Tag: contemporary music

“Body Beautiful” excites, awe-inspires, and charms as a life’s occupation is celebrated.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Koki – New Zealand School of Music presents:
BODY BEAUTIFUL – a tribute to Jack Body in his 70th year

Saetas  (string quartet and accordion)
A House in Bali  (narrator, accordion, string quartet and gamelan gong keybar)
Yunnan Sketches  (string quartet, guitar, tape)
Songs My Grandmother Sang  (voices, piano, string quartet)

New Zealand String Quartet
Ross Harris (accordion) / Richard Greager (baritone) / Margaret Medlyn (soprano)
Christopher Hill (guitar) / Jack Body (narrator)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University of Wellington

Monday 14th April, 2014

Jack Body celebrates his 70th birthday this year – and he’s determined to make the most of this particular anniversary, helped by warmth, acclaim and gratitude from the many people he’s come into contact with over the years as a teacher, composer, author, publisher and general advocate for the music of this country in both a Pacific and world-wide context.

This particular concert, appropriately titled “Body Beautiful” took place in Victoria University of Wellington’s Adam Concert Room under the auspices of the New Zealand School of Music. The music for three-quarters of the concert presented aspects of the composer’s fruitful relationship with the New Zealand String Quartet, before finishing, just as heartwarmingly, but in a completely different sound-world, with Body’s Songs My Grandmother Sang.

Preferring to talk with his audience rather than supply written program notes for each of the items, Body was in his usual excellent form as a communicator, giving us a real sense of process and context as well as a description of each of the “end product” in relation to the music we heard.

First up in the program was Saetas, which was a NZSQ commission dating from 2002. Body explained that he had at the time been exploring a genre of music associated with religious feasts held during Holy Week in Spain, semi-improvised, highly ornamented songs derived from the flamenco tradition. These songs, sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes using a strong drum-beat as a kind of pulse, were often associated with a quejío, or lament, a kind of cry sung as a phrase during the course of a single breath.

Body accentuated the “lament” aspect of these songs in his transcriptions in different ways. In both the first and last pieces a kind of “quejío” was exclaimed by the musicians at the beginning. But also, in the opening song Body took aspects of pieces by both Tchaikovsky and Hugo Wolf cast in a similar expressive vein and worked certain of these figurations and gestures into the music’s fabric. Fragments of both the “Pathetique” Symphony’s finale and a song from Hugo Wolf’s “Spanish Songbook” gave a strangely familiar, dreamlike flavour to the scope of the sounds, throwing their familiar contexts open to the wider world of human angst and suffering.

To my ears the music in the first piece in general seemed to take on a kind of Russian sound in places, moments featuring sweet, open-air harmonies, a sound I associate particularly with Borodin in some of his chamber music. But this could be mere fancy on my part as could also be a reminiscence I heard earlier in the piece of one of Wagner’s rising phrases associated with the flooding of the Rhine waters from “Gotterdammerung”.

The other three pieces saw ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten relinquish his normal instrument for the accordion, a change which accentuated the biting rhythmic accents of the next of the Saetas, a piece with string see-sawings and squeeze-box crunchings, the viola playing a Moorish tune in the middle of it all. The following piece had stuttering and stammering strings set against long-breathed cluster chords from the accordion. The viola played a chant suggesting something ancient, the violins echoing the notes and gradually tapering off as the viola continued, the accordion keeping in ambient touch with things.

Again the instrumentalists gave voice to the music’s feelings at the beginning of the final piece, reinforcing the anguish with foot-stampings, though varying the dynamics so as to make things antiphonal-sounding. As the strings clustered their tones around a driving, beating rhythm, the accordion played a kind of melodic counterpoint, adding to the ever-increasing texturings of the sounds – biting accents, fierce glisssandi and running scales all drove the music onwards as the players’ stamping feet beat out the pulsations to incredibly exciting effect!

Next on the program, A House in Bali combined several strands of diverse activity. First there was Jack Body himself reading exerpts from writings by Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer turned ethnomusicologist, based on his experiences in Bali during the 1930s, and describing vignettes of Balinesque village life. Incidentally, the actual house McPhee lived in was subsequently inhabited, for a short time, by the pianist Lili Kraus, before she was incarcerated for a time during the war by the Japanese.

But the piece’s chief musical feature was its “jointly-composed” aspect, Body responsible for writing the quartet and accordion contributions and the Gamelan composer and orchestra leader Wayan Gde Yudane writing the pre-recorded Balinese gamelan orchestra music. Strings and accordion (the latter played here by Body’s fellow-composer, Ross Harris) took their cues from the gamelan sounds, allowing the speaker intervals of sufficient ambient space for his words to be heard by the audience.

Body had said in an earlier interview that the rehearsals of this piece for this performance had been hair-raising, because the gamelan group in Bali seemed to him to have set much faster tempi than when it was played here previously by the New Zealand ensemble. Parts of the opening did sound rather like a kind of Balinese hoe-down, though the music’s breathless pace let up sufficiently for the mood to allow some lovely exchanges between the two quite different worlds of sounds, strings and accordion on one hand and the gamelan group on the other.

I thought the gamelan sounds extraordinary – a magic and resonant world! The scenes described by McPhee’s words were distinctive – firstly a cricket duel, with the creatures suitably prepared for the fray, like a kind of ritual battle with music. Another evocation was Nyepi, the yearly day of silence (I enjoyed the words “demons pass by, thinking the village deserted”), the seeming emptiness underpinned by lonely, isolated strands of “snake-charmer” melody from the instruments. More animated was a vignette described by McPhee of pigeons with bells tied to their legs flying around in tintinabulating flocks – the gradual diminuendo of sounds as the birds disappeared was extremely effective.

China was the focus for the next work on the program, a piece which was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2007, called Yunnan Sketches. The first was Bouyi, a duet setting, using a tape Body had made of two women singing, one which the composer described as “initially discordant” but whose harmonic rigours were softened by the instrumental accompaniments. I found the results hauntingly beautiful. The other two reworkings, “Bai” and “Lahu”, were each very different – the first rhythmic and syncopated, a solo viola mixing pizzicato with arco, creating a sequence that Stravinsky would have appreciated for its angularity. Finally, “Lahu” featured Christopher Hill’s guitar, interestingly, but not altogether successfully, I thought, as the instrument almost completely lacked the plangency one associates normally with oriental stringed instruments – this sounded too much to my ears like a tourist in a foreign land who’d wandered off the beaten track….

As if further evidence of Body’s versatility as a composer was needed, the concert concluded with a sometimes piquant, sometimes droll-humoured item, made up of three of the set of Songs My Grandmother Sang, performed here by Richard Greager, Margaret Medlyn and pianist Jian Liu (with audience participation in the final song “All Through the Night” encouraged by the composer!).

The composer took the songs from an album which he recalled was a favorite songbook of his grandmother’s at the family home in Te Aroha. He spoke briefly about his youthful distaste for sentimentality and his efforts to avoid it at all costs in his own music – though he then admitted, rather like Noel Coward once remarking on “the potency of cheap music”, that he’d since discovered “something about it”. He added, a little ruefully, that, though his father didn’t really care for his arrangements of the songs, he had an uncle who did like them very much.

Tenor Richard Greager led off with “Two Little Girls in Blue”, a song whose words brought forth wry grins at the convolutions of the age-old “eternal triangle” situation – one here with a bit of a difference – “and one little girl in blue, lad / who won your father’s heart / became your mother, I married the other / but now we have drifted apart….”. Rather like Benjamin Britten’s piano accompaniments for his folk-song settings, these began by supporting the tune, but then seemed to do their best to try and destabilize it – at a previous concert at which I heard these songs performed, the pianist on that occasion, Bruce Greenfield, affectionately described the accompaniments as “quite mad”!

Having enjoyed Richard Greager we were now treated to the rich, balladic tones of Margaret Medlyn, singing Body’s setting of “Genevieve” – a wonderful “open” accompaniment took flight along with the singer’s excitingly vertiginous vocal line and the help of the string quartet, which joined in with the music throughout the last verse, the tones at the end oscillating upwards and disappearing.

With the third song came the audience’s chance to make its presence really felt – a grand, chordal accompaniment supported both singers and the quartet players, while, after each introductory couplet massed voices were raised on high with the words “All through the night”. The instrumental building blocks of sound supported the melodic line beautifully, and it was left to pianist Jian Liu to play a brief, rapt chordal postlude, which he did, before reverting to a clipped “that’s it, folks!” manner for the final chord.

Very great acclamation for the composer at the concert’s end, from fellow-performers and audience alike. There’s evidently an Auckland concert coming up (30th April) at the University, featuring different repertoire to what we heard tonight. One can only wish Jack Body all the best for this concert and for further fulfilments of exploration, engagement and completion by the year’s end.  To you, Jack, every possible satisfaction and a richly-wrought sense of fulfillment on the occasion of your 70th birthday and the completion of a remarkable year.

 

 

Junghwa Lee – pianistic brilliance and recreative ferment at the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music presents:
Junghwa Lee (piano)
French and contemporary American piano music recital

Emmanuel CHABRIER – Improvisation / Menuet pompeux (from Pièces pittoresques)
César FRANCK – Prélude, Choral et Fugue
Camille SAINT-SAËNS – Allegro Appassionato Op.70
Frank STEMPER – Piano Sonata No.2 (2013) – (world premiere)

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Kelburn Campus
Victoria University of Wellington

Wednesday 26th March

This was one of those concerts whose first item (quite apart from other, later revelations) I didn’t really see coming – true, I was intrigued at the thought of hearing how the composer of orchestral classics such as Espana and Marche Joyeuse would acquit himself in the realm of keyboard music, though I wasn’t expecting much beyond what the title suggested – “picturesque pieces” was my schoolboy French translation, which didn’t seem to suggest much more than salon music.

Thanks to an obviously alchemic combination of music and interpreter I was immediately entranced by the first of these Pièces pittoresques, appropriately titled Improvisation, by Emmanuel Chabrier. The pianist was Korean Junghwa Lee, who currently lives and works in the United States at Southern Illinois University, where she is Associate Professor of Piano, though she’s also developing a profile as an international performer.

The “Improvisation” title of the first piece sounded exactly like that in Junghwa Lee’s hands –  in fact I found it difficult to tell whether the pianist was playing the music or vice versa, so integrated was sound with gesture, rapt concentration with liquid flow. Throughout, her performance caught the piece’s play of light and colour in and around spontaneous irruptions of energy and beautifully floated stillnesses.

I thought her pianistic control superbly judged in its complete lack of self-consciousness, with everything instead put at the service of the music in a continuous flow of “interest”, the sounds quite beautifully liberated. By contrast, the other piece from the same set, the Menuet pompeux, bristled with volatile energies, whimsy set against willfulness, except for a trio section which, just as unexpectedly, sought to soothe and charm. A work to investigate further!

For much of Cesar Franck’s meditative Prelude, Chorale and Fugue I felt the same “connection” with Junghwa Lee’s playing as I did with the Chabrier items – the pianist quickly caught the opening Prelude’s distinctive flavour, its barely-contained passion alternated with tender circuspection, the whole suffused with those characteristic chromatically flavoured harmonies which can sound vaguely “spiritual”, and for some people have a kind of “sanctimonious” feeling which they then attribute to the composer! (These same people can’t have ever heard Franck’s Piano Quintet!)

The Choral which followed was underpinned by a lovely, deeply-wrought bass, the theme deftly and lightly arpeggiated, its figurations ear-catchingly varied in places, thanks to Junghwa Lee’s  ever-varied voicing of the lines and beautiful control of the music’s harmonic colourings. A questioning, then more vigorous passage ushered in the fugue, in a manner not unlike, if less angular in expression than Beethoven in his “Hammerklavier” Sonata’s finale.

Splendid though much of the playing was at this point, I did think the music needed a more “larger-than-life” aspect than the pianist was prepared to give it – towards the end I wanted an even fuller-blooded sense of eventual triumph over darkness, a more unashamedly rhetorical enjoyment of things like the return of the Choral theme as a joyous pealing of bells. But then I’m an unashamed sensationalist in these matters, and undoubtedly lack Junghwa Lee’s innate sensitivity!

Franck and Saint-Saëns were chalk-and-cheese composers and personalities, and the latter’s Allegro Appassionato Op.70 (not to be confused with the same composer’s Op.43 work for ‘cello and orchestra) has none of Franck’s other-worldliness, or sense of personal suffering – the “appassionato” of Saint-Saëns’s title is expressed simply and directly in the music, with occasional respites from the agitations having the aspect of interludes more than a different side of the same coin. As a consequence, the music in quieter places reminded me of Ravel, like Saint-Saens, renowned for his outward detachment and his concealment of deeper feelings.

Junghwa Lee brought all of her quicksilver elegance to this music’s gossamer opening, following the somewhat portentous three-note beginning. She allowed the more lyrical passages plenty of space and considerable fluidity, so that the sequences shared with the more agitated moments a certain spontaneous flow – and I liked the almost Lisztian pensiveness which settled over the music just before the allegro jumped out at us once again and whirled the piece to its brilliant conclusion.

After a short interval came my second surprise of the evening – a piano sonata (the composer’s second, in fact) written specifically for the pianist by American Frank Stemper, a colleague of Junghwa Lee at Southern Illinois University, where he is currently Composer in Residence, and a Professor of Music.

The programme notes concerning the sonata were written, not altogether surprisingly, by the composer – as befitted the occasion of this performance being the actual world premiere of the work. So, we did feel somewhat privileged at having such an event presented to us here in a part of the world somewhat removed, it seemed, from the piece’s geographical origins, even given that the dedicatee was tonight’s pianist!

I didn’t really know what to expect regarding the work. Having said this I confess that my first reading of the composer’s notes, explaining the music’s links with the concept of death, gave rise to the reaction, “Hmm, well, very American!” But when I thought about this a bit more, I thought this was a little unfair of me, because many composers throughout the ages have composed unequivocal “death-pieces” – and in some instances similarly expounded their ideas about either the music in question or the associated state of being – or non-being!

So, in a somewhat ambivalent state of part-delicious, part-anxious expectation I awaited the return of the pianist buoyed by the composer’s assertion in his notes that “Ms. Lee would go to any lengths to absorb and understand the music and then clearly interpret its web of sonic activity” – so,, you see, this was, in other words, a kind of recreative imprimatur, a word about to be made flesh……perhaps I should now begin talking about the music and its performance…….

The first of four movements was called Sonata Allegro, and sub-titled L’inizio della fine (The beginning of the end) – describing the opening as depicting the moment of death, that process of life winding down and concluding, the composer crafted suitably dark, meditative bell-tolling textures, the deepest notes building towards a brief moment of agitation in the treble, before exploring some Messiaen-like ambient spaces, the music (like Elgar’s in the second part of “Gerontius” freed from “the busy beat of time”) revelling in its liberation from pulse and rhythm.The second movement’s musica da ballo (dance music) had a mischievous, almost diabolical air, an insinuating melody singing over driving, angular figures suggesting Musorgsky-like characters whose faces kept changing. It’s the sort of music Liszt might have written had he been a twentieth-century composer.

Throughout, but especially in the latter stages, the composer kept his promise to use the entire range of the keyboard – throughout what I imagined might be the Andante e improvisatione third movement the pianist’s hands created some remarkably spaced-out sonorities between treble and bass, with repeated right hand chords set against vigorous left-handed leaps, the effect positively orchestral in places, and growing in frenetic energy and incisiveness, encouraging the right hand’s repeated notes to grow in power and insistence, resulting in some exciting toccata-like sequences.

What was remarkable about the playing at certain points was the contrast between Junghwa Lee’s sheer keyboard physicality and, within moments, her ability to hold silences unflinchingly and resonantly. It was as if her whole body continued to emanate the ambiences of the previous tumult, creating, as it were, from these tonal echoes the murmurings of voices being wrought anew – one had a sense of the music setting its own house in order before what one presumed might be something of an onslaught. And so it proved, the Sonata Rondo being the drama’s final act – the onset of alarm, which, in the words of the composer “signals the end”.

If Junghwa Lee’s playing had impressed up to this point, her full-blooded engagement with the music’s demands at this point astonished us further still – again that “playing or being played” sense of oneness with it all was overwhelming, with energies literally flying in all directions! Then, at the tumult’s height the music suddenly returned to the world of the work’s opening pages – a most eerie and engaging effect, even if, possibly, a little too much of a good thing. A final irruption from the depths – a kind of “triumph of death” – and the piece came to its end. A remarkable journey, to say the least…….

Had the pianist brought something of that concluding physicality and abandonment in the Stemper Sonata to the last couple of pages of the Cesar Franck work, I would have been at a loss for words regarding the achievement of the whole recital! As it was, I thought Junghwa Lee had treated us to performances not merely of brilliance, but of great distinctiveness and individuality, utterly compelling in their realization.

Of late we’ve been able to enjoy some pretty stunning performances of all kinds from both visiting and resident artists through the NZSM’s auspices, a happy situation that deserves the heartfelt thanks of we music-lovers to the Music School. It’s one that I sincerely hope will continue.

Fancies and realities from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
LA DONNA IDEALE

BEETHOVEN – Leonore Overture No.1 Op.138
Symphony No.8 in F Major Op.93
LUCIANO BERIO – Folk Songs
JULIET PALMER – Three Pop Songs “Solid Gold”

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

The Opera House, Wellington,

Sunday, 8th September, 2013

Restricted as to performing venues on account of the capital’s various earthquake-generated strengthening projects, Orchestra Wellington triumphantly made good in the Opera House on Sunday afternoon with its most recent concert, La Donna Ideale, whatever difficulties might have arisen from having to make music in relatively unfamiliar spaces.

By covering the pit and extending the floor area of the stage to well out in front of the proscenium arch the organisers had given the musicians a surprisingly immediate acoustic for its audience to enjoy. Though a smallish orchestra, the sounds in the purely orchestral items packed plenty of punch, with clear (almost too clear) detailing – the string passages which began the Leonore Overture No.1 had great intensity, but moments of less-than-uniform intonation, a glitch which receded as the players “found” one another.

For me the concert’s venue recalled my first-ever orchestral encounter in a similar kind of space – the Palmerston North Opera House in 1969.  Maestro Piero Gamba conducted the then NZBC Symphony Orchestra in an evening of music-making that rocked my socks off, especially with Ravel’s La Valse as a rousing finale. Here, the fireworks at the concert’s end were Beethoven’s, Marc Taddei leading a performance of the composer’s Eighth Symphony that emphasised the music’s dash, drive and excitement, though somewhat at the expense of wit, charm and good humour.

It was Beethoven’s music also which led this latest concert off. Here was a further instalment in a survey by the orchestra of the various Leonora Overtures written by the composer for his opera “Fidelio” – the composer wanted “Leonora” as his opera’s title, but Beethoven was persuaded eventually to make the change, as at least three other composers had previously used that name for their operatic settings of the story.

Leonore No.1 was thought for many years to be the original version of the overture  – but recent research has established it was written after the other versions, specifically for a Prague production of the opera in 1808 which apparently never actually took place (hence the Overture’s somewhat “academic” high opus numbering). Though not as overtly theatrical in its layout as the other “Leonora” overtures, the music still has a pleasing and satisfying overall shape – a sombre introduction, giving way to determined energies followed by lyrical yearnings, the whole completed by a surging, all-conquering conclusion.

Having the players, specifically the strings, brought foward of the proscenium arch made for a more-than-usually analytical sound-picture, sharply-focused, but lacking the bloom of the Town Hall’s ampler ambience. However, the smallish number of strings survived the sound-spotlight with considerable credit, a couple of previously-mentioned ensemble and intonation inconsistencies aside, during the slow, recitative-like opening passages.

Once the allegro got under way the full orchestra’s extra weight and immediacy of sound was thrilling to experience, the music’s syncopations and energies here, and at the conclusion of the work, done with verve and dash. Conductor Marc Taddei managed the music’s contrasts beautifully, the horns and other winds giving great pleasure with their handling of the famous yearning theme sung in the opera by the imprisoned Florestan.

The following work on the programme indirectly gave the concert its overall title, “La  Donna Ideale”, which was the title of the sixth of a collection of eleven Folk-Songs composed and/or transcribed from other sources by avant-garde Italian composer Luciano Berio. Of course, Beethoven’s eponymous heroine celebrated in the concert’s opening music had already ticked the requisite boxes suggested by the title!

Berio wrote these songs for the celebrated singer Cathy Berberian, whom he was married to for a number of years. Today’s singer was our own Madeleine Pierard, resplendently pregnant, and as engaging in voice and platform manner as ever. I could imagine Berberian’s voice having a bit more “edge” and feistiness in places compared with what we heard, but not any more charm, wit and heartfelt directness which Madeleine Pierard gave to us so generously.

The singer’s focused diction enabled us to hear every word of the two American songs which opened the set, and her fully-vocalised engagement with the changing moods of the others brought each one to life. From song to song one marvelled at the differences
of ambience and energy and the range of emotion.

Particularly telling were the contrasts across the final sequence of four songs, the eerie, almost spectral quality of the singer’s “bleached” tones in Motetu de tristura, the out-of-doors chirpiness of Malurous qu’o unno fenno, the folksy, tongue-in-cheek exchanges between singer and solo ‘cello in Lo fiolaire, and the verve and energy of the concluding Azerbaijan Love Song – it sound as though those people in the final song were playing for keeps!

Supporting and matching Pierard’s artistry was the quality of the orchestral playing throughout, both in ensemble and across the many solo lines, making the whole a heart-warming experience.

What a contrast with the world evoked by ex-pat Toronto-based Kiwi composer Juliet Palmer – unlike the often more rarified, prescribed work of many of her contemporaries, her Solid Gold presentation drew directly from mainstream culture, namely, those of pop lyrics associated with music.

Juliet Palmer used only the texts of various pop songs to gather the shards of material she needed to make into a kind of distillation of impulses concerning  love – the composer declared her aim to “unearth the heart of the love song”.  A lot of the time the singer was using the word I – beginning with “I am, I said” which was about the closest to a direct quote from an actual song – but elsewhere it sounded as though Palmer was actually reassembling  the sounds of the words. Other reconstructions brought forth phrases beginning with such words  as “I wanna be” –  according to the composer, echoing a 1984 hit song “I wanna know what love is”.

As she was inspired by pop music’s “distinct sound world” her own music here mostly courted pastiche, (I scribbled the phrase “Disney-like accompaniment” at one point) primarily a kind of springboard for those deconstructed/reconstructed lyrics to bounce along before taking and relishing their brief individual moments of glory. But there were also abnormalities and angularities in places, diverting horn glissandi notes during the work’s introduction and a clustered, Ligeti-like accompaniment to the words “I am” and their subsequent development, sharp Stravinsky-like chords  contributing to the faint underbelly of edginess in certain places in the work.

Enjoyable, but intriguing – and sung by Madeleine Pierard with a richly-wrought relish that brought to mind Noel Coward’s comment  regarding “the potency of cheap music”.

After this we pleasurably anticipated a different kind of delight – the rich, robust humour of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. It’s always seemed to me a work of enormous verve and assurance, one which appears to confidently sum up a whole cosmos of symphonic achievement on the part of its composer. Though outwardly it appears something of a classical “throwback”, the music constantly confounds expectation and is filled with dramatic surprises and rhythmic angularities.

Alas, in this performance, the “rich, robust humour” was a sometimes thing. Brilliantly though the orchestra played the work, I thought Marc Taddei’s frantic pacing of the music took away some of the work’s capacity to delight and confound as Beethoven probably intended. For every sequence that impressed with its near-breathless brilliance, there were two which caused me to lament the over-riding impression of excessive haste  – with such deliciously-contrived humour and droll charm to be savoured, I’m at a loss to understand why these things seemed to be put to the metronomic sword.

To be entirely fair, the parts of the work which I thought did come off well were certainly exciting to listen to – the first movement development evoked a kind of tense game of chase between groups of instruments, the horns in particular bringing out their accents tellingly at one point, though the crescendo leading to the reprise had little chance to register at such a pace. And the finale, too, had its best moments mid-movement, the music’s driving force giving an extra vertiginous quality to the “giant’s footfalls” and their hair-raising harmonic lurches.

The middle movements seemed to me far less happy with so much detailing being made to rush by at speed – the Allegretto scherzando movement lost some of its droll contrasts between delicacy and girth, while the canonic passages between winds and strings had little chance to properly register at such a tempo. Similarly, the Tempo di Menuetto sounded too businesslike and regimented here, as if all the dancers had personal trainers as their partners, keeping things up to speed. And the delicious triplet accompaniments for the horns and winds in the Trio went almost for nothing for me, despite the wonderfully alert playing.

One person’s meat, they say – but even so, a thing of beauty is surely to be savoured and not merely efficiently despatched. There were enough good things about the symphony’s performance here to divert the harshest critic, if only momentarily – but I felt that, if more time had been given for notes, phrases and paragraphs to properly “own” and relish their allotted spaces, a good performance of the work would have become a great one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stroma – the Elemental and the Fabulous

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma New Music Ensemble presents:
GODDESS AND STORYTELLER

Music by IANNIS XENAKIS, GAO PING, and DOROTHY KER

Nicholas Isherwood (bass baritone)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Hunter Council Chamber,
Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday 1st September 2013

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned (those of us who read the program note before the concert, that is….)….short of resorting to an official rubber-stamped, or publicly-broadcast Government Health Warning, the accompanying note did made it quite clear regarding the salient characteristics of the two items written by Greek-born, French-naturalised composer Iannis Xenakis which framed this extraordinary Stroma concert: “….these works are unprecedented in their raw power and violence”.

Both pieces were late additions by the composer to an opera inspired by the classical Greek story known as The Oresteia (a work by Aeschylus, about Orestes, the son of Clytemnestera and Agamemnon, and the series of tragic events involving these characters). The first of these additional pieces was called Kassandra, and featured a series of dialogues between the Prophetess of the same name who had forseen these tragedies, and a chorus. The second, titled La Déesse Athena (The Goddess Athena) took the form of an accompanied monologue of declamation, the text a series of directives by the Goddess to the people of Athens to establish courts of law.

Despite each piece having a “stand-and-deliver” appearance on the part of the musicians that one might associate more with the concert platform than the stage, both made the kind of visceral impact one would expect from raw, graphic theatrical depictions of brutal violence and conflict. The theatricality of each piece was underscored by the remarkable vocal virtuosity of American bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, required to sing throughout both works alternating (sometimes rapidly) between baritonal and falsetto pitches. It was, one might say, a vocal tour de force.

In the first piece, the two differently-pitched voices represented both Kassandra, the Prophetess, and her exchanges with the chorus of elders. The singer’s voice was amplified (in both pieces), which for me contributed to the immediate “all-pervasiveness” of the sounds –  in Kassandra,  biting, dramatic exchanges between the prophetess and the chorus. Solo percussionist (Thomas Guldborg) activated both drums and wood-blocks, advancing both the declamatory style of the exchanges and remorselessly driving the trajectories of the narrative forward as the prophetess graphically described how Agamemnon would be murdered by his wife and her lover. As well, the singer occasionally activated a kind of psaltery, the sounds imitating an ancient Greek lyre (actually, the instrument was described as an Indian siter).

Just as engaging/harrowing was the second of Xenaxis’s pieces, La Déesse Athena, which concluded the concert – if anything, it was even more blistering an experience than was Kassandra, with the resources of a chamber ensemble put to immediate and confrontational effect. Everything was shrill and hard-edged, with the singer frequently changing from falsetto to baritonal pitch and back again, underlining Athena’s dualistic, male/female nature, and emphasising the implacable, all-encompassing nature of the directives.

From the stark, harrowing pterodactyl-imagined cries of the opening winds, through to the piece’s end, the intensities never really let up, the exchanges between the singer’s dual-voiced utterances and the raw insistence of the ensemble groups expressing sounds of the most elemental and uncompromising kind. Not for nothing was Xenakis quoted by the programme notes as saying that he felt he was born too late, and had nothing to do in the twentieth century – these sounds seemed at once ancient and anarchic, a kind of screaming and moaning from the underbelly of human existence. The archaic Greek texts of both pieces “placed” to an extent the composer’s creative focus, but the classical or pre-classical “statues” referred to in the excellent notes, and here given voice seemed to me, to “speak, sing and scream” to all ages.

The only thing that perhaps could have further advanced these sensational, no-holds-barred performances was to have performed them in a properly theatrical setting. As it was, the presentations were as confrontational and uncompromising as I think they could have been in normal concert surroundings – and, in a sense, the “neutrality” of the concert situation enabled we listeners to focus purely and directly upon the music, to memorable effect.

Thankfully, both Gao Ping’s and Dorothy Ker’s pieces inhabited somewhat different, less harrowing realms, although each had its own distinctive way with sonority and with its organisation of material. I thought Gao Ping’s work was the more overtly discursive and exploratory, as befitted the composer’s title for the piece – Shuo Shu Ren – The Storyteller. Naturally enough, as well as the stories themselves, the storyteller’s own personality and distinctive way of putting across his material were here presented, for our great delight.

One could extrapolate the scenario’s different elements from the sounds – the first section of the music strongly redolent of a “Once upon a time….”, with jaunty, angular winds setting the trajectories at the beginning, but giving way to a whole inventory of textural and rhythmic variations, the lines and timbres engaging us with the idea of a kind of “exposition” of characters, situations and contexts at the conclusion of the work’s first section.

Something of the composer’s idea of myth blending with reality seemed to haunt the wistful, remote opening of the second section, like impulses of a cold memory being stroked and brought back to a state of warmth. Lovely cello-playing by Rowan Prior helped give the sequence a Holst-like austerity, augmented in places with oriental-flavoured intervals and harmonies. The music then re-established its narrative flow, with many imaginative and interactive touches, incorporating both the storyteller’s entrancement and the listener’s rapture.  These interactions brought about a two-note figure of resolution, almost a shout of triumph and fulfilment, brought back by the solo ‘cello to the meditative realms .

A third section gave the wind players plenty of scope to galvanise the narrative and “flesh out” the protagonists – from birdsong beginnings, the figurations grew in animation and girth, underpinned by strings and harp.The kaleidoscopic texture-changes kept the pace keen and listener-sensibilities guessing, culminating in alarm-sounding squeals(winds), acamperings (strings) and flourishes (harp) – very exciting!

The epilogue began with dreamy responses to a perky oboe, strings and winds drifting their lines into harmonies which dovetailed into a cadential trill, then delicately sounded again, to gorgeous, somewhat disembodied effect, with notes sounding across silences and dissolving into them. We readily experienced the composer’s idea of the storyteller dispersing fragments “ephemeral as light”.

An even more interesting-looking assemblage of players trooped out for Dorothy Ker’s work (…and…11), continuing a kind of mushrooming of numbers effect with each succeeding item. Where Gao Ping’s descriptions of his music drew largely upon his childhood memories, Ker’s less overtly personalised language in her programme-note focused intently upon metaphor and imagery describing what she called in her music a “wave-like morphology”, and the resulting “cycles of accumulation and decay” stemming from her use of the word “and” in the piece’s title.

More concentrated, terser and in a sense “tougher” a work than Gao Ping’s, (…and…11)  held our interest in a more immediate, less hypnotic sense, rather as I remembered old radio serials of decective stories used to do, with music soundtracks generating as much imagined expectation and incident as did the voices. I liked Dorothy Ker’s use of a repeated kind of what I immediately thought of as a “radio chord” whose focal-points repeatedly interacted with instrumental incident – percussion rumbles, scintillations, breath-sounds and mutterings, rock-bottom brass sonorities – sequences to create, in the composer’s words, “anticipation, followed by a release energy”.

As with Gao Ping’s work, the sonorities led the ear ever onwards through these sequences – disparate sounds included slashing pizzicati, with strings stinging the fingerboards, chords eerily made by breath-sounds in tandem with deep brass,and recitative-like solos from flute, clarinet and trombone. And the concluding episode was entrancingly done, the dance all-too-briefly suggested before leaving the outcomes to the realms of our imagination.

One was left, at the concert’s end, marvelling at the range and scope of the Stroma musicians’ skills under Hamish McKeich’s clear-sighted direction, bringing into being such a far-flung range of musical realisations with terrific aplomb and conviction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2013 National Youth Orchestra shines and glows

Posted on by admin

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2013

SAM LOGAN – Zhu Rong Fury!
BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No.3 in C Minor Op.37
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.5 in E Minor Op.64

Richard Gill Conductor
Lara Melda Piano

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 30th August, 2013

This event was one of those marvellous musical experiences that proves to be as much a celebration as a concert. It was an evening that showcased some 75 young kiwi musicians brimming with talent, passion and stunning professionalism. They were led by Australian conductor Richard Gill, an outstanding educator and musician who has encouraged thousands of youngsters in their journey to musical maturity, and the rapport between conductor and players was palpable from the initial downbeat.

The programme opened with Zhu Rong Fury! a short work commissioned for this concert from Sam Logan, the young NYO Composer-in-Residence. It was a programmatic work depicting the furious struggles between the Bronze-Age  Chinese deity Zhu Rong and his son Gong-Gong who played out a creation myth not unlike that of Rangi and Papa in Maori legend. The score was highly inventive in its colourful orchestration, and exceptionally demanding technically, particularly for the percussion whose role was to express all the fury and violence of the divine confrontation. It was an explosive start to the evening and the NYO pulled it off with great panache.

The following Beethoven Piano Concerto No.3 in C minor, Op.37 called for a complete quantum shift in the players’ mindset, but they did not falter. It was clear that this performance had been crafted by conductor, soloist and orchestra with great care and devotion: each was attuned to the other in a mutual understanding of the profound depths of this music. Yet that understanding was tempered with a lightness that wonderfully expressed the youthful joy they found in the rich delicacy of melodic writing, offset against the powerful dramatic contrasts that typify the work.

The 20-year-old British soloist Lara Melda was born in London to Turkish parents, and currently studies at the Royal College of Music. She is rapidly making her mark in the world of recitals and international competitions, and is also an accomplished viola player who enjoys chamber music on both instruments. This broader background was obvious in the conversations she created with the orchestra, and particularly with the woodwind principals as together they wove melodic fabric of exquisite complexity and sensitivity. Her dynamic range displayed an astonishing mastery of the keyboard, and a technical command that enabled a reading of this concerto that left a sense of  real musical completeness. It brought the house down, and she returned with an encore of Chopin’s Butterfly Etude – sixty seconds of magic executed with breathless lightness and delicacy.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 in E minor, Op.64 comprised the second half of the concert. This huge work is a real endurance test for any orchestra, but the NYO and Richard Gill threw themselves into it, and clearly revelled in the opportunity. The brooding theme of the opening Andante was beautifully stated by clarinets and bassoons, and followed by a rich warmth from the massed strings that immediately set the scene for the breadth of  this score. They moved effortlessly into the drive and energy of the following Allegro con anima and gave great colour and contrast to its sudden shifts in temperament.

The Andante Cantabile opens with one of the most famous and evocative horn melodies in the entire orchestral repertoire. It fell to principal William McNeill who, unlike many professional orchestral principals, was not supported by a fifth horn to take over some of the slog of extended tutti passages. Undeterred, he played it with great sensitivity that truly captured the heartbreaking beauty of this melody. And this yearning passion marked out the entire movement as the whole orchestra reached far into the depths of its richly expressive writing.

The Valse that followed was played with a lilting grace that endowed this classic courtship ritual with a delightfully youthful, slightly breathless aura.

The huge Finale movement was tackled with no hint of the exhausting demands of this huge work. Players and conductor alike launched themselves at its furious, larger-than-life orchestration with no holds barred. Following the somber majesty of the introduction, they gave full force and brilliance to the power of its relentless drive, right through to the final dramatic chords. It was a fitting end to an outstanding performance of this work that would do credit to any professional orchestra.

I had only one issue with this concert. It was a remarkable display of youthful kiwi talent, yet the management chose to bypass that same talent in their selection of the solo performer. New Zealand has so many outstanding young musicians who would do more than justice to this role, be it on piano or some other instrument, yet that call was not made. If it was good enough to showcase a kiwi for the Queen Mother’s special youth orchestra concert in 1966 (with violinist Michael McLellan), why not now and in future years?

 

Electric music and music-theatre – Nicholas Isherwood

Posted on by Alan Wells

THE ELECTRIC VOICE

Nicholas Isherwood (voice), Michael Norris (sound diffusion)

Isaac Schankler: Mouthfeel / Lissa Meridan: shafts of shadow
Jean-Claude Risset: Otro / Michael Norris: Deep Field
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Capricorn

Adam Concert Room

Thursday, 21 August 2013, 7.30 pm

The Adam Concert Room darkens. Electronic sound wells up like a rushing wind. After several minutes, a tall, gaunt figure mounts a platform at the back. The lights fade up to reveal the futuristically silver-clad spaceman from the Dog Star.

So began Stockhausen’s Capricorn, an adapted segment of his longer work SIRIUS. Low electronic sounds underlying Nicholas Isherwood’s voice gradually rose in pitch over the half-hour (or so) of the piece, with a few exceptions, such as when the bass frequencies returned, heavily amplified (perhaps over amplified) to eclipse the voice at the point of climax. Near the end, a hauntingly naïve tune emerged out of the abstract texture, and Isherwood produced ethereal vocal harmonics (especially written for him by Stockhausen).

In 2009, Isherwood had performed Havona, part of Stockhausen’s last composition, in the same venue. Again, incongruously, I was reminded of Harry Partch. In Havona, it was chintzy synth-sounds that suggested the Partch chromelodion. In the mid-period Capricorn, it was the stylised poses (futuristic here, rather than antique) assumed by the actor-singer.

Isherwood has worked with Stockhausen, and with an impressive list of other 20th and 21st century composers, including Iannis Xenakis, whose La Deesse Athena (“The Goddess Athena”) and Kassandra, he will be performing with Stroma in their “Goddess and Storyteller” concert on Sunday (1 September 2013, VUW Hunter Council Chamber, at 4 pm). Isherwood is also the author of the forthcoming The Techniques of Singing, chapters of which will cover (among other things) extended vocal techniques, and the twelve-odd gradations between the whisper and the scream (yes, he can do them all!).

The first half of the concert consisted of world premieres of four of the six pieces for voice and electronics, that will make up The Electric Voice (the remaining two, I understand, have not yet been completed). As programmes had run out when I arrived (more had been printed by half time), I listened to the first half “blind”, knowing only that there were two New Zealand works (by Michael Norris and Lissa Meridan), and two by unfamiliar international composers (and I had no idea of the order).

The first piece was a tour de force of Isherwood’s extended techniques, such as mouth-sounds, isolated abstract phonemes, deconstructed words (“prrrrroduct”), along with the occasional vocalise. I thought: Swedish sound-text poets, Bob Cobbing, Ernst Jandl, and other sound poets, and Berio’s treatment of e. e. cummings’ poems in Circles. I thought it was not New Zealand, and I was right. Mouthfeel, by US composer Isaac Schankler, was a sort of anti-advertisement for a brand of taco.

The second composition also had something of sound poetry about it, but here there was more vowel content, and some beautiful falsetto singing that was chorused through the electronics. I thought that this, too, was not New Zealand, but I was wrong. It was Lissa Meridan’s shafts of shadow, in which the singer listened to a track through headphones and translated what he heard, vocally.

The third piece made extensive (and effective) use of panning the sound around the loudspeaker array. I thought this might have been Meridan: the bell-like chimes near the beginning reminded me of the gamelan, which Meridan would have heard when she was director of the NZSM Electronic Music Studio, and the French words could have resulted from her now living in France. But no, it was Otre by international composer Jean-Claude Risset (the only piece in this Electric Voice group not a full premiere, apparently being a version of a previous composition).

The fourth work impressed me immediately, even without my knowing that it was by Michael Norris. Deep Field I sets ancient and historical astronomy texts, with Isherwood’s voice weaving freely over sustained, elongated syllables in the live electronic part. The effect is reminiscent of the twelfth century free organum of Leonin, that moment in history when western music stood poised to develop as a single melodic line of rhythmic suppleness and intonational subtlety, over slowly changing drone notes (akin to, although still different from, middle-eastern and Indian classical music). Then Leonin’s successor Perotin added the third voice, setting western music on its path to the forty-part motet and the Symphony of a Thousand.

 

SMP Ensemble plays Contag for “The Crowd”

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Forty-second Wellington Film Festival 2013 presents:

The Crowd

Silent Film with live score performed by SMP Ensemble

Composer: Johannes Contag
SMP Ensemble conducted by Karlo Margetic

Paramount Theatre,  Courtenay Place, Wellington

Sunday 11 August 2013

This film dates from 1928 and is in the timeless tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It was written and directed by King Vidor, and the score was commissioned by Creative NZ from young Wellington composer Johannes Contag. The 12-piece SMP Ensemble comprised a handful of strings, flute, clarinets (including bass), bassoon, percussion and piano, a selection which gave Contag a varied colour palette to work with, and the tools he needed to support the wide sweep of settings, emotions and characters depicted in the film.

The composer comments of the film that “Despite being received very well at the time, its bold modernism and systemic cultural critique defy most Hollywood tropes. Already an enormously successful director, King Vidor had the rare privilege of flouting studio expectations, and consequently there’s not a single hero or villain to be found here. Instead, we are treated to an engaging dissection of everyday city life, one that refuses to succumb to the predictabilities of comedy and tragedy alike. What really makes The Crowd a delight to watch is its underlying love story……..It is in its astute depiction of the romantically mundane that The Crowd wins us over, making us care for the underdog despite his follies.”

King Vidor’s film is a poignant drama of a charming but all-too-fallible dreamer and the exasperated woman who loves him unconditionally and never gives up on him through thick and thin. The dramatic range of this screenplay presents an enormous challenge for the composer – almost two hours of non-stop music for scenes that encompass the dreamer’s gentle rural upbringing, the shock of a parent’s premature death, the heady thrill of setting off to seek his fortune in New York, the grinding reality of employment as a pen-pushing clerk in a vast office, then the romantic encounter that drives the remainder of the plot.

Each of these settings was sympathetically handled in Contag’s score, with the frenetic pace of New York life being perfectly captured in his Twenties-style ragtime idioms. The colour of the score more than compensated for the 35mm Black and White medium which seems so spare to modern viewers. The scoring for the courtship and honeymoon scenes trod a masterly knife edge between the extremes of lust and tenderness, with never a hint of predictable banality. The central part of the screenplay covers the mundane realities of daily work and commuting, and the monotony of suburban life for the stay-at-home wife and children. This called for essentially background music but, given that,  I nevertheless felt that Contag’s writing here was somewhat short on melodic, rhythmic and  tonal variety. It became rather pedestrian compared with the earlier score but, that said, his sense of drama was still keenly expressed in his very effective use of silence at key dramatic moments.

The latter part of the screenplay covers the increasing pressures on the marriage that result from the heartrending death of their daughter – a catastrophe which catapults the husband into a reckless decision to quit his pen-pushing job. Contag captured the poignancy of grief and crippling self doubt with great sympathy, together with the agonized indecision of a wife who still unswervingly loves her man, but has finally reached the end of her tether. When their fortunes finally seem to be recovering, the score sashays effortlessly into a conclusion filled with the brighter moods of optimism and hope.

Bouquets are due to the Film Archive and Creative NZ for putting their efforts and funding into this very successful collaboration between the composer, the Wellington Film Festival, and the local SMP Ensemble, who did such justice to the score. Together they made possible the only live performance of this year’s festival, and the fact that the house was sold out well in advance demonstrates the soundness of backing this endeavour. Hopefully this will be just one of many similar collaborations in the future.

 

 

 

 

Stroma, with percussionist Claire Edwardes

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA presents Event Horizon

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich, with Claire Edwardes (percussion)

Alison Isadora: Cornish Pasty / Gyorgy Ligeti: Continuum
Jeroen Speak: Musik fur witwen, jungfrauen und unschuldige
Gerard Brophy: Coil / Steven Mackey: Micro-concerto

Ilott Concert Chamber

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Stroma’s recent concert featured works by two expatriate New Zealand composers, Jeroen Speak and Alison Isadora, both past graduates of Victoria University.

Speak, based in England, is currently in the country with his partner, Dorothy Ker, who holds the 2013-14 Lilburn House residency (Ker’s own […and…11] is scheduled for performance by Stroma at its next concert on 1 September). This August concert, Event Horizon, was named after Speak’s mini-concerto for piano and three percussionists, which in its turn was inspired by the stark paintings of Wang pan Yuan, Taiwan’s “prince of loneliness”.  As it happened, due to an insufficiency of percussionists, the eponymous work disappeared over a different event horizon – like that surrounding a black hole. In its stead, we had another composition by Speak, Musik fur witwen, jungfrauen und unschuldige (“Music for widows, virgins and innocents”, 2005) which had previously been premiered by Stroma. This proved to be a music of quietly intense, fleeting gestures (punctuated by side-drum strokes played by harpist Ingrid Bauer and violist Peter Barber), that gradually developed a sense of direction as repeated phrases hinted at an emerging underlying pulse.

Speak’s enigmatic title was drawn from that of an earlier composition, developed from a chant by Abbess Hildegard. The name of Netherlands-based Alison Isadora’s Cornish Pasty (2010) was similarly opaque (the programme note described the food, but not the music). The piece began with a starburst of sound, with tremolandos from Emma Sayers’ piano, Nick Granville’s electric guitar, and Steve Bremner’s vibraphone, creating a moving sound-object, through which melodies emerged from Rueben Chin’s and Hayden Sinclair’s soprano and tenor saxophones. Almost unrelentingly dense (in marked contrast to the sparseness of Musik fur witwen…), this composition, too, had a sense of direction and satisfying shape, gradually slowing down and thinning out after some interjections from Dave Bremner’s trombone, evolving from a texture-based piece to a predominantly rhythm-based piece.

I thought I detected some similarities here with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (whose Zilver was performed in 2010 by SMP Ensemble under visiting conductor Lucas Vis), and also with some elements of minimalism. Continuum (1968) might have been Gyorgy Ligeti’s study in minimalism. This pulsating texture of trills and tremolandos has been played in Wellington, in its original harpsichord version, by Donald Nicolson.  Stroma’s “stereo” arrangement for marimba and vibraphone (impeccably realised by Claire Edwardes and Thomas Gulborg) had the odd (and enchanting) effect, for me, of  being “music in the head” (like the South American difference-tone flutes, demonstrated by Alejandro Iglesias-Rossi). Also affecting – and surprising – were the sustained, singing tones that were elicited from these percussive instruments.

Featured star, Claire Edwardes, performed solo in fellow Australian Gerard Brophy’s 1996 Coil, its dynamic contrasts and short, lively phrases demanding virtuoso control of the vibraphone’s pedal for both sustain and staccato effects.

American Steve Mackey’s Micro-concerto (1999) saw Edwardes take up small, hand-held instruments (such as claves, guiro, and whistle) along with the more conventional drums and vibes, for a five movement concert piece with small ensemble. The fourth movement, a warm-toned duo for Edwardes’ marimba and Rowan Prior’s cello, was especially enjoyable. The more vernacular-friendly style of both Mackey and Brophy made for a satisfying balance with the adventurous works in the first half.

Stroma’s next concert (Sunday, 1 September, 4pm, VUW Hunter Council Chamber) will feature (along with the Dorothy Ker, and former NZ resident Gao Ping), the versatile bass-baritone (and actor) Nicholas Isherwood. Last here in 2009, he performed then Stockhausen’s Havona (with electronics), and Sciarrino’s Quaderno di Strada (with Stroma). Both compositions had the uncompromising severity of late works: one was, the other not (thankfully, Signor Sciarrino is still with us). On 1 September, in “Goddess and Storyteller”, Isherwood will be performing in two dramatic vocal works by Iannis Xenakis.

Antipodean stargazing and planetwatching from the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents

MUSIC FOR MATARIKI

EVE DE CASTRO-ROBINSON – The Glittering Hosts of Heaven

GUSTAV HOLST – The Planets

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 14th June, 2013

“Matariki” – the “eyes of god”, are said to be the stars belonging to a cluster (known elsewhere as the “Pleiades”) which were formed by the fierce God of the Winds, Tāwhirimātea, who tore his eyes out and threw them into the heavens in anger at the separation of his parents the Earth and Sky.

Somewhat less overtly savage is the account in Greek mythology of the seven daughters of Atlas, the Titan, who were pursued by the hunter, Orion, and saved (presumably from a fate worse than death) by Zeus who placed them in the sky. And, yes, there are seven stars, and in both of the mythologies quoted here, each star is given its own name and character.

Only after the concert did I go looking for these definitions and explanations – and I was both delighted and amazed by how these archetypal depictions and metaphorical interpretations of the particular stars in question seemed to particularly resonate with my memories of Eve de Castro-Robinson’s wonderful “Glittering Hosts” music, which was the first music we heard during the evening.

This work was a new commission by the orchestra, and I thought one that most successfully threw wide open its composer’s particular gifts of evocation, along with an ear for near-inexhaustible detail and an unerring sense of structure. De Castro-Robinson’s arresting story-like rhetorical gestures and vivid instrumental characterizations kept us transfixed, like some sultan of antiquity in thrall to his Scheherazade, as she related tales of wonder and excitement.

I liked how the piece began, not with far-away, nebulous murmurings divorcing us by dint of sheer distance from the firmament and its activities, but with in-the-face insistent, spiky, here-and-now happenings, the deep strings and percussion opening up the vistas only after we ourselves had become caught up with some of the scintillations. So, the vastness of the territory was indeed evoked, but so were its relative immediacies, with three of the seven instrumental soloists, flute, clarinet and trombone, drawing us into their opening interplay as part of the overhead galactic goings-on .

The piece seemed very “layered”, with frequent ostinati delineating patterns of orbital and rotating movement, bursts of shimmering detail evoking both individual and “clustered” stars, and more long-breathed lines (usually from the strings) suggesting the mystery of great distances. Details came and went more by osmosis than chance, leaving resonances in their wake, a cantabile figure from the solo ‘cello taken up by the strings, and a trombone solo sounding part-clarion-call part-lament. And across the larger picture, orchestral percussion gradually added their weight and colour to a kind of processional sequence which generated great warmth and colour, almost Straussian in its impact.

After this, the sounds deepened and darkened once again as though some kind of “event’ had occurred, leaving far-reaching resonances, and the soloists all gingered-up with impulse-gestures, angular figures bouncing between one another and different orchestral groups! The solo ‘cello, high in its register, brought forth a deep, double-bass and timpani response, as the flute “sounded breath” against a solo viola’s romantic inclinations, and the percussion trickled in strands of ambient warmth, taking little notice of the larger concerns of gleaming brass and scintillating winds.

The vastness of physical territory was matched by the piece’s far-flung moods – out of the sounds’ passive objectivity at the beginning gradually evolved what sounded to me like a baleful oppressiveness, challenging the solo violin’s lyrical warmth and generating energies throughout the orchestral textures which rose up in a kind of madness, the laughter chromatic in accent and mocking in tone, a kind of display of awesome power dwarfing any human aspiration. The solo trombone’s flatulent-textured comments gave ready rise to similarly pithy responses from among the other soloists, almost an “enter-the-clowns” scenario, one which both entertained and disturbed with its implications for we earthly mortals.

All of these interactions seemed to me in the overall grip of some wonderful kind of axial trajectory whose volatility of detail and surety of progress seemed to mirror, in a star-crossed way, human affairs on earth. I could fill paragraphs with minute-to-minute impressions of the journey taken by the music, but such an undertaking would be out of the scope (orbit?) of this review. Enough to say that the whole was rounded off by the seven soloists’ adroit dovetailing of their lines and fusing of their ever-waning tones and textures with those of the orchestral winds, into a deep silence at the end.

As homage to the splendour of the night skies, I found De Castro-Robinson’s work compelling and satisfying. While it may never challenge its companion concert piece this evening in the popularity stakes, it’s a work which, I think, will reward repeated hearings, and – what would be best of all to happen – a recording. Certainly it’s a handsome tribute by the composer to her “beloved parents”, one of whom (her father) was able to be present at the performance (I understand, somewhat hair-raisingly, after having his scheduled flight to Wellington cancelled earlier in the day!) – it was obviously “in the stars” that he was able to eventually make it!

Having had our terrestrial selves already somewhat borne aloft by contact with the “glittering hosts” of Matariki, we were more than ready for some closer-to-home interplanetary explorations in the form of Gustav Holst’s well-known seven-movement suite “The Planets”. Despite its great popularity, it’s an elusive piece, terribly difficult to get “right” all the way through, due to its wide-ranging moods and compositional styles over the seven parts, not to mention the sheer virtuoso instrumental demands upon the players. Surveys by commentators of recordings which have been made over the years haven’t turned up a single performance by one conductor and orchestra which is reckoned to have “nailed” the piece through and through – though,of course, the same could be said of many, many works, both on record and in concert.

So, how did Holst’s brilliant series of astrological character-studies come across here, throughout the evening? Generally, I felt that Pietari Inkinen and his players were happiest when the music took them to realms furthest from the heat of the sun (with the exception of Venus, more of which in a moment). In fact the final three movements were, I thought, superbly delivered, not least of all the composer’s own favorite movement, Saturn (the Bringer of Old Age), which was cold and unremitting at the outset, with the music’s growing disquiet built to a terrifying central climax (such scalp-pricking trumpets!), before slowly and inexorably turning the music’s despair to resignation and acceptance. Uranus (the Magician, and a favorite of mine) I thought a riot of colour, energy and scarily-directed impulse (the music should sound, as here, just as dangerous (baleful brass and shrieking winds!) as it does funny (galumphing timpani and wheezy contra-bassoon!).

And the enigmatic Neptune (the Mystic) demonstrated such endless reserves of sustained tonal control from all concerned (including the wordless off-stage choir), that we sat for what seemed almost like an age in eerie silence at the end, lost in our own wonderment at the spell cast by those beautifully-distant voices. Earlier in the suite , the cool, chaste, and determinedly virginal charms of Venus (the Bringer of Peace) were of course as much Holst’s doing as anybody’s – and this performance from Inkinen and his players was no exception, with peerlessly pure horn-playing from Samuel Jacobs and matching tones from the winds, as well as Vesa-Matti Leppanen’s violin and the rest of the strings (apart from a not-quite-true attack on their soft final chord, obviously difficult to achieve).

Interestingly, I found myself talking with an old friend at the concert’s interval (before the Holst work was played) – this was an extremely experienced concert-goer friend who enthusiastically praised Pietari Inkinen’s recent work with the orchestra (much of which he said I was heartily agreeing with!) – he then said something like “…and such elegant music-making! – never a vulgar or ill-conceived sound from the orchestra…”. Again I was able to agree, though as I was about to opinion that with some music, this conductor’s encouragement of elegant, and unfailingly mellifluous orchestral textures didn’t for me take some things in the music far enough, the “resuming-bell” sounded, and that was the end of the discussion.

So as I listened to each of the remaining pieces, I found myself recalling my friend’s words – Mars (the Bringer of War) was first up, with everything expertly played by the band, and including some wonderful individual moments – a big-boned, sonorous euphonium solo, for instance! – but the playing for me, though brilliant, didn’t really disturb or truly alarm. One of Holst’s own books on astrology had the following description of the planet: “Mars is cruel,has blood-red eyes and is prone to anger”. Here, it all seemed not quite brutal- or harsh-sounding enough – while at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, I thought Jupiter (the Bringer of Jollity) lacked real humour and bucolic energy. In a sense, each characterization needed more sheer abandonment, towards ugliness in “Mars” and vulgarity in “Jupiter” – and this is probably the rub!

Finally, Mercury (the Winger Messenger) featured skilled, precisely-timed playing, but was it all mercurial enough? – was this the speed of thought? My own thought processes, perhaps – but then I’m a flat-footed, somewhat pedestrian thinker, lacking in true wit and real spark. There are wings on the feet of visual depictions of Mercury that l’ve encountered, but this performance’s sounds didn’t accord with those images in my head. Alas, Mercury here remained earth-bound!

So, in the fine old tradition of performances of this work, some of the planets on Friday evening shone more brightly than others. Those that really glowed did so most effulgently – and conductor, orchestra and choir can be especially and justly proud of that unforgettable moment at the end of Neptune’s performance when it seemed in the hall that the whole of the Universe had stopped for a few seconds just to listen to the music’s silences…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orchestra of Swing, courtesy of “The Duke”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:

NIGHT CREATURE

GERSHWIN – An American in Paris

BERNSTEIN – Three Meditations from “Mass”

MARGETIC – Music for Wind, Brass and Percussion

ELLINGTON – Night Creature

Andrew Joyce (‘cello)

Mark Donlon (piano) / John Rae (drumset) / Miguel Arnedo-Gomez (bongos) / Patrick Bleakley (bass)

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Orchestra Wellington

Town Hall, Wellington

Sunday, 26th May 2013

The only clue I had to what we might be in for, during the course of the oncoming Orchestra Wellington’s concert with the overall name “Night Creature”, was George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, which I knew reasonably well.

I had not heard any of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” – though I remember reading a review of the composer’s own recording many years ago, one whose description of the work’s full-on theatrical, somewhat confrontational style put me off ever wanting to get to know it.  Such an attitude on my part was bound to catch up with me, sooner or later…..

Duke Ellington’s was a name I knew far better than his music – my Take the “A” train days of listening almost exclusively to swing I still recall with great pleasure, but of course Ellington’s was a creative spirit which explored realms far removed from swing. His three-movement suite Night Creature resulted from a 1955 commission by conductor Don Gillis and the Symphony of the Air (the old NBC Symphony), and used a quartet of saxophones and a jazz combo, emulating a kind of baroque concerto grosso arrangement – intriguing, to say the very least.

As for New Zealand-based composer Karlo Margetic, and the Bartok-like title of his new piece Music for wind, brass and percussion, I had heard some of his music before and remembered enjoying the experience, most recently a work for Piano Trio called Lightbox, premiered in 2012 by the NZ Trio.

So, the evening’s music promised a tantalizing assemblage, one whose parts I was determined I would give every chance to make a positive impression – even the Bernstein! In the event (thanks partly to the stellar playing of ‘cellist Andrew Joyce) Bernstein’s Three Meditations from “Mass” provided some of the most beautiful and heartfelt-sounding moments of the concert.

Having thought such dismissive thoughts about the piece I was pleased to find myself enjoying the music thoroughly. It all began with xylophone-like chimes, and an anguished, questioning ‘cello solo, the themes and ideas of the opening between the soloist, orchestra and organ. I was particularly taken with Andrew Joyce’s handling of the ‘cello’s beautifully rapt final utterances, even if the effect was all but spoilt by a persistent audience cougher.

The next piece’s opening was a slow and portentous pizzicato march, into which the orchestra joined, building the tensions with plenty of volatile excitement, aided and abetted by the organ at one scalp-pricking point! Through it all, the solo ‘cello kept an “eye of the hurricane” aspect, alongside menacing side-drum rolls and a final orchestral crash.

Straightaway, the drumbeat led into the final Presto, the soloist responding first with a disjointed cadenza-like recitative, and then taking up the drum’s dance-rhythm. I loved the cheery, angular folksiness of the dance, whose energies eventually gave way to the ‘cello’s taking up of a passionately romantic theme , supported beautifully by the orchestral strings. The “working-out” of these things reminded me in places of the composer’s “West Side Story” in its bitter-sweet, volatile mood. To finish, the ‘cellist played cadenza-like fragments imitating birdsong, as the percussion persisted with its “motto” rhythm in the background. Irrespective of the music’s wider context, I thought the work engaging and thought-provoking.

The concert had begun with music of quite a different mood, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, here thrillingly given what I can only describe as the “full” treatment by Marc Taddei and his players. From the start, the energies of the piece came at us in great and colourful waves, with brash auto-horns and whipped-up tempi at the climaxes. Played with such sharply-focused detailing the quieter interludes, when they came, made an enormous impact of withdrawal, the traveller’s sudden bouts of homesickness made all too heart-rending by the beautiful string- and wind-playing (Matthew Ross’s violin solo a bitter-sweet joy).

At first I thought the energetic bits needed a bit more “swagger” and point, and to rely less upon sheer speed of execution in places – but the trumpet-solo episode (superb!), counterpointed by the saxophone choirs, had such rhythmic “schwung”, such a delicious and infectious immediacy, that I capitulated, head-over heels, to it all from that moment onward! The orchestra strings played with plenty of stylish heart-on-sleeve emotion, matched by energetic wind and brass detailings which surged and flowed through the precincts of the Town Hall in grand fashion. It might have been a little too “over-the-top” for some people, but I loved it.

Again the trumpet-playing captured all the swagger of the rollicking theme which struck up in response to the solo violin’s chromatic angstings, inspiring the orchestral strings to respond in kind. At the end, the great restatement of the earlier trumpet theme by the full orchestra had more of a jazzy, spiky aspect than a “symphonic orchestral” one, a detail not lost upon the droll-voiced tuba with his brief concluding solo. In all, a terrific achievement!

Karlo Margetic, Orchestra Wellington’s Emerging Composer-in-Residence wanted to write a piece that contributed to the repertoire for wind and percussion ensemble, or as he put it in a pre-concert interview, “orchestra without strings”. As a clarinettist in various ensembles, Margetic would often enjoy first-hand the writing for winds within the framework of full orchestral pieces, and wonder why there wasn’t more stand-alone repertoire for the combination – “…such an amazing sonority!” he would think to himself – so he decided he would do something about it in the most practical possible way.

His work, Music for wind, brass and percussion, did surely and exactly what the title suggested it would do. Here were the unique sound-characteristics of the ensemble through its constituent parts and its combination of those parts, presumably as its composer imagined would happen. And it was surely no accident that the piece began with the sounds of clarinets weaving their lines throughout the textures, as the other instruments awaited their turn to try a folkish falling theme, despite the snarling aspect of the trombones, warning their fellows not to get too cocky with their new plaything too soon.

But to no avail – the theme became thoroughly energized through all this attention, and began arcing shreds of melody through the air like shooting stars,underpinned by crashes, explosions, and rolling timpani. Margetic certainly didn’t neglect his percussion, enabling it to glint and sparkle in places, roar and rattle in others, as this theme rolled around the stratospheric regions belonging to each instrument group. The panoply of sounds thus created made for a wonderful effect, both lyrical and dramatic, its melodic contouring not unlike the well-known thirteenth-century chant “Dies Irae”.

As the melody developed, the tensions around and about it receded, provoking a final ensemble-roar in passing, and leaving a muted voice whose tones had perhaps underlined the whole of the interaction – having done, it melted away along with the other resonances. On this showing, I thought the work a great success – coherent throughout, beautifully shaped and contoured, interestingly coloured (those “amazing sonorities”, no doubt!) and always suggesting spontaneity, however much was pre-ordained.

Conductor Marc Taddei belatedly talked to his audience before the orchestra began the final item of the concert, Duke Ellington’s Night Creature. Taddei wanted to draw people’s attention to the idea that classical music didn’t exist entirely of itself, but drew inspiration from popular music, and cited “The Duke” as an example of a musician who “thought across” categories as both a performer and composer. Apparently, Night Creature was written because its composer wanted to get a symphony orchestra to “swing”.

“Swing” it all most certainly did, the work launched by the jazz combo (piano, double-bass, drum-set, bongos) playing part of another Ellington-inspired work, music which “set the scene” for what followed, without a break. The first part of Night Creature was just as evocatively titled Blind Bug, the “nocturnal dance” scenario somewhat nightmarish, the textures dominated by the brasses and saxophones, with the strings providing a kind of atmospheric backdrop.

The following Stalking Monster had well-defined rhythmic trajectories set by low piano notes, winds and strings, the music droll, rolling-out and evocative. At the other end of the sound-spectrum were powerful toccata-like exchanges between brass and timpani, though these also joined in with the rhythmic drolleries, the muted brasses extremely characterful. Solos from both saxophone and trombone were an exciting feature, and even the strings got to do a bit of “funky” towards the movement’s end.

Finally Dazzling Creature stirred some glamour and sex into the mix, a depiction of the “Queen” of all the night creatures – a muted trumpet announced the erotic “charge” of her presence, strings delineated her seductive movements and the winds underlined her exoticism. Having established this “Mistress of a Modern-day Venusberg” and her thralldom over all, the music swung with the saxophones, and hit its straps with the brass choir. And, how the composer did enjoin us in his programme note on the music to relish his depiction of “the most overindulged form of up-and-outness”! I’m certain that “The Duke” would have been pleased had he been there – for all of us, players and listeners, it was “swing” with a vengeance.