimalist heaven

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fawzi Haimor with Anne Akiko Meyers (violin)

Steve Reich: Three Movements
Mason Bates: Violin Concerto
Dvořák: Symphony No 9 in E minor, Op 95 (‘From the New World’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 8 October, 7:30 pm

Once upon a time to have scheduled the New World Symphony would have guaranteed a pretty full house in spite of its being accompanied by unfamiliar music. But sometimes I think that as the years pass, the general public is becoming, not more open and adventurous, and simply ‘well-informed’ in the arts, and music too, but less in all those spheres.

And there are various reasons: slavery to the flat black screen, perhaps the cost of tickets, disagreeable weather outside, but most importantly, the lack of exposure on all popular radio and television channels, to anything but the most vacuous noises and sights of the tawdry, commercialised world of entertainment; and a school curriculum that avoids much real exposure to worthwhile music, or the other arts, including literature.

So there were too many empty seats for what turned out to be a splendid, enjoyable concert and the ‘happy few’ – I mean, really ‘quite a large number’ went pretty wild after each piece.

Steve Reich’s earlier New Zealand appearance
The first piece was a chance to recall the great days of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts (as it was then), in 1990, the first of the two under the direction of Chris Doig. One of the many exciting international visitors was Steve Reich and the Musicians, who played inter alia, Reich’s famous, holocaust-related Different Trains.

Perhaps trains have a special place in Reich’s life, for the piece played on Saturday, Three Movements, has inspired a performance on You Tube, played by the LSO under Michael Tilson Thomas, accompanied entirely by a film by Alessandro Manfredi featuring trains in Switzerland, some speeded up to accompany the outer fast  movements, some slowed for the middle movement. It’s a riveting, infectious experience, for a lover of both trains and music.

Three Movements for Orchestra
So was the NZSO’s performance. Coincidentally or calculatedly, the performance celebrated Reich’s 80th birthday, on 3 October.

The centre stage was occupied by two marimbas, two vibraphones and two pianos, which squeezed the strings to the sides; they were divided into two distinct string orchestras. It starts with marimbas and piano in fast alternating beats, with excitement created by shifting tonalities (accompanied in the You Tube clip as white and red, high-speed Swiss and occasional Deutsche Bahn passenger trains flash through, intensifying the excitement of the music). While the pulse remains steady, the rhythm changes to become more and more difficult to identify as sections of the orchestra handle overlapping harmonies and rhythms.

The middle movement runs at half the speed of the outer movements with vibraphones taking over the main rhythmic work and woodwinds, notably clarinets and oboes (winds are limited to pairs of each, but four horns and triple trumpets and trombones) dominate the colouring. The third movement resumes the speed of the first, but intensifies the experience as both marimbas and vibes and the pianos increase the density, loudness and rhythmic complexity. Reich draws attention to his penchant for rhythmic ambiguity and coins the term ‘canonic mensuration’ to describe the way his motifs appear simultaneously in two or more speeds. Even though it’s not easy to keep track of the pulses, they are undeniably fascinating and compelling.

American conductor Fawzi Haimor electrified the orchestra with gestures that were vivid and lucid; it was an occasion when the orchestra’s international quality and acumen were both in high demand and met the competition with formidable success.

Bates: Violin Concerto
Similar strengths were demanded by the next work by 39 year old Mason Bates who has made an impact in the United States. It was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin in 2012. Bates is composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, having just completed five years in a similar role with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He followed the violin concerto with one for the cello; his first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, will premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017.

It looks as if its performances in New Zealand are among the few so far outside the United States, if my Internet browsing reflects the situation. The violin concerto has been recorded by the London Symphony under Slatkin with Anne Akiko Meyers, the soloist in Wellington; and the European premiere was by the Orchestre national de Lyon last year. In the United States it’s been played by orchestras in Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and others no doubt that don’t appear on my computer screen.

And incidentally, Bates’s website and others highlight the three-city tour by the NZSO.

Bates is travelling the road that was paved by the minimalists, Glass, Reich and Riley, but his palette is rather more eclectic, not adhering to the habits of repetitiveness felt in the early minimalists. Like most younger composers who are more interested in giving audiences a good time than impressing musicologists, he avoids serialist dogma and complex, tuneless music such as his compatriots Morton Feldman or Elliott Carter produced.

I found an interesting observation in an American review of Bates’s music, touching the direction of classical music today:
“… classical music and its audiences love young dynamos who satisfy the urge for innovation while continuing the traditions of the classical canon. Bates presents cutting-edge concerts and writes big pieces for orchestra that are essentially 21st-century tone poems, or musical narratives.”
It’s not irrelevant that he moonlights as a DJ, is deep into electronica, and the sophisticated areas of pop music.

So what does the violin concerto sound like? What are its influences?
Though I didn’t find many distinct echoes of earlier composers, there were glimpses of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, inter alia, certain of the pulsating passages of his violin concerto; and you can hear sounds that, in a couple of decades from now, will define the time and place of this music. Thinking about violin concerto models, the fast movements of John Corigliano’s ‘Red Violin’ Concerto is not far away.

The piece doesn’t demand a Straussian or Mahlerian sized orchestra: strings numbered 14 first violins down to six basses; there’s a piano and some interesting percussion that I could hear but not see.

Bates and the primitive birds
Then there’s the illustrative aspect. Bates’s own notes describe how he fastened on depicting a chase between two mesozoic animals, of the Jurassic age (around 150 million years ago): the bird-like Archaeopteryx lithographica chasing a compsognathid (Compsognathus longipes) at night. Though I’m really not interested in dinosaurs, it was not hard to be fascinated by the music itself, listening to the contest between the two creatures, through frantic, pulsating, skittering sounds alternating with the violin’s rather gorgeously lyrical, soaring music.

There was, naturally, a very special feel in the violin’s part, since we were privileged to have the commissioner/dedicatee/performer of the premiere playing with the NZSO; they were indeed driven by the combination of Meyers’s intensity and soulfulness, and the elegant, energetic conducting of Haimor. While the orchestral part of the work is full of entertainment and uncluttered virtuosity, the violin was so constantly the centre of attention that it was too easy to miss the delights conspicuous in the orchestra.

The second movement, called ‘Lakebed Memories’, took us from the actual Jurassic age to viewing a mesozoic lakebed, perhaps from the present day, in a series of slow, falling phrases from the violin and semi-glissandi pizzicato from cellos and some curious sounds from percussion, e.g. crotales(?) and glockenspiel(?).

In the middle of the third movement the orchestra gave way entirely to the violinist who raced away with endless oscillating figures representing ‘The Rise of the Birds’, another opportunity for flight, breathless ascents, or peaceful gliding on up-draughts, as the by-now-familiar, beautiful soaring motif comes to dominate until the relatively matter-of-fact ending.

I doubt that the orchestral performance was any less brilliant and convincing that those by the premiering orchestra, Pittsburgh, and others that have played it. It was one of the most attractive and engaging pieces of contemporary music I’ve come across for a while.

The New World Symphony
After the interval, the ‘New World’ Symphony did not feel like a retreat to old-fashioned music, something one knew too well, that had become hackneyed. Though other composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, of the period when Dvořák wrote it (the 1890s) have now come to dominate, to hear such a vibrant and vivid performance was to be reminded that it was no disgrace to have become more immediately popular than the other composers I mentioned.

The opening, extremely calm with strings and a telling clarinet note, and then a surprising, extra-fortissimo call to attention from Lenny Sakofsky’s hard-sticked timpani and Greg Hill’s horn. To watch conductor Haimor again, in main-stream repertoire (and here, no score), bending to the same emphases and gestures, the balletic movements that galvanised the auditorium in the first half in music of our day, made clear the essentially contemporary nature of the symphony. Every section of the orchestra, now at full strength – 16 first violins down to 8 basses – seemed to be electrified by the call to deliver a message of this kind: breathy, slow and quiet flute, velvety horns, and in the famous Largo tune, cor anglais and then bassoons, in playing that quite eliminated any sense of its being over-familiar.

And the Scherzo movement was alive with variety and subtlety, with scrupulous articulation everywhere. The Finale – con fuoco – further upped the emotional temperature where sudden switches of tempo, dynamics, discretion and brashness, brilliant orchestration and, as the programme note remarks, Dvořák’s unending melodic invention, create one of the most colourful and arousing of orchestral finales. An early experience of the symphony came to mind, hearing, in the late 1950s the opening of the Finale used as a sensational promotional tool in a sampler LP of the ‘new stereophonic recording technique’ , when the breathtaking opening assaulted the ears seemingly from every direction.

Not much has changed.
This concert will go down as one of the real highlights of musical 2016.

Quintessence on show via youth and experience at Michael Fowler Centre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents
QUINTESSENCE

String Quintets by Mozart and Brahms
(with Salina Fisher (b.1993) – Tōrino: echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne)

The Pettman Players
The New Zealand String Quartet
James Dunham (viola)

Concert One: MOZART – String Quintets: No.3 in C Major K.515 / No.6 in E-flat Major K.614
The Pettman Players:
Shauno Isomura, Benedict Lim (violins), Julie Park, Caroline Norman (violas), Martin Roberts (‘cello)

Concert Two:
MOZART – String Quintet No 5 in D Major K.593 / BRAHMS – String Quintet No.1 in F Major Op.88 (“Spring”)

Concert Three:
MOZART – String Quintet No.4 in G Minor K.516 / SALINA FISHER – String Quartet Tōrino: echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne / BRAHMS – String Quintet No.2 in G Major Op.111

The New Zealand String Quartet:
Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
with James Dunham (viola)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 17th September, 2016
(Concerts 1 and 3 reviewed below)

What a lovely idea,  arranging a day of performances of quintets for strings, and then giving the arrangement the name “quintessence” – and I must confess to not previously knowing the origin of the term in classical and medieval philosophy, of the “fifth” element or essence, a substance said to comprise the makeup of the celestial bodies, no less! In relation to Chamber Music New Zealand’s event, Quintessence was having both the New Zealand String Quartet join forces with the eminent American violist, James Dunham in concert, as well as a talented youth ensemble, The Pettman Players, whose members were associated either currently or formerly with the Pettman National Junior Academy of Music, an organisation based both in Auckland and in Christchurch.

Over the course of  a single day, Wellington concertgoers were able to hear in the morning the Pettmans in two of Mozart’s String Quintets (No.3 in C Major K.515, and No.6 in E-flat Major K.614), and then luxuriate in both an afternoon and an evening concert given by the New Zealand String Quartet with guest violist James Dunham. Each of these latter concerts featured a Mozart Quintet (No.5 in D Major K.593 in the afternoon, and No.4 in G Minor K.516 in the evening) along with a String Quintet by Brahms (No.1 in F Major Op.88 “Spring” in the afternoon, and No.2 in G Major Op.111, in the evening). As well, the evening concert contained a Chamber Music New Zealand commissioned work by local composer Salina Fisher, Tōrino: echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne.

I wasn’t able to attend all three concerts, but I managed to get to the first and third of them, relishing the opportunity to enjoy (and nonchalantly compare) the playing of two different ensembles.  I was, naturally enough, prepared to make allowances for the youthful aspect of the Players, as my understanding was that the musicians would all currently be students at the Pettman Academy, either in Christchurch or in Auckland. While the programme notes tell us that the ensemble consisted of both present and past members of the academy, we weren’t told who was specifically who in that respect. No matter, as the playing of the group members was of such a uniformly high standard it wasn’t really relevant as to who was up to which stage in his or her studies – this was music-making of a remarkably accomplished level as regards both individual and ensemble skills, these players able to realise the beauties and intricacies of the music with great aplomb and sensitivity.

The group opened their concert with the C Major Quintet K.515, one of the grandest of Mozart’s chamber works, and beginning with an extended dialogue between violin and ‘cello, the exchanges fluent and focused. Both players had finely-spun tonal qualities, the first violin, Shauno Isamura, able to beautifully “inflect” his line even at speed, the figurations handled with a deftness whose detailing seemed rich and full. As for the cellist, Martin Roberts, his responses to his leader were at once whole-hearted and finely graded to match the volinist’s declamations. Throughout, the teamwork of the ensemble was exemplary, the violas’ passages in thirds having a rich, velvety sound, the players (Julie Park and Caroline Norman) taking great care with one another’s sound-worlds so as to make their dovetailings coherent.

Though a long work, the C Major Quintet’s sequences seemed to fly by under these players’ fingers – I thought their corporate command of nuance and phrasing, especially so in the transition passages which so often depend on split-second timing, was astonishingly good. The Minuet engaged us from the start with its characterful sequences, a rising figure dominating the opening measures, while a Trio diverted our sensibilities with a leap of a seventh and a chromatic swerve – the players gave the chromatic figure plenty of “misterioso” by way of contrast with the physicality elsewhere. A hymn-like Andante featured heartfelt exchanges between the first violin and the first viola, everything distinctively and strongly focused, every note and associated phrase given its due. Then, the finale’s high spirits rounded the work off in a suitably celebratory fashion, the players relishing the occasional accents and beautifully colouring the moments of modulatory exploration before bringing it all to a joyous conclusion.

I knew the E-flat Major Quintet well, as it was a work featured on my very first recording of these pieces. To my intense pleasure these players took a no-holds-barred approach to the music, the two violas bringing out the hunting-horn character of the opening with terrific elan, then richly and excitingly interacting with the ‘cello through both energetic and more subtly-nuanced passages. The playing certainly brought out the music’s orchestral quality, no more so than at the movement’s end where the violins add their fanfares to the galloping rhythms of the lower strings – most exhilarating!

The Andante featured some lovely work by the pair of violins in tandem, a rare and brief moment of not-quite-matching intonation at the beginning of one of the melody’s variants apart – it detracted not a whit from the sense of easeful communion between the players, and the beauties of their shared phrasings. Again in the Minuet there were lovely cascading thirds from the “violin duo” (second violinist Benedict Lim matching his leader all the way in refinement and in energy) for us to relish, and a sense of the players’ delight in sweeping the dance steps along during the Trio. The finale’s Haydn-ish bustle carried everything before it in these players’ hands, Mozart’s fugal writing engendering a real sense of fun and freedom, the lines brilliantly nuanced by the players and brought together at the end with tremendous verve. What a tribute to Edith Salzmann, the artistic Director of the Pettman Academy, to have fostered and encouraged such talent as we witnessed here with these young players!

Back again to the MFC in the evening, this time for a more varied programme of Mozart and Brahms with the New Zealand String Quartet and violist James Dunham, and a newly-commissioned work for string quartet from New Zealand composer Selina Fisher. A measure of the quality of the Pettman Academy Group’s playing earlier in the day was that we weren’t made to feeli n the evening that “here, at last, was the real thing” with these adult performers – it was, instead, a different kind of musical experience, the players of the NZSQ reflecting their own by now familiar performing ethos of one of the country’s finest music ensembles.

Beginning with Mozart’s G Minor Quintet K.516, the music immediately took on a dark, theatrical “Don Giovanni-like” aspect, heightened by the “layered” sonorities of firstly three instruments, then including two more, making for a dramatic “burgeoning” of the tones and textures. I thought violist James Dunham’s playing most interesting, his tones more assertive than what I’ve been accustomed to with Gillian Ansell’s playing, his playing “tighter” and for me far less easeful. The music here certainly lent itself to dark, terse statements of intent throughout, concluding with some heartfelt downward sighs colouring the mood of the coda.

Again, with the Menuetto,  the mood remained terse and sombre, wonderfully downwardly spiralling runs meeting great sforzandi – dramatic stuff! The players relaxed into the trio, the two violas enjoying a moment of concerted lyricism, the surrounding ambiences easeful and grateful for some respite! Mozart anticipates Beethoven in the Adagio’s opening, music of such a rarefied state, almost above human emotion – the players made just as much of the movement’s contrasting sequences, a running accompaniment ushering in a descending major-key figure. And then there was the finale’s beginning, a heavy-footed trudge through stricken cadences, the two violins bearing the expressive burden , and keeping us guessing as to outcomes, before dancing into the sunniness of G major. We delighted in the players’ teamwork throughout the contrasting episodes, the hints of gypsy-like music adding touches of temperament to the Elysian happiness of it all.

Salina Fisher’s newly-commissioned work for Chamber Music New Zealand was then given by the NZSQ – this was an exploration by the composer of the similarities between the traditional Maori instrument the pūtōrino (similar to a trumpet or a flute in its function) and string instruments, particularly in its ability to equate with the human voice in terms of pitch, vocal timbres and different registers.  The instrument itself can produce deep mournful voices , male in character, and the more female, lighter, more erie and agile voice – as well, a more breathy sound can be produced by blowing across the instrument’s opening. Salina Fisher’s work was an exploration of these effects, inspired by the work of the pūtōrino’s foremost present exponent, Rob Thorne, who’s taken up the mantle of guardian of this taonga from legendary figures of the past such as Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns.

Quintessence ended with a work by Brahms, a revelation to me! – my experiences of these works by Brahms haven’t been altogether positive in the past, to the effect that I was disappointed that this series of Quintets didn’t include all six works by Mozart and have done with it! Well, I must have either been listening to the wrong recordings, or been in a peculiar frame of mind when encountering these works in the past, and specifically this G Major Quintet. The NZSQ with their visiting colleague James Dunham made the work such a life-enhancing experience for me, I listened open-mouthed right through the work and forgot to take any notes on the performance!

Thinking about how I had regarded this music on previous (and long-distant) hearings, I fished up from my memory unflattering terms like “opaque”, “weighty”, “academic”, and “self-consciously contrapuntal”. As I listened to the playing, those epithets dropped away, one by one, like scales falling from my eyes so that for the first time I could clearly see.  Right from the joyous opening, in which I could hear bells pealing and activating the surrounding ambiences (not unlike the beginning of Schumann’s great “Rhenish” Symphony) I was transfixed on several counts, by the beauty of the opening ‘cello solo and the duetting violas making their response, by the rapt sequences in the music’s development, and the reawakening of energies ,and the light and shade of the different levels of intensity right up to the music’s coda (so reminiscent of the Second Piano Concerto). The Adagio began with deep, melancholic footsteps, but varied its gait throughout between introspection and full-blooded feeling, while the mischievous Scherzo, marked Un poco Allegretto, gave one the impression of the composer chuckling to himself over the music’s enigmatic textures.

The finale certainly gave the impression of “going somewhere”, at times sounding a bit like a mystery adventure (again I thought there were parallels with the Second Piano Concerto),  with quasi-Hungarian impulses in its gait and Viennese café gestures in its mood! Hugo Wolf once wrote that “Brahms can’t exult!”, but he too may have heard performances which didn’t do the music sufficient justice as to its character and general attitude – I thought the players built up throughout the movement a terrific sense of energy, dashing and vibrant in its abandonment! It was music-making which carried all before it and throughout the final bars most appropriately brought out the joyousness of the work  – a case, as far as I was concerned, of a composer certainly having the last laugh, one which I couldn’t begrudge him in the face of such resplendent writing!

NZ Trio with Xia Jing – violin, ‘cello, piano and guzheng

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZ Trio with Xia Jing – Fa (“Open up”)

ZHOU LONG (China/USA) – Spirit of Chimes
XIA JING (China) – composition for Guzheng
JEROEN SPEAK (NZ) – Serendipity Fields (World premiere)
DYLAN LARDELLI (NZ) – Shells (World premiere)
DOROTHY KER (NZ) – String Taxonomy (World Premiere)
GAO PING (China) – Feng Zheng (World premiere – commissioned by the NZ Trio and dedicated to Jack Body)

NZ Trio
Justine Cormack (violin) / Ashley Brown (‘cello) / Sarah Watkins (piano)
with
Xia Jing (solo guzheng)

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

Friday 16th September, 2016

This concert was part of Victoria University Confucious Institute’s China/New Zealand Musical Exchange programme, and sponsored jointly by the Confucious Institute and the China Cultural Centre in New Zealand, with support from both the Asia New Zealand Foundation and Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music.

A special feature of the concert was the presence of Xia Jing, one of the foremost exponents of the guzheng – a kind of Chinese zither or dulcimer, whose documented use dates back over two thousand years. The instrument is growing in popularity in modern times, and is frequently used in popular and modern classical music, as either a solo or chamber music instrument. As one of the concert’s items Xia Jing played one of her own compositions for solo instrument, one which enabled us to experience at first hand the guzheng’s unique tonal and timbral characteristics.

Also on the programme was a work for piano trio, and four other pieces for the ensemble with guzheng, which were world premiere performances. The work for Piano Trio was written by Chinese/American composer Zhou Long and was called Spirit of Chimes, while Chinese composer Gao Ping contributed a piece commissioned by the NZ Trio and dedicated to the memory of New Zealand composer Jack Body, which was called Feng Zheng. And no fewer than three New Zealand composers  wrote works for the Trio to be performed at this concert – so the event represented a kind of feast of creativity come to the table to be savoured and enjoyed.

Zhou Long’s Spirit of Chimes opened the programme, the composer telling us in a written note that his inspiration came from “the sounds of chime-stones, bone-whistle and chime bells from ancient China”, though he additionally confided in us that, because of the disappearance of early pre-Tang Dynastic Chinese music, he had to imagine in his head the “real sound” of such ancient instruments when composing for the piano trio.

Beginning with soft, mournful sliding notes on the ‘cello, echoed by the piano and joined by the violin with its delicate sliding figurations, the music before too long took on a kind of processional aspect, as if bringing to us from the past the different sound-characters that could unlock our appreciation of these ancient gestures and tones. The strings interacted warmly and readily, firstly in full-blooded vocal terms, and then in a more folksy, homely, throw-away manner – the piano joined them, partly to support the interaction and partly to push things on, to plant and then to till elsewhere.  This seemed to provoke division in the ranks as the cello broke away from the discourse of three and disrupted the dovetailed interactions –  suddenly the musical exchanges were volatile and angular, with the different lines and timbres of the instruments colliding and opposing one another as much as they were colluding and intertwining. Though a measure of calm was restored  we got the feeling that those same disruptive elements were waiting for their chance to strike again, something that an enormous tam-tam stroke more-or-less- confirmed.

I enjoyed the “danse macabre” sequences which followed, the piano instigating the dry-bones manner and enjoining the strings to take part, which they did, adding weight and extending the motif to a six-note tattoo, which got all kinds of treatment. As if in payment for pleasure, the music irrupted again, almost vengefully, as if a veritable battery of physical assault, characterised by savage trills and tremolandi………did we want to be there? But what amazing sonorities!

Strings mused on the quiet that followed, the cello occasionally bursting out, more in sorrow than in anger, the other instruments following suit, and, it seemed to me,  transforming by osmosis the mood to one of great longing, almost to the point of weeping! The piano’s ambient colourings were left, pushing out the spaces and leaving us drifting, contemplating a certain “tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect” ambivalence……whatever my stance I was left contemplating the startling presence with which the players enabled the voices of those “ancient chimes” to speak to me, whether real or imagined……

‘Cellist Ashley Brown then introduced the guzheng player, Xia Jing, who demonstrated to us by way of some kind of improvised solo, what her instrument could do. Sitting flat at the instrument like one might at a Western dulcimer or Japanese koto,  Xia Jing plucked the strings with her right hand and pressed the strings down with her left hand at certain points to produce pitch variations and different kinds of vibrato. Her hands seemed to alternate between melody and accompaniment, producing timbres not dissimilar to a balanaika or a cimbalon. I was astonished at the degree of energy she seemed to be able to produce, in terms of both strength and excitement.  She brought the music’s energy down to a more ritualistic level,  finishing her piece with a beautiful kind of postscript or epilogue.

Justine Cormack, the Trio’s violinist,  told us briefly about the four pieces especially composed for the trio in collaboration with the guzheng, inviting us to enjoy the pieces on their own terms as well as relishing the differences between them.  For me to try and repeat the kind of “gesture-by-gesture” commentary I noted down throughout the course of the first piece, would, I think, run the risk of depleting both my vocabulary and the number of people prepared to stay the course in any case!  The first three pieces of this group seemed to me to reflect certain philosophical attitudes towards “sound content”, though Jeroen Speak’s work Serendipity fields I thought more inclined towards out-front expression than was the case with the relative reticence of the other works, each displaying a reluctance to “resound”. Both Dylan Lardelli’s Shells and Dorothy Ker’s String Taxonomy seemed in fact more like physical choreography than sound generation, each composer stressing the importance for their piece of “semblance” (Lardelli) and “shared gestures” (Ker), ahead of creating tones from notation, a more oblique, almost “underbellied” manifestation of things.

Serendipity fields made each instrument say its name at the music’s beginning with terse but characterful impulses, which I liked, the guzheng dalicate and lyrical, the piano percussive and the strings angular and sinewy – then tossed these characteristics about, resulting in the music veering from vehement, through whimsical to wraith-like……Speak’s music had an extremely volatile inclination allied to an interior quality whose character seemed furtive and inward, setting up situations where the sounds seemed to “goad” one another, and build up sequences whose textures and ambiences produce what sounded like some kind of “chaos of delight”. Any semblance of permanence was short-lived, as the instruments swooped, burgeoned and withdrew their tones as required and then as quickly disapeared, with a final, characteristically short-breathed pair of impulses. What teamwork there was between the players in the realisation of these scenarios!

Compared with Jereon Speak’s engaging ‘serendipities”, the impression left by Dylan Lardelli’s Shells was dry and taciturn, which underlined the appositeness of the piece’s title. Whatever “substance” gave rise to these gestures, whatever fleshed-out intentions that once perhaps spoke their names, had long since disappeared, leaving only encasements and frameworks, like a luggage-room filled with empty suitcases and leaving behind little more than spaces for conjecture.  Pianist Sarah Watkins used her hands to resonate the piano’s “box” rather than any actual tones, apart from occasional single, transfixing notes, while the string-players pursued a kind of “silent music” course – for someone as sleep-deprived as I was just at that time, the effect was hallucinatory, filling my half-lit consciousness with surreal light and dumb-show gesturings, a narrative at which I felt I was little more than a mute spectator.  Dorothy Ker’s String Taxonomy seemed to me less of an “inward” experience, the movements of the players more out-going and exploratory than in Lardelli’s mutescape, vis-à-vis the use of knitting needles by both the ‘cellist and violinist, making for a dry, metallic effect involving little or no flesh-and-blood. The pianist activated the strings inside the box, the three string-players joining in with the effect through brushing or scraping, creating what the composer styled as “a sonic alchemy”, an interaction of which worked on my sensibilities to produce a kind of looking-glass-land effect – a language of meaning through gesture rather than its conventional result, counter-intuitive when it came to making sense of it all.

Again, one had to marvel at the sounds that were conceived by such original means, right from the outset, with its “knitting pattern” exchanges and determinedly non-pitched language – furious irruptions of energy biting and snapping and resonating from the stringed instruments were followed by their antitheses – coded whisperings took the place of shouted or semaphored riddles. Together these sequences gave the impression of some kind of dynamic coagulation which could surely have blossomed forth in a kind of “transfigured night” synthesis of gesture and melismatic fruition – but apart from a startlingly brilliant metallic scintillation, the work’s conclusion was as enigmatic in its effect as was the whole.

To Gao Ping’s work Feng Zheng we then came, to conclude the concert, the piece’s title transliterating into English as “Wind Kite”, as fitting an image as any for a work dedicated to the recently-departed Jack Body, a friend of Gao Ping as well as a fellow-composer. A Chinese tradition was to fly kites during the time of Qingming, when the living pay respect to their deceased ancestors by way of the kites bearing their thoughts and feelings to the realms of the departed.  Here, the music was divided into four sections: – (1) Still Clouds, (2) The Breeze, (3) Breaking the Air, (4) Broken Line. Gao Ping underlined the connection of the music with his late friend by devising a motif from his name (jACk BoDy) used at the beginning and end of the piece.

The opening “Still Clouds” captured the ‘calm magnificence” of the sky, and the wonderment of those still earthbound beneath its splendour – the music’s resonant, drifting textures suggested a peace and order away from earthly conflict – string pizzicati spiked these ambiences, attempting to disrupt the undulating tones of the guzheng and piano, violin and ‘cello irruptions tumbling over themselves before being borne away on the piano’s “wind-borne drift” of tones to which the strings contributed tremolandi and the guzheng mesmeric repeated notes.  The instruments seemed to rise from out of the music’s layered textures and then submerge again, the argument growing more and more involved – a kind of “communion of impulse”, one which brought forth some heartfelt responses from the players, such as Sarah Watkins’ exciting, toccata-like irruptions from the piano. The music developed real “schwung” with what I presumed was its “Breaking the Air” sequences, everything propulsive and exhilarating, with emphasis on the ensemble rather than individual strands, reaching a kind of crisis-point of function with trenchant tremolandi from the strings, the  weight of sound becoming more and more stratospheric, abetted by echo-chamber effects from the guzheng, almost like voices humming off-stage! It seemed very much a valedictory point, one which the composer, by some alchemic means, was able to suggest to me a “here-and-now” feeling not unlike that which infuses the final song “I Remember” in Lilburn’s settings of Denis Glover’s “Sings Harry” verses – something that could have taken place nowhere else but here – something one knew, by dint of awareness and experience. The musicians played out this mood with a deep sense of having travelled and of, at the end of it, returning home.

The Chinese title “Fa” and its associated character for this concert suggested the English words “open up” – which, it seemed to me, the NZ Trio, Xia Jing, and the composers and their music encouraged our imaginations to do here most rewardingly.

Sombre Music of the Low Countries from the Bach Choir

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Bach Choir of Wellington, conducted by Peter de Blois, with Douglas Mews (organ), Laura Barton (violin), Vivian Stephens (violin), Aidan Verity (viola), Lucy Gijsbers (cello), Michelle Velvin (harp), Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion)

Music by Belgian and Dutch composers

St. Teresa’s Church, Karori

Sunday, 11 September 2016, 2pm

Most of this music made me feel low, like the countries.  Only Sweelinck (1562-1621) seemed to sparkle with life, and he was much the oldest of the composers performed, the others being all from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  I decided that I liked soulful music – but not doleful music.  After hearing two sombre works (first movement from Mahler’s 10th symphony and Berg’s violin concerto) the previous evening  from Orchestra Wellington, I was not in a receptive mood for music such as the choir sang, in a concert of over two hours’ length.

It was an ambitious programme of unfamiliar, and often difficult, works in modern idiom.  The relatively modern, large church has good acoustics, and the sound came over well, without undue reverberation from both choir and instruments.  The disadvantage was that all the performing took place in the organ gallery at the back of the church, behind the audience.  This meant we did not have the interest and stimulation of seeing the performers, which adds quite a lot to the enjoyment of music, especially when instrumentalists are involved.  Peter de Blois explained in his preliminary remarks that this was necessary because of the impossibility of moving the altar at the front of the church; thus there was not adequate space for the choir.

De Blois pointed out that the day was the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US, thus the first part of the concert was about death, while the second dealt with resurrection.  Images, varying from statues to flowers to skies, were shown on a screen at the front of the church, but their relationship to the music being tenuous.  I did not find them a good substitute for seeing animated performers at their tasks.

The first composer we heard was Wietse Stuurman, born 1976; his Miserere mei Deus.  This involved, in addition to the choir, organ and strings, tubular bells.  The choir made a marvellous sound, and the effect of discords in the music was clear.  The organ part had splendid tunes, with a continuous pedal note.  The bell and organ became loud and insistent, but there was little variety of tonality in the piece, because of that note and bell.  The piece was mournful.  Although the words were reasonably clear, it was good to have the Latin words and translations for the whole programme, in addition to excellent notes.  The work was well performed, but didn’t ‘grab’ me, despite some interesting shifting harmonies.

Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’ by Sweelinck was a bright organ interlude, despite its title, especially after the second variation when a 2-foot stop was added.  More sounds and textures were added in other variations, before a return to quiet contemplation in the last one.  This was a most satisfying performance.

The next choral piece, a seven-movement Requiem, was by Huub de Lange (born 1955) and was set for choir and string quartet.  This would not have been easy to sing, but one or two voices tended to stand out at times, and top notes were not always hit squarely.  Otherwise, the choir produced lovely velvety tone.

I could not help thinking that Mozart, Schubert, Verdi and others knew how to make a Requiem Mass that was gorgeous, even animated, as well as solemn.  This one was monotonous; it needed more changes of tonality and mood.  However, there were some excellent dynamic effects, such as a fading pianissimo at the end of the Sanctus.  It was an innovative work and the choir and quartet made a good job of it, but the minimalist influences (remarked on in the programme note for the Stuurman work) made it boring to my ear.

Even the In Paridisum had a rather slow tempo and a minor modality, as did the unusually added Te Deum, which is a hymn of praise.  Yet it had doleful intervals of diminished and augmented seconds.  Its final Sanctus revealed a full choral sound, but it was not remotely jubilant.  The varying close intervals made great demands on the singers.

Sweelinck brought back some jollity, with variations on ‘Onder een Linde groen’ (Under a green linden tree), a secular piece.  It was delightful and uplifting, played with great contrasts of stops and between runs and detached chords. Use of reed stops in the finale reiterated the melody with different sounds.

Evert van Merode (born 1980) wrote his Stabat Mater dolorosa in 2013.  The men’s sound was good, but the women’s pitch was not always accurate; it was probably difficult to maintain it in this sort of tonality.  The harp had a dramatic part to play, but it didn’t always seem to fit with the other instruments (violin and cello).  For me, the best part musically was the concluding ‘Quando corpus…’ (When my body dies, grant that my soul is given the glory of paradise).

After the interval, the music was entirely by Flor Peeters (1903-1986), a Belgian organist and composer.  I still have the programme from his visit to New Zealand in the 1970s.  The Kyrie of his Missa Festiva had the men opening in sombre tones.  Despite the good acoustics, it was a drawback to clarity that they did not all pronounce the vowels in the same way.  Some of the choir tone sounded strained; there was a lot of difficult singing.  After the Kyrie, Mews played Peeters’s chorale prelude on ‘O Gott du Frommer Gott’, with a mellow tone and mood.

The splendid tenor introits to both the Gloria and the Credo were, I suspect, sung by de Blois himself.  At last, there was a bright mood in the declamatory Gloria.  Singing in the latter part of was without instruments, and the writing was not so taxing.  It came off well, especially the jubilant ‘Amen’.  It was interesting to hear the composer’s ‘Jesu meine freude’ chorale prelude which followed on the organ, since Bach’s settings as a motet and for organ are familiar.  It was more appealing than the mass, though there was little variation of volume or tone.

The first part of the Credo was appropriately loud, while the quieter section, Et incarnatus est, sounded splendid, apart from too many misplaced s’s from the choir.  The final section of the Credo was suitably exultant.  The Sanctus began a little flat, as did the Benedictus, and both continued that way intermittently, with less clear words and vowels.  I’m sure the singers were tired by this time.  An interposed chorale prelude ‘Ach bleib’ mit deiner gnade’ was played with gorgeous flute stops, and flowed in a Bach-like way.  The programme ended with the mass’s Agnus Dei.  This made a very pleasing finish, dying away at the end.

The concert was rather too long, but a tour de force from a good choir.  However, the choice of programme was challenging for both choir and audience, and the former was not consistent in its performance.  The instrumentalists were all strong, and Douglas Mews’s organ-playing was magnificent both in solo pieces and with the choir, where he was no mere accompanist.