Tag: New Zealand music

NZ Trio with sonorous help from friends, continues to enchant

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio+ at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral

GARETH FARR – Ahi (for violin, ‘cello and piano) –
Amalia Hall (violin)  / Matthias Balzat (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

CAROLINE SHAW – Thousandth Orange (for violin, viola, ‘cello and piano)
with Alexander McFarlane (viola)

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Piano Quintet in A Major Op.114 D.667 “Trout”
(for violin, viola, ‘cello, double-bass and piano)
with Damien Eckersley (double-bass)

Old St.Paul’s Cathedral, Mulgrave St., Pipitea, Wellington
Thursday, 17th September, 2026

Though obviously pure coincidence, each of two consecutive Thursday concerts which I recently attended at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral in Mulgrave St, was beset by bad weather – the real pity was that the first of them –  Quang Hong Luu’s stupendous Liszt recital a week ago, –  was seriously compromised. with a mere handful of souls braving the torrential rain that would have kept most lunchtime concertgoers away. This more recent chamber music concert featuring the NZTrio and friends drew a much bigger audience for various reasons – it was part of a well-publicised tour, it contained better-known repertoire (including the ever-popular “Trout” Quintet of Schubert’s), and the weather conditions, though not ideal, were nowhere near as dire as for last week’s meteorologically-compromised event.

Having recently attended and enjoyed a trio-only concert given by this ensemble, I found myself here again engrossed by the same players’ remarkable identification with the many and varied “characters” of the music – not a note seemed to be unattended either on its own merits or in tandem with others in a harmony or a rhythmic phrase. I remember in particular loving their Schumann-playing on that occasion, and how well it captured the music’s unique amalgam of resolve and introspection peculiar to its composer. Something of that singularity was brought out here in Gareth Farr’s remarkable Trio “Ahi”, in which the composer’s opening theme was sounded in differing guises throughout the work, from the child-like playfulness of the piano-only opening to its final tug-at-the-heartstrings appearance in the last movement. I was pleased violinist Amalia Hall made reference to the late and much-lamented pianist Katherine Austin, whose association with this work’s performance included a memorable recording, with the heartfelt tones of the music’s principal theme a fitting tribute.

The word “Ahi” literally means “fire” in Te Reo, but is used in several cultural contexts like “the spark of life”, and “belonging to the land”, and “the warmth of hospitality” as well the “heat” that comes with energy, passion, conflict and rebirth.  Farr’s piece explored a number of these over the work’s different movements using a kind of motto theme in places throughout  – after the lyrical simplicity of the opening, we were plunged into a Shostakovich-like confrontation with relentless piano-initiated “slash-and-hammer barrages morphing into string-moanings and lamentings against swirling pianistic vortices! A third movement restored calm temporarily, with ‘cello and violin both intoning interactive recitative-like thoughts and impulses, before the reveries were shattered by wailing, beseeching tremolandi, the piano determinedly persisting with ostinati-like figure as the strings gently reiterated their lamentations. Finally, girding their respective loins violin and ‘cello plunged into a reprise of the work’s signature theme, which sang out defiantly, reawakening what might have represented the idea Te Ahi Kāroa  (the Spark of Life) and to which the piano joyously accorded the rapidly-rotating gamelan-derived carillon-like melody to near-abandoned and almost cathartic effect!

Next, the concert’s mystery object was the enigmatic title for one of the pieces, Thousandth Orange, which straightaway invoked the “all sensibilities opened” kind of response that anything with such a juicily (sorry!) Zen-like title might have had upon the average listener! Just as playfully enigmatic was the programme-note by the composer herself, American Caroline Shaw, at once revealing everything one perhaps needed to know about the piece without letting on about anything we might have wanted to know! – perhaps the NZTrio ‘cellist Mathias Balzat came closest to the mark by telling us that the group was “going to play the piece for us one thousand times”, adding  that “the experience should be as beautiful even after the thousandth playing!”

Violist Alexander Macfarlane (the NZSO’s current Associate Principal Viola) had joined the group for this piece, so that we had pianist Somi Kim and no less than three string players ready to convey to us the music’s many-sided, ostensibly inscrutable qualities. Pianist Somi Kim began the work, a series of four chords on the piano in a constantly-repeated pattern, and interpolated with entirely differently-constituted String Trio harmonies and rhythmic designs – almost Ivesian-like in effect! The strings then surreptitiously “took over” the four-chord pattern, leaving the piano to “extemporise”, and the strings to “play with” the chords and gradually “deconstruct” them, though the four-note “motif” remained discernable while being put under all kinds of strictures! The four-note pattern was arguably “the orange” on its way to its thousandth permutation! I liked the composer’s droll but significant comment regarding the process  – one which accorded “more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable”….. to the point where its perception was accompanied by a kind of mystique attitude, a heightened appreciation of ordinary things……the final statement of the “motif” on pizzicato strings at once both  “throwaway” and “significant”…..profound!

Obviously the more-than-usual atmosphere of camaraderie in the cathedral had encouraged people to leave their seats at the interval and engage in fellowship of all kinds, as the concert organisers were forced to make repeated calls to people to resume their places for the second half! This was duly done, and the performers plus yet ANOTHER additional musician, double bassist Damien Eckersley, (also an NZSO Associate Principal!) took up their places on the platform to perform Franz Schubert’s beloved “Trout” Quintet.

This was a splendid performance – I can honestly say I’ve not heard a better one, either “live” or on record! Obviously the “in situ” experience would have brought out whatever qualities there were in the music-making  more vividly than on a sound (or even on a video) recording – and these qualities, such as the technical brilliance, both individual and ensembled, allied to the ever-apparent sense of rapport between the players, and what seemed like an instinctive feeling for the music’s special “character” in these respects, made, I’m certain, this occasion one to readily “gather up” in the memory. For me, nothing seemed to stand in between or distort or dilute the impact made by the music – so, rather than meticulously  (and tiresomely) try and dot and cross all the “I”s and the “t”s of the performance I’d like to highlight a few moments that can serve to speak for the concert as a whole.

I liked the “perfect half-circle” of the string players, with the double-bass especially accorded a front-row place equal to the rest of the strings, instead of being relegated to a more backward position  – and this gave particular delight in the scherzo at some of the phrase ends when the’ cello and double bass had some unison repeated-note exclamations, and made certain each time that they were in accord (especially the final one to which they both amusingly gave some extra “oomph!”). Much earlier, in the first movement, the ensemble were able to achieve an amazingly fluid, nuanced sound which communicated so much expressiveness even when springing forward at a great pace! – as a result the first movement was an extra joy  – as well as making the development section all the more different and exciting.

The Andante second movement opened up vistas of such beauty (beguilingly-voiced lower strings!) making such a gorgeous contrast with the second “layabout” theme that came along later, like a “hands -in-the-pockets” whistling tune! Similar characterful contrasts were delivered in the theme-and-variations “Troutr” movement, during which we were all galvanised by the “helter-skelter” section, carried along by the music’s irresistible energies, then soothed by the ‘cello’s graceful phrasings. And I liked the way that violin and piano began the last variation when reverting to the composer’s “lieder” mode, each player variously giving us a taste of the hapless fish and the cruel fisherman – Amalia Hall and Somi Kim here, to my ears, made their instruments “talk” to one another so deliciously.

What a purposeful journey the ensemble made of the finale – so much energy and schwung in places, with double bassist Damien Eckersley grasping the mettle and giving his instrument plenty of “rumble” with his rapidly-repeated notes. But it was a concerted effort, and a more-than-fitting finish (one thought at this point!) to the concert – except that the ensemble reappeared mid-ovation at the end, and Damien Ecklersley himself had the task of introducing an encore, concerning which he spoke in particular reference to the joy of being a single double bassist playing with wonderful colleagues in chamber music, a change from his usual role as being part of the “bottom end” of a symphony orchestra!

This was a piece written by British composer Judith Weir for the UK’s Schubert Ensemble to commemorate the group’s farewell performance season in 2017, a work fittingly composed for a “Trout Quintet” performance group. Weir wrote the work with Schubert’s famous song Abschied from the song-cycle Schwanengesang in mind, describing the music as containing “goodbye waves in turn from viola, violin, ‘cello, bass and piano” – a perfect way for this evening’s ensemble to finish a truly memorable concert.

 

 

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “Colossal” triumphantly ticks all the descriptive and presentation boxes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Marc Taddei with Orchestra Wellington and Wellington District Brass Ensemblepresents “Colossal”
JOSHUA PEARSON – Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fau (world premiere)
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Requiem: Grand Messe des Morts
Kyle Stegall (tenor)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington (Brent Stewart, director)
Te Kōkī Orchestra / Wellington Brass Band / Trust Porirua City Brass
Hutt City Brass / Levin and Districts Brass
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, September 12th, 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

With the confidence, surety and irrepressible flair that has characterised his work with Orchestra Wellington over the past few years, conductor Marc Taddei brilliantly succeeded in both masterminding  and spearheading an event which  bounteously fulfilled the ineffably effable title “Colossal” for the concert itself. In every way it was an appropriate description of an event that in my experience has perhaps been recently matched for grandeur here in Wellington only by the performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” in 2010 when Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, together with a team of vocal soloists, the Orpheus Choir and various other choral groups in a similarly unforgettable occasion.

Of course pride of place in respect to the concert’s title was inevitably accorded French composer Hector Berlioz’s intrinsically prodigious “Grand Messe des Morts”, or “Requiem”, and borne out by the extent of musical forces employed by the composer. Such large-scale events were not uncommon in France of the composer’s time and before, being an expression of La Gloire, that source of pride, honour and distinction associated with one’s nation. From the era of Louis XIV (“the Sun King”) French composers would seek to emphasise and reflect in their music the earthly and divinely-appointed virtues of the monarch, bringing to the public spectacular musical depictions by such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau – and not forgetting, in more revolutionary times, the famous La Marseillaise of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Berlioz’s music was to serve a ceremonial, rather than a liturgical function, a reflection of the changed, post-Revolution place of the Church in French society (as was the use of the composer’s own setting of the words instead of the traditional “Dies Irae” Catholic liturgical setting, in use since the fourteenth century). The Requiem was in fact a commission from the French Government in 1837 for a work of remembrance honouring soldiers who fell in the July 1830 revolution – but due to the disapproval of various anti-revolutionary interests, the dedication was then changed to honour a hero (General Damrémont, the French Army’s commander-in-chief, killed during the country’s recent war efforts aimed at colonising parts of North Africa).

Though Berlioz’s music in general displays occasional touches of La Gloire his Requiem here paid singular attention to a number of varied influences, both musical and social, reflecting his individual feelings towards a “new Romanticism” in art and culture.  The work’s large and diverse forces produced a remarkable range of musical and aural responses, in particular a sensitivity and restraint in certain places, which of course made the almost seismic upheavals of parts of the Dies Irae all the more overwhelming in their effect. The composer described his initial enthusiasm for the text of the work in characteristically excitable tones – “I fell upon it with a kind of fury – my brain felt as though it would explode with the pressure of ideas!” – given these declarations of such creative ferment (here reproduced in the concert’s excellent programme notes), it continued to surprise with how much of the work was so introspective, delicate and ethereal. Here was a composer-sensibility capable of generating intensities at practically every place along such a spectrum, a kind of compendium of emotional response whose spontaneously-wrought effect compelled constant attention.

Along with this “Grande Messe des Morts”  and its historical and cultural associations, the concert brought to us the very great pleasure of an additional work, moreover, one from this part of the globe which nicely balanced things with the Berlioz work – this was the world premiere of a work by young Aotearoa New Zealand-born Samoan composer, Joshua Pearson, one whose title Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fou concerned the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and translated from the Tuvaluan language as “Navigating the changing Environment”. The issues facing Tuvalu have been exacerbated by climate change over recent years – they concern rising sea levels, coastal erosion, drinking water shortages and extreme weather patterns. Joshua Pearson’s astonishing and instantly impactful orchestrations plunged all of us into a series of swirling turbulences, with insistent chimes heralding the onset of currents and counter-currents of watery impulses, coloured by megaphonic vocalisations from different parts of the orchestra as strings sounded eerie harmonics and a solo violin floated a stratospheric solo line. Players alternated between conventional instrumental sounds and creative rustlings and crinklings from crumpling cellophane clusters (how onomatopoeic these description words themselves sound!) .

What could be taken on surface value for a magical fairytale sound-world of course had darker, bleaker and more ruinous implications, with Pearson’s evocative instrumentations graphically illustrating both the destabilising action and effects of increasingly confrontational weather-patterns and resulting conditions threatening present living environments with eventually uninhabitable conditions. Hand-in-hand with the ”thriil” of these near-virtuosic orchestrations came, of course, the realisation for us that these spectacular evocations were portents of doom in a sobering, “for whom the bell tolls” kind of way – all the more credit to the composer, therefore, in sounding so graphic a warning to humanity at large. The conclusion of the piece underlined its grim message with the players gradually enveloped in darkness as the sounds faded to silence. As befitted the piece, its presentation and performance, the reception at the end was overwhelming, with the composer making a warmly-acclaimed appearance!

There was no interval, but a kind of changeover process during which the Orpheus choir and brass band personnel filed respectively into their places, while Marc Taddei gave a brief outline of the freshly-published 2027 Orchestra Wellington concert prospectus – an exciting and stimulating season based upon “Dance” and affording all of us many a delightful listening prospect. That done, and a goodly proportion of the composer’s requirements regarding voices and instrumentalists having been brought into the performing arena, the stage was set for the “Requiem” to be set in its “leviathanic” motion.

The work’s mournfully-phrased opening gave notice of its proverbial “depths”, with lower and higher voices in tandem properly emphasising their “polar opposite” tones, the singing,  with variously deep and pure tones combining with strings and winds to make an immense “carpet of sound”,  as the cries of “Requiem” vied with the winds’ piercing, downwardly-cascading  phrases  After the tersely-delivered “Kyrie Eleisons” came the “Dies Irae”, introduced by black-toned double-basses, with Berlioz again using his sopranos, this time in tandem with winds, as a dramatic contrast, before bringing in the other voice-lines. Each group of verses was given its own level of purposeful intensity by agitated string passages, the “Quantus tremor” passages urgent and vigorous, leading up to the first of the work’s truly monumental passages, with brass choir antiphonally following and exchanging phrases with brass choir, two upper groups interacting with two lower groups and leading to the thunderous entrance of the percussion – a scalp-prickling moment, to which the men’s voices then added their stentorian cries of “Tuba mirum” as part of an enormous crescendo of sound, one which resorted to hushed tones for “Mors stupebit” but which then flared up excitingly once more at “Liber scriptus proferetur”. And how pathetic, energy-drained and fearfully wonderful was “Quid sum miser”, with its bleakly forlorn cor-anglais and bassoon accompaniments!

The tumultuous “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” outbursts, followed by the increasingly urgent ‘Recordare, Jesu Pie”, leading into “Confutatis maledictis” made for episodes of great and desperate excitement, the “prayer” becoming a compelling “theatre of supplication” before returning to “Rex Tremendae” amid piteous cries of  “Salva Me”.  The following “Quaerens Me” brought us some of the evening’s loveliest singing, the voices in unaccompanied . lyrical mode, pleading for forgiveness as was accorded Mary Magdalene and the Good Thief at Christ’s crucifixion, and a necessary respite when considering what was to follow.

This was the mighty “Lacrimosa”, the “day of tears”, Berlioz unsparingly giving the verses a harsh, jagged syncopated accompaniment from strings, winds and brass in rugged 9/8 time – two quieter passages gave some respite, but soon returned to the merciless onslaught with additional brass and percussion joining the fray as the choir wass spared nothing!   The prayer rose towards its punishing finality, with every singer and player in the hall, it seemed, hanging onto those final utterances for all they were worth – a transfiguring moment, leaving at the end an exhausted, but still reverberating  silence!

Into this “void left by a maelstrom” came the Offertorium, a deeply-moving  work whose obsessively-repeated and anxiously unresolved vocal lines representing a kind of great anxiety, with the voices seemingly left abandoned in a wilderness, intoning a figure that oscillated between two notes without settlement or deliverance – meanwhile all around these voices the instrumental lines “wandered” as if enchanted or bewildered, the strings and winds aware of and responding to the text’s invocations of the “promise” made by God to “Abraham and his seed” – the beautiful moment at the words “promisisti et semini ejus” was here like balm for our senses, the music moving into the major key and generating a flowering of hope for deliverance into light and warmth – wonderfully and superbly-delivered!   The following “Hostias”, with its hauntingly celestial key-changes  generated by angelic winds (always reminding me of – and, of course, pre-dating – “Lohengrin”!) gave even further hope for salvation (but what creepily sepulchral brass-playing was sounded here at the end, affording scary glimpses into the abyss!).

Then came the equally spell-binding sequence with solo tenor Kyle Stegall, the single voice resplendently furthering Berlioz’s transfiguring fusion of the ordinary and the fabulous, backed up by celestial echoes and resonances from the choir (apart from a brief moment of strain for the sopranos in their “Gloria” utterances) – their “Hosannas” here joyously danced and exalted in response, as did the adjoining brasses at the end!

It was left for the “Agnus Dei” to usher in the drama’s final moments, with magical wind and brass chordings underpinned by strings giving the choir’s heartfelt utterances a kind of enduring luminosity, as did in contrasting ways the succeeding, entirely characteristic exchanges between the lighter strings and winds and the darker, more sinister brasses. More grounding was the return to the work’s opening, with the cries of “Requiem” punctuated once more by those well-remembered descending wind chords, but reaching a finality with the voices’ utterances resolving into “Quia pius es, in aeternum, Domine” (Because thou art forever merciful, Lord) and a series of heart-easing “Amens” with blissfully rising-and-falling string roulades underpinned by gently-throbbing timpani and string pizzicati which together concluded the work.

Such an accolade-exhausting achievement left one grasping vainly for further acclamations! To all the performers, enablers and organisers one needs must bestow very great gratitude at being presented with such a work brought off with all the elan, brilliance depth and variety that it needed to succeed. It takes its honorable place in the growing pantheon of memorable presentations by Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir, here enriched by the stellar contributions of so many local musicians who obviously relished their integral part in the proceedings. Both Marc Taddei’s and Orpheus Choir director Brent Stewart’s stewardship of this historic event will be remembered and appreciated for a long time to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dolfin-Lin Duo – positively tingling with spontaneous re-discovery!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Dolfin-Lin Duo – Balazs Dolfin (‘cello) / Tony Chen Lin (piano)

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY  –  Magyar Rondo (Hungarian Rondo) (1917)
ANTON WEBERN  –  Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano (1914)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH  –  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Major  BWV 1028
GAO PING  –  Sonata No. 2 for ‘Cello and Piano “Departure” (2001)
BÉLA BARTÓK – Rhapsody No. 1 for ‘Cello and Piano (1928-9)
NATHANAEL DEJONG – Abandoned Voices (2021)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Sonata No.1 for ‘Cello and Piano in E Minor Op.38

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday,, 30th August 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

This partnership of ‘cello and piano made a profound impression with the Duo’s strongly-projected, in places “larger-than-life” realisations of the works chosen, with those I’d heard before (the Bartok and Brahms pieces) giving a remarkably singular impression to my ears of hearing the music for the first time! I’d heard Tony Chen Lin’s playing on several occasions previously as well as on recordings, and found myself often remarking upon his boldly-characterised view of both detailings and overall trajectorial and colouristic character, playing which unhesitatingly “addresses” more than merely “coaxes out” the music’s manifold moods. On this occasion, of course, his partner was Hungarian cellist Balazs Dolfin ( their Duo was formed in Italy in 2021) whose similarly arresting and whole-hearted approach to his instrument and its sound-world in general seemed to me to fit like a glove with the pianist’s aforementioned qualities  – so that the music-making throughout the concert positively tingled with spontaneously-generated re-discovery!

First up was Zoltan Kodaly’s Magyar Rondo, written in 1917, and drawn from incidental music the composer had written for a play by Zsigmond Móricz called Pacsirtaszó (Lark’s Song), a folk-style drama but  with “social realism” themes – this version for ‘cello and piano brought out the piece’s soulful folk-character at the outset, before breaking into a dance variation, angular and quixotic! A deeper, more baritonal tone came with the next, slower variation, the piano contrasting the cello’s sombre voice with full, assertive treatment accorded the melody’s refrain, though the music returned to more intimate realms for a wistful, harmonics-like cello passage, almost ghostly in effect! A far more helter-skelter mood overtook the next variation’s minor-key mood-change, the music abandoning itself to a burst of high-spirited display before the cello took us suddenly along a pizzicato-strewn pathway, the piano playing bagpipelike figurations as the dance swirled and swayed up and down – but how wistful and redolent were the dream-like moments of remembrance, compared with the wildness of the duo’s concluding high-spiurited flourishes!

Nothing further from the opening could have been devised than what we next experienced, Anton Webern’s ‘Cello Sonata, a work written in 1914, and intended as a present for his father, who loved the ‘cello! For whatever reason the composer broke off working on the piece and decided he would give his father the “Three Little Pieces for ‘Cello and Piano” Op.11 instead, abandoning the Sonata, which wasn’t rediscovered until 1965, twenty years after t3he composer’s death. Though roughly contemporaneous with the Kodaly piece we heard  at the concert’s beginning, the Sonata seemed to inhabit an entirely different creative sphere,  Though not twelve-tone music. Webern’s Sonata features fractured phrases and angularly-pointed rhythms whose contrasts are often explosive and even disturbing, with “sehr bewegt” (very animated) suddenly giving way to (“zart bewegt”) gently animated, before reverting without warning to the original marking for the piece’s final gesturings.

Not inappropriately, the players then took up, after a moments’s pause, the programme’s next item Johann Sebastian Bach’s  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Minor, with the first-movement Adagio in our minds seeming almost to “sort out” the still-resonating strains of the Webern piece, almost as if giving credence to Webern’s teacher Schoenberg’s dictum that “there are no dissonances in music, just more remote consonances…”. I thought the playing so very exquisitely dovetailed, bringing out as much the character as well as the beauty of the lines’ interactions during the following Allegro. The soulfulness of the minor-key Siciliano rhythm throughout the Andante brought out the expressiveness, the depth of feeling, the grief inherent in this music that awaited release in a finale that danced like thistledown in the wind, joyously freed from earthly constraint as the composer evoked the prospect of life’s fulfilment in expectation of heavenly reward.

Sixth-generation Chinese composer Gao Ping’s music is well-known to New Zealand audiences due to his significant working associations with various educational institutions in this country, such as Christchurch’s University of Canterbury and Te Koki New Zealand School of Music in Wellington. He’s developed long-term relationships with local musicians such as Michael Houstoun  and  the New Zealand String Quartet – the fifteen year-old association with Houstoun has resulted in a recent recording “Outside the Window” of Gao Ping;s music, released on the Rattle label. By way of acknowledging a New Zealand influence upon his own music he is currently planning an opera set in this country, one whose setting (Central Otago) will draw from storytelling traditions present in classic stories from both Chinese and Western cultures. This has been, he has said

Gao Ping’s Cello Sonata No. 2 was written on 2001 – its title, “Departure” was taken from the subject of a Chinese poet of the “Song Dynasty” one writing in times parallel to western medieval times (10TH-13TH century), the Song Dynbasty poet Su Dongpo. The poet relates the work’s title to the cyclical meaning of the Chinese  word shi meaning “departure” which incorporates both an end and a beginning, an idea elaborated upon by Geo Ping’s music which ends the piece with the notes of its beginning. Its sounds also give voice to the composer’s inclination to blend Western and Chinese music, reminding the listener in places of the inclinations of Janacek, Kodaly and Bartok in their similar “seedings” of various pieces with folk-inspired impulses and gestures.

There are five sections to the work  which play continuously, and whose flow emphasise that same “end is my beginning” concept. The cello underlines traditional colours and timbres of traditional Chisese instruments such as the Guqin and Erhu, as well as having recourse to vocal inflections of traditional speech-styles, stemming from an era of personal expression and introspective inclinations. The ‘cello emphasised these associations at the beginning, now and then “bending’ the notes, and employing freely ranging dynamic levels, with eerie, other-worldly harmonics that invited the piano’s first entry. A sustained note slowly developed more elaborate configurations which grew to  allowing ever-increasing freedom of expression – the instrumental sounds could be described as reaching for speech inflections, suggesting the full human range of tones, timbres, colours and dynamics.  Whole episodes then gave themselves over to contrasting depictions of emotion and purpose, often alarmingly confrontational, then reverting to introspective moods, the tones becoming increasingly disembodied as a sense of overriding timelessness crept into the sound-worlds and gradually silenced the remaining impulses and counter-impulses in spell-binding fashion!

An interval of discussion made the time pass quickly before we were off again with the dauntless duo, this time a folk-flavoured work by Bartok, the Rhapsody No.1, originally composed for violin and piano but arranged by the composer for ‘cello and piano – here, ‘cellist and pianist gave a remarkable display, giving full measure to both the physical and lyrical aspects of the Rhapsody, tearing into the well-known contrasted pairing of the traditional Lassú (slow) and Friss  (fast) sections of the Hungarian verbunkos (recruiting) dance with tremendous physicality, precision and plaintive lyricism, the soft-playing as arresting as the excitement generated by the more brilliant sections.

An entirely new name to me was New Zealand composer Nathanael Dejong (b.1988) whose work reflects his training as both a pianist and violinist as well as composition, but directly focuses on his interest as a parent in childhood development relating to teaching and learning in an age he considers overshadowed  by electronic media devices –  the “Abandoned Voices” title reflected this dominance of digital media at the expense of human interaction. Consequently the work we heard presented sombre exchanges between the instruments, deep, serious and heartfelt utterances punctuated by long silences and wide dynamic ranges, both piano and cello employing delicate, winsome sets of gestures representing a plethora of sounds to make sense of, both of their own volition and in responsive contexts to one another – the cello playing unworldly harmonics and the pianist reaching into the body of the piano to dampen notes and chordings. It all makes for a variety of impulse and intent awaiting definition and associated meaning, the “small voices, waiting to be heard” presence embodied in newly-emergent human form.

Though there was nothing “small voiced” about Johannes Brahms, the young composer’s rabid perfectionist nature resulted in his destroying many youthful compositions before allowing his innermost creative thoughts to remain, an inclination which for some years dogged his compositional efforts – indeed, some scholars suggest that probably only one-third of Brahms’s entire compositional input has survived. The earliest “official” works were for solo piano and song collections, the young composer’s meetings with the violinist Joseph Joachim and Robert and Clara Schumann gained him invaluable advice, example and confidence, though he maintained his rigorous self-critical attitudes to his work throughout his compositional career. His two ‘cello sonatas interestingly “reverse” their composer’s expected compositional trajectories, with the earlier First (played today) very much connected to the past, the deep-throated melody that opens the work frequently “changing places” with the piano, so that the harmonic structure of the work is richly varied in texture and tone. The “fusing” of the two leads strengthened the discourse between the two voices, both performers here scarcely holding back in terms of full-blooded expressiveness – I simply loved it!

For whatever reason, Brahms removed an Adagio movement originally composed, leaving the “Allegretto quasi Menuetto”  to fend for itself as a foil to the outer movements, a charming theme, sharing the opening section with a sinuous second theme, also in a minor key – the trio was even more suggestive in intent, with both instruments tying the melodic strands closely together, before returning to the opening dance. The finale  plunged into a whirling dervish-like opening, (commentators cite Bachian influences here relating to “the Art of the Fugue” at the beginning, which took on a more playful aspect in places, and with Brahms broadening the trajectories into momentary illusions of adventurous impulse (shades of the D Minor Piano Concerto’s great “questing” theme at one point!) and disarmingly charming dance-like manoeuverings, all swept away by the return of the opening “whirling” figures, concluding with a furious, cataclysmic stretto leaving us all deliciously dishevelled by the music’s wonderfully conclusive sound and fury!

 

New Zealand String Quartet bring to us music with “the beauty of loneliness, pain, strength and freedom”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet – Storytellers

Music by Henry Purcell, Anthony Ritchie, Fanny Mendelssohn, Salina Fisher and Benjamin Britten

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Mt.Cook, Wellington

Wednesday 12th August

Review by Leila Lois, for “Middle C”

We are seated in the glowing wooden wood panelled warehouse structure of Prefab Hall, ensconced down a laneway in Wellington’s Mt.Cook, a full audience for the New Zealand’s String Quartet’s second chapter of their Storytellers tour. The night promises to showcase both classical masterworks and contemporary commissions, each piece to guide and delight through sonic narrative.

The night is introduced by an address from Martin Smith on cello, who reminds us of the fateful words of the classical poster-boy of the series, Benjamin Britten: . He wrote, “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain: of strength and freedom.” A perfect epigraph to an evening of music with such a breadth of emotional registers and composition styles.

First up is Chacony in G minor Z.730 by Henry Purcell, (c. 1680) (arranged by Britten in 1947). The piece, as the quartet accentuates, encapsulates the seventeenth century Baroque style of Purcell, with the expressive reimagining of Purcell. The Chacony is a glittering celebration of admiration of one composer for another, alive with playfulness and colour. The repetition and transformation and vibrant way the quartet plays really delights the ears and embraces us with warmth. It is, as Smith tells us, the 50 year anniversary of Britten’s death, and as such a marvellous moment to hear the piece. Various amusing asides are given relating to Britten and his unyielding genius, himself professing that he was “an arrogant and impatient listener” to other masters’ work. These are welcome and uplifting, and remind us of the strength of obsession and devotion in classical music.

The second piece for the evening is New Zealand composer, Anthony Ritchie’s String Quartet No.3, ‘In Time’ Op. 221 (2023). The programme notes describe the work as “a meditation on the passing of time” and exploring “the temporal nature of our existence”. It certainly feels like a journey through the two movements, Perpetual Motion and Last Dance, which have a giddying tarrantism to them, and demonstrate the toil of the quartet’s artistry, as the bow of Peter Clark’s violin loses quite a few strings by the end. It’s mesmerising and rather frenetic, in contrast to the rest of the programme, a necessary tonal shift perhaps.

Next, a too rarely celebrated work by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, forever in her time behind her renowned composer brother’s shadow.

The String Quartet in E flat major, H.277 (1834) is a perfect antidote to the tempo of the previous piece, with a lyrical slow build and an ephemeral scherzo, building into a vivacious finale. It is so refreshing to see these historical female composers at last getting their dues in contemporary bills.

Interval, and then a rare treat from young Kiwi composer, Salina Fisher, who wrote the piece Heal during the internationally fateful year of 2020, when the world was reeling from the shock of COVID-19 lockdowns. It is a hugely tender piece, really resonating in the body through the yearning of the cello and overlapping notes. A gorgeous experience to hear this live in Fisher’s hometown, Wellington.

The final piece for the evening was  Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2, in C major, Op. 36 (1945) which was written as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations of Henry Purcell’s death. The piece truly  reflects Britten’s deep admiration for the composer he adored, and the quartet perform this to a breathtaking degree.

The work was composed after Britten returned from Germany, where he accompanied Yehudi Menuhin in concerts for survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and it bears the mark of deep emotional intensity. The quartet held audiences in rapture with this final piece.

A wonderful meditation on peace and healing (Britten having been famously a pacifist and conscientious objector). This lyrical programme, with some excellent storytelling by the quartet members themselves is surely a highlight of the New Zealand chamber music calendar for this year, an extraordinary tour of timely works, played with nothing but devotion.

 

Classics and commemoratives from the splendid Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents the Aroha String Quartet

The Aroha Quartet: Eli Vincent (viola), Konstanze Artmann (violin), Haihong Liu (leader), Robert Ibell (‘cello)  – photo, Wellington Chamber Music

HAYDN – String Quartet Op. 64 No,6
BARBER – String Quartet Op.11
ROSS CAREY – Toccatina (Elegy – 2010)
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No. 10 “Harp” Op.74

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 2nd August

This was a beautiful and revelatory concert from the Aroha String Quartet,as near to a “something for everybody” presentation as one might reasonably wish for!

First of all, there was a String Quartet by Josef Haydn, as delightfully self-explanatory and satisfying as any work from the string quartet repertoire could be to as wide a range of tastes as might be imagined. Following this we heard a work by American composer Samuel Barber, his single most well-known piece of music, popularly known as Barber’s Adagio for Strings, but here brought to us in its original context as part of a three-movement string quartet.

After the interval the focus was shifted to some “closer to home” music, not as indigenous in origin as might have been possible, but whose human interest connection resonated sufficiently for us to register its proximity and relevance to our part of the world.   This was music by Lower-Hutt-born Ross Carey, written in 2010 to commemorate the death of Ruby Hunter (1955-2010), the indigenous Australian singer-songwriter, Carey having been inspired by what he considered as “the profound personal struggles and triumphs of the dedicatee”, one of Australia’s “Stolen Generation” who was taken from her birth family and placed in foster care from the age of eight. She became the first indigenous Australian woman to record and release a solo rock album. Carey in his  work Toccatina – Elegy wanted to reflect something of that eventful journey.

A different and no less eventful kind of life-journey was that of the composer of the concert’s concluding work, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose String Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, Op.74.has long become identified with its nickname, “The Harp” (given not by the composer, incidentally, but by a publisher!), and earning the sobriquet through its opening movement’s passages of plucked arpeggiated notes .Beethoven dedicated this work to the Archduke Rudolf, one of his most loyal supporters in Vienna. Written against the background of battles in and all around Vienna between the Austrian and French armies, the quartet was able to be premiered towards the end of 1809 after the French had left!

So to the music and its performance – and, to begin, we heard the last of Haydn’s six Quartets Op, 64, in E-flat , a group dedicated to Johann Tost, a virtuoso violinist of the composer’s acquaintance. What a glorious E-flat opening of the work we enjoyed! – with the refulgent warmth of the tones spreading through the ambient spaces of St.Andrew’s, a combination of elegance and playfulness with the sonorous opening set against those filigree impulses of playfulness. The development was treated as a kind of “fantasia” on the opening, before the second violinist presided over a kind of “triologue” between the other three players, a delightful sequence of conversational exchanges, each with a personable kind of opinionated quality, and seeming to come to concerted agreement before returning to the opening – the revisitations added enrichments and feelings of increased satisfaction to the exchanges in their sense of a shared, and obviously relished experience. The slow movement had its own surprise in store – after a serenely lullabic, beautifully “arching-over” melodic opening, the  music\.s central section abruptly changes, depicting what the programme note calls a ”tantrum” from the first violinist (terrific playing from Haihong Liu, here!) – one wonders how “personal” an utterance this episode depicted, as the composer’s marriage was reputedly not a happy one! On the other hand, its volatility could be nothing more than an instance of “gypsy-like” character Haydn had frequent recourse to in his music.

I adored the Menuet’s performance – here, lively and somewhat pesante in character, with the aristocracy depicted as “kicking up its heels” in places, stepping outside the traditionally “courtly” nature of such interactions. The Trio is a gentler “landler” which employs occasional glissandi figurations – a mannerism deemed too “vulgar” by nineteenth-century editors, “smoothing out” the scoops in the lines, but here restored, giving the music an engaging folkish character! And what a joy was the finale! – real “Keystone Cops” stuff which a later composer given also to such headlong dashings, Dmitri Shostakovich, would have relished all the more had he been a violinist!  The whirling, almost vertiginous figurations enacted a stop/start manner whose theatricality added to the pleasures of the entertainment, complete with teasing tempo variants towards the end, and capped off with a furious presto finish that had us on the edges of our seats for the final flourish.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has long been the American equivalent of Elgar’s “Nimrod”, taken from the latter’s “Enigma Variations”, music whose strands in both cases readily conjure up a sense of shared emotion involving either commemoration or loss on the part of a whole nation and in many cases across boundaries. Both pieces are parts of larger works, in Barber’s case a string quartet Op.11 from 1936, one whose second movement Adagio the composer quickly made into an arrangement for string orchestra, one which has virtually gone around the world, leaving the remainder of the hapless parent work languishing in the wings of largely unheralded appreciation!

Now was our chance to hear the actual “source” from which the work was drawn. It was the first time I had heard the string quartet version of the work, and, in fact, my first experience of the complete quartet! Barber was content with completing three movements, the familiar Adagio here flanked by an opening  “molto allegro e appassionato” movement, and a concluding “molto allegro (come prima)” sequence, He began work on the piece in 1935 while living in Austria with his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, intending to have the work finished for performance by the Curtis Quartet – however, the finale gave Barber a good deal of trouble, and after the first, delayed, performance of the work, Berber rewrote the movement several times, eventually settling for a kind of reprise of the beginning movement, music of spiky textures featuring colourful contrasts of mood, much shorter than the two movements preceeding it.

The first movement  opened intensely and passionately – music that seemed in a hurry to take us somewhere. A dramatic pause introduced a more lyrical second theme, refreshingly open and song-like, until the tempo was impulsively switched back to the opening urgencies, though retreating again for a gorgeous violin solo, prompting the ensemble to take up the lyrical lines, the cello enjoying a moment of rapturous expression as well – the players then remembered their allegiances to the opening urgencies once again, but couldn’t resist the nostalgic beauties of the more lyrical sequences, which they returned to most affectingly – the music seemed to want to have its cake and eat it too, reminding the players of the music’s need for further fervent gesturings before enigmatically concluding the movement with a few abruptly dismissive shrugs.

The Adagio which followed needed no detailed description, except that its long lines of expression engulfed our  sensibilities in a timeless world, seemingly endless “stretches of sound” which created their own breathing-patterns and impulses, out of normal time, and reminiscent of something like an ancient chant drawing inexhaustible energies from some kind of life-force, and prompting those listening to attune their own biorhythms accordingly – the viola in the ensemble held what seemed like a central note, while the surrounding instruments both stratospherically and metamorphically harmonised to mesmerising effect.  in the midst of the silences that followed, the heartfelt epilogue brought violin and viola together to sound the opening theme’s concluding voice – a superb, deeply affecting performance!

Was a finale necessary after such an utterance? I think so – some kind of “closure” was actually welcomed after the rawness of the Adagio’s conclusion, and the sense of continuation from the first movement brought us back to a world from which we had escaped, and perhaps needed to be re-reminded of, however enriched by the revelations of the Adagio’s other-worldliness. The famous stand-alone Adagio wasn’t at all diminished by its quartet companions, but its impact was sharpened and  made more  multi-dimensional in its original context.

The interval’s breathing-space prepared us for something different, a work whose composer was present in the audience! This was New Zealand-born Ross Carey’s work Toccatina (Elegy), though its subject was more Trans-Tasman than home-grown, and was written while Carey was in Australia. The composer talked with us briefly about the work’s subject-matter before we got down to grips with the actual music – here in three sections, the first an energetically restless “perpetuum mobile” with the lower strings providing rock-steady “hocket” accompaniment to the violins’ soaring and swooping overhead lines, the first violin at first taking the lead with some heart-stopping stratospheric lines, but increasingly joined by the second violin, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint!  In the second section the ‘cello took the lead with a poignant-sounding repeatedly descending figure (lovely voicings from the ‘cello!), supported by a tapestried networking of triplet-like lines from the other instruments, handing over to the violin in places, with the figurations from both instruments seeming to dance to their own music in places….before we knew what was happening the first movement’s ostinato-like movement had crept back, this time with more resolve in the music’s sights, the rhythms giving way gradually to what became increasingly self-affirming statements of quiet fruition at the end – in its way, profound and moving.

And so we reached the concert’s last item – I remember the distinctive first-movement concluding “motif” of Beethoven’s “Harp” string quartet being used as the theme of a televised programme series about famous works of art, long before I started getting to know the quartets properly. Having been television-less now for nigh-on forty years, the aural spaces that were created in my life by such a blessed liberation left room for music of all kinds, and inevitably brought those remarkable works swimming into my ken – so that the reappearance of the aforementioned motif, with its genesis long since identified, continued to give special pleasure!

So it was, naturally, that the Aroha’s voyage through this quartet’s opening, truly venturesome movement enabled me to enjoy that sense of returning from afar all over again, though of course the intermittent journeyings between the aural milestones were as rewarding in their own way, and especially in this intensely committed performance – the opening poco adagio took us into a world of wonderment with those occasional sforzandi chordings reminding us not to tarry overmuch amid incidental beauties, but to keep our intents and purposes on the journey! With the allegro came those delicately-placed pizzicati notes which earned the quartet the sobriquet of “Harp”, along with amazing will-o-the-wisp figurations whose vertiginous quality (here, brilliantly executed) whirled through our sensibilities up to the moment of my “great works of art” revisitation passage, forever fresh and nostalgic at one and the same time! The work’s middle section varied between amazingly “busy’ variants of  the movement’s first allegro subject, and rapid-fire pizzicato exchanges, taking us on a whirlwind kind of ride to the recapitulation, in which all the movement’s elements returned in “same-but-different” guises, and an extended kind of “coda” which managed to integrate those same elements in a spirited confrontation-like summation AND re-echo my “motif” of  cherished memory!

The programme note mentioned the second movement’s ”tender love aria” description, which the performance straightaway brought out, possibly a reflection of an “amour” of the composer’s, though one which perhaps didn’t work as planned due to the near-despair of the minor key mood that suddenly clouded the music, and the almost palpable “hesitancy” which takes over the exchanges! The violin determinedly took the initiative, supported by the cello, before the mood darkened once again (and with the violin dropping into a register that resembled a viola or even a ’cello while its violin partner took the higher ground! Again the instruments mused between hope and despair, though one sensed as much a feeling of resignation in the softly-whispered concluding chords.

What a startling difference wrought by the vigorously-propelled Scherzo, here! Bitingly-precise ensembled attack depicted a fierce kind of exultation, the playing part exhilarating, part fearsome in its physicality, quite overwhelming in its impact, its four-note repetitive phrase modelled on the opening of the Fifth Symphony, premiered just a few months before. The “Trio” sections didn’t let up, but whirled like dervishes around and about chant-like figures, ostensibly used by the composer as counterpoint exercises for his pupils. The scherzo’s “third-time round” was then delivered in increasingly whispered tones, coming to an unresolved halt, and allowing the first strains of the finale to sound from the exhausted silences – an engagingly repeated three-note Allegretto theme!

The first of the variations on this theme, a dancing, canonic celebration of gaiety providing further welcome relief from the scherzo’s punishingly relentless drive. was led by the ‘cello, as was the following graceful triplet variation. Then came a contrasting running variant of the theme, followed variously by a slower, wistful sequence, a sprightlier violin-led dance, and a chugging ’cello triplet accompaniment a cross-rhythmed song – this grew in intensity and pace until it changed to an allegro stretto with all the instruments excitingly in unison, and racing towards the work’s end, finishing, somewhat disconcertingly, on two soft chords!

What a finish, and what a performance, as evidenced by warm appreciation from all parts of the auditorium!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music that unfurls the Colours of Karori’s splendid Futuna Chapel

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

“Something old, something new…”  – the Elementi Trio at Futuna Chapel, July 2026Monica Verburg, Nicholas Hancox and Pepe Becker

ELEMENTI TRIO –
Monica Verburg – flute, alto flute
Nicholas Hancox – viola
Pepe Becker – soprano, thumb piano (mbira)

Futuna Chapel, Karori, Wellington
Sunday, 5th July 2026

Sitting in Futuna Chapel, in Karori, on a recent Sunday afternoon, listening to a concert of music given by a trio of extremely talented performers (flutist, violist and soprano vocalist), I found myself thinking at various stages of the concert about the sheer beauty of the sounds being brought forth by these musicians. I’m sure that, given the singular beauty of the venue’s overall atmosphere, ambience and amalgam of design and colour, I was allowing those qualities to infuse the music’s impact beyond the realms of a simple auditory response and into a kind of totality of experience that transcended “normal” listening. Be that as it may, the effect of these different factors conspired to produce a level of enjoyment of this concert’s music-making that has stayed with me right up to this moment.

Interestingly, the very first item of the concert seemed to me as much a “test run” by the performers, almost a “getting the pitch of the hall” kind of run-through with an audience present for the musicians to be able to sound out things like the balances between the instruments and the voice, and the degree to which the sounds “come back” from the peopled ambient spaces. I did find this first item (Thomas Morley’s madrigal “Arise, get up, my dear” a trifle chaotic in its full-blooded amalgam of sounds – and yet the music is actually about incidental chaos, being Morley’s musical description of the hustle and bustle of a new bride’s wedding day. More spacious and wide-ranging was Pepe Becker’s singing of Hildegarde of Bingen’s “O Euchari” which followed, the singer enabling her voice to “ring down the ages” from Hildegard’s time, with Nicholas Hancox’s viola steadily recreating the age-old drone accompaniment. A third item completed an opening “triumvirate” of the concert’s range and scope, featuring a home-grown work, Pepe Becker’s own setting of a sixteenth-century poem “T’amo mia vita” (I love you, my life) by Giovanni Battista Guarini, originally written for three voices and mbira “thumb piano” but here recast by Becker for soprano, viola and mbira – the latter is an African instrument and was played here by Becker herself, its sound creating a kind of timeless, tonally transcendent “voice”. The words of the poem have a universality which here seemed to fit the composer’s revised setting as much as it must have her all-vocal original!

We heard three more of Pepe Becker’s by turns playful, declamatory and darkly visionary pieces placed separately throughout the concert, the delightful “Two Tui” a work for flute premiered by Bridget Douglas in 2010, and essayed here most viscerally by Monica Verburg, the music based on two separate calls associated with different places in Wellington, and brought together as a kind of dialogue, with a petulant dismissive squawk of one bird at the other’s expense at the end! Becker’s more expansive, almost ritualistic piece, “Scorpio II – From the far point of the Rising Sun” featured her soprano voice enacting a kind of ritual exchange with the solo flute. Long, sonorous lines alternating with stately roulade-like flourishes before the dialogues become intricate and earnest (though no words were provided – I presumed the singer’s phrases were in Latin), the lines occasionally mirroring one another before concluding the piece with some brief mirror-image shared phrasings. Most suggestive for me was her darkly resonant tribute to Sagittarius, a setting of William Blake’s “The Tyger” a work Becker dedicated to her father, along with her “many Sagittarius friends” – something of a “Do not go gentle into that good night” work of darkness and angst, the sombre tone set by Nicholas Hancox’s opening viola chord, though the trio fetched up more incisive and trenchant tones for the poem’s “fearful symmetries” (it was a work composed for this concert, in fact!).

Bringing her own creative talents to this cornucopian assemblage was flutist Monica Verburg, who contributed no less than two recently-completed pieces for premiering at this concert, the first one a heartwarming and environmentally topical work titled “To the Hills” (Ki ngā puke), being inspired by a recent campaign of conservation of Otago’s Dunstan Mountains. Verburg drew our attention to the piece’s influences, a certain “Celtic flavour” in accord with early European settlement of this area, and which the trio of musicians made much of in performance throughout the piece’s three sections, The other recent work of Verburg’s was  “In the Slipstream” a delight for the ear in its interplay between two instruments, flute and viola (the flutist often swapping between flute and alto flute in her performances, which variation, to my shame, I seem to have neglected to draw any attention to in my notes – mea culpa!) Here, the two instrumental  lines  imitated, shadowed and mimicked one another constantly, with (I thought) occasionally bluesy inflections spicing the sounds ever so slightly, as the music, by turns teased and blended its two strands before drifting into a pensive ending.

Monica Verburg was as well responsible in full or in part for four other items, two of them original works and two arrangements, the first original work “Turn Your Eyes”, originally composed in 2024 for soprano and alto recorder, and then rewritten for soprano, flute and viola – the words were based on the text from Proverbs 4:25 “Let your eyes look straight ahead….” Though the combination of tones made it impossible for me to decipher any of the actual text, the sounds in tandem, though brief, were themselves glorious! We then heard a song “Ocean Breeze” (aha! – in my notes is a mention of the ALTO flute!) – here, Pepe Becker’s soprano and Monica Verburg’s instrument were wistful companions at the song’s opening, one whose melody readily caught the ear in balladic fashion! The two arrangements made by Verburg were for larger-scale forces as one might have expected in her grand setting of Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Jubilate Deo” with its splendidly ceremonial trappings, not to mention the fulsomeness of the text – “Shout joyfully to God, all of the earth!” – what attention-grabbing gesturings (suggesting, of course, antiphonal voices) and declamatory utterances, complete with brief, wistful occasional minor-key harmonic turns, just for variety! Great stuff!

Before I mention in conclusion the concert’s final item (Verburg’s second “arrangement”) I need to recap with still more “gems” which came up in passing  – one was non-vocal, Jack Body’s “Aeolian Harp”, here most evocatively realised by Nicholas Hancox’s viola, capturing the piece’s extraordinary and irresistible frisson of intensities gleaned from nature’s random impulses. Then there were three medieval “pop” numbers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the earliest of which was Guillaume de Machaut’s “Douce Dame Jolie”  (Sweet. Lovely lady)  – performed here with the viola as the drone instrument and the flute as a companion for the voice – what an uncanny sense of time and place, here, with music making its way to us centuries later! Of the two other later works, one (“Quel fronte signorille” (That noble brow) by Guillaume Dufay) had a similar “courtly love” sentiment no less resonant and focused than de Machaut’s, while the other (a motet “Quam pulchra es” by John Dunstable) was by contrast an unashamedly erotic setting of words from the Biblical “Song of Songs”, its performance here suggesting a parallel musical “enchantment by beauty”.

By the time we reached the programme’s final item everything seemed suffused with a spirit of complete capitulation towards the music and its making, one suitably enhanced by Monica Verburg’s inspired arrangement of this concluding music. Flute and viola began the “thistledown on the wind” introduction, the former extempore and the latter holding a firm foundation line. The scene having been set, the voice then entered with the famous melody “Hine e Hine”, one written famously by Princess Te Rangi Pai (the stage-name of Fanny Rose Poata – b.1868 d.1916), composed in or around 1907. It felt like a kind of “homecoming”, one returning to something deeper than the present, and with enveloping tendrils of belonging, easier to “feel” than to explain. But in tandem with the glories of the venue in which we had enjoyed these sounds it “rounded off” for me (and for others I spoke to at the time) a most agreeable afternoon’s music-listening!

A world-encircling winter solstice concert compendium – from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra with Virginie Pacheco, Sam Zhu and Ewan Clark

CLAIRE COWAN* ( Aotearoa New Zealand) – Legend of the Trojan Bird (2008)
EDWARD GREGSON (England) – Concerto for Tuba (1978)
AMY BEACH (United States) – Symphony in E Minor “Gaelic” (1896)

Sam Zhu (tuba)
Virginie Pacheco* (assistant conductor)
Ewan Clark (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 21st June 2026

Winter Solstice day in Wellington! and with it a venturesome programme of music from the Wellington City Orchestra! True, there was little or no ostensible relationship as regards the pieces’ content to the Solstice date and its marking of the venue’s furthermost separation from the sun – but as the concert featured three pieces new to the orchestra’s schedules, the musical territories we were taken to today seemed to have an appropriate sense of something out of the ordinary. This was further underlined by the cosmopolitean nature of the works and their origins, almost as if the music-making was putting a kind of Shakespearean girdle about the earth, beginning very properly with homegrown sounds and straightaway circumventing the globe before returning to our south seas via the Americas!

I thought it all fell excitingly in line with the general adventurousness of the orchestra’s recent repertoire, in terms of the programme’s relative unfamiliarity, and its attendant technical and interpretative challenges. Each WCO concert over the last couple of seasons has sparked interest in what has seemed to me like an encouraging rejuvenation of Wellington’s concert-going scene – with an increased proportion of both new and less familiar works in concerts a stimulating feature

This concert was no exception, with a trio of works notable for its diversity as such, besides representing different eras of musical history, and a variety of genres, in this case a miniature version of an orchestral tone-poem (Claire Cowan’s 2008 ”Legend of the Trojan Bird”), a 1978 concerto for tuba and orchestra (from Englishman Edward Gregson) and a fully-fledged romantic symphony (1896) by the American composer Amy Cheney Beach. I’ve not been able to find any other instance of this latter work being performed in this country, which possibly gives the occasion the additional distinction of being an Aotearoa New Zealand premiere – though I would have thought the organisers would have made mentioned of such a circumstance had it been the case.

As with previous recent concerts, one of the items was assigned to the orchestra’s Assistant Conductor, Virginie Pacheco, in this case Claire Cowan’s concise and evocative work “Legend of the Trojan Bird”, one dating from Cowan’s student years, during which she wrote the piece for the Auckland Youth Orchestra in 2008. Though not printed in the programme, a poem, presumably written by the composer, outlines the music’s trajectories, the music in effect elaborating what the poem’s words describe – the coming of the bird to “the ancient city” bringing a “moving shadow” of darkness along with the visitor’s  “dangerous beauty”. The music by turns depicted both the bird’s obvious mechanical attributes  – “wooden wings flapping, squeaking, lurching and shuddering”  along with more transformative modes, resulting in trajectories of soaring flight. Here, the rhythmic mechanical aspects become more vertiginous as the sounds “swoop, hover, soar”, before achieving, in its song a lovely “conversation with the neighbourhood of stars”- after which it disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. In every sense the scoring was magically ambient and ear-catching, holding one’s attention right to the mystical “stellar conversation” at the piece’s end. Conductor and orchestra achieved, I thought, miracles of evocation throughout every moment of the piece – a wondrous experience.

A different, more down-to-earth encounter was enacted by the performers in the next item, bringing both tuba soloist Sam Zhu and conductor Ewan Clark to the platform.  This was English composer Edward Gregson’s 1978 concerto for tuba, a piece obviously indebted to the latter’s historic compatriot Ralph Vaughan Williams with his similarly-wrought work for the instrument – Gregson at one point in the first movement unashamedly quotes the earlier work in an appropriate act of tongue-in-cheek homage, bringing a smile to the faces of those “in the know”, though there were many more felicities to be enjoyed, such as the wondrously cavernous notes Sam Zhu coaxed out of the ambient depths slumbering within his instrument!

A second movement demonstrated in places the expressive range of the instrument, its lyrical, and, in places, somewhat anguished tones far removed from the humour and rumbustions of the opening, partnered by some haunting wind playing sequences, and featuring a great percussion-capped climax at one point before the music drew up its folds of sound and returned to its dark silences. We were given a “return to life” by the finale, with marching pizzicato at the outset accompanying some jolly “tuba-triplets” and which then morphed into a festive dance! Sam Zhu’s instrument then gave us an almost lullabic moment with some pendulous winds as well as a briefly-philosophical like cadenza, before being marched off triumphantly at the end by the band as if “spoils from a day’s successful tuba-watching” – a great success!

So to the concert’s much-awaited second half and a symphony by the remarkable Amy Beach,a work which, at the time caused quite a stir with its first performance in Boston in1896, as it was the first symphony composed by an American woman to be performed by a major orchestra. Beach  had begun her musical career primarily as a pianist, and had already appeared as a soloist with the Boston Symphony when just seventeen years of age. However her marriage shortly afterwards resulted in her giving up her performing career for a number of years and concentrating upon composition. Largely self-taught, she drew her inspiration from both the “classics” and from the music that was still new in the 1880s, Brahms, Wagner. Liszt and Dvorak. Her compositions beside the Symphony included a Piano Concerto, a Mass and many chamber works and songs, which, after a period of neglect, are finding their way back into recent concert schedules everywhere.

Beach was a member of a group of composers from New England whose goal was to develop a uniquely “American” style of composition through combining traditional classical structures and forms with indigenous melodies and rhythms (such as Afro-American spirituals and folk melodies (Antonin Dvorak, who lived and worked for a period in New York was a passionate advocate of this principle in his composition teaching at the American National Music Conservatory).  Beach’s contemporaries included George Whitfield Chadwick,  Horatio Parker, John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote and Edward MacDowell  – despite the esteem she was held in, she still had to overcome prevailing attitudes towards her “women composer” status, even when positively expressed – it was Chadwick who, when congratulating Beach on the success of her Symphony, described his “thrill of pride” that such a fine work had been produced by someone whom he considered had become “one of the boys”! However, Beach was determined also to advance women’s composition activities, helping to establish a Society of American Women Composers in 1925 and supporting the compositional careers of several who became known and admired, among them Margaret Ruthven Lang, and  Mabel W. Daniels, as well as the French-born Cecile Chaminade.

Beach’s Symphony in E-flat was given the name “Gaelic” because of her use of the technique of using “music of the people” for thematic and rhythmic inspiration as advocated by Dvorak, though with a significant difference – her “indigenous” affinities were with the folk-song and-dance material brought to America by her English, Scottish and Irish forbears, and the predominately ”irish” origins of the songs and dances quoted in the Symphony resulted in the work’s subtitle. She quoted the idea of the folk-themes expressing “the laments of a primitive people – their hopes and their dreams”.

Written between 1894 and 1896 this was Beach’s only Symphony, and fully expresses her determination to capture the flavour of the “music of the people” she knew best – the “Allegro con fuoco” opening of the work immediately expresses a rich, dark chromatic Romanticism, reminiscent of some of Liszt’s and Wagner’s music, mysterious swirlings punctuated by great calls and declamatory gestures. Solo winds then quoted from both Beach’s own music, a song “Dark is the Night” and from a Gaelic dance-tune, with solo clarinet, oboe, flute and horn splendidly doing the thematic honours, their traditional exposition, development and recapitulation roles coming to the fore throughout the movement, and with remarkably assured support from strings, brass and percussion in various sequences.

The second movement charmingly began “Alla Siciliana” before transforming itself into an Allegro vivace – lovely work at the outset from the solo horn, followed by the oboe quoting a beguiling Irish tune “The little field of barley” (along with other winds), after which the strings magically ushered in dancing, scampering and rumbusting textures to captivating effect! – a sudden  luftpause then brought horn, clarinet and flute as harbingers of a gorgeous cor anglais rendition of the “Little field” melody, to which the strings and brass addeed their voices, and the various winds “paired up” with fragments of the melody, until the scampering strings returned to round off the movement’s fairytale enchantment!!

The brasses announced the opening of the third movement’s “Lento”, which the winds carried on, before the solo violin presented a kind of recitative, joined by the solo cello – we then got an evocative  melody called “Cushlamachree” led by the ‘cello and joined by the oboe, and strings. This led to an epic, almost “Smetana/Ma Vlast-like” section featuring a series of “great views” from the whole orchestra, the solo horn leading the way in a series of wind and brass solos cycled about the orchestra! soundscape, with beautiful solos aplenty! The solo violin adroitly introduced a major-key melody – presumably one called “Which way did she go?” –  which built up to an almost angst-flavoured climax, before restating the first melody, Beach here displaying her compositional mastery with variants of the themes in major and minor, and with the interchanges brought to a particularly piquant conclusion.

I had found the symphony’s finale something of a protracted puzzle on first hearing a recording, but this performance held the structure together steadfastly and seemed to make everything work, right from its vigorous and declamatory “ready! – set!” introduction, indicating the onset of an adventurous journey – after this vigorous opening came a lyrical counter-subject in a major key, not unlike that in the finale of Sergei Rachmaninov’s E Minor Symphony, written a decade or so later. A strange, moodily restless passage followed, which took some time to build back the energies of the opening, the players keeping their heads and fiercely concentrating upon the music’s “search for redemption” which came with the horns sounding the alarm and rousing the brass and the rest of the orchestra to readiness! With that, and the major-key second subject’s return, the skies suddenly cleared, and the music raced to its close as jubilantly and decisively as might have been expected.

I thought, at the end of the work, that Ewan Clark and the WCO players had completed something of a major achievement, here   – such an enthusiastic and spankingly capable performance! We were left to all babble our way homewards at the joy of such a discovery, and of experiencing a whole afternoon’s feisty and absorbing listening!

Aotearoa and China – a musical dialogue presented by Jian Liu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Concert Series 2026

Jian Liu (piano) presents “Aotearoa and China – a musical  dialogue”
Works for solo piano  by New Zealand and Chinese composers
– the first of four concerts as part of a CMNZ tour)

St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 14 th June 2026

Review for Middle C by Gary Wilby

What a thoughtfully curated concert by Associate Professor Jian Liu of Te Koki New Zealand School of Music Victoria University of Wellington. This was a brilliant piano journey through both the place and the culture of New Zealand and China. The programme – Aotearoa & China: A Musical Dialogue  –  cleverly paired piano solos by composers from the two places which are Jian Liu’s home.

In his introductory comments he mentioned that the programme was not the big works from the romantic period – which he had recently been playing as
member of a Quintet at the Chamber Music section of the Michael Hill International Violin Competition Semi Finals in Auckland – but rather smaller piano works from the two countries which complement and contrast place, land, and its inhabitants.

Jian Liu, who has lived in NZ for some 16 years spoke of live performance as having an energy and connection  which he wished to share with us. The programme began with Lilburn’s 1951 “From the Port Hills” one of Five Bagatelles. This  the most evocative and embedded of piano works relating to the landscape of NZ – the vista, the walking, cycling, running, the backdrop to every Cantabrians day – was played with spacious crafted phrases and dynamic range, the bass notes played with a heft to perhaps even suggest the crater’s volcanic origins.

This was immediately followed without a break by “Pictures from Bashu” by Huang Hu Wei,  referencing the cultural richness of Sichuan in a selection of four pieces from that work. Immediately the delicacy of morning, the lyricism, the dynamic virtuosity, the festivity, the sound with Chinese characteristics was
apparent.

“Three Short Pieces” by Salina Fisher, who was present in the audience, moved us to a more abstract view – amazing for a work by a school student at the time – of “Raindrops on a Misty Pond”, “Moths in the light” and then “Galaxy”, giving us a sense of vastness. Each of these Jian gave us with great clarity – delicate echoes, where every note had its place creating an almost different piano sound. And, we were made aware of that by the performer.

Salina was paired with probably the most well-known Chinese composer to New Zealanders in this programme – Tan Dun. If not for the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” maybe because of his many concertos. His “Water Concerto” has been performed in NZ as has his opera “Tea” performed at the NZ International Festival of the Arts. He also visited NZ a number of times and worked at VUW, facilitated by Jack Body and connections through the Asian Composers League Festivals. Again, only a selection of movements from this longer piece – “Eight Memories in Watercolours” – were heard  – the exciting “Staccato Beans”, the
pastoral “Herdboy”, and the evocative “Floating Clouds” almost French floating away to nothing.

Tan Dun’s work was more motivic than we had heard thus far. Dynamic with strong rhythms, tempo and beat. The “Herdboy” evoked isolation and Chinese instrumentation. I would love to have heard Jian playing the last in this suite – the very exciting “Sun Rain”

The programme then moved into love and affection – lyricism. Gareth Farr’s beautiful, sensitive “Love Songs” for three friends – subtle and beautiful melodic lines with arpeggiated left hand accompaniment. Immediately appealing but also requiring reflection. Of course, Jian played these very sensitively,  gifting us the simplicity and emotion of these pieces.

Jian then played “Three Songs from the Mountains of Southern Yunnan” by Zhang Zhao. The folk aesthetic moved though dance like activities involving children, hills, Mountain Moons and mountain Fire which sparked under Jian’s fingers and almost felt slightly dangerous.

After the Interval we had two Lullabies – “For Matthew” by Gillian Whitehead and a work by He Lu Ting. The intimacy of interacting with a child, the soothing of a child – Gillian’s rocking motion with Jian bringing out the bass part and then a work with a Chinese taste where the pianist “rang out” the melodic line. A universal act.

The children are presumably slightly older in Anthony Ritchie’s “Carolina Bay Suite” and Ding Shan De’s “Children Suite – Happy Holidays”. The former evokes a sunrise then children excitedly playing and running on one of the South Island’s most well-known beaches and carnivals. Having fun in the sun at the beach. The Chinese child getting out of the city, skipping with ropes and playing hide and seek. The perfect day for children – here and there.

The programme concluded with two early works by senior composers of the two countries’ earlier times – more formal and traditionally structured.  David Farquhar’s “Sonatina” is a work which should be played more as it reflects on and is part of a time when NZ composers were finding their own feet as part of this country, as part of this land. The programme finished with Wang Li San’s “Sonatina”. Unlike Farquhar’s typical music tempo markings (eg .Andante) for each movement, the latter has the more typical Chinese “titles” describing nature’s sunshine, new rain and “Dance of the Mountain Men” evoking dance and nature.

What an interesting programme –  so well curated and so well presented to the large audience by the performer and by Wellington Chamber Music. As one woman said leaving the venue “That was so exciting –  I didn’t know any of the pieces”. But she was converted and enthralled. Jian Liu’s playing is in its self worth hearing but in this concert he did more by creating links and dialogue for us. He brought us to the lands and the people of two countries’ cultures – especially the children.

It is worth noting that the music is available through Sounz Centre for NZ Music and also through the NZ Music Trust who published “Chinese Piano Music for Children” and also “NZ Piano Works in Two Volumes”. Jian Liu is, during the next week, presenting the programme through Chamber Music NZ to Whanganui, Upper Hutt and New Plymouth

NZTrio’s sensational Dreamscape Concert sweet relief for Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

NZTrio He Taonga Wairere performing at Nga Pou Ruahine – Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui, Wellington

NZTrio He Taonga Wairere – Dreamscape
ROXANNA PANUFNIK – Around Three Corners (1995)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No.1 in D Minor Op.63 (1847)
CLAIRE COWAN – wood: strings: hammers: flesh (2008)
CHARLES IVES – Piano Trio (1911-15)

NZTrio He Taonga Wairere – Amalia Hall (violin) / Matthias Balzat (‘cello) / Jian Liu (piano)

Nga Pou Ruahine – Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui (Wellington Public Library)
Saturday, May 23rd, 2026

Oh, to be in Wellington! – annus mirabilis 2026! How ironic that, when we’re in the throes of  an unprecedentedly savage institutionalised attack by the Coalition Government on our city’s lifeblood of productive public employment activity, we’re still able, in almost Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, to continue to enjoy, courtesy of our classical music organisations, a wondrous – under the circumstances, little short of escapist! – level of artistic excellence in concerts given by our (mostly locally-based) performers.

I write this, having experienced over the course of two consecutive weekend days a pair of chamber music presentations of performances which, quite literally, bowled me over, Both ensembles were piano trios, whose players demonstrated a breathtaking mastery of intent, understanding and execution throughout each of the concerts – as well, we heard not only established masterpieces recognised worldwide as such, but a couple of uniquely treasurable instances of homegrown composition which would have graced any such programme anywhere

These concerts came with a number of attendant pleasures relating to factors such as venue and personnel – enough for me to give each occasion sufficient “raison d’etre” to warrant a separate review. However, their combined pleasures and inspirations certainly gave extra hope and strength to my feeling that (as has happened in the past) humanity both in this part of the world and at large will actively respond to these resonating artistic expressions with sufficient will and determination to overcome aforememtioned troubles and go on.

As outlined above, the superb NZTrio He Taonga Wairere, performing at the capital’s magnificently refurbished Public Library (Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui) began for me this memorable two-staged feast, and with the “other” newly-formed Korimako Trio continuing the weekend’s pleasures at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, also in Wellington, the following day – the two events were not “linked” as such in any way except in terms of their remarkable “shared”  qualities. A particular feature of the earlier NZ Trio concert was the presence of guest pianist Dr.Jian Liu, Associate Professor of Piano from Te Koki/New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, who has been at the keyboard for the Trio’s “Dreamscape” series of concerts, along with regulars violinist Amalia Hall and ‘cellist Matthias Balzat.

Besides the music we were able to enjoy the surroundings of the Library’s new music-performing space, Nga Pou Ruahine, spectacularly appointed with various artworks depicting most prominently a rawa by Darcy Nicholas of the Feminine Pillars of Life,  Earth Mothers HIneahuone, Hinetitama and Hinenuitepo, one whose resonances stretch right across the ceiling, and which cast vivid impressions of the goddesses’ all-pervading influence. Earlier today I glanced through writer Elizabeth Kerr’s useful thoughts upon performance spaces for music available in Wellington and their acoustical suitability for music, a compendium to which this striking environment can be added with enthusiasm, even though I wondered about the effect of having significant walled areas on each side of glass surfaces upon the acoustics. Every venue has its own particular sound-character, and in this case I did initially prefer, I must admit, the slightly crisper St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace “sound” the following day for the Korimako Trio. Still, the ear does adjust quickly to all but the most intractable of acoustics at most concerts I’ve attended, though I have to say I agree with my colleague’s views over the distinct “lack of bloom” in the ever-problematic Michael Fowler Centre, awaiting as I am the return of the near-matchless sweetness of the sounds of music in the city’s Town Hall auditorium (a building mercifully spared the wrecker’s ball!).

One characteristic that Nga Pou Ruahine readily allowed us to enjoy was the “shared” aspect of the listening-space, mercifully freed from any restrictive boundary between performers and listeners (several other local venues also have this warmly-communicative quality, making music-listening such a joy!) – so it was when Amalia Hall, Matthias Balzat and Jian Liu appeared, with any initial aural “opaqueness” I’ve hinted at soon relegated to normality as the concert proceeded.

NZTrio “Dreamscape” members – Amalia Hall (violin), Jian Liu (piano), Matthias Balzat (cello)

What a programme it was!  beginning with Roxanna Panufnik’s haunting “Around Three Corners” a palindromic-like piece with a theme as its centrepiece flanked by variations on either side! I thought the piece a real “adventure” one framed by opening and closing sequences with the strings repetitively “decorating” the piano’s beautifully meditative, fanciful line, and with the sounds at the end returning to the mists out of which everything had first emerged. Along the journey were adventures aplenty – sequences of true, breath-catching wonderment from both piano and violin, each living “for the moment” and the ‘cello seemingly earth-bound while looking upwards in mild bemusement – and Jian Liu directly “activating” the piano strings by reaching into the instrument’s body, bringing into play what could only be described as “interior” worlds, as the violin and ‘cello voiced pleasure/concern with “dying fall” phrases and equivocal moments of note-bending. I loved the “harrumphing” piano rumbustifications and the scintillatingly “shivery” tremolandi from both strings as the trajectories rumbled along (“Are we dreaming you or are you dreaming us?” I could imagine as thoughts were made into words!) – with a “held” violin note echoed by the ‘cello, I imagined the dream beckoning to its participants that its hour had passed for the moment, with beautiful violin tones drawing empathetic responses from the ‘cello, and deferring once more to the piano, a kind of envoi as the sounds took their leave….

It seemed a perfect scenario into which to introduce the music of Robert Schumann, surely the most instantly recognisable of any composer’s music, with its “poetically serious” energies constantly striving to break through and into the light. The players here instantly “got” the restless ebb-and-flow of emotion, its evanescent quality which spontaneously varied in intensity mid-phrase, or even sometimes, mid-note! Were they playing harmonics in the ethereal middle section of the first movement? – such an other-worldly, almost visionary aspect to the music! I loved how Jian’s playing was so attuned to the strings, as if the piano was often at times another stringed instrument! A lovely lead-back to the opening teased our expectations right to the moment of re-recognition – and a beautifully-voiced coda underlined Schumann’s reluctance to let the music go!

Schumann’s mania for near-endless rhythmic repetition in his scherzo movements (surely having an influence upon Bruckner?) generated tremendous momentums here, like “a galloping horse” in places – breathlessly exhilarating! The Trio was, in contrast, like a kind of “wafting” over the same ground, but with an entirely different kind of trajectory! The contrastingly deep piano chords which began the  “Slowly, with intensity” third movement had a beautiful austerity here, which the ‘cello’s entry softened as the dialogue came beautifully together – the increased flow was nicely paced, with the piano joining the thematic ranks – how spellbinding these players then made the introduction to the finale, whose initial sighs of relief were here given an ebb-and-flow kind of physicality, in places quixotic, in others full-blooded – it had a feeling of joyous culmination, even abandonment, reminding me of the finale to the Piano Concerto!

I mean no disrespect to anybody or anything, composer, music, or performer, by declaring that the concert seemed to get even better as it went along – and not due to anything in particular, but the result of a cumulative effect of a constant stream of wonderful music and its astonishing execution! The concert’s final two items were, in a sense, incomparable with both the rest and with each other – each was a kind of idiosyncratic singularity of creativity, conceived in its own isolated surroundings, and brimming with its own time-and-place energies and purposes! First we were drawn into Auckland composer Claire Cowan’s work, wood: strings: hammers: flesh (2008) – one which the composer herself described at the time in a Schumannesque kind of poem –
and you will wear my heart on your bow
you will speak my words
music like flowers will blossom from your fingertips
and they will see right through me
Violinist Amalia Hall told us, by way of introducing the work, that she played in the ensemble which gave  the first performance of Cowan’s piece. I loved its sense of shared discovery  – the opening emphasised the sheer physicality of music-making, with the composer’s performers here using knuckles knocking, fingertips drumming and tapping, and hand-palms slapping and resonating upon the wood, fibres and metal objects and surfaces normally employed as conduits for conventional musical expression. Here the dimensions were enlarged, resonated and given basic, instinct-like impulse, spotlighting the frameworks and interactive relationships between performers and their instruments in an almost primitive, state-of-origin way. From this plethora of sounds came ideas using basic processes to “grow” music before our very eyes, combinations of timbres, rhythms and tones as the players and their instruments interacted, creating moments of magic (the piano strings directly activated by the pianist) and rhapsodic expression (violin and cello strings bowed and plucked) with, by turns, both startling and haunting results. As the unfolding soundscape took us through the various episodes everything became more physical and almost epic in its imaginative reach, to the point where my senses seemed overwhelmed by a kind of ferment of discovery! A final, decisive “clunk” from the players at the end broke the spell, from which I awoke to a kind of silence that hummed with a memory of having shared something of a composer’s journey, or at the very least, a brief immersion into realms (Schumann, again!) of infinite possibilities.

The evening’s final work approached the idea of music-making from the other end of the process – American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) believed that life itself was the source for music, reflecting as many kinds of creative activities as could be discovered, and disdaining any kind of “hierarchy” that put “art-music” at the top of the pyramid and more populist styles below. An excellent programme note for the concert written by Charlotte Wilson underlined the debt owed by Ives to his father, George, himself a bandleader, and “clearly a force of nature, like his son, innately inquisitive and enquiring” and who bequeathed to Charles his own fascination for music, its essences and its different sources.

Ives’s Trio for Violin, ’Cello and Piano, completed in 1911and revised in 1915, drew much of its inspiration from his student days at Yale University, from where he graduated in 1898. Pianist Jian Liu remarked on the work’s in places riotous nature, drawing our attention to the second movement’s “TSIAJ” title (This scherzo is a joke”), and referring to its somewhat chaotic amalgam of tunes therein, emphasising that we were thus warned! Ives himself made reference to his inspirations for the work, citing a “short but serious talk” by “an old philosophy professor” as the first movement’s source of origin, then characterising the somewhat chaotic second movement as “the games and antics by the students on a holiday afternoon” – he then described the final movement as “a remembrance of a Sunday service on the campus”.

I’d heard a recording of the piece before going to the concert, so was “prepared” better than I would have been had I encountered the music as a novice listener – nevertheless I couldn’t believe the extent that the NZ Trio’s playing “made sense” of what had seemed almost like total chaos during my first listen! Here, the first movement distinctly characterised the different dialogues between, firstly, the ‘cello, and then the violin, with the piano – the first measured and circumspect, the second, more animated and even quixotic in places, as if real personalities! The second movement’s “onslaught” of themes also seemed less “randomly disorganised” here, more purposeful and driven, enabling one to really “swing along” as a listener, rather than feeling as if endlessly floundering in a sea of random ditties! Not that spontaneity was lacking – one felt driven less by desperation here and more by “good-old” riotous remembrance!

As for the finale, Moderato con moto, the musicians sounded the “perfect fifths” sequence fanfare-style, before  performing (and repeating) what seemed increasingly like various enigmatic “nostalgia-rituals” – duetting soulful sequences, surviving near-dissonant encounters, tripping through brief, syncopated dance-sequences whose trajectories allowed moments of skitterish excitement, before returning to the soulfulness of the opening “duet” and revisitng the other sequences theme – until, almost out of nowhere came (incredibly moving!) the “Rock of Ages” theme, firstly on the ‘cello then the violin, and lastly (minus its concluding note) on the cello once again, the piano continuing to muse broke off before sounding the phrase’s final B-flat! Enigmatic to the end though it all seemed, the Trio allowed us to drift back into our recognisable lives by playing part of a Brahms Trio – the Andante grazioso from Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor. – before sending us all home!

Trio Obscura – singular tones and timbres bringing to life old and new music with verve and sensitivity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

TRIO OBSCURA
Bede Hanley (oboe), Robert Ashworth (viola), Sarah Watkins (piano)

AUGUST KLUGHARDT (1849-1902)
“Schilflieder” (Songs of the Reeds) – Five Fantasy Pieces   (1872)

ALYSSA MORRIS (1984- )
“The Big Questions” (2024)
1. Who am I?  2. What is this Crazy Thing called Life? 3. How is it Possible?  4. What Comes Next?

CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER (1861-1935)
Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano (1901)
1. Lento (un poco andante ) – L’etang (“The Pool”)
2, Un poco maestoso  (Andante) – La Cornemuse (“The Bagpipe”)

JANET JENNINGS  (1957- )
Five Emotional States (2025)
1.Anxiety   2.Melancholy   3.Anger  4.Relief  5.Exhilaration

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 10th May, 2026

Trio Obscura’s name reminded me somewhat of TS Eliot’s wonderfully idiosyncratic poem “The Naming of Cats”, in which the poet describes a cat’s reverie when contemplating “…his ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable, singular name”.  Of course, there’s no such comparable mystery regarding “The Naming of The Trio” (its title is sufficiently and resonantly suggestive!), but there’s certainly a kind of singularity in the actual combination of “sounds” here, one which was sported blithely and cheerily by this combination of musicians!

I’d not heard of two of the four composers on today’s programme, the first of whom was August Klughardt, born in Köthen, Germany, in 1849, and who grew up during a time of turmoil in music between conservatives who held to classicism and its traditions and the progressives who wanted to explore new modes of expression. From an early age he worked at developing his performing as well as composing skills, first as a pianist and then as a conductor, in which capacity when working at the Ducal Court in Weimar he encountered Franz Liszt, who exerted a profound impression upon him, introducing him to Richard Wagner and the “New German School” of creativity (Klughardt was to conduct Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the court in Dessau in later years). His own compositions, however, reflected a kind of eclectic attitude to the music of the times, taking elements from both traditional and progressive influences. Today his music – symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal and chamber music – is hardly known, though his chamber music is beginning to receive increased attention –  an obvious influence in his work we heard today was that of Schumann  (as it was in Klughardt’s own 1884 Piano Quintet, the appearance of which suggested an act of homage made by one composer to another!)

Today’s work “Schilflieder” (Song of the Reeds) took the form of five “Fantasy Pieces”, inspired by the poetry of Nikolaus Lenau (1802-50), whose work also inspired music by Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. This particular set of verses devotes a separate stanza to the different moods of a wanderer’s day and evening in a forest and by a pond.  “Schilflkieder” was written in 1872 and dedicated by Klughardt to Liszt himself – and actually achieved well-deserved attention for the remainder of the composer’s lifetime.  Interestingly, Klughardt noted in the score that the oboe part could be played if necessary by the violin, a starkly practical, if somewhat radical-sounding adjustment to a sound-world!

The first piece, titled “The sun is sinking over there”, was begun by Sarah Watkins’ piano solo as a sombre preparatory.  The music continued its melancholy course on Bede Hanley’s oboe, until Robert Ashworth’s viola’s entry brought a contrastingly flowing, more expressive character to the mood, seeming to have cheered the oboe up considerably when it re-entered. In this mood of appeasement the instruments ended the piece quietly together. With the following “Darkness falls, the clouds are flying”, I was straightaway taken into what seemed a Schumannesque world = the music had that same earnestly-toned sense of striving (the music marked “impassioned”), with, of course the viola’s sombre tones adding to that so-distinctive ambience! With the following, and so delectably, in places, Brahmsian  “Along a secret path”  I found myself straining to hear the viola at first, against the piano, (the composer’s rather than the player’s fault, here!) wanting more body of tone to make the lines sing. The oboe had no difficulty in this regard, even despite the florid nature of the piano writing, but the viola’s line I thought too subdued in places for the material.,

As for the fiery “Sunset” which followed, it sounded as if we were on board Wagner’s Dutchman’s ship battling the tempests – Sarah Watkins’ piano-playing conjured up a veritable storm through which the oboe piped strenuously and heroically, except that the viola was for the most part, to my ears, lost, swamped in the torrents of sound! Most thankfully, with the “sehr ruhig” of the final piece “On the pond, the motionless one”, we heard both exquisite solo lines and beautiful duetting between oboe and viola, suggesting perhaps moonlight on the tranquil waters after the storm, the viola spaciously raising its voice and singing its melodic traceries. The piano still generated energies aplenty with triumphant-sounding chords in places, but was content to accompany its companions over the work’s serenely lyrical close.

Another name new to me was Alyssa Morris (b.1984), an American composer whose style was described in the programme as “approachable, flashy and beautiful” – the title of her 2024 work “The Big Questions” poses the idea of confronting our very existence, pondering imponderables such as “Who am I?” / “What is this crazy thing called Life?”/ “How is it Possible?” / “What comes next?”.  Reasoning that there are as many potentialities and possibilities as there are humans on this planet capable of flooding one’s sensibilities with uniquely-conceived minutae potentially delivering as much confusion as enlightenment (that sentence will do for a starter!), I strained forwards in my seat hoping to discern via the infintinesimal/infinite action of sound-impulses upon my primed sensibilities a true sense of awareness illuminating my inner being. I wasn’t sure whether the result would be any different to my listening to a favourite piece of music at any given moment of out-of-the-ordinary receptivity – but I counted myself at that particular moment as “ready for anything”.

It struck me that the composer was indulging in a kind of “sleight-of-hand” in giving us the existential titles I’ve already quoted, their “idea” actually containing the seeds of execution more than the actual sounds that followed. “Who am I?”, for example, began with a viola’s single note over which oboe and piano elaborated, recitative-style in a series of “statements” – the piano floridly invited the oboe and viola to similarly elaborate their lines. The music became very “Big American Musical” or “Big Screen”,r even “Big Country”, encouraged by fulsome instrumental tones. A by-product of these fulsome amplifications was that I felt “engaged “ with ideas while losing any specific sense of any uniquely distinctive and definitive state – was it me in this “Who am I?” moment, or was I actually experiencing with this “the craziness of the thing called Life?”

There were “clues” as to what was happening – conversational exchanges between the three instruments punctuated by crazily sassy detailings such as the viola’s sudden downward-plunging glissando, followed by pizzicato-like excuses for such off-the-wall spontaneities! Then there’s a waltz-rhythm, with the three players “bending the trajectories” in Salvador-Dali-like ways, until the famously flaccid structures raised themselves up with an effort and brought off a surprisingly “cutsie” gesture of farewell!

By this time, the question of “What comes next?” that we felt “ready for” had been gazumphed in itself so many times by the music itself we felt ready for anything! A piano solo, gesturing and ruminative, answered by the viola and echoed by the oboe (where he/she goes, we go! was almost sentimentally refrained by the ensemble) – until there was definitely a sense of something impending – was this, perhaps “The Next?” – the piano plunged into  a running, surging accompaniment-like figure which had left its soloists at the starting post by accident! – but which oboe and viola catch up hurriedly! The music became a full-scale song, almost Negro-spiritual-like in manner! The instruments fulsomely decorated their lines as if approaching a kind of climax! Suddenly, everything stopped! – could this be “an end”?  Was there actually such a thing?  I remember when a small boy thinking “When the spaceship reaches the so-called “end of space”, what’s behind that end-wall? – there’s still more space!” Similarly, was this an ending? – or was there simply no end? Was this “What comes Next?” – will there be “no end” of “What comes next?”… except continued (and gorgeous!) soft playing?  The music drifts into space – the oboe and violin hold their notes……the piano softly elaborates…..and finishes!

We needed a half-time! – the sense of “Where am I?” needed some familiar, reassuring sign-posting  – also, I was uncomfortably aware of having perhaps too readily indulged in fancy throughout Alyssa Morris’s essentially “escapist” piece. I needed something more earthily “real” once again, upon which to plant my feet. Interestingly,  the composer Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) whose music was next on the programme  was to supply me with a soupcon of empathy in this respect – Loeffler was described by violist Robert Ashworth in his introduction as “a German man trying to be French”! This was a reference to the composer’s reluctance to acknowledge his actual birthplace (Schonëberg, Berlin), and his somewhat “displaced” sense of upbringing, as he spent most of his life claiming his birthplace was in the Alsace region, which famously borders France, Germany and Switzerland! – (in fact a number of references I checked continue to maintain his claim that he was born in the French Alsacs region!)

Embarking on a career that took him from his birthplace in Germany to the United States via France, Russia, Hungary and Switzerland, the young Loeffler studied the violin in Berlin with Joseph Joachim and then composition with Ernest Giuiraud in Paris, playing in various French orchestras. After his move to the United States in 1881 he joined the Boston Symphony, with whom he performed as assistant concertmaster until resigning from the orchestra to devote his energies to composition. He’s known today as a skilled, highly fastidious and self-critical composer, belonging to no “school”, but combining his earlier French influences and sensibilities with his later “New World” experiences . In February 1931 Olin Downes, Music Critic of the New York Times, wrote in a seventieth birthday tribute to the composer, that Loeffler was “one of the representative musicians of an age”, but concluded that “his expression of that age has come from within, and not, as an imitation of fads and shibboleths of the hour, from outside.”

This work was originally planned as a set of Three Rhapsodies in 1898, but was extensively revised by Loeffler after the tragic death of the dedicatee – one of the pieces was shelved, and the two remaining works were rescored during 1901 for oboe, with viola and piano The first of these Rhapsodies became a memorial for the composer’s deceased colleague. Consequently, the piece began darkly, with the viola answering the piano’s first sombre notes strongly and whole-heartedly, more than matching the oboe’s plaintive tones, the viola here far more assertively-voiced than was the case with the Klughardt work. The style recalled the late-Romanticism of Ernest Chausson, evident in the “longing” nature of the phrases for all of the instruments, the oboe delivering a particularly beautiful solo episode at one point over the piano’s rippling phrases. A darker passage for both instruments resulted in recitative-like passages suddenly seeming to break into a dance , almost like the “friss” which follows a “lassu” in the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, the music readily ebbing and flowing across the instrumental timbres, until the sombre mood suddenly returned, the viola again richly-and darkly-toned against the plaintive oboe and  piano, with the music hauntingly drifting between minor and major harmonies as the voices died away.

The Second Rhapsody (subtitled “The Bagpipe”) actually began as if it were a Liszt Rhapsody, with a florid piano passage, but then wistfully morphed into a kind of plaintive Bartokian folk-song – perhaps the bagpiper’s tune? Its repetition was suitably lump-in-the throat in its wistfulness – oboe and viola responded most rhapsodically, the “bagpipe” theme by turns lively and ruminative, either goading its listeners into dancing-mode or regaling listeners with a story. We felt regaled by story-telling tones and gestures from each of the instruments, feeling as if the listeners had “heard this tale before” and were reliving its characterisations and narrative lines! And what a particular joy it was to hear the viola sing so sonorously, next to its companions!  After oboe and viola had finished their near-operatic “duet” with the piano’s sterling guidance, the three instruments engaged in a brief, gestural “are we all here, still?” exchange before letting the tones of the discursive tales find their rest.

For those who felt that the Loeffler work was much too earnest a response to those “Big Questions” posed by Alyssa Morris earlier in the afternoon, an alternative, “thistledown-on-the-wind”-like  rejoiner to “Life And Its Problems” was posed by Waikato composer Janet Jennings (whose work “Voices of Women” I’ve previously reviewed on “Middle C” – see https://middle-c.org/2020/09/16161/ )  This work – “Five Emotional States”  – is described in a programme note by its composer as “not to be taken seriously”, a comment that on a certain level of engagement makes plenty of good sense, but may simultaneously “beg the question” of emotional health in general for those who look beyond the work’s wondrously rollicking capacities for entertainment and into the real world of 2026 New Zealand, where people of all ages and circumstances are often forced against their will into situations where these states are all too palpably experienced. I’m not saying the work shouldn’t have been written – rather the opposite! Perhaps, though, it needs, in my opinion, not to be trivialised.

Having gotten that concern “off my chest”, may I say that the experience itself was for me an absolute riot, a palpable and resonating amalgam of delight and disturbance whose sequences I could all too readily recognise as having a degree of self-ownership of feelings generated by both inward and outer tensions – it also made me aware of the vital role that hope has to play amidst such experiences, given expression here in the section called “Relief”, and without which for me would have been akin to a horrifying, inwardly Faustian prospect of eternal damnation! Am I myself thus guilty of doing what the composer urged her audiences not to do?  I was, all above concerns considered, ultimately delighted by the experience – and, to the performers, Sarah Watkins, Robert Ashworth and Bede Hanley, I dips my lid in boundless appreciation!