Tag: contemporary music

Beauty, poignancy, energy, focus – Kenneth Young’s CD “Shadows and Light”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shadows and Light
Symphonic Compositions by Kenneth Young

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

Atoll ACD 216

Over much too protracted a period I have lived with this disc of Kenneth Young’s music, playing single tracks at times when opportunities arose, and, in random-step-wise mode very gradually familiarising myself with the music’s sounds. It’s only recently that I’ve had the oportunity to tease it out from my constantly-attenuated “must-hear” collection of recordings, and given it the uninterrupted attention I’ve felt it deserves. Playing a track at a time, I remember being caught up in each one’s very different version of an intense experience, though in isolating my listening to the pieces I had little sense of “carry-over” from one world of intensity to another – it’s as though I was “beginning again” with each piece, and therefore having to re-establish my relationship with the composer’s sound-world before properly taking in any specific content.

Of course, away from recordings, and the luxury of repetition they provided, this was the old way of things, by which listeners got to know any “body” of work from a single composer – a public performance here, followed by another one there, and so on, except on those red-letter occasions when a concert featured a number of that same composer’s works! So in due course came my first chance to get a decent and protrated “listen” of Young’s new CD from beginning to end. What can I say as a result of it all? – just that the experience has had an overwhelming effect on me, putting me in no doubt as to the cumulative beauty, poignancy, energy and focus of the composer’s achievement over the span of this disc’s contents.

I had previously reviewed another all-Young CD, one from Trust Records which appeared as long ago as 1998, again featuring the composer as conductor, with the NZSO. I was, on that occasion, extremely taken with the composer’s “skilful and evocative way with orchestral colour”, and expressed admiration for “Young the executant as much as Young the composer”, who, to my ears had “so admirably controlled and balanced…..the sounds, even in the most heavily-scored passages”. At the risk of repeating myself, I can’t help but reiterate my pleasure at Young’s executant skills in relation to the more recent Atoll disc, along with, of course, his creative abilities. If anything, the touch is even surer, and the results honed with even clearer and more focused distinction.

Right from the beginning of the new recording, Young the composer takes his listeners to a place one feels is exactly where the composer wants us to go – he alludes as much to this feeling in his own words, reproduced in the booklet – “….it (Remembering) is the one work I’ve written in which I would not change a note”. From its drifting, evocative opening, in which NZSO concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppanen’s solo violin sings its “lone soul” melody, through sequences of quixotic interaction and constantly-shifting textures (Debussy’s Jeux occasionally comes to mind), to its cumulative and enriched “return” to tranquility, the music weaves its compelling amalgam of detailed re-engagement and visionary oversight in a richly compelling, and properly “memorable” way.

If Remembering seems very much the stuff of “things past”, then Lux Aeterna works on a much wider canvas, an amalgam of some kind of deeply-ingrained awareness of things past with a conscious present, and an exploration of various connective pathways between the two. Only a handful of minutes longer than Remembering, this second work at once seems to dwarf its predecessor, the chant-like unison melody mysteriously sounding as if from ages past (like the opening of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture) before a kind of “opening up” of the world, winds and strings filled with wonderment at the vast, colourful incomprehension of it all.

What impresses me is how Young manages to create sound-vistas which express these visions with the utmost clarity and conviction – the first section of Lux Aeterna sets a whole world of motoric activity in a backdrop of vast spaces that expresses an age-old question, that of life’s purpose and destination. Then after the chant-like melody reaffirms its continuum of consciousness, more vigorous impulses spread across the spaces, galvanising the textures and reactivating the “here and now” voices, until the solo ‘cello seems to patiently transcend such worldly preoccupations, dissolving their substance into a strange alignment with those greater, more transcendent spaces, the recurring chant encouraging the string textures to gater around and suffuse thew whole scenario with a kind of “peace that surpasses understanding”, its long-breathed lines trailing into a kind of eternity…..

Symphony No.2 came from a 2001 commission which marked the beginning of Young’s full-time career as a conductor and composer. A First Symphony had been written in the 1980s while Young was still an orchestral player, a somewhat Mahlerian “symphony is like the world” utterance, things paralleling further with the earlier composer when Young himself took up a conducting post (Conductor in Residence) with the NZSO. The new Symphony followed in the wake of Young’s active involvement in performing and recording seminal New Zealand works, along with fulfilling the occasional commission for an original work. Slow in its gestation, but enriched by experience both creative and recreative the Symphony came when it had to, and was finished in 2004.

With a phrase resembling a bird-call a solo clarinet began the work, setting up a world of dialogues with different variants and textures, the heavy percussion adding both scintillation and deep, spaced-out ambience beneath the chatter of the instrumental comings-and-goings. Urgent brass-calls brought forth eloquence from individual instruments – a solo violin, a bassoon, and a ‘cello all took their opportunities, separately and together, as the rest of the instruments tossed melodic and rhythmic scraps around, at times in the manner of a “concerto for orchestra”. An irruption of intent heaved upwards and energetically resounded among the brasses as string ostinati pattered like rain on the roof, and the winds squawked like ruffled birds, before the vigorous musical argument was becalmed by strings and tongued winds, and something of a new world brought to view.

Throughout, the music evoked a kind of volatile biosphere of activities, the instruments and their groupings skilfully and characterfully employed by the composer to interact, contrast, oppose and throw into bold relief. Always there was a characterisation involving declamation or interaction, brought about by Young’s well-honed instrumentation skills, the sounds enjoying a coherence of intent and/or effect, the silences bringing forth breath-catching moments of further tremulous expectation.

The concluding sequences presented a kind of nocturnal world, bolstered by tight brass harmonies, and ennobled by an extended ‘cello solo threading its way through ambient orchestral textures, soft percussion scintillations, and celeste-like colourings. After the energies and volatilities of the work’s central sequences, these defty-wrought impulses (including a delicious “tuba dreaming tuba dreams” passage) came across partly as very much a “recharge-batteries time” tempered with undercurrents of unease – nothing lasted, tranquility least of all, and the “we want to go home” statements grew in agitated frequency and intent to the point of anarchy until the detailings surrendered as quickly as they had thrust themselves forward. What had been fractious and abrasive became conciliatory and accommodating, as the end approached, and all things gave way to the silences.

Invocation, written during Young’s “Composer-in Residence” period with the Auckland Philharmonia during 2014 highlighted the skills of the NZSO’s principal oboist, Robert Orr, here playing the oboe d’amore, a slightly larger and mellower version of the standard orchestral oboe. At first the melodic line was free and exploratory, and inclusive of other lines, sometimes in tandem, at other times in a hand-over sense, but as the music continued a fantastic sense of tumult broke out as if across an overhead sky, stunning the watcher into silence. The agitations filled out to what seem like cosmic proportions, both overhead and from underneath, deep percussion seeming to activate the very ground beneath the observer’s feet – as with the symphony, the sounds seemed to reduce human proportions to a size which seems insignificant, were it not for the return of the oboe d’amore’s plaintive voice, suggesting a kind of steadfastness and strength amid those vast, self-sufficient spaces, a place in whatever scheme of things might be. Commentator Roger Smith’s description of the piece, reproduced in the booklet, spoke aptly of a search for light, life and positive energies through music.

The disc’s final work, Douce Tristesse, inhabited a much gentler and readily inhabitable world, the music inspired by what Young calls “an idyllic Bay of Plenty holiday spot” much visited and enjoyed by his family. Confessing that an “English pastoral zephyr” gently moves through the music, Young mentioned the names of Finzi and Butterworth as two of the shades of the friendly ghosts peering out from copses, hedgerows and water-shaded willows, perhaps delighted at being asked to cast illumination upon Antipodean vistas for a change! Perhaps at times these found themselves a little disconcerted by the relative intensities of the light, which, however broughts out its own unique versions and sensibilities.

Whatever attention I’ve given this disc over the duration, I’ve found it pays back most handsomely, be it a “one work at a time” experience or as a representation of a “single concert”. The latter experience is something to aim for, as the works are judiciously placed to have a kind of cumulative effect, with the Symphony as the great central crossbeam, before the final two shorter works return us, as it were, to our lives. On all counts to my ears – compositional, performance and recording quality – the disc makes a compelling case for the cause of Ken Young’s music.

Xenia Pestova – an interpreter for all ages, at St.Andrew’s, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
THE GREY GHOST – Xenia Pestova (piano)

DEBUSSY – La cathedral engloutie (from Preludes 1910)
ED BENNETT (b. 1975) – Gothic (2008)
SCARLATTI – Keyboard Sonatas in D Major (K.9) and D Minor (K.10)
PATRICIA ALESSANDRINI – Etude d’apres Scarlatti (2002)
DARIA DOBROCHNA KWIATKOWSKA (b.1969) – After Brin (2000)
BERIO – 6 Encores: Brin (1990) / Feuerklavier (1989) / Wasserklavier (1965)
JS BACH – Sechs klein Praeludien BWV 939: No.6 in C Minor
GLENDA KEAM (b.1960) – Mind Springs(2016-17)
ANNEAR LOCKWOOD (b.1939) – RCSC (2001)
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier BWV 933
No.5 in E Major / No.6 in E Minor
HEATHER HINDMAN – Two and a Half Miniatures 1 (2005)
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien BWV 939: No.4 in A Minor / No.6 in C Major
ARLENE SIERRA (b.1970) – Birds and Insects (2003-15) Painted Bunting – Cicada Sketch – Titmouse
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier BWV 933 No.4 in D Major
CLARA WIECK SCHUMANN – THree Preludes and Fugues, Op.16: No.3 in D Minor
MIRIAMA YOUNG (b. 1975) – The Grey Ghost (2017)

Xenia Pestova (piano)

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

Sunday, 30th July 2017

Xenia Pestova’s programme in itself commanded a good deal of interest, with its many and varied juxtapositionings of old and new adding adventurous touches to the concert’s overall excitement along with the anticipation of many individual delights. I’d not had any previous encounter with the pianist’s playing, but read with interest her “artist’s bio” resume as per programme, which outlined a goodly number of notable artistic achievements, enough to whet the appetite for what might come of the afternoon of music-making about to be set before us.

The pianist readily and eloquently talked with us throughout the concert, introducing each of the items and giving it a context which I thought enhanced the effect of her performances – though she spoke freely, everything seemed to the point, and in fact enhanced the helpfulness of the programme’s written notes without excess point-making. No doubt that some people would have preferred that she simply played the programme without spoken introductions – I found her direct and brightly-focused manner refreshing and, in instances where I wasn’t familiar with the composer or the music, generally helpful.

In her own programme-note, Pestova spoke of the interconnectiveness of existence, and how this is expressed in music, citing her presentation of works by eight contemporary composers which offer “personal commentaries on the past”, and how their music can be heard “sharing with us their unique visions of the music yet to come.” Certainly, in this context her performances for me almost invariably “struck chords” across time-frames, opening the pores, it seemed, of my listening, to register those resonances and almost “feel” the inter-connective tissue. Even so, I suspect there was more to this process here than mere “cheek-by-jowling” the pieces in question.

What delighted me was that, in the instances where I knew the music, Pestova’s actual playing seemed to me to completely inhabit the work and its evocations, physical, intellectual and spiritual, so that her performances had a “stand-alone” quality which satisfied in their own right, and not merely served as forerunners of “x” or resonances of “y”. Here was a remarkably sensitive, thoughtful and totally involved interpreter at work, whose understanding of the there-and-then of each piece seemed as potent as her awareness of its connections with the past or the future.

Her playing of the concert’s opening work, Debussy’s La cathedral engloutie, for instance, brought a potent amalgam of clarity and atmosphere to the evocation of this subterranean miracle – the tolling bell at the work’s outset at once focused our sensibilities amid a spacious ambience charged with mystery. Right through the work Pestova seemed able to balance all kinds of like exclusives, with, in places, breathtaking results, no more so than during the aftermath of the main climax, where the playing became suffused with a quality akin to an interior world of sound, quite unearthly – her control of both dynamics and tone-colour I thought remarkable, both in forward movement and, as here, in retreat. I found the ending very Lisztian, resonant and beautiful.

Pestova’s interpretation was then further enriched by her programming of the next work, an uncannily different-but-similar piece called Gothic, written by Irish composer Ed Bennett who just happened to be present in the St.Andrew’s audience! Prior to the work’s performance, the composer came forward to tell us of his fascination with the atmosphere of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, and of his attempts to recreate something of that unique resonance, particularly when those spaces were near-empty, and the building itself could “speak” without interruption.

Big, jagged chords alternating with the pianist’s vocalisations created uncanny echo effects, while repeated note passages brought forth echoes of Musorgsky’s Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language) from Pictures from an Exhibition. Generally the composer used the piano itself as an enormous cathedral interior space, using a variety of dynamics and textures, and creating sounds which were left to resonate over these same spaces, augmented by the pianist’s vocalisations – which actually had the last word.

Domenico Scarlatti’s music was the starting-point for the group of pieces that followed – two keyboard sonatas which again highlighted Pestova’s skills as an interpreter, her performances gently and cooly activating the music’s textures and colours rather than setting sparks flying, and clearly contrasting the middle section of the D Major work with its outlying territories, generating a real sense of exploration of the differences.

American-born contemporary composer Patricia Alessandrini’s “response” to this same D Major Sonata took the form of an Etude after Scarlatti, beginning with a pensive kind of dialogue set up by the pianist between the direct activation of exterior keys and interior strings, straightaway creating wondrously spacious atmospheres and amazing Cage-like silences! Pestova’s note on the music talked about “the changes of colour between (the gestures)”, evident in the “charged atmosphere” wrought by what framed these silences, a kind of dichotomy between focus and distance, resulting in something I found magical and elusive.

The pianist then, I think, played the Luciano Berio piece Brin (1990) before another work After brin (2000) by Daria Dobrochna Kwiatkowska, a Polish-born UK-based composer. Berio’s piece was one of a set of six encores, of which Pestova gave us three. My unfamiliarity with the music resulted in a modicum of confusion regarding the programme’s actual order, here – but it seemed to me that we heard the first Berio encore and the Kwiatkowska “response” to that piece. Berio’s work featured repeated notes played with the intensity of searchlights, alternated with single notes that were sounded here as if they were bells – the contrasts of different registers and ambiences of these groups creating a heightened response to each one, as well as to the phenomenon of what Daria Dobrochna Kwiatkowska beautifully characterised in the Berio work with the words “Music happens between the notes”.

Kwiatkowska’s piece After brin was a student exercise involving a response to Berio’s work, the younger composer seeking to capture a certain diffusiveness of Berio’s same pitches and note-positions, but with clusters of notes rather than isolated tones. I thought it echoed the original inspiration in slow-motion, with Debussy-like colourings irradiating the stillnesses, and billowing the intensities upwards and outwards – a most attractive piece.

Returning to Berio’s work with the remaining two “encores”, we heard Feuerklavier (1989) and Wasserklavier (1965), each of the pieces “saying its name” in performance, Pestova’s playing again seeming in both cases to reach into the music’s substance and activate those same particular qualities – thus Feuerklavier rumbled, bubbled chattered and fermented, with occasional irruptions of energy, the figurations darting about, seeking everything out, and tumbling in all directions, while the Wasserklavier was all limpid textures, almost Debussy-like in its liquidity and subtlety.

JS Bach’s Little Prelude” BWV939 in C Minor flowed and chattered its course up to the cusp of Auckland composer Glenda Keam’s new work Mind Springs, a piece which began explosively, resembling the sudden onslaught of a nightmare in a scenario which might have promised order and structure. Keam’s programme notes spoke of water in bubbling, babbling mode, accounting for the piece’s moments of whimsy, though these soon found themselves besieged by ever-insistent figurations, becoming in places trenchant and demanding – the music’s title kept the listener waiting for the next leap into a different mode, be it textural or gestural. Our kaleidoscopic listening journey took us to a number of these expressionist realms, filled for example with murmuring insect activity in, around and between mystical chords whose trunks rose from leaf-laden ground, then without warning transfixed by the onset of supercharged birdsong, strident, jagged-edged outcrops and liquid ostinati – amid a raft of suggested influences the composer gave significant prominence to “distorted echoes of JS Bach”.

The interval brought with it the opportunity to re-establish our bearings in the wake of the variegated candour of what we’d encountered so far in the recital – so much full-fronted creativity and recreativity, perhaps even awakening echoes of T.S.Eliot’s words, “human kind cannot bear very much reality” in its direct impact. Having girded our loins we awaited what was to follow – pieces by two New Zealanders, Annea Lockwood and Miriama Young, and by two more off-shore contemporary composers, and still more from an iconic nineteenth-century performer who happened also to compose, if well-and-truly in the shadow of her more illustrious composer-husband.

So, our sensibilities refreshed, Xenia Pestova welcomed us back to the crucible of experience that we’d embarked on earlier in the afternoon and were about to continue, beginning with a piece by Annea Lockwood, called RCSC, the combined initials of American composer Ruth Crawford Seegar and pianist Sarah Cahill (who commissioned the work in 2001 as one part of seven pieces in honour of Seegar.) Annea Lockwood achieved fame bordering on notoriety for a work she wrote to parallel the achievements of Christian Barnard, the world’s first heart transplant surgeon – Lockwood called her 1960s/70s work Piano Transplants, one which involved submerging, burying and/or setting alight defunct, irreparable, and unwanted pianos. The instruments were in many cases abandoned, most of them along London’s Thames River. Pestova assured us that she would not be setting fire to the piano on this occasion, when playing Lockwood’s work!

It wasn’t what I expected – I’d read enough about Lockwood’s music to imagine her work as anarchic and uncompromising, and featuring all kinds of unconventionalities – and it was to my utmost surprise that this work came across to my ears as ambient and beautiful, spacious and thoughtful. At the beginning, Debussy-like sonorities were contrasted with the metallic tintinabulations of string-plucking, augmented by the use of dampeners for a contrasting effect.Widely-spaced chords conjured vast spaces into which the dampened notes “drubbed” as if the music was trying to dance while in sacks – and yet another section featuring slides and glissandi from string manipulation brought to mind the mysteries of the col legno sections of the Introduction to Stravinsky’s Firebird.

Then followed two sections which depicted responses by contemporary composers to older and more established musical realisations, each of the latter being the music of JS Bach.A third “parallel presentation” featured a less-than-contemporary but profoundly of-its-time work by none other than Clara Wieck Schumann, whose creative efforts were for many years ignored as being of little worth compared with those of her husband, Robert, and of far less importance than her skills as a pianist! Concluding the recital, then, was a new work by Australian-based New Zealand composer Miriama Young, a work called The Grey Ghost, more about which below…..

Demonstrating once again her characteristic feeling for the essences of the recital’s “older” pieces, Xenia Pestova gave us some more JS Bach – firstly, a cheerful, propulsive E Major Prelude BWV 933 No.5, bringing out the music’s ceremonial qualities, and highlighting the contrasts with the companion BWV 933 E Minor Prelude, a lovely, piquant “stroll” whose trajectories enabled the music’s world of feeling to sound right up to the last note and beyond, to my ears totally avoiding the new-age “authentic-performance” tendency to rattle through pieces such as these, leaving the trampled-on fragments on the floor in the playing’s wake.

Then came Canadian composer Heather Hindman’s 2005 work for solo piano Two and a Half Miniatures, a piece chosen by the ISCM (International Society of Contemporary Music) to feature in a recent (2012) World New Music Day. The music’s more overt aspects – vigorous single-note declamations which spanned and then distended octave-leaps, hammer-blow cluster chords and spectacular glissandi, repeated rise-and-fall figurations punctured by more hammer-blow chords whose accelerated repetition resembled a giant steam locomotive attempting to move off – appeared to be “haunted” by an ambient background kept alive and resonant by the sustaining pedal, and to which the composer referred as the “underneath” – besides the resonances there were string-activated glissando-like voices towards the piece’s end reminding one of Schlegel’s comment re Schumann’s Fantasia in C – “the soft note for one who listens secretly…..”

Two more Bach pieces followed, a brief, questioning A Minor Prelude (No.4 from the Sechs kleine Präludien BWV 939), and a graceful C major Prelude (No.6 of the same set), music in which Pestova seemed to bring out its exploratory instincts, the player enjoying the music’s modulatory impulses, and pensive,”somewhere-else” ending.

For any musician, performing a piece of music dedicated to and written specifically for them must be an experience like no other – and though Xenia Pestova wasn’t giving a “world premiere” here, it was at least a New Zealand “first” for American-born composer Arlene Sierra’s Birds and Insects, in this instance three of the ten individual pieces that make up the entire work. The first of these three pieces, Painted Bunting, was dedicated by the composer to Pestova, something of a compliment in more ways than one, the bird itself (albeit the male!) having been described as the most beautiful in North America, accounting for its nickname “nonpareil” (without equal)!

The pianist, not unexpectedly, greatly relished the motifs, textures and energies of the eponymous bird’s music – characterful, attention-seeking treble scintillations set the silences tingling, in the midst of which disturbance was set a somewhat mournful mid-range call. Gradually the lower voice energised and became more insistent and mirror-like in relation to the scintillations, creating definite and formidable synergy, there – a stunning display of avian personality.

Sierra’s other two portraits, Cicada Sketch, and Titmouse, were no less evocative in effect, the first featuring solitary ambient calls over dark landscapes, impulses that resisted any underlying agitated irruptions, suggesting spacious, dogged persistence. As for the Titmouse portrait, it seemed like a sound-sketch of a supremely-determined obsessive, Pestova’s playing remarkably split-second in its dovetailings of detail.

The more Bach Pestova played, the more I wanted her to continue! – here, it was another from Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier, the fourth Prelude in D Major of BWV 933. While listening and enjoying, I kept on making mental notes of parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier I wanted to hear her interpret! However, such mental wanderings on my part seemed singularly unhelpful regarding the job in hand, which was to express and relate the music to that timelessness of being which Pestova herself alluded to in the recital’s introduction.

Interestingly, the third of Clara Wieck Schumann’s Op.16 set of three Preludes and Fugues seemed to me almost uncannily like a minor version of the Bach piece we had just heard. Pestova brought to this work the same qualitites that had illuminated the previous work. I would make a guess that the shade of that great Bach interpreter Franz Liszt would be nodding its approval at the ear-catching amplitude of the music’s different voices as presented here on the piano. The Fugue began from a quiet and simple place of origin, and proceeded with remarkably-inflected eloquence to the point where it had given its all – no wonder that I wrote, while spell-bound by the music’s revelatory progress, “she (Pestova) makes fugues make sense”!

Though Pestova’s recital seemed to have the subtitle Gothic, as per programme, I preferred the title of the work by Miriama Young already referred to, The Grey Ghost, which was the final presentation of the afternoon. This was described by the composer, who was present, as “a meditation in piano and electronics drawing on the ancient song of the once prolific North Island Kokako”. The actual “Grey Ghost” of the title refers to the South Island Kokako, a sighting of which was last recorded at Mout Aspiring National Park fifty years ago, and unfortunately not  seen or recorded since then.

Speaking with us about her work, Miriama Young confessed to us that this presentation was the fulfilment of a dream of hers regarding involving an audience with sound performance. She had prepared what people who know about these things call an “App” on her website for people to download and play on their smartphones as part of the overall performance of the work. We had a brief tuition session from the composer regarding what was necessary for us to do, and it seemed to bear fruit and effectively “sound” in some quarters of the auditorium. Needless to say, my technophobic efforts with my own smartphone were unsuccessful, but it left me able to properly take in the concerted efforts of the pianist and her cyber-cohorts to recreate Miriama Young’s work “The Grey Ghost”.

Those of us who had managed to secure the “App” had ‘phones poised ready for Xenia Pestova’s downbeat – the bird’s song came out of the ‘phones extremely softly and atmospherically, a haunting, ambient environment through which the piano could sound, the figurations rolling and resonant, with occasional declamatory tones seeming to echo the bird’s tessitura. Gradually the piano built up towards a climax not dissimilar to that of the “Engulfed Cathedral’s” which had begun the programme. after this, the piano itself seemed to become like a bird, rather than a resonator – the pre-recorded sounds were assisted by being played through the church’s sound system as well as the individual ‘phones. As the piece gradually subsided the piano contented itself with resonantly-produced fragments of the figurations we heard in the piece’s first half, everything having a deep and almost magical presence, the various “sources” of the sounds creating a beautifully diffuse and ultimately elusive atmosphere.

We were all thanked, pianist, listeners and sonic artists alike, at the piece’s end by the composer, who was obviously thrilled and moved by the happening and its effects. A brief encore later – a Chorale for something quiet,  written by Wellingtonian Thomas Liggett (who was present) – slow, deep rich and meditative music, whose privacy and inwardness was breached at the end by the merest pinprick of light – and this remarkable recital was over. That this review’s been a long time in coming is indicative of the spell cast by Xenia Pestova’s playing of old and new items alike, making this listener think afresh about what was familiar, and ponder deeply (and at great length) over the new and introduced works and their thought-provoking realisations. Bravo!

Adventurous, quirky, energetic – a musical-life experience for the 2017 NZSONYO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2017 presents:
YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA

CELESTE ORAM (NYO Composer-in-Residence 2016)
Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra (World Premiere)
JAMES McMILLAN – Veni, Veni Emmanuel*
REUBEN JELLEYMAN (NYO Composer-in-Residence 2017)
Vespro (World Premiere)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell Op.34
(The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra)

*Colin Currie (percussion)
James McMillan (conductor)
NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2017

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday, 14th July 2017

Thank goodness for Benjamin Britten’s variously-named The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra / Variations and Fugue on a theme of Purcell Op.34! At the recent pair of NZNYO concerts in Wellington and Auckland it was music which, unlike the works making up the rest of the programme, was reasonably familiar to the audience. As such, the piece provided a benchmark of sorts with which the youthful orchestra’s playing could be more-or-less assessed in terms of overall tonal quality, precision of ensemble and individual fluency and brilliance. These were qualities more difficult to ascertain when listening to the players tackle the idiosyncrasies, complexities and unfamiliarities of the other three programmed pieces.

I’m certain that the NYO players relish the opportunity every time to give a first performance of any piece written especially for them, even one as unconventionally wrought as was Celeste Oram’s piece The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, which opened the programme. In this instance, however, there were TWO new works by two different composers, awaiting a first performance, presumably due to last year’s concert being wholly taken up with a collaboration by the orchestra with the NZSO to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’au-delà (Illuminations of the Beyond) – obviously, a thoroughly exhilarating experience for all concerned, youthful and seasoned players alike.
So as well as the 2016 composer-in-residence’s work having yet to be performed, there was also a work by this year’s composer-in-residence, Reuben Jelleyman, waiting for its turn. In the event, putting all the possibilities together made for an interesting programme of symmetries and contrasts – a percussion concerto and a work inspired by an older classic, with each of these in turn regaled by a separate “guide” to the orchestra, the two latter having interesting “corrective” capacities in relation to one another!

To be honest, there was a considerable amount of speculation expressed by people I talked with at the interval as to whether the first item on the programme could be classed as “music”! Celeste Oram’s piece The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, far from being an updated version of Britten’s celebrated instructional work, took a kind of “field” approach to experiencing music instead, refracting a history of many New Zealanders’ initial contact with orchestral music as conveyed by radio (as the composer points out, the first permanent orchestra in this country was initially known as “The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra” – actually it was “the National Orchestra of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service”, with the word “Corporation” first appearing as part of the orchestra’s name in 1962). This phenomenon was depicted through transistorised recordings from what sounded like a number of largely out-of-phase broadcasts of an announcer’s voice from smartphone-like devices sported by the orchestra players, sitting onstage waiting for their “actual” conductor to arrive.

I hope the reader will forgive this relatively literal (though not exhaustive!) account of these happenings, linked as they seemed to the composer’s intentions! Still conductorless, the orchestra players then took up their instruments and launched into the first few bars of Britten’s work, an undertaking lost in the cacaphony of distortion emanating once more from the radio-like devices. As “Haydn Symphony No.25” was announced, the conductor, Sir James McMillan, arrived, waited courteously enough for the announcer to finish, and then directed a somewhat Hoffnung-esque opening of the Britten which then morphed into all kinds of wayward musical illusions in different quarters, fragments that were constantly being broken into by the announcer’s voice introducing other various classical pieces, a somewhat “catholic” section including the Maori song “Hine e Hine”, Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique”, and so on.

After Beethoven’s “Tenth” Symphony (“the Unwritten”) had made a static-ridden appearance, the announcer stated portentously, “Having taken the orchestra to pieces, the composer will now put it all back together again”, then promptly tuned us into the National Programme 5 o’clock news beeps and prominent newsreader Katriona McLeod’s voice. Some orchestra players at this point appeared to get fed up, and go for walkabouts down from the platform and into and through the auditorium, ignoring the efforts of their conductor to keep the music going. Soon, all the players were standing in the aisles of the auditorium, even the concertmaster, who was the last to go, leaving her conductor waving his arms around conducting a very loud, and out-of-phase-sounding recording of the Britten work. At the music’s end, we in the audience applauded him, a bit uncertainly, then watched him sit down and pull out a newspaper and read it, while the players standing in the aisles began to paraphrase parts of the music, and the radio continued to blare, the voices largely unintelligible – some sort of impasse was reached at which point it was unclear what would happen next, if anything!

From this sound-vortex Concert announcer Clarissa Dunn’s voice sounded clearly, with the words, “….and you have NOT been listening to Radio New Zealand Concert!…..”, and that, folks, was it! – a rather lame conclusion, I thought, but perhaps that was the point! It seemed to me that the piece lost its way over the last five minutes – but perhaps THAT also was the point! Celeste Oram explained the ending to her “piece” using a quote attributed to Gaetano Donizetti, who wrote in an 1828 letter that he wanted “to shake off the yoke of finales”. The determinedly “non-ending” ending of Oram’s work did seem to put the concept of the “symphonic finale” to rout!

Thoughtful, innovative, provocative, incomprehensible…..whatever characterisation one liked to give Celeste Oram’s work first and foremost, I felt it should be in tandem with descriptions like “entertaining”, “absorbing”, “spectacular”, “engrossing”. It seemed to me that the composer had achieved, by dint of her explanation printed in the programme, what she had set out to do – and what better a way to attain satisfaction by means of what one “does” as an occupation?

After this, Sir James McMillan’s own work, the percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel would have seemed like a kind of relief-drenched reclamation of normality to some, and something of a “safe” and even predictable example of what Celeste Oram was criticising with her work, to others. Percussion concertos have become extremely popular of late, thanks partly to the skills and flamboyant performing personalities of musicians such as Evelyn Glennie and Colin Currie, who’ve had many works written for them. For some concertgoers they’re thrilling visual and aural experiences, while for others (myself included) they seem as much flash as substance, in that they seem to me to rely overmuch on visual display to sustain audience interest to the point of distraction from the actual musical material.

Perhaps I’m overstating the case, but after watching Colin Currie indefatigably move from instrument group to instrument group, activating these collections with their distinctive timbres, my sensibilities grew somewhat irritated after a while – one admired the artistry of the player, but wearied of the almost circus-like aspect of the gestures. I began to empathise as never before with Anton Bruckner, who, it is said, attended a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth, his eyes closed the whole time so as to avoid being distracted by the stage action from the music!

I wrote lots of notes regarding this performance, which certainly made an effect,in places spectacularly so – the opening a searing sound-experience, with shouting brass and screaming winds, and the soloist moving quickly between instrument groups for what the compser calls an “overture”, presenting all the different sounds. My gallery seat meant that the player occasionally disappeared from view! – rather like “noises off”, a sound-glimpse of a separate reality or disembodied state! In places the music became like a huge machine in full swing, which appealed to my “railway engine” vein of fantasy, while at other times the sounds seemed to drift spacewards, the winds playing like pinpricks of light, and the soloist at once warming and further distancing the textures with haunting marimba sounds. I enjoyed these more gentle, benediction-like moments most of all, the gently dancing marimba over a sea of wind and brass sostenuto tones – extremely beautiful.

At one point I wrote “All played with great skill, but everything impossibly busy!” At the work’s conclusion the soloist climbed up to the enormous bells at the back of the orchestra, beginning a carillion which built up in resonance and excitement, aided by individual orchestral players activiting their own triangles. A long, and slowly resonating fade – and the work came to a profound and deeply-wrought close. While I wouldn’t deny the effectiveness of certain passages in the work I found myself responding as to one of those nineteenth-century virtuoso violin concertos the musical forest obscured by trees laden with notes – and notes – and notes……..thankfully, my feelings seemed not to be shared by the audience whose response to Colin Currie’s undoubted artistry was overwhelmingly warm-hearted.

So, after an interval during which time I was engaged in discussions concerning the nature of music (in the light of Celeste Oram’s piece) in between wrestling with feelings that I perhaps ought to give up music criticism as a profession through dint of my inadequacy of appreciation (the result of my response to James McMillan’s piece), I settled down somewhat uneasily for the concert’s second half, which began with a work by Reuben Jelleyman, who’s the Youth Orchestra’s 2017 composer-in-residence, a piece with the title Vespro, deriving its inspiration from Monteverdi’s famous 1610 Vespers.

Describing his work as akin to a restoration of an old building “where old stone buttresses mesh with glass and steel”, Reuben Jelleyman’s piece at its beginning reminded me of a basement or backroom ambience of structure and function, where solid blocks and beams were interspersed with lines and passageways, the whole bristling with functional sounds, much of it aeolian-like, (whispering strings and “breathed” winds and brass) but with an ever-increasing vociferousness of non-pitched sounds.

Great tuba notes broke the spell, underscored by the bass drum, like a call to attention, one igniting glowing points in the structure, with each orchestral section allowed its own “breath of radiance”. A repeated-note figure grew from among the strings, spreading through the different orchestral sections, the violinists playing on the wood of the bows as fragments of the Monteverdi Vespers tumbled out of the mouths of the winds and brass – such ear-catching sonorities! As befitted the original, these reminiscences contributed to ambiences whose delicacy and sensitivity unlocked our imaginations and allowed play and interaction – a “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” sense of amalgamation of present with past, the new music, centuries old, continuing to live…..I liked it very much.

To conclude the evening’s proceedings, James McMillan got his chance to show what he could REALLY do as a conductor with Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, a performance which brought forth from the youthful players sounds of such splendour and brilliance that I was quite dumbfounded. Each section of the orchestra covered itself in glory during its own introductory “moment” at the work’s beginning, the four sections (winds, brasses, strings, percussion) framed by a tutti whose amplitude seemed, in the classic phrase, “greater than the sum of its parts”, which was all to the good.

Singling out any one section of the ensemble for special praise would be an irrelevant, not to say fatuous exercise under these circumstances. McMillan’s conducting of the piece and interaction with the players seemed to bring out plenty of flair and brilliance, with individual players doing things with their respective solos that made one smile with pleasure at their ease and fluency. I noted, for instance, the bassoon’s solo being pushed along quickly at first, but then the player relaxing into an almost languorous cantabile that brought out the instrument’s lyrical qualities most beguilingly. The musicians seemed to have plenty of space in which to phrase things and bring out particular timbres and textures, such as we heard from the clarinets, whose manner was particularly juicy and gurgly!

A feature of the performance was that the “accompaniments” were much more than that – they were true “partners” with their own particular qualities acting as a foil for the sections particularly on show – in particular, the violins danced with energy and purpose to feisty brass support, while the double basses’ agilities drew forth admiring squawks from the winds. The brasses covered themselves in glory, from the horns’ rich and secure callings, to the tuba’s big and blowsy statement of fact – trumpets vied with the side-drum for excitement, while the trombones arrested everybody’s attentions with their announcements, the message soon forgotten, but the sounds resounding most nobly. Finally, the percussion had such a lot of fun with the strings, it was almost with regret that one heard the piccolo begin the fugue which eventually involved all the instruments, and was rounded off by a chorale from the brass choir featuring the theme in all its glory.

I’ve not heard a more exciting, nor skilful and involving performance of this music – an NZSO player whom I met on the stairs after the concert agreed with me that, on the evidence of playing like we had just heard, the future of music performance in this country is in good hands. Very great credit to the players and to their mentor and conductor Sir James McMillan, very much an inspirational force throughout the whole of the enterprise. Not, therefore, a conventional concert – adventurous, quirky, energetic and idiosyncratic – but in itself an experience of which the young players would be proud to feel they had made the best of and done well!

Magnificent NZSO concert, with percussionist Colin Currie, under James MacMillan

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by James MacMillan with Colin Currie (percussion)

Thomas Adès: Polaris
James MacMillan: Percussion Concerto No 2
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No 4

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 8 July, 7:30 pm

I had rather expected that, even if the pieces by Adès and MacMillan had not exactly created a stampede for tickets, that the remarkable, let’s even say ‘great’ symphony by Vaughan Williams would have done the trick.

But no, it didn’t. However, if it was something of a statement about the timidity of Wellington audiences, it was not a disgrace.

Thomas Adès
For another thing, I’d have thought the name Adès might have chimed with a few hundred on account of the operatic notoriety Adès achieved in the 1990s. For some time after the 1995 premiere of his Powder Her Face, it looked as if a new era of box-office success might result from opening the stage to rather explicit sexual flagrancy, in our new age of public pornography.

But opera news, even highly spiced, doesn’t penetrate much into mainstream media.

Based on the flamboyant life and eventual humiliation of the Duchess of Argyll, Powder Her Face was commissioned from the Almeida Theatre for the Cheltenham Festival in 1995, made headlines at once and over the following decade was produced widely across Europe and North America.

Polaris (formerly known as the Polar Star, till it was renamed after a submarine) clearly, is not in quite the same class as Powder Her Face. It’s an astronomical tone poem based formally on rather arcane musico/mathematical, acoustic, even metaphysical notions (and Adès writes of magnetic relationships between notes), none of which is probably of help to the uninitiated; and is a rather more apparent and visually affective evocation of the Arctic (I suppose) sky, with aurora borealis thrown in.

It was a quarter-hour long, fairly spectacular, orchestral extravaganza, employing six percussionists plus timpanist, as well as piano, two harps, glockenspiel and celeste. If first impression was of a show-piece demonstrating Adès’s command of musical erudition and extreme orchestrational skill, a combination of close attention plus a suspension of intellectual effort, revealed an evocation of infinite space, that might have been beyond rational comprehension and any easy definition but created an undeniable impact.

A kind of rotating, machine-inspired theme underlay the music, which rose to a climaxes followed by tonality changes, perhaps three times. The range of sounds and their effect was kaleidoscopic (did someone say ‘prismatic’?); sometimes, faced with the employment of very large and disparate orchestral forces with a seeming lack of much basic musical inspiration, one is sometimes tempted to hear it all as no more than composer exhibitionism. This music was emphatically not of that sort, and its eventual impact made such scepticism hard to sustain. Yet: is it music that warms the heart and compels rehearing?

MacMillan’s 2nd percussion concerto
One suspected that Polaris was chosen in part to support the stage-full of percussion instruments that had been prepared for McMillan’s second percussion concerto (the first, named Veni, veni, Emmanuel was played by the NZSO under Alexander Shelley in 2010, a fact that I’d have expected the programme to have mentioned).

MacMillan had spoken a little about the percussion, particularly the aluphone, a long row of small, tuned, bell-shaped aluminium gongs across the right side of the stage. The other soloist’s percussion at the front of the stage, not individually listed in the programme, but to be found in Wikipedia, included: crotales, cencerros, vibraphone, marimba, steel drum, four wood blocks, two gliss gongs, eight “assorted pieces of metal”, floor tom-toms, high tom-toms, and a pedal bass drum.

In addition, there was a fairly formidable range of percussion behind the orchestra: glockenspiel, two marimbas, tuned gong, siren, bass drum, suspended sizzle cymbal, tam-tams, tubular bells, tomtom drums, snare drums, two suspended cymbals, two triangles, thunder sheet; plus harp, and piano.

The ability of the normal audience member, including the non-specialist critic, to distinguish all these individual sounds, and to accord them some kind of purpose, is probably extremely limited and one really has to accept it in a spirit of quite profound bemusement. Generally, because of course there was only one player of all the front-of-stage hardware, only one implement (instrument?) played at a time which ensured a degree of sonic clarity. However the complementary array of machinery behind the orchestra often compensated for much prolonged quietness.

Currie is among the most versatile and virtuosic percussion practitioners in the business, multi-tasking to beat even the most gifted female achiever in that sphere. In addition to which he appeared to be handling his multifarious equipment from memory.

The novel item, the aluphone, opened the soloist’s performance, soon joined by the marimba, immediately behind it; and from then on one tried to be alert to significant and repeated motifs in order to gain a sense of its narrative, its emotional journey. Even though such attempts largely failed, the evolving dynamic patterns, which at times drifted to near silence, with gentle harp and murmuring trombones, succeeded in holding attention, suggesting that at a second or third hearing a path through the maze would take root in the memory. In the midst of the near frenzy emerged a near lyrical string episode in an adagio section, as Currie caressed reverberant cow bells, with flutes and double basses among the few contributors.

It was not only a showcase for the extraordinary soloist, but presented the orchestra and the composer/conductor with a formidable challenge which was met with impressive success, evidenced by unusually heart-felt, mutual applause from all parties involved.

Vaughan Williams’s fourth may be his most sunless, atypical symphony; and it might be compared with Sibelius’s fourth in mood, though it’s more fiery and varied. It does evoke something other than the landscapes, townscapes, seascapes and the avian world; the emotional opposite to the sunny fifth which he wrote in the middle of World War II. The fourth was written avowedly with no programme in mind, but it’s hard not to believe that a politically aware composer was not depressed at state incompetence in dealing with the human tragedy of the Great Depression of the early 30s, not mention the advent of Hitler.

The composer’s wife, Ursula, recorded this comment about the symphony: “The towering furies of which he was capable, his fire, pride, and strength are all revealed and so are his imagination and lyricism.”

Here, if MacMillan had not proven his powers already, was an electrifying performance of huge intensity, displaying anger and ferocity right from the start. What attack and energy he drew from his players! What powerful momentum and compelling rhythms! Though it is almost always tempered, for example, by string-led more meditative moments, finely judged.

The second movement, slower in tempo and more calmly sombre and even beautiful, but no less biting even if there are no clues as to their emotional origin. The third movement is the traditional Scherzo, a symphonic movement that I used to enjoy in my youth, but often less these days. But this scored high with me; a most energetic and colourful performance, evoking in very quick triplets, a spirit of chaos with dark, muted brass, before the sudden mysterious subsiding just before the close, leading with no pause to the Finale, Allegro molto. It too is full of starkly contrasting episodes, often pulsing, trombone-led, to be followed by beguiling, muted strings: an extraordinarily arresting passage, that continues for some time before the return to the pulsing passages that with MacMillan became hypnotic, even nightmarish.

This great performance confirmed how much I love this symphony, with the fifth, my favourites. I place it very high among Vaughan Williams’s works; it was a privilege to hear it played by such an orchestra under a conductor so much attuned to the composer’s spirit.

Beautiful contemporary choral music from Cantoris: if only an orchestra!

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Cantoris Choir conducted by Thomas Nikora with Mark Dorrell – accompanist and Barbara Paterson – soprano

Chris Artley: O magnum mysterium
Rutter: Magnificat
Lauridsen: Sure on this Shining Night

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 1 July, 7:30 pm

It was a calm, cool, drizzly night, when most of Wellington’s population was either at the stadium, in pubs or at home watching a rugby match between New Zealand and the combined British-Ireland team. Very few: to wit, about 30, felt free to attend a rather fine concert by one of Wellington’s longest surviving choirs (almost 50 years).

Those happy few had a wide choice of seating.

The concert opened with an a cappella setting of the Medieval Latin, liturgical chant, O magnum mysterium, which has inspired many of the great composers, particularly in the Renaissance.

Chris Artley was born in Leeds, then lived elsewhere in Yorkshire and Lancashire, went to school in Bolton, graduated from Bristol University (1981-84), did teacher training at Cambridge University. Then he worked in London until coming to Auckland ‘13 years ago’ (2004?), as he told Eva Radich on RNZ Concert back in February. In 2010 he took a graduate diploma in music at Auckland University, including conducting with Karen Grylls and composing with John Elmsly. He’s worked with and composed for Terence Maskell’s Graduate Choir, and currently teaches at King’s College, Auckland. O Magnum Mysterium was written for the Nelson Summer School Choir in 2013. (See https://www.chrisartley.com/biography)

Though it’s a short piece, it is based on several short but coherent and ear-catching motifs, and ends with the choir calling sweetly and engagingly, ‘Dominum Christum. Alleluia!’ Artley’s lucid and unpretentious music is a nice contribution to the fast-growing body of new music written to be enjoyed by singers and audiences alike, and Thomas Nikora guided his singers through a sympathetic, well-delivered performance of it.

The main work was Rutter’s Magnificat. Again, a liturgical text that’s been set by everyone from Josquin, John Taverner (and John Tavener), Tallis and Victoria, Monteverdi, Schütz, Vivaldi and Bach, Mozart, Bruckner and Franck to Arvo Pärt and, well… Rutter.

It opens at a fine clip, in triplets and the high voices of the choir generated a joyful clamour. The first of the sequence of mood shifts, to a sort of English pastoral scene, was again dominated by higher voices, which I came to feel was more an observation on the exposure and smaller numbers of tenors and basses. But then came a return to the almost operatic lustiness of the opening, though as this part of the work ended, in spite Mark Dorrell’s excellent handling of the piano, sensitive and colourful, some of its excitement may have been missed in the absence of an orchestra. You only need to look at the scoring that includes harp, four horns and rich percussion: glockenspiel, snare drum, cymbals, tambourine, bongos to see the importance Rutter placed on an orchestra. But what to do, given the poverty of New Zealand’s artistic resources? Funds are needed to meet the costs of an orchestra of the calibre of Orchestra Wellington, for a job on this scale. Wellington has the singers and the professional instrumentalists for a work like this, but how to pay them, as one must, without even a tiny fraction of the public and private funds that are readily found for sport?

Rutter’s insertion of the lovely Middle English poem, Of a rose, a lovely rose, might have seemed a curious aesthetic move, but it’s not too much at odds with the spirit of the religious canticle.

It was good to have the words of ‘Of a Rose,’ in the programme but it would also have been useful for those not so conversant with Catholic liturgy to have had the Magnificat’s text as well, so that the several sections into which the work was divided could be identified confidently. For example, one needed to read the sense of ‘Et misericordia’ as soprano Barbara Paterson sang this section. Initially her voice sounded slightly tremulous, rather than lyrically reverent, but her confidence and accomplishment sustained her performance there and at her reappearance in the ‘Esurientes’ movement where she expressed a humane message in a moving melody: ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away’.

But between the two soprano sections, came the almost ferocious ‘Fecit potentiam’. I couldn’t catch enough words here to make sense of it, though it was jagged in rhythm suggesting some kind of revolutionary action. Again it would have been good to know that it was a plea to overcome that very contemporary political evil of gross economic and political inequality: ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek’.

The final section, Gloria Patri, is a further plea to banish oppression against the powerless that Rutter, actually a non-believer, clearly took rather seriously. ‘succour those in need, help the faint-hearted, console the tearful: pray for the laity … intercede for all devout women’ (mm.. what about all women?); and it was full of ecstatic energy with its fierce dotted rhythms, repeated rising phrases, and crescendo.

The choir and its accompanist had done very well.

The last piece was Morton Lauridsen’s Sure on This Shining Night (setting a poem by American novelist and poet James Agee). Unusual poem, much given to repetition of the title, I can see its attraction to a composer, to whom such techniques are commonplace. Opening with graceful notes on the piano and the slow emergence of first, men’s voices and then women all coming together to develop an indescribably beautiful melody, again exquisitely handled by conductor, pianist and choir. I will draw contempt from certain quarters in saying that, for me, this music and that of the other two composers handled here, surely point the way to a revival of approachable and simply beautiful music that gifted composers have avoided creating over much of the past century.

 

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.