Tag: New Zealand music

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS – Wellington City Orchestra’s congress of assorted realities

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, with Diedre Irons (piano), Brendan Agnew (conductor), and Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor)

SAI NATARAJAN – In This Corner Of The World
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor
DOUGLAS LILBURN – Symphony No. 2

Diedre Irons (piano)
Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor – Natarajan)
Brendan Agnew  (Conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 7th December, 2025

Now this was a treat for any concertgoer relishing the thought of something old and something new, combining an easeful kind of familiarity with more challenging musical terrain, as well as setting home-grown worlds in a wider context. Wellington City Orchestra’s programme enterprisingly opened up for us here-and-now impressions of creative forces at work in Aotearoa, before time-travelling us to Beethoven’s world and back again, and finally giving us a time-in-motion slice of “being” at a significant emerging point in our own colourful history. The sounds we heard spoke volumes for each of these times and places – it was something of a proverbial journey!

Different people participated in this process, and in different ways – we were welcomed to the concert at its beginning by Rowena Cullen, the orchestra’s President who’s also a member of the violin section, after which today’s conductor Brendan Agnew firstly paid tribute to a recently deceased orchestra member, Mark Hill, and then introduced today’s concert’s assistant conductor, Virginie Pacheco, who directed the concert’s opening performance, a heartwarming piece by youthful composer Sai Natarajan. At its conclusion Brendan Agnew then  bade us welcome pianist Diedre Irons to the stage to deliver her Beethoven concerto performance. Like the “players” in Shakespeare’s “Ages of Man” all of these individuals had, by their own lights, a special part to play in the panoply.

Beginning the concert charmingly  and sonorously was a work written by emerging freelance composer Sai Natarajan, from Palmerston North, one called “In This Corner of the World”. With Assistant Conductor Virginie Pacheco (the first to actually hold this title with the WCO) at the helm, we were transported at the beginning to the Manawatu plains, with Sibelius-like wind impulses sounding across the deeper murmurings of those open spaces, all the while engendering awakenings of activity, the thrustings and resoundings suggesting  iceberg-tips of the “absolute powerhouse of artistic and musical talent” that abides in the region.

The music gathers itself and epically “pushes out” this landscape, contrasting numerous “forest murmurings’ with attention-grabbing percussive scintillations, a recurring motif resounding in one’s attention as the brass give us some Lilburn-like reminiscences suggesting the inherent “musicality” of natural rhythms. My own experiences as a born-and-bred Palmerstonian responded to the composer’s recognition of “artistic toiling” in modestly-appointed, yet still-resonating hatcheries of human productivity in all fields of expression. I remember watching as my parents and their contemporaries set examples for us of partaking of things resulting for some of us in what Sai Natarajan calls  an artist’s “joys, struggles, disappointments and triumphs”, and from which modest origins still brought forth “beauty and joy”  in the doing, and occasionally even something enduring and worth celebrating – as this this great-hearted piece certainly was!

Happily, “In This Corner of the World”, after being premiered by the Manawatu Sinfonia in 2024, was recorded earlier this year by the NZSO as part of their annual NZ Composer Sessions initiative. I would imagine we haven’t heard the last of this intuitive, versatile, and delightfully communicative composer.

The programme’s suggestion of a wider context of human creativity was hinted at by the music of a composer whose output for many people epitomised a kind of universality  of utterance, Ludwig van Beethoven. His Third Piano Concerto is a kind of bridge-work between the classical and romantic eras, a realm which Mozart had also occasionally explored in music written in a similar key, but one more fully and dramatically furthered by this and other works by Beethoven.

Having splendidly recorded all of the composer’s piano concertos, and frequently played them in concert Diedre Irons was the ideal soloist to realise the “sturm und drang” of this work, aided by a suitably dark-browed accompaniment from the orchestra, with conductor Brendan Agnew on the podium. The opening was the orchestra’s alone, strongly-focused and well-detailed, to which the soloist responded with suitably dramatic contrasting gestures – it wasn’t all high drama and theatricality, with the second subject group almost playful in intent in places under Irons’ fingers, but leading back to a stern recapitulation by the players under Agnew’s direction and a properly virtuoso performance of the solo cadenza. Here, Irons was in complete command of the drama and volatility of the writing, bringing out the almost ghostly ambiences of the instrument’s return to the world of interaction in the movement’s darkly-enigmatic coda.

One of the most beautiful of Beethoven’s slow movements followed, with piano and orchestral passages delighting the ear, and the interchanges expressing a heartfelt “communal” sense of expression. Irons’ voicing of the decorative poetic utterances made every impulse a joy, and the winds and strings in particular matched her ardour – though the strings’ pizzicati could have been a tad firmer in places as they were near to inaudibility, so sensitive was their response! Particularly lovely were the last few interactions, the strings tender phrasings and the piano’s “haunted” chordings all underpinned by dark wind-and-brass murmurings before the latter echoed the piano’s final descending notes and brought in a final single chord – magical!

I loved the insouciance with which Irons then started the finale’s ball rolling – but the orchestra was ready for her, picking up the traces of the trajectories and ready to do its bit with the first big tutti – what great exchanges between orchestra and piano with those mighty chords and flourishes! A lovely clarinet solo introduced and elaborated on a new episode, and a string fugato followed, after a while beginning to loosen at the seams, but managing to complete the task as the pianist jumped in and steadied the rhythms! The recapitulation was strong and purposeful, as was Irons’ final grandstand solo flourish before the coda’s cheeky beginning, with truly spectacular piano-playing and a suitably vigorous audience response.

She was accorded a richly deserved tribute from all, but had not done with us yet! To our delight she sat back down at the piano and began the deliciously droll F Minor Allegro moderato dance from Schubert’s adorable Moments Musicaux. It was playing in which every note resonated and every impulse “choreographed” its own sound, inviting parts of us by turns to listen and sing and dance in our minds – and the moment towards the end when the final line impishly turned to F Major seemed as if the music was suddenly smiling at us and telling us to forget our troubles – magical piano playing!

An interval saw the piano further “magicked” to one side, leaving more space for the players to resound the strains of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant musical compositions, Douglas Lilburn’s Second Symphony. Completed in 1951, this iconic work had to wait until 1959 for its first public performance. Part of the problem was the country’s National Orchestra still being in its relative infancy (it gave its first concert in 1947) and its early conductors were certainly reluctant at that time to “take the plunge” with anything as off the beaten track as a locally-produced symphony – rather, they were set upon establishing the standard repertoire. The composer’s First Symphony had been an earlier casualty, completed in 1949, and premiered in 1951, to be then ignored for a further ten years. It wasn’t until the advent of John Hopkins as the National Orchestra’s Principal Conductor in the late 1950s that Lilburn’s music began to be performed more regularly – the composer’s gratitude was such that he went on to write a Third Symphony in 1961 and dedicate it to Hopkins!

The Second Symphony has always been associated with quintessential aspects of New Zealand life and landscape. What the composer referred to as “the imponderables” of the natural world feature strongly in the work – contrasts of light and shade and the vagaries of weather are prominent characteristics of the music’s different ambiences. Human influences are also a factor – in the second movement Lilburn immortalised what he described as the ”nasal and tangy” cry of Wellington’s Evening Post Paper-boy’s call, heard as he passed through the capital en route to or from the South Island. Others have commented upon the “search for identity” aspect of the music in the other movements, particularly in the third “Introduction”, where the “frontier” aspect of the environment seems somewhat remote and forbidding and essentially solitary. The music’s angst-like textures and ambiences seem to reflect struggles associated with a 1950s “coming of age” in artistic and other matters, one which the final movement translates into more positive and robust gesturings. I must here admit to a degree of dissatisfaction with the “Introduction” movement regarding its brevity – though expertly crafted, it doesn’t for me go far enough or even resound sufficiently within its existing parameters, eluding the feeling of a truly epic statement of being (it’s significantly shorter in scale than both the first or last movements!) – or have I been listening to too much Mahler or Bruckner or Shostakovich of late?

But to the beginning – beautifully and wistfully opened by the strings the first movement also featured buoyant solos from oboe, clarinet and flute, with the horns in atmospheric alignment. The strings, winds and brass raised us to the heights mid-movement with the horns having a wonderful “Carl Nielsen” moment (I once got taken to task by Lilburn himself for suggesting  the merest connection of him with that composer!), and the timpani adding to the music’s “epic” quality before the strings, with the oboe supported by the horns, bring the movement to a relatively placid close. A pity the St.Andrew’s acoustic had difficulty sorting  the dynamics, with the brass, to my ears sounding a bit lost in the mid-movement tuttis’ welter of sound!

Better-realised was the Scherzo, a more nimble, less weighty sound, the oboe doing a great job with the perky theme, and the brass and timpani lively at the climaxes. The other winds did splendid things with their variants of the theme, but the most nostalgic moments were the cellos’ introduction of the “paperboy” theme, and the strings in general joining in with its more extended moments. Elsewhere, the “snap” and “bite” of the rhythms was a joy.

The opening of the third movement  “Introduction” with its bleak and unremitting atmosphere was promising – strings and winds in tandem advanced the sobriety of it all, bringing out an almost Sibelius-like feeling of isolation to the textures. The strings pursued a “wandering” course underscored by the brass and counterpointed by the horns, and with the oboe and flute doggedly “lifting” the mood in places. The brass seemed warmer and more heroic when first entering, but their aspect quickly darkened in accord with the strings, the anguished chordings from both heightening the unease which the flute sought to console. At this point I wanted more, but for whatever reason the composer had decreed “enough”, and before we knew where we were, the finale was upon us and the clouds had dispersed …..

Though the composer might have given this marvellous finale more to react to in situ,  the energising warmth and freshness of the movement’s opening textures set the tone for what followed, impulses which seemed like a symbolic renewal of confidence following a dark night of the soul. Lilburn had already in words enjoined his fellow-composers to engage in what he called “a search for tradition” relating to the necessity of “writing our own music”, in his now-historic 1946 Cambridge Music School lecture written under the same title. Here, now, he practised his own dictum in the composition of this symphony, and to the extent he felt it necessary, whatever critics might say about the result! The work emphasised both challenge and possibility, and the results today spoke for themselves.

The coming-together of these things in this finale was a heady experience – moments in which the big ringing brass theme soared out gloriously, and the orchestra in other places seemed to pick up its skirts and dance were made the more memorable by a final peroration begun by stratospheric strings, and chiselled out of the texture by resounding brass and rolling timpani in glorious C Major! It had the effect of consuming everything at the concert’s conclusion in swathes of splendour and happiness!

 

 

 

Music from Home and Abroad – for its time and for all time

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:

THE ARTIST REPENTS

VICTORIA KELLY – Requiem
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 5 In D Minor Op.47

Barbara Paterson – soprano
Alexander Lewis – tenor
The Tudor Consort
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 22nd November, 2025

The sixth and final concert in Orchestra Wellington’s 2025 series The Dictator’s Shadow portrays a creative artist’s dilemma living and working in a regime seeking to curb individual artistic expression and freedom of speech, and while under severe duress producing a work which adroitly treads a path of compromise. Dmitri Shostakovich had fallen foul of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with an opera, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” in 1936 which brought the full weight of displeasure upon the composer’s head via the Government’s official print-organ, the newspaper “Pravda”, which condemned the work and its performance on the basis of Stalin’s negative reaction to the production (ironically, since its premiere two years previously, “Lady Macbeth” had been a resounding success with the public and with officialdom!).

Reeling under the weight of the regime’s official expression of displeasure, Shostakovich had his opera withdrawn within two months of the “Pravda” article, and then did the same with his ballet “The Limpid Stream”, which was being performed at the time, and came under similar attack from the same source – while this was happening, he was writing his Fourth Symphony intending to have it performed, but was persuaded from doing so by friends and associates who heard the work in rehearsal and feared for the composer’s safety if the performance went ahead. Shostakovich complied with the advice and turned, not to an ostentatiously patriotic cantata or regime-praising ode, but to yet another symphony, one, however, that came to have bestowed upon it the famous byline (whether from the composer himself or another commentator is uncertain) “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism”.

The work’s reception, in November 1937 could possibly have saved Shostakovich’s skin, judging by the fate of some of his friends and colleagues whose activities had similarly displeased Stalin at around this time. It addressed all of “Pravda’s” criticisms regarding the composer’s previous efforts – the music was tonal, with simple, direct language, its form was classical, with easily-discernable themes, and it ended on a positive note, in fact with a triumphant fanfare-like apotheosis. Shostakovich said later in private that the music for the finale was a kind of satire, with a hollow exuberance glorifying the dictator. One of the composer’s biographers, Elizabeth Wilson, aptly characterised the situation for Shostakovich, commenting that in this music “he had found a way to be truthful for those who had ears to listen.”

All of this was here laid aside for the concert’s second half, as the evening’s opening item confronted us with a vastly different work in many ways – New Zealand composer VIctoria Kelly’s 2023 Requiem, for soprano, tenor, mixed choir and orchestra. In her programme notes she calls the work “a secular contemplation of life and mortality”, using texts from five New Zealand poems, alongside word-fragments of the text for the Latin Requiem Mass. We were fortunate to have the composer’s presence at the concert, emanating as vibrant a force in person when acknowledging the applause and the efforts of the musicians as had her music done that we’d heard.

Kelly wrote the work in response to the deaths of her parents, ten years apart, telling us that her music and the poets’ words were her responses to not being able herself to find “words for the events” bringing with them such loss and grief and all of their manifold associations. For her it took shape as a non-religious work. hence the “secular” poetry, but with connections to tradition briefly acknowledged (the word “Requiem” itself being an example). She talks of the poems as “filled with the wonder of nature, of grief and longing, of surrender and letting go”….

This work has already achieved fame, winning the SOUNZ Contemporary Award / Te Tohu Auaha at the 2023 APRA Silver Scrolls. I had the enthralling experience of watching the SOUNZ/RNZ film of the premiere performance at the Auckland Town Hall, given by the Auckland Philharmonia and conducted by Vincent Hardaker, with soloists Simon O’Neill and Jayne Tankersley, together with the Luminate Voices Women’s Chamber Choir and Lux Singers   – so I was in a sense prepared for tonight’s performance, while finding myself consumed with expectation as to how different it could sound with different performers!

What particularly transfixed my reactions to both performances were the solo singers in both cases – Kelly required the tenor in particular to sing in falsetto for much of the time, far above his natural register, wanting his voice to convey “vulnerability, hope and fear”, which Alexander Lewis certainly managed, though not as effectively as Simon O’Neill due to the latter being so closely-miked (as were both the Auckland soloists). In this latter performance both singers, though miked, were not as clearly projected – I could hear more of Barbara Paterson’s voice, though she, like her partner, struggled in places to be heard over instrumental and sometimes choral tones. We had the texts in our programmes, and I could read them, but still found them difficult to follow – and friends sitting elsewhere told me during the interval that it was too dark where they were sitting to make out the words on the page!

Having said all of this it struck me that the impact of the work as sound alone was conveying such a visceral impression, with orchestra and choir making music which, in Kelly’s own words  “ebbs and flows around the poetry”, that one could surrender readily to the degree one often experiences so exhilaratingly in opera where the singers’ voices are the catalysts for overwhelming emotion rather than the words’ “meaning” in a literal sense!  This in an almost animalistic way gave to us throughout the work so much of that “reaching for one another” sensation which Kelly described as creating “harmony” – here a kind of transcendent thing that didn’t need explaining, as so many great abstracted instrumental pieces of music do with their tones alone.

We were able, therefore, to “experience” those frissons of feeling described by the singer with the words “I stayed a minute – and the garden was full of voices” – the “language of earth” activated for our pleasure in the midst of sorrow! Likewise, we were taken, here tumultuously, with the ascending voices and percussive scintillations illustrating Sam Hunt’s lighthouse keeper manning the lights “to reappear among his polished stars”. Coincidentally, I had not long before heard John Rimmer’s beautiful instrumental realisation “Where Sea Meets Sky” using those same words by poet Ian Wedde as used here by Kelly, here poignantly continuing with the second part of the poem , in which friends long to embrace once more “between sea and sky”, to the accompaniment of the chorus’s beautiful “Libere eis de morte aeterna” (Free them from eternal death).

The voices began and continued Chloe Honum’s claustrophobic “Bright Death” with canonic “Lacrimosa, dies illa” phrases  accompanied by piteous oboe tones, the music inexorably and obsessively building towards grief-stricken utterance, before concluding with a quietly-voiced “Requiem”. And lastly, we felt a liberation of sorts with James K. Baxter’s “High Country Weather”, with spacious string and percussive texturings, and voices sounding like unfettered winds sweeping through the sky – the choir built great utterances from the word “Gloria” after which the silences surged softly backwards and forwards, allowing the soprano to intone the thoughts of a life in what seemed the throes of its finality, with the words “Surrender to the sky your heart of anger” marking a final acceptance of what is and will be. Barbara Paterson’s celestial soprano took us there unerringly and gratefully (with a quieter, less demonstrative, but just as needfully “present” voice as Jayne Tankersley’s), one which, along with the choral voices and instruments drifted through hypnotic repetitions of the word “surrender” and into the silence finally left by a single sustained instrumental note…

As much thoughtfulness as discussion (mostly regarding the solo voices and the different impression they made) seemed to absorb every moment of interval before resettling and proclaiming us ready for the Shostakovich symphony to follow. It proved a more than fitting finale to the composer’s “season”, with Marc Taddei and his well-versed forces bringing all the music’s sharply-focused accents, upholstered tonal weight and gait, and purposeful attitude to the fore throughout the first movement’s tense, playing-for-keeps utterances!  Those baleful brass calls splendidly activated the rest of the orchestral forces towards an allegro which in turn pushed the playing  excitingly into  the string reiteration of the opening – so gloriously wild and combatative! The big recitative-like unisons would have gladdened all hearts at that first performance (most likely for different reasons!) – but they were just the job, as were the great crashes leading to the flute-and-horn “appeasement” passages (with one or two slightly “blurped” brass notes here simply adding to the excitement!).

Then, what terrific attack we got from the lower strings at the Allegretto’s beginning! – such incredibly “engaged” playing from all the sections! And what a contrast with the Largo, with its real sense of “lament” (I read somewhere there were accounts of people at the first performance weeping during this movement!) – the performance made much of the contrast between the moments of tension and the hush of the more desolate sequences, Again one was made to think in various places of the “layered” agenda of the composer in giving the establishment what it thought it wanted!

As for the finale, its “enormous optimistic lift” referred to by most Soviet critics was here made more than palpable by the orchestra’s performance, the playing holding nothing back, its full-bloodedness a resounding indication of how officialdom’s faith in the composer’s  restoration of “all that is bright, clear, joyous, optimistic and life-affirming” would have been restored. And, of course, we also heard in this performance what other critics were able to discern at the time as “unsettled, sensitive, (and) evocative music” inspiring “gigantic conflict” – the same sounds which the composer reportedly referred to as “forced rejoicing”. Those massive concluding bass-drum strokes here at the work’s end continue, as they did at the time, to speak volumes in today’s world of enforced glorification and scarce toleration of views which dare to be different!

To Marc Taddei and his redoubtable Orchestra Wellington players I dips me lid in sincere tribute to their incredible collective artistic achievement throughout what has been a truly memorable season of music-making that’s exhibited both brilliance and depth – brilliance in the standard of execution, and depth in the explorations of music as a living entity of our human condition, be it a Requiem with a recognisably home-grown articulation of ritual from the orchestra’s resident (and native-born) composer Victoria Kelly,  or the music of a distant Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich which expressed attitudes and values out of step with those of the ruling powers, and initiated what potentially became a life-and-death struggle, one with wider implications for humanity at large. I look forward to the continued enrichment of music and music-making from these amazing artists with the advent of 2026.

 

NZSO’s Symphonic Dances concert explores Nature, Life and Love

Posted on by Peter Mechen

TABEA SQUIRE – Conversation of the Light-Ship and the Tide (World Premiere)
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Saxophone Concerto in E-flat Major Op 109
DARIUS MILHAUD – Scaramouche for saxophone and orchestra Op.165c
SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Symphonic Dances Op.45

Jess Gillam (alto saxophone)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Gemma New (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Thursday 20th November 2025

“Symphonic Dances” seemed an apt enough description of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s latest concert with inspirational Music Director Gemma New – however while listening to the concert  another title occurred to me, that of the well-known  “Nature, Life and Love” trilogy of orchestral Overtures completed by Antonin Dvorak. I thought it would make an apt key to characterising the programme we heard in the Michael Fowler Centre last evening, with star British saxophonist Jess Gillam taking a significant role in three of the four pieces we heard.

“Nature”, then, formed the basis of the concert’s opening item, a world premiere performance of music by Tabea Squire (b.1989 in Scotland, of Kiwi (NZ) and German parents). The work’s title “Conversation of the Light-ship and the Tide” reflected something of the composer’s multi-national origins, as it depicted the once-common practice of various Northern Hemisphere countries with coastlines too rugged and impassable for lighthouses to instead use “light-ships”, vessels containing warning lights who were moored close to any such hazards to warn any passing ships of the attendant dangers.

Tabea Squire’s music took us immediately to remote, unpeopled places, with sounds and impulses devoid of flesh-and-blood human activity – here were louring brass tones, percussive patternings and stark, almost pitiless wind-and-brass chords, made bleaker and more unremitting by undulating strings, whose occasional sul ponticello tones  further highlighted the isolation and loneliness of the seascape. Slowly the characters in this scenario emerged – the ship, bound, but patient and stoic, and the sea, with its near-limitless resources giving notice of its power while holding itself at first in reserve.

Clarinet and piccolo brought light and animation, the ship feeling the ocean’s all-encompassing but relatively static embrace and conveying its gratification, which the brasses at first seemed to confirm, though occasionally reminding the vessel of its tenuous grip upon oceanic tranquility – however, the winds’ ever-increasingly playful, and La Mer-like interactions with the strings which followed seemed to defy at first the disquiet of the increasingly baleful brass – but then, with the tocsin adding portentous soundings, the ocean finally voiced its displeasure and impatience, unleashing its dominance over the hapless ship. In the wake of the agitations a kind of cosmic balance seemed crucial and came with the winds’ restoration of serenity, with the strings’ stratospheric tones resounding in empathy as vessel and ocean retreated into silence.

With Jess Gillam’s superb alto saxophone playing “life” was definitely on the cards for both of the next two items, the Saxophone Concerto by Alexander Glazunov being a new piece for me, though I’d heard Darius Milhaud’s “Scaramouche” before played by two pianos. Glazunov wrote his concerto for Sigurd Rascher, a German-born American saxophonist, who, according to the composer “mercilessly hounded” the latter for the piece’s completion. He himself never heard a public performance of the work.

Though Jess Gillam “owned” the performance in a visual, “playing with her whole body”  sense, we were just as entranced by the exchanges between soloist and orchestra throughout – Glazunov didn’t seek to exploit the instrument’s more jazzily contemporary qualities, but instead expressed and shared with the orchestra an old-world romanticism, to which Gillam and the players responded with breath-bated beauty. Perhaps the gem from the piece was the fugal finale, which tossed the material around between soloist and orchestra before the saxophone skipped off on a kind of goose-chase of recycled material and then regaled us with a hilariously raucous fanfare finish!

Darius Milhaud’s Scaramouche was even more winning than I remembered in its saxophone-and-orchestra guise – a delightfully vertiginous opening, with the soloist’s whirling figurations buoyed up by strummed strings and bubbling winds and brass! We were regaled by a version of “Ten Green Bottles” which differed from the one I was taught at school but resonated just as strongly, its trajectory then deliciously interwoven with the opening! The middle movement’s dream-like processional took us to a graceful waltz sequence, then combined the two, before whirling us into a final Brazileira, a samba that produced toe-tapping activation all around and enthusiastic applause at the end. Gillam’s encore, Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”, couldn’t have rounded the life-vibe off better!

And what, then, of love? Sergei Rachmaninov’s music for many people embodies such a feeling, though with this, the concluding work of his creative career he would have pronounced his achievement as something of a failure, describing his composing self as “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien…..” and calling his Symphonic Dances, his Op.45, his “last spark”. However, the love Rachmaninov felt as an exile from his lost homeland, Russia, is manifest throughout all of this music. And it was a love that was greater and deeper for being unattainable – the Russia he knew and loved had gone.

Gemma New’s performance of the work with the NZSO was an extraordinary experience for me, due to the abiding sense I got from her realisation of the music with her players of this quality of love. It was expressed in many ways – in the players’ attack throughout the work, in the weight she accorded the phrasing of the main themes, in the variegated emphases she gave different phrases so that they sounded freshly-minted, and in her awareness of the specific character of each of the work’s episodes. Not the least of these achievements was her inspired collaboration with the same Jess Gillam as the “guest” orchestral saxophonist in the first movement’s great instrumental solo.

Only at the end of the first movement, when Rachmaninov relinquishes his iron grip on the music’s driving rhythm and allows a reminiscence of the “Dies Irae” theme from his First Symphony to make an appearance, did I experience a pang of disappointment – New took us straight into this moment without reflection upon its sudden reincarnation. whereas I wanted to be taken more tenderly to this “freshly disinterred” episode from a work whose ham-fisted premiere performance (conducted, ironically, by Alexander Glazunov!)  had given the young composer the most harrowing artistic experience of his career.  Of course it’s one of those instances of a different interpreter’s subjectivity having to be accepted and validated. But the rest brought ample compensation, with one of the most moving and exciting performances I’d ever heard for all the above reasons, and richly deserving of enduring memory.

ENEMY OF THE STATE – a multivaried concert experience with Psathas, Glazunov and Shostakovich

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
ENEMY OF THE STATE

JOHN PSATHAS – Next Planet
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Violin Concerto
DMITRI  SHOSTAKOVICH – Lady Macbeth of the Mstensk District –
(Suite from the Opera – arr. Marc Taddei)

Benjamin Baker (violin)
Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Hutt City Brass
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 18th October 2025

Concert programmes can be tricky things to put together, whatever the aims and objectives of those who consider what might best fulfil projected outcomes. Some will prioritise the idea of pleasing what would be considered a requisite amount of people for attendances’ sakes, looking to assemble repertoire that’s either tried and true, or novel in a sense of interest generated by reputation or even recent sensation. Others wanting to explore less well-worked vistas which however indicate sufficient potential for attracting interest will gradually build momentums of discovery and exploration for audiences to ease themselves into and hopefully relish such discoveries and thus be enthused all the more, developing a positive and lasting momentum of support.

Obviously my scenario descriptions show a bias in favour of the latter, mainly because it’s a scenario which I think Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington have followed throughout this present season with considerable success, and in their own distinctive way – Taddei could have alternatively “cherry-picked” Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s entire symphonic output over the six concerts, or presented an amalgam of symphonic and concertante works, but instead chose to concentrate on a specific era of the composer’s creative achievement, in this case (and quoting the title of one of the concert programmes)  very much “Under the Dictator’s Shadow”.

What it’s meant is that we’re being given an in-depth resume of a significant period of activity by one of twentieth century music’s most significant creative artists while in the throes of institutionalised disapproval almost to the point of persecution at the hands of the authorities, personified (and instigated) by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The final concert of the sequence will present to us a composer’s ostensible “giving way” to a dictator’s demands with what seems a public gesture of submission, while privately and through encoded musical gesturings, expressing and maintaining defiance. Some commentators continue to maintain that, despite such ambiguities the composer’s behaviour suggests an acquiescence to  the Soviet regime even after Stalin’s death, while others tend to disagree, a debate that continues to divide opinion.

This latest concert instalment of the sequence highlights a particular flashpoint in the dictator/ composer relationship, the latter’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, a work that had achieved popular success until Stalin took it upon himself to attend a performance, late in January 1936, and famously leaving the theatre before the work’s conclusion. Little time was wasted in expressing his displeasure at what he heard, via the Soviet newspaper Pravda’s notorious review of the work a couple of days afterwards, bringing down the dictator’s ire, along with that of his collection of toadies  that made up institutionalised Soviet officialdom, on the composer’s head.

Pravda’s resounding phrase “Muddle instead of Music” has since, along with similar  examples of critical invective levelled against Shostakovich,  triumphantly vindicated Oscar Wilde’s famous quip “There is only one thing worse in the world than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about”, Even though in situ there were , of course,  attendant dangers for artists in Stalin’s Russia in voicing any criticism of the regime, history has come out with firmly positive views regarding the opera’s artistic validations of life and culture for Russian people in the era of the time, set within its wider depictions of human universality.

Though even in its somewhat truncated form here “Lady Macbeth” simply dominated in almost every way its concert companions on this occasion, both offerings allowed us a modicum of “food for thought” of divergent kinds. The concert opened with a work by John Psathas, a superbly-ambient “spaced-out” orchestral experience whose title “Next Planet” nevertheless posed for me more questions than it answered by the time the music had run its unexpectedly brief inter-planetary course. Psathas’s work was jointly commissioned by the Tonnhalle Dusseldorf GmbH and the Dusseldorf Symphony as part of an extended environmental protection project whose theme was “sustainability within the concert experience” – “Next Planet” was one of twelve works, each assigned to different sustainability topics, though Psathas, who co-ordinated the project, was allowed to choose his own topic. His response was to write a piece about “the self-aggrandizing heroes…intent on spending billions in taking a few people to Mars, rather than invest that money in improving life here on Earth……”

On the face of things, the music depicted little more than what seemed like the outer-space equivalent of  “a short ride in a fast machine” – but I was taking the music at its face value instead of looking for clues suggesting hidden meanings and agendas. It may be that Psathas’s piece might perhaps have been more appropriately performed  in the orchestra’s finai concert along with the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, (as “coded” a piece of outwardly-optimistic composition as ever was conceived!) – Psathas’s contempt (heartily endorsed universally) for such inappropriately self-glorifying undertakings would have then made a splendidly fatuous-sounding adjunct to Shostakovich’s hollowed-out paeans of praise for an already brutal and repressive regime and its great leader!

Though I would have just as happily heard some examples of shamefully-neglected music by Rimsky-Korsakov (those splendid suites from “Tsar Saltan” or “Le Coq d’Or”) as examples of anti-establishment artistic expression, I took heart at reading about the supportive stances and various kindnesses shown to his fellow composers (including Shostakovich) at various times by Alexander Glazunov, whose Violin Concerto was here programmed. The only previous work I had heard of Glazunov’s was the delightful Ballet “The Seasons”, while his other, somewhat dubious claim to fame I’d encountered  was his much-reiterated ineptitude as a conductor when placed in charge of the ill-fated premiere of the young Sergei Rachmaninov’s First Symphony!

I had never heard the Violin Concerto before – a work notable for its late-Romantic nostalgic feeling and somewhat idiosyncratic structure, its three movements being  reorganised into two, with the usual slow movement “sandwiched” into the first as a kind of “interlude”, and the last movement entered without a break at the conclusion of a cadenza from the soloist. All of this fell most gratefully on the ear, and provided ample opportunity for the soloist, Ben Baker (whom we’d seen and heard at an earlier concert in Mozart’s gorgeous Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola) to display his  virtuosity and feeling for the music’s character.

Soloist and orchestra established a focused, sombre mood at the beginning, the work’s sequential passages then bringing us to the tender second subject, Baker’s tone pure and clean and delightful, with a gorgeous “silvery” aspect in places, though one that was sometimes “covered” by his accompaniments – in the scherzo-like section Baker was more assertive, leading from this into the cadenza with pin-drop concentration, and varied energies. Though one quickly tired of the rather trite fanfare theme of the finale, Baker put across great enjoyment of the more rustic of the variations, and the quickening of the tempi towards the ending brought excitement and daring to the concluding exchanges.

And so the stage was set for the performance of a Shostakovich work which in terms of range and scope and potential trouble from the ruling establishment for the composer, is almost a kind of “companion work” for the epic Fourth Symphony that featured in the orchestra’s previous Shostakovich concert,. The composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, was presented tonight in a truncated but still impactful version made up of various orchestral excepts (mostly “interludes” which the composer had crafted especially for the work) and various arias sonorously delivered throughout the story by the opera’s heroine.  Katerina is the bored wife of a merchant husband who spends most of his time away from her on business. She inevitably falls in love with somebody else, and her obsession with her new lover, Sergey, leads to the murders of both her father-in-law and her husband before she and her lover are eventually caught and sent to a labour camp, where Sergey, having grown tired of her, blames her for everything and rejects her, before forming an association with another woman prisoner – in the throes of despair, Katerina drowns both her rival and herself in a nearby lake.

Despite the dark savagery of much of the story, parts of it (Katerina’s arias especially) are genuinely moving, while other parts draw from Shostakovich’s gift for black comedy and irony (the picture drawn of the police force is of pure comic irony, Gilbertian, but with savage overtones). In a society where corruption is rife and brutality and misogyny are close to the surface, the story still readily resonates – to claim that it would lack basic box-office appeal (as does another reviewer, while nevertheless rhapsodising over Madeleine Pierard’s stunning vocal realisations of the aforementioned arias) is in my view a debatable point!

Music director Marc Taddei selected not only the existing orchestral interludes crafted for the opera by the composer, but excerpts from every scene of the opera, contriving, in his own words, “a concentrated symphonic portrait of her passion, independence, transgressions and tragic fate”. Certainly the juxtapositioning of charged, atmospheric orchestral narrative with Pierard’s straightaway arresting voice brought us into almost cheek-by jowl proximity with both the character and the circumstances that would shape Katerina and her destiny. As a “road map” of the opera I found it an incredibly full-on experience, though I felt it was somewhat less “of a piece” with Katerina herself when her character seemed to suddenly recede during the orchestral descriptions of the discovery of Katarina’s husband’s body, the wedding celebrations and the arrival of the police to arrest the lovers. We “connected” with her again when she returned to the front of the platform to deliver her two despairing final arias, here very properly running them into one single utterance so that the character’s opening lament is then subsumed into a nihilistic vision, giving her the only option available that makes sense – simply devastating!

Marc Taddei’s dauntless Orchestra Wellington and their sonorous cohorts, the Hutt City Brass, played their hearts out in bringing into being the composer’s extraordinarily vivid depictions of life under duress for the story’s characters. As with this orchestra’s quite extraordinary realisation of the demanding Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich a couple of months previously, the players seemed to revel in whatever demands the music made on ensemble, or tone production, with only a hiatus or two of trajectory which I noticed on the couple of occasions that conductor Marc Taddei introduced some kind of rallentando in heavily-scored passages where the ensemble seemed to have brief moments of less-than-unanimous response. For all the rest it seemed that conductor and players had again achieved something remarkable with this less-than-well-known but fascinatingly addictive and readily compelling music.

 

NZTrio – “fantastique” here in Wellington in every way

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio presents “Fantastique”
Music by Turina, Shostakovich, Chen Yi, Psathas and Franck

JOAQUÍN TURINA – Circulo (1936)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor (1923)
CHEN YI – Tibetan Tunes (2007)
JOHN PSATHAS – Angelus (2025)
CESAR FRANCK – Piano Trio No. 1in F-sharp Minor (1841)

NZTrio – Amalia Hall (violin) / Callum Hall (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 30th August, 2025

To my surprise I discovered my last encounter with the justly-vaunted NZTrio took place no less than seven years previously – though the Covid pandemic can be held responsible for numerous  cancellations, dislocations and reorganisations of music presentations over time, such a biblical duration of estrangement in this case hardly seemed likely! On further investigation I found I had actually been “gazumphed” on a handful of occasions by my fellow-reviewers who’d obviously snaffled the Trio’s more recent Wellington appearances for their own delectation!

Now, here in 2025 I realise this is not the same NZTrio I had seen and heard perform in 2018 – in fact, not even slightly! These are three different musicians whose qualities have naturally realigned my expectations, but whose performance has predictably given rise to a “vive la difference” reaction, and particularly as I had already encountered both Amalia Hall and Somi Kim as concerto soloists in concert to spectacular effect.

To enrich matters even further, the group had a “guest” cellist on this occasion, one who’s currently filling in for the recently-appointed Matthias Balzat – apparently the Trio are using “guest” cellists in different programmes throughout the year, of which Callum Hall (who happens to be Amalia Hall’s brother) is one for this Fantastique programme. Whether this arrangement will continue in future seasons, or the Trio will eventually “secure” Balzat’s occupancy of the cellist’s chair remains to be seen!

Described as “a programme of contrasts”  this Fantastique presentation certainly filled the bill, with a positively global range of evocations! Joachim Turina’s music is slowly finding its way back into concert programmes of all kinds, my memory being of a recent performance in Wellington of the once-popular and colourful Danzas fantásticas, and of not-so recent but still-remembered occasional outings for the composer’s second Piano Trio. Tonight’s work was new to me, and a joyful surprise – a brilliant evocation of an Andalusian day, whose title, Circulo, suggests the metaphorical “circle” of a regular world-wide phenomenon of progression from dawn through midday to dusk – there are, of course, “no words to make the sun roll east”, as New Zealand poet ARD Fairburn once wrote….

The music appropriately began with Amanecer (Dawn), with darkly and deeply pondering cello and piano exchanges, from which grew an opening melody on the cello – the violin took it further, and with the piano’s full-blooded support united with the ‘cello in a soulful string unison utterance! How beautifully the NZTrio players then nudged the growing light of day forwards, colouring the changes beautifully with alternating harmonies and reaching a point where the music was liberated into the morning’s fullnesses! Here the violin and ‘cello soared upwards as the piano cascaded light-and-sound energies in all directions, the music conveying an irresistible sense of joyous delight at the day’s promise amid pending excitement, then breaking off exultantly at the top of the music’s concluding phrase!

The second movement, Mediodia (Midday). plunged us into the world of flamenco trajectories and sonorities, with flailing pizzicati from the strings and crunching rhythms from the piano dramatically riveting the listeners’ attentions, see-sawing throughout the movement  from pizzicato to arco and from jagged accents to sultry lines – the flamenco rhythms gathered themselves for a final sequence of exuberant swashbuckling gesturings before grandly tipping over and into the work’s final Crepúsculo (Dusk) movement, redolent with feelings of spent energies and relaxed release, the music gradually and beautifully surrendering its buoyancies and high spirits to the oncoming night and its mysteries – gorgeous string  playing from Amalia Hall and Callum Hall, with sonorous support from Somi Kim’s piano here, redolent with a nostalgic sense of farewell – with such playing it was easy for me to fall madly in love with this work.

As promised each item brought with it a markedly different sense of “place”, with Dmitri Shostakovich’s youthful Piano Trio in C Minor bringing a new world to view. The marked contrasts within the piece itself were somewhat accentuated by the seventeen year-old composer’s somewhat agitated state when the work was written, of having fallen in love and subsequently dedicating the work to the object of his affections  – she eventually married someone else having left her indelible mark on this music’s wildly passionate character! Adding to the music’s character are the pronounced influences of Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Glazunov, the last-named  Shostakovich’s composition teacher at the Petrograd Conservatory. Despite its juvenile aspects the music readily hints at a number of the composer’s lifelong traits, such as his love of grotesquerie in various forms – sudden changes of mood through contrasting dynamics, timbres and trajectories, His occasional employment as a cinema pianist also shows through –  I read an account of Shostakovich actually rehearsing his part in the work with others as an accompaniment to some films he was playing for!

The piece had almost everything its instrumentalists could want as regards satisfying and involving display of all kinds – trenchantly-involving lines, lyrical display, brilliant and quixotic passages of teamwork, and in certain places near-fulsome virtuosity – both Amalia Hall’s violin and Callum Hall’s ‘cello caught the heart-on-sleeve melancholy of the opening exchanges, but were equally at home with the skitterish contrasting episodes which boiled over in places, the players appearing to relish the “sparring” aspects of the sequences – as for pianist Somi Kim, her playing delivered in spadefuls every variation of mood, from the deep, full throated utterances of the opening, through the more gently-lyrical Rachmaninovian sequences to the all-out virtuosic sweep of the work’s more coruscating moments! Another tidbit of information I picked up from elsewhere was that the final section of the work had at some stage been lost, so that the piece’s last 16 bars in the work as published (not until after the composer’s death) were apparently “added” by one of Shostakovich‘s pupils (Boris Tischenko).

Next came music by Chinese-born American-based composer Chen Yi, a work called “Tibetan Tunes”, one which I’d previously heard twelve years ago, when it was played by the “old” NZ Trio at a memorable “China meets New Zealand in music” concert held at Victoria University of Wellington.  Chinese-born Chen Yi, now living in the United States was trained as a classical violinist, but was inspired by her contact during the Cultural Revolution with Chinese folk music to take up further studies of her folk music heritage. She moved to the US in 1986 to continue her musical studies at Columbia University, and at present is Distinguished Professor of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri/Kansas City.

Her two-movement work Tibetan Tunes, written in 2007 for the New Pacific Trio and premiered by them the same year was inspired firstly by a Tibetan folk melody “Du Mu” which is the name of a god of Tibetan Buddhism, one which the composer here wished  to depict “in a serene mood”. I remember thinking at my previous hearing of the work how evocative of something “elsewhere” was the writing for the instruments – as it was here, the violin’s harmonic-like held notes contrasting with the rhapsodic, folkish cello tune while the piano’s echoed the exchanges with decorative roulades. After some gentle, widely-spaced canonic gesturings, the strings joined in unison to celebrate the god’s all-encompassing equanimity, and afterwards reflecting individually, leaving the piano with the last word.

The second piece, “Dui Xie” had its genesis in ensembled folk-music featuring bowed and plucked strings and bamboo flutes – dance-like from the beginning, and altogether livelier than the opening work, the strings sang a melody and its variants over the piano’s rhythms, the cello’s lines having a particularly folkish kind of portamento character in places – charmingly old-fashioned! This excitingly changed to exciting string pizzicati and driving piano figurations, before the opening returned bringing  expressive, recitative-like harmonics – amazing playing from Amalia Hall – along with piano ostinati, sustained trills from the strings and a climactic mid-air finish!

Appropriately one of the concert’s stopover places was Aotearoa New Zealand,  represented here by a work from John Psathas, a piece with the name Angelus and freshly commissioned from the NZTrio itself. It’s actually in part derived from an earlier work for ‘cello and piano called “Halo”, one whose final movement Psathas reworked for NZTrio – these are the composer’s comments at the time of writing the complete work: –

I created this piece around the time of my mother’s death, something I’ve always found it difficult to write about.

The pre-recorded sounds in this piece are very subtle, and in a live performance it should not be visible to the audience how and when these sounds are beginning and ending.

The ‘circle on the head of an angel’ is a good metaphor for these extra sounds; they are like an audio ‘halo’ around the live sounds. They should be quiet enough that the listener isn’t sure if they are hearing them or not, almost like it’s an invisible processing of the natural piano sound.

They are supposed to represent the presence of a spirit from ‘the other side of life’ – for me it is the presence of my mother’s spirit in the room. For you or anyone listening, it could be anyone in your life or mind or heart.

The last movement is really about (the memory of) conflict between child and parent. This conflict is fuelled by strong emotions, mostly love, and is often powerfully dramatic. The way our anger and conflict can be shaped by love within our closest relationships.

The last LH idea in the piano is a way to end with a question, and also a representation of the infinite, and also a dissolving of the physical (the live instrument sound) into the spiritual (the invisible audio halo). I love this ending very much – it is like music from beyond life. (John Psathas)

From the piece’s abrupt beginning the music grabs the listener with its insistent driving rhythms, the syncopations activating exhilarating criss-cross rhythmic thrusts and tugs, with pizzicato violin set against arco cello set against running piano, the intensities rising and falling as the violin’s sul ponticello tones rasp and sting, with the strings  descending into the depths, the tremolandi tones intensifying, and the piano sounding doom-laden pronouncements. As the ambiences descend further the composer’s “audio halo” sounds as if from another world, eerily activating a harmonics response from the strings, a strange and wondrous dialogue of connection of sounds floating through space.

Out of the exchanges come impulses of urgency, the energies pushing all ways, upwards, downwards and forwards simultaneously, the piano elaborating on an ever-ascending chorale-like theme which leads to an impassioned kind of recitative from the strings, additionally “whipped up” by swirling piano figures – the resonant sonic wave emanating from the sudden climax of this cornucopian all-together is almost heart-stoppingly allowed to run its course until a gentle piano ostinato emerges, registering first a violin then a cello tremolando response – and, as the piano continues to gently rhapsodise and the strings murmur their assent, the sonic halo reappears, transfixing our riveted sensibilities into an indefinite silence…..what an experience!

I was looking forward to the César Franck Piano Trio at the programme’s end, fascinated at its Op.1 place in this composer’s output and marvelling upon further investigation at there actually being two other similar works sharing the same Opus number! These works were praised by both Mendelssohn and Liszt, the latter generously organising further performances throughout Germany – but Franck’s early years and works were blighted by his difficult relationship with a dominant father, resulting in eventual estrangement and the young man going his own way, pursuing the career of an organist and only returning to chamber and symphonic works in his maturity. As someone who loves masterpieces such as the Violin Sonata and the Piano Quintet, this Op.1 Trio was for me fascinating in sounding occasional pre-echoes of the inspiration that would eventually flower to produce those resounding achievements of Franck’s later years.

A stepwise piano figure opened the work, joined by cello and violin elaborating on a soulful theme, with the exchanges intensifying the interaction – out of a sudden pause came a charming second theme, the instruments then building the triplet rhythms up with gusto, Somi Kim’s piano pounding out the trajectories  as Amalia Hall’s violin passionately sang the melody, with Callum Hall’s ‘cello-tremolandi filling out the quasi-orchestral textures with urgently upward-rushing figures! These vigorous peregrinations wound the exchanges down through major-minor key shifts to a crashing,almost apoplectic-making concluding chord!

An allegro molto movement followed, the piano tapping out a repeated note triplet rhythm and the strings urging along a kind of horseback-ride melody – splendid stuff, with the strings adding skitterish figurations for exciting effect! – the trio section did well with simple means, a downward-rushing scale in canon between piano and strings, varying this effectively with the strings ascending against the piano’s descent! A return to the triplet scherzo music had the solo strings varying the  mix with pizzicato repetitions of the horseback music, almost to sinister effect in places – this led to an unexpectedly resounding plunge, attacca, into the work’s finale – a stirring transition which worked splendidly, so that, almost before we knew what was happening, the Allegro Maestoso was on its way, complete with  great pianistic flourishes and gesturings from Somi Kim.

Easeful, lyrical and whole-hearted playing from Amalia Hall’s violin and Callum Hall’s ‘cello engaged our interest through contrasting minor-key episodes and some singular, almost honky-tonk modulations – the young Franck determined to flaunt his wares! – that done, the players raced into what felt like the movement’s coda, at the conclusion of which , the unexpected pause before the final flourish caught us out, as it would have done many audiences before, bursting in as we did, with premature applause! –  followed, of course, by subsequent laughter and giggles all around at the combination of our eagerness and the youthful composer’s largesse! All in all –  Fantastique! – just as promised!

STROMA – a quarter-century of recreated effervescence in heaven and earth!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – Heaven and Earth – a celebration of 25 years of bold new music

Works by Leila Adu-Gilmore, Olivier Messiaen, Gemma Peacocke, John Rimmer,
Sofia Gubaidulina and Michael Norris

OLIVIER MESSIAEN – Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus (1941)
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Gabriela Glapska (piano)
LEILA ADU-GILMORE – Heaven is Life (2025) (premiere)
Julia Broom (violin), Nicholas Hancox (viola). Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
JOHN RIMMER – When Sea Meets Sky 2 (1975)
Hamish McKeich (conductor), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Hayes
(clarinet), Lenny Sakofsky (percussion), Gabriela Glapska (piano),
Julia Broom (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
MICHAEL NORRIS – The Spaces in Between (2025)
Gabriela Glapska (piano), Anna van der Zee (violin) Ken Ichinose (cello)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA – Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (1980) (Garden of Joy and
Sorrow)
Bridget Douglas (flute) / Michelle Velvin (harp) Nicholas Hancox ( viola)
GEMMA PEACOCKE – Sky-fields (2020)
Bridget Douglas (flute), Gabriela Glapska (piano) Ken Ichinose (cello)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)

Public Trust Hall, Wellington,

Wednesday, 27th August, 2025

This was a red-letter concert for Wellington’s contemporary music ensemble Stroma, being the 25th anniversary (almost to the day) of the ensemble’s very first concert on the 18th of August, 2000. Michael Norris, one of the founders of the fledgling group (and a co-director of the present Stroma Ensemble) welcomed us all warmly,  outlining for us something of the flavour of the group’s genesis and current raison d’etre, including the evening’s inclusion of both home-grown and off-shore works, and the presence of at least one premiere (see below).

The concert this evening actually began with an excerpt from a larger work by Olivier Messiaen – which I’ll describe at the end of this review, and instead give pride of place to the palpable excitement generated by the evening’s premiere, second on the programme. This was  New Zealand composer Leila Adu-Gilmore’s Heaven is Life, a work which has its genesis in the composer’s reaction to present-day global strife and civil unrest in the wake of travelling in India and encountering a community of Tibetan Buddhist nuns at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery in Rumtek, Sikkim, India, a group of women, in the composer’s words, “caring for others, garnering respect, and sought out more and more for practices previously performed by men”. Adu-Gilmore was particularly moved by the nuns’ chanting for hours both morning and evening, in ceremonies for the local community, and decided to record the ritual, from which she eventually picked a short, self-contained chant with the title Green Tara, the community’s conceptualisation of a “Mother Earth”, a being whose wisdom and compassion would help those in their time of need. She then composed a string trio whose gesturings and tones would complement the nuns’ voices, intending to blend the recording of the material within the Trio’s performance. The result is this performance, dedicated to the nuns and young children in their care at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery, in Rumtek, Sikkim, India.

The performance here created a truly singular effect with the nuns’ voices intermeshed with the instruments in a parallel expressions of invocation, sharing through common cause a heightened sense of a process centred on the life-force –  for the nuns the focus was “Green Tara”, while from the standpoint of the composer and musicians the resulting instrumental sounds made for a kind of connective recognition. This was most marked, oddly, when the chanting voices stopped, leaving the stringed instruments in possession of those “acquired” connections, and charged with conveying their retrospective essence to us! The shift from meditative lines and impulses to dance-like gesturings in the trio’s music indicated something of that inclination to further communicate something of a “Heaven is Life” feeling for the here and now…..

John Rimmer’s Where Sea Meets Sky 2 is a “twin” manifestation for acoustic instruments of a previous electroacoustic piece of the same name. and which was inspired by a flight across the Tasman. The piece was an “outgrowth” of the electronic piece for the composer in that the acoustic version did things that the electronic version didn’t do, though without one superseding the other.

The work had an arresting beginning – a loud chord bolstered by tremolando notes from winds and piano, but allowed to die away, followed by a sliver of percussion and deep piano chords, stimulating string-timbres, and winds hanging on to ever-diminishing tones. The piece’s evocations had a constant state of flux, with the instruments’ variations between spectral irruptions and sustained tones adding to the atmosphere – for instance,  we heard percussion scintillations with a gong-stroke, then strings playing disembodied held notes as winds sounded single-note irruptions and piano adding to the ambiences with brief treble impulses – the instruments particularly crowded in their impulses throughout the music’s middle section, creating a constantly interactive cornucopian sound picture to the point of near frenzy, before slowly dissipating, gradually favouring longer-held tones (clarinet and flute solos remaining in the memory), augmented by wide-ranging “dampened” piano notes and gradually receding percussion – all reflecting its composer’s particular sensitivity towards ambient detail.

Michael Norris, himself contributed a thoughtful (and entertaining) spoken preface to his recent (2025) and intensely visceral composition “The Spaces in Between”, a work which here put us in touch with the music’s subject-matter in no uncertain terms – I confess to always enjoying Norris’s readiness in his music I’ve heard for employing direct and often graphic (though invariably intuitive-sounding) stimuli – two pieces in particular I remember which demonstrated for me this power of  illustrative evocation are, firstly a 2018 performance of Claro, written for full orchestra, (described as :”an exercise of expressivity out of abstractiveness”) , and (when reviewing the disc in 2023) a recording featuring an epic string quartet work Exitus, one containing a number of raw musical depictions of different cultures’ conceptualisations of afterlife.

Here, I particularly enjoyed Norris’s succinct descriptive phrase  “rocks can bend” words which he attributed to his father, and which sums up the effect of forces constantly at work in our own Earth’s particular geosphere, in direct relation to which is the composer’s own sonic realisation of the interplay of these forces – “The Spaces in Between”. Norris quoted both Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Rashmirathi at the beginning of his programme note about the music, firstly (Ovid) “the shifting story of the world”, and then (Ramdhari Singh) “everything is born from me, everything returns to me”.  The music’s evocation therefore deals with a transitory world, where the idea of terra firma is in fact one subject to “inexorable flux”.

To entrust the depiction of such forces at work to the seemingly economical contingent of a piano trio seemed a boldly ambitious scheme, but the musicians here seemed to readily transcend any such physical limitations with the energy and focus of their evocations throughout, with firm, constant-sounding beginnings from the piano playing fifths and the strings establishing a palpably “present” state of being.  As the strings began “pulling” gradually at the tones and patternings of the notes, suggesting inexorable pressures, the piano intensified its patterned fifths into a rapid ostinato, the strings’ intensities deepening, with “bending” of their notes, indicating the elemental nature of forces at work. The ostinato fifths galvanised into more rapidly-repeated note-patterns as the irresistible forces exerted their effect – the strings played both held and repeated notes against the piano’s constant arpeggiations and tremolandi depicting the ferment within and the evident disruptions without, the music’s key-changes further dramatizing the processes. The tones suddenly took on a soaring kind of aspect whose strands melted down to meet the irruptions from below, with a single-note “centre” that turned into a warmish chord slowly spreading through the sounds’ harmonic world, the piano’s fifth transformed into octave-sounds, everything slightly “smudged” in effect, or “fractured”, a quality that felt to the listener like a recast or remoulded state of being – as if one’s own sense of existence had been reshaped,  and a new order prevailed – again I found myself thinking of TS Eliot’s description of “an eternal action, an eternal patience”.

Sofia Gubaidulina  who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-three was notable for her work’s “purity of sound” and her love for “ecstatic incantation”. Growing up in Soviet Russia in a predominantly atheist household, she maintained an unquenchable personal religious faith which found its way into her music despite official disapproval (she took heart from the quiet support of Shostakovich at the time), and was admitted to the Union of Soviet composers in 1961.Inspired by her contemporaries, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part and Valentin Silvestrov, she looked beyond her Russianness to 20tth century modernism in general, and developed a reputation for incorporating theological ideas in her concert music, famously Introitus (1978) and Offertorium (1980), besides numerous other works since then.

Her 1980 work Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (Garden of Joy and Sorrow) was inspired directly by two literary works. One was a biography of a legendary Armenian storyteller/singer Sayat-Nova, written by the Russian writer Iv Oganov, and the other a set of verses by the modern German poet Francisco Tanzer – the two works encapsulate Gubaidulina’s creative philosophy in the merging of their different influences, Oganov’s intense and rapturous personalisation of the garden’s flowering here finding a kind of sublimated detachment of feeling in Tanzer’s wry reasonings – Gubaidulina’s score directs that the original German text of the poet’s words be read aloud – a good thing the programme notes gave us some of Oganov’s sentences as well! – “the peal of the singing garden grew”, and “the lotus was set aflame by music” – those thoughts enabled us to experience even more directly the composer’s  own progressions in her music  from bright, visceral colourations to their “true endings”.

This engagingly ambient work for flute, harp and viola began with a kind of “awakening” duet between flute and harp, the sounds gradually coalescing into consciousness via encouraging breaths of tone from the flute and bent glissando tone-gulps (almost sitar-like) from the harp, followed by eerily beautiful fanfare-harmonics from the viola, two different sonic worlds gradually effecting a meeting. The viola darkened its tones, flute and harp tremulously acclaimed its presence, and the “trialogues” began – beautifully arpeggiated exchanges, firstly flute-and-harp, and then viola-and-harp, the latter “preparing” the strings for a bone-dry ostinato to accompany the like-minded viola. How resonant was the following sequence, the three instruments building blocks of effervescing phrases, until the flute’s spectacular downward-cascading tumble! And what a journey we were taken upon by the composer’s  “ecstatic flowering” versions of the music’s bright major aspects – such a joyous and uplifting flute solo on the piece’s “central plateau” which was then set against those“darker intervals” of minor seconds and thirds which then grew out of the crevices and cracks of the aftermath’s rather more rueful continuance!  A  meditative viola solo took us back to the work’s beginning with those nostalgic viola arpeggio harmonics, sitar-like harp glissando-notes and envoi-like flute notes – how interesting to then have the human voice making a contribution to what the music expresses, which we got from violist Nicholas Hancox at the end…….

Originally from Hamilton, Gemma Peacocke studied firstly at Victoria University and the  New Zealand School of Music before moving to the United States in 2014  where she  worked with various ensembles, including her co-founded Kinds of Kings Collective, often in projects with a sociopolitical focus on under-heard voices.   Sky Fields, a 2020 work (which for some reason got into the programme listed as a 2025 composition), concluded the concert with a kind of visionary series of vignettes, introduced  and re-emphasised, often with compelling, attention-grabbing urgency, by the ensemble’s delivery of “blips” – unpredictably-placed but redolently hopeful irruptions of energy  whose sequence suggested a kind of life-dance which Peacocke characterised in her programme-note with the words “even when we can’t see it  there is hope”. The composer drew her title from a sequence in J.R.Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series of books when one of the characters in the third book Return of the King refers to the promise of the coming day, though hidden in the darkness, already opening in the eastern mountains’ Sky-Fields.

The ”blips” which began the piece could be said to “clear the air” for both performers and the audience, a kind of “sky-washing” of sonic textures in preparation for something new and original – the toccata-like togetherness of the opening trajectories initiated by the “blips” combined irruptive energies, such as the flute’s explosive interjections, with more delicate, patient intertwinings. There was a feeling of the textures being airborne rather than earth-bound, with even the bowed marimba notes seeming to arise from out of the earth and take flight – it all brought a cumulative kind of momentum to the music, heading towards the “what happens next” pause before the second movement…

Again, the blips! – the flute gave us what sounded like birdsong, a summons of sorts to the cello singing with the piano and the flute and marimba dancing, then all coming together on a “shared “ note, commented on by the piano and irradiated by a sparkling cymbal roll. Movement Three then blended the sounds beautifully, the lines “floating’ between the instruments and their different timbral characteristics and punctuating things with a nudged phrase or occasional “blip”, the intensities of exchange growing, resulting in a kind of concerted recitative point, the gestures ‘displaying” to the others in turn, each almost vying for attention!

The toccata trajectories rebegan, the interactive energies ranging from ghostly murmurings to sudden ghoul-like cries – and then, out of the silence came a new kind of awakening, a fifth movement with a more relaxed pace, and the lines a quiet radiance that suggested a growing towards surety – more “blips” and other irruptions refocused the players, occasional reminiscences of things like the flute’s bird song calls helping to reinforce a “coming together” – as the music reached a dance-like stage a robustly upward concerted call finished the piece!

I thought I’d finish the review on a kind of retrospective “where it all began” note in relation to the concert, particularly as the work from which this movement was taken has long been regarded as something unique in musical history. For its composer it represented  “a leap into an invisible paradise”.  Unlike his contemporaries, French composer Olivier Messiaen did not want to eradicate the old world or fix his gaze totally on the thereafter – instead he saw Paradise in daily life, in the words of Alex Ross, its “happenstance epiphanies”. In a way, Stroma’s collective modernist instincts seemed, like the contents of this evening’s programme, inclusive rather than rigorously “avant-garde” in a pure sense. Which is why I felt that Messiaen’s excerpt from what probably became the most famous of all his works, the “Quartet for the End of Time” was a more-than-appropriate way to begin this anniversary concert. And while I haven’t mentioned above the playing of any of the musicians by name in any of the other items (trusting in an acceptance of a certain standard excellence of quality on everybody’s part throughout the evening) I can’t help but comment on the rapt beauties of both Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s and Gabriela Glapska’s playing of their respective instruments throughout the work’s final piece, Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus. Time certainly seemed to stand still throughout this tribute to the composer, the circumstances, the occasion, the musicians involved past and present, and to music in general as an on-going living entity. And to Stroma? Messiaen was saying in his music, “Que tu vives pour toujours”.  Agreed.

 

A double bill from Wellington Opera which pulled no punches – Dame Gillian Whitehead’s Mate Ururoa, with Ross Harris’s Notes From the Front

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ROSS HARRIS – Notes from the Front (texts by Vincent O’Sullivan)
DAME GILLIAN WHITEHEAD – Mate Ururoa (libretto by the composer)

ROSS HARRIS  –  Song-cycle “Notes from the Front”
Richard Greager (tenor), Matthew Ross (violin), Emma Sayers (piano)

DAME GILLIAN WHITEHEAD – Chamber Opera “Mate Ururoa”
Cast: David Tahere (Captain Roger Dansey)
Brent Allcock (Commanding Officer)
Ariana Tikao (Whaea / Taonga Puoro)
Director: Sara Brodie
Theatrical Designers: Jacob Banks/Rebecca Bethan Jones
Conductor: Hamish McKeich
Stroma Contemporary Ensemble

The Hannah, Wellington

Friday, 11th July, 2025

Wellington Opera has surely brought off a kind of coup with these two works, Gillian Whitehead’s opera Mate Ururoa and Ross Harris’s song-cycle Notes from the Front being brought together for performance at a time when people everywhere on our planet surely have no greater, nor more urgent cause to question the rationalization, antecedents  and vindication of war.  Each of these stories draws from the same source, the conflict known as the First World War (1914-18), in which millions of people, mostly soldiers, but also civilians, perished, and which, ironically, drew in significant participation from the country geographically furthest from the actual conflict – Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Of these two works the earlier (2014) and first-performed was Ross Harris’s Notes from the Front  (the title in this context practically self-explanatory), with the text of the seven songs drawing from the letters “home” of Dunedin-born Alexander Aitken, who enlisted with the Otago Infantry as part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. The letters were written in places where he served in action, from Gallipoli to the Somme, at which latter place he was wounded. Aitken was particularly remembered for smuggling a violin into his “kit” to take with him and play on occasions in between the sequences of  “action” (the instrument miraculously survived all of this and was brought home, to be later donated to the Otago Boys School, where it is currently on display).

Though not all verbatim quotes from Aitken’s letters, poet Vincent O’Sullivan based the songs’ texts on the latter, summarising the soldier’s traumatic (and in places even surreal) experiences while on active service, and poignantly rounding the sequence through a declaration to Winifred, his future wife, whom he had met when a student, and with whom he subsequently emigrated to Scotland, taking up a mathematics professorship at Edinburgh University.

Aitken’s feelings regarding the war and its effects upon humanity in general were here laid bare in the first, and in places hallucinatory song  Visions, much later, which delineate the psychological traumas that haunted him throughout his life – “nightmare seizes me – the veiled figures…….I count on nothing more….”  – words hauntingly voiced by tenor Richard Greager, and underpinned by pianist Emma Sayers’ beautifully-focused touch, along with violinist Matthew Ross’s wraith-like postscript. The second song The Notes depicts Aitken hauntingly playing his violin in situ, “between concussions”, the latter suggested by short, sharp piano irruptions – along with bemused “that’s his violin” comments from his listeners.

Bitter irony and  savage underlinings characterise the third song’s outbursts, the piano subdued, its notes almost cowering, as the singer describes the hell of the trenches, a nightmare like nothing described in official dispatches – “it’s the blood – and the guts – and the stink of the flies!….that’s how you tell we’re Anzacs!…….” – Richard Greager grips our sensibilities as he describes people he knew from home – “Harry..…the bloke from Tuatapere……the sun turns black!….” as these people’s lives are destroyed, and the bitterness reaches its peak at the words  “…..it’s a change from Gallipoli, soldier, when you reach the Somme….”

The violin begins the elegiac fourth song On a Different Note as if playing “Deutschland Uber Alles”, accompanied by a deep piano rumbling which then breaks off – the notes the violinist plays reminds the singer of Haydn’s tune, heard at another Christmas from a German’s violin –“….a single line, defying war…..”  expressed in deep-throated tragedy. The next song Pretty Much Verbatim is the blackest irony possible, as the singer and piano characterise a fellow-soldier “Clark of Dunedin” with a description of how this friend sacrificed himself against a live grenade, holding it hidden from his mates –  “…….it is pride enough to tell I was there…..what I breathe is his….”.  Though more rhapsodic, the sixth song  Close as this is just as unsparing, describing the soldier’s imagined reunitement with a friend killed on the battlefield, but alive, back in Otago – “on the peninsular……we met where one of us had no shadow, one of us living, one of us dead….close as this……”

The last piece, Song for Winifred is a tribute to Aitken’s wife and an impassioned hope for a return to a normal life together – begun by the violin and joined by the piano, the singer passionately declaims “….Love, love in any weather….in the summer grass – and God! – the seasons pass……”  – beautiful and intensely moving. The work’s but one all-too-eloquent example from Ross Harris’s and Vincent O’Sullivan’s group of resounding collaborations regarding the subject of war’s inhumane ambition and senseless carnage.

Besides its own intrinsic qualities the Harris work made the perfect introduction to Gillian Whitehead’s Opera Mate Ururoa (a title translated as “fight bravely” or “fight to the death”, and taken from a Maori  whakatauki, or proverb “Kaua e mate wheke, mate ururoa” (Don’t die like the octopus  (that gives up easily), die like the shark (that keeps on fighting)). Whitehead undertook to write the work at the behest of David Tahere, a US-based Maori baritone whose whanau, he discovered, had close historical connections with that of Roger Te Kepa Dansey, the central character of the opera who enlisted as a member of the “Native Contingent” formed here when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914.

Dansey’s wartime story tells of the humiliation of both the Maori and Nepalese Gurkha soldiers being regarded as “second class” by the British hierarchy, and relegated to performing menial jobs like digging trenches – only when the casualty lists at places like Gallipoli deemed it necessary were Maori and Gurkhas allowed to fight. Promoted to the rank of captain, Dansey then fell foul of his commanding officers by refusing to follow orders which would result in his men facing certain and pointless death, resulting in his disgrace through accusations of cowardice and desertion, in the wake of his famous assertion regarding fighting a “white man’s war” where soldiers were “sent into” battle rather than “the Maori way” of men led by their chiefs from the front.

Thanks to the efforts of influential Maori politicians of the time Dansey’s true qualities of leadership were recognised and he was reinstated. After returning to the frontline in France at the Somme, he was gassed and had to be sent to England to recover – he remained in Europe for the next nine years, working on rehabilitation schemes in Belgium before returning to New Zealand in 1927 and settling in Rotorua, where he died in 1938 of complications resulting from his war injuries.

Whitehead wrote her own libretto for this work, intending at first for it to be a “working draft”, but deciding as she developed the piece further to retain it as a strong “from scratch”  initiative, one  creating its own on-going tradition. She was assisted throughout by David Tahere’s knowledge through his connections with Dansey’s surviving whanau, and by director Sara Brodie’s enthusiasm. respect and feeling for the project However, preparations for the first performance of Mate Ururoa at Carnegie Hall, New York, in November 2021 were unexpectedly thwarted by the Covid epidemic, so the “premiere” had to be rescheduled, not inappropriately, to its Southern Hemisphere origins.

Interviewed a couple of days before the premiere, the triumvirate of composer, director and lead singer delineated aspects of their respective journeys towards the oncoming performance.  Whitehead, with several music-theatre pieces of different kinds under her belt, was calmly philosophical regarding outcomes, emphasising the phenomenon of a work existing only in the moment of performance, and expressing quiet confidence in the extent to which her colleagues would help successfully realise these outcomes. For Brodie there was “a humbling satisfaction” at what she felt privileged to be part of (she and Whitehead had previously worked together on a 2016 music-theatre piece of the latter’s, Iris Dreaming).  Tahere characterised the opera as resembling something presented in a kind of “dream state”, with many “fragments” of the protagonist’s experience brought into play in vastly differing situations involving diametrically-opposed cultures, drawing attention to the composer’s representation of these differences, with the used of both conventional instruments (and taonga puoro (Maori instruments), straightaway giving an extra dimensional feel to these different worlds.

As with the earlier Ross Harris song-cycle, the presentation of the opera generated its own singular ambience of almost claustrophobic intensity in its depiction of a single individual pitting himself against almost insuperable odds with courage and resolve……my notes are as follows: Upon entering this wonderfully indeterminate but pliable performance space finely modulated by designer Rebecca Bethan Jones, and ambiently lit by Jacob Banks, David Tahere’s presence as Captain Roger Dansey flows into its world like a beam of light awakened by the taonga puoro “call” from one of the bird-song-like indigenous instruments played by Ariana Tikao, the singer’s words making reference to his birthplace, near Ohinemutu, in Rotorua – “Here the steam rises – my home, my resting place”…. and at once we realise that here is a man looking back over his life, the first reminiscence being his confrontation with Brent Allcock’s stiff upper-lipped Commanding Officer accusing Dancey of defying orders at Gallipoli in order to save the lives of his men. Conductor Hamish McKeich keeps his Stroma Ensemble forces on the boil throughout, their frequent interjections representing both the establishment and the individual, tracking the exchanges between both personalities and the interaction of modern instruments and taonga puoro to underline the conflict between not only Pakeha and Maori but officers and enlisted men.

The mention of a “white man’s war” and Maori’s progress from being an “enemy” of the British to an “ally” brings great declamatory tones from Tahere, and a distinctive “conch shell-like” call from Ariana Tikao’s taonga puoro instrument accompanied by the cracking together of percussive stones. As Dansey recounts his people’s history of interaction with the British, McKeich and his players elaborate with music that fuses sounds of warfare with ceremonial regimental-like calls – and the singer intones the opera’s theme ”Kaua e mate wheke, mate ururoa!”  (Die not like an octopus, but like a hammerhead shark!) before breaking into the famous haka, followed by a lament, in Maori “Let me weep for my dead! – they are not like the cabbage tree that springs up again!” (according to witnesses the haka by the soldiers apparently took place on the beaches at Gallipoli….).

Seemingly unimpressed, the British Officer again appears demanding an explanation for Dansey’s disobedience, to which, to the accompaniment of the taonga puoro  Dansey refutes the charge and sings about the chiefs in Maoridom “leading their warriors into battle” – unlike in the “white man’s war” where soldiers alone are sent to slaughter! His explanation is ignored, and he is dismissed and sent back to New Zealand – sostenuto wind tones then are sounded to haunt the words  “I saved many lives”, to a ferment of instrumental affirmation!

From here the music and the scenario becomes almost transcendent, with Tahere recounting his subsequent reinstatement due to intervention by influential Maori politicians of the time, his return to Europe and his experiences in the trenches at the Somme, where he is gassed and has to be relocated to England to recover – we witness his delirium (a bull-roarer sounding what seemed like a heartbeat as he struggles to rid himself of the poison in his system) – the players blow soundlessly through their instruments to further depict the desolation – and he imagines being comforted by his mother (who is sung by Ariana Tikao), her words foretelling his recovery and his work in post war Belgium, helping people recover their lives.

The Soldier sings a duet with his mother – these exchanges have a “time standing still” feeling, as we sense when she sings to him he has since returned to his present back in New Zealand and is near death. “You will stay here beside the rippling waters of Lake Rotorua – Kua wheturangatia” – words which means “Return to the celestial realm of your ancestors”…… –  What gave this particular performance a unique turn at this point was the voice of an audience member suddenly replying with a poropororoaki (a farewell to the dead) to the singer playing Dansey and then the rest of the assembled whanau of the story’s dying man standing and singing  “Aue Ihu tirohia”, the official hymn of the 28th Maori Battalion….. and so we sing the displayed words with them…

The lights eventually do come up and we applaud, most vociferously when Gillian Whitehead comes to the stage to acknowledge our tribute – a redolently memorable glimpse into aspects of our nation’s past that continue to give crucial relevance to our somewhat tumultuous present!

 

Wellington City Orchestra – a Matariki celebration of nature, legend and art

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JENNY McLEOD – Three Celebrations for Orchestra (1986)
ANTONIN DVORAK – The Noonday Witch B.196
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Triple Concerto for Violin, ‘Cello and Piano Op.56

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello) Gabriella Glapska (piano)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra (concertmaster, Paula Carryer)

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

Sunday, 22nd June 2025

Why have I never before encountered Jenny McLeod’s cheekily iconic “Three Celebrations for Orchestra”? – particularly as the pieces are each so heartwarmingly “grounded” in atmospheres that readily recall my own childhood memories, of forests, beaches and rural celebrations that proclaim a uniqueness of experience with tradition that’s in danger of disappearing as life here becomes increasingly “global”. I thought also that it’s music that “connects” with other examples of composers’ depictions of environments and activities worldwide – the opening “Journey through Mountain Parklands” for me strongly echoed parts of Finnish composer Jan Sibelius’s “Legends”, as well as similar landscape evocations from American composer Aaron Copland – and the final ”A&P Show” was startlingly redolent in places of the latter’s ballet “Rodeo”.

As a sometimes-conductor of the Wellington contemporary music ensemble Stroma, today’s conductor Hamish McKeich was able to draw from his performing experience to recall for us Jenny McLeod’s earlier compositions as being “rather different” in style and flavour to what we were about to hear from this, a later period of her work. By then she had turned away from the avant-garde and towards more “populist” styles, declaring at one point that “both writing and performing music should definitely be enjoyable!” – a disarming attitude that has earned her compositions increasingly diverse interest and respect from audiences.

Here, we revelled in the epic, voyaging opening of the “Mountain Parklands” journey, the trajectories straightaway moving the ground beneath our feet as the textures pushed out the vistas and spectacularly opened up the scenarios – exhilarating! Those Copland-like impulses further detailed our responses, the saxophone bringing to the ambiences shimmerings of romantic allure and the piccolo chirruping its delightful birdsong, before the Sibelius-like brasses brought a renewal of the adventurous nature of our journeying, accompanied by “music blasting away on the car stereo” – (the composer’s own down-to-earth comment on the proceedings at that point!). It all made for something terribly nostalgic for me – at times I was flashbacking to those family holidays in the car again, following railway lines, traversing hills, crossing bridges and catching sight of those, my own, mountains of memory……..

Next we found ourselves “At the Bay”, the cor anglais setting a different scene, with mellow winds dancing a slow waltz with a ‘cello – such lovely wind decorations and with the horns adding beautiful colours. Strings and percussion and then horns poured out the emotion, the mood enlivening gradually and spreading though the orchestra – the brass seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely, while the percussionists kept things rolling. As the mood quietens a slow dance ensued, coloured by wood-block-like beats – everything had a relaxed “by the sea” feel, with the winds encouraging a solo cello then joining in themselves with counter-themes and decorations. it all built up to a burst of emotion from strings, brass and percussion, and then, like memory sometimes does, slipped almost mischievously back into hiding with piano-and bassoon-notes, a sliver of percussion and wind, all as elusive as a dream….

To finish, how wonderful to have an A&P Show here documented! – I loved them so much! Like one’s own pent-up youthful excitements, the music was full-on, right from the start – a big, striding theme,  buoyed by strutting brass and a sinuous saxophone (the latter, incidentally, played superbly throughout by Tessa Frazer, whose name unfortunately wasn’t listed in my programme’s orchestra personnel lineup!). The winds played a kind of chirpy cakewalk, and we caught the sounds of a distant hoe-down, but here, mixing in with cameo-like episodes of different side-shows, we had a kaleidoscopic experience of images as well as sounds, everything very “outdoor” and mixing fairground excitements with more pastoral ambiences. But, like the real thing, it was all over too soon, as a percussion flourish steered us excitingly into and through that world of fantastic entertainment, everything working like a well-drilled whole – ha! – another hoedown! –  taking our sensibilities for a final ride with a wind-and-orchestra gesture of all-too-familiar satisfaction and regret!

Having had our own national identities reaffirmed we were then transported to the diametrically opposite realms  of Central Europe, and to a world of folkloric atmosphere marked largely by unease, superstition and brutality  – Antonin Dvořák spent the last few years of his compositional life returning his attentions almost exclusively to the folklore of his native Bohemia, writing orchestral music inspired by verses from the nationalistic poet Karel Jaromir, who had published a collection called Kytice (Bouquet), one of which was Polednice (The Noon Witch). a tale which, if not exactly bloodthirsty in a visceral sense was still blood-curdling!

Though all of Dvořák’s orchestral music has a readily recognisably Bohemian character, he hadn’t before fully exploited a penchant for descriptive orchestral writing in the manner of his fellow Czech composer Bedrich Smetana with his out-and-out nationalistic work Ma Vlast  (“My Country”) – it was only after Dvořák had completed his From the New World Ninth Symphony that he turned to the musical form of the “tone poem” that had been introduced by Franz Liszt and then ceaselessly pilloried by conservative critics such as the notorious Eduard Hanslick, who, up until this time had praised Dvořák’s “pure, absolute music” compositions.

In fact Polednice (“The Noon Witch”) is a masterpiece of musical description! – it’s basically, a “cautionary tale” of a mother whose child is so badly behaves she threatens him with the spectre of a witch who traditionally appears during the hour before midday to steal naughty children away. Inevitably, the Polednice DOES appear, and a battle ensues between the mother and the witch over the child, which ceases when the midday bell sounds and the witch disappears. But when the father returns home he finds his child lifeless, smothered in the arms of his unconscious wife.

The orchestral winds opened the story in deceptively charming folk-tale style, with firstly the clarinet and then the oboe depicting the naughty child and his toy cockerel. The mother’s anger burst forth from the strings, agitating in fine style, the whole orchestra then plunging into a splendidly vivid evocation of what the Polednice would do to the boy if she came to claim him! Seemingly undeterred the child sounded his toy cockerel again and the mother reiterated her anger and frustration at his naughtiness, further describing what sounded like a veritable “witch’s ride” in the orchestra.

Suddenly an ominous note on the lower brass introduced a sinister passage as the witch DID enter! – the splendid lower brass playing sounded uncannily like the dragon, Fafner, in Wagner’s “Siegfried” emerging from his cave! A kind of “fate” motif was ominously sounded by the orchestra as the witch advanced on the mother and child, the strains repeated by the clarinet and strings, and further hurled out by the brasses. We held onto ourselves or to each other as the witch came closer, orchestral momentums scarily depicting the mother’s struggles to keep hold of her child – until the noon-bell sounded and the spectral figure vanished.

In the wake of all of this, how carefree the homecoming father’s music sounded at first! And how uneasily the oboe and clarinet put the questions in his mind as to why his house seemed so silent! A brief moment of relieved recognition was followed by the unfortunate man’s rapidly escalating anxiety at finding his wife unconscious and then his ultimate horror to discover his child was dead! The orchestra’s whiplash-like concluding chords were here merciless, brooking no help or pity!

The interval provided extra entertainment for those who chose merely to stay put/or to stand and stretch their legs in front of their seats, enabling a life-enhancing view of various orchestral members and “behind-the-scenes” helpers “moving” the piano from its place up on the next platform down to a central front position for the Beethoven Concerto which was to follow – an operation performed with the utmost aplomb on the part of all concerned.

Something of the concert’s opening “holiday” mood had returned, now that the strictures of the Dvorak piece had passed, with the arrival on the platform of the soloists for Beethoven’s adorable “Triple” Concerto (violin, ‘cello and piano) one of the composer’s happiest creations! Though not ideally spacious as a performing venue (underlined by the extra space required for the three soloists!) the church’s layout ensured an extra “intimacy” of music-making, an almost “cheek-by-jowl” performer/audience situation, which gave the experience a uniquely treasurable flavour for the memory to lock away!

The first two movements gave me, quite simply, undiluted pleasure! Hamish McKeich’s direction brought forth an exciting and ear-catching range of dynamics at the beginning, getting the lower strings to “murmur” the opening phrase as if all the players were awakening the music from a dream, sounding the brief crescendo just before the top of the phrase, falling back to a whisper, and then springing the sounds forth with a start at the “rise and shine” call of the horns! All was then galvanic action, as the music snowballed into the first tutti, the energies joyous, the interplay delightful! As for the soloists, Ken Ichinose’s cello and Monique Lapins’ violin by turns sang their opening lines as irresistible invitations to “come and play”, to which pianist Gabriela Glapska responded in kind with gleeful eagerness, the three dovetailing their parts winningly in their concerted passages.

In response, the second orchestral tutti, though brief, was all whole-hearted agreement, as well as introducing a new theme, on which the soloists pounced with glee, Ichinose’s cello (as per usual in this work) leading the way, Lapins’s violin following with a winning  “anything you can play I can play higher!” kind of aspect, and Glapska’s piano retorting with a “Well, I’m going to play something else – follow me if you dare!” kind of spirit! It was such a celebration of teamwork, both in the accepted “trio” sense and in the interplay of the soloists with the orchestra. I loved, too, the ebb and flow of the work’s intensities, how the lines and figurations could express something so simply and beautifully, and yet within a few seconds be pushing the musicians’ fingers into and through intensely-wrought variants of the same and emerge still in tandem at the end!

The slow movement brought lovely “covered” tones from the orchestral strings at the outset, and playing to “die for” from the soloists – firstly Ichinose’s particularly radiant lines throughout his extended opening solo, and properly concomitant responses from firstly Glapska and then Lapins, in duet with Ichinose. The movement’s a remarkably short one, and part of its time is spent “shaping up” towards the finale, which, here was taken at what could be described as a “good lick” – I even wrote down the phrase, “a “devil-may-care” tempo”, at the time! This was followed by another phrase, hastily scribbled – “Wow! – they (the soloists) are flying along in those running passages! – Very exciting!” Which was true in places, though being “The Ghost Trio” they were always in remarkable, and often enchanting accord, as with the “whose turn is it?” passages where they toss pairs of notes between each other in what seem like delightfully random “first to pick up” fashion!

The orchestra played along suitably in the exchanges as well, but at times I felt Hamish McKeich and the band would noticeably move the finale’s various tutti along, rather than pick up the soloists’ way with those delicious polacca rhythms – Ichinose, Lapins and Glapska gave the movement plenty of delicious “schwung” in their solos and ensembles (and which Beethoven actually seems to indicate for the orchestra as well by including a grace-note “kick” in their descending figure that leads to the minor-key beginning of the Polacca section). It’s a small point, but I always enjoy, as here, soloists in this work who give those trajectories in the finale something of a playful character which the orchestra can respond to in kind. But hey! – far more important was all of the acclaim, such happiness and such bubbling excitement both throughout and at the concert’s end (I sat next to two people I didn’t know at all, and soon found myself chatting enthusiastically with them about the music and the playing in between each of the items!) – it was that sort of occasion, and one that the orchestra and its members and organisers and friends should definitely consider a great and resounding success!

 

 

 

The First Smile – 50 years of Gamelan in Aotearoa New Zealand – a celebration!

Posted on by Dan Poynton

The First Smile | Gamelan Ensemble – Rattle Records (2024)
Players: Gerard Crewdson, Chris Francis, Rosalind Jiko, Helen Lowe, Hui Luo, Barbara Lyon, Keith McEwing, Jennifer Shennan

The First Smile is not really a CD, it’s a celebration!
Actually where to start with the celebrations? Nothing less than a list is in order:
*50th anniversary of the heroic role this rustic little orchestra – The First Smile – has played in New Zealand gamelan
*Feast of sensuous and intimate sounds from the rich heritage of Indonesian gamelan
*Carnival of the probing expansion of this tradition by a panoply of Kiwi composers
*Hats-off party to New Zealand’s original gamelan pioneer, patron saint of The First Smile, and all-round lovely man, Allan Thomas
*A marvelling at yet another exquisite artefact from Rattle Records, in an age where such relics have largely been devoured by the rapacious ether.

Allan Thomas – photo by John Casey

Allan Thomas was offered this neglected little village gamelan orchestra (whose origins were at the Sultan’s Palace of Kacirebonan) in exchange for “many bags of rice”, while he was studying traditional music in Cirebon, northwest Java, in 1974. The only condition was that the gamelan would be played, not just displayed. Allan was to treat this promise as a solemn oath and over the last 50 years the ancient engineering of this Cirebon gamelan has been tested way beyond the call of duty – not bad for a taonga thought to be over 300 years old.

As The First Smile was the very first gamelan to ever arrive on these shores, 2024 was the 50th anniversary of gamelan in New Zealand. Jennifer Shennan, the well-known and loved proponent of Baroque dance and all-round powerhouse of the arts in Wellington, is now the adoring and jealous custodian of the gamelan, as Allan passed away in 2010 (Jennifer also happens to be Allan’s wife, and mother of their two daughters). Jennifer decided something special needed to be done for the gamelan’s 50th, and the result is The First Smile – the CD!

Thanks to Allan’s trailblazing, there are a dozen or so other gamelan in New Zealand these days, not the least of which is Gamelan Padhang Moncar (GPM), a grander courtly gamelan from the Central Javanese tradition, which is housed at the School of Music, Victoria University. When Allan established Ethnomusicology at Victoria, the Cirebon gamelan was the star attraction and the gateway for many students to experience a new musical universe away from the Western tradition for the first time. Later, as demand grew, the larger GPM would become the main gamelan, and when I first joined the gamelan in 1984, under Allan’s inimitably understated and just-let-it-happen guru-ship, the Cirebon gamelan was looking a little battered and not being played so much. Over the summer holidays Allan sometimes organised a leaner “commando unit” to play the Cirebon gamelan at Summer City and other events and festivals in and out of Wellington. The mysteriously smiling Jack Body was never far away either – and many other great Wellington characters. They were fun days.

Nowadays, if you snake down a little path next to Roseneath School, past “Allan’s seat”(complete with a plaque to the man himself), you’ll finally arrive at The Long Hall on a windswept promontory overlooking Wellington Harbour. In this old army barracks you will find The First Smile in pride of place. Jennifer transferred it here in 2011, and was also the mover and shaker behind the renovation of The Long Hall, which is now an active community hub. Events such as Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten’s ongoing concert series now take place there, and Helene and Rolf are so delighted with  The First Smile that they have programmed in a live performance of Ostinato and Cantor’s Infinity from the CD, as curtain raiser for one of the upcoming concerts (see Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten ‘s “The Long Hall” Concert Series – https://middle-c.org/?s=The+Long+Hall)

Gambang ( xylophone-type instrument, struck with soft beaters, and with wooden keys unlike other bronze-keyed instruments of The First Smile gamelan )

Based in this little (and long) fortress, The First Smile has had a true renaissance, and the little group practises and performs here dedicatedly. It is not easy to take the old and precious instruments out, but a generous exception was made in October 2024 for Jack!@80, a celebration of the late Jack Body’s 80th birthday at St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington. Featured as entrance music were Lagu Allan by Jennifer and Lagu Jack by Gerard Crewdson, especially written for the occasion (see Jack!@80 at https://middle-c.org/?s=Jack+Body).

But enough history! To the CD:

What an artefact! My CDs are now all sadly stored away due to the encroachment of newer, horribly efficient media, but this one has been placed glamorously on my bookshelf, for anything else would be a waste. Such a beautiful thing to hold: The evocative photos by John Casey and contributing artwork from Barbara Lyon…the moving stories about Allan, the composers and others…the ravishing production and design permeated with Indonesian ethos. It’s best described as a mini-coffee table book with a CD – the sort of thing we have come to expect from Steve Garden and Rattle Records, those dauntless promoters of NZ music. And credit must once again go to that most benevolent paternal spirit, The Lilburn Trust, for its grant towards the recording.

Saron — bronze keyed instrument struck with wooden beater ( drawing by Barbara Lyon, photo John Casey )

To play the exacting CD critic for a moment: the one worry is if you open the CD with gusto (probably the case), you are more than likely to witness a UFO as the disc itself catapults across the room. But what a gorgeous orange batik UFO! – so perhaps this was the desired effect from Rattle.

The recording by Warwick Donald is miraculous. The First Smile was transported into my living room, so intimate and whispering are the sounds. Everything speaks as it should, from the piquant and limpid ringing of the bonang and saron to the soul-penetrating gorgeousness of the gong. The sound of the gong obtained here is particularly poignant for, as Allan taught me all those years ago, the large gong is usually only played occasionally at the end of cycles, but contrary to a typical Western hierarchy, it is viewed as the most important instrument, and should only be played by those with the appropriate mana.

The traditional music is the backbone of any gamelan, and for me, this is also the case with this CD. There are only two classical Cirebon pieces on this CD, due to the wealth of NZ composers that had to be packed in, but I was definitely left wanting more.

Dr. Joko Susilo, patron of The First Smile, is a gamelan leader and wayang kulit dhalang (shadow puppet master) and renowned authority on the musics of Indonesia. Joko now lives in Dunedin but is often commissioned to give workshops and performances internationally. On a recent residency at La Musée de la Musique in Paris, working with musicians of the Paris Philharmonic, Joko discovered that the ensemble they play is also from Cirebon, gifted by the Dutch to the French to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, no less. The implication of this is that the gamelan Debussy, Ravel and Satie famously first heard at the 1899 Paris Exhibition was a Cirebon gamelan. They were all utterly enchanted, and the exotic sounds and ethos were to seep subtly into their own music.

“Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint that make Palestrina seem like child’s play,” Debussy wrote. “One will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a travelling circus.”

A simpler counterpoint than Palestrina’s is felt in the CD’s first traditional piece Sinjang Kirut (‘crumpled sarong’), but its gentle tintinnabulation, so typical of gamelan, beguiles nonetheless. Also typical is the subtle pulsing accelerando (surely the racing heart of the Cirebonese lady as she discovers her prized sarong has been crumpled?), followed by the homecoming ritardando (the lady realising her sarong is salvageable, and forgiving the delinquent boys responsible?).

Kasturun, the disc’s other traditional number, is usually used as accompaniment for female court dancers and evokes an image of angels descending from heaven. The introduction is more upbeat as it reaches into a sky full of angels, and then drops back to the earth of the balungan (backbone melody). Hypnotic and catchy, the balungan is funkily punctuated by the ketuk, with the accelerando/ritardando patterns coming in waves. In the end things are settled by the traditional final gong stroke, which in this piece comes right on top of the second to last note of the balungan –sounding a little premature and eccentric to my ears. Although, as I was informed, this is actually the accurate way to close this piece, I can see Allan giving us one of his little smiles – and certainly not “the first smile” he gave as a gamelan leader. As he always emphasised, gamelan is community music and is famously flexible with such things.

Gong (l) Kempul (r) : ( photo John Casey)

The CD begins with the solemnly spacious and courtly Lagu Senyum Pertama (“Inner melody of The First Smile”) by Anton Killin, one of the NZ composers on the disc. Anton studied ethnomusicology with Allan at Victoria and has been prolifically involved with gamelan. Composed in 2017 for The First Smile, this lagu is based on codes using letters from each of its members. I admire the restraint of this piece, which doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is.

The world-famed US composer and gamelan expert, Lou Harrison (who in later years was also a park ranger in California) worked with Allan and Jack Body in 1983 when he came to NZ as a senior Fulbright Fellow. On the disc are two of the pieces he wrote for this very Cirebon gamelan, obviously from the hands of a master gamelan composer. Lou dedicated the pieces to Allan and Jennifer.

Lagu Lagu Thomasan sports a poised strolling balungan of decidedly strong backbone, with softly ironic and offbeat punctuation from the ketuk and kenong. A nice representation of Allan Thomas’ spirit, I’d say.

Lagu Victoria, with its understated funky riff on ketuk, and an utterly catchy balungan, takes the prize for sheer cuteness.

“The Prof”, as we used to secretly call the rather distant David Farquhar when he taught us  composition (extremely dryly!) as professor of music at Victoria University, was not exactly known for the seductive charm of his music, even if he did compose Ring Round The Moon, one of the few “classical” pop hits ever to come out of New Zealand. But with Ostinato, The Prof has produced a gorgeous charmer! It’s definitely one of my favourites on the CD, and shows what an adaptive master craftsman David was. The Prof was an early adopter of Cirebon gamelan, and encouraged his students to play and compose for it soon after Allan first brought it to Victoria. David thought, to be fair, he should have a go himself, and Ostinato is the result. There’s a Spaghetti Western music feel to it – although I’m not sure the movie has been made yet…

Nhemamusasa means “building a temporary shelter from musasa branches for hunters” and Chris Francis has adapted it from mbira (“thumb piano”) music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. Chris, an old colleague from my GPM gamelan days, has truly had a vision in bringing the people of Cirebon and Zimbabwe together through gamelan. The music works so well, it’s as if the Cirebon gamelan did indeed emerge from the savanna of southern Africa, and the somnolent fade-out at the end seems to evoke the hunters dropping off to sleep, dreaming of friendly cheetahs…

Wetonan Cycle was written in 2017 by Alison Isadora, when she was back in NZ as the Lilburn composer-in-residence after decades of living in Holland. The piece involves a story from the childhood of Joko Susilo (see above). Joko’s father was a dhalang (puppet master) in Solo, and through a timetabling mix-up caused by confusion over the Javanese 5-day week and the 7-day Gregorian calendar, Joko’s father got double-booked. As it was considered bad luck to cancel a booking, the 7-year-old Joko was brought in to replace his father for an all-night show. His celebrated success launched Joko on his dhalang and gamelan career. The 35-day cycle of the two combined calendars is called Wetonan, and Alison has created an intricate tapestry of 5- and 7-note motifs. There are also dancers and the choreography of the players as they come and go to their instruments – surely a feast to behold. The piece is composed by someone who really understands gamelan, but one senses it would be a fuller experience if in the presence of the visuals.

This richest of CDs is given the perfect ending by a real gem: Cantor’s Infinity by Gerard Crewdson. Gerard is a long-time player with The First Smile and here he uses Georg Cantor’s Theorem of Infinity to generate a series of rhythmic cycles potentially expanding into infinity. God (or Cantor) knows how Gerard does this, but magic happens here. The cycles finally morph into an ominous tolling, and Gerard himself on a trumpet wails above, thin and sepulchral, as if the Ghost of Miles Davis has been summoned to accompany The First Smile.

The First Smile and Jennifer, we need more!
How about a follow-up Rattle CD of all-Cirebon traditional music?
Or the definitive performance of Lagu Allan and Lagu Jack coupled with music by Jack Body?

Whatever happens in the recording department, Jennifer and The First Smile are busy sowing fecund gamelan seeds among the young with The Young Smile gamelan, made up of Roseneath School pupils, and The Little Smile, featuring preschool gamelaners – including several of Allan and Jennifer’s grandchildren.

Here are just two reviews of The Young Smile by its primary school members:

I feel so privileged to be able to have such an opportunity and when I found out that I was going to be able to play Gamelan I was so happy. I had just seen it and thought it was amazing but playing it is a whole other story. I also love learning about the history and origins of it and I am just so happy that I was able to do it. I also really hope when all of you reach Year Seven and Eight you get to try this magical experience. (Evie)

My favourite thing about gamelan is that every second of it is something really special. Almost no kids my age get to play gamelan not to mention with an amazing teacher.  Also another really cool thing that happens is the geckos that live in the rafters, sometimes we find their shredded skins on the floor, the patterns are amazing and we’re going to make them into puppets for our gamelan story. The instruments make up a beautiful array of sound but also you can actually feel the music. (Sebi)  

The future of New Zealand gamelan appears to be in good hands.

John Psathas’s “Leviathan” – genre-defying and irresistible

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN PSATHAS – Leviathan
Four Percussion Concertos
The All-Seeing Sky (with Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffelbach)
Call of the Wild (with Adam Page)
Leviathan (with Alexej Gerassimez)
Dijnn (with Yoshiko Tsuruta)

All with Orchestra Wellington and Musical Director Marc Taddei
Orchestra Wellington OW 23CD

Hailed as “genre-defying music”, four of New Zealand/Greek composer John Psathas’s percussion concertos have made a spectacular appearance on Orchestra Wellington’s own label, a release appropriately gathered together under the name of “Leviathan”, the title of one of these concertos. The “genre-defying” aspect reflects Psathas’s intense feelings concerning the role of a contemporary composer, which he feels is a matter of “connection” across all genres and boundaries, one which reaches out to all audiences. For him this “outward” energy conveys that connection, and it has come to inform works such as the four presented on this album. Significantly, Psathas regards Beethoven’s music as an exemplar of such “reaching out” to people, music that embodies, in his words, “that desire to reach another human being”.

All four of these concertos were recorded during Psathas’s “composer-in residency” tenure with Orchestra Wellington, a circumstance that has given him a good deal of joy – “we had these incredible soloists and we had fantastic performances, and we’ve captured them”. As well, the venture is obviously a tribute to the staunch support for Psathas’s music from the orchestra’s Music Director, Marc Taddei.  I’ve not been able to comment on the vinyl format of this release as I’ve only seen the CD format (which, in terms of my own reactionary sensibilities regarding recordings in general, has what I would call the “minimalist” approach to presentation, with no accompanying documentation regarding either the works or their performers, save a QR code which you scan for access to liner notes (“Not I, but some child, born in a marvellous year….” etc.! – however, my own “marvellous child” was able to guide me through these personal “portals of Dis” with nary as much as a backward glance!).

The first of the set’s four percussion concerti, “The All-Seeing Sky” is dedicated to the soloists in the recording, Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffelbach. A “double concerto”, it has three movements – The Portals of Dis, The Upper World, and the titular The All-Seeing Sky  – and it entrances the listener at the outset with its almost subconsciously-heard impulses, a process characterised by the composer as “a very subdued oh wow, this is actually happening kind of feeling”. Of course, the opening movement’s title “The Portals of Dis” suggests something dismal and dark,  a kind of penetration of an Underworld (as suggested by Psathas’s reference to Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” which he had read, and which characterised for him a sense of antiquity and ancient times, furthered for him by artist Gustav Dore’s nineteenth-century visualisations of the poet’s journeyings through the Inferno – and yet the opening paragraphs of the music evoke more mystery and eeriness than fear and dread as the travellers in the boat in Dante’s poem cross the River Styx, the sounds of the orchestra detailing the almost limitless wonderment of these adventurers amid their surroundings, as the two soloists – Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffenbach – gradually but inexorably advance the sense of a “journey” with their increasingly compulsive and addictive patternings on, respectively, the marimba and xylophone. Whole sequences of minimalist patternings alternate with newly-wrought material from both the soloists and the orchestral musicians, gradually intensifying the ambiences with extra percussion – timpani and cymbals – and achieving what Psathas describes as a “welcoming fanfare” to the Gates of Dis. It’s one where the traditionally spectral “abandon hope all ye who enter here” mindset of antiquity is leavened by a more modernist view of one’s mind being “its own heaven and hell” (Psathas suggests in so many words a similarly updated view.).

The following movement, “The Upper World” delivers a new kind of eeriness, with the soloists floating and arpeggiating over a series of deeply-voiced slowly-undulating gestures from the orchestra’s lower instruments, striking an occasionally more forceful, and by turns an exquisitely-flowing air with winds and strings, the atmosphere more claustrophobic than free, as if further reminding us that our “Upper World” can take on similar threatening propensities to that of antiquity’s visionary horrors, with the dismissal of a traditional God plus the trappings creating a vacuum filled by any number of entities bent upon dominance of peoples’ minds. This is further explored by the freewheeling third movement “The All-Seeing Sky” – a kind of “juggernaut” through the void, for much of its length, with the kind of energy that freedom brings, along with a price that has to be paid for that “freedom” – it isn’t long before the exhilaration develops an obsessive, hectoring note, breaking off at the climax to sound a warning – the orchestra builds frightening vortices against whose sides the percussionists hammer until the reality of a new kind of imprisonment hits home. In a tremendous crescendo, begun quietly and almost innocently, both soloists define the formidable slopes that have to be climbed and the spaces that must be filled with new resolve, building the sonorities in a do-or-die effort which awakens the entire orchestral forces who play above their weight, reaching a hammering climax of renewed hope – Psathas elaborates here on his idea drawn from his Greek ancestry of a “gladdening sorrow” – in his own words “gratitude for being alive, and sorrow for understanding all that’s ill in the world!”

Following this on the set’s first disc is Psathas’s “Call of the Wild”, a concerto for tenor saxophone and orchestra commissioned jointly by Orchestral Wellington and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, the recording here presenting the work’s actual 2021 premiere given on July 17th by saxophonist Adam Paige and Orchestra Wellington. My “Middle C” colleague, critic Lindis Taylor, reviewed this concert in glowing terms, struck as much by the work’s “vividly individual” nature as by the brilliance of the performance by soloist Adam Page, and of the orchestra under Marc Taddei’s direction. Taylor highlighted the soloist’s “flamboyant confidence” and noted the latter’s use of a “wide range of techniques” as the music unfolded. The instrument itself, while not a standard symphonic orchestral instrument, has long enjoyed imaginative instances of use by various composers – I would have added Vaughan Williams’s name to the list my colleague proffered (for the review see https://middle-c.org/2021/07/orchestra-wellington-under-taddei-with-adam-page-triumphant-in-psathass-saxophone-concerto/).

Solo saxophonist Adam Page describes in his accompanying notes how musical collaboration often has a kind of “jewel in the crown” quality for artists, even though these experiences are sometimes isolated and short-lived – but with the “Psathas/Page” partnership a true friendship (Page calls it “a lifelong connection”) evolved from the pair’s first collaboration in 2012 when co-writing “The Harvest Suite”– consequently Page “jumped/bomb-dived” at the chance of renewing his creative association with Psathas via a new tenor saxophone concerto the composer was formulating.

Psathas’s description of this work’s genesis encompasses a good deal of his family history, dealing with events that left an indelible and continuing mark on both the twentieth and the present century, but more immediately on his own family – his grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to relocate between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s in what could only be described as devastating and denaturalising circumstances – in the wake of genocidal activities between various racial and religious groups exacerbated by the 1914-18 war in Europe, the governments of both Greece and Turkey deemed it necessary to forcibly relocate ethnic groups whose religious beliefs and cultural mores had become regarded as incompatible with the respective majorities of their citizens, despite the long-established (in many cases) native and indigenous ties these people had created over centuries within what they considered their homelands. There had already been genocidal massacres of non-Turkish Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians both before and after the war and by the time the Governments had signed the 1923 Convention Exchange (called The Asia Minor Catastrophe in Greece), resulting in about one-and-a-quarter million people arriving in Greece from Turkey and over 300,000 Muslims expelled to Turkey by 1923. A Muslim Professor, forced from his home in Crete, to Turkey, expressed in an interview every migrant’s tragedy – “Born in one place, growing old in another place – and feeling a stranger in both places”.

Psathas’s grandparents and great-grandparents experienced the forced marches sustained by people expelled from Turkey during this early 1920s period, resettling in Greece, only to experience a second World War and a subsequent civil war, from which their children (Psathas’s parents) left to emigrate to New Zealand to begin a new life in 1960.. Though he was born in Wellington, most of John’s childhood, along with a sister, was spent in Taumarunui, after which he attended college in Napier. His interest in music developed throughout this time, resulting in his entering University to study piano and composition at Victoria University of Wellington. John’s parents and sister Tania returned to Greece to live in 1988, but apart from trips back to Europe to reconnect, John has remained in Wellington, and he and Carla, his wife, have two children, Emmanuel and Zoe.

Unusual as it is to explore the biographical aspect of a composer to such an extent in a review as here, the works on this CD recording each relate singularly to Psathas’s life experience and familial ties, none more directly that this work “Call of the Wild”. In three movements, Psathas by turns characterises and meditates upon the salient features which define each of his parents, and their heritage and life-experience as embodied in Psathas’s own children and their attitudes and impulses.

Call of the Wild begins with a piece of music dedicated to John Psathas’s mother, Anastasia given the title by the composer “She stands at the edge of the incomprehensible” – a saxophone solo at the beginning, an opening up of a sonic world with which the soloist can play, dominate, integrate, lead or dissolve into. The orchestra becomes the world, giving the energetic impulses of the soloist a sense of direction and unlimited purpose, resonances that seem to have the capacity that resound for all time, in places demonstrating a determination above all else, unquenchable energy of the kind that seems to feed itself – though an almost heart-stopping moment is when the saxophone seems to challenge the limitations of existence itself, sending out a call whose reach is as high as its compass suggests it would allow before pushing even further. Even the surrounding resonances are amazed, perhaps agog at the temerity of this instrument, this single entity pitting its capabilities against the business of being. And then, as if some kind of reassuring synthesis is needed, the saxophone and orchestra come together, surging towards a corelated kind of ecstatic outpouring, then setting an inexorable course towards continuance.

How different is the following, opening with slow, dreamy oscillations of some kind of prenatal nature, Psathas’s father Emmanuel perhaps waiting in the womb to be born, or else meditating the nature of the circumstances of that event in later life. The music suggests a time for reflection upon things that are important to know, feel and conceptualise – in a way it could be characterised as the inner life of the first movement’s outer being, an idea of fusion having different though accessible natures, and each giving to and feeling from the other, Psathas stressing unity of different personalities, spirits, souls. Or it could claim its independence from the outset (Psathas’s title “He can worship it without believing it” suggests this), elaborating upon what the composer considered to be his father’s “staggering force of will” in being “inflexible in his principles of decency and fairness”. Throughout this piece the sounds are unwavering in their constancy and disarming in their quiet persistence and surety. Something of the depth of emotion this piece explores by association is the quoting by a solo violin of a vocal line from the composer’s 2016 work “No Man’s Land”,

From the outset of the third movement (“Tramontane”) there’s a restlessness, both in the setting of different (three-against four) time-signatures for the soloist and the orchestra, which, after a confrontational build-up fuses energies and begins a more concerted exploration – dramatically reducing the pace and the dynamics brings the piece’s elements together, agreeing on the agenda, and setting off again with near-irresistible resolve. This is Psathas’s and his children’s heritage (the name Tramontane literally means “From the other side of the mountains”, and refers to a particular Mediterranean wind which frequently blows up a storm), the composer characterising the energised impulse within his family “to fight for what we needed in life” after his relocation in small-town New Zealand and having to endure being “outsiders” in terms of heritage, custom and religion. What emerges is an incredibly wild ride on the part of the music’s various elements, the soloist’s giving vent to a contemporary “Call of the Wild” in his instrument’s at times frenzied tessitura against the orchestra’s similarly restless soundscapes. In conclusion Psathas comments on the near-inevitability of his children having inherited the same impulsive desire to express what he calls “that nomadic gypsy impulse” and take it to who knows where?

Turning to the set’s second disc, first up is the piece that gives the collection its overall name “Leviathan”. This work, completed by Psathas in 2020, was commissioned as part of an international project with the title “Beethoven Pastoral”, an initiative by the UN Climate Change and BTHVN2020  to promote action on climate change and the environment during the 250th anniversary year of the birth of Beethoven. The Project represented a “determination to be part of the solutions to current planetary challenges’ and the desire “to inspire and be part of that change”. Psathas wrote this work for and dedicated it to Alexej Gerassimez, the soloist in this recording.

“Leviathan” has three movements, summarised as follows – the opening Hightailin’ to Hell crystallises both the composer’s introductory remarks and the feelings generated by the music – “Our planet is in a very bad way, and it seems that we can’t wait to get to the “finish line”. To this end, the human race’s “out-of-control race to environmental disaster” is depicted by the use of “junk-percussion” – The trajectorial impulses are remorseless – the pulsatings never let up as the journey takes the listener through what seems like a thankless and unforgiving, almost lifeless kind of terrain, an experience that gives a feeling of being driven rather than driving – I was put in mind of connections with similarly “driven” music such as Hector Berlioz’s “Ride to the Abyss” from La Damnation de Faust, and (during  the most frantically virtuosic sequences)  parts of the first movement of Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony during which a solo side-drummer is instructed to try and halt the orchestra’s progress at all costs with savage interjections and disruptive counter-rhythms!

The Final Brook , a homage to Beethoven, comes next – a complete contrast, limpid, shimmering, effusions of light and sensation with instruments that suggest the play of light on and through water, a sound-world I to which one can give one’s sensibilities over to entirely and feel refreshed and renewed, while at the back of these instruments the strings are beginning to playing the actual music of Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” in a dream-like, trance-like way – a “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?’ kind of sensation, one which puts Beethoven’s hymn of praise to nature to the forefront of the madness of today’s polluted world.

A single plastic water-bottle used as an “instrument” by the soloist centres our attention throughout Soon We’ll All Walk On Water – a movement one cross-furrowed with dippings, splashings and “impingings” on our sensibilities, with an eerie cosmic circle of sound sensation revolving around the dancing plastic object – a symbol of the madness threatening our world with ruin.

Finally, there’s A falcon, a storm or a great song – (a quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke) – a determined tattoo-like pulsating over luminous orchestra chordings which come and go like fog lights in the gloom, and a grand brass statement reinforced by percussion and driving  tones – a held chord, and jagged rhythmic slashings indicate that action is being called for and, indeed demonstrated by the vigorous rhythmic patternings and the long-breathed calls across the sound-spectrum. The sounds make a stirring impression, even though they can at times tremulously fall back as if lacking certainty,  but then gather and plunge onwards after a dramatic pause – obstacles appear out of nowhere and are subdued and conquered – it can be done, and human beings, whether falcons, storms or great songs, can be inspired to act with such purpose! – in the composer’s words, “of steel and drums and momentum and drive!” Percussionist Alexej Gerassimez and the orchestra players are heroes, every one, under Marc Taddei’s unswervingly focused direction!

Rather more elusive, mercurial and mysterious as a creation is Djinn, a 2009 work which Psathas first crafted as a marimba concerto for Pedro Carneiro, but which has since appeared in various other guises. The soloist here, Yoshiko Tsuruta, remembered the premiere of this concerto well, and was honoured to be invited to present this work in 2024 – in her words,  “an exciting and deeply-rewarding experience”.

Djinn is a marimba concerto in three movements – 1. Pandora – 2. Labyrinth – 3. Out-dreaming the Genie. The first movement is a meditative dialogue between soloist and orchestra depicting the legend of Pandora, who opened a box containing all the evils of the world, leaving only hope inside for humankind. – though distinctive, the movements are interconnected by a common mythological resonance where consciousness and mystery can interact and colour both our individual and collective imaginings. The second, Labyrinth, is perhaps the most profound as it symbolises a journey of self-discovery and has the capacity to surprise and astonish us, despite our expectations. The final movement, Out-dreaming the Genie offers a kind of interpretation of these previous experiences as
sources of hope, confidence and freedom as one might imagine it could be. The soloist, Yoshiko Tsuruta, gives an extraordinary performance,  never missing a beat or nuance, and Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington lead us through the proverbial maze of exploration, entanglement and eventual realisation with single-minded resolve and a degree of hope bolstered by determination – the music  in both its performance and symbolic power becominga synonym for human perseverance.

So, what feelings am I left with  about what I’ve been listening to? Mainly that, to go into and through these pieces, either separately or together, is to undertake a journey that puts one in touch with things that ebb and flow, and helps one crystallise one’s feelings about music in general and about humanity and ITS relationship with music. After listening to these works by John Psathas on this recording, the most resounding thing I’m feeling is to equate music all the more with being human, and reinforce that quality of sharing something that’s about continuance – as someone put it so succinctly, like ”a journey on an overgrown path”. To be thus presented with such a simple yet profound idea is a wondrous achievement – one that I urge people who haven’t yet done so to try through this splendid set of recordings of John Psathas’s music.