Tag: contemporary music

On The Transmigration Of Souls – 9/11 Commemoration by John Adams presented by the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Vector Wellington Orchestra’s John Adams 9/11 Commemoration

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.5 in C Minor

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.25 in C Major

ADAMS – On the Transmigration of Souls

Orpheus Choir, Wellington / Choristers of the Cathedral of St.Paul, Wellington / Wellington Girls’ College Teal Voices

Diedre Irons (piano)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday September 11th, 2011

Review adapted – not a transcript – from a radio review for Radio New Zealand Concert’s”Upbeat”, with Eva Radich)

It was unusual for the Wellington Orchestra to be performing  on a Sunday afternoon.

The 9/11 date gives a clue – and in fact it’s ten years to this very day since New York’s World Trade Centre was attacked and destroyed by two hi-jacked terrorist-controlled aircraft. American composer John Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write a piece to be performed on the first anniversary of the attack, in 2002. This performance was the New Zealand premiere of this work, which won for its composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003, and for the premiere recording in 2005 various Grammy Awards.

The orchestra usually performs in the Town Hall – but here they were in the Michael Fowler Centre on this occasion.

Acoustically, the Town Hall would have been great for the John Adams work – the music was gradually built up with many different textural strands that would have responded even more powerfully to a full, immediate and  reverberant ambience, the kind of things that performers have to work harder to get in the MFC. But there were advantages gained from performing in the bigger venue, most obviously a bigger audience, and more space in which to place the various choirs that the work requires. Having said this in comparing the two venues, I have to say that I thought the sounds were beautifully managed all the way through – the taped sounds of city activity and the various voices reading the names of people who died in the attack and written tributes to them that were displayed in various places afterwards all came across with plenty of clarity and atmosphere, as did the heartfelt efforts of the different choirs and the power and beauty of the orchestral playing.

It must have been a pretty daunting commission for any composer, to commemorate such an earth-shattering event.

John Adams himself admitted to feeling, at first, a bit overawed by the range and scope of it all – he was quoted as saying “I had great difficulty imagining anything commemorating 9/11 that would not be an embarrassment” –  but then he reckoned that any composer that was worth his salt wouldn’t shrink away from confronting something “profoundly intense” and conveying its essence by whatever means. Adams felt that this event had been so well documented and its images spread so widely, that his job as a composer wasn’t what he called “an exposition of the material” – he had no desire whatever to create any kind of narrative or description. Instead his intention was to create in sound a kind of “memory space” for human reflection, absolutely free from any statement about religion, patriotism or politics. Adams likened to the concept the feeling one gets when one visits an enormous cathedral – he cited the experience of going to Chartres Cathedral in France, saying that “you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot.”

So, how did he do it? – how did the piece begin and develop and make its impact?

Adams decided he would dispense with the usual texts composers used for commemorative works, poetry, liturgy or Scripture. Instead he decided to use words that had been scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by people searching for their missing loved ones. In this way the focus would be on the people who were left behind, on their expressions of hope mixed with gradual acceptance of the reality of loss. He began the piece with prerecorded tape sounds of a city, of people going about their everyday business, pedestrians and traffic noises. Then a voice begins repeating the word “missing” over and over, followed by the introduction of names of the dead. The choirs begin to sing, like angels singing halos of tones, the orchestra strings play soft tremolandos, the percussion begins to softly scintillate, the choirs repeat words with growing intensity, like a great tower or archway gradually lighting up all over. A solo trumpet (very American) reminiscent of Charles Ives and of Gershwin, paying homage to a kind of cultural history, suggests an on-going presence of the spirit, as the choirs continue their chanting (Orpheus Choir) and sustained tones (Choristers’ Choir) accompanied by woodwinds playing Straussian Rosenkavalier-like chords. The music grows and changes textures by osmosis, as different instruments add their timbres and colours, brasses introducing a deep,sombre aspect, the overall sounds gathering girth and variety. The heavy brasses, trombone and tubas, play the most sepulchral notes imaginable and the tape voice repeats the word “missing”, everything growing in intensity and focus until the orchestra, like some leviathan awakening, opens up its heavy batteries with brazen bell sounds, expressing anger, war, disaster and danger, before subsiding into an uneasy calm, with only the children’s voices repeating the messages of grief at first, then gradually joined by the adult choir, the voices like waves of sound, reinforced by the orchestra, canonic flurries from the strings, irruptions from brass and percussion expending tremendous energy. The choir repeats the word “Light” as the taped voices return repeating more names of the dead and the phrase “I see water and buildings” (which were the last words spoken by a flight attendant on her cell-phone) repeated, as the intensities narrow down to a few simple phrases, repeated by the taped voices, such as “my brother’, “my son” and “I love you”. And with these sounds the music gradually fades and dies.

What was the reaction of the audience at the end?

Certainly very respectful, enthusiastic, but at the same time, thoughtful, applause – obviously the “Mr Bravos” of the concert-going world weren’t going to have the chance to exercise their lungs at the end of this piece. I think the audience’s reaction was tempered by the solemnity of it all, and rightly so.

What was the effect of the piece on you? How much power did the piece have to move your emotions?

For me, the most moving section of the work was the last, reflective episode following the final altogether irruptions of sound and energy, impressive though the impact of these was. I found that, in a sense, the composer was requiring of me to “accumulate” emotion over the course of the piece, so that I felt the lump in my throat coming up when I heard the words at the end “My brother”, “my son”, and “I love you”. It’s interesting that, when I was listening to the first five minutes of the work on you-tube on the computer earlier in the day, I felt the emotion well up then, very palpably – but I think that was because the video clip I was watching contained images of the events of the tragedy, the buildings on fire, the rescue workers standing amid the rubble, the onlookers distraught, the people jumping to their deaths, the simply-written poster-messages – somehow the visual imagery worked with the music to activate my emotions far more overtly, which I didn’t experience during the actual performance in any way until those last few minutes.  And I think, as I said, that this accumulated effect was what the composer had planned, that in the end it was the simplicity of utterance of these ordinary people who had been bereaved that was so extraordinarily moving.

This work was placed last on the program – did you think that was a good idea?

Yes, I think one was able to carry out of the concert hall an abiding impression of the commemoration of the day, because of hearing the Adams work last. Of course, to then have played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wouldn’t have actually “spoiled” the Adams piece – but it would’ve lessened its raw impact on the audience, going into the aftermath of the concert. It was a contemplative, rather than an earth-shattering piece, the realization of which the composer made quite clear was his intention all along.

Perhaps it would have upstaged anything that followed it?

Actually, no – I don’t think so – and again, I think the composer intended it to be that way. Hearing the piece was for me like connecting with some kind of collective human energy for a short while, and feeling a commonality of spirit and of impulse that was comforting in its way. I think it was a boldly-conceived and sensitively-constructed work. I wondered whether some simple visual production techniques, such as appropriately ambient lighting, might have enhanced the work’s overall impact.In one or two places I did imagine that something visual could have been brought into play with no violence done to the composer’s intentions. But there again, it was obvious Adams intended nothing more than a sound-picture, and for those sounds alone to have a cumulative effect upon his audiences.

So, what about the other two items? – were they put in the shade by the Adams work?

For me, not at all – and partly because it was very much a concert of two halves, with each creating its own unique world of feeling. The first half was absolutely splendid in a completely different way, featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (arguably the most famous of all symphonies in the classical literature) and a lesser-known, but still imposing work, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25, with Diedre Irons as the soloist. I was speaking with one of the ushers whom I know, during the interval, and who told me that the first concertgoer who came out of the auditorium a few minutes before had said to her, “World class – absolutely world class!” So, people were obviously impressed by what they were hearing.

Do you think it would be difficult for any conductor and orchestra to tackle something as well-known as Beethoven’s Fifth, something that almost everybody would have heard, and with so many great performances available on recordings? I would think it would be quite daunting a prospect.

I think you’re right about that – and in the face of such circumstances, the only way to tackle such a work is to do exactly what Marc Taddei and the orchestra did – which was to play the music almost as though they’d never heard anybody else’s performance, and instead make it their own. Interestingly, I reckoned it was only the second performance of the work I’d ever heard “live” – of course I’ve heard countless versions on record – but in the concert-hall the music’s still a relatively new experience for me, so I was really looking forward to hearing the work. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Under Marc Taddei’s direction the orchestral sounds blazed forth, all departments covering themselves with glory. One of the things that thrilled me was, despite this being the Michael Fowler Centre, and not the Wellington Orchestra’s usual home, the Town Hall, the playing had enough energy and tonal weight to fill the auditorium’s spaces and get across the music’s heroic qualities with plenty of gusto. Particularly successful in this respect was the first movement – great attack, right from the outset, with urgent, rather than monumental tempi, but with the rhythms given plenty of chunky, energetic emphasis. The strings were excellent, but the support from the brass and winds and timpani was also spot-on. Other highlights – one of them in this performance for me was the way Marc Taddei challenged his string players in the scherzo to keep the tempo steady for the rushing string figurations – you remember the lower strings come in first, followed gradually by other, higher voices. The skin and hair was flying as these players bent their backs to the task and kept the momentum of the music going – absolutely thrilling! Another great moment was in the finale when Taddei brought the players in for the repeat, at which point the playing seemed to leap forward all the more eagerly and propulsively.

I did think, in one or two places that the famous “motto” theme needed a touch more rhetoric, a bit more underlining, such as for its very last, grand, first movement statement – after all, it is an intensely dramatic as well as a structural motif. More serious, for me, was the nonappearance of the goblins in the third movement, where Taddei got his strings to play so quietly their pizzicati could hardly be heard against the winds – in fact at one point I thought they’d lost their way and stopped playing, so hushed were their sounds.

And who are these goblins, you might well ask? – Well, in Chapter Five of E.M.Forster’s novel Howard’s End there’s a wonderful description of the Symphony’s third movement, made by Helen, one of the novel’s characters – “….the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures – it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world…..Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push and they began to walk in a major key instead of a minor – and then he blew with his mouth and they were scattered……..The goblins really had been there. They might return–and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things….” Alas, the pizzicati were so quiet, and the tempi so swift, we couldn’t really register the goblins’ footfalls and their uncanny progress, or feel their ominous presence. And when Beethoven briefly returned to the scherzo just before the reprise of the finale’s triumphal theme, Taddei’s tempi were so quick there was no time for goblins and their ominous footfalls whatsoever!

If you hadn’t read “Howard’s End”, what would you have thought of the performance overall?

Oh, absolutely splendid (though with a touch more drama and rhetoric required for the “Fate” theme) – but you’ll appreciate that there are some episodes in one’s favorite music that have got to be done “just so”, otherwise they don’t work as well as they ought to. This is all terribly subjective, I’m sure you must be thinking!

Tell me about the Mozart concerto with Diedre Irons.

This,alas,was the last in the series of Mozart concertos played by Diedre Irons with the orchestra – such a pity that we’re not going to go as far as the last one of all, which I would love to hear her play. Still, this one, No.25 in C major, was suitably grand and ceremonial, as befits its key, and also a counterweight to the C Minor of the Beethoven Symphony that we heard. This is a big-boned concerto, with occasional touches of the exotic – trumpets and drums speaking with what I thought was a Turkish accent during the second subject group.

After these very grand, ritualistic beginnings the soloist’s first entry is, by contrast, somewhat rhapsodic, making us “stop and listen” – Diedre Irons’s playing has such character, such purpose, so that with each phrase we experience delight in the moment and satisfaction with the whole. I liked her piano sound – it seemed to my ears a more characterful, brighter and more sharply-focused sound she was getting, compared with the instrument in the Town Hall, enabling her to do more with the music.

Has it been a good combination, Diedre Irons with Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra?

I thought this concerto in particular interestingly set the music-making styles of two different musicians together in a very interesting and creative partnership – Diedre Irons’s playing detailed and momentous, able to expand the phrases for expressive effect while maintaining the music’s larger momentum, compared with Marc Taddei’s energetic, somewhat “driven” style, given to tauter inclinations, marshalling his rhythms and driving the lyrical lines. Here, those differences worked well upon one another, and helped to bring out the concerto’s variety of mood and colour, to the extent that, if one didn’t know the music well, one wasn’t sure what was going to happen next (Mozart at his most inventive).

I believe that the first movement cadenza was the work of none other than Kenneth Young, which I didn’t know until after the performance, thinking at the time that it was a wonderful window into a composer’s soul, exploring the music’s fundamental materials in different lights and from varied angles (no cadenzas by Mozart for this work have survived). The slow movement was one of Mozart’s “operatic” realizations – it seemed that the winds’ tender descending phrase had taken us to the world of “Le Nozze di Figaro”, to the Count’s garden in the fourth act, with beautiful al fresco horns alerting us to the wonders of the evening air. Despite a few momentary spills – one or two horn blurps, and, elsewhere, some pianistic sunspots (in somewhat ruminative passages) – Irons and the orchestral winds enjoyed some delicious dialogues throughout, particularly lovely in effect towards the movement’s end. The finale’s chirpy, but somewhat plain-sounding theme, gets a good going-over when triplets turn the tune into exciting rhythmic swirling and tumblings, and later there a lovely dovetailing of pianistic triplets against long string lines as part of the rich variation Mozart brings to the music – undoubtedly some of his most inventive and colourful for piano and orchestra. Soloist, conductor and players despatched it all with the utmost élan and enjoyment, for our enormous pleasure.

Made in New Zealand – Enchanted Islands

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MADE IN NEW ZEALAND – ENCHANTED ISLANDS

Music by Ross HARRIS, Anthony RITCHIE, Douglas LIBURN, Lyell CRESSWELL,
Gareth FARR, Chris GENDALL

Stephen de Pledge (piano)
Kirsten Morrell (soprano)
Tama Waipara (baritone)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Wellington Town Hall

Friday 13th May 2011

In a real sense this concert epitomized what a “Made in New Zealand ” concert ought to be about – presenting its listeners with plenty of excitement, frustration, argument and satisfaction, putting life alongside art in fine style. Everybody will, of course, make up their own cocktail mix from the aforementioned ingredients when recalling the concert and its afterglow (some will add other things, while others will make do with less, or even with none of the above). But I thought there was a palpable buzz within the audience at the start (a peculiarly “Town Hall” phenomenon, it seems to me) followed by plenty of effervescent discussion at the interval in the wake of a first half of colourful composition and splendid music-making. Even at this stage of the proceedings there was excitement aplenty, all that one could wish of a contemporary music concert’s effect upon an audience.

As for the frustration, I’m sure there will be people, like myself, with their own list of favorite, neglected pieces of New Zealand music hoping for the same to be given an airing via these concerts – perhaps next year, or the year after? It could be that we listeners don’t drop enough hints to those who are the musicmongers that sort out the catch brought in by those trawling the creative currents in this particular ocean – maybe I need to tell twenty times the number of people I already do how much of a crime I think it is that some of our “founding symphonic documents” are unaccountably ignored by our orchestras year after year after year. If I mention David Farquhar’s First Symphony in particular (no public performance since its premiere in 1959!), I’m equally determined that I’ll be fair and report back to these pages any response, written or verbal, to my piece of opinionated partiality, so that others can have their say as well about what they might like to hear in subsequent “Made in New Zealand” concerts.

I mentioned argument as an ingredient of the occasion; and conversations at the concert’s end seemed to have a different tenor to those during the interval, largely thanks to Gareth Farr’s Sonnets, settings for two singers and orchestra of a number of Shakespeare’s eponymous poems. This work divided opinions I heard into not just two camps, but a number of sub-groups, with discussions freely flowing. For myself, I thought the piece didn’t work well within the normal concert-hall setting that was imposed upon it – as if the musicians were trying to perform something like Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Given that both singers (soprano Kirsten Morrell and baritone Tama Waipara) were “miked” because neither seemed to have the vocal “heft” to compete acoustically with the orchestra, I thought the concert’s organizers ought to have taken their cue accordingly and emphasized the piece’s rather more mainstream popular-music-genre. I would have liked the singers not only in their own performing-space away from the conductor and players (even perhaps individually separated for antiphonal/visual effect and spotlit with appropriate lighting), but also have them given properly-modulated microphones that would enable their voices to be actually HEARD. With the precedent in mind of last year’s “Made in New Zealand” concert with its spectacular, if somewhat ill-conceived, visual imagery accompanying most of the music, I would have imagined such a recreation to be perfectly possible this time round.

What’s ultimately most important, however, is the degree of satisfaction given by the music and the music-making – and despite these diverse ingredients, or perhaps because of them, the concert gave to us the feeling as though it had indeed satisfied by the end. It started with a wonderful wallop, courtesy of Ross Harris’s Fanfare for the Southern Cross, a work for brass ensemble whose sombre, almost Brucknerian opening blossomed spectacularly into a brilliant toccata-like display. The music seemed to scintillate like a comet crossing the night sky, before disappearing, much too quickly! – would that it were a prelude to a suite of movements, or something, so that our pleasure at the composer’s exuberant mastery of those radiant textures could be enjoyed for longer!

I took great pleasure also in Anthony Ritchie’s A Shakespeare Overture, a thirty year-old work from the composer’s student days receiving its first-ever performance (with revised touches). I found myself admiring the young Ritchie’s exuberant orchestral writing and sure sense of balance between passages of chamber-like delicacy and piquancy, often involving winds, which were set against more heavily-scored strings-and-brass episodes, occasionally rhythmically spiked with percussion. My notes contain phrases such as “colourful scoring”, “energizing percussion”, and “beautifully dovetailed motifs leading the ear onwards” – besides such detail, I had a sure sense of the piece being well-organized throughout, so that the orchestral forces at the end were able to unerringly build things towards a thrilling climax, a grand exposition of sounds. In all, I thought the piece a worthy addition to this country’s home-grown concert repertoire.

Has any performance of Lilburn’s Four Canzonas featured more beautiful string-playing than what we heard on this occasion? – I doubt it, even if I thought Hamish McKeich’s tempo for the Willow Song (Canzona No.2) a tad quick, Donald Armstrong’s lovely solo playing for me not quite “laden” enough with foreboding at this speed, as befits the work’s original inspiration.I was struck anew by how Sibelius-like the third Canzona sounded, like something out of the latter’s Rakastava, certainly Nordic, rather than Shakespearean in atmosphere. But these were certainly very beautiful performances.

With Lyell Cresswell’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (significantly, not entitled a “piano concerto”) the evening’s music-making lurched well-and-truly into relatively unknown territories, soundscapes of the heart and soul, it seemed, considering the circumstances under which the music was written. The work was commissioned by that generous patron of the local arts, Jack Richards, for pianist Stephen de Pledge to play at this concert, so that the performance was a world premiere. It seemed that Lyell Cresswell wanted more of a concertante than a concerto-like work, and this was shown in the extent to which the orchestra reflected and extended what the piano did, very much a concourse rather than a contest.

The work commemorates the memory of a friend of the composer, who actually died while the piece was being written, but whose terminal illness overshadowed the work’s entire conception. No wonder, then, at the extent to which both piano and orchestra gave voice during the work to harsh, jagged outpourings, in grief and anger at a friendship’s loss. Even so, Cresswell found plenty of scope for expression of episodes whose eerie beauty astonished the ear, by way of both recollection of times past and resigned reflection in the wake of death. The work’s seven movements had an intensely volatile quality, indicating parallel strands of feelings and instincts as likely to be in violent opposition as in an uneasy accord. I scribbled phrases like “jagged defiance” and “tolling pulses” while listening to the opening Funeral March, then “bird-song piano figurations” and “ethereal string ambiences” during Adagio 1. And I noted the savagery of the brass attack and the dominance of the heavy artillery throughout Scherzo 1, all the while marvelling at the compositional virtuosity of Cresswell’s writing for orchestra.

The work’s centre, Addolorato (meaning upset or distressed), was the work’s emotional core, expressing both quiet and violent grief by turns, while throughout the following movements variants of the relationship between head and heart were further explored – a characteristic contouring might feature the piano playing the visionary, creating a rapt, magical atmosphere more of the mind than of the world, echoed by Ligeti-like string chords before being splintered by vitriolic brass with toccata-like textures that curdle without warning into amazing air-raid siren-like sonorities. Some of the orchestral figurations might well have owed something to Messiaen’s similarly visionary sound-worlds, but in this case one felt the tones and textures were exploring a very real emotional context of their own. Again my scribblings attempted to capture aspects of this incredible set of soundscapes – “maniacal instrumental energies in a ferment”, or “brass cackle like hooting harridans”, or even “strings become swirling stinging bees”…..all of which hopefully serves to give the reader an idea of the range and scope of sounds created by the piano/orchestra combination. The final presto, though flung at the listener almost peremptorily was able to link briefly with the opening in the midst of its toccata-like tagging, indicating (as the program notes suggested) that from questions can come still more questions rather than answers.

Wanting to earn my keep as a critic, naturally enough, but struggling to offer any comment of sufficient worth in a critical sense about the piece, all I could think of saying was that the music did seem to me to begin to overwork the material towards the end – but then the composer would confound my reaction by producing yet another magical sonority which opened up a fresh vista of wonderment – and despite my occasional instinctive feeling of there having been enough said, I couldn’t bear the thought of any of those sounds being excised! I hope someone moves to have Stephen de Pledge record this work before too long, so that we can get to know it by hearing it often and gradually unlocking at least some of its secrets. I thought it a very great work indeed.

As for Gareth Farr’s Sonnets, somebody I spoke with briefly at the end of the concert said that the performance of the Farr work seemed to them a pale shadow of the music’s previous incarnation as The Holy Fire of Love, which on that occasion featured the vocal talents of Rima Te Wiata and Kristian Lavercombe. It would seem from the reviews I’ve read that these singer/actors projected the songs rather more successfully and theatrically than happened with the fatally straight-laced quasi-classical treatment accorded the words and music on Friday evening in the Wellington Town Hall. To me it seemed all so wrong-headedly presented, to the extent that to comment any further would, I think, be to do the composer and his music an injustice.

Finally in the concert, one of the country’s most exciting younger composers, Chris Gendall, was represented with a work that in a sense was a foil for the Lyell Cresswell concerto in the first half – this later work Gravitas was tough, uncompromising and unyielding, abstracting orchestral sounds and their meaning where the older composer sought direct, straight-from-the-shoulder emotional engagement from his audience with his instrumental tones. I thought that Gendall had written some kind of Etude for Orchestra here, an idea emphasized by the composer’s own note about the music, describing the relationship between a piece’s construction and its most audible elements. Less cerebrally-minded listeners, such as myself, would probably register and enjoy more readily the sharply visceral aspects of the music, its cutting-edge accents set against both deep-throated sonorities and troughs of pregnant silence, its obsessiveness with repeated notes and an interval of a third, and the feeling of these and other notes eventually breaking free of such hegemony and enjoying episodes such as “chaos of delight” pizzicati passages and volatile hide-and-seek scamperings across the orchestral blocks.

As with many a “tough” piece I’ve come to enjoy, it’s necessary to live with the music for a while and get used to the sharp edges – I hope Chris Gendall’s piece gets its chance to be heard rather more often than has been the case with other works I’ve mentioned from time to time, one of them (David Farquhar’s First Symphony) earlier in this review. Gravitas certainly played its part in helping to make the occasion one of the best and most interesting “Made in New Zealand” Concerts of recent years. All credit to conductor Hamish McKeich, to pianist Stephen de Pledge, and to the orchestral musicians, for giving us such magnificent playing throughout the evening.

Colours rich and strange, from the SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SMP Ensemble presents: XPΩMATA – Colours

Music by Tristan Carter, Jack Hooker, Carol Shortis, Anton Killin, Iannis Xenakis (Greece), Pauline Oliveros (USA), Michael Norris, Ewan Clark, Robbie Ellis, Andrzej Nowicki

The SMP Ensemble

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

Saturday 9th April 2011

Continuing its work on behalf of classical music’s contemporary voices, the SMP Ensemble produced yet another absorbing and thought-provoking line-up of works from home and abroad with its program XPΩMATA – Colours. Without resorting to mega-anarchic practices, the group seems always to manage (via its own version of an incredible lightness of being) to blow invigorating gusts of fresh air through normal concert procedures and presentations, making each event a unique delight.

Darkness giving some of its space to candlelight set an expectant scene for the opening item, Tohoraha, by Tristan Carter. Away from the program note one might guess the players who had assembled and were delicately activating different acoustical properties of their instruments were concerned with representing either a subaqueous or a stratospheric state of being – these were sounds I reckoned to be outside of my direct biospherical experience! The coalescence of these sounds generated a micro-excitement which prepared the scene for something of a give-away conch-shell set of signals – very spectacular, if irrevocably conjuring up an oceanscape. A cursory knowledge of Te Reo Maori would have by this time alerted most people to an association of the piece with whales, and the connections readily translated into the idea of some kind of “dialogue among higher beings”, here, for all kinds of reasons, acoustical, environmental and emotional, a “transporting of the mind” experience, rich and strange, in any case for this listener.

Jack Hooker’s Field Murmur, ambiently titled, used electroacoustical means to evoke its world, arresting and splendid at the very beginning, as well as disconcerting, with something like a door or cupboard opening and shutting. I imagined animal or bird or even insect activity, though my carefully-constructed soundscape was peremptorily shut off by a revereberation-less halt to the sounds, which was presumably intended, as the effect was repeated with different kinds of evocations – it generated a kind of schizoid response to the medium as opposed to the message, the uncertainty of imminent closure creating its own set of tensions.

Carol Shortis’s The Riddle of Her Flight was a setting for soprano, piano and vibraphone of part of a poem by Mike Johnson. The music readily courted both pictorial and emotional responses, grumbling bass notes on Jonathan Berkahn’s piano at the beginning stimulating shafts of light from deft touches upon the vibraphone criss-crossing the soundscape. The sound of the soprano Olga Gryniewicz’s voice was perhaps siren-like, or maybe that of a wood-nymph’s, haunting and pleading. The singer emphasized the idea of “sanctuary”, aided and abetted by the instrumentalists, Takumi Motokawa’s vibraphone occasionally bowed as well as struck, producing lovely tintinabulations, and stimulating bell-like diction from the singer at the words “You must find the island”. At the end of a richly-extended lyrical episode, the final cadence following a culminating high note felt like a real homecoming. The music couldn’t help but repeatedly take my sensibilities to what seemed like “other realms” associated with Shakespearean fantasy, such as Prospero’s Island, or the Magic Wood of Oberon outside Athens.

Andrzej Nowicki was the clarinettist in tandem with his own pre-recorded playing of fragments from the same work, for composer Anton Killin’s absorbing Absence; Primes. The soloist listened at first to the recorded performance, then began a dialogue with the original, fascinatingly exploring the idea of feedback, discussion and even “second thoughts” regarding one’s own creative impulses. At first ruminative, Nowicki’s “live” clarinet-playing animated the textures, the discussion a “brightly-lit” affair until a brusque declamatory statement brought the dialogue to a sudden end.

The programme’s first “offshore” work was Yannis Xenakis’s Echange, in effect a bass clarinet concerto, bringing the first half of the concert to an end with plenty to engage the thoughts. The composer called the work “terrifying and mysterious”, and indeed, the single-note clarinet opening brings forth a disquieting subterraneous soundworld from trombone (Xenakis wanted a tuba, but…) and bassoon into which the cello oscillates and over the top of which the soloist exuberantly barks – perhaps a European manifestation of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s “gods of the middle world” flexing their might and muscle into a colour-change chord irreverently “curdled” by the soloist’s contribution. The clarinet ruminates deeply as its ambient surroundings ring changes of tempo, texture and articulation, creating memorable vignettes of incident – a wonderfully seismic “wobble-chord”  from the ensemble, and a “blues in the night” response from the soloist, very jazzy and lively playing, which, however develops into a kind of ritual of attempted domination on both sides, the impasse declared by implacable brass against whose black tones the soloist slashes and stabs. We fear for the safety of the music itself, at the point of dissolution the sound-world’s resonating voices asking questions we can only numbly acknowledge. A good place for the interval!

We were prepared even less for what was to follow – audience participation! – fortunately, humming was all that was required, the SMP ensemble members walking around the auditorium antiphonally encouraging us to add our unique vocal vibrations to Anton Killin’s realization of Lullaby for Daisy Pauline by the American composer Pauline Oliveros, one of the composer’s “Sonic Meditations” aimed at engendering a focus among listeners on “the intimate reality of sound”. Philosophically, Michael Norris’s work which followed, Blindsight, explored the antithesis of Oliveros’s shared ambient construct, describing his work in a context of fragile individual sensory reality. Norris’s work translated this “process of sensory faith” into a musical work involving strings and winds, with the piano as a kind of intermediary. The winds played chords using halftones, to which the piano and strings responded in a kind of instinctive manner, “feeling” their way towards a kind of kinship with the original sounds. The piano seemed then to take the lead, the winds responding to the instrument’s chords and patterning with characteristic sonorities (a kind of “opening up’ of an essential sound-nature for both groups, the winds sostenuto, the strings oscillating and flurrying melismatically. Whether growing in confidence or in desperation, the responses by both groups to the piano reached a fever-pitch of animation before sinking, exhausted. The piano maintained a dispassionate “devil’s advocate” kind of stance, allowing the winds to blow themselves out, leaving the strings fulminating amongst themselves, then relinquishing their voices with a last sotto-voce gesture – I was given the feeling of micro-processes continuing, after the overt activities had ceased…..

Reversing the program order, Robbie Ellis’s Maeve set recorded voice against solo piano, to the former’s disadvantage, unfortunately, the piano’s declamatory style in places obscuring the speaker’s tones (the loudspeaker would have been better-placed in front of the piano, eliminating the “competitive” aspect which seemed to be set up regarding the soundspace – a pity we were thus distracted, because the piano-part was gorgeous-sounding in places, Debussy-like in its focus and delicacy, while Leila Austin’s story, read by the author, would have filled out its place in the sound-tapestry in a much more balanced and contextual way – a further performance needed, I feel. Following this, Ewan Clark’s Reverie set parts of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s Elegy for soprano, clarinet and piano, Olga Gryniewicz’s clear and pure voice making the most of the vocal line’s beauties at “Sweetness to the root – may the tree climb high against the sun”, while Andrzej Nowicki’s clarinet-playing conjured up whole eternities of bird-song underpinned by Jonathan Berkahn’s rich and  resonant piano realization. A lovely performance of a beautiful work, capturing the lonely beauty and desolation of the poet’s evocations.

Concluding the generous program was a work by the group’s director, Andrzej Nowicki, appropriately entitled Unknown Realms, the ensemble (strings, organ, piano and winds) conducted by Karlo Margetic. We expected a kind of “road” piece, with much and greatly varied terrain covered, and weren’t disappointed. A nascent, almost tentative piano presence at first addresses only dark organ tones and subterranean bass clarinet sounds – forces of darkness holding sway, almost daring other, brighter impulses to ignite and energize the textures towards the light. The clarinets stimulate the strings’ awakening, the latter holding steadfastly to their notes as the drama unfolds, the clarinets having a “field day” both instigating and repelling various agitations, the organ joining in with weighty presence, provoking the conductor’s patience to breaking-point in the face of such concerted anarchies – a marvellously petulant “Will you stop it!” ejaculation from the podium restores order amid chaos. Great fun, nicely “placed” amid the trials and tribulations.

The group’s director, Andrzej Nowicki was warmly and ceremoniously farewelled by all at the concert’s conclusion, on the eve of overseas explorations – the best of all possible send-offs, one would think, via this musical feast from the SMP Ensemble.

New Sounds – SMP Ensemble, Magda Mayas, Tony Buck and Hermione Johnson

Posted on by Alan Wells

SMP ENSEMBLE

“INTERIORS I”

Mitchell McEwen (flutes), Andrzej Nowicki (clarinets), Dylan Lardelli

(guitar), Carolyn Mills (harp), Claire Harris (piano), Antony Verner

(violin), Andrew Filmer (viola), Charley Davenport (cello), Jeremy

Hantler (taonga puoro).

DYLAN LARDELLI: “Musical Box”;

PHILIP BROWNLEE: “He rimu pae noa”; “As if to catch the fleeting tail of time”;

SUN-YOUNG PAHG: “ThresholdIng”,

RACHAEL MORGAN: “Unfold”,

SAMUEL HOLLOWAY: “Sillage”.

Adam Concert Room, Wellington.

Saturday 26 February 2011


MAGDA MAYAS, TONY BUCK

St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington

Saturday 26 February 2011


HERMIONE JOHNSON

Two Works

Adam Art Gallery, Wellington

Sunday 6 March 2011

After funding was withheld from leading NZ contemporary group Stroma

for this year, the senior-student/recent-graduate ensemble SMP was

left to carry the torch for new “concert” music – at least for
Wellington. Thankfully, some money was made available by Creative NZ
for “Interiors I”, the first of two presentations exploring subtleties
of tone colour and aspects of player interaction.

All but one piece featured the versatile Dylan Lardelli on guitar, and
all but one (a different one) were written by recently-emerged New
Zealand composers. Lardelli himself is one such: he starred in his own
2009 “Musical Box”. This delightful dance of harmonics from guitar,
Carolyn Mills’ harp and Andrew Filmer’s unexpectedly resonant viola,
was joined by Jeremy Hantler on taonga puoro: soft contrabass-clarinet
kakapo booms blown across the hue gourd, mouth modulated infrasonics
from the spinning porotiti, and (in a change of mood at the end) the
piccolo register of the bone koauau. There was a sense of timelessness
here, which Lardelli has evoked before, nowhere more successfully than
in “Aspects of Theatre”, premiered by SMP Ensemble under Lucas Vis in
March last year. There was an absence of development, which was not
however a deficiency: as also in Holloway’s “Sillage”, the sounds were
sufficient unto themselves.

Lardelli seamlessly integrated the traditional Maori instruments into
the world of western classical ones. So too did his fellow graduate
from Victoria University (NZ School of Music), Philip Brownlee. The
2009 “He rimu pae noa” began with Jeremy Hantler whirling the
dove-voiced poi-a-whio-whio gourd, while simultaneously playing the
nguru (with mouth). The albatross bone putorino, heard first in flute
mode, announced the climax with its trumpet voice, while Claire
Harris’s brittle, sparkling piano displaced Lardelli’s otherwise
ubiquitous guitar. Hand cupped “speaking stones” (Phil Dadson style)
led this well-shaped piece back to its beginning.

I found Brownlee’s “As if to catch the fleeting tail of time” (also
from 2009), less successful, despite the precision playing from SMP.
Here Lardelli’s guitar solo (and it can be played as a solo) was
magnified by the ensemble: blended tonally with the harp, its attacks
extended by Charley Davenport’s cello. I found the succession of
separated events overlong, compounded by the lack of the sense of form
and direction found in Morgan’s “Unfold” and Brownlee’s own “He rimu
pae noa”.

I had a similar feeling about the only work not written by a New
Zealander. Sun-Young Pahg is a Korean living in Paris, and her
“ThreshholIng” (2007) was an alternation of slow, spacious passages
with more agitated sections.

Rachael Morgan’s “Unfold”, on the other hand, unfolded, simply and
beautifully. Another graduate of VUW/NZSM, Morgan has been a recipient
of the Edwin Carr Foundation Scholarship which has taken her overseas.
Beginning with the guitar softly bowed (yes, bowed) near the bridge,
“Unfold” grew gradually with string tremolandi and flute pitch bends
to an understated climax (where the guitar strings were struck with
what appeared to be a dulcimer hammer), before returning to the sotto
voce opening.

Aucklander Samuel Holloway is one of our most exciting
recently-emerged composers. In his somewhat Webernian 2005 trio
“Stapes”, he managed to make a piano sound microtonal by using quarter
tone pitches on the violin and cello. The long-held tones of “Sillage”
(2010) belong to the time-suspended world of his recent string quartet
“Domestic Architecture”, which made a feature of the pulsing beats
between sustained micro-intervals. These scores are dangerously close
to minimalism – dangerously, because Holloway has publicly expressed a
distaste for minimalism. However, his idiom here is far removed from
the frenetic repetitions of Philip Glass (which, I think, Holloway had
in mind), and more akin to the “holy minimalism” of Aarvo Part, and
the prolonged soundings of LaMont Young. In “Sillage” (the word means
a wake in water or a waft of perfume) Lardelli’s bowed guitar
established a harmonically rich tambura-like drone (unobtrusively
detuned over the course of the piece) above and around which the
timbres of alto flute, clarinet, viola and cello merged and emerged.
Atmospheric as this realisation was, the instrumentation (apart from
guitar) is variable: a different version will be heard in SMP’s next
concert (“Interiors II”, Adam Concert Room, Friday March 11, at 7pm).

Interiors (in this case the inside of the piano) was very much the
theme of the recital by German musician Magda Mayas. Perhaps
paradoxically, there was greater ebb and flood of tension in these
extrovert, improvised interactions with percussionist Tony Buck, than
in many of the  more fully composed offerings from SMP. I caught only
the last one-and-a-half sets (and missed the contribution from Sound
and Light Exploration founder Daniel Beban altogether) because –
crazily – there were two concerts of enterprising new music scheduled
for the same evening.

Sound and Light Exploration member and regular performer at their
Frederick Street venue Fred’s, Hermione Johnson, had two works played
at the Adam Art Gallery. The reprise of a  multi-instrumental piece,
originally premiered in October to open the Designs for Living
exhibition, took advantage of the disparate spaces of the Gallery:
violinists Chris Prosser and Tristan Carter on different floors, Jeff
Henderson on sax in a side room, Nell Thomas on the mezzanine with her
theremin, Gerard Crewdson prowling with spooky unpitched staccatos on
the trombone, and Johnson herself barely audible on accordion in a
distant corner. The second item was rather more, well, dramatic.
“Drama Studies” was improvised – brilliantly – by Johnson, on a
spectacularly prepared piano (not only the classical Cage bits of
metal and wood, but also a network of wires strung from the ceiling).
After a long first half that was like Stockhausen on speed – something
of a marathon for both pianist and listeners – the rewards came as
Johnson began to use varying slabs of texture and changes of tempo,
culminating in a galaxy of attacks  mixing standard and altered tones.
A tour de force, never to be heard in quite the same way again.

Sweet Dreams from The Song Company

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Song Company – Chamber Music New Zealand

English and Italian Madrigals: William Byrd, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes,

Thomas Vautour, Claudio Monteverdi

Horatio Vecchi – A Night in Siena

Peter Sculthorpe – Maranoa Lullaby

Jack Body – Five Lullabies/Three Dreams and A Nightmare

Anon. – Israeli Lullaby

The Song Company, directed by Roland Peelman

Anna Fraser, Louise Prickett – sopranos / Lanneke Wallace-Wells – mezzo-soprano / Richard Black – tenor / Mark Donnelly – baritone / Clive Birch – bass

Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 16th October, 2010

I spent the first part of this concert luxuriating in some glorious madrigal singing from the talented Australian vocal ensemble The Song Company, touring the country under the auspices of Chamber Music New Zealand. The ensemble’s programming enabling me to enjoy and marvel at both the similarities and differences between the English and Italian schools of renaissance vocal composition. The English group, which began the programme, contained some exquisite gems, from the heartfelt immediacy and world-within-a-flower simplicity of John Wilbye’s Draw On, Sweet Night, to the virtuoso inventiveness of Thomas Weelkes’ Thule, the period of cosmography, the group encompassing and beautifully expressing both kinds of intensities and fluidities. Wilbye’s major-minor colourings and antiphonal dynamic variations were most sensitively given, readily evoking the chiaroscuro of both outer and inner worlds commented on in the excellent programme notes. By contrast, Thomas Weelkes’ writing suffused the soundscape with intricate dovetailings and overlappings of tones and rhythms, beguiling one’s ear with echo and contrast, the unbridled mock-satire of Ha!Ha!This world doth pass a kind of Dionysian jest on the opposite end of the see-saw from the idiosyncratic philosophy of Thule. And I loved the sharp-etched character of Sweet Suffolk Owl, with its “te whit, te whoo-ings”, the group’s articulation and dynamism making the most of Thomas Vautour’s vivid portraiture of an iconic bird.

It’s probably too simplistic to declare that the main difference between the two madrigal schools seems to be the actual sound of each language; but the liquidity and sonority of those Italian vowels seemed straightaway to add a whole tonal dimension to the music – a different kind of intensity, rather less subtle, but richer and darker-toned seemed to me to come across almost straight away. The gloriously declamatory Sfogava con le stelle, with its evocation of the beauties of the night sky, milks the rhetoric to stunning effect, the singers full-toned and committed throughout. No less heartfelt was the following Si, ch’io vorei morire (the text’s erotic suggestiveness adding to the emotional charge), ascending sequences and repetitions in thirds heightening the expressive power of it all. Momentary relief was at hand from the weather and its interplay with the rest of Creation, with Zefiro torna, though the initial gaiety and playfulness of the nature-descriptions suddenly gave way to darkness and despair as poet and composer bemoaned the loss of the beloved amid Springtime’s felicities – the setting’s final line stretched the music’s expressivity almost to its limit before the heart-stopping final resolution. Mercifully, Oimè, se tanto amate and Amorosa pupilletta were better-humoured, the first giving rise to amusement with its repeated mock-serious “Oh my!”s, and the second featuring a drum accompaniment and wordless Swingle Singers-like “do-do-do-dos” providing a rhythmic carriage for a sombre dance of longing, beginning with a solo, then a duet, and then the ensemble, the singing keeping the impulses of feeling nicely ebbing and flowing throughout.

The group’s director Roland Peelman introduced Horatio Vecchi’s entertainment A Night in Siena, composed in 1604, a kind of musical catalogue of instructions for people to follow a game of mimicry – as the programme note puts it, “a 16th-Century version of musical theatre-sports”. I found the spoken introduction difficult to properly hear, so the programme note and texts of the songs were life-savers. The sequences were most entertaining, poking gentle (and, topically, probably not-so-gentle) fun at different types of people, be they travellers from other lands or simple girls from the country. One didn’t have to “read between the lines” to glean prevailing native attitudes towards these people, the German imitation taking us remarkably close to Basil Fawlty’s “Don’t Mention the War!” by the end, and the introduction to the exotic Spaniard persona making naughty reference to his abilities “as a very cunning linguist”. It was all tremendously good-humoured fun, the quasi-Spanish “effects” to finish rousing the participants (and their audience) to great enthusiasm, and a warm reception at the end.

After the interval the focus shifted from nocturnal entertainments both amatory and theatrical to the earnest business of sleep itself, by way of lullabies, dreams and nightmares. Peter Sculthorpe’s arresting Maranoa Lullaby fully exploited the spacious ambiences of the Town Hall, with the singers stationed at various points around the gallery. Dramatic lighting heightened the impact of each voice, the opening single-voiced bell-accompanied lullaby (originally an indigenous melody collected in Queensland during the 1930s) counterpointed by the other voices, all taking turns to add their melodic strands to the tapestry. A plaintive, strident episode caught up these strands and pulled them tightly together, focusing and hardening the harmonies, before bringing the work back to the unison theme once again. The whole sequence created a dream-like inner world which, despite its short duration, cast a powerful and evocative spell.

More complex and discursive, but with comparable subconscious explorations in places was the clever fusion of two works by Jack Body, the older (1989) Five Lullabies now interspersed with the freshly-commissioned Three Dreams and a Nightmare. The “invented” word-sounds of each of the lullabies demonstrated the composer’s interest in different folk-idioms and traditions relating to chant, while the dream/nightmare sequences explored the subconscious realms of sleep itself, using poetry by authors such as Shakespeare and ee cummings set with marvellously-wrought accompaniments, both vocal and instrumental – I loved the wordless exhilaration of the first Dream, Flying, with its vertiginous lurching and gong-like tintinnabulations, the singers occasionally sounding warning sirens in close proximity to reefs on treacherous sea-coasts. This was followed by the impulsive and volatile Brain worm, involving endlessly inventive vocalisings, layered, multi-harmonied and seemingly tireless. Throughout, the Lullabies gave a continuing “fled is that music?” ambience to the work’s progressions, rather like arias between recitatives, so that the saucy eroticism of ee cummings’ poem may I feel had an extra element of fantasy which for me gave those somewhat outrageous Rochester-like physicalities a more poignant, escapist connection (then again, perhaps I was simply feeling my age!)….still, those glass harmonica-like sounds, together with the volatile seduction-vocalisings made the whole Erotique episode properly suggestive and delightful.

The Nightmare pulsated and palpitated appropriately, the performance virtuoso in its control of detail and atmosphere, with drums and woodblocks beating out obsessive rhythms, threatening inescapable and intransient anarchic realms familiar to all who have experienced such disturbances – the poetry, well-known from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, evoked that wondrous imagery of “the cloud-capp’d towers” yoked with the stuff of dreams, the ensuing vocal writing suggesting a similar wonderment at the words’ fusion of the timeless and the ephemeral. Interesting that a composer would come back to an existing work and augment it thus – though there was a lot going on both in an immediate and a cumulative way, the contrasts had the effect of refocusing the listeners’ attentions and drawing them ever onwards.

Both the anonymous Israeli lullaby which followed, and the Eurythmics-inspired encore, brought us back from the labyrinth-passages of the subconscious sufficiently to enable us to properly and whole-heartedly register our approval at the end of the concert – the Song Company gave us “Sweet Dreams” which were entertaining, enchanting and inspirational.

Birthday presents from Stroma in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma – Living Toys  (10th Anniversary Concert 2010)

Thomas Adės – Living Toys (1994) / Peter Scholes – Relic (2010) / Alexandra Hay – An Island Doesn’t Either (2010) / Jeroen Speak – Silk Dialogue (VI) (2009) / Iannis Xenakis – Thalleïn (1984)

Stroma: Paula Rae (fl/pc), Peter Dykes (ob/ca), Richard Haynes (cl/bcl), Phil Green (cl), Ben Hoadley (bsn/cbsn), Ed Allen (hn), Mark Carter (tpt), Dave Bremner (tbn), Claire Harris (pf), Thomas Guldborg, Jeremy Fitzsimons (perc), Vesa-Matti Leppanen, Rebecca Struthers, Emma Barron, Kristina Zelinska (vlns), Andrew Thomas (vla), Rowan Prior (vc), Victoria Jones, Matt Cave (db), Su Yi (hps)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Ilott Theatre, Wellington

Thursday 12th August 2010

Wellington-based contemporary music group Stroma couldn’t have chosen a more engaging and demonstrably virtuosic ensemble piece than British composer Thomas Adės’ work Living Toys, with which to commence the celebrations marking their tenth anniversary as a performing ensemble. As well as beginning the concert, the piece also gave the evening its truly apposite title, one which seemed to express something of the character of each of the works chosen by the group, an alchemic sense of something having been created in each case which then evolved a life of its own – a metaphor, of course for all artistic creation, but particularly suited to the abstract medium of music. In other ways the sense of occasion regarding the anniversary wasn’t exactly writ-large or over-inflated by the group – the printed programme sweetly featured a modest image of a single burning birthday candle, accompanied by a “thank you” note to the group’s supporters for their encouragement and attendance at concerts over the years. It was the music that did the talking and the ensemble that brought it all to life – an anniversary celebration that proclaimed that Stroma meant to go on as it had begun, the implication being an intention to deliver at least ten more years of exhilarating chamber music.

One of a number of things that was pleasing about the concert was the programming of both New Zealand and overseas works – of course the “double whammy” of such an arrangement was the tacit proclamation that (a) home-grown works could stand alongside pieces by iconic composers such as Thomas Adės and Iannis Xenakis, and (b) local musicians had the skills and interpretative capacities to tackle the best of the contemporary crop, both from home and off-shore. The New Zealand works were freshly-minted, two of them world premieres ( Peter Scholes’ Relic and Alexandra Hay’s An Island Doesn’t Either), and a third, Jeroen Speak’s Silk Dialogue VI, receiving its New Zealand premiere at this concert. Incidentally, two of the musicians in the ensemble played in the world premiere of this work in Australia last year, clarinettist Richard Haynes (for whom the work was written), and flutist Paula Rae, from Melbourne. Rae had to be flown in from Australia on the day before the concert to deputise for Bridget Douglas, Stroma’s regular flute-player, but alas, flu-ridden and temporarily out of action.

Thomas Adės’ 1993 work Living Toys is a kind of chamber symphony in a single movement, but with clearly-defined, often insinuating narrative episodes (a detailed note by the composer was reproduced in the programme). The piece seemed to resemble a continuous interaction of confrontation and persuasion, the sounds alternating rapidly between the two states, with the sharp bite of some of the writing a perfect foil for the lullabyic character of the contrasting episodes, befitting the work’s prefaced programme – a somewhat elliptical account of a child’s dream-fantasies that blurs the divide between sleeping and waking. The raucous squeals of delight right at the work’s beginning quickly moved into narrative mode, with arabesques rolling around a bardic horn solo, the music going on to depict a kind of subconscious Jungian unfolding of imagery involving angels, extinct bison and space-age computers (the iconic H.A.L. from the film 2001 A Space Odyssey even makes an appearance!). Then there were connecting sequences whose anagram-style titles both helped to connect and further complicated the scenario. While it might seem invidious to single out single players in a performance of such a complex ensemble work, one must particularly mention Mark Carter’s brilliant trumpet-playing during the “militia men” sequence of the piece. Conductor Hamish McKeich directed with both energy and patience, steering the players through both concerted and fractured frenzies, and the equally compelling ghostings of timbre and colour that propelled and intensified the work’s course.

On the face of things, any music following Adės’ cornucopian inventiveness might seem to have a hard time making any kind of impression; but both Peter Scholes’ Relic and Alexandra Hay’s An Island Doesn’t Either provided soundscapes of such a different and distinctive order that one’s ear was straightaway led to contemporary equivalents of Schumann’s “different realms” of expression. Scholes’ relatively tonal style evoked a certain exotic element in his work’s colourings and an underlying suggestion of ancient ritual in its rhythmic character. The composer indicated in a programme note a certain fascination with Middle Eastern antiquity and its manifestations, stimulated by a visit to Egypt and the prospect of working with Arabic musicians, the harp-and-drum combination that opened the piece presiding over age-old processionals, then goading the ensemble into a lively primitive-sounding dance. Interestingly, Scholes cites the Locrian mode as the dance’s melodic “key”, emulating twentieth-century composers as diverse as Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Sibelius and Britten in his use of this exotic-sounding sequence (a minor scale with the second and fifth notes lowered a semitone). I enjoyed the music’s concurrent states of mystery and clarity, judiciously worked by the composer.

Alexandra Hay’s An Island Doesn’t Either was a piece whose sounds were more hinted and suggested in effect than articulated, but as one moved into her aural world the many subtleties of timbre and colour brought innumerable impulses of delight to the careful listener. Verses written by the composer gave clues here and there as to the music’s direction, with phrases such as “chance unions are framed in watery free fall” hinting as much, one suspects, at the piece’s creative philosophical impulse as suggesting a poetic description. That tone and pitch were pared away almost to nothing created worlds of burgeoning potential involving gestures and timbres which were as likely to dissolve as coalesce, those “chance unions” given their freedom and charged with expectation at one and the same time. I enjoyed the feel of the underlying tensions which to my delight occasionally irrupted as scintillations, whose “ripples-on-a-pond” effect create resonances very much at the mercy of the same random impulses that influence our lives, whose grip upon existence on “the warm surface on this limb of archipelago” is of course as evanescent as each breath exhaled by the music that we heard. A bold and compelling work, realised by the ensemble with considerable sensitivity.

Jeroen Speak’s Silk Dialogue VI, composed in 2009, was written for and dedicated to the Australian clarinettist Richard Haynes, whom I had heard play with Stroma previously to stunning effect. This performance, more concertante- than concerto-like in effect was nevertheless astonishing in its virtuosity and sensitivity. The music reflected Speak’s current activity in both China and Taiwan, where he has worked since 2004, among other activities studying ancient Chinese music notation systems with a view to reviving some of the traditions in “new approaches to contemporary notation, instrumentation and tonality”. A feature of the new work was the use of snare drums by each player in addition to his or her own instrument, the resulting activation of percussion adding a theatrical element linked by the composer to traditional Chinese opera, as well as delineating the flow of time throughout the work. From the beginning, the music pulsed outwards and upwards, each individual burst of energy an almost systolic-like impulse countered by a gentler exhalation. These alternations gave rise to the idea of the sounds seeking light and space, inclined as they were towards buoyancy rather than weight, and accompanied by a gradual emptying-out of tonal and colouristic elements in the music. Speak’s researches into a particular aspect of Chinese notation involving a traditional instrument called the guqin (a kind of zither) emphasised his interest in the gestural aspects of the music-making, and suggested a certain kinship across centuries with independently-conceived soundscapes like those of Alexander Hay in the previous work. But the added theatricality of Speak’s music made a powerful individual impression, especially the clarinet’s increasingly desperate attempts to give voice to the growing abstractions, before resigning itself to seeming incoherencies, its gestures at the work’s end indicating a hard-wrought transition towards an even subtler language.

In attempting to sum up ten years’ worth of contemporary music performance Stroma very appropriately turned to the work of an iconic figure, Iannis Xenakis, often described as a true renaissance man because of the range and scope of his interests and activities both in music and other associated areas. His works touched every media, from acoustic, through electro-acoustic to multi-media; and his interests took in mathematics, experimental engineering, architecture and education. His work Thalleḯn for fourteen instrumentalists dates from 1984, one whose Greek title suggests growth or germination leading to organic evolution, except that the composer stipulated the exclusion of all human gesture and expression in performance, thus denying conventional musical rhetoric and emphasising “a more impersonal sound-utterance” (for instance, Xenakis wrote on the front page of the score “vibrato is not permitted”). Theoretically, the plan sounds impervious, except for its realization via the same human element in performance, which sets up all kinds of creative tensions as different attitudes on the part of both musicians and audiences kick in. Be the approach one of acceptance or denial of the composer’s visionary directives, confrontations were bound to occur between participants in the exercise – not everybody would, I expect, want to buy into the composer’s “purification of the spirit” idea as a pre-requisite to understanding or enjoying the music. There was no question as to the music’s raw power, or its ability to engage with its listeners, as the opening “no holds barred” paragraphs demonstrated. Perhaps the composer might have found Stroma’s full-blooded performance manner too engaging, too expressive, as the players certainly seemed to put their energies on the line within the instrumental “blocks” and confront one another without reserve. As with the Adės work, the soundscape was occasionally saturated, the music’s intensely physical aspect at those times both imbued with and going beyond what the programme note (Xenakis’s own?) called “the heat of the human world”. My own reaction to the music was ambivalent – such unidentifiable realms as the composer’s sounds hinted at I felt both drawn towards and repelled by almost by turns, possibly reacting to the inevitable process of recognising such gestures as the players were visibly making, and then struggling to equate my expectations with what I heard, and drawing back in search of more solid ground on which to put my feet. My enduring memory of the work is a sense of a mid-life melt-down crisis (contrasting markedly with the feeling of things thrusting upward suggested by Jeroen Speak’s work), followed by energised reawakenings of those same instrumental blocks registered earlier and their incorporation into a march-like processional, whose short-lived but unashamed theatricality occasioned brassy shouts, percussive roarings, shimmering strings and trilling winds. What was Xenakis thinking of? Drama and interaction such as this surely tends to stimulate, not eliminate, “human” gesture.

Presumably, reactions such as the above keeps the skin of music porous and moist and stimulates the heart still beating within (more human imagery? – what is this reviewer thinking of?). At the concert’s end the enthusiasm of the audience for the performances, the programming and the occasion must have gladdened the sensibilities of Stroma’s players and administrators. It struck me that people at the concert who regularly go to hear the NZSO wouldn’t have failed to register familiar faces from orchestral ranks among the ensemble’s personnel, suggesting lines of connection between what’s considered “establishment” and the newest music, and helping to break down the “that” and “this” divide which puts art in pigeonholes, to everybody’s long-term disadvantage. On that count, Stroma represents a powerful force for new music across a wider spectrum than its own performance schedules. But considering simply the ensemble itself, one looks expectantly towards the next ten years and wishes the group a similarly fruitful and richly constituted twentieth anniversary celebration.

Superb Aroha Quartet in the Sunday Series

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Beethoven: String Quartet Op 18 No 1; Tan Dun: Eight Colours for String Quartet; Britten: String Quartet No 3, Op 94

The Aroha Quartet (Haihong Liu, Anne Loeser, Zhongxian Jin, Robert Ibell).

Sunday afternoon, 1 August

Since its formation about six years ago the Aroha Quartet has gained a place close to the New Zealand String Quartet for its intuitive musicality and virtuosity.  Their previous performances in this series and for Chamber Music New Zealand around the country have left no doubt about their quality and so it was a little surprising to find the 300-seat Ilott Theatre little more than half full: the weather; the Film Festival; too much other music?

The quartet has adopted a new second violinist temporarily replacing Beiyi Xue; she seems to have slipped gracefully into the sound world that distinguishes the quartet.

Beethoven’s first set of string quartets, written aged about 28, show him mature and confident, disposed to make big demands of players, though not departing significantly from the form and musical style of his time.

In some music, played by some quartets one struggles to pay attention to the work of individual players, but the striking individuality of these players sometimes distracted me from attention to the bigger picture. That did not mean any lack of a unified view of the music, of homogeneity, for the integrity of the whole persisted through the perfect command of rhythms and the sense of flow and the meaning of whole paragraphs. Here it was the viola that captured my ear first and at many later stages, but the cello’s alert and lively contributions also stood out. The slow second movement is a remarkable creation and the quartet played it with a rare fastidiousness, with its singular pauses extended to create an uncanny feeling of anticipation, utterly unhurried.

Every movement in fact carried delights and surprises that are not routinely to be found with such familiar music.

Tan Dun’s Eight Colours brought us face to face with modernity; not a particularly abrasive kind, though the first section, Peking Opera, took the instruments’ capacities to extremes, with some use of ‘extended’ techniques like heavy bowing to produce harsh sounds. In the second section, Shadows, the cello and viola brought more comfort with their more lyrical, bowed passages.
The piece was written when the composer was about 28, his first after reaching New York and it reflects both Chinese and Western forms.

The titles seemed arbitrary; I paid no attention to them during the performance and afterwards was surprised that the music had suggested so little of what they hinted at, though the glissandi in Pink Actress might have been diverting. Black Dance did indeed feature a nice little dancing idea, leading to descending glissandi and hard, rapid pizzicato from the viola. Black as in evil or in nocturnal?

Perhaps the most visible, for the literally-minded, might have been the low-set cello opening of Cloudiness, and the later descending cello phrases that might have described an aircraft descending through cloud.

The second half was devoted to an important work that I had not heard live before. It was written in Britten’s last year, 1975. Robert Ibell who talked a little about it before playing had led me to expect a more tragic or despairing quality, but in spite of references in the last movement to motives from Death in Venice, it emerged as strong and life-affirming, if elegiac and profoundly thoughtful.

In particular, it again offered proof of the striking gifts of the first violinist, Haihong Liu, whose every solo passage illuminated the music so vividly. Though she has not quite the strong musical personality of her leader, Anne Loeser’s contributions matched the ensemble with her acute feeling for style and musical shape.

Certainly there were a few angry moments, as towards the end of the first movement, but much more music that was seriously absorbing and pretty sanguine. Of influences, Britten offers few hints, such is his strength and originality. But the opening of the third movement, Solo, in many ways the heart of the piece, Shostakovich was present, in a sense of disconnection and loss; again, the viola was prominent in carrying a long melodic idea and then an accompanying passage where its powerful cross-string motif actually dominates the scene.

The form was interesting: the scherzo divided to frame the middle movement, so disguising its basic four movements. So the last movement, Recitative and Passacaglia, like the third, is substantial, with important utterances, that again expose the strengths of each individual player. The combination of tonal expression, rich musical content and some kind of reminiscence of string quartet origins suggested nothing less than the world of Beethoven. 

It may have contained two works from the last quarter century but the whole was a concert of very great interest and satisfaction. I only hope one of the reasons for the small attendance was not the programme.

A Good Time Not A Long Time – SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A Good Time Not A Long Time

New short piano and solo works by New Zealand composers

Music by LILBURN, WHITEHEAD, RITCHIE, PSATHAS, ROZEMOND, ELLIS, SHORTIS, KILLIN, NOWICKI, HEXTALL, BECKER, HOADLEY, SQUIRE, TAYLOR, MARGETIC, AUDAIN, CARTER

Sam Jury (piano)

The SMP Ensemble

Adam Concert Room,

New Zealand School of Music

Sunday June 27th 2010

The SMP Ensemble, a Wellington-based contemporary music performing group, has gradually become a welcome “presence” upon the local music-making scene. Formed by clarinettist Andrzej Nowicki, the group draws upon the skills of various freelance and New Zealand School of Music performers. Like its longer-established  “big brother” equivalent Stroma, it has a wondrous flexibility in terms of performance, both in playing existing music and in commissioning new works, being able to call upon the services of so many talented musicians. Although this recent concert “A Good Time Not a Long Time” was advertised as featuring mainly solo piano, there were other instrumentalists involved at various times, making for a few diverting surprises throughout the evening.

The bulk of the performance responsibility was borne by pianist Sam Jury, an extremely capable and talented player, who was able to encompass the diverse worlds of the compositions for solo keyboard with quiet, undemonstrative confidence, and (very importantly) what seemed like considerable enjoyment. His programme included a number of established contemporary piano classics by Douglas Lilburn, Anthony Ritchie, Gillian Whitehead and John Psathas, a recently-composed work by Pieta Hextall, and some highly diverting miniatures by various composers, written as submissions for a concert performed at the 2010 ISCM World New Music Day Festival in Sydney.  So, the solo piano component of the concert alone was diverting enough, but the occasional alternatives served to refresh eyes and ears – french horn, strings and contrabassoon all played their part in this process of bringing to audience ears new and thought-provoking sounds.

The concert actually began with a work for French horn, Deux Grand Fanfares by Karlo Margetic, a composer whose work I find constantly stimulating and often surprising, not least of all for his droll sense of humour which occasionally makes a telling appearance. After Alex Morton had gurgled, breathed and grunted his way through an opening fanfare notable for its player’s physical gesturings and the sense of antiphonal spaces created by the contrasting timbres and “exit-points” of the sounds, the composer appeared with a bucket, presumably suggesting either that the musician either was or would shortly be in need of a receptacle of some kind! The second fanfare was delivered with the mouthpiece removed from the instrument, creating what might be thought of in some quarters as an uncanny visual reminiscence of the cartoonist Hoffnung’s depiction of an oboe player. The “plumbing” sounds took us past such visual and aural conventions into a different cosmos of chain reaction involving impulse, player, instrument and listener, a cobweb-cleaning process for our receptivities if ever there was one.

Sam Jury’s first appearance was to give us some Lilburn, beginning with the Four Preludes from the years 1942-4, ritualistic pieces with characteristic rhythms drawn from melodic impulses. A lovely Grieg-like descending sequence marked the first piece, while the second was a sombre and subtly-inflected processional. The third Prelude alternated repeated-note patterns with deep, rich shifting chords, while the fourth was more energetic, a Toccata-like energy driving the music through darkly rich realms, with a lovely, treble-voiced throwaway ending. Two Christmas Pieces for L.B. from 1949 followed, the first singing a gentle, wistful song, and the other depicting distant carollers and resounding bells floating in an ambience of nostalgic harmony. These pieces were dedicated to the composer’s friend, the artist Leo Bensemann, and reflect a shared perception of ritual and natural order in the world. The last piece, Rondino, has the composer’s characteristic repeating note-patterned melodies, the obsessive treble set against a shifting bass to winsome effect.

A number of shortish pieces followed, written by various composers for the 2010 ISCM “Momentary Pleasures” concert in Sydney, works that had to be written in one day. Justus Rozemond’s Humoresque had a quirky, accelerando character, using a triplet rhythm to generate momentum, before contrasting the mood with a nocturnal-like melody, and returning to a skittery scherzando before finishing with a fortissimo chord. Carol Shortis called her piece Momentary Pleasures, creating wistful spaces between treble and bass at the start, the sounds agglomerating into a sphere of rolling triplets, before the energies dissipated once again, a final whimsical phrase suggesting a poem’s words “a caress of momentary pleasures”. Anton Killin’s After Clive Bell evoked a great stillness, into which was hewn a great resounding forte, the music moving and tolling like an earth-clock – very evocative! By contrast, Andrzej Nowicki’s Resonate seemed to reverse the previous piece’s process, massive chords resonating, whispering fragments of melody building up to monumental blocks of sound, saturating the ambiences and gradually dying away, the music for me strangely evocative of dreams. The final ISCM piece was Drying Music by Robbie Ellis, a piece that achieved the distinction of being selected for the actual concert in Sydney – a brief and instantly memorable evocation of a laundrette dryer, a bass ostinato driving a motif that petered out along with the money.

Gillian Whitehead’s Lullaby for Matthew, dating from 1981, and dedicated to the composer’s nephew, worked its well-known enchantments, from the opening’s dynamic contrasts through the lull of the ever-diminishing repetitions, and to the point of sleep. Something completely different was provided by composer Tabea Squire, a work for violin and viola called Reto Doble, a Spanish expression meaning “double challenge”, the piece played by the composer on violin and Greg, her father, on the viola, the work suggesting an interaction not unlike that of bull and bullfighter. The two instruments began by musing on a single note, violin holding the note and viola decorating around and about it, before generating rhythmic repetitions with a Spanish flavour, the players taking turns with the melodic and accompaniment roles of the music’s advancement. What developed was a musical dance of confrontation between combatants, the intensities screwed up ever-tightly to the point where the “coup de grace” was held and savoured, and then delivered. Most enjoyable and compelling!

More “Momentary Pleasures” followed the interval (wonderful refreshments! – prospective SMP concert-goers, please note!), pianist Sam Jury returning to do each composer’s brief but telling conception proud with sensitive, well-focused responses. I loved Pepe Becker’s Snoozing, the sounds having all the colour, ambience and feeling of my own doze-dreams, with the awakening depicted as a couple of involuntary, regretful murmurings. Ben Hoadley’s Ben and T at the Puriri Trees together with Shirin’s Music began as another meditative, Debussy-like soundscape, with sensibilities shaken and stirred by violent irruptions and exotic-sounding declamations, the music crowding around and about the centre with clusters of melismatic figuration. I wasn’t too sure regarding the division-point between the two named sections, but I guessed that Shirin’s Music was more ritualistic and processional, the music’s progress decorated by exotic-sounding ornament and irrupted by flashes of temperament and agitation. Cascades of figurations allowed these energies to run their course, the music returning to the opening processional aspect, the ending wide-eyed and widely-spaced.

Alex Taylor’s somewhat elliptically-titled work alt. generated, like Ben Hoadley’s piece, a world of wonderment at the outset, gathering increasing weight as the widely-spaced arpeggiations vied increasingly with what its composer called “glacial phrases”, the effect dramatic and visceral, and in almost complete contrast with Yvette Audain’s Upon attending a performance of “The Wizard Of Oz” , which readily brought to mind a child’s wonderment at the magic of a theatrical experience, the music infused with treblish brighness and enthusiasm. To achieve true closure of the ISCM bracket of piano pieces, Hayley Roud brought out her wondrously large contra-bassoon to play a piece by Tristan Carter entitled Lilith. Such demonic associations were suggested more by default than by the serpentine sounds conjured from what seemed like a sleeping being, a monster slowly aroused from slumber, the player viscerally choreographing the soundscape with breathiness and impulsive vocalised exhalations, the instrument’s voice abstracted through gesture as it were.

Three piano pieces remained, one a new work by Pieta Hextall, and two other, more established pieces by Anthony Ritchie and John Psathas. Pieta Hextell’s 2010 piano piece Planet Vandal was described by its composer as “a musical impression of a confrontation between whalers and activists on the Pacific Ocean”. The writing has both pictorial and narrative elements, the opening redolent of the vast spaces of a seascape, with tones clustering and reforming, and fragments of a song sounding. As the music’s manner becomes more dynamic, first figurations and then chordal passages begin to generate agitations, leading to syncopations, hammerings and downward cascades of notes, a mood which runs its course and returns the music to the mood of the opening, the song taking the character of a lament, as the sounds gradually disappear. This was the work’s second performance in public, and one hopes it will be heard again before too long (via William Green in Auckland, perhaps?) – in Sam Jury’s capable hands I found it a moving listening experience.

Anthony Ritchie’s attractive Birds and a Steam Train in the Caitlins was written for Ann Saslav for performance in schools, but surely deserves wider currency, perhaps as New Zealand’s answer to Heitor Villa Lobos’s world-famous steam-train evocation. The composer gets it right throughout, taking the listener to the heart of the native bush via rich and verdant harmonies and insistent birdsong, before stimulating gentle locomotions, generating less steam and smoke than atmosphere and nostalgia. Of course, John Psathas’s well-known work Waiting for the Aeroplane is a quintessential nostalgia-trip, having what pianist Dan Poynton once described vividly as a “goosebump-sick” quality, the drifting resonances generating powerful equivocations of presence and distance which never fail to touch deep places within. Sam Jury kept the ambiences together, moving the arpeggiated melismas along, and knitting more closely the agitations of the central section with the overall rhythmic pulsings of the piece, rather than going for maximum contrast – more Stravinsky-like than Schumannesque in his approach. His playing of the piece made an appropriately resonant conclusion to the evening’s music, a sense of something ongoing, despite the immediate sounds dying away…

SOUNZtender – NZ Music going for a song…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SOUNZtender – the Concert

The Music:

John Psathas – Songs for Simon / Gillian Whitehead – Tumanako: Journey through an unknown landscape / Eve de Castro-Robinson – and the garden was full of voices / Ross Harris – Four Laments for solo clarinet  Chris Gendall – Suite for String Quartet

The Winning Bidders:

Jack C. Richards – John Psathas / Helen Kominik – Gillian Whitehead / Barry Margan – Eve de Castro-Robinson / Wellington Chamber Music Society – Ross Harris / Christopher Marshall – Chris Gendall

The Performers:

Donald Nicolson (piano) – Songs for Simon (Psathas) / Diedre Irons (piano) – Tumanako (Whitehead) / Gao Ping (piano) – and the garden was full of voices (de Castro-Robinson) / Phil Green (clarinet) – Four Laments (Harris) / The New Zealand String Quartet – Suite for String Quartet (Gendall)


Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 30th May 2010

New Zealand composers putting their creative talents up for auctioning online? Local music patrons, sponsors and benefactors competing amongst themselves for compositional favours from our top composers? Amid the recent shivers caused by icy blasts directed by politicians and bureaucrats against music practitioners and disseminators such as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Radio New Zealand Concert, this composer-inspired project from the Centre For New Zealand Music represented a skyful of sunbeams brightening up a naughty world. Five composers, all previous winners of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, proposed to each write a work for solo instrument (or, as it turned out, small ensemble) for the five top bidders in an online auction. It took little more than a fortnight for the bidding to bring in more than $20,000 to further assist with the work of SOUNZ in promoting and collecting and making more readily available the work of New Zealand composers.

The resulting concert was the culmination of more than a year’s preparation of the project, whose inauguration took place on May 14th 2009, the ensuing bidding taking place throughout the remainder of that month. The five successful commissioners won the right to work with a selected composer in relation to a particular composition. In each case  there was a degree of collaboration between commissioner and composer, details of which were in some instances (though not all) outlined in the concert’s programme notes. I found the details of all of this fascinating, recalling as it did my readings of past composers’ dealings with people who commissioned works from them – thought-provoking tracings of interaction between creativity and expectation, a process with an extremely colourful history.

So, a little more than a year after the inauguration of the scheme, composers and performers were ready with the fruits of their labours – the overall result was a concert featuring three diverse piano pieces, and a work each for solo clarinet and string quartet. No wonder that each of the performances of these new pieces promised a particular intensity, a sharp-edged focus that would require concentrated and committed listening, the process made all the more direct and immediate by the “shared-space” ambiences of the Ilott Theatre. Those who had been charged with the task of delivery were about to prove the worth of their discharge.

The first of the pieces, John Psathas’ “Songs for Simon” I found something of a disarming experience at first, the pianist (Donald Nicolson) launching into a simple, repetitiously patterned sequence in tandem with pre-recorded percussion. It established a kind of passacaglia form throughout which attractive melodic lines appeared, built up a certain textural ambience, and then gradually diminished, leaving the percussion to “round off” the sequence. The second part, entitled “Minos” by the composer, was much freer rhythmically and harmonically; and presented the fascinating spectacle of a “live” performer interacting in unpredictable, non-rhythmic ways with the pre-recorded sounds. Whereas the first part of the piece (interestingly titled “His Second Time”) had seemed a shade “formulaic” in its regularity, this whole second episode I found extremely compelling due to its improvisatory air. Such was the concentration with which Donald Nicolson seemed to be “listening” to his “partner” the latter’s utterances seemed also to take on a live, spontaneously-wrought quality. I liked the assertiveness of the percussion cadenza towards the end, and the piano’s dreamy, equivocal response which concluded the work. It would have been interesting to have had some inkling of the interaction between commissioner and composer regarding the work, its titles and sections, and its musical content.

Gilian Whitehead’s piece which followed relied entirely on “conventional” piano acoustics, the only departure from tradition being two sections in the work where the performer is invited to extend and further elaborate upon what is already written. Such was the extent to which pianist Diedre Irons seemed to have “swallowed” the work’s whole ethos I found it impossible to tell which sections these were in performance. Commissioner Helen Kominik dedicated this work to her great grandchildren, Kate and Tom Fraser, the composer thoughtfully making reference in her written notes to the music’s journeyings reflecting the progress of time and the coming of new generations. This renewal of life is suggested also by the piece’s title, “Tumanako”, which means “hope”, though a subtitle “Journey through an unknown landscape” gives further dimensions to the music. Arising from a recent trip through the Yunnan province of China, the composer’s inspiration was stimulated by the plethora of images and sensations, partly traditional, partly unknown, that were encountered  and experienced in a short time. The music was intended to reflect this profusion of encounters, and their relatively unrelated juxtapositioning, though I thought  detected a certain recurrence of some motifs. In general, the piece seemed to encompass whole worlds, with ideas often running in accord – sometimes as in a sense of great stillness existing at the centre of rhythmic activity, while at other times with contrasting characters kaleidoscopically changing, bell-like descents alternating with delicate birdsong-effects. Diedre Irons seemed to catch all of the piece’s moods, hold them for our pleasure, and just as tellingly let them go, playing throughout with such freedom and understanding – those deep, upwardly-echoing chords and the slivers of birdsong which ended the work made for one of many such breath-catching moments throughout.

On the face of things putting three piano pieces together at the beginning of the programme seemed a more pragmatic than artistic piece of programming designed to avoid constant piano relocation! In fact, such were the contrasts wrought by each composer’s music that the instrument seemed almost to be reinvented with each piece, perhaps most radically with Eve de Castro-Robinson’s work “and the garden was full of voices”. Bearing the description “for vocalising pianist”, the music requires both performer and instrument to go beyond conventional sound-parameters, the player asked to recite, to whistle and to vocalise, as well as play; and the piano “prepared”, as well as having its strings directly manipulated by the player. Commissioner Barry Margan, himself a fine pianist, took an active part in the music’s initial formulation, suggesting titles for two of the work’s three movements, and working with the composer on various sonic, literary and metaphysical inspirations. The outcome was a piece rich in poetic allusion, the associations intensified by the use of Bill Manhire’s poetry in the titles for both the overall work and its second movement, “moon darkened by song”. On this occasion the pianist was fellow-composer Gao Ping, who, closely miked, entered fully into the performance’s more theatrical aspects, whispering the opening words “I stayed a minute” and using both the piano’s conventional tones and the “prepared” registers of the instrument (which the pianist did in full view of the audience before the music started). The first part resounded with tui calls, antiphonally rendered through the different timbres created by the strings’ augmentations, and contrasted with richer ambiences created by cimbalon-like tremolandi – by contrast, the delicacies of the gently-strummed treble strings gave an other-world effect at the movement’s conclusion.

At the beginning of the second movement I began to wonder whether the pianist’s microphone had actually been set at slightly too high a level for the whistlings and vocalisings – although there was plenty of expressive impact the sounds seemed over-wrought, a shade too “enhanced” next to the piano-tones. Even so, the composer’s “ritualistic” description of parts of the music was adroitly brought into play, as the pianist initiated an almost primitive singing-along with the music’s melody line, as well as speaking in low, chant-like tones and clapping slowly with raised hands, as if invoking an elusive spirit of delight. In between, the piano sounds suggested different kinds of ruminations, surface musings rubbing shoulders with deep thoughts and charged silences, the spoken incantation “moon darkened by song” providing an apt description of the mystery. The “ancient chants” of the finale featured a whispered title from the soloist at the outset, and oscillating repetitions from the piano, the right hand occasionally seeking air and light in the treble, then resubmerging, the repetitions resembling a kind of dance-chant, which builds into an impassioned interplay of half-tone patternings, with resounding bass notes suggesting the abyss below our feet that stalks our existence. As it began, the piece ended as might a ritual, with doomsday-like gong-stroke notes that resounded, lingered and faded away.

Though the solo clarinet featured in Ross Harris’s work which followed provided plenty of contrast with piano timbres, there was no let-up in intensity, as suggested by the “Four Laments” title. Described by the composer as consisting of “four short and rather quiet movements” the music reflected upon and interacted with the sound of each of the movement’s titles, the word for “lament” in four different languages. The first, “Klaga”, was Swedish, slow-moving, very out-of-doors music, its wide-ranging notations suggesting the isolation of vast spaces, and associated loneliness, and a sense of a spirit communing with nature. This was followed by the Yiddish “Vaygeshray”, a rhythmically droll and quirky piece, engagingly angular in places, choleric in others, and with lovely sotto-voce stream-of-consciousness episodes that set off the more energetic outbursts. The “Tangi” movement featured long-breathed lines, flecked occasionally by birdsong, and echoed with haunting “harmonics”, two notes sounded simultaneously, along with the player’s audible breath as a third timbral “presence” (superb playing by Phil Green), creating an almost prehistoric ambience. The last movement was the Gaelic “Corranach”, somewhat redolent of a wake, with its lyrical opening giving way to snatches of mercurial, dance-like sequences, with ghostly jigs and reels fleetingly remembered. Phil Green’s playing conveyed a real sense of living the music throughout, with each sequence drawn into a larger, more equivocal and suggestive world of different life-and death enactments, deeply moving.

Although these SOUNZtender works were originally designated as commissions for solo instruments, Christopher Marshall, the winning bidder for composer Chris Gendall, decided to specify a work for a string quartet. Marshall’s idea was to propose four ubiquitous forms of music and commission a response to each, with a different instrumentalist in the quartet taking the lead in each piece. Gendall’s response was to abstract certain stylistic elements of each form, rather than attempt to imitate with a set of pastiche-style pieces. The result was a set of boldly-etched pieces whose characteristics seemed to leave their original inspirations behind, but whose sharp, if oblique focus still compelled attention in each case.

Canto, the first movement, spotlit the solo ‘cello, whose music represented a struggle to coalesce into any kind of song, despite the efforts of the higher instruments to entice their partner into lyrical mode. The swaying, sighing character of the next movement, “Scorrevole”, conveyed its eponymous character with great delicacy and beauty, while the third movement, “Tango”, seemed to be a kind of “noises off” realisation of the dance, the skeletal left-handed pizzicati evoking something gestural more than sounded. Here, the solo viola juicily intoned the beginnings of a melody amidst the “danse macabre” of the other instruments, which then all rounded on a single note, each voice colouring the contributing timbres and “bending” the pitch to somewhat exotic effect. There was plenty of ‘snap” to the playing from all concerned, suggesting a certain volatility, and rich chordings that broke off their sostenuto character to fragment in different and adventuresome directions. The final “Bagatelle” largely inhabited the stratospheres, the first violin’s harmonic-like shimmerings drawing similar sounds from the other instruments, whose subtly-shifting colourings brought different intensities to bear, before clustering around the tightly-focused tones of the leader in a nebula of other-worldliness.

What worlds, what evocations, what alchemic realisations! All composers except for Chris Gendall were present to share audience plaudits, along with the respective performers, a unique distillation of contemporary New Zealand music-making. People I spoke with afterwards admitted to favourites among those heard, though interestingly no one work seemed to resound more frequently than others throughout the discussions. As with all new music, though, premieres are one thing, and further performances are another – so it will be interesting to listen out for these works played in different settings and circumstances (although Ross Harris’s work “Four Laments” has already stolen a march on the others, being repeated by Phil Green at an Amici Ensemble concert in Wellington again, tomorrow). The commissioners proudly received their presentation scores of the works performed at a function in the Town Hall Mayoral Chambers after the concert – and the project was thus completed. Very full credit to the Centre for New Zealand Music, the directors Scilla Askew (recent) and Julie Sperring (current), its Trustees and volunteers and contributing commissioners and composers, for a notably historic and successful undertaking.

Sounds contemporary – Stroma and SOUNZ Contemporary…

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: Sequences

Featuring Dave Bremner (trombone), Bridget Douglas (flute), Peter Dykes (oboe), Rebecca Struthers (violin), Lenny Sakovsky (flowerpots),

Hamish McKeich and Mark Carter (conductors).

Berio: “Sequenza I”, “Sequenza VII”; Xenakis: “Charisma”; Rzewski: “Song and Dance”, “To the Earth”; Ross Harris: “Fanitullen”, “Trombone Opera”; Chris Gendall: “Rudiments”.

St Andrews on the Terrace, 1 May 2010

also: SOUNZ Contemporary Award 2010  (preview): Chris Gendall: “Rudiments”; Ross Harris:  “Violin Concerto No. 1”; Chris Cree Brown: “Inner Bellow”.

New Zealand Music Month 2010 began with a highlight – the “Sequences” concert from leading contemporary music group Stroma, which  featured NZ premieres of two recent offerings from Ross Harris and Chris Gendall. These large-ensemble, almost orchestrally weighty scores, bookended a series of  mainly solo pieces showcasing the virtuoso talents of individual Stroma members.

Luciano Berio’s 1958 monodic classic “Sequenza I” gave star flutistBridget Douglas scope for delicate multiphonics, and a twentieth century version of baroque “virtual counterpoint” on a single melodic line. Interestingly, I did not particularly notice any of the microtones and pitch-bends that have become a characteristic of many, more recent, pieces for solo woodwind. Berio’s 1969 “Sequenza VII” took oboist Peter Dykes on a breath-control marathon, with its dissolves from multiphonic fuzziness to “uniphonic” clarity, and – again – the use of contrapuntal lines sketched from contrasting registers (here anchored by a recurrent tonic).

The tense, telling gestures of Iannis Xennakis’ 1971 “Charisma” (fortissimo scrunches, and tremolando slides, on Rowan Prior’s cello; bell-like grace notes on Patrick Barry’s clarinet) were fitting in a work written to commemorate a premature death. More celebratory was Frederic Rzewski’s 1977 “Song and Dance” ( vibes, flute, bass clarinetand contrabass) in which “song” sections with their graceful flute lines and plaintive bowed contrabass, were set against the rhythmic, jazzy “dance” episodes. A later Rzewski piece, “To the Earth” from 1985, had been performed during the composer’s visit here a few years ago. It was a solo (or perhaps more accurately, a duo for one): percussionist Lenny Sakovsky played in a tetratonic scale on four flowerpots (made, of course, from clay – from earth),  while reciting a hymn to Gaia (Earth) translated from the ancient Greek. The effect was one of affecting simplicity.

Ross Harris’s “Fanitullen” was written as a test piece for the 2007 Michael Hill International Violin Competition. Taking its cue from Scandinavian folk fiddling and the legend underlying “The Soldier’sTale”, this “devil’s tune” demanded virtuoso playing from Rebecca Struthers – by turns fiery and ghostly, with polyphony within a single line, as well as double-stopping. Harris’s “Trombone Opera” was inspired by pansori, a form of Korean monodrama for a singer –  with only her fan for a prop – and a drummer. Not a fan in sight with Stroma, but a battery of three percussionists (including bass drum, marimba, and bells) were amongst the support for the recitatives of David Bremner’s golden-toned trombone. Bremner notwithstanding, I did not find the work attractive (it probably wasn’t meant to be). It seemed to belong to the gnarly, knotty sound-world of those discomfiting compositions in which Harris (sometimes courageously) confronts the darker, angst-ridden side of human nature. Among these are “To the Memory of I.S. Totska”, “Contramusic” (one of Harris’s earlier essays for Stroma), and also “Labyrinth” for tuba and orchestra (the NZSO) –  which received a Sounz Contemporary Award (unlike the awards for Harris’s Second and Third Symphonies and for “…Totska”, which were all eminently deserved, I thought the win for “Labyrinth” was suspect, displacing as it did Ken Young’s enigmatic but ultimately powerful Second Symphony).

As in “Labyrinth”, there was a significant place in “Trombone Opera” for tuba (Andrew Jarvis), and as in “Contramusic”, Hamish McKeich featured on the contrabassoon. “Trombone Opera” was written in 2009 while Harris was Creative New Zealand/ Jack C. Richards Composer-in-Residence at the NZ School of Music. The prospective (now current) holder of the  Residency is Chris Gendall. While a student at Victoria University, Gendall was noted for his impressively energetic, rhythmically driven compositions, such as the piano duo “Xenophony”, and “So It Goes”, which won the inaugural (2005) NZSO/Todd Foundation Young Composers Award (in my view, it should have been first equal, along with Andari Anggamulia’s exquisitely Webernian “Les Images”). Even as early as 2002 (with “Sextet”) and 2003 (“Miniatures” for guitar, cello, contrabass and drums), however, Gendall was interrupting his  motoric momentum with passages of fragmentary free rhythm. Gendall has now completedpostgraduate studies at Cornell University, and in his most recent scores, such as the 2008 “Wax Lyrical” (another Sounz Contemporary winner, also performed by Stroma last year), and in “Rudiments”, the ostinati have been almost entirely dispensed with, and the jagged, disjunctive rhythms have come to predominate.

The three movements of “Rudiments” were based on three foundations of music: melody, harmony and counterpoint (rhythm, notably, did not get a mention). The energy of “So It Goes” was still here, but expressed as a kind of textural exuberance (for my part, I miss the metre). In the first movement there was a dense tone-colour-melody, and a progression from single note to cluster. In the second (“Forest for the Trees”) there were some remnants of pulse, while in the third, hints of contrapuntal  imitation. For this piece, the versatile HamishMcKeich packed away his contrabassoon and took up the baton.

Gendall’s “Rudiments” is one of three contenders for the 2010 Sounz Contemporary Award, to be announced on 8 September. While undoubtedly a strong work, it remains to be seen whether it will be a landmark, and whether Gendall will consolidate his current style or explore other areas. Ross Harris is again in contention for the Award, this time with his Violin Concerto, first performed by Anthony Marwood and the NZSO in this year’s Made in New Zealand concert (7 May). Here the soloist wove an almost continuous commentary around the orchestra’s discourse, which ranged from the idiom of Webern, to Berg, to (even) Shostakovich. The episodic one-movement structure could seem either delightfully rhapsodic, or confused and meandering.  Despite the impeccable advocacy of Marwood and the NZSO, I was unconvinced by the premiere. After hearing subsequent Radio New Zealand Concert broadcasts, I have warmed to the work a little, but still remain ambivalent. If time-frames had permitted, I would have  much preferred Harris to have been represented by either “The Floating Bride, The Crimson Village” (Jenny Wollerman, NZSO/Sounz Readings last year; and Made in New Zealand 2010), or “The Abiding Tides” (Jenny Wollerman and the NZ String Quartet,  Arts Festival, 7 March). “The Floating Bride”was a romantically Mahlerian song-cycle, and while “The Abiding Tides” had some of the stylistic diversity of the Violin Concerto, in the chamber work the different styles tended to be confined within separate movements, and furthermore had a purpose in underlining Vincent O’Sullivan’s compelling texts.

Nevertheless, I would put money (if I had any) on Harris winning the Award. My own choice though would be  Chris Cree Brown’s “Inner Bellow” for clarinet and electronics. Performed by Gretchen Dunsmore at the CANZ Nelson Composers Workshop opening concert (4 July 2010), “Inner Bellow” not only seamlessly blended live and recorded sounds, but also created strange new colours from the partially dismantledclarinet, with intervals being compressed (instant microtones!) in some registers. As in “The Triumvirate”, played by the NZ Trio during the 2005 Nelson Composers Workshop, Cree Brown employed an adventurous musical language within a reassuringly conventional structure (with recurring elements suggestive of  a rondo).

Given the calibre of this year’s contestants, whoever receives the Award will be a worthy winner.

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