Tag: contemporary music

Creative, thrilling and heart-warming conclusion to Orchestra Wellington’s 2018 season

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “New World”

MOZART (arr. Busoni) – Overture “Don Giovanni”
MICHAEL NORRIS – Violin Concerto “Sama” (World Premiere)
DVORAK – Symphony No. 9 in E Minor Op. 95 (B.178) “From the New World”

Amalia Hall (violin – Michael Norris)
Andrew Atkins (conductor – Mozart)
Marc Taddei (conductor – Michael Norris, Dvorak)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 1st December 2018

Well, it was quite a night for Orchestra Wellington! – in front of an enthusiastic and appreciative audience at the Michael Fowler Centre on Saturday evening the musicians put everything they had into making the final night of the orchestra’s 2018 concert season one to remember. We were presented with a line-up of pieces which, if perhaps not all sure-fire crowd-pleasers, perfectly expressed the desire of the orchestra’s organisers to provide a rich and varied concert experience! There was a fascinating arrangement of one of Mozart most famous operatic overtures, along with the first-ever performance of a New Zealand work, a violin concerto by Wellington composer Michael Norris, both counterweighted after the interval by what is certainly one of the most popular symphonies of all time, Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony in E Minor, best known by its subtitle “From the New World”.

Before the actual music-making began, Marc Taddei, the orchestra’s Music Director, warmly thanked the audience for its support throughout the year, promising that the about-to-be-launched 2019 programme would continue to deliver the excitement and enjoyment of past seasons – in fact, even more so this time round by, in Taddei’s words, “pulling out all of the stops!” The 2019 season sported the title “Epic” by way of indicating something of the range and scope of the presentations, the conductor remarking that in each case the work or works featured in that particular concert introduced something “important” and “pivotal” to music, significant to the art-form’s development.

As an example (I thought this a particularly mouth-watering prospect!) the opening concert in April of next year was to feature both Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” AND Its rarely-performed sequel, “Lelio, or Return to Life”. Even on its own this choice of repertoire amply indicates the innovative spirit that informs the orchestra’s work in general and pays tribute to its enterprising music director and his supporting musicians and artistic management. A further innovation came with the display of a special recording of the orchestra playing a couple of Beethoven Symphonies (these are “live” performances from previous concerts….) captured on both CD and “180 gram vinyl”, the latter especially striking regarding colour and packaging, giving it extra distinction for a collector, though for some people the former at a mere $16.00 (as opposed to $40.00) might be perfectly viable a souvenir of the orchestra.

So, the 2019 season having been “launched” and associated things been given honourable mention, the concert began, Taddei at this point handing over the “conducting reins” to his Assistant Conductor, Andrew Atkins, who was scheduled to conduct the first item. With gestures whose flowing aspect often reminded one of a bird in flight, but which secured as finely-honed and dramatically-sprung a performance of the music as one could wish for, Atkins got a properly dark-browed aspect from the players at the work’s beginning, followed by an engagingly buoyant rendering of the music’s “giocoso” manner – in fact, Mozart himself interestingly styled the work as both a “dramma giocoso”, a dramatic comedy, and an “opera buffa” (comic opera).

Opera overtures are often linked by their composers to the ensuing stage action, Mozart’s music in the theatre in this case flowing seamlessly into the story’s beginning. However, to be performed like that in concert with no opera to follow would result in a kind of unresolved cadence at the piece’s end – so either the composer or a subsequent editor would “recompose” the concluding sequence to make a satisfying conclusive ending to the music. This time round, however, the orchestra played a version I’d never encountered before, one arranged by the brilliant Italian pianist and composer Feruccio Busoni, and which seemed to me to successfully incorporate more of the opera’s whole “flavour” for concert-hall performance. Busoni, at the Overture’s end returns us to the opening, darkly monumental “Stone Guest” music, reminding us of the Don’s eventual fate, and follows this with the music accompanying the opera’s “epilogue” (which Mozart added to the opera AFTER the premiere) – here, the Don’s adversaries, plus his much-maligned manservant, Leoporello, entone a moralistic conclusion – “This is the evil-doer’s end – sinners finally meet their just reward, and always will”, the sentiments (as befits a “dramma giocoso”) delivered with something of an ambivalent twinkle in the eye, a feeling conveyed here by the energetic, high-spirited playing.

By way of providing something of a contrast, next up was Michael Norris’s new Violin Concerto (an Orchestra Wellington commission), one which the composer had subtitled “Sama”, the Arabic word for “listening” and the name given to a Sufi ceremony involving different ritualistic elements. This work was expressly written for Amalia Hall, the orchestra’s Concertmaster, who, though still in her twenties has already developed an international reputation as a soloist, going on from competition successes in New Zealand to win various international awards in various parts of the world. Of coursed she’s already appeared as a soloist with Orchestra Wellington this year in a stunningly-delivered performance of Bartok’s formidable Second Violin Concerto (see the review at https://middle-c.org/2018/06/orchestra-wellington-a-golden-beginning-to-its-2018-season/), so we were thoroughly spoilt by having this second opportunity to enjoy her magnificent solo playing of music that was, to say the very least, extremely challenging. Incidentally, the Orchestra Concertmaster for the evening was none other than Justine Cormack, ex-APO Concertmaster and NZ Trio violinist, obviously happy to “help out” her conductor-husband and his orchestra in their time of need!

In three movements this concerto evoked a world of exotic ritual inspired by the “Sama”. We were straightaway transported into a mystical realm via “tolling” undulations from the harp and the orchestral winds, joined by ambient strings and then by the solo violin, entering quietly at first , but constantly responding to different aspects of the “Ard” expressed by the orchestral textures and impulses – it seemed to me a kind of “rite of passage” for the soloist and her instrument, both here in accord with the orchestral happenings, and there ostensibly “assailed” by overwhelming forces, which the solo violin did its best to combat, either by accordance or stoic defiance. Perhaps the orchestral irruptions were more manifestations of life-force than they were adversarial, though I still thought there were some baleful moments! However, these were balanced by writing for both violin and orchestra which expressed a gamut of illustration and incident characterising what Norris called “life and growth” throughout the movement, with variety, colour and energy abounding.

The second part, Fada, came cataclysmically into being via a hugely reverberant opening chord, the solo violin exploring the ensuing resonances in the manner of a spirit inhabiting a strange, almost surreal world in a trance-like state of being. There was as much “incident” as stillness throughout, the impulses mostly contained within the parameters of the dream-like writing, though the brasses stirred uneasily at one moment and roused one another in an outburst of disquiet before leaving the violin to join with the harp and the gently-thrumming strings, connecting as much by the sound of breath as by actual tones with the music’s cosmic heartbeat.

Perhaps the solo part’s “display element” was manifest more consistently in the final movement “Semazen”, the composer commenting on the “constant state” of “vortical force” expressed by the music, a reference to the well-known “whirling dervish” aspect of Sufi worship. Beginning with trance-like ritualistic invocations both ruminative and forceful, both soloist and orchestra gave us a rollicking parade of interactive impulses involving quicksilver figurations, galloping drums, galvanising irruptions from the winds and brass, and energetic underpinnings from the strings. The violin seemed “central” to the ritual, obviously a “Master of Ceremonies” but very much an integral thread in the work’s “one among equals” tapestry. The composer used his manifest musical forces with both elan and discretion, not least of all at the work’s very end, with the violin, having decided that its work is done, ascending and disappearing into the silence of the stratospheric spaces – what a work, and what a performance!

The final act of the orchestra’s 2018 season – the performance of Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” – was preceded by a touching tribute made by Taddei to his Principal Second Violin Leader, Pascale Parenteau, who was stepping down from the position after a number of years, though still intending to continue in the orchestra as a rank-and file player. And then it was all hands to the pumps for the Symphony, though the quiet opening of the work was here lightly and fluidly played by the strings, like something almost airborne. A stentorian horn call awoke an answer from the winds, before strings and timpani flexed their muscles and strongly announced their intentions, moving the music on more urgently to and through the allegro molto.

Tempi were kept swift and straight, and the rhythms incisive, Taddei relaxing the trajectories just a little for the more lyrical wind-led themes of the second subject group, allowing the flute enough space in which to phrase most beautifully the famous “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” sound-alike theme, repeated just as sweetly by the strings. What a pleasure to be able to hear all of this again, courtesy of the first-movement repeat (not always played), with the players generating just as much rhythmic excitement and lyrical feeling the second time through. Throughout these more lyrical episodes I loved the prominence given to the wind counterpoints, obviously encouraged by the conductor to “play out”, giving the music such a winning and distinctive “al fresco” feeling.

Dvořák went to a lot of trouble to get the opening of the Largo slow movement right, indicated by the variants of the “chord progressions” in the composer’s sketchbooks – he also thought seriously about using a clarinet for the famous main theme before finally turning to the cor anglais (and in doing so, of course, ensured the instrument’s immortality!). As with the symphony’s opening, the brass kept things moving throughout their richly-wrought introductory chordings, allowing the cor anglais player Louise Cox to follow in kind, the playing lyrical without overt sentimentality, her tones beautifully-rounded while still suitably plaintive-sounding. Her playing was nobly supported throughout, the winds just as feelingly framing the soloist’s melody, the strings echoing the strains with rare beauty and the brass and timpani adding touches of grandeur to it all.

From the rapture of the slow movement’s conclusion we were plunged into a different mindset by the Scherzo, a tighter and more “symphonic” affair than any in the series of symphonies by the composer we’d heard thus far this year, though Dvorak had in mind a passage in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that the composer called “the feast where the Indians dance” and thus builds the excitement of the dance’s opening rhythmic gestures into something wild and forceful, contrasting this with charming interludes, including a Trio whose spirit seems more akin to his Czech homeland. I thought the playing outstanding in all aspects, feeling that the wind players, particularly in these interludes seem to “inhabit” the composer’s evocations, via the out-of-doors character of the playing. And Taddei and his players delivered the “surprise” coda, with its reminiscences of the symphony’s first movement, in a properly exciting and dramatic way, the brief (and uncharacteristic) moment of untogetherness by the horns mattering little in the drama of the exchanges.

This same energy carried over and into the finale’s opening, delivered absolutely without rhetoric, directly and powerfully, the brass resplendent, the strings intense and full-bodied, and the trajectories with their cross-rhythms between the sections most exciting! I loved the flexibililty of Mark Cookson’s clarinet solo, and the cheekiness of the winds later in the movement, answered in almost Mahlerian style by the brasses, who built up their opening statement magnificently. And what a resonant and heartwarming exchange between strings winds and horn which followed afterwards!

At this point I thought the whole ensemble imbued with a kind of “playing for keeps” spirit, which of course befitted the last few moments of the season – and out of it came the last charge towards the work’s stirring peroration, begun by the winds, galvanised by the horns, and flung skyward by the strings and the brass, unable to contain their excitement during the final measures until Mark Taddei and the players farewelled us with the last wind chord, held so beautifully and resonantly. It was a moment which will, I’m sure, sustain the orchestra’s many followers over the time before the band again picks up its instruments for the aforementioned new and tumultuous 2019 season!

 

 

Beautiful, visceral, hypnotic, disconcerting – Stroma’s “essential experimental” at Wellington’s Pyramid Club

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
ESSENTIAL EXPERIMENTAL
An intimate evening of song, water, glass, harmonics, beat frequencies and vases

Music by John Cage, Peter Ablinger, Antonia Barnett-McIntosh,
Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Chiyoko Szlavnics

Stroma: Michael Norris (sponges), Barbara Paterson (soprano, voice), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh (voice) Rebecca Struthers, Kristina Zelinska (violins)
Reuben Jelleyman (accordion), Emma Barron (viola), Matthew Cave (double-bass)

Venue: The Pyramid Club, Taranaki St., Wellington

Thursday 29th November 2018

The venue really brought it all alive, in a way that I thought a more conventional concert-chamber-like place wouldn’t have done. In the most positive way we in the audience seemed to be “put at ease” by the “late-night club” surroundings at Taranaki Street’s Pyramid Club, and, rather than attending a concert, were instead made to feel we were “eavesdropping” on the ongoing creative processes constituting and shaping each item. It was a feast of visceral interaction between performers, media and audience; and even if the results at times gave rise to as much bemusement as illumination (speaking for myself, here!) I felt these moments pulled our apertures further apart and teased our sensibilities with even more of the workings and their trajectories.

This was the first of two performances scheduled that evening, and the venue was packed in the most encouraging and atmospheric way possible. Stroma’s presentations, under the leadership of Michael Norris have constantly sought to stimulate, engage and challenge audiences, and have steadily earned the group a loyal following based on its remarkable set of capacities for renewal in the form of fresh explorations and bold, and compelling performance practices. This evening’s programme, entitled “Essential Experimental”, was no exception, the items generating sounds from sources and practices in some cases far removed from conventional means, even when a number of familiar instruments were involved in the process.

Michael Norris called the outcomes of these presentations “unusual but beautiful sound-worlds”, and the first of these, featuring a 2002 work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger called Weiss Weisslich 31e, certainly made good that description by way of a most intriguing and diverting set of procedures. Norris himself was cast in the role of “performer”, with the title given in the programme of “kitchen-sponge hanger-upperer”, his function being to fix a number of wetted sponges to places along a line strung over a number of amplified glass tubes laid on the ground, allowing the drips of water from each sponge to land on corresponding individual tubes. Because the “operator” can only hang or remove one sponge at a time, the acceleration and deceleration of “drip incidence” from each sponge takes place at a different time from each of its seven fellows, making for complicated “canonic” results involving different tones from the amplified tubes. Norris further varied the interplay of the drips and their sounds by rehanging the freshly-wetted sponges in a different order a second time round! Magical!

At times the very slow drips found themselves “paired” with rapid ones – and with the different amplifications directed through speakers placed in different parts of the room, both the different speeds, pitches and physical placements of the speakers made for some atmospheric antiphonal effects. Interestingly I found that in sequences where many different drips were sounding, I often noticed specific ones ONLY when they stopped or the sponge was removed, indicating that it was as much my subconscious as my conscious hearing that was “registering” the drips. The composer himself wrote that his material here “was not sound but audibility” and that he could “set audibility then inaudibility”, further explaining that “inaudibility can arise through…too little occurring, but also through too much occurring…” The drips created pulse, melody, counterpoint and texture at various times, ranging from altogether what one commentator somewhere called “a turbulent polyrhythmic forest”.

From these abstractions we were taken to John Cage’s 1958 composition Aria, originally dedicated to one of the most renowned performers of contemporary vocal music, soprano Cathy Berberian, and here performed with remarkable assurance by Barbara Paterson, her voice dealing most adroitly with the work’s many changes of mode, style, timbre and character – at certain points I was in fact reminded of composer/pianist Donald Swann’s virtuoso rendering of his similarly exploratory song “Korkoraki” (part of the well-known Flanders and Swann “At The Drop of a Hat” presentation). Here were far more divergencies from the conventional “art-song”, including words from different languages and rapid fluctuations between different styles of delivery – the emotional effect of Paterson’s cornucopian rendering was not unlike witnessing a performer attempting to piece together some kind of coherent message while in the process of either suffering from a kind of schizophrenia, reliving a series of traumatic experiences, or giving us the full gamut of what any singer’s physical and vocal equipment is put through in performance, most of which the performer has ordinarily been taught to suppress! – an incredible display!

Continuing to ring the changes, the concert next featured a work by Alvin Lucier, featuring the ‘cello-playing of Ken Ichinose, performing in tandem alongside a number of empty, differently-sized vases, all amplified – somewhat literally, the work was called Music for ‘Cello with One of More Amplified Vases.  The cellist was required to begin with his lowest note and slowly play an upward glissando, right up to halfway along his top string. At certain points along this journey, the resonances created by the notes reverberated within the empty jars and created an additional “presence” surrounding the tones already being sounded by the player. To my surprise I thought I distinctly heard the nostalgic “drone” of the engines of a distant DC3 taking off from Milson Airport in Palmerston North, a regular occurrence for me when a small child. Sometimes the vases seemed to be “duetting” or “quartetting” with the soloist, while at other times the effect was that of a companion ghost or guardian angel. Perhaps the work ought to be retitled “Unlocked…” or “Liberated” Voices………..

I must confess to the readership that I found the next piece, by Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, the current composer-in-residence at the Lilburn House in Thorndon, a REAL challenge! This was a work given the title yesterday blocks, and one to which the term “composed” seemed to me, for some reason, an inadequate description of the process! In Barnett-McIntosh’s own words, her work is described as presenting “the specificity of sound gestures and their variation, translation and adaptation, often employing chance-based and procedural operations.” As with John Cage’s Aria the only instrument in evidence was the voice, here the composer’s own voice in tandem with that of Barbara Paterson’s. The two “artists” produced narratives that seemed at several degrees’ removal from one another, though towards the end of the different discourses there seemed to be glimmerings of TS Eliot-Waste-Land-like attempts at communication, of the “Speak to me – why do you never speak?” kind of impulsiveness. Up to then, the composer’s disjointed narratives had run teasingly and tantalisingly alongside the other speaker’s half-conversation with what seemed like unheard inner voices. Was it delineating a fragmentary relationship between thinking and vocalising, an out-of-phase attempt to bring together recall and the present, or a conversation between parts of the same personality? – somebody playing with/being played by their alter ego? I found the crossover aspects involving both spoken theatre and music fascinating, as the voices seemed to me to increasingly coalesce, as if they were starting to “decode” one another – in effect very daring! – but for me very confusing!

More “conventional” (if such a word is allowed ANY currency pertaining to this concert!) was the next piece, Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics’ Triptych for AS, written in 2006 for two violins and an accordion (“AS” is the composer’s mother, incidentally). Described as a “visual artist” as well as a composer Szlavnics is credited by the programme note with an “idiosyncratic” method of working, something about converting lines on a drawing to glissandi that exactly replicate the drawing (to say the first thought that came into my head, which was “Oohh, what about the “Mona Lisa” in sound?”, is to trivialise the concept, which I won’t!) What I also thought (hardly rocket-science!) was that there would be three “somethings” in all of what we were about to experience, as per the title.

The sounds were to be produced both acoustically (Rebecca Struthers and Kristina Zelinska the violinists and Reuben Jelleyman the accordion-player) and electronically (a bank of five sine tones). The opening chords straightaway had an “electric” quality, the upward glissandi generating incredible intensity, sounds with long, burgeoning lines, reminiscent of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”. They seemed cyclic in effect with the strings re-entering the fusion and working their glissandi gradually upwards again. Both the second and the third pieces seemed to use higher pitches with a more intense result and a clearly augmented string-sound, the “quality” agglomerated by the electronic resonances. I liked the growing tensions, and the uncertainties of the points where the lines for the individual instruments “crossed” and the sounds “reared up”, Then, at the third piece’s conclusion, the accordion was suddenly left to carry the thread, a lone plaintive and isolated voice.

So we came to the final presentation in this hugely enjoyable panoply of creative innovation, a work by American James Tenney that’s part of a multi-movement piece called “Glissade”, in fact the first movement of the work, itself called Shimmer. Its three instrumentalists (Emma Barron, Ken Ichinose and Matthew Cave playing viola, ‘cello, and double-bass respectively) shared the sound-stage with ”delayed” computer-recorded reminiscences of what the strings played, the ensuing “womb of resonances” the agglomerated and on-going result of this five-second delay.

The viola began with a drawn-out repeated note, before moving into harmonics in a repeated arpeggiated pattern, before the ‘cello did the same, as did the double-bass – with all three instruments contributing plus their overlaid recorded echoings, I found the effect uncannily similar to parts of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” Prelude, hypnotic and compelling, drawing one’s listening into the web and waft of it all. The discernible flecks of colour and tone added to the ongoing magic, as did the ever-increasing prominence of the glissandi, the sounds eerily ascending, before becoming like impulses of sunlight dancing on cloud-tops! As the tones gradually surrendered their intensities we became aware of being returned to a “place of origin”, eventually reaching a point where the players ceased, and allowed their own resonances to continue for a brief further moment in time, a treasure as much in the hearing as the letting go……what better a way to end such an absorbing collection of sound-adventures?

 

 

Too important to let go – Ashley Brown with a “new” NZTrio for Braid, a Suffrage Year concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZTrio presents:
BRAID – Celebrating the Feminine in all of us……Braid

RACHEL CLEMENT – Shifting States
CLARA SCHUMANN – Piano Trio in G Minor Op.17
ELENA KATS-CHERNIN – Spirit and the Maiden
VICTORIA KELLY – Sono
FANNY MENDELSSOHN – Piano Trio in D minor Op.11

NZTrio – Benjamin Baker (violin) / Ashley Brown (‘cello) / Stephen de Pledge (piano)

City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

Wednesday, 26th September, 2018

This is the second concert with overt connections to the recent 125th suffrage anniversary that I’ve recently reviewed, very different to the earlier one (Cantoris Choir, Wellington), though packing a similarly powerhouse punch on behalf of women’s musical creativity. It was titled Braid, and is one of three concert series given by the trio this year featuring the work of women composers, the other two being called Weave and Twine. As with Cantoris Choir’s presentation, I very soon forgot the “idea”of these sounds I was hearing having been composed by women, so caught up was I in the process of listening – reacting to creative sensibilities expressing the kind of individuality and focus which put any idea of “gender” in a proper existential context. To use less convoluted language the sounds were soon coming to me as a listener “on their own terms”.

The NZTrio has of late reconstituted in an altogether startling way, losing both its violinist (Justine Cormack) and its pianist (Sarah Watkins) in relatively quick succession, due entirely to attrition. Surviving member, ‘cellist Ashley Brown has joined forces with various other musicians in order to present the group’s 2018 series of concerts, given the titles Weave, Braid and Twine. This was the second in the series, Braid, and brought into the picture the talents of violinist Benjamin Baker and pianist Stephen de Pledge, an all-male lineup which found itself addressing the entirely female-composer essence of Braid. One article I saw concerning the concert was subtitled “The classical blokes saluting unsung women composers”, which certainly conveyed the ironies of the situations in no uncertain terms!

Perhaps it’s a “sign of the times” that both the Trio and Cantoris, mentioned above, featured works by nineteenth-century as well as contemporary female composers, allowing a comparison of contexts in which women worked to create music. Cantoris featured an 1892 Festival Cantata by the American composer Amy Beach, as well as including pieces by Dame Gillian Whitehead and Jenny McLeod, while the NZ Trio gave us chamber works by two different nineteenth-century women, both connected with illustrious male composers by blood or marriage – firstly Clara Schumann, and then Fanny Mendelssohn. Along with these we heard pieces by Australian Elena Kats-Chernin (b.1957), as well as contemporary NZers, Rachel Clement and Victoria Kelly.

To open the concert the Trio chose an attention-grabbing piece by Rachel Clement, one called Sabbia (sand) from a larger work whose title “Shifting States” referred to the process of artistic glass-making in its numerous forms. The opening sounds were flung at us by the composer, the playing positively suggesting flint-like substances with hard, sharp edges, able to change shape and form at a moment’s notice, evoking by turns long, sinuous lines, scintillations and colourings. These sound-impulses developed a certain breadth, suggesting either dreams of a substance morphing into something else, or in the hands of a glassmaker interacting with her or his artistic imagination! A certain “exotic” element in colour, texture and rhythm also evoked something of sand’s natural environment, desert vistas, long lines of unbroken space, something of a wonderous contradiction with the piece’s actual brevity. Austere and yet beautiful and startling!

In the programme Fanny Mendelssohn’s D Minor Piano Trio was next scheduled, but Ashley Brown told us that the group had done a rethink, and swopped the pieces’ order around, which meant we got Clara Schumann’s Trio first. Had the music been unannounced and simply played, then away from any programme listing, I would have hazarded a guess that Robert Schumann was the composer, right from the flowing tune that opened the work – though some of the following piano figurations seemed to push the music slightly more Mendelssohn’s way. I did like the generosity of both melody and interchange throughout, the flowing theme of the opening tempered in its seriousness by the more quixotic second subject.

I enjoyed the charming quirkiness of the Scherzo’s opening, and the “different-worldliness” of the Trio, so circumspect in its poise, equivocal in its rhythmic trajectories, and yet so passionate in its string unisons, played here with the kind of focus that made every note mean something. The third-movement Andante begins as a veritable “song without words”, with a piano solo whose “drawing-room” melody give way to vigorous dotted-rhythm exchanges in the movement’s middle section, the players digging into the forthright statements with a will. The ‘cello leads the music out of this mood and back into its opening lyricism most tenderly, with melting acquiescence from both violinist and pianist.

Again I thought the finale’s opening Schumannesque in its anxieties and suggestions of flight, the melody having a “haunted” quality, which the violinist’s chromatic descents seemed at first to take further, though the rather chirpy second subject was more of a children’s “hide-and-seek” game than anything deeper and more sinister. I liked the chromatic figuration of the fugue-like development, the players giving their various entries a trenchant quality that again took the music away from the drawing-room and into more fairy-tale realms. In the work’s coda the players found both qualities , the anxiety given more energy and punctuated with vigorous phrases that resolved as many doubts as showed their faces.

It seemed quite a quantum leap to go from these gracious drawing-room gestures to Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s Spirit and the Maiden – very much an “in your face” work right from the beginning, with driving rhythms and deeply-etched melodic lines creating a strongly “filmic” kind of atmosphere, the trajectories covering a lot of ground, dancing along, wildly and abandonedly, with occasional folkish touches that eventually steer the sounds into wonderment at the first movement’s enigmatic conclusion. The story involves an affair between a young girl and a water-spirit, which ends, as these things seem always to do in folk-lore, tragically – and much of the music’s course over the first two movements was wild and vigorous, as if emotion on all sides was hper-driven by both exhilaration and fear. The second movement’s dance-like course again concluded mysteriously, with added menace and unease suggested by a string tremolando whose sound seemed to dissolve into spectral-like regions.

Unlike the first two movements this concluding piece began lugubriously, with heavy sighing, gradually becoming more animated and florid, everything seemingly trapped in a great trough of despair, the ‘cello upwardly sighing with great glissandi, and joined by the violin, continuing a series of increasingly-despairing moments. The piano then ”upped” the rhythm to a march that became more and more savage until the textures suddenly started to dissolve, as it were, right in front of our ears! All momentum ceased and the sounds drifted into nothingness.

Victoria Kelly’s Sono is, literally, the stuff of dreams, in this case, it seems, a rude awakening from a dream. Not unlike Rachel Clement’s Sabbia in its initial impact, this was more obsessive an experience, long-term, the music trying to both enter into and escape a world from which the sensibilities have been, according to the composer, “untimely ripp’d”. Here, it was a superbly-sustained dreamscape, one half-lit but made altogether tremulous with possibility. As the piano picked its way through its own sound-world, the strings more and more insistently beamed their tones upon the wanderer, half-encouraging, half-mocking the figure’s progress. Depending on one’s mood one could have been wandering lost after being cast adrift, or, more passively, immersed in some kind of meditation amid an extended jazz-piano solo, the strings present either as fellow-musicians or representing a totality of listener-responses, a “did we dream you or did you dream us” scenario. Whatever the case, the music was superbly focused on states of consciousness and their waxing and waning, setting up a state of trance-like wonderment, seeming to me to be in the process of fusing outward and inward states of being.

Awakening us from such reveries was the programme’s final work, a Piano Trio by Fanny Mendelssohn, in fact her last published piece (of almost 500 separate works found posthumously only eleven found their way into print!), and one which was completed only a short time before her death. By all accounts she was as talented a performer as her more famous brother, Felix, and on the strength of her surviving compositions, possessed gifts as a composer that matched his own. In fact Felix occasionally published her songs under his own name to give them a public life otherwise denied most of her work at the time. Pianist Stephen de Pledge introduced the work to us, calling it “remarkable”, and drawing our attention in particular to the finale, in which the writing, he remarked “goes mad”, perhaps partly reflecting the composer’s urgent desire to complete the music in time to present it to her sister as a birthday gift!

I thought on the strength of this evening’s hearing, it overshadowed Clara Schumann’s work in content if not in form, its intensities reflecting what seemed an “inner life” of enormous depths of artistic feeling and imagination. That Fanny desired recognition as a composer was indicated by her decision to publish some of her works, initially without her brother’s approval, but then, in 1846, on being approached by no less than two publishers, six opus numbers of works, with his (probably reluctant) blessing! Hearing this Op.11 Piano Trio with its compelling outer movements, one gets the feeling that this was music which desperately NEEDED to be written!

The opening Allegro vivace began with a remarkably Schumannesque melody sounded by the strings over an agitated piano accompaniment, the players bringing out the music’s restlessness, which was then partly relieved by a wide-leaping melody shared by all three instruments in turn, with variants of the melodic line then tossed about among the individual players. At the development it seemed as though the music’s underlying mood had merely been waiting its chance – with the piano once again in agitated mode, the players built the music towards some wonderfully full-blooded romantic gesturings, with even the wide-leaping melody being subjected to the composer’s “sturm und drang” manner, removing all hints of drawing-room sensibility with splendidly assertive gesturings (I was going to use the word “virile”, but thought better of it!). After what appeared to be a somewhat desolate little coda, the music suddenly re-ignited and flung the last few bars at us most unapologetically!

A piano solo began the slow movement, andante expressivo, joined by the strings, the instruments in turn given ample chances to sing, not only with the opening, but a more flowing minor-key melody in the music’s middle sequence, one which is heard again later as a piquant counterpoint to the opening tune – everything is “voiced” by the players with great poetry and sensitivity. Instead of a third movement scherzo, we got a “Lied”, a brief but beautiful “Song Without Words” kind of movement requiring little comment. Not so the finale – beginning with a heroic recitative-like flourish, the piano took charge from the outset, launching into a swaggering dance-like processional, not unlike a Czardas in rhythm, and one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies in mood. The strings entered soon enough, joining in with the dance, and helping to build up the tensions, adding weight and pace to the textures, including a forthright “strut” to the dance-rhythms – very sexy in places, with the piano contributing great flourishes. Finally, the coda galvanised the energies further, paused for a brief reminiscence of the slow movement theme, then despatched the rest with a tremendous burst!

All credit to the NZTrio for their scintillating and thoroughly engaging traversal of music which ought to be heard more often.

 

 

125th Women’s Suffrage Anniversary Concert with Cantoris in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cantoris Choir  presents:
CELEBRATING WOMEN COMPOSERS

AMY BEACH – Festival Jubilate
Hymn – All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
ELAINE SHARMAN – Works for piano solo – Fish / Rain / Icicles / Deep Water
GILLIAN WHITEHEAD – Missa Brevis
JENNY McLEOD – Sun Carols

Cantoris Choir

Thomas Nikora, Musical Director

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

Wednesday 19th September 2018

2018 marks the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand.  On 19 September 1893 the Electoral Act 1893 was passed, giving all women in New Zealand the right to vote.  As a result of this landmark legislation, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which all women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

Cantoris Choir in Wellington presented a concert of works on the anniversary of the actual legislation, a presentation intended to “bring to life and shine a spotlight on women’s achievements in music composition”. This extended offshore, with the inclusion in the programme of pieces by the American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944), reflecting a world-wide women’s movement to achieve recognition as creative artists, both in Beach’s era and leading up to the present time.

Works by two present-day New Zealand composers, Dame Gillian Whitehead and Jenny McLeod, took up the remainder of the programme, and were joined by an unassuming but nevertheless distinctive set of piano pieces by a Wellington composer and teacher Elaine Sharman (1939-2018).

In the case of Amy Beach, her music has had a complex history – fighting contemporary attitudes that women lacked the proper facilities to be creative artists (voiced most influentially, perhaps, by Antonin Dvorak in 1892, to the effect that “….they (women) have not the creative power”), Beach’s works achieved considerable success at first, seemingly against all odds – she was entirely American-trained, and became one of the first US composers whose work was recognised in Europe.

A child prodigy pianist, she made her debut in 1883, also having several compositions published that year for the first time. Upon her marriage she concentrated on composition (at her husband’s request), and produced a vast array of music, among which was her “Festival Jubilate”, a work commissioned by the World’s Columbian Exposition which opened in 1892 (celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the New World).

Cantoris’s programme notes comment that, prior to the first performance of the work at the Exposition the following year a landmark speech concerning women’s rights and equalities was delivered (by the leader of the Board of Lady Managers of the Exposition, Bertha Honore Palmer, the acknowledged Queen of Chicago Society) to an audience of two thousand people. One critic wrote afterwards that Beach’s work was then “a fitting climax to {Palmer’s} address, which was in itself a “jubilate” over the emancipation of women”, while  another wrote that the music was “a clarion of triumph – the cry of a Balboa discovering a new sea of opportunity and emotion”.

Despite this and other successes in almost all genres of composition, Beach’s music after her death was neglected until relatively recently. Because of the success she experienced in her lifetime she remained a “presence”, although the neglect was a very real phenomena – and even now her music hasn’t taken its place in the repertory alongside that of somebody like Aaron Copland’s, for example. The work of living female composers is increasingly recognised, but there’s a distinct absence from the repertory of music by women in Beach’s era and earlier.

This evening’s major work by Beach, the “Festival Jubilate” though performed by Cantoris in a version with piano, rather than orchestral accompaniment, made a splendidly full-blooded impression, giving us little inkling as to why the work might have suffered neglect since its composer’s death. A heartfelt, full-throated choral sound at the outset, splendidly sustained in slow, harmonic rhythm and bolstered by a turbo-charged orchestral piano straightaway caught and held the attentions, before the piece flowed into a fugal-like sequence, with different strands clearly and sonorously delivered. I particularly relished what seemed like a Beethoven-like moment at the sequence’s end, not unlike the anticipation created by those repeated cries of “Vor Gott!!” in the latter’s Choral Symphony finale.

Beach’s own documented performances of Beethoven’s piano sonatas occasionally seemed to have “informed” her musical fabric in places, as echoes of passages from these works “ghosted“ the piano accompaniments and transitions linking the work’s sections. Jonathan Berkahn’s playing excellently dominated the sound-picture when appropriate and gave sterling support to the singers at other times while Director Thomas Nikora’s conducting allowed the stratospheric lines of the sopranos as much space and freedom as the basses’ lowest notes which here were “sounded” most impressively. What scintillations and energies there were in the renditions of the cries of “Gloria”, the lines riding on high in suitably ceremonial fashion, with the piano adding both sparkle and energy to the mix! And how sonorously the “Amens” sang out, gladdening the hearts and thrilling the senses of listeners revelling in the composer’s mastery of her forces and presentation of the material!

The “Festival Jubilate” was followed by another work by Amy Beach, a hymn written in 1915, to words by Edward Perronet, a Missionary who worked in India in the Eighteenth Century. Obviously hymn-like, the piece was beautifully sung, with the sopranos again shining with their sweet and true tones, and receiving plenty of support from the choir’s other sections. A third verse was begun softly, in contrast to the rest, while a concluding section grandly and unexpectedly modulated to bring the work to a satisfying end.

After the interval, something completely different diverted our attentions to engaging effect – a mini-recital of pieces written by a Wellington teacher and composer, Elaine Sharman. She studied composition at Victoria University of Wellington with both Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar, but regarded herself more as an educationalist and advocate for music than a composer or performer. Incidentally, each of the four pieces have been published in recent collections of New Zealand piano music edited by composer-teacher Gillian Bibby, three in an anthology called “Take Flight” and one in another collection called “Sunrise”.

“Fish”, the first piece, alternated quirky, angular rhythms with more smoothly-flowing sets of impulses, while the following “Rain” gave us beautifully-wrought resonances deriving from both downward and upward figurations – a simple, but strongly effective illustrative idea, Debussy-like in effect. The third, “Icicles” evoked rows of stalagtites and stalagmites, strong at the base but delicate and scintillating at their tips.The final “Deep Water” began with subaqueous sounds whose impulses occasionally broke away to represent the play of light on the watery surfaces and the downward refraction of those light-strands, beautifully connecting surfaces and depths with murmuring arpeggiations – all simple, but stunningly effective, and played with real sensitivity by a member of Cantoris, bass

The choir re-entered (from the front, a little disconcertingly, this time) to perform Dame Gillian Whitehead’s Missa Brevis, a work I hadn’t heard “live”, even though it’s one of her earliest compositions. It has been given performances in both London and Chicago, as well as by a number of groups here in New Zealand, and recorded on the excellent “Waiteata Collection” series of CDs of NZ composers’ works.

Begun by the sopranos, the elegantly-shaped lines of the “Kyrie” immediately generated a kind of ritual ambience at once timeless and redolent of medieval music – the altos followed, elaborating on the sopranos’ figurations, the effect spreading through the voices, culminating in a resonant and definite chord of a fifth. Sopranos and altos harmonised in thirds with the “Christe”, tightening the intervals as the men’s voices entered, supported by a solo ‘cello. The men’s voices finished on a unison note. Then, with the “Kyrie’s” return the altos took the lead, the music beautifully flowing from line to line, each group “handing over” the music as the flow continued, again concluding with an open fifth.

A tenor solo began the “Gloria”, reinforcing the ritual once again, before the sopranos led off, combining with anxious intervals of a second in places with the altos, the text praising God, but the music displaying some tensions in the Almighty’s presence, settling down again with long unison stretches up to “Jesu Christe”, before rising in a series of layered pleadings at “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris” – quite beautiful!

“Qui tollis” brought forth a different kind of beauty, long-breathed, tightly-harmonised floating lines sopranos lifting upwards, basses remaining anchored, as if all humanity were inhabiting the spaces in between, the different strands resonating with a beautifully-voiced ”Miserere nobis”, with the “fifth” again in evidence at the end. As if unable to restrain their emotions, the voices burst out with the “Quoniam”, pouring energy into their tones for the three “Tu solus…” acclamations, sopranos and altos encouraging each other in the “In Gloria dei Patris”, and then beginning a lovely elongated “Amen”.

We heard the gentle pealing of bells at the “Sanctus” with the sopranos and altos overlapping to redolent effect, melismatic impulses growing from the pealing bells, and a single-strand soprano “Pleni sunt caeli” similarly rising skyward – a beautiful sequence! The “Hosannas” were more declamatory and florid, making a telling contrast with the previous tintinnabulations. The “Benedictus” featured a near-obsessive downward repetition of a phrase from altos and basses, before the “Hosannas” sprang back into hearing, even more euphoric and florid than before.

After the beauties of the “Sanctus” the “Agnus Dei” was a sobering change, the vocal textures austere and bleak at the outset, the lines together but pursuing separate courses, the music rising to despairing heights, before the voices came together once more with “Dona Nobis Pacem”, the lines huddling together at first, but gradually opening up and out and risking a unison of hope right at the work’s end.

To conclude the concert we were given Jenny McLeod’s “Sun Festival Carols”, which was a 1983 commission from the Wellington City Council for the city’s “Sun Festival” of that year. On that occasion a women’s and children’s choir performed the carols, alongside various other festivities, including fireworks, to celebrate the beginning of summer.

The piano here returned as accompaniment, Jonathan Berkhan pitching the instrument once again into the fray with the voices, this time engaging with the attractive “Road Music” aspect of the opening carol, “Vulcan”, whose trajectory wasn’t unlike the well-known “Joshua fit de battle of Jericho”. It all worked well with piano, the syncopated rhythms all the more strongly projected and counter-balanced. By contrast the second carol, “Ochre”, was more ritualised and “circular” – the different lines described circles of their own to meet other strands, not unlike “recite and answer” music. A third carol “Azure” began with brilliant piano scintillations and with sopranos and altos exchanging opening lines, with the sopranos having a gorgeous sequence in the work’s middle, singing in thirds, before joining in unison with the other sections for a final, rousing effect.

A piquant rhythmic pattern supported flowing melodic lines in No.4 “Henna”, a gentle “gospel blues” kind of a rhythm, a marked contrast to the trenchant trajectories and melodies of the following carol No.5 “Gentian” –  an attractive syncopated filigree moment signalling a contrasting sequence during which the opening was momentarily “transformed” before returning to the grunty opening manner. A single note then heralded No.6 “Indigo I” with delicate lullabic sounds, from “out of the blue” as it were, a soprano being put to the test and emerging with credit, the women’s voices combining beautifully with the music’s more “narrative” sections.

The composer’s impish rhythmic invention brought No.7, “Jade”’s beginning to life, with straightforward meters gradually attenuated, sopranos and altos having the melody and the men the rhythm. The music irradiated joy and exuberance throughout its middle section, the piano’s extended postscript giving us the chance to “climb down” from wherever, once again, perhaps in preparation for the nostalgic beauties of the final carol Indigio II (No.8). Its gentle rhythms and beautiful melodic lines were here exquisitely realised, recalling for this listener something of the wonderment of a child’s Christmas. The central section’s long-breathed lines in particular seemed to activate the gift of recollection of long ago, the piano at the end appearing to trail off into a kind of disappearing world, having worked its magic in tandem with the rest of the performers’ sterling efforts.

Afterwards, while walking back to my car I was suddenly and unexpectedly re-struck by the thought that I had been to a concert whose music had been composed entirely by women – but at the time of listening I’d forgotten entirely about that, and so, probably, had most of the rest of the audience! Our enjoyment of it all was seemingly “driven” first and foremost by the sounds themselves and their performance – a sign of the times? – progress? – even a victory? 125 years AND Jacinda Ardern later, here was this music in New Zealand roaring out its message with no inhibitions or self-conscious restraints! Notable thoughts, and not the least for this day of days!…….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inspirare’s partnership with Youth Choirs a resounding success

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ILLUMINATIONS – Inspirare Choir, directed by Mark L.Stamper

PAUL BASLER – Missa Kenya
Richard Taylor (tenor) / Rachel Thomson, piano / Shadley van Wyk, horn
Jacob Randall, James Fuller, percussion
Wellington College Chorale / Men of Inspirare

IMANT RAMINSH – Missa Brevis
Maaike Christie-Beekmann (mezzo-soprano)/Rachel Thomson, piano
Queen Margaret College Chorale / Altissimi, Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, Karori
Women of Inspirare

JOHN RUTTER – Mass for the Children
Pasquale Orchard (soprano) / Daniel O’Connor (baritone)
Orchestra – Rebecca Steel, flute / Merran Cooke, oboe /Moira Hurst, clarinet
Leni Maeckle, bassoon / Shadley van Wyk, horn / Vanessa Souter, harp
Vicky Jones, bass / Michael Fletcher, organ / Grant Myhill , timpani
Jacob Randall and James Fuller, percussion
Wellington Young Voices / Metropolitean Cathedral Boys’ Choir
Inspirare

also featuring:
Z.RANDALL STROOPE – Tarantella
Helene Pohl, violin / Peter Gjelsten, violin
Hayden Nickel, viola / Rolf Gjelsten, ‘cello

CRAIG COURTENAY – Ukrainian Alleluia
Arr.JACKSON BERKEY – Cibola
Tejas Menon, TJ Shirtcliffe, guitars / Rachel Thomson, piano

Wellington College Chorale / Men of Inspirare

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Wellington

Saturday 15th September, 2018

This second concert that I’ve attended which featured the voices of Inspirare, a choir founded by their director, Mark L.Stamper, couldn’t have been more different from the first one (an inspirational performance of Sergei Rachmaninov’s All Night Vigil earlier this year), but was equally impressive in achieving what it had obviously set out to do. In the same venue as where the previous concert had held its audience spellbound, here was something more akin to a true community event, or even a school prizegiving, but with the intent of demonstrating to all and sundry what singers of all ages could achieve in tandem by dint of hard work and inspired direction.

A glance at the credits above will give the reader an idea of the variety of forces involved in this presentation – in itself it’s a tribute to both the organising skills and the visionary scope of Stamper that the different strands worked together so well. Though the audience was made up largely of people connected with the performers, a good many, like myself, were there primarily for musical reasons, drawn by the prospect of hearing repertoire which, if not familiar, certainly looked and sounded innovative and exciting, and especially if performed with a similar level of skill and intensity to that which for me made the Rachmaninov work so brilliantly.

It took but a few seconds of the opening item, a work by Z. Randall Stroope called “Tarantella” (curiously, not the usual 6/8 “spider-dance” tarantella rhythm one usually encounters in music so named), for us to register the performance commitment of the young singers of the Wellington College Chorale, the voices arrestingly full-toned from the beginning, and maintaining the rhythmic energies of the music’s running trajectories with great excitement, aided by handclapping and choreographic body movements, reflecting the adroit angularities of the accompaniments from the string players. I especially enjoyed the singers’ synchronised nodding heads indicating canonic or fugal entries, towards the piece’s conclusion.

We then got some sombre unaccompanied alleluias from the lower voices at the beginning of Craig Courtenay’s “Ukrainian Alleluia”, the tones beautifully hued with no lack of variety – the basses rich and sonorous, the tenors sweet and true. A lovely cascading effect was to be had at certain inner trajectory points (one of them finishing with an unscheduled slamming of a door somewhere that didn’t however disturb the singers’ flow, nor ruffle the harmonic clusters of the lines in the slightest!)….

An arrangement of the song “Cibola” brought out stunning attack on the song’s first note, thrown out by the singers almost defiantly – then, to rolling guitar accompaniments, the word “Cibola” was tossed every which way with remarkable dexterity, accompanied by vocal exclamations which added to the variety of colour and texture. Altogether these three works covered a lot of ground in both vocal and instrumental spheres, reflecting the conductor’s interest in variety and innovation as a means of securing maximum involvement in the music-making.

The same group of voices then prepared to present the first of the three major works on the programme, the “Missa Kenya” by Paul Basler. The composer worked as a teacher at the University of Kenyatta in Nairobi, thus coming into contact with a Kenyan vocal tradition whose elements he incorporated into his work, fused with Western traditions. We thus had a solo singer with chorus using elements such as what theorists term “call and response” and “call and refrain”, with the soloist and chorus sometimes overlapping. One would expect African folk music in general to be rhythmically rich, with rhythms sometimes playing alongside or against one another; and so it was here, particularly so in Basler’s treatment of the “Gloria”.

Originally written for mixed choir, the version of “Missa Kenya” performed this evening was for male voices only, with the Credo and Agnus Dei omitted. A strong unison beginning which had already showed off the strength and richness of these voices in “Cibola” was again employed at the “Kyrie’s” beginning, though broken soon after into different lines, ritualistic and dance-like, and underpinned by the composer’s instrument, the horn, and piano and percussion, though concluding with a return to more declamatory vocal gestures, counterpointed by the horn writing.

The “Gloria” I thought wonderfully “jivy”, the solo tenor and the choir exchanging phrases, and interspersing more declamatory passages. I liked the idea of the tenor (Richard Taylor) being more a “voice from the choir” rather than pushed too far to the front, even if his voice was occasionally swamped – he put across a true and songful account of his phrases, and the exchanges gave a more spontaneous feel to the music’s folk-like style. More ritualistic was the “Sanctus”, here joyful and bell-like, with the voices answered by splendid piano scintillations, the horn joining in with the voices in the raising-up of tones on high, most evident and celebratory in the “Hosannas”! Splendid!

There was a “changing of the guard” for the next item, Imant Raminsh’s “Missa Brevis” being sung by various female groups, the  Queen Margaret College Chorale, Altissime, from Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, all with the women’s voices from Inspirare, along with soloist mezzo-soprano Maaike Christie-Beekmann, and accompanist Rachel Thomson. Though written for a children’s choir, the work could also be sung by women and children. Beginning with the “Kyrie”, the work opened beautifully with a canonically-repeated “Kyrie” phrase, before the soloist entered with “Christe” – all very impassioned, with the choir supporting the soloist and the top notes made by the children’s group simply breathtaking in effect! When the “Kyrie ” returned with its canon-like phrases, the mezzo-soprano sang a descant-like line in accompaniment.

Contrasting with this was the “Gloria” with its toccata-like piano introduction, generating great expectation and excitement from the voices, rising to a pitch with Glorificamus te. Christie-Beekman’s rich mezzo gave us a heartfelt Gratias agimus tibi, answered by the choir, after which the heart of the movement was laid open with the sombre processional beginning at Qui tollis peccata mundi by the soloist, accompanied wordlessly by the choir up to Miserere, where the choir repeats Qui tollis – all very dark and intensely moving, with the concentration beautifully sustained, and reaching a climax with Miserere nobis, after which the prayer occasioned a brief calm, here, blown away by the attention-grabbing Quoniam, whose agitations led to a dancing fugue at Cum sancto spiritu, the singers exulting more and more vigorously until reaching a joyous Amen!

The Inspirare women’s voices added their strength and colour to the “Sanctus” – all most mellifluously realised, other-worldly in atmosphere, with stratospheric swayings and celestial harmonies thrown into relief by a dancing Hosanna in excelsis. Christie-Beekman’s voice ennobled the “Benedictus”, with Rachel Thomson’s piano practically orchestral in its support, while at the Hosanna’s reprise the music simply “took off”, giving the church’s acoustic a proper workout!

“Agnus Dei” was a properly concerted effort, solemn at the beginning, with the idiom straightforwardly melodic, and, quite unexpectedly, what sounded like a solo oboe accompanying the voices most affectingly at the repeat of the opening. Christie Beekman led the third “Agnus Dei” into Dona nobis pacem, the children’s choir positively radiant-sounding when joining in, contributing to a resounding and moving conclusion from the whole ensemble.

In welcoming us back for the concert’s second half, Mark Stamper reiterated a request for the audience to allow the separate Mass movements of what was to follow to continue uninterrupted, and to save its applause for the end – part of the initial confusion was, I think, having the three separate pieces at the concert’s beginning, which as stand-alone works each deserved audience acclamation, but then got us into an “applaud everything” mode. The message, diplomatically worded, was re-received, and, I think, understood.

So, to the “Mass of the Children”, a work completed by John Rutter in 2003. Associated with the loss of his son in an accident in 2001, the work represented at the time a kind of “return” to the life of a composer, but also a tribute in tandem to his “formative” experience as a pupil of Highgate School chosen to sing in Britten’s War Requiem under the baton of the composer himself. Rutter wanted to create something that might replicate a bringing together of children and adult performers “in a similar enriching way”. This performance thus brought together the Wellington Young Voices, the Metropolitean Cathedral Boys’ Choir and Inspirare with two young soloists, soprano Pasquale Orchard and baritone Daniel O’Connor, and a chamber orchestra.

A radiant, Respighi-like opening to the work brought forth luminously shimmering instrumental textures, introducing the children’s voices, not with the Kyrie, as is usual in a Mass, but with lines from a seventeenth-century hymn written by Bishop Thomas Ken – “Awake my soul and with the sun”, after which the adult choir sang the “Kyrie” – here the flowing lines reminded me in their manner of Faure’s Requiem, with its fluent blending of lyricism and impassioned declamation. The children’s voices sang “Christe Eleison”, with accompaniments I found glittering, and a touch spectral, followed by the return of “Kyrie Eleison” with soprano and baritone joining with the choir, Pascale Orchard’s voice here strong and vibrant, and Daniel O’Connor’s sonorous and steady. At the end the organ made a deep, resoundingly satisfying impression.

Growing in energy and light, the “Gloria” rose from the depths, its rhythmic trajectories enlivening the performers and their words, children and then adults echoing the opening cries, then revelling in the jazzy angularities leading to Et in terra pax with its cherubic bell-like chants for the children’s voices. Soprano and baritone exchanged phrases at Domine Deus Rex caelestis with the music at Filius patris taking on the character of a floating ostinato as the music arched its way  through Qui tollis peccata mundi, the lines nicely balanced by the soloists throughout right up to Miserere nobis. A vibrant return to life came with Quonian, the music jazzy and energetic in these performers’ hands, carrying us away with its exuberance to the end.

The gently glowing wind arabesque-like solos brought in the “Sanctus” presented by the choir like a gently-tolling bell, the voices rising to impassioned tones at the Hosannas, and again from the Pleni sunt caeli onwards. What a gorgeous panoply of wind sounds accompanying the children’s singing of “Benedictus”, itself so affecting with those innocent, ethereal tones – such drama in the contrast between adult and children’s voices, here! As the soloists sang the Benedictus as a duet, the instruments provided heart-easing counterpoints to the music’s simple intensities.

If the impression thus far was of a composer who preferred light to darkness, the grimmer, haunted opening of the Agnus Dei  dispelled the notion for the setting’s duration – the organ’s tones of disquiet, the haunted strings and winds, and the chromatic lines of the voices in their Agnus Dei utterances instigated currents of lament that gradually built to great waves, reinforced by tubular bells sounding a tocsin of gloom – perhaps one might regard the introduction at this point of the children’s choir with an angelic setting of William Blake’s “Little Lamb who made thee?” as much an unsubtle contrast as a masterstroke (critical opinions vary on the topic!), but the very sound of the voices here acted like balm to the sensibilities, irradiating the gloom with light and hope, until the music again darkened as the voices took up the repeated pleas of Miserere nobis.

Came the work’s final section, the “Dona Nobis pacem”, beginning with somewhat Elgarian string-phrases, and a baritone solo (supported by beautifully-turned wind solos), Rutter setting the words of a prayer “Lord open thou mine eyes that I may see” by Lancelot Andrews (1555-1626) to a nicely-turned melody, delivered confidently and strongly by Daniel O’Connor, then enabling the soprano to affectingly carry the melody further with different words, those of a 5th-century text called St.Patrick’s Breastplate.

The work’s final section featured the adult voices (choir and soloists) reiterating the words “Agnus Dei” and  “Dona nobis pacem” while the children’s voices soared above the chant with Thomas Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God this night” set to Thomas Tallis’s well-known canonic melody, the music gently subsiding into silence at the end, everything, as throughout the work, most sensitively balanced and controlled by Mark Stamper.

There could be no doubt as to the commitment and involvement of all the musicians throughout this ambitious presentation, one whose on-going strength of purpose, depth of interpretation and skill of execution represented a resounding and well-deserved tribute to the various choirs and choir directors involved, to the soloists and instrumentalists, and to Inspirare Choir and Mark Stamper,  its “inspirational” Music Director.

 

 

 

Stroma – Iconic Sonics at the City Gallery, Wellington…..revisiting the new, along with the new

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
ICONIC SONICS – Music by Reuben Jellyman, Iannis Xenakis, Kaija Saariaho,
Witold Lutoslawski and Gyorgy Ligeti

SAARIAHO – New Gates (1996)
LIGETI – Ramifications (1968-9)
JELLEYMAN – Designs (2018 – world premiere)
XENAKIS – Aroura (1971)
LUTOSLAWSKI – Chain 1 (1983)

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich

City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

Wednesday 29th August 2018

Eighteen years into the 21st Century a lot of music-lovers are still coming to grips with the innovators and radical figures of twentieth-century music.

It’s a process which was in some ways mirrored a century ago by the fin de siècle attitude of many people to the works of Berlioz, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Bruckner and Mahler, all of whom had to wait for a “later time”, at which stage their creative achievements were able to be given a fairer, more contextual hearing. Each of these composers achieved some degree of early success based on less challenging, more populist aspects of their output at the time, but all as well produced significant music that underwent neglect and/or earned them hostility, some of which “fallout” continues in certain cases to this day.

Each one of the offshore composers represented in this concert emulates those 19th century figures in their music of a century later, wanting to change the existing order of rules and conventions in order to discover hitherto unexplored worlds and renew human creativity. Though there continues to be something of a “divide” between traditionalists and supporters of the new, it’s by no means as pronounced or indeed as “character-assassination-like” in intent as of yore – and in fact there’s plenty more coming-and-going between the two “sides” than there used to be in the good/bad old days!

It’s possible that the music of Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006)  is the most widely-disseminated of that of the group, having, of course, been given a “head-start” by Stanley Kubrick in his iconic film 2001 – a Space Odyssey (albeit without the composer’s consent at first).  Ligeti’s music evokes the cosmos like no other, with no sounds conceivably more unearthly or far-flung than his Atmospheres, enthralling a whole generation of film-goers with his micro-polyphonic clusters piled up and intertwined like a great city’s communication-centre’s wires and cables. But he was never content to repeat himself, and though he was continually fascinated by polyphonies he strove to formulate new ways of arranging, or even “de-arranging” (deranging?) them. His Ramifications, for twelve solo strings, which we heard tonight, and which date from the end of the decade of Atmospheres, already show the composer employing “destabilising” techniques – diversifying the polyphonies by having half the ensemble tune higher than the other half, thereby heightening his writing’s tensions with built-in-dissonances.

The piece opened with “nature-sounds”, gently undulating textures pursuing separate patternings, like distant individual conversations, whose resonances seemed to gradually fuse as if organically linked, a kind of naturally-wrought beauty burgeoning towards the stratospheres and growing in intensity. The sounds clustered around and fused with a single note, before others magically “turned on” as if they were glow-worms in a dark cave. Lower instruments began their own patterned journeyings but with more volatile results, irruptions, re-stratifications, everything pursuing its own rhythmic and pitch courses – what frenzy! – what abandonment! – what devastations, as everything played itself out and tumbled down to the depths in a kind of private Gotterdammerung.

But with that, was the work finished? No, Ligeti’s fine wisps of skeletal light then quietly reactivated the “survivors” across a spectrum that reached down to things that went “bump” in the night, all of whom enigmatically withdrew, whispering ethereal blandishments into the composer’s eternities.

At this point I ought to confess that I’ve jumped ahead, as, for housekeeping reasons, the first piece Stroma presented was not Ligeti’s but one written by Kaija Saariaho (b.1952).  This work, titled New Gates was written in 1996, and was derived from a ballet called Maa, from five years earlier. The concert’s excellently-notated printed programme informed us that this ballet is constructed not around a plot as such but built out of “thematic archetypes” representing passing through into something new – gates, doors, journeyings, new worlds. Saariaho’s  sound-world here was accordingly made up of lucid, minimal gestures and figures, allowing we listeners time and space in which to connect with both finely-wrought timbral detail and larger, further-reaching ambiences and movements.

Written for just three instruments, flute, harp and viola, the music sounded a single note out of the silence of its beginning, whose pitch was bent upwards in a way that suggested a striving of impulse towards the heavens.  Throughout the music’s course the flute and violin breathed, bent and stretched their lines as the harp “texturised” the spaces and/or circumlocuted the portals of passage, often “bardic-sounding” as if accompanying a sequence of storytelling, or “fleshing out” an ongoing pulse. Those “fine timbral details” mentioned in the programme note were very much in evidence throughout, the timeless process of progressive change taking on varying forms, the most prevalent being a series of on-going exhalations which for a while gathered up energy and focus and threatened to burgeon without actually doing so, the light and movement of the impulses turning increasingly inward and gradually becoming infinitesimal.

Amid these and other compositional “heavies” stood steadfastedly the music of Reuben Jelleyman, here a world premiere of a work called Designs, written for the Stroma ensemble earlier this year. I thought the programme note, written by the composer, nicely “of a piece” with his music (which, of course, should go without saying, but at times doesn’t always seem to), having a freshness and candour regarding his youthful impressions. The music’s quiet opening belied the soundings of energies that followed from the eight instrumentalists, extremely visceral bendings, burgeonings, swayings, slidings, creakings and slippings, all very kinetic, and uncannily fluid and jagged all at once. The work unhesitatingly reacted with itself along its course, blending repetition with its composer’s reinvention of remembered things, the more extreme sonorities (an agonised screeching whose origin I couldn’t identify through sitting too far back, for example) becoming more integrated dynamically and rhythmically, as if the process of recollection had “shaken them down”. Things reached the point of tonelessness with thrummed strings, and breathed-through winds and brasses resembling ambient sighings as the ghosts drifted back to their places of origin, the harp uncannily playing what sounded like a brief reminiscence of Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro” from the midst of the sonic debris, the remaining fragments becoming as things forgotten but still forever imprinted. I enjoyed this work due to its accessibility and its thoughtful exploration of the relationship between memory and recreation.

Having always previously trod cautiously around and about the music of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), I was interested to encounter an autobiography of sorts on an internet post (words which will probably already be familiar to the composer’s fans, of course), in which he talks about the uniqueness of individual human response to music, and specifically to his own creations: – “….Whatever I place there, consciously and probably also unconsciously, is perceived by the listener in a way that is perhaps not completely different, but sufficiently different in any case that you can never immediately draw conclusions about the meaning or value of a piece of music.” Along with Stroma’s programme note for Xenakis’s piece Aroura (1971) which was also written by the composer, the two statements in their different ways emboldened me to throw caution to the winds and “think inside” the sounds that I heard throughout the piece.

Xenakis’s opening observation regarding the title being the Homeric word for “earth” itself spoke volumes, as did the “word-made-flesh” textures of the piece’s sounds, a “virtual recreation” of the earth itself as we perceive it. My notes recorded as many of the multifarious realisations by the instruments as I could (my shortcomings in this exercise obviously akin to one’s limited conscious perceptions of the world – as with life, one does what one can with music!). So this piece marked, for me, an encounter with sounds which I could not only equate at least to some degree with their composer’s avowed intentions, but also allow myself my own impressions of, with hitherto unrealised confidence.

Too many to dwell upon all in detail, here, I’ve retained, firstly, a memory of a particularly haunting sequence of glissandi that opened up most disconcertingly what seemed an ever-widening chasm between lower and upper strings, exposing mysterious and suddenly vulnerable spaces between extremes in which it seemed we lived most of our lives. Then, at the piece’s conclusion, I registered a quiet, sardonic gesture of finality which silenced the “danse macabre” bouncing of bows upon strings (difficult to distinguish between hair and wood from a distance) with a single instrument’s whisperings.

Lastly came the work of Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) whose music I was introduced to in the 1970s via the composer’s Concerto for Orchestra. This was a work entitled Chain I, written in 1983, and one of a trio of works similarly-titled, though  otherwise unconnected. As with Xenakis’s work, the composer’s comments regarding the music were reproduced in what I thought was a model of its kind for a concert’s printed programme.

Lutoslawski was quoted as saying that he thought the act of composing was a search for listeners who thought and felt the same way he did—he once called it “fishing for souls”.  He wrote his work Chain I in something of that spirit, as a “gift” for the musicians of the London Sinfonietta, whom he had enjoyed working with – he called the work a “souvenir of……common music-making”.

The form of Chains I divided the music into two strands, with sections along the strand overlapped or “staggered” in terms of their beginnings and ends, and forming the greater part of the piece, with things increasing in complexity towards the end and allowing for individual figurations played “ad libitum” forming what Lutoslawski described as a “network of melodies”.

In effect, the sounds were impactful from the word go, with opening bursts of colour and energy reinforced by reverberant brass, then contrasted with cheeky winds flecked by harpsichord and percussion sonorities. The music developed into a dream-like dance, various instruments crossing the spaces as if entranced, the ambiences ghostly or crepuscular, depending on the listener’s predilections. A series of instrumental games featured several solos dovetailed as to produce ever-changing textures containing ravishing moments, whose freely-concerted strands of lyrical expression burgeoned in intensity and energy. Things took on an increasingly martial air until the gong and cymbals sounded us all up with a round turn, the winds flurrying like frightened birds! Having briefly tasted freedom, the ensemble was then reined in, the textures dissolving hue-by-hue and strand-by-strand into the silences.

Mention must be made of the concert’s surroundings, the City Gallery’s walls featuring parts of an exhibition entitled “Iconography of Revolt”, and visually expressing something of the determined individuality and uncompromising impact of new art found in abundance throughout Stroma’s skilled and whole-hearted musical presentations.

 

 

 

 

 

East and West mingle at Wellington Youth Orchestra Concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
LOVE AND FREEDOM

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Leonore Overture No.2 Op.72a / Symphony No. 7 in A Major Op. 92
MICHAEL VINTEN – Six Korean Love Poems (arr. Anne French)

Sarah Court  (mezzo-soprano)
Wellington Youth Orchestra
Michael Vinten (conductor)

St.James’ Church, Woburn Road, Lower Hutt

Sunday, 19th August, 2018

A most striking frontispiece on the programme cover (uncredited) for this enterprising concert seemed to alert us to the presence of something out-of-the-ordinary – an illustration something along the lines of those disconcerting front-and-profile images of one and the same person. It wasn’t exactly that, in this case, but the effect certainly caused a double-take on my part, which I presume was the idea! – here, a youthful portrait of Beethoven was set literally cheek-by jowl with a young woman’s image similarly iconic (if somewhat Westernised) in exotic effect.

All that it was signifying was the programme’s setting of a pair of “classic” orchestral pieces next to an almost brand-new New Zealand work, a premiere of sorts, in fact – more about this circumstance below. The venue wasn’t the orchestra’s usual performing-place, with Wellington’s still-recent spate of earthquake activity continuing to exert its toll by putting pressure on performing groups seeking appropriate spaces in which to do their thing, as various buildings normally used for this purpose get ear-marked for “strengthening”, a process which takes time and considerable expense.

Here, it was St.James’ Church in Woburn which served the purpose, a place in which I’d previously heard vocal ensemble music, but not an orchestra. I thought the sound lively (too much so, it seemed to me, in the case of the timpani), and with an audience present to soak up some of the reverberation, allowing plenty of detail to register. Best of all sound-wise was the set of songs, with the singer’s forward placement enabling her superb diction to give the words that inner life which concert situations so often blur or impede in an unhelpful acoustic. The orchestral detail, too, bloomed in those spaces, the sounds working beautifully with the singer to convey the composer’s desired effect.

First up, though, and very properly, was an overture (I invariably think, at a concert’s beginning, of Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame in partnership with Donald Swann, telling his audience that they always considered their opening song important, because, as he remarked, “it helps us to get the pitch of the hall”) – and so it was, here, with the very opening chord of Beethoven’s Leonore No.2 Overture (written for the composer’s one and only opera) generating a sound which, thanks to conductor Michael Vinten’s expert direction and the players’ sharpness of response, nicely “defined” the spaces, and set the ambient tone for what was to follow.

The winds had a lovely colour throughout the work’s opening, with supportive work by the horns creating a sense of expectancy, and leading to some strong and sure chording whose aftermath gave rise to the work’s principal melody, the radiance eventually breaking through the darkness – the strings managed their tricky syncopations throughout, while the winds brought forth a lovely “glow” with Leonore’s lover Florestan’s lyrical theme, the exchanges allowed time and elbow-space to phrase their figurations. The ‘cellos enjoyed their playing of the main allegro theme, counterpointed by the winds and leading up to the stormy sequences which preceded the famous trumpet fanfare – here played with breathtaking skill on both occasions by the orchestra’s principal player Vincent Brzozowski. More expert playing from the winds brought back the music’s lyricism and expectancy of light triumphing over darkness, the strings playing the notes with a kind of breathless caution at first before gaining in confidence and activating themselves and one another to cascade outwards in all directions, excitingly sounding the theme in a kind of gabble, and bringing forth the brasses in glorious C Major with an energised, victorious version of Florestan’s “Leonore” tune. Vinten got his players to work up a “real” presto-like tumult here, skin and hair flying and no prisoners taken, a truly joyous conclusion to a well-fought musical campaign.

I was curious enough originally at Michael Vinten’s choice of Korean texts for his song-cycle “Six Korean Love-Poems”, but things became “curiouser and curiouser” when I discovered that the English words from the poems were in fact “transliterations” by the New Zealand poet Anne French – the programme note elaborates further by saying, re the original texts, “Anne has taken their ideas and images and refashioned them, whilst retaining a flavour of the originals”. Any disquiet I might have had regarding such a practice was effectively quashed when remembering that Gustav Mahler’s purportedly translated Chinese texts in his song-cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” were similarly “adapted” by Hans Bethge from material which itself had been in places “expanded” by earlier European sinologists. In fact Mahler himself in places revised Bethge’s wording to fit his musical lines, further distancing his work from the original “letter”, even if retaining the “spirit”. Well, I reasoned, if it was good enough for Gustav Mahler……….

Vinten set French’s versions of these poems during 2015/16 for voice and piano, and they were premiered in Brisbane in 2016 by today’s singer, Sarah Court, and pianist Therese Milanovic. Today’s performance was thus the world premiere of the songs’ orchestral version, and the first time they had been performed in New Zealand in any form. I’m not sure whether the composer’s original intention was to eventually orchestrate them, or whether it became obvious over time that they cried out for orchestral colour and variation – but whatever the case, and, of course, not having heard the voice-and-piano version of the songs, I thought the realisations remarkably “at one” with the texts.

Anne French used verses by poets writing as early as 1560 (Hwang  Chin-i, a sixteenth-century gisaeng, or courtesan, famous for her beauty and intellect), and more recently, Kim So-wol (1903-1934, considered the “founder” of modern Korean poetry, despite his tragically short life) and Han Yong-Un (1879-1944, a Buddhist monk, reformer and poet). Each of the poems in the collection had a different kind of intensity of shade, texture, or colour of utterance, which I thought Vinten’s writing reflected in each case. Thus, the music of the first poem connected with the words’ evocations of natural phenomena, the leaves falling, the scent of flowers, the babble of a stream, all of which were heard in both figurations and their accompanying stillnesses, the vocal line mirroring the “natural dance” of these things. The second song seemed like a series of sighs, with long singing lines and warm, luscious textures, delineating a period of waiting for the arrival of a lover. By contrast, the third poem was a tightly-woven mind-game interaction, quixotic and angular in effect with exotic tinges coloured by percussion in places, and yielding at the end in accordance with the words “softened just a little by love”.

How different the evocations for the following “The sweet briar rose”, diaphanous textures and repeated patternings creating an ethereal effect over which the vocal line rhapsodised, while a flute solo joined in with an exquisite effect of tremulous wonderment – the voice soared, swayed, teased, enticed and reflected, before resigning to waiting, with a brief orchestral postlude for company. The fifth poem was a soliloquy on deprivation following the loved one’s departure, the opening agitated figures supporting the singer’s description of the “treading red and gold leaves under his feet”, almost like a running commentary, with strings and timpani pushing the music forwards. With a memory of a first meeting the music became rhapsodical, and then as the singer voiced a strategy “let my grief kindle my hope”, the sounds threw open the picture, suggesting distance and emptiness spanned by the vocal line’s confident tones. In stark contrast, the final song generated no such comfort or confidence, the piccolo and other winds evoking loneliness and abandonment, the vocal line angry – “Let that name be broken into pieces”, anguished – “Let that name be scattered on the air”, and despairing – “There is no answer to it yet”. The instrumental writing adroitly suggested full, rich textures yet remained curiously open, almost feeling cut adrift, as the sounds evoked that “great space between earth and sky” and generated brief moments of grandeur before dissolving, leaving behind the desolation of a solo violin and dark percussion sounds underpinned by low piano notes as the singer intoned “I call your name in sadness”. A brief frisson of energy accompanied the words “I shall be calling your name all my life”, before a final plaintive statement from the piccolo signalled the end of the piece.

An interval allowed time and space for what we’d heard to settle and take hold within, though the performance had from the outset already begun to carve a niche of enduring memory, thanks to Sarah Court’s rich and varied mezzo tones and her heartfelt rendering of the texts, augmented by an incredibly inventive panoply of orchestral sounds gotten from the players by the composer himself on the podium. I found myself marvelling at the human empathies of those words, poet Anne French triumphantly forging a link here with expressions of feeling one might consider on the face of things intractably rooted to far-removed worlds, mere curiosities from an alien culture – what came through, of course, was a shared and binding humanity, though I wouldn’t have been surprised had the “thought-police” of cultural appropriation gotten wind of the occasion and chimed in at some stage, PC spurs and medallions jangling!

Refreshed, we settled back to listen to what would be made of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the work famously styled by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” (in contrast with the view of one of Beethoven’s contemporaries, Carl Maria von Weber, who remarked on hearing the work that its composer was ‘fit for the madhouse!”).  Michael Vinten seemed to take Wagner at his word regarding his approach to Beethoven’s music, which was athletic and sprightly rather than grand and monumental. The opening chord, though slightly fallible, had considerable “punch”, and though the scales were played tentatively at first, the strings got more of a “swing” as the music went along. Both winds and timpani kept the rhythms sprightly, the timpanist (whose work I always admire) playing a shade too emphatically for me occasionally in this context, though always exciting and reliable (a moment of concerted confusion apart, later in the movement). The allegro stumbled a bit at its outset, but was finally launched, Vinten driving the dotted rhythms at a great rate, the effect somewhat raucous, but also very “Beethoven”, vibrant and unbuttoned!

It was this energy of Beethoven’s writing that was consistently conveyed by the performance, and which I relished, despite the occasional hit-and-miss element with the notes. It’s always seemed to me more important for players in youth and amateur ensembles to be encouraged to “get the rhythms right”, and, past a certain point, let the notes take care of themselves – if the rhythms are strong and confident, then the music will sound right despite any mis-hits, but if the rhythms are untidy, then no amount of correctly-sounded notes are going to be of much use! With brisk speeds and strongly-wrought rhythmic direction,  Vinten seemed to me to be achieving plenty of coherent excitement with these players. There was the occasional mixup, most notably near the first movement’s end with the music emerging from the grinding bass vortices, and some voices coming in a measure too early; but in general, the dance and its irrepressible rhythms triumphed!

The symphony’s most renowned for its “slow” movement, and here, the processional-like figures received well-wrought and full-throated treatment from all concerned, the lower strings especially good at the outset, the cellos eloquent and soulful. The contrasting major sequences  sounded properly easeful, with nicely-articulated canonic work between winds and horn, and the great cascading return to the processional rhythm was impressively managed. The strings held their rhythmic patternings beautifully throughout the fugato, and integrated superbly with the rest of the orchestra at the grand, ceremonial refrain of the hymn-tune – a great moment!

What an orchestral difficulty the scherzo must be to launch! Untidy at the very beginning, the ensemble rallied itself, once again finding the rhythm’s “swing” and managing the whiplash szforzandi with great elan! Vinten kept the Trio moving, encouraging the players to plunge into the full tutti, boots and all – very exciting! – and afterwards, perhaps emboldened by what they’d just achieved, the reprise of the scherzo’s opening was much tidier.

Despite my “connecting” with Vinten’s way of keeping the ensemble rhythmically tight, I still wasn’t prepared for the “Vienna Philharmonic” speed with which the finale began, here! – though occasionally starved of tonal weight, the sounds leapt forwards with each accented downstroke, the players keeping things together as if their lives depended on the outcome! I occasionally thought more weight could have been applied to some phrases, such as the lower strings’ reply to the oft-repeated dotted figure hurled at them by the upper strings – but this was a small point compared with the energy generated by the whole. At the end we certainly felt as though we had been immersed in a kind of maelstrom, the conductor and players sharing with us an accompanying sense of satisfaction at re-emerging with exhaustion and invigoration triumphantly hand-in-hand!

 

 

One piano, six hands and a programme of highly unfamiliar, surprising music by composers in unorthodox mode

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZ Six Hands Trio: Hamish Robb, Nicole Chao, Beth Chen

Rasim Ramazanov: Salsa Rhythm and Small Rhapsody (trio)
Rachmaninov:  Barcarolle and Scherzo, from Six Morceaux, Op. 11 (Hamish Robb & Beth Chen)
Johann Strauss (arr. Greg Anderson): Blue Danube Fantasy (Nicole Chao & Beth Chen)
Mike Cornick: Bénodet Breeze, from Three Pieces for Six Hands (trio)
Gershwin, arr. Manfred Schmitz, ‘I Got Rhythm’ (trio)
Lidia Kalendareva and Alin Cristian Oprea: Russian Dance for Six Hands (trio)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 8 August , 12:15 pm

Though this three-pianist ensemble has evidently been around for a while, I hadn’t encountered them. All three were masters students together at the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University nearly 20 years ago.

They operate at one keyboard, in case you have the impression that even the piano duet format is a bit crowded and might be uncomfortable; their places at the keyboard varied with each piece.

Clearly there was neither discomfort nor embarrassment here, for they emanated a feeling of considerable enjoyment.

The first two pieces were by Rasim Ramazanov. I am always interested in composers’ identity but there were no notes and the material that the trio sent to me later did not offer any information about him. Nor did the Internet help initially as there are scores of people with the name, but eventually I spotted a composer-pianist whose name fitted, evidently from Crimea or Ukraine, with a Tartar connection; there were several others of the name in Azerbaijan.

Anyway, the first of his two pieces, Salsa Rhythm, was vigorously rhythmic, jazzy, suggested Gershwin influence and involved ‘prepared piano’ technique, creating dampened string sounds, while the second, Small Rhapsody, was calmer and more melodic, again involving strumming deadened strings inside the piano; there was a third piece, not mentioned in the notes: perhaps one of the two named was in two parts.

Beth Chen and Hamish Robb played two pieces from Rachmaninov’s Six morceaux, Op 11. The Baracrolle sounded Prokofievish rather than Chopinesque while the Scherzo was playful, even frenzied in character with dotted rhythms, sounding very uncharacteristically Rachmaninov. But there was no question about the pianists’ command of the notes and their idiom.

A highly unorthodox yet entertaining fantasy version of The Blue Danube followed, possibly still recognisable by Johann II had he stopped by, as it could, at a pinch, have been a particularly adventurous Lisztian paraphrase.

Mike Cornick’s Bénodet Breeze, from his Three Pieces for Six Hands again had hints of Gershwin or perhaps Poulenc; extremely dense, as if all 30 available fingers were involved at times.

Gershwin himself, arranged by Manfred Schmitz, arrived next, with ‘I got rhythm’, with sequences of heavy, rising chords exaggerating the basic rhythm.

And finally Russian Dance for Six Hands by Lidia Kalendareva and Alin Cristian Oprea. Lidia is from Saint Petersburg and Alin was born in Bucharest; both were educated partly in Germany; both studied at Rostock, a famous university city in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, north-east Germany. They are involved in many styles of music, prominently film, judging by websites. They operate as LA Music. One could well wonder how the composing partnership worked – perhaps each contributed one player’s part while the third was a compromise. This again revealed echoes of Prokofiev, pausing after a while to resume in a more relaxed manner, now dropping hints of Bartók, mining his huge collection of Balkan folk music.

I found this on their website: “Lidia Kalendareva & Alin Cristian Oprea founded LA Music in 2005. They perform and create international award winning custom made music for a variety of different purposes: reaching from music and arrangements for media, movies, games, commercials, to ballet shows and concert music.” Try it out: https://www.la-music.com/ – quite beguiling.

It was a high energy recital, the main object seeming to be to strip away orthodox expectations of the nature of piano music, and listeners’ prejudices, that might be limited to Chopin and Brahms.

Admirable, stimulating programme of piano trios from Te Koki Trio

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Te Koki Trio: Martin Riseley (violin), Inbal Megiddo (cello), Jian Liu (piano) – senior lecturers in Victoria University School of Music
(Wellington Chamber Music)

Brahms: Piano Trio in C minor Op. 101
Avner Dorman: Piano Trio No. 2
Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67

St. Andrews on The Terrace

Sunday 20 May 3 pm

Gale-force winds outside might have been an appropriate accompaniment to Shostakovich’s frightful war-time masterpiece. But it was not necessarily a fitting way to characterise Brahms’s third piano trio. In spite of the remarks in the programme notes (in general, illuminating), and even though it’s in a minor key, I have never found the opening pages devoid of melody, or revealing an ‘unsettled nature’; though later movements might be so characterised.

However, Jian Liu’s reading of the opening chords might for a moment have supported the sense of the programme note. His first chords were so heavy that they dominated the violin and cello and I rather wished the lid had been down, as well perhaps as having the piano on a carpet. But the music soon shifts to the much more sustained, warm and heart-felt second subject that in fact seemed to characterise most of the movement, in spite of momentary returns of the more emphatic first theme. The imbalance between piano and strings didn’t recur.

The notes might have somewhat exaggerated the restless and haunted nature of the second movement which is considered the Scherzo, though not marked so. The minor key colours the entire work and even this ‘scherzo’ movement hardly produces a feeling of ecstasy or contentment. Much of it is staccato in character, permitting neither buoyancy nor delight. The singular feature of the work as a whole is the shortness of each movement – the second movement lasts only about four minutes. And the first was only about twice as long.

The Brahms we’ve waited for arrives in the third movement, and here Martin Riseley’s violin and Inbal Megiddo’s cello play alone for half a minute and they do so again after the piano had a brief contribution. The movement seemed all too short, as I couldn’t help feeling that the players longed for its prolonging and I even wondered whether there was actually a repeat that they were ignoring. There is not of course. Here was the quintessential Brahms writing the most expressive and alluring music, and the programme note’s ‘unsettled material’ and ‘irregular phrases’ were not very audible to me.

Even though the last movement remains in the minor key and there’s a seriousness of mind which the players showed their full awareness of, there’s no lack of melody, even if the tunes are sometimes stretched over a wide range, and the occasional staccato irruptions hardly encouraged the listener to drift into a feeling of contentment. The gentle rising and falling theme which becomes the heart of the movement was all too short.

Avner Dorman
The novelty of the concert was a 2002 trio by Jewish-American composer Avner Dorman. When I looked at YouTube, I was surprised to find scores of performances of a great variety of music by Dorman, though none of this piano trio. He has clearly attracted a large following for music that is distinctive and genuinely imaginative. His music seems often to begin in a comfortable, familiar manner, sometimes, like the present trio, with the utmost simplicity. It began with a simple four-note chorale-like motif, repeated in subtly changing ways, creating at least the impression of each instrument playing distinct phrases in different keys, while one became aware of the original motif continuing repetitiously below the evolving sounds above.

Dissonances slowly became more and more arresting and complex, curiously, not in a way that aroused frustration or irritation. Perhaps no dissonance can today really sound barbarous or outrageous because profligate use of it has diminished its impact, its capacity to offend. Just as swearing in public, on television and film no longer has the power to shock though I suppose there are still some who find it offensive just as some still find gross dissonance offensive. To me these passages were simply counterpoints or foils to the more conventional. The players gave every sign of commitment, persuaded that here was music that had something to say, music that was not imitative but which did not seek to be ‘original’ just to win academic brownie-points.

These situations are always interesting as some in the audience reacted with at least a little reserve, even disapproval. The second movement was faster, no less free with unorthodox harmony and darting, reckless rhythms. Sudden passages of meditative music, violin and cello bowing their way in adagio sequences; then rushing torrents, from high to low registers. One always searches for influences and these were hard to perceive; perhaps certain hints of Vasks or Pelecis came to mind, absurdly perhaps.

Shostakovich’s Piano Trio Op 67
Few pieces of chamber music in the 20th century pack the punch that Shostakovich’s 1944 piano trio does (unless it’s his Eighth String Quartet). I first came to know it through performances by the Turnovsky Trio (Sam Konise, Christopher Kane and Eugene Albulescu) in the 90s. The famous opening, starting with uncanny, false (or artificial) harmonics by using (with the cello) the thumb to shorten the length of sounding string, presaged an extraordinarily sensitive and expressive performance. One could dwell on the range of ‘effects’ employed by the piece, but it is better to consider the plain emotional impact of the music – a matter that should always come before academic consideration of the means by which it’s achieved.

Traditional descriptive musical language, Allegro con brio, hardly captures the real nature of the music, any more than the neutral moderato and poco piu mosso does of the first movement. Its brio isn’t altogether a mistake, but there’s a manic quality here, and with all the bite and energy these players adopt makes you sit bolt upright. It’s the third movement in which Shostakovich expresses the grief that war has plunged his country into, a sustained threnody which fades with dying piano notes to the piano’s grief-stricken staccato start of the last movement.

Though written presumably after the Siege of Leningrad had been lifted (January 1944; the composer had been evacuated from the city in October 1941) this movement remains one of the most graphic, emotional descriptions of war imaginable. And the playing varied from despairing to terrifying, to repetitive, violent passages interspersed with sudden pauses to reflect and regain one’s balance and equilibrium.

I found the whole programme, the choice of works and their committed and accomplished performance by these three senior lecturers in the School of Music totally engrossing. As I seem to say often, it deserved a far bigger audience; a few short years ago these concerts in the Ilott Theatre in the “How long must we wait?’ Town Hall used to attract a couple of hundred people, even in blizzard conditions.

 

Jason Bae – an enterprising, exploratory and heroic performer

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music

A recital by Jason Bae

Debussy – Images oubliées
Esa-Pekka Salonen – Dichotomie (NZ Premiere)
Grieg – Ballade Op.24
Medtner – Piano Sonata No.11 Sonata tragica Op.39 No.5

Jason Bae (piano)

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

Friday, 13th April 2018

Korean-born NZ-adopted pianist Jason Bae made a welcome return a week ago to the Wellington region for a lunchtime recital at the School of Music’s Adam Concert Room, Victoria University. He brought with him a programme he’s taken to a number of venues around the country, one whose content suggested that there would be no compromises on an artistic level, despite the degree of informality and relaxation often associated with a “lunchtime concert”. This was a programme deserving of serious, five-star attention from start to finish, and received playing that fully realised the “serious” intent of the pianist’s enterprising choice of repertoire.

Bae has already made his mark in the world of piano-playing with many prize-giving performances and awards in various places around the world – according to his web-site, his recent activities include performing recitals in Helsinki, Finland and in Seoul, Korea, as well as currently in New Zealand.  The young pianist is also turning his attention to orchestral conducting, making his New Zealand conducting debut with the Westlake Symphony Orchestra in Auckland. He’s obviously one of those multi-talented musicians who has the aptitude to succeed at whatever he turns his hand to.

Judging from the programme we heard Bae perform at the Music School on Friday, there’s no ‘resting on his laurels”, no trotting out well-consolidated warhorses with which to impress audiences. These pieces required his listeners to come some of the way themselves towards the music, itself extremely varied in content and character, rather than simply let it all “wash over” the sensibilities in a generalised way. Perhaps the best-known of these works, albeit in a roundabout fashion, was that of Debussy’s “Images oubliées” (an earlier work than each of the two, better-known sets of “Images”, but one which, for some reason, wasn’t published in the composer’s lifetime). Recently,  though, there has been some recorded attention given both to Medtner’s solo piano works and to Grieg’s hitherto neglected output outside the “Lyric Pieces”. Certainly the remainder of Bae’s programme indicated there were treasures aplenty awaiting more widespread awareness and approval.

The opening of the Debussy work (Lent) brought forth exquisitely-voiced tones from the young pianist, the sounds resembling some kind of ethereal recitative, accompanied by the softest, most velvety of arpeggiations. This accorded with the composer’s own description of the pieces as “not for brilliantly-lit salons…..but rather, conversations between the piano and oneself”. Bae allowed a beautifully-appointed ebb-and-flow of colours and contours, a kind of nature-benediction in sound, allowing the tones at the end to breathtakingly mingle with the silences.

The second piece “Souvenir du Louvre” bore a close relationship with a movement from the composer’s later “Pour le piano”, a rather more fulsome version of what became the Sarabande from the latter work. Again, the pianist’s evocations were meticulously directed towards detailings of wondrous delicacy, with dialogues throughout sounded between the piano’s different registers, sculpted strength set against liquid movement. Debussy’s original was actually written for Yvonne Lerolle, the girl both Degas and Renoir painted at the piano, and for whom the composer described the piece with the words “slow and solemn, even a bit like an old portrait” (hence the title).

The title of the third piece betrays its inspiration even more candidly than does the later work it (only) occasionally resembles – “Jardins sous la pluie” from “Estampes” with its well-known folk-song quotations. Here it is somewhat teasingly called by the composer “Quelques aspects de ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois'” (Aspects of the song “We will not go to the woods”), with the added afterthought, for the benefit of his young dedicatee, “…because the weather is dreadful”…….Bae’s fleet-fingered playing evoked a game of chase through the woods, by turns lightly-brushed and hard-hitting, with some tolling bells sounding towards the end, the piece then disappearing literally into thin air.

By way of introducing the next work on the programme, Bae spent some time talking with us about his relationship with a composer who’s better known as a conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, after which the pianist performed Salonen’s work for solo piano “Dichotomy”. One of a select few of brilliant contemporary performing musicians who significantly compose, Salonen has a number of important works to his credit, for orchestra, two concerti (piano and violin), and a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus, “Karawane”, which premiered in 2014 in Zurich.

Salonen’s work isn’t exactly “hot off the press”, Dichotomie having received its premiere as far back as 2000, in Los Angeles. The composer wanted a short, encore-type piece as a present for a favourite soloist, Gloria Cheng, but, as he discovered, the material he wrote seemed to take on a life of its own,  and expand to proportions bearing little relation to its actual conception. Jason Bae explained to us, along with his account of a serendipitous encounter with Salonen that led to his espousal of the composer’s work, how the music came to be, its two-movement structure representing a relationship between the two “kinds” of music that Salonen seemed to create almost involuntarily. Thus the first movement of this work, Mechanisme, represented machine-like processes, while the second, Organisme, had a more naturalistic way of developing and extending created material. Salonen wanted to explore how these very different styles might, by dint of juxtaposition, “borrow” qualities from one another which could affect their development.

I confess to being fascinated by what I heard, which is a way of paying tribute to Jason Bae’s playing of it as well. The opening of Mechanisme was indeed motoric and Prokofiev-like, the rhythms growing and developing in dynamically varied ways, with different sequences taking on different and unpredictable characters, variously syncopated, symmetrical or angular. Bae’s playing built to almost frighteningly orchestral levels of volume and intensity, before abruptly adopting flowing, legato phrasing that suggested some kind of counter-impulse had been mysteriously, even covertly activated within the work’s being. It preluded a mercurial section where one sensed the creative process was in a kind of ferment of crisis (the machine, perhaps, trying to be human?), with the musical argument appearing to fragment under scrutiny, almost to the point of stasis. A final counter-burst of incendiary energy, notes swirling and figurations exploding in every direction, left the music almost insensible, with only a few legato-phrased, wider-spaced chords holding the centre, and pronouncing the “new order”.

The following Organisme brought forth shimmering, exploratory textures containing reiterating figurations attempting to secure their tentative foot-and finger-holds in the music’s fabric. I thought it Debussy-like in places in a textured sense, the basic materials gradually coalescing and producing a kind of ambient glow, with beautifully voiced fragments of melody floating by on wings of air. The trajectories were passed from hand to hand, thereby suggesting a kind of osmotic continuity of flow, one which inevitably built up tensions of a kind that saw the tones take on increasingly rhythmic and thrustful expression, becoming tumultuous in the sense of a storm, the pianist sending great arabesques of tone shooting upwards and into the ether. Having resisted the temptation to inhabit “the dark side” the music made a flourish of quiet triumph, and the piece ended enigmatically – all told, an enthralling listening experience, thanks in part to Bae’s brilliant advocacy.

Further explorations were furnished by the pianist with his programming of Edvard Grieg’s rarely-heard Ballade Op.24, in my view one of the composer’s greatest works. It was one of the pieces that the tragically short-lived New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell recorded (as part of an all-Grieg recital disc), but has yet to claim a regular place in the concert repertoire. Though part of this is due to the piece’s technical difficulty, my feeling is that Grieg is still regarded by many people as a “miniaturist”, able to turn out  pretty Scandivavian picture-postcards in the form of his numerous “Lyric Pieces”, but lacking the ability to handle larger forms (despite his magnificent Piano Concerto!). Debussy’s well-known swipe at Grieg (“a pink bonbon filled with snow” was his description of one of the latter’s “Elegiec Melodies”) hasn’t helped the latter’s cause – but less well-known is the remark made by Frederick Delius to Maurice Ravel, that “modern French music is simply Grieg, plus the third act of Tristan”, to which Ravel replied, “That is true – we are always unjust to Grieg.”

Justice was certainly done to Grieg by Jason Bae, here a rather more turbo-charged reading in places than that of Richard Farrell’s poetic soundscapings, one underlining the music’s virtuoso aspect, while giving the more ruminative passages enough space in which to breathe Grieg’s bracing air. The work is basically a theme-and-variations treatment of a Norwegian folk-song melody,  “Den Nordlanske Bondestand” (The Northland Peasantry), and ranges from extremely simple elaborations of the theme to full-scale, almost orchestral outbursts of expression, including some forward-looking, even daring excursions into harmonic conflict, particularly during the work’s final cataclysmic section, before the music suddenly dissolves all such conflicts and returns to the melancholy of the original theme. In general, I thought Bae most successfully brought out the music’s brilliance and sharply-etched contrasts, underlining in places the music’s debt towards and kinship with that of Liszt (Variations 11 and 12 are here particularly overwhelming in an orchestral sense!) but also paying ample tribute to Grieg’s own originality. The pianist’s playing of No.9 allowed the composer’s singular gift for melodic piquancy its full effect, while No.10 here vividly captured the music’s characteristic rustic charm and feeling for grass-roots expressions of energy. In the wake of this performance I’m sure Bae would have garnered in many listeners’ minds fresh respect for Grieg as a composer.

The recital concluded with a work from a figure whose music has only recently received the kind of mainstream espousal needed for it to flourish. Russian-born Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), a younger contemporary of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, received much the same acclaim as a result of his musical studies in Moscow, but then elected to devote himself entirely to composition rather than pursue a career as a pianist. However (and perhaps not surprisingly) the piano figured in practically all of his major compositions, both prior to and after leaving Russia in 1921. Altogether, Medtner completed fourteen piano sonatas, Jason Bae performing for us the eleventh (which the composer subtitled Sonata Tragica, possibly as a reaction to the aftermath of the Russian Revolution) The sonata, incidentally, was one of a set of pieces separately entitled “Forgotten Melodies” (Second Cycle) by the composer. Those who have a taste for idiosyncratic numbering methods of musical compositions will find much to enjoy in Medtner’s own various enumerations of these works.

None of which is relevant to Jason Bae’s performance of the music, which seemed to me to front up squarely to the piece’s overall character, with its big-boned, declamatory  aspect at the beginning and the war-like march that follows proclaiming a Slavic temperament, with the swirling textures obviously breathing the same air as did Rachmaninov’s music. Bae gave the flowing lyricism which followed plenty of “soul”, allowing the deeper textures to make their mark amid the frequent exchanges between the hands, then gradually building the excitement to almost fever pitch, before strongly arresting the flow of the music with a portentous left-hand, almost fugue-like version of the opening declamation – all very exciting! The pianist’s beautifully wrought filigree finger-work introduced further agitations, the music building inexorably towards a kind of breaking-point (Bae’s left hand performing miracles of transcendent articulation) at the apex of which the sonata’s main theme thundered out at us most resplendently and defiantly! It was music that, in this player’s expert hands, punched well above its own weight, with a bigness of utterance which belied its brief duration!

Very great acclaim greeted the young pianist, at the conclusion of this challenging, and in the event splendidly-achieved presentation of some monumental music.