Tag: contemporary music

Turning over a Blue Leaf – Adam Page and Stroma

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA with Adam Page  – BLUE PAGE

Adam Page (saxophones and looping)

David Bremner (trombone)

Mark Carter (conductor)

Stroma

Downstage, Wellington

Sunday 9th December, 2012

This concert put me in mind of a review I once read of a performance given by the great 19th Century pianist/composer Anton Rubinstein, while on tour in the United States, the writer turning to a kind of “vernacular” in order to be able to express the wildness of exhilaration that had seized him when confronted with such music-making –

“….the house trembled, the lights danced, the walls shuck, the sky split, the ground rocked – heavens and earth, creation, sweet potatoes, Moses, ninepences, glory, tenpenny nails, Sampson in a ‘simmon tree – Bang!!!……I knowed no more that evening!….”

The concert was billed as “New Zealand s largest chamber ensemble meets New Zealand’s greatest multi-instrumentalist”.  Even though he’s Australian-born saxophonist extraordinaire Adam Page can call himself a Kiwi (or anything else he likes), just as long as he keeps his voyage of spontaneous and interactive discovery as fresh, intriguing and even as dangerous as he did with the Stroma musicians at Downstage Theatre.

Though the concert’s apex-point was Adam Page’s Space, Time and a new pair of shoes,  a work featuring this multi-talented musician’s technique of looping his own and accompanying musicians’ live improvisations into a continually enriched texture of accumulated musical impulses,  the concert featured as well works by Jack Body, Michael Norris and Jacob ter Veldhuis, all taking their starting-point as the tradition of the Blues.

Jack Body’s work Tribute to the Blues began this exploration, a work in four sections. It began with “Big Joe’s Moan” lovely, lazily loping accordion sounds, joined by various other instruments,  playing homage to jazz legend Big Joe Turner by way of setting long and lyrical lines,  over the top of an almost pointillistic soundscape, flecks and single brushstrokes of sound and colour. The following “Penitentiary Blues”,  realized by the New Orleans-based group Tangle Eye, had a sombre and definite “Singing Detective” ambience about its textures, one trying, it seemed, to ”lighten up” and escape the claustrophobia of both form and context.

John Lee’s Pluck came to the rescue, marimba and piano creating a gorgeous “carpet” with string pizzicato joining a sympatico marimba and piano, and finger-clicking from the musicians keeping the faith, as it were, in the spirit of John Lee Hooker. Contrast, if needed was afforded by “Chain-gang Chants”, with heavy bass-dragging beat underpinning a roaring sax and trombone. The lamenting winds and strings  seemed to speak for the human spirit, the roaring brass underpinning the oppression.

Finally, Mary Lou’s Dream (homage to another jazz giant, Mary Lou Williams, pianist composer and educator) presented a kind of “blues fantasia”, with cool, walking-pace rhythms leading the ear into a kind of twilight zone of eerie wind chordings and tremolando strings, until the blues gestures begin to coalesce, building up to great roulades of expression, before expiring with a muttered cadence.

Michael Norris’s Heart across night followed on from a film clip of Theolonius Monk playing his classic Straight, No Chaser, the trio of musicians responding at first with primordial sound-impulses, a muted trombone (David Bremner), rumbling double-bass (Alexander Gunchenko) and quietly scintillating percussion (Lenny Sakofsky), all kept pulsing together by the beat of Mark Carter. The composer’s own poetry was printed as a kind of word-map “paraphrase” of Monk’s piece giving us clues as to his specific visions – thus the irruption of energies could be interpreted as “hot tears crashing”, to all of which the electric double bass seemed to choreograph a kind of “danse macabre” very much on the surface.

“No rest” cautioned the poem, so that even the twilight-zone evocations contained bursts of activity responses to disturbances and terrors within. I found a kind of  perverse joy in David Bremner’s muted trombone, a lovely sound, the instrument later reverting to its full-throated voice. with Stravinsky/Firebird-like glissandi sliding like a board-rider on a molten surface of percussion-driven activity – the climactic “that’s her” getting a volcanic, exciting response from all the players.

The final two items were dominated by Adam Page’s incredible playing, firstly Jacob ter Veldhuis’s Grab It! for tenor saxophone and audio tape, the latter containing samplings from a documentary film of death row prisoners’ aggressive verbalisings. The saxophonist played a series of high-powered synchronisations  mirroring the energy of the constantly-recycled words. The whole scenario was an amazing assault on one’s sensibilities, though the combination of images, music and words drew one into the matrix of anger and despair evinced by the presentation’s various elements – a haunting, life-shaking experience.

Lastly, we got Adam Page’s own Space, Time and a new pair of shoes, a work whose improvisatory spirit created a Baroque-like panoply of melodic and rhythmic explorations processed and shared by Page himself and the whole ensemble in tandem with a looping recorder machine. The technique enabled the musicians’ contributions to and variants of the bluesy opening material to be added to the sound-picture via the recorder-machine, whose agglomerations gradually built up to near-epic proportions. Page commented in his programme notes that he had never used so many musicians when previously presenting this work live, and was thus looking forward to the “unknown” aspect this circumstance would create.

The effect was exhilarating, transporting – a total knockout! – not quite shades of “I knowed no more that evening” but instead, a kind of flabbergasted audience babbling in response, something which, had it also been recorded and “looped”, Adam Page himself would have presumably delighted in augmenting with the excitement of his own visceral, heart-on-sleeve intensifications.  And that would have been yet another work, and it would have been even harder to tear oneself away – as it stood, from Stroma it was no less than a feast of musical discovery, with Adam Page as the inspirational “lead-from-the-front” guide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rain, wind and moonlight – Stroma’s “Pierrot Lunaire” and more……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA presents PIERROT LUNAIRE

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Kirstin Eade (flute/piccolo) / Phil Green (clarinet/bass clarinet)

Blas Gonzalez (piano) / Megan Molina (violin)

Andrew Thomson (violin/viola) / Robert Ibell (‘cello)

HANNS EISLER – 14 Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of depicting Rain)

AMNTON WEBERN – String Trio Op.20

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG – Pierrot Lunaire

Ilott Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, 25th November, 2012

Stroma brought up the 100th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg’s landmark creation Pierrot Lunaire in unique style at Wellington’s Ilott Theatre, as part of a program featuring the music of both pupils and contemporaries of the composer.

Naturally, the concert’s focus centered firmly on Pierrot Lunaire, with the advance publicity’s imagery suggesting a theatrical presentation, one featuring the extremely gifted singer Madeleine Pierard. This performance took up the second half of the program, with Hanns Eisler’s Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of depicting Rain) sharing the first half with Anton Webern’s String Trio.

The Hanns Eisler work was played here in accordance with the composer’s original intention, in tandem with a film. Dedicated to Schoenberg on the occasion of his 70th birthday and scored for the same instrumentation as the master’s Pierrot Lunaire, the music was a manifestation of Eisler’s fascination with and study of music’s relationship to the medium of film. The composer “set to music” an existing silent film, Regen (Rain) made in 1929 in Amsterdam by filmmaker Joris Ivens.  Its montage-like construction featured scenes whose placement suggested a kind of understated interplay between natural elements, mostly rain, and people going about their business in a city.

Completing the first half was Anton Webern’s String Trio Op.20, to the uninitiated, a work presenting the wonder of new sensations, especially the lyrical explorations and variants of the same throughout the first movement, then with the second movement introducing what felt like a more “physical” kind of engagement, stimulated by greater contrasts of timbre and rhythm. Interesting that the performance was “conducted” by Hamish McKeich, something that, for me, added a kind of dimension to the sounds, almost like a life-pulse beneath the contrasting plethora of surface incident.

As for “Pierrot”, it has always been regarded as “new”, even a hundred years after its creation. After the premiere in Berlin in October 1912, with the composer conducting and Albertine Zehme as the vocalist, the musicians took the work around Germany and Austria. A critic after a performance in Augsburg the following month suggested that, in order for people to “understand, enjoy, or at least feel” the work, they would need to grow “ears of the future” – a statement with particular relevance for concert-hall audiences.

It’s a truism that in almost any creative sphere things which seemed like daring, almost anarchic cutting-edge first-up presentations can in many cases become absorbed by the main-stream of forward movement, and their edges rounded-off for more general consumption. Where “shock value” was and is an integral part of a work’s message, this can place extra stress on contemporary performers to try and replicate that essential sense of outrage and anarchy, public or private.

Of course, in a world all-too-accustomed to daily presentations of atrocity and carnage as television news entertainment and much worse (so I’m told) awaiting mere mouse-click activation via the Internet, it’s perhaps the performance-context that then becomes all-important for art-music.

I believe that’s why the “refined order” of the concert-hall and its age-old associations continues to allow music of all eras their specific kinds of impact and impressions. And, with reference to this present concert, even though our ears may have gotten “used” to the relative astringencies of the sounds produced by members of the “Second Viennese School” (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, et al…), in performance situations certain impulses activated by intensities unique to that performance will always have an impact.

Also, one doesn’t underestimate the increased familiarity and better-developed understanding of any work that comes with repeated exposure, a kind of “roundabout” that makes up for the loss of the shock value’s “swing”. This concert afforded us plenty of food for reflection along these lines, the items able to engage us in all kinds of ways and at different levels of receptivity, from surfaces to inner recesses.

Regarding the opening work by Hanns Eisler, I loved the combination of film and music on this occasion (being normally a last-ditch opponent of add-on visual accoutrement to music presentation). Of course, this was different to that, the film being the composer’s original inspiration for his music. On the face of it, fourteen musical vignettes stitched together would, one might think, produce a disjointed hotchpotch of impressions in sound, with no guarantee that the whole would be greater, etc….. But for a variety of reasons we as listeners seemed to be taken out of ourselves and ‘put in touch” with a kind of synthesis of sounds and images throughout, in places cleverly dovetailed, and in others interestingly contrasted in terms of feelings produced.

I could detect no strain, no discomfort or lack of co-ordination regarding the musicians’ performance (expertly duetted, cross-media-style, with the on-screen happenings through Hamish McKeich’s direction). It all seemed as one, the music-making reaching back from its immediate “face” to make the connections, as any piece of music might similarly fuse with aspects of a listener’s previous experience.

In the wake of Eisler’s work Webern’s Op.20 String Trio promised a potentially less immediate and engaging experience for the listener, an expectation that for me was confounded by the austere beauty of the sounds made by the trio of violinist Megan Molina, violist Andrew Thomson and ‘cellist Robert Ibell. Originally intended by the composer as a three-movement work, the surviving two movements seemed complementary, a kind of “air and dance” pairing. A commentator whose analysis I read called the work “jagged and severe”, qualifying the judgement with “yet strangely beautiful and lyrical”. The latter statement came out more readily with these musicians’ playing.

Here were finely-wrought exhalations of breath at the beginning, a gentle flow of movement, angular in places, and flecked with little irruptions and pizzicati impulses. Its companion movement seemed more impulsive, volatile in line and figuration as well as in dynamics, each player in this performance seeming both singer (in places more like “sprechgesang”) and listener, such was the playing’s interactive spirit throughout.

The interval done, Madeleine Pierard took the platform, dressed and made-up as Pierrot and accompanied by Hamish McKeich and the ensemble. She was stationed to one side, well-lit, while the musicians and conductor were in the centre. Immediately behind the group was a backdrop of a screen on which titles, translations and images were played, giving the audience plenty of help regarding the texts of the poems. First impressions were of an immediacy and clarity of utterance from both singer (beautiful diction) and players (beautifully-focused, transparent lines and atmospheric tones). The voice encompassed a frequently startling dynamic range, wonderfully mirrored by similarly explosive accents and contrasts from the players.

I confess I was transfixed by the clarity and focus of it all throughout the first couple of numbers. It actually took me until midway through Part One’s grouping of seven songs to regain my critical senses sufficiently to realize just why it was that Madeleine Pierard’s performance sounded so much more lyrical, wistful and engagingly human than any other singer I’d heard on record (I had never heard the work in concert before). She was actually SINGING a great deal of the text and sustaining many of the pitches of her notes to a greater extent that any other exponents of the role I’d encountered. There was, of course, variation in what I’d previously experienced, to the extent that, without a score it was impossible to plot precisely where Schoenberg had intended his “singer” to sing and where to break into speech, or at least “bend” the note pitches. But this performance was, to my ears, “sung” like no other I’d heard.

The effect was to “humanize” many of the poems’ utterances, and play down the more grotesque, often deranged-sounding modes adopted by the singer. Whether this was how Madeleine Pierard “saw” the work, along with her conductor, Hamish McKeich, or whether it was due partly or wholly to a lack of experience in performing it, resulting in more conventionally accepted modes of utterance being used, I’m not sure. Schoenberg himself was undoubtedly influenced when writing the work by the vocal capabilities of the first person to “create” the role of Pierrot, the actress Albertine Zehme (who, incidentally, chose the poems for the work). I came across a fragment of the correspondence between composer and singer-actress which was revealing:

The singing voice, that supernatural, chastely-controlled instrument, ideally beautiful precisely in its ascetic lack of freedom, is not suited to strong eruptions of feeling…..Life cannot be exhausted by the beautiful sound alone. The deepest final happiness, the deepest final sorrow dies away unheard, as a silent scream within our breast, which threatens to fly apart, or to erupt like a stream of lava from our lips…..We need both the tones of song as well as those of speech. My unceasing striving in search of the ultimate expressive capabilities for the “artistic experience in tone” has taught me this fact.

There was no doubting Madeleine Pierard’s considerable skills in bring this work to life, and her ability to make the words of the poetry pulsate – only in one or two instances did I feel that she hadn’t freed the music completely from the page, partly due to her playing-down the grotesque, spectral element which the sprechgesang mode would have helped emphasise – in Der kranke Mond which concludes the first part, she didn’t quite match the ambience of her flutist Kirsty Eade’s wonderful solo, her voice a shade earthbound, without the suspended gleam of the moonlight’s focus. But what a contrast, then, with her almost primordial, pitch-dark rendering of the following Nacht! – her deep-throated tones redolent of the abyss, as it were. She also captured the out-and-out horror of the Rote Messe, with its “gruesome Eucharist”, though I thought the sound of the words of Die Kreuze, the final song of Part Two, needed more of a certain spectral, “blood-bled” quality, something that more focused sprechgesang would have possibly given. But certainly there was vocal energy and finesse from this artist to burn.

The singer’s costuming and make-up was first-class, as was the organization of the backdrop screen and the timing of the text translations. I did wonder whether her lighting-pool was too unrelieved – some shadow on the face at certain angles would have given some contrast and allowed her a bit of freedom – as it was, every glance and every flicker of expression was laid bare, throughout. Make-up and costume suggested a theatrical statement was being made, and I felt it could have been followed through more strongly and consistently. Again,I don’t know whether Madeleine Pierard’s presentation was “directed” as such by anybody, but she could have been encouraged to incorporate what glances she did give her conductor (understandable in a score such as this!) into a kind of pattern of derangement or moonstruckness – something theatrical, or at least cabaret-like. And I would have liked her lighting to have had SOME shadow, a dark line allowing some facial contouring which she could have used for some respite along with more covert purposes.

Enough! Hang these comments, which matter far less than the fact that Pierrot was here a “tour de force”, a work whose stature was overwhelmingly conveyed by singer, conductor and players. Each of the instrumentalists did splendid things, conductor Hamish McKeich was the music’s flexible but unbreakable anchor-chain, and Madeleine Pierard’s voice gave us its beating heart. Performers and everybody associated with the Stroma team deserve our gratitude for giving us the chance to share so graphically and tellingly in a great work’s hundredth anniversary.

 

Stroma’s beautifully “luminous horizons” at Ilott

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – LUMINOUS HORIZONS

Music by SCIARRINO, PESSON, CLEMENTI, TAÏRA, SAARIAHO, CAVALLONE

Roberto Fabbriciani (flute)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Stroma

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Thursday, 11th October 2012

Five of the six works in this Stroma concert were New Zealand premieres, and one of these was a world premiere (Paolo Cavallone – Hóros). The odd one out was Yoshihisa Taïra’s highly theatrical and dramatic Synchronie, a kind of “Duelling banjos” for two flutes, which one imagines being readily enjoyed by all but the most conservative listeners. For that reason, I wasn’t surprised to find that it’s already been heard here.

Such a high proportion of unfamiliar music in a concert might be an an enticing prospect for some listeners, and a somewhat daunting outlook for others. Still, it would be fair to say that audiences who attend contemporary classical music concerts are generally pretty dauntless, being well used to having their ears pinned back by the originality of the sounds.

This concert would have thrilled the regularly adventurous ones, but on a number of counts had qualities which would have readily furthered the cause of contemporary music for people who might not have been “regulars” but in this case were attracted to its novelties. While one could have questioned the absence of a New Zealand work, the presentation’s title “Luminous Horizons” suggested an attractively exotic, far-from-here quality about the content which worked throughout superbly well.

A drawcard for aficionados was the presence of legendary flute-player Roberto Fabbriciani, whose virtuoso playing and interest in “new” sounds inspired various European composers from the 1970s onwards to explore what was initially a radical world of microscopic sonorities and nuances in music – what Stroma director Michael Norris called in his illuminating program note “this fragile, transient world”.  At least two of the evening’s works had direct connections to Fabbriciani, with the most recent, Paolo Cavallone’s  Hóros, including in its reference of dedication the Stroma players and artistic directors.

Straightaway Roberti Fabbriciani showed his credentials by opening the concert with a performance for solo flute of Salvatore Sciarrino’s eponymously titled L’orizzonte luminoso di Aton. Aton (sometimes spelt “Aten”) is a manifestation of the sun in Egyptian mythology. This was music born “on the breath” as it were, the sounds eschewing normal tones and pitch and concentrating instead on their edges and undersides, their parameters and foundations. The program note drew a parallel between sound and light in the respect that the latter suggests, defines and obscures its own shadow, the two states indivisible.

Sciarrino’s work created a world of suggested light, activating our imaginations with those aforementioned parameters, and setting in motion what Tennyson described in a different context in his poetry: – “our echoes roll from soul to soul / and grow forever and forever….” Fabbriciani’s evocation of Sciarrino’s world was, for this listener, spellbinding, with player and instrument seeming firstly to fuse before our very eyes and ears, breathing as one. But then sprang up what seemed like in places a fiercely intense dynamic between musician, flute, music and listener, with sounds and gestures constantly varying the focus of attention.

Gerard Pesson’s Nebenstücke was a kind of rumination by the composer on musical memory, focusing in particular on Brahms’ B Minor Ballade Op.10. I liked the composer’s description (reproduced in the programme) of his memory of the piece having “gradually corroded like an object that had fallen into the sea”, but augmented by the same process as well, “encrusted with elements that my own musical works had added to it”. Pesson’s work established a skeletal rhythm at the start, with muffled timbres sounding either waterlogged, or decrepit with age, the piece’s movement causing bits here and there to fall off. Perhaps I was influenced by the composer’s programme-notes, but I did tune into what sounded throughout this opening section like the shades of a ghostly Viennese waltz.

A trio-like sequence desynchronized the music for a bit, a warm string chord coming to the rescue and inspiring the clarinet to breathe some life-blood into the proceedings, the violin accompanying and the ‘cello counterpointing. Ghostly memories paraded before our ears, strings swelling and receding, playing a combination of arco and pizzicato – while the strings consorted thus with the clarinet, the viola explored the stratospheres, until the concluding impulses left us with something of a shadow-world, toneless clarinet-breath and soundless string-bowings putting the dream to rest.

There was more than a whiff of theatricality about Aldo Clementi’s 1983 Duetto, featuring partnerships within partnerships – two clarinets and two flutes, everybody taking up antiphonal positions. Clementi’s “variation on a theme” scenario was begun by Bridget Douglas’s flute, with the others following canonically, but each sounding as if pursuing a kind of improvisatory course, a slightly “curdled hall-of-mirrors” prescription. I found the textures and juxtapositionings wonderfully claustrophobic in places, especially when the clarinets were closely intertwined – at one point they were playing in seconds, and their timbres seemed to completely crowd out the ambiences – by comparison the flute intertwinings had the opposite effect, opening the sound-vistas up and suggesting far-flung spaces.

Roberto Fabbriciani amusingly drew our attention to a squeaky floorboard on which he had to stand while playing Yoshihisa Taïra’s Symchronie opposite Bridget Douglas, armed with her own instrument – this highly combatative piece arose from its composer’s imaginings of Japanese warriors in battle, leaping across clouds in the sky (a scenario somewhat reminiscent of a particular Japanese computer-game my teenaged son went through a recent phase of playing, and which the music also reminded me of), and manifested itself here as a kind of confrontational show-down between two players and their instruments.

Throughout this extremely theatrical and volatile piece I was amazed as to how aggressively-toned the sounds made by a flute could be. Every sound it seemed possible to make on the instruments, and then more besides, seemed to be fetched up by these players, along with occasional normally-vocalised shouts and yelps. But the over-riding feeling at the end was that of some kind of ritualized conflict, with certain protocols observed, despite the unbridled nature of some of the utterances from both instruments.

A piece by Kaija Saariaho followed, Cloud Trio, a work for strings alone, played here by violinist Rebecca Struthers, Andrew Thomson (viola) and Rowan Prior (‘cello). The composer’s own note about the music evocatively described the different instruments’ pictorial and structural functions in the piece – the upper (violin) and lower (‘cello) instruments evoking reverberation and shadow respectively, in between which the viola created the substance related to these effects. Saariaho indicated she was inspired by cloud formations over the French Alps, and her writing during the opening section of the work had what seemed like an intensely “analogue” character, lines filled with curves, bends, stretches and dissolutions, which suggested constant, gradual evolution.

The players beautifully caught both the energies of the second part, with the process of formation and dissolution sped up to a frenetic pace, and the toccata-like asymmetric patternings of the brief third movement with its follkish-dance suggestions. And the instruments beautifully coalesced throughout the lazily unfolding final movement, its melodies and figurations beautifully dovetailed by the composer, everything drifting in a similar direction overall while maintaining a kind of impulsive independence.

Roberto Fabbriciani returned with the ensemble to finish the concert with Paolo Cavallone’s Hóros, written this year for Fabbriciani and the Stroma ensemble, and here given its world premiere. This work was practically a flute concerto, and, like Aldo Clementi’s work earlier in the evening, took an existing piece of music as its starting-point, in this case, Chopin’s E Minor Prelude. This time, though, we actually heard a recording of the Chopin, played in the darkness immediately after the reading of a poem by Cavallone, the text of which was printed in the program – a meditation concerning spaces, distances, and boundaries.

From the darkness of this extremely theatrical opening came light and the sounds of instruments being activated by breath and bow, and developing a rich spectrum of colour and texture. Confrontations and re-inventings followed, the solo flute playing Mercutio to the ensemble’s Romeo, leading and teasing, light-fingeredly suggestive and gently mocking, the music opening and narrowing spaces between lines and timbres as did the Chopin Prelude. Over the last few pages the composer took us to different realms, the ensemble “reinventing” the ambient space of the opening, and making peace with the soloist.

So many notes, all of them unfamiliar ones! – but thanks to some judicious programming and excellent playing, and bags of individual and ensemble personality from flutist Roberto Fabbriciani and the Stroma players, I found this concert a stimulating and warmly intense listening experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wellington Orchestra’s musical haggis

Posted on by Peter Mechen

VENI, VENI EMMANUEL – Vector Wellington Orchestra

DEBUSSY – Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire

MacMILLAN – Veni, veni, Emmanuel

MENDELSSOHN – Symphony No.3 “Scottish”

City of Wellington Pipe Band

Wellington East Girls’ Cantala Treble Choir (director – Brent Stewart)

Claire Edwardes (percussion)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 23rd June 2012

There’s no doubt about the ability of a set of bagpipes – or, more profoundly, a Highland pipe band – to make an impression on people – I was going to say “set the blood racing”, but I know some people for whom the sound of bagpipes has the opposite effect as regards the movement of blood! I love the sound in reasonably digestible doses and I’m sure most people in the Town Hall on Saturday night got a real thrill at the beginning of the Wellington Orchestra’s concert when the pipes began. Those of us sitting downstairs couldn’t see whether it was one, two or a hundred pipers – but of course, we could certainly hear the skirl of those plangent strains! It was as if the music presented at the concert was the haggis that was being piped in for all of us to enjoy.

It was a characteristic gesture on the part of the organizers of the concert and I thought it worked beautifully. Of course it was designated a “Scottish” programme, with repertoire combining the familiar (Mendelssohn) with the not-so-familiar (Debussy) and the excitingly contemporary (MacMillan). I thought this was fair enough, by dint of the last-named composer’s nationality, even if the work had almost nothing whatever to do with Scotland, being a meditation for percussion and orchestra upon the coming of Christ to the world. So, it was a concert planned and brought off with a lot of flair.

There remained the curious affair of Debussy writing a specifically Scottish work, a circumstance I’m certain I knew about but had tucked away in the recesses of my store of encyclopedic knowledge, never expecting to have to take it out and dust it off and actually look at it. The printed programme notes, which I thought were very good in the case of each of the works, told the popularly accepted story pretty comprehensively – that Debussy wrote the work in response to a commission from a certain Scottish military officer, General Meredith Reid. The latter wanted the composer to arrange and orchestrate a march using popular Scottish tunes generally associated with the General’s ancestors, the ancient Earls of Ross, who were also known as  “The Lords of the Isles”.

According to certain accounts, the General called unannounced upon the composer, at his humble lodgings, and handed him his visiting-card. Apparently, as neither could speak the other’s language, composer and general decided, via expression and gesture, to seek help in a local tavern, where an interpreter was found, and the General’s purpose made clear. Debussy set to work on the march, arranging it initially for piano for four hands – the original title of the piece was Marche des anciens Comtes de Ross  or “March of the ancient Counts of Ross”.

Perhaps it needs to be pointed out that Debussy, though still a young composer, and grateful for any commissions that came his way, wasn’t exactly a raw beginner by the time the incident took place, in 1891. The year before, he had written his most popular single piece of music – “Clair de lune” from the Suite Bergamasque for solo piano – and had completed various other works, including songs, other solo piano pieces, a Petite Suite for piano, four hands, and a Fantasie for piano and orchestra. Some accounts have “romanced” the General as well – he was, in fact John Meredith Read, an American diplomat and lawyer of Scottish descent, who had been the United States Consul-General for France for several years during the 1870s. Perhaps his French was a little rusty by the time he called on Debussy, but he surely would have been able to converse with the composer – and the story’s “translator”, the writer Alphonse Allais, would probably have been present in the tavern merely as a drinking companion.

Anyway, once Debussy had completed the four-hand keyboard version of the March, he took his time to orchestrate the piece, and didn’t finish the job until 1908. The result, if not the greatest of his works, is charming, and has more than a whiff of Scotland about it. Here, at the concert, it made a splendid overture for what was to follow; and the orchestra played the music with plenty of sensitivity and panache in the appropriate places.

Next on the programme was the work by James McMillan, the percussion concerto Veni, Veni Emmanuel. The Debussy piece had put all of us in an excellent humour, ready to be entertained by the spectacle of seeing an energetic percussionist dashing madly around and about the concert platform, going from instrument group to instrument group, and creating some wondrously ear-catching sounds in the process – this is what I remembered of seeing and hearing Scottish percussionist Colin Currie performing this work in Wellington almost two years ago.  But there was a surprise in store for us –  the soloist Claire Edwardes had come onto the stage and received her introductory applause, and gone over to her first “station”, when two groups of young women suddenly stood up in lines on either side of the upstairs auditorium. They began singing a plainchant version of the Hymn Veni, Veni Emmanuel, from which composer James MacMillan had received his initial inspiration for his work. The surround-effect was lovely to begin with, but then entered magical realms in verse three, where the two groups sang in close-knit canon, the result sounding like the “opening up” of some kind of enormous reverberation and enlargement of the space in which we were listening. So evocative – and so enchanting – again, indicative of flair and imagination in presenting a concert.

The choir was mentioned in the printed programme, but only if one read the acknowledgements page at the back did one pick this up – there was no indication of any such group present on the “programme list” page, the intention (so the group’s conductor, Brent Stewart, told me, afterwards) being to give the audience a surprise. It turned out that the two groups were members of the Wellington East Girls Cantala Treble Choir.  When they had finished singing, I thought the orchestra might have most dramatically begun straight away with the opening of the concerto – but instead, conductor Marc Taddei led the applause for the choir and conductor, which, of course we heartily joined in with.

Reflecting on the differences between Claire Edwardes’ performance of Veni, Veni Emmanuel and that by Colin Currie, as I remembered it, they weren’t so much in what the soloists did, but in the spaces and contexts of each occasion. Most people would, I think, agree with me that, if the same work is performed first in the Michael Fowler Centre and then in the Town Hall, it’s an utterly different experience being in the audience. Colin Currie’s performance in the Michael Fowler Centre seemed more like a ritual, more contained and prescribed, more elevated and removed from his audience. Everything seemed (was) further away, so that it was all more dreamlike, less immediate – and so was the sound, or sounds, because of a very different acoustic. Thus I was far more easily able to relate the different musical episodes to what the composer was trying to express during the earlier performance, because the distancing of everything abstracted the performing experience. I still remember, at the time, feeling that the constant movement of the soloist between stations of percussion drew the observer’s attention perhaps distractingly to what the player was doing and how he or she was doing it, rather than focusing on the sound that was being made and its expressive or symbolic effect in the overall scheme. However, at the time, there was this sense of the player’s progressing between percussion stations, suggesting some kind of journey towards a goal – so there was this ritualistic aspect, culminating in the sense of fulfillment with the tubular bells played high up at the back of the orchestra.

There was no doubting Claire Edwardes’ incredible virtuosity – an astonishing tour de force of percussion playing, no doubt about it. But in the Town Hall, in that confined space and very immediate acoustic, the soloist and what she was doing was all much more physically palpable – and her sounds very “present” – so that the element of display came across, I thought, far more strongly than any sense of larger ritual, of following some kind of poetic or spiritual ideal. Claire Edwardes had, like Evelyn Glennie (whom I saw a few years ago playing a John Psathas Percussion Concerto), a very engaging physical presence which drew our attention to everything that she was doing. For me, at any rate, the music’s programmatic significance was swamped in a series of waves of there-and-then enjoyment – a bit like the news presented as entertainment on television – somehow the actual information gets a bit lost in the razz-matazz.

The part of the work which did allow me to refocus on the composer’s spiritual expression of an idea came with the coda of the work, entitled Easter, where the heartbeats representing Christ in the human soul are pounded out between the soloist and the orchestral timpanist (the sight-lines weren’t the best and so Edwardes and timpanist Larry Reese had trouble keeping their whacks absolutely together, but the effect remained strong and telling) following which came Edwardes’ symbolic ascent to the tubular bells, which rang out hymn-like amid a scintillating sea of tintinnabulation.  Every string player softly activated a triangle suspended from his or her music-stand, while the bells rang and sank back into silence.

For performances to successfully achieve a realization of the composer’s program or scheme for an audience seems to me problematical, considering the distraction of the display element – the soloist’s movement between stations and often frenetic activity in creating the sounds was akin to what I would imagine that of a honey bee in a beehive. In both performances (more so with this latter one) I tended to get taken up with that process, fascinated by the array of skills on display and enjoying the different sounds. But I would also imagine that, as one grows more familiar with the work, its message would gradually begin to coalesce – there were certainly moments amid the beaverings and squirrelings that suggested something beyond what was going on in front of one’s eyes.

Interestingly, I had the opportunity to listen to some of the concerto’s performance via a recording, which I was able to use during an RNZ Concert review – away from the visual aspect, the sounds immediately took on a more abstracted and transcendent purpose, so that I found myself as a listener thinking of the piece’s meaning, as the composer surely had intended. Food for thought, I would think (so to speak)…..

And so to the Mendelssohn “Scottish” Symphony, which took up the second half of the program, an absolutely gorgeous piece of music – as Marc Taddei said, one of the first examples of great nineteenth century romanticism in music. I thought the first three movements of the work came across splendidly, with many fine things. The very opening of the work was beautifully played, first of all by the winds, with the oboe very prominent – for me, perhaps because of the “bagpipes” association, there’s something about the timbre of an oboe that suggests a similar ambience – and then the strings, whose tonal sheen was, I thought, utterly beguiling, and whose line was so eloquent – what beautiful playing Marc Taddei got from his orchestra! I thought the playing captured the atmosphere that Mendelssohn himself talked about when he said he found the beginnings of his “Scottish Symphony” in the ambiences of the rooms at Holyrood Palace where the lover of Mary Queen of Scots, the courtier David Rizzio was murdered by Mary’s enemies, and the chapel where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. This romantic, historical aspect which inspired the composer was brought out beautifully in the first part of this performance.

Only the finale I found somewhat problematical – and I admired what Marc Taddei and the orchestra were trying to do with it, but I don’t think it quite came off. There’s a slightly pompous and bombastic element in the work which comes to the fore in this movement with the work’s coda – a kind of grand processional, in which a version of the main theme of the opening movement is brought back, but this time in a major key. Conductor and orchestra were, I think, trying to remove its pomposity, and make it more integrated with the rest of the finale, which is an energetic Scottish dance. What happened, though, was that the finale was started at such a terrific lick that the performance almost had nowhere to go by the end, and things were steaming along to the point of everything being a bit of a gabble. I think the tempi were just too quick all through for the players to properly articulate the music – the strings had trouble pointing the “Scottish snap” at the very beginning at Marc Taddei’s tempo, and there was certainly no grandeur at all in the coda – and I think there should be some kind of sense of summing up, true, without pomposity, but with a sense of arrival. For me, here, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater – but I must say in fairness to all concerned I spoke with a friend afterwards who thought it was all tremendously exciting!

So each of us listens to these things with wonderfully subjective ears! What was also interesting was a slight hiatus at the beginning of the clarinet solo almost at the end of the work, where it seemed as though either the clarinettist Moira Hurst started her solo too early or else Marc Taddei brought her in too early – just the matter of a bar or so – she stopped, and quickly started playing again, and no harm was done. But it was significant that, whatever the case, the conductor singled her out for some extra plaudits at the conclusion of the performance – and, quite apart from the slight “blip” of the uncertain moment, the focus on the player was richly deserved.

I shouldn’t nominate favorites, as a critic – but I couldn’t help capitulating completely to the second movement, the scherzo, as played here – and with good reason. One perhaps can never play a Mendelssohn scherzo too fast, to get that fairy-like aspect, and this performance cracked along with some marvellous playing from all concerned – some wonderfully soft, bustling elfin-like delicacy in places, and then some rumbustious, give-it-all-you’ve-got hell-for-leather exuberance from the players by way of contrast, leading up to the climax. That movement alone gave me enormous pleasure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STROMA – Percussion/Action in small but compelling doses

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – Soundbytes III

Works by Beat Furrer, Manuela Meier, Andrew Ford and Toru Takemitsu

Lenny Sakofsky / Jeremy Fitzsimmons / Bruce McKinnon (percussion)

Adam Auditorium, City Gallery, Wellington

Saturday 2nd June 2012

Stroma’s 2012 concert formats are taking in both larger, standardized happenings called “Headliners”, which feature well-known performers and works by established composers, and briefer, concentrated concerts of less than an hour’s duration called “Soundbytes” – the group’s publicity referred to these events as “aural degustations”, a term which had me reaching for my dictionary, illiterate peasant that I am, to be summarily enlightened – and yes, these in this “Soundbyte” under consideration, were tasty sound-snacks indeed!

New to me, though open since 2009 (where has this reviewer been, of late?) was the venue, a space called the “Adam Auditorium” located on the ground floor of the Wellington City Gallery. I loved being in the space, and thought the acoustic and ambience served the music-making well, marrying sound and sight with pleasing directness. Because of the pronounced auditorium “rake” almost everybody in the audience could clearly see what the players were doing to conjure up their panoply of sounds, giving the concert something of a specific gestural, or even choreographic, element.

Being a determined advocate for the audio-only listening experience, I’m surprised to find myself stressing this aspect of the presentation, though the relative novelty (when compared to one’s normal concert-going experiences) of encountering percussion ensembles means that one is more than usually interested in what is actually happening on the concert platform. Our three percussionists on this occasion didn’t disappoint, with plenty of variety of sound and movement served up for our delight by way of whirling us through four very distinctive musical experiences in an all-too-brief concert.

Actually, I thought the brevity of this “Soundbyte” experience had the positive effect of leaving us with appetites sharpened for more, which the “degustation” definition certainly implies. I confess to not really coming to grips with the first of the items, however, finding Beat Furrer’s sound-world a mystery, one which gently repulsed any kind of construct or attitude I strove to place around the sounds I heard along the way (I was pleased to read in the program afterwards of the composer’s “predilection for refinement and restraint”, qualities I found in the music almost to a fault!).

Not that I was overly worried about indulging myself in enjoyment of the sounds, but afterwards wondered how I could convey something of the experience of Beat Furrer’s Music for Mallets in words – it felt as if a patient, gradually unfolding soundscape grew from the first few minutes of the work, with sudden impulses of tone precursors of more frequent irruptions of energy which enlivened the textures somewhat, even if the music’s pulsing spent a lot of the work “underground”. A freer, more volatile episode followed, rapid glissandi and other figurations, staking out the land, though the sense of something restrained, evanescent and mysterious remained, embedded in the music’s character, and making a lasting impression.

By contrast, Stroma administrator Manuela Meier’s 2012 work Cada bristled with movement and impulse, throughout, the antiphonal exchanges between the two percussionists a delight to the senses. Again, the seating configuration allowing us to really “get involved” with the players’ physical gesturing and form a relationship between different sounds’ cause and effect. The composer treated us to a plethora of timbres and colours and what seemed to our “insectified” ears like a stunning range of dynamics, from the whisperings of wood against a smooth metal edge to the harsh complaints of friction-making textured metal surfaces worked upon by the same hard sticks. It all had the feeling of some kind of inner reality, akin to the flowing of blood, impulsings of a nervous system or an intelligence network processing sensory responses. This was the piece’s first-ever performance in public.

Andrew Ford’s Composition in blue, grey and pink for solo percussionist gave Lenny Sakofsky a chance to demonstrate his considerable performance skills. Taken from a larger work for flute and percussion and arranged as a stand-alone movement, it places the performer at a kind of drum-kit arrangement as if in control of the flight-deck of an enormous flying machine. Content-wise, the piece is extremely theatrical in its soliloquy-like structure, completely in accordance with a certain improvisatory air (intended by the composer, who leaves certain decisions to the player, such as the choice of drumsticks, and the dynamics throughout).

The opening episode is almost like a jumble of thoughts, as if emotion is trying to sort out an order of saying or a coherent overall shape – so we get fast and chatty sequences, but within a fragmented discourse. Slow and sinister follows, a different view of the material, or else a change in its ambient surroundings, contrasting with a sequence of brittle scintillations, whose short, questioning coda concludes with a final flourish. Both sounds and the player’s choreography of performance were totally absorbing, with never a void moment.

One doesn’t have to be a camp follower of percussion concerts to encounter the music of Toru Takemitsu, as this same work, Rain Tree, was heard during a concert given by the NZSO Soloists in March of this year (the same concert which featured Shchedrin’s entertaining, reworked and re-orchestrated take on Bizet’s Carmen). On that occasion I remember the music being somewhat marred by excessively-projected lighting of each instrumentalist – the systematic spotlighting was meant to synchronize with the music, but for me it was all too visually “loud”, and thus proved a fatal distraction. Significantly, Takemitsu himself is on record as having supervised a performance of his work with similar lighting, but then commenting afterwards that he found the effect “too distracting”.

Here, most thankfully, there were no such lighting manipulations, the musical impulses allowed to speak for themselves throughout the piece. Again, the characteristics of the auditorium enabled us to connect directly with the three players and their instrumental gesturings – Takemitsu’s title for the piece, Rain Tree refers to a tree described in a novel by Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe The Ingenious Rain Tree, one which, because of the thickness of its foliage “stores” water from rain and continues to water the ground long after the rain itself has ceased. The work reflects this process, the raindrops depicted by use of the crotales (antique cymbals) build up towards a cascade, with the marimbas alternating the whole while, and the vibraphone providing a kind of underlying foundation. Some of these were gorgeous sounds, both when isolated (the crotales) and when interactive – the marimbas woody and solidly ambient, the vibraphone all air and water.

The evening’s music and its performance, along with the venue and its warmly attractive ambience, all came together beautifully to make this Stroma concert yet another one to remember with great pleasure.

 

 

 

Rhapsodic strains from the NZSM Orchestra with Kenneth Young

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Rhapsodie

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Saxophone : Deborah Rawson

Conductor: Kenneth Young

Sam Logan – Lost Island  / Maurice Ravel – Suite “Ma Mère L’Oye”

Claude Debussy – Rhapsody for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra

Witold Lutoslawski – Concerto for Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Welington

Tuesday, 29th May, 2012

Every NZSM Orchestra concert I go to seems to surpass the previous one in some respect or other, to the extent that I now expect to encounter on each new concert occasion a stimulating and innovative programme and a high standard of performance skills from all concerned. This latest one was certainly no exception, with conductor Ken Young at the orchestral helm securing from the students (and some of their NZSO tutors, swelling the band’s numbers) plenty of impressively-wrought playing, which shaped up well to the programme’s considerable demands.

As well as playing skills, also on show was a new piece evocatively titled Lost Island, written by an NZSM student, Sam Logan, a recipient of the David Farquhar Prize in Composition. Describing his work as “an episode of escapism”, Sam Logan freely acknowledged in his program note the piece’s debt to the composers he likes – one would think, for a young composer eager to learn, an excellent springboard for creativity, especially as this was a “first” for him in writing for a full orchestra.

In seven or so minutes, his work progressed confidently through a number of atmospheric episodes – to begin with, an attractively languid opening nicely launched and floated exotic fragments of melody, the music gradually building in intensity towards a full-blooded roar and a quixotic change of key (brass glissandi and heavy percussion contrasting their voicings with a lovely violin solo). Then, with rhythms nudging the textures more and more insistently, the Lost Island scenario came into focus, bringing tropical-flavoured pulsings not unlike Gershwin with a dash of Jamaican Rhumba, all of which sounded easy on the ear and great fun to play.

Haunting chimes sounding over string tremolandi gave the music a mysterious “Shangri-la” aspect, with an ascending motif prominent, one which worked through trenchant orchestral textures and determined ostinati, creating waves of attractively La Mer-ish sea-swellings (uh-oh! – a tautology?) – but I thought at some stage the episode needed a bit of thematic interest or character to sharpen the listener’s focus (a solo instrumental line? – perhaps more from the violin, whose voice was heard to great advantage earlier). So, hardly a distinctive voice, but there was some well-crafted orchestral writing from the young composer, to go with discernible character in some of the sections of the piece, enough for its hearing to be an enjoyable audience experience.

Further delight was to be had from the performance of Ravel’s suite from his ballet Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), our anticipations sharpened by the entrance onto the platform of additional players, among them a contra-bassoonist (very visible!). This music is, of course, both a gift and a challenge for any orchestra, simple figurations tempered with exacting refinements throughout. We got a piquant blend of winds throughout the Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane, dynamics not perhaps perfectly gradated, but each player’s sounds winningly wholehearted. More finely-honed was Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb), with lovely strings and melancholy oboe to begin with, and a meltingly beautiful cor anglais solo – the strings gave us a fine surge of emotion at the climax, as did the cor anglais’s return; while Kate Oswin’s violin cheekily led the chorus of birds mocking the lost wanderer.

Laidronette, Empress of the Pagodas, one of Ravel’s happiest creations, here splashed and scintillated with joy, the winds in fine fettle, and the horns resonant and atmospheric. The xylophone’s pentatonic tinklings, tentative the first time round, were brilliantly nailed by the player on the repeat, ably supported by the rest of the percussion at the climax. No greater contrast could be imagined than with Beauty and the Beast, clarinet and strings depicting the girl’s loveliness, set against the grotesquerie of the contrabasson’s rasping tones (great playing by Hayley Roud), backed up by suitably growly percussion! The strings admirably portrayed Beauty’s initial disquiet and confusion, before Kate Oswin’s silken-sweet violin tones brought about the Beast’s magical transformation.

The suite’s final number,The Enchanted Garden, completed the magic, the strings encouraged to play with plenty of warmth by Ken Young right at the start, and the solo violin again lovely, if not always steady, joining in with the great rocking rhythms, horns chiming, strings singing and percussion sizzling, in celebration of the day’s sun-drenched awakening of a garden’s beauties.

This was the first time I had heard the Debussy Saxophone Rhapsody, and was highly entertained by the account of its history and its composer’s dilatory attempts at composing the piece, as set out by the program note. Its title suggests precisely what the piece sounds like – not a concerto, but a rhapsody with a prominent solo instrument part. And Deborah Rawson played it exactly like that, her tones always beautifully rounded, but often meditative, blending in with the orchestral discourse rather than seeking to dominate or over-ride the textures.

It all sounded like a civilized discourse between equals, though a more robust and forthright episode towards the end brought forth more energy and rhythmic intensity. Whether or not the composer was himself properly convinced of the work’s efficacy is open to conjecture – certainly Debussy’s coyness regarding his relinquishing of the work’s orchestral sketches for publication suggests an equivocal attitude – but Deborah Rawson and the orchestra certainly gave the piece every chance to shimmer and glow with this finely-played performance.

I had not heard the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra in concert since, I think, 1972, which was when Vaclav Smetacek directed a performance with the then NZBC Symphony in the Wellington Town Hall. The piece knocked me sideways then, and did so again here, Kenneth Young inspiring his student players to dig into the textures and relish the earthiness of the orchestral writing throughout the first movement. We got searing strings, soulful winds and pin-point brass fronting up with trenchant rhythms and rolling maelstroms of sound, contrasting with gentler, more folksy episodes involving winds and a solo violin, with the celeste sounding a kind of stricken aftermath at the end, a solo flute and clusters of strings picking over the salvageable remnants.

How well I remembered the skeletal eeriness of the second movement’s opening, everything dryly dancing and scampering, a real sense of musical sleight-of-hand, with both wisps of ghostly illusion and breaths of human warmth whisked away alike in a trice! What music, and what playing from this young orchestra! Brass interruptions led to a percussive hammering whose sounds reached breaking-point and exploded, leaving a mourning flute over grumbling strings. And in the aftermath the disquiet took up again, the dovetailing of lines at speed expertly done to the end. Exhilarating stuff!

As for the third-movement Passacaglia, launching a longer movement than the other two put together, it all proved an epic journey, beginning solemnly, with pizzicato strings bringing out a wonderful solo from the cor anglais and inspiring further wind-and-string interchanges. There were brass shouts and percussion onslaughts momentarily obliterating all other voices, ruling by force, though winds and strings reasserted themselves with a chorale-like theme, the strings sounding like a heavenly aftermath of angels. And the toccata-like irruptions from the brass – terrific playing! – spearheaded an even more brutal assault, against which the winds sang a kind of “coming through” theme, like lifelines stretching over an abyss.

Under Young’s direction the orchestral forces throughout all of these contrasting calms and storms scarcely faltered, with only a single episode of less-than-unanimous playing that I noticed – the accelerando passage towards the end in which the players took a few bars to “find” one another. The ensuing cataclysmic chorale grew magnificently out of the ferment of orchestral activity, and Young whipped the players into a final frenzy for the skitterish payoff at the end. Had I been completely new to this work I might have been writing at this point “I knowed no more that evening…..” For all concerned, a stunning achievement!

 

 

Wonderland in name and deed – Made In New Zealand

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WONDERLAND – MADE IN NEW ZEALAND 2012

CREE BROWN – Celestial Bodies

CRESSWELL – Concerto for Orchestra and String Quartet

WHITEHEAD – Alice

New Zealand String Quartet

Helen Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Wellington Town Hall

Friday 25th May 2012

This was a “Made In New Zealand” concert which packed a real wallop, featuring three substantial pieces of music by different New Zealand composers – all of whom, incidentally, were present.  While none of the performances on this occasion were premieres, each one seemed to me to freshly unwrap the music, and square up whole-heartedly to the technical and emotional challenges of each of the pieces’ different physical and spiritual worlds.

It seems to me to be important that any orchestra can play and sound as if it “owns” music written by composers who live in the same geographical space, however “global” or “multi-national” an outlook certain forces of darkness seek constantly to try and impose on our lives. And, as Douglas Lilburn was fond of pointing out, there are aspects of the New Zealand experience which even Mozart, for all his music’s greatness and universality, couldn’t express – and an orchestra such as the NZSO which both encourages and can brilliantly play music by local composers that CAN express these things, is, purely and simply, above rubies. At least, in the expert hands of conductor Hamish McKeich, this was certainly the case throughout Friday evening’s concert.

While I’m still convinced of the need for integrating New Zealand music into “normal” concert programs and schedules, rather than treating it as a kind of separate species  confined to its own enclosure (open to the public only at certain times throughout the year!) I’m certain that having a “Made In New Zealand” concert gives additional opportunities for the NZSO to (as orchestra CEO Chris Blake puts it) “support and stimulate the creation and development of a New Zealand symphonic repertoire”.  And it’s fortunate we have conductors such as Hamish McKeich and Kenneth Young who can, when given opportunities to do so, make good that statement of intent with fully-committed advocacy.

Without wanting to “limpet-mine” this review with any suggestion of a subaqueous agenda, I feel nevertheless compelled to mention, quite offhandedly, that one of the greatest (in my opinion) of New Zealand symphonies – David Farquhar’s first, performed in concert in 1960, a year after it was written –  still awaits its SECOND public performance. Ironically, the work has enjoyed two recordings throughout the interim, and thus can’t claim to be completely neglected – but how else would one characterize something that’s had a single public airing in fifty-two years? To my ears the work urgently has a part to play in any such “development of a New Zealand symphonic repertoire”.

Back with the business in hand, I was interested to read that the first work on the evening’s program, Chris Cree Brown’s Celestial Bodies, was first presented in 2005 in Christchurch as an audio-visual collaboration with the artist Julia Morison. It would have been interesting to have experienced something of the composer’s original conception for this work, though previous “Made In New Zealand” concerts which used visual elements encountered a good deal of criticism from concertgoers, myself included, which might have been off-putting for the organizers. However, it must be said that the criticism was directed almost exclusively at instances where visual elements were imposed on existing music, not where it was part of the composer’s own initial scheme.

This accounted for those parts of the work so readily and cheerfully dispensing entirely with the “live” orchestra (the whole of the fourth section “Dark Matter” for example.) Having visual imagery interacting with the taped material would at this point have, I feel sure, removed some of the incongruity for me of having to watch an entire orchestra sitting on a concert platform listening to prerecorded sounds. For the rest I enjoyed the players’ skilful acoustic dovetailing with some of the sounds on the tape throughout (a sign of the times being a reference to an “electroacoustic CD” instead!).

Celestial Bodies is a work in ten sections, the parts named for various phenomena found throughout space, the composer describing them as “overwhelming in their size, awe-inspiring in their diversity and breathtaking in their beauty”. New Zealand composers have written outer space-inspired music before, an example being Edwin Carr’s ‘The Twelve Signs”, though Cree Brown’s work avoided any astrological reference-points. Instead, his pieces unfolded for us, one by one, aspects of the cosmos with titles such as Galaxy, Globular Cluster, Pulsar, Nebula and Supernova, as well as those with a more sinister ambience like Dark Matter and Black Hole.

These were brilliantly crafted sounds, atmospheric and pictorial, with plenty of variation, and readily suggesting their subject matter in practically every case. They were not for everybody, as I discovered when talking with people, some of whom said they struggled to feel any connection with the music, while admiring the composer’s craft and skill. I felt involved in almost every episode, and particularly enjoyed the orchestra’s interactions with the pre-recorded sounds, a process which I thought set up interesting performance tensions in places and pushed my listening boundaries outwards, towards places that felt quite eerie – the second piece, Globular Cluster, worked on my imagination readily in that respect.

I also enjoyed the pieces’ contrasts, for example, when going to the following piece, Pulsar, and encountering those strongly-etched rhythms pulsating through spaces that had seemed up to this point pleasantly nebulous. Black Hole was another piece whose elemental irruptions gave a real sense of menacing power, thrillingly at odds with one’s accustomed sense of vast stillness when looking at the night sky, the orchestra’s heavy batteries making splendidly frightening noises, complete with a startlingly anarchic chord at the end.

Where I didn’t especially “connect” with Cree Brown’s music was, as I’ve said, with any “pre-recorded only” episodes of any length – the fourth piece, Dark Matter, the most ready example. I’m certain that, had we seen Julia Morison’s images, the sequence would have told more readily and maintained enough interactive tension – perhaps a soloist or group of soloists from the orchestra needed to play ad lib with the pre-record, in the absence of any visuals, to keep the impulses alive and flowing.

Interactive tension was the name of the game with Lyell Cresswell’s Concerto for Orchestra and String Quartet. In one continuous movement, the work spun its listeners excitingly through what seemed like an endless variety of episodes involving interchange between the performers – in this case the New Zealand String Quartet and the orchestra. Although this concerto wasn’t written for the NZSQ, (it was premiered in Scotland by the Yggdrasil Quartet and the Scottish National Orchestra in 1997), Cresswell has written other works specifically for the group, a piano quintet And Every Sparkle Shivering, first given here in 2000 with Michael Houstoun, and a string quartet, Kotetetete, which the NZSQ performed last year in the City of London Festival. Cresswell has described the NZSQ as “a quartet that can play anything”, and felt that whatever demands he made of the players in writing the Quartet, they would relish the challenges.

The group has played the Quartet Concerto before, the first time in 2001 with the BBC Scottish Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young. From the start, Cresswell wanted to write a piece that was a genuine partnership between quartet and orchestra, and not merely with the latter group providing some sort of “accompaniment”. And neither did he want the piece to be a kind of Concerto for orchestra, with string quartet. On the “genuine partnership” count alone, the work seemed to me a truly egalitarian tour de force – one noted a constant flow of creative happenings between solo instruments, small groups and larger forces, a kind of all-encompassing concerto grosso, with all the attendant tensions and resolutions which one might expect would throw up between such elements.

Cheryl Hollinger’s magically-phrased trumpet-playing, introduced by scintillations of percussion and airborne, ethereal orchestral strings, got the work way to a suitably “storyteller-like” beginning, the theme hinting at a kind of unfolding aspect, as in the best tales. And though the quartet’s viola-led instrument-by-instrument configurings, supported by the orchestra strings and commented upon abruptly by brass punctuations, were carefully terraced by the composer, the effect seemed always natural and organic, never forced or contrived. As with genuine human interaction, the exchanges occasionally flared up excitingly, the music expressing its fair share of marked contrast and volatility, but was then balanced by slower, more reflective and meditative episodes midway through the work. Here, I loved the heartfelt duo lines between various pairings of solo strings from the quartet, seeming to me expressing great beauty against what felt in places like a backdrop of ambient desolation.

There were places throughout the final section during which I wondered whether the writing fell back on itself every now and then, and could have benefitted from some  “tightening” by the composer – but always a succeeding episode would scoop up and whisk away my misgivings, generating so intense an excitement of quicksilver exchanges of texture, colour and rhythmic patterning between quartet and orchestra. Cresswell’s orchestral writing in particular I thought so very virtuosic in places, the music’s occasionally vertiginous momentum creating exhilaration aplenty. The quartet players, as always, gave their all, and each section of the orchestra, directed and balanced with admirable skill by conductor Hamish McKeich, seemed switched-on to razor-sharp mode with the timing and focus of their rapid exchanges.

After the interval came intensities of another, more directly human kind, Gillian Whitehead’s setting of poet Fleur Adcock’s retelling in verse of an ancestor’s emigration from Britain to begin a new life in New Zealand in 1909. Twenty-three year-old Alice Adcock, showing symptoms of tuberculosis, and hoping that a change of climate would help effect some kind of cure came to this country from Manchester, to the consternation of her family. She lived for a further fifty years, during which time she lost her husband and was then rejected and dispossessed by his family, having to relocate with her children to another part of New Zealand and start a new life.

Fleur Adcock felt Alice’s story was, in a sense, that of all those who came across the seas to establish a new life, the commonalities having, in her words, “the resonances of a universal myth, known to all of us who live here”. Making the most of the deceptively simple poetry, singing with great power and beauty, and relishing occasional forays into a kind of sprechtgesang, Helen Medlyn here became the heroine, Alice, body and soul, pretty much as she would have done when she “created” the role in 2003 at the premiere performance. She brought out all the different elements of the text – its humor (much talk of lice, using terms like “gentle creepers” and “big crawlers”), positive energy (revelling in the clean air of a new country), unflagging optimism (happiness at finding a man to marry who will take and accept her child) and a sense of loss and grief over deaths of loved ones (father and husband) – but also gave the sung lines plenty of theatrical (even operatic) presence and vibrancy.

No praise is too high for orchestra and conductor, Hamish McKeich, living the different scenarios with Medlyn every inch of the way throughout the story-line, and continuing to deliver, right through the unfortunate contretemps which quietly erupted in the gallery, where an audience member suddenly took seriously ill ten or so minutes before the end of the piece. This, of course, occasioned a flurry of piteous activity (those on the ground floor, along with many of the musicians, largely oblivious to what was going on) – but evidently the revival efforts of those brought to help were successful.

A stimulating and colorful “Made In New Zealand” concert then, with three substantial works whose effect will have won for the orchestra, its conductor, and the special solo performers many plaudits from a delighted audience and from three grateful composers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great enthusiasm at Jenny McLeod’s “Hōhepa” premiere

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JENNY McLEOD – HŌHEPA (opera) – World premiere performance

New Zealand International Festival of the Arts / NBR New Zealand Opera

Cast: Phillip Rhodes (Hōhepa) / Jonathan Lemalu (Te Kumete) / Deborah Wai Kapohe (Te Rai)

Jane Mason (Jenny Wollerman) / Nicky Spence (Thomas Mason) / Martin Snell (Governor George Grey)

Narrator (Te Tokotoko /Te Waha): Rawiri Paratene

Director: Sara Brodie

Members of the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Conductor: Marc Taddei

Wellington Opera House

Thursday, 15th March, 2012

I’m not sure whether I ought to admit to readers of this review that, earlier in the same day that I attended the opening of Jenny McLeod’s “Hōhepa” I took up a friend’s invitation to accompany him to a screening of the latest New York Metropolitean Opera production of “Götterdämmerung”.

Perhaps my abrupt juxapositioning of the two experiences was foolhardy, considering the chalk-and-cheese aspect of the works involved. But I found the inevitable comparisons thrown up by these “close encounters” thought-provoking, residues of which have undoubtedly coloured my reactions to Jenny McLeod’s work, outlined below.

The first thing that must be said of “Hōhepa” is that it’s a pretty stunning creative achievement on McLeod’s part, in line with Wagner’s achievement of writing his own texts for his stage works. And as with Wagner in his “Götterdämmerung” I felt an incredible emmeshment of words and music throughout the work, if at the opposite end of the grandly operatic textural and tonal spectrum.

Employing a moderately-sized cast and chorus with a small orchestra, McLeod created an evocative and enduring variety of ambiences throughout the story’s presentation, the sounds shaping and enlivening the narrative with firmly-focused contouring and colorings. In a sense I thought the orchestral score the most consistently dramatic protagonist, one from which nearly everything on the stage seemed to take its cue. One’s ear was constantly being drawn forwards and into that “world of light”, the sounds suggesting an order presided over by ancient gods and disrupted by unexpected change.

To briefly outline some background – Hōhepa Te Umuroa was a Whanganui Maori living in the Hutt Valley during the 1840s, one who, though well-disposed towards the European settlers he met and befriended, opposed the land-confiscation policies of Governor George Grey and took arms against the British militia. Captured, he and others, including his friend Te Kumete, were exiled to a penal colony in Tasmania, where Hōhepa died. His forgotten grave was rediscovered by a New Zealand child visiting Tasmania, whose parents alerted the authorities, and began a process that would see the remains of the exiled chief returned to New Zealand in 1988.

Through her involvement with writing church music for use by Maori people in the Ohakune district, Jenny McLeod had developed an association with Ngati Rangi. She was asked by Matthew Mareikura, elder, and leader of the mission which brought home Hohepa’s remains, if she would undertake to write the history of the entire saga – not as an opera, but hopefully in book form, a task she accepted. She was then approached by the current director of NBR New Zealand Opera, Alex Reedijk to write “a New Zealand work” for the stage, and she thus decided that it would be appropriate to adapt Hohepa’s story for the purpose.

In the course of her compositional career, McLeod has, in a sense, covered more territory than most, her works ranging from avant-garde innovation and her own brand of neo-primitivism, through popular styles, including hymn-writing for present-day worship, to a re-thinking of an avant-garde “tone-clock theory” involving innovative use of the chromatic scale, something she found influenced her writing of “Hōhepa”. She’s refreshingly pragmatic about her use of such techniques in as much as they have an impact on what the ordinary concert- or opera-goer hears in her music – in a recent “Listener” interview she talked about listeners not needing to know too much about the technicalities, expressing confidence that people would instinctively sense a “structural coherence” in her work.

I wondered, as I listened to the evening’s finely-wrought tapestry of sounds, whether this “structural coherence” of McLeod’s would generate sufficient energy of itself to implant a stage work with requisite dramatic possibilities. What I felt must have posed an enormous challenge for director Sara Brodie was how to respond to McLeod’s writing – how to render it onstage as “dramatic” or “theatrical” in an operatic sense. The presentation involved a great deal of “storytelling” via a narrator, one self-styled as a “talking stick” – Te Tokotoko, who is also the hero’s spirit guardian. Actor Rawiri Paratene looked and sounded the role to perfection, though I wondered whether his prominence throughout actually diminished the impact made on the proceedings by Hōhepa himself, whose dramatic character could have “taken on” more of his own story and enhanced the depth of his onstage presence in doing so.

In an article in the programme, Diana Balham writes of Hōhepa that he “is really an ideal opera leading man” – an ordinary man caught up in events which lead to his wrongful exile, imprisonment and eventual death, his fate leavened by a kind of post-mortem coda of wrongs addressed and put to rights. On the face of things that’s perfectly true – but the writer’s words created an expectation that, as a character Hōhepa would behave more “operatically”, which didn’t seem to be the composer’s (and following on, perhaps not the director’s) intention.

McLeod’s work itself seemed to me stylistically more like a kind of “dramatic legend” – something of the ilk of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust”, a work which is equally successful in concert as when staged. There were occasional moments during Hōhepa of physical energy and dramatic movement (a brutal killing was depicted at one point), but in general the stage movement and configuration had a gradually unfolding aspect suggesting pageantry or ritual more than theatrical cut-and-thrust.

This impression was heightened by the composer’s use of some of the drama’s supporting characters, as well as the chorus, to advance the narrative – while the effect wasn’t unlike stylized classical drama, I felt the balance between storytelling and theatrical depiction was pushed away from the latter to the point of dramatic dilution. Ironically, I also thought that Hōhepa himself wasn’t given sufficient prominence throughout the first two acts to capture our attention, to train our focus upon him with sufficient force so that his fate as the tragic embodiment of a victim of gross injustice would later have its full dramatic impact.

Phillip Rhodes, who played Hōhepa, did everything he could with the part – he looked and sounded splendid throughout, and had both powerful and touching moments, the most enduring of which for me over the first two acts were the imposing warrior’s delight in his Christianity-inspired “Holy Family”, and his teaching of the names of birds to his children. But the Pakeha settler couple, Jane and Thomas Mason, made even more of a lasting impression on me, dramatically (splendid singing from both Jenny Wollerman and Nicky Spence), while Deborah Wai Kapohe’s Te Rai (Hōhepa’s wife) and Jonathan Lemalu’s Te Kumete (Hōhepa’s friend), both richly-characterised roles, seemed just as prominent in the scheme of things as the eponymous hero.

And yet – perhaps one shouldn’t be making such an issue of this. After all, in Maoridom it is the whanau, hapu, iwi, and the associated whakapapa which matters more than the individual; and Hōhepa’s tragedy was essentially a communal one, given that he endured great personal privation of both a physical and spiritual kind up until his death in exile in Tasmania. In that sense it’s appropriate that the character be portrayed as an integral member of a group as much as an individual, particularly as the Western operatic concept of a “hero” doesn’t sit well with the scenario that McLeod evokes. Should the work, then, be actually called “Hōhepa”? Is it more about a darker aspect of this country’s history than about what actually happened to him? Is it even more universal than that?

At the time, in the opera house, I felt myself musically entranced by it all, despite some bemusement – upon reflection, and having read back through what I’ve already said in this review, I feel myself beginning to incline towards taking the things I saw and heard on their own terms, and greatly enjoying them. Above all was, as I’ve said, the beauty and variation of McLeod’s illuminated tapestry of instrumental sounds, rendered with the utmost skill by a chamber-sized group of players drawn from the Vector Wellington Orchestra, here under the guidance of conductor Marc Taddei.

Then there were the voices, at the beginning of the work as people of the land enacting the rituals of acknowledging the tipuna, and paying homage to their living descendants. These choruses then merged with the drama, as Hōhepa’s descendants witnessing the recovery and repatriation of his bones, and afterwards as his contemporaries, expressing in heartfelt tones the shared ignominious humiliation of displacement, and the sorrow of his loss to exile and death.

Each of the solo voices suggested oceans more capacity for characterization than was allowed by the composer – apart from those I’ve mentioned, Martin Snell as Governor George Grey quickly established the character’s arrogance and implaccable nature, again largely with audience-directed pronouncements, though in places with engagingly jaunty (and ironic) Stravinsky-like accompaniments.

Given that McLeod’s treatment of the subject-matter demanded a good deal of recitative-like storytelling on the part of the characters, director Sara Brodie wisely responded with stagings designed by Tony de Goldi that emphasized and underpinned the ritual-like aspect of the drama. Her “less-is-more” instincts gave our imaginations space to augment the physical movements of the characters with impulses of our own, suggested either by music, words or backdrop images, sensitively applied here by Louise Potiki Bryant.

Opera is meant to be a visual as well as an aural experience – while this unconventional work of McLeod’s seemed to me to work just as effectively as abstract music and storytelling as it did as a theatrical event, the production’s feeling for ritual and atmosphere grew beautifully from the sounds made by voices and instruments. An enthusiastic and heartwarming reception was accorded the composer, along with her singers and musicians and her creative team, by an enthralled audience at the final curtain. I thought it richly deserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sixteen’s second concert, a cappella, a benchmark performance

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand International Arts Festival

The Sixteen  conducted by Harry Christophers

A cappella music by Tallis, Morley, Gibbons, Byrd, Sheppard, Tippett, Britten and James MacMillan

The Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 3 March 7.30pm

The second concert by The Sixteen was devoted to music by composers born in Britain, not simply one who spent most of his life in the country, as was the first of The Sixteen’s concerts.

Two groups of Tallis’s ‘Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter’ were sung, four at the beginning and four at the end of the concert. They were a sort of purifying wash to introduce the audience to singing that was not too complex – in fact the first began with four men singing in unison – allowing the unprepared ear to adjust to the acoustic of the hall and to sample the sounds of many individual voices.

The choir is perhaps a little unusual in having more men than women, though that is because parts otherwise sung by female altos are here sung by male altos (or counter-tenors). It lent the ensemble a quality that set the exemplary sopranos in marked contrast to the weight of males singing the other parts.

Tallis’s ‘Salvator mundi’, in Latin, was a striking illustration of Tallis’s versatility, coping with the dangers of religious dogma as the country moved back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism. And the choir demonstrated the contrast between Tallis’s setting of English and Latin texts as clearly as his shift from the vertical harmony of English music to traditional Latin polyphony.

The Latin element was very temporary and it was followed by English part-songs: Morley’s ‘April is in my Mistress’ Face’ and Gibbons’s very beautiful ‘The Silver Swan’; the weight and warmth of the men’s voices kept the mood from becoming too ‘hey-nonny-nonny’ in Byrd’s ‘This sweet and merry Month of May’. John Sheppard’s ‘In Manus Tuas III’ returned to a Latin text, opening with a demonstration of men’s voices in unison, and then a strong counter-tenor solo.

The first half finished in the 20th century however with, first, James MacMillan’s ‘Sedebit Dominus Rex’, given a subtle Scottish accent (it’s one of his Strathclyde Motets), an attractive separation of men’s and women’s roles, to produce singing of very great emotion.

There was a second piece from MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets later: a striking contribution by women’s voices as well as the gentle opening section by basses, marked his ‘Mitte manum tuum’, again quite short and technically approachable.

The best known part of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time – the five spirituals – brought the first half to an end, with several opportunities for strong solo voices, particularly female.

Yet, what is it about a composer’s fundamental well-spring of invention and emotional power that consigns almost all of his music – apart from arrangements of existing melodies – to museum status almost within his own lifetime? No want of trying on my part, yet I feel impelled to revisit almost nothing even of the music I have on my own CDs.

The second half was also a satisfying mixture of the 16th and the 20th centuries; It began with three more Latin motets by Tallis, each with its distinct character, reflected in the tempo, in the varying amounts of legato singing, and the vocal colours produced by the choir.

The curious little dissonances (remarked in the programme notes) gave ‘O nata lux’ vitality; the next, ‘O sacrum convivium’, was by contrast sombre, calm and quite extended. The third motet, ‘Loquebantur variis linguis’, cleverly simulated a complex tissue of disparate languages through elaborate counterpoint: even those without Latin could have worked it out.

There was another Byrd motet, his masterpiece ‘Laudibus in sanctis Dominum’, that seemed to mark him as an English composer, set to song-like music in which vertical harmonies were as audible as the elaborate counterpoint.

The other major contribution from the modern repertoire were the Choral Dances from Britten’s opera Gloriana. For long, these were about all that was much performed from an opera that was inexplicably felt to be a ritual occasional piece, but is now firmly placed among Britten’s greatest operas. I was delighted to catch a performance a couple of years ago in the Ruhr, in Germany. Britten himself arranged this unaccompanied version of the dances, and I have to say, heretically, they did not make quite the impression on me that the original operatic ones did. They emerged, for me, somewhat affected and bloodless; but the performance of them was far from that.

The choir presented an encore: an arrangement by choral composer Bob Chilcott of a Tallis anthem.

Finally, the programme booklet was a model. It provided a wealth of rich and informative material about the choir and its director, but also writings about the composers and their social and political situation, and evocative thoughts about the nature of the music itself, all of which might deepen listeners’ knowledge.

Not enough of the audience bought the programme however.

From time to time I express my view that programmes for concerts – and other performing arts too – should be provided free. For a year or so New Zealand Opera did that, but later reverted to the practice of confining them to those who could pay the fairly high price for them. That is to sacrifice a valuable opportunity to deepen and broaden the audience’s knowledge of what it is hearing, a matter of even more importance now that most of the population under 50 is approaching the more serious arts without the benefit of any formal exposure to them at school where the sounds of good music (and poetry and foreign languages) can be implanted, perhaps subliminally, in the minds of the young – when that faculty is at its most receptive.

The major cost of programmes lies in the preparation of the texts and the design and formatting of the printing; for the fruits of those efforts to be restricted to a minority of the audience is a sad lost opportunity to educate.

The programme also took the trouble to ask the audience to refrain from clapping between the items in a group; the fact that few on the audience had programmes meant that there was applause between the numbers in Tippett’s Five Spirituals.

A bevy of intensities – Ensemble Liaison with Wilma Smith

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand 2011

HAYDN – Piano Trio in G Major “Gypsy Rondo”

BRAHMS – Clarinet Trio in A Minor Op.114

MESSIAEN – Quartet for the End of Time

Ensemble Liaison:

Timothy Young (piano) / Svetlana Bogosavljevic (‘cello) / David Griffiths (clarinet)

– with Wilma Smith (violin)

Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 29th October 2011

Contrast was very much the going order for this concert, given by the Australian group Ensemble Liaison, with violinist Wilma Smith, in the Wellington Town Hall. The group made light of the rather over-generous acoustic and voluminous spaces of the venue, with some extremely focused and well-projected playing throughout the varied program. As well, the ear soon adjusted to the prevailing ambience, so that the sounds soon became as “normal” as at any concert.

One comes to expect certain levels of musicianship and technical proficiency from visiting artists, and the members of Ensemble Liaison delivered handsomely on all counts. Timothy Young’s piano-playing combined a soloist’s presence and focus with a chamber musician’s sensitivity throughout the evening. He was admirably partnered in all three works by ‘cellist Svetlana Bogosavljevic, sonorous and supple-toned, from the largely continuo-like underpinnings of the Haydn Trio to the fractured intensities of Messiaen’s work. And clarinettist David Griffiths charmed us at first with his expressive sensitivities in Brahms, before pinning back our ears with playing of searing surety in the Messiaen Quartet.

Joining them for this series of performances in New Zealand was Wilma Smith, well-known here for her work as concertmaster with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and as leader and a founding member of the New Zealand String Quartet. She brought what a friend of mine described at the interval as “warmth and clarity” to the music, as well as an experienced chamber musician’s sensibility to the interactions with her colleagues.

Before the concert began Chamber Music New Zealand boss Euan Murdoch welcomed the audience and highlighted some aspects of next year’s programme, making particular reference to the visit by illustrious Italian ensemble I Musici, as well as that by the equally renowned Takács Quartet. A further announcement came from Wilma Smith, telling us of her wish to dedicate the concert to the memory of a recently deceased former colleague of hers from the NZSO, veteran trumpeter Gil Evans.

Haydn’s well-known G Major Piano Trio, named “Gypsy Rondo” on account of its exotically-rhythmed finale, enabled musicians and audience to”get the pitch of the hall”, the resonances bringing out Haydn’s delightful “al fresco” echoes of the forest and the hunt throughout the first movement’s variations – I wanted the opening major-key sequence repeated, so felicitous was the playing and the sense of delightful rapport between the musicians. Though the ‘cello had practically nothing thematic to do throughout, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s playing warmed the harmonies beautifully, enabling the violin to sing and the piano to sparkle with even more sweetness and élan. Only in parts of the finale did I feel the acoustic robbed the playing of some of its finesse of detail – some of the rapidly moving figurations were but a blur, though the skin-and-hair “gypsy” sequences came across with plenty of temperament, the whole delightfully paprika-flavoured.

From rustic exuberance we moved to a more autumnal mood with Brahms’s Op.114 Clarinet Trio, the first of several works written for the famed clarinettist Richard Mühlefeld, whom the composer had heard play in the Meiningen Orchestra. David Griffiths introduced the work, making reference to Mühlefeld and his skills, and to the beauties of these later works. On the showing of his subsequent playing in the Trio I would have been happy to have heard Griffiths play all of them, including the two sonatas, in a single concert – perhaps another time! What impressed me was the beautiful transparency of his tone, the playing catching the music’s “wind-blown” quality in a number of places. With Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s dulcet ‘cello tones leading the way into many of the melodic contourings, the music’s emotive impulse was constantly maintained, Timothy Young’s piano-playing contributing a nice sense of fantastical suggestion to the proceedings.

The Adagio here delivered a beautifully-voiced dialogue between clarinet and ‘cello . Griffiths had pointed out beforehand that he and the ‘cellist were a married couple – but even Oscar Wilde, with his “washing one’s clean linen in public” remark, couldn’t have helped but approve, with such felicitous music-making on display! As well, the third movement’s ritualistic waltz-like impulses produced in this performance something at once stirring (those wonderfully ‘”arched” phrases, like uplifted festoons of roses) and surprisingly tender. True, there were passionately-expressed moments in the finale, here given full voice by the performers, but the over-riding impression was one of light-and-shade, the composer seeming more readily to trust his lyrical instincts in these later works than in much of his earlier chamber music. Upholder of the classical tradition he may have been, but the aspect and mood of some of Brahms’ later works present more lines of connection with Romanticism than perhaps the composer himself might have cared to admit.

Naturally most of the concert’s focus fell on the second half’s single work, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Though by now a twentieth-century chamber music classic, the work had eluded me up to the time of this concert, so I had no previous experiences, save some knowledge of the composer’s other music, to bring to the occasion. Reading some of the background to the work’s composition certainly heightened my expectation of hearing something that was uniquely special – and on that score I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Even so, there was for me something unsettling about it all which took me a while to come to grips with, more of which anon.

As is well known, the work was written while Messiaen was interned in a German prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, in the Eastern German province of Silesia. Thanks to a fortuitous amalgam of humanity and circumstance on the part of both the composer’s fellow prisoners and some of his German captors, Messiaen was able to write a work that gave a lasting voice to both his own creative personality and to a representation of a moment in time interwoven by numerous strands of indomitable human spirit. In later years the composer tended to “mythologize” the circumstances surrounding the work’s first performance, exaggerating the audience numbers and the parlous state of the musical instruments. Evidence from other sources suggests that the work’s gestation and completion was as much the result of collective co-operation as of individual genius. In fact the composer’s German captors went out of their way to facilitate the work’s composition and performance, giving the music a kind of wider reference to collective human empathy, alongside the composer’s own purposes.

The “End of Time” reference by the composer in the title, while relating to to the Apocalyptic imagery contained in the Revelations of St.John seems also to illustrate in musical language the composer’s own attitude towards time – “…not as flow, but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in a series of brilliant unalike instants…”. We therefore got not a Berlioz-like or Verdi-like Apocalypse, but a more abstractly-conceived and quirkily-expressed outpouring involving elements of plainchant, birdsong and ambient resonance. In between episodes of transcendent stillness and beauty there were occasionally fierce irruptions, and dances that swung along irregular rhythmic trajectories in disarmingly unexpected ways.

It was challenging as a “long-music” concept – ironically, perhaps less so in today’s world, where the constantly-changing mini-byte is the expected mode of communication – but especially to those of us brought up on Aristotelian-like unities of dramatic action and narrative flow within a time-framework. This music simply didn’t do any of that – each of the Quartet’s eight movements had an almost stand-alone independence which had little to do with flow within time. To me there seemed at the time (!) an undermining lack of ostensible organic unity about the piece, completely at odds with the idea of the whole being greater than the sum, etc….later, after my brain had had time to catch up and reorganize its expectations, I began to feel more comfortable in retrospect with what I’d heard, accepting more readily the composer’s idea of time as “pre-existing being” encompassing our “human temporality”.

What I instantly appreciated was the playing of each musician – true, my being able to say that I thought the third-movement clarinet solo “Abyss of the Birds” was a performance highlight, in a sense defines my problem with the piece’s overall unity, but perhaps it equally points to a deficiency of analytical brain-power on my part. In any case, the movement seemed the “dark centre” of the work, the solo instrument contrasting the deep “sadness and weariness” of the ages with the “stars and rainbows and songs” of the birds. Incredible playing from David Griffiths – his instrument produced sounds from the bowels of being, as it were. Comparable moments included the fifth movement ‘cello solo, “In praise of the eternity of Jesus”, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s beautifully rapt ‘cello playing matching intensities with her husband’s, right to the piece’s held-note conclusion. And though a couple of Wilma Smith’s violin notes weren’t pitched at exactly their mark, her playing’s overall purity and sweetness carried the day to breathtaking effect throughout the work’s final “In praise of the immortality of Jesus”. Here, as in the other movements requiring piano, Timothy Young provided all the delicacy, energy and deep sonority the music asked for.

We in the audience were, by the end, properly caught by the music’s power of communication and enthrallment, and showed our appreciation of the ensemble’s achievement accordingly.