Tag: New Zealand music

Atoll Records releases CD conspectus of Ken Wilson: Music For Winds

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Music for Winds by Ken Wilson

Atoll Records / CD

Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra (1963)
Patrick Barry and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra strings, conductor Hamish McKeich
Wind Quintet (1965)
Zephyr Wind Quintet
Introduction, Theme and Variations (1965)
Adrianna Lis E flat flute, with string quartet
Duo for Clarinet and Bassoon (1963)
Peter Scholes and Ben Hoadley
Spiderweb for solo clarinet (1988)
Peter Scholes
Duo for Two Clarinets (2002), Duo for Two Clarinets (2004)
Peter Scholes and Andrew Uren
Two clarinet quartets: Slow Piece, & Variations on a Theme of Paganini (1963)
Peter Scholes, Andrew Uren, Donald Nicholls, Elsa T.W. Lam
Octet (1961)
STROMA (consisting of NZSO players), conductor Hamish McKeich

Monday 19 February 2018

A worthy addition to Atoll’s now substantial catalogue of recordings of music by New Zealand composers, this CD should delight many music-lovers.  That it is already doing so is proved by its place at number three on the RNZ Concert Classical Chart, on Saturday, 18 February.  They played an excerpt from Ken Wilson’s Wind Quintet of 1965.  This was recorded by Kiwi Records on LP in the mid-1980s, and much more recently appeared on CD.

On the new CD it is played by Zephyr Wind Quintet, made up of principal wind players from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.  It is a fine, crisp recording, as indeed are those of the other works on the disk.  Chief among these is the Concerto for clarinet and string orchestra, composed in 1963, which receives a marvellous performance from the NZSO with soloist Patrick Barry.

Ken Wilson’s music is great – its Poulenc-ish quirkiness is so much fun.  Also enjoyable is the more serious music.  For those to whom Ken Wilson is an unfamiliar name, it won’t be a surprise to learn that he was a clarinetist as well as a composer.  He was a teacher and mentor, and taught many New Zealand wind players, as well as young musicians in the USA, where he spent a substantial period of his life.

Other works vary from the Octet of 1961 (over ten minutes’ duration) and shorter pieces for clarinets in combinations, down to the ‘Spiderweb for solo clarinet’ (1986) at one-and-a-half minutes.  The most recent of the ten pieces is a Duo for two clarinets, written in 2004.  All exploit the clarinet in interesting and surprising ways, such that only a highly competent player could do.  The shorter pieces are played by a variety of performers, prominent among whom are clarinetist Peter Scholes and the bassoonist Ben Hoadley.  The Octet is played by  STROMA, the Wellington-based contemporary music ensemble.

This disk will be enjoyed not only by lovers of the clarinet, but all lovers of good music.

 

Gaudete at St Mary of the Angels with Baroque Voices and Palliser Viols

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices and Palliser viols present:
Gaudete

Music by Anon, Tompkins, Byrd, Gibbons, Hume and Ross Harris

Baroque Voices (directed by Pepe Becker)
Pepe Becker, Rowena Simpson (sopranos), Milla Dickens, Alex Granville (altos) Richard Taylor, Phillip Collins (tenors), Isaac Stone, David Morriss (basses)

Palliser Viols (directed by Robert Oliver)
Lisa Beech, Sophia Acheson (treble viols), Jane Brown, Andrea Oliver (tenor viols), Imogen Granwal, Robert Oliver (bass viols)

St Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St.,Wellington

Wednesday 20th December, 2017

This was a beautifully devised and presented programme, appropriately given the name “Gaudete” as a kind of seasonal evocation, an enjoining spirit of joyfulness, as well as a reflection of the sentiments proclaimed by both words and music throughout the evening, such as with an eponymously-named work written especially for these musicians by New Zealand composer Ross Harris.

The term “verse anthem” is the English equivalent of the German “cantata” and the French “grande motet”, the form being originally for voices and viols or organ. In an entertaining and illuminatory note accompanying the concert’s programme, Palliser Viols director Robert Oliver elaborated on the development and popularity of the form, and its use by the greatest composers in England of the day, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins.

We also learned about Oliver’s regard for the solo viol music of Tobias Hume, which the former had played and loved ever since he bought his first bass viol 50 years ago. Here, Hume’s work, though actually written for two instruments, demonstrated to us both a composer’s and a virtuoso performer’s skills. Hume’s advocacy of the viol even occasioned a brief war of words with fellow-composer John Dowland (who favoured the lute) over the respective merits of their chosen instruments, Dowland going so far as to having his views published!

Merely the act of entering and sitting within the breathtakingly beautiful interior of St Mary of the Angels at a time of day when the stained glass windows were still activated by the light served to give rise to feelings of well-being both spiritual and secular. We were thus disposed mightily towards the prospect of hearing “sweete musick” by the time the instrumentalists and singers appeared.

They came bringing tidings of great joy from various sources, the first a setting by William Byrd of verses by one Francis Kindlemarsh, “From Virgins wombe this day did spring”. Beautiful though this opening setting was I though the vocal line too low for Pepe Becker’s normally radiant voice, and thought that an alto’s tones would have better suited the melody’s range in each of the verses – the setting “came alive” in the sections enjoining us to “Rejoice, rejoice”, the ensemble’s voices inviting the words to exult and dance, which the viols also did of their own accord in an introduction to the second verse.

The accompanying Pavan and Galliard for six instruments gave the Consort a turn to demonstrate its skills, the sounds in this acoustic taking on a “bloom” which liberated any hitherto confined spirits and allowed them air and space, the gently-insinuating rhythms having both a solemnity and a carefree aspect which held us in thrall. After this, the Galliard enlivened our enchantment with its evocations of dance and gaiety and high spirits.

Following the relative restraint of Byrd’s “From Virgins wombe”, we were somewhat galvanized by the weight of tone from the whole ensemble at the beginning of Thomas Tomkins’ “Rejoice, rejoice and singe”, the voices sounding like a great throng in comparative terms. Each verse featured invigorating exchanges between individual voices, soprano and tenor in “For Happy weare the tidings”, and the line being tossed from singer to singer in “Blessed is the fuite”, the piece finishing after the men and women alternated between “For beholde, from henceforth” and “blessed, blessed virgin Marie”, before concluding on a tremulously sweet chord, to angelic effect.

Just as captivating was, I thought, Tomkins’ Fantasia for six instruments, the Consort of viols beginning with a modern-sounding phrase whose tonality seemed to shift uncannily, before a series of chromatic descents focused the strangeness of the terrain even further. I loved the sensation of simultaneous movement and stasis in the music, the energies gradually unlocked and pulsating, a sequence which led to a gorgeous overlapping figure building up and intensifying the textures towards the end – music of blood-flowing emotion!

Orlando Gibbons’ “Behold I bring you glad tidings” reiterated excited, hopeful voices at the phrase “glad tidings”, the joy occasionally leavened by seriousness at “A Saviour which is Christ the Lord” and purposeful repetition at “Unto us a Son is giv’n”. Then all was uplifted at “Glory be to God on High” with a great ascent, given rich weight at its base by the men’s tones – everything nicely controlled. Lovely playing by the Consort, both resonant and clearly-focused at one and the same time in this acoustic, brought us the Fantasia which followed, the music cleverly “fantastic” with lines both ascending and descending at once in places, and followed by beautifully “charged” withdrawals of tone into modal-like realms of the kind loved by Vaughan Williams.

In the wake of these iconic-like pieces came Ross Harris’s “Gaudete”, the fruit of the composer’s desire to write something for this actual concert, after having written separate piece for each ensemble previously. A tumult of voices and instruments at the beginning conveyed the excitement of the news of the Saviour’s birth, the cries of “Gaudete, Christus est natus” reiterating at intervals during the piece, providing some contrast with the relatively sombre “road journey” of the verses, at “Tempus adest gratia” (The time of grace has come), and later, “Ezekielis porta Claus petransitur” (The closed gate of Ezekiel has been passed through). I was given the whole time the sense of a journey from darkness to light, from ignorance to enlightenment, from fear to hope, the music’s trajectories conveying a kind of direction and purpose punctuated by revelations expressed with utter joy. I thought the work heartwarming and the performance exhilarating!

After the interval came one of those treasurable “Pepe Becker” moments, with music which admirably suited her voice – this was the anonymously-written 17th Century Christmas song “Sweet was the song”, an angelic soprano voice accompanied by a single viol, the sounds again given a certain bloom by the acoustic to memorable effect. Just as remarkable was the enchantment of four viols accompanying the song’s second verse, voice and instruments conveying an overall sense, in the sound’s pure quality, of something eternal.

Following these celestial outpourings the instrumental consort music of Tobias Hume brought us back to terra firma, but delightfully so – here, instead, were earthy, characterful tones, in places attractively nasal, while elsewhere the timbres were sweet and ingratiating. These were two duets whose titles – “Sweet Music” and “Musick and Mirth” – suggested contrasting pieces were in store, the first vocal in character, and the second dance-like. The performances’ rhythmic control and subtle variation of pulse was a joy, the trajectories breathing easefully at all times, while the accenting meant that one never knew what next to expect – razor-sharp tones were followed by full, rich vocal lines, the music moving easily and excitingly through eventful contrasts. The “Musick and Mirth” section had a gigue-like character at the beginning, one which seemed to “morph’ into something rather more four-square and even more ruminative, before suddenly accelerating! – the players splendidly put across the music’s exploratory quirkiness to wonderful effect.

The anonymous, carol-like “Born is the Babe”, was the perfect foil for the instrumental pieces which surrounded it, bright, melodic and meditative, with its final line “who cured our care by suff’ring on the cross”. Then, as with Tobias Hume’s piece, William Byrd’s Fantasia for six instruments was filled with imaginative touches, beginning wistfully as if day-dreaming, before gathering more and more tonal weight with the lines overlapping, with lots of “echo-phrases” for our delectation. Rhythms began to throw out accents, enlivening the textures, and leading us towards a joyful dance variation, before rushing to an exhilarating conclusion.

For us in the audience it all felt and sounded fun to perform, as did the same composer’s “This day Christ was born” with its “lively rhythms”, and its magnificent peroration, gloriously put across by the musicians, the voices reaching upwards with “Glory to God on High” and the concluding Alleluiahs. As a kind of “Christmas bonus” the group treated us to a repeat performance of Ross Harris’s “Gaudete”, even more resplendently given this time round – the Monteverdi-like energies of the opening declamations, the almost Sibelius-like rhythmic trajectories of the repeated instrumental figures accompanying “Tempus adest gratia”, denoting the irresistible forces of change and enlightenment, as “the closed gate of Ezekiel” was left behind, and the soaring vocal lines riding the waves of expectation, leading to a final, confident and joyful “Gaudete”.

It all left we in the audience feeling joyful and expectant, and with a sense of wonderment and thankfulness at music’s power of transformation, as well as gratitude to those who performed it all so splendiferously! – omnes laudate!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Admirable Sibelius as well as Lilburn and a rare trombone concerto from Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Ewan Clark with David Bremner (trombone)

Lilburn: Suite for Orchestra (1955)
Tomasi: Trombone Concerto
Sibelius: Symphony No 2 in D major, Op. 43

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 10 December, 2:30 pm

Lilburn’s Suite for Orchestra was composed for the Auckland Junior Symphony Orchestra in 1955. Thus it was a sensible piece for a non-professional orchestra, though that is not to suggest that its wide-ranging moods, brilliant orchestration and rhythms that range widely from the utmost subtlety to the unusually boisterous are not very taxing.

Subtle brass playing is rarely a highlight of amateur orchestras and it was trumpets and trombones that had some difficulty in adapting to ensemble expectations, particularly in the opening Allegro movement. However the large string sections and both the horns (four of them) and woodwinds contributed the sort of sounds that are recognisably Lilburn. The middle movement, Andante, offered rewarding opportunities to oboes and horns; while the orchestra’s timpani has been problematic in this church in the past, Alec Carlisle’s handling ensured its role was perfectly integrated in the orchestral texture.

The fifth movement, Vivace, is a delightfully scored dance in Latin rhythms – Mexican I guess, which is no doubt the reason for J M Thomson’s programme notes for William Southgate’s recording remarking on a Copland influence (I imagine, with El salon Mexico in mind; a solo trumpet sounded very idiomatic). Conductor Ewan Clark gave the players their head in this movement and the result was perhaps a rare occasion when Lilburn lets rip – not too much, mind you. However, the performance was a happy opportunity to witness a not often heard aspect of his personality, and it was also sufficient to make the audience aware of the composer’s international stature.

Henri Tomasi (French, not Italian; of Corsican origin) flourished through the middle of the 20th century; he wrote a number of concertos, mainly for winds, and this one seems to have gained popularity. The opening movement is in triple time, entitled Andante et scherzo – valse, and this gave the piece a dreamy quality. David Bremner’s programme note mentions jazz influences – Tommy Dorsey in particular, though I tended to listen for French influences. Debussy and Ravel are there though not dominant, and there are rather more suggestions of later French composers such as Ibert or Jolivet; but Tomasi’s language, while essentially tonal, melodic in a Poulenc sort of way, sounds more radical, testing than either – more acidic, harmonically complex.

There were interesting forays for most other instruments. One interesting event was a sudden break off in the middle of the second movement (Nocturne) which had been going along in a calm, bluesy manner: a trombone breakdown. A gadget called a trigger broke; it enables the player to obtain low notes by diverting the sound back through the tube behind him instead of fully extending the slide forward. Since none of the orchestral trombonists was playing, one of those instruments came to the rescue. So it continued its rather charming (Ellingtonian, I thought) way.

The last movement too was rather diverting, though Bremner didn’t pull off a comparable stunt; here, there were offerings from side drum, timpani, xylophone…, all ear-catching, quirky and attractive.

I’d like to explore Tomasi’s other music.

Sibelius 2
Then came the main course: Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The work opened very promisingly, as we were drawn in with those expectant, pulsing strings and the oboe and then the four rapturous horns; and the strings long legato lines, handled with gentle emotion. This was the first Sibelius symphony I heard played live by the then National Orchestra in the 1950s, and still a feeling of rapture overcomes me.

The second movement is announced almost threateningly, with a startling timpani fanfare, followed almost silently by a longish pizzicato episode that emerges slowly from basses then cellos, overlaid by questioning bassoons. Its rather rhapsodic character – it’s labelled Tempo andante, ma rubato – and its increasing grandeur involved much from the fine horn section; and though other brass didn’t always blend in the otherwise good ensemble, the whole was certainly more successful and more beautiful than the sum of its parts. The slow movement runs to around a quarter of an hour and to hold audience enraptured throughout is a considerable challenge for a conductor, one that Clark met admirably.

The emotional crux of the scherzo movement, Vivacissimo, is the contrasting string of nine repeated notes (B flat?, and repeated a semi-tone higher) from the oboes and these were beautifully played. And the transition from a further evocation of those repeated notes through the steady build-up to the grand opening out into the Finale, Allegro moderato, remains just another of the glories of the work that I have simply never tired of, and although this was not to be compared with the many magnificent performances that one has heard by professional orchestras, live and recorded, any performance that seems driven by an awareness of the emotional and spiritual splendour that Sibelius conceived here, simply works. This one did.

 

Stroma’s “Spectral Electric” concert at City Art Gallery

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: “SPECTRAL ELECTRIC” CONCERT

Jonny Marks (throatsinger), Ed Allen (horn), Bridget Douglas (flutes), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Shannon Pittaway (bass trombone), Leonard Sakofsky and Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Michelle Velvin (harp), Catherine Norton (piano), Anna van der See and Alan Molina (violin), Andrew Thomson (viola), Ken Ichinose and Robert Ibell (cello), Matthew Cave (contrabass): conductor Mark Carter

Luigi Ceccarelli: Respiri (1999)
Kaija Saariaho: Ciel Etiole (1999)
Salvatore Sciarrino: Fauno che fischia a un Merlo (1980)
Kaija Saariaho: Cendres (1998)
Annea Lockwood: Immersion (2001)
Michael Norris: Sygyt (2017)

City Art Gallery, Wellington, 16 November 2017

Large and flexible contemporary music ensemble Stroma subdivided into smaller units for most of their “Spectral Electric” concert. Founder member Ed Allen, using a mechanically and electrically modified horn, got to demonstrate aspects of virtuosity not typically heard in his work with the NZSO and Orchestra Wellington. In Luigi Ceccarelli’s Respiri, there were raindrop staccatos, deep pedal notes and plaintive keening. Horn calls were echoed and blended, acoustic sounds extended and processed in a manner similar to “granular synthesis”. Moment to moment the performance was very well paced, but in the end I did not feel that the moments – intriguing as they were – coalesced to form a coherent piece.

No such problem with fellow Italian Salvatore Sciarrino’s Fauno che fischia a un Merlo. Bridget Douglas’ flute and Michelle Velvin’s harp created a consistent sound world of high register trills and tremolos, like a dialogue between two birds, punctuated by occasional glissandos and palm-slaps on the harp.

New Zealand born, U. S. resident composer Annea Lockwood is known for her installations featuring recordings of natural sounds (as in Sound Map of the Hudson River), and for activities involving the burning, burying or drowning of pianos. A title like Immersion, then, had to be a bit of a worry. As it turned out, duo percussionists Leonard Sakofsky and Thomas Guldborg showed it to be a well made, almost conventionally structured piece, exploiting two different kinds of sustain: bowed or rubbed metal (bowl, cymbals and tam-tam), and rapid marimba tremolandos. It built up to a powerful climax on mysterious deep marimba and roaring tam-tam, before returning to its rarefied beginning.

Finland’s Kaija Saariaho also utilised the delicate effects of bowed metal (cymbals, crotales). In her Ciel Etoile (“Starry Sky”), percussionists Sakofsky and Guldborg were joined by contrabassist Matthew Cave, who provided dark low notes and high harmonics. Pizzicatos marked a more rhythmic section, before the piece evaporated into the stillness with which it began.

Saariaho’s Cendres was more varied and driven. Subtle effects, such as Catherine Norton’s inside-piano, the fusing a piano tremolo with Ken Ichinose’s cello harmonics and with Bridget Douglas’ flute, were contrasted with more conventional instrumental flourishes. These made beautiful intrusions, but also diluted the work’ stylistic integrity a little.

Saariaho was somewhat on the edge of the Spectralist movement, which began in 1970s France. Ironically then, the most spectral work in the concert was composed in 2017 Wellington. The full Stroma ensemble under conductor Mark Carter joined the remarkable throatsinger Jonny Marks for Sygyt by Michael Norris. Wellingtonian Marks studied in China/Mongolia, and performs with the All Seeing Hand, and at the Pyramid Club.

As a score with wordless voice, Sygyt joins a select list of vocalises that includes concertos by Gliere, New Zealand’s Lyell Cresswell, and English quarter-tone pioneer John Foulds (Lyra Celtica), and the small-group Preludio a Colon by Mexican microtonalist Julian Carrillo. These all used the female voice. Sygyt requires Marks to traverse his commanding range, from the gravelly, visceral, sub-bass kargyraa style, to the exquisitely ethereal harmonics (all the way up to the fourteenth) of the eponymous sygyt. Norris (and Marks) seamlessly integrated these ethnically Mongolian and Tuvan ways of singing into the language of Western music – or perhaps what Western music might have been like if it had followed the trajectory implied by Renaissance just intonation and meantone, instead of reverting to the modified form of mediaeval Pythagorean tuning that is Equal Temperament. Rich, resonant chords are built from the harmonic series (a preoccupation of the Spectralists), and the series itself is employed as a melody on instruments and on the voice. In the last section melodic lines are created from selected disjunct notes of the series.

Marks used a microphone to achieve balance with the ensemble. But he didn’t need it to produce the sounds, as he demonstrated dramatically at the end, leaving the room to sing in the echoing, reverberant spaces of the City Gallery.

Stroma will be performing in the New Zealand Festival (Mechanical Ballet, 16 and 17 March 2018), and taking part in the 2018 Chamber Music New Zealand series with The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross (Wellington, 26 May).

Orchestra Wellington out-performs the fireworks with a stunning “Petrouchka”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
PETROUCHKA

TABEA SQUIRE – Colour Lines (commission from Orchestra Wellington)*
CARL NIELSEN – Violin Concerto Op.33
IGOR STRAVINSKY – Petrouchka (Ballet – Revised 1947 Edition)

Arohanui Strings – Sistema Hutt Valley (Alison Eldredge – director)*

Andrew Atkins (conductor)*
Suyeon Kang (violin)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Saturday 4th November, 2017

Audiences can be curiously unpredictable, on occasions exhilarating and galvanizing masses of energy to be part of, caught up in the excitement of either enthusiastic or rapt responses to some performances, (especially those involving soloists) and then for no apparent reason, every once in a while, strangely under-responsive. Why this sudden out-of-the-blue observation, going a little against the grain of my normally unrelieved positivism as a music reviewer?

It was Saturday’s Orchestra Wellington concert that left me feeling a little bemused, after I’d experienced warmth and enthusiasm aplenty on the part of the audience in response to the efforts, firstly, of the youthful Sistema Strings, playing both a group of demonstration pieces and taking a vital role in composer Tabea Squire’s newly-commissioned work “Colour Lines”, and secondly, violinist Suyeon Kang, in giving us a rapturously beautiful performance of that concert-hall rarity, the Nielsen Violin Concerto, with plenty of tensile strength and winning gossamer-woven lines.

In each of these cases the performers’ energies were accorded the kind of reaction from the listeners that reflected the music-making’s outstanding and warm-hearted qualities. However, I thought that, on the same performance “Richter-scale”, the audience’s reaction to the concert’s second half, a breathtakingly brilliant realisation by orchestra and conductor of Stravinsky’s music for his ballet “Petrouchka”, by rights ought to have been something along the lines of a twenty-minute standing ovation!

That such a stunning realization of the work didn’t seem to me as forthcoming as it fully deserved could have been because (1) there had already been a lot of applause in the concert already, due to the presence of the Sistema students, (2) the remarkable violinist Suyeon Kang had already taken the lion’s share, with her gorgeously elfin-like performance of Nielsen’s Violin Concerto (including a round of spontaneous applause at the first movement’s conclusion) and (3) Petrouchka of course ends not with a Firebird-like bang, but with a subdued whimper, from which listeners have to then re-activate those glowing embers of enthusiasm and get them bursting into flame once more. So the audience response conveyed what I thought W.S.Gilbert might have described as “modified rapture”, instead of conveying (as I and a colleague afterwards were both feeling) a sense of “Did we really hear that? It was mind-blowing!”

Overall, the concert’s trajectory lent itself to a kind of “from seeds to forest giant” progression, with tremulously awakened beginnings demonstrated by the cutest brigade of junior string-players one could imagine, all under the sway of their director, Alison Eldredge. All of these were introduced by Orchestra Wellington Music Director, Marc Taddei, and included OW’s assistant conductor Andrew Atkins (unfortunately not credited in the programme for his efforts with both the Arohanui Strings, in their introductory items, and in directing the combined ensemble in the commissioned piece “Colour Lines” by Tabea Squire).

This was a work whose composer conceived as involving both the student players and the orchestra proper, by using ‘”free-time” notation in places to allow the younger players the means of continuously contributing to the music’s texture. A chorale which appears in various guises during the piece eventually blends with the younger musicians’ efforts. I was struck by the confident orchestrations throughout, a definite character emerging with each of the sequences, making for strongly-etched contrasts (scintillating upper strings are then “cooled’ by the winds near the opening, before a lovely dancing interaction develops between strings and winds beneath warm horn tones, the latter then assuming a ”stopped” out-of-phase effect which kaleidoscopes the music into yet another world of wonderment).

I recall both my Middle-C colleague Rosemary Collier and myself being delighted by Tabea Squire’s work for string quartet “Jet-lag” at a 2014 concert, a piece with something of a similar sharply-etched sense of character, obviously wrought by a composer with an ear for textures and the on-going ambiences. What mischief, and indeed, even danger, was let loose with the burble and ferment generated by the brass in their “hornets’ nest” sequence! – again contrasting with the nobility of the chorale voiced by those same instruments not long after – reminiscent of Hindemith, here, as the strings muscled up to join with the tutti in gestures of satisfying finality, snappy and definite. I thought the music most skillfully and confidently focused and blurred its edges all at once, throughout, as the title suggested it might.

Relatively unknown compared with its Nordic cousin written in 1904 by Sibelius, the slightly later (1911) Violin Concerto of Carl Nielsen’s proved equally as strong and fascinating a work, and certainly as difficult to play, if not more so. Like Sibelius, Nielsen was himself a violinist, though neither composer would have attempted to perform his own concerto, despite Aino Sibelius describing her husband’s playing of the work’s solo part during its composition as “on fire all the time.….he stays awake all night, plays incredibly beautifully,…he has so many ideas it is hard to believe it….”

Nielsen’s work, unlike Sibelius’s, turned away from the standard three-movement concerto form, the composer casting the work in two large movements, each with a slow and quicker section (some commentators alternatively describe the work as having four movements). The music began strongly, dramatic and declamatory, the soloist (South-Korean-born Australian violinist Suyeon Kang) meeting the orchestra’s initial challenge with full-throated recitative-like passages whose striking quality of tensile strength and flexibility of phrasing instantly compelled and held one’s attention throughout. I wondered whether, in the big-boned virtuoso sequences, Kang’s tightly-woven silken tones would fill-out sufficiently to provide a sufficient match for the orchestra’s more assertive gestures – but such was her focused concentration her instrument seemed able to “inhabit” the music’s dynamics in an entirely natural and unselfconscious manner. From these trenchant responses right through to the Elgar-like lyricism of the Praeludium’s final musings, she held us in thrall.

Nor did she shirk the physicality of the jolly “cavalleresco” opening of the allegro, with its vigorous exchanges, rapid running passages, and sudden moments of introspection, all leading to a solo cadenza which mirrors the quixotic moods which have gone before in the music, before dancing back to the allegro’s lively theme. And such was the breathtaking skill with which she swung into the movement’s dancing coda, and traded playful feints and gestures with the orchestra right to the end, that the audience responded with some spontaneous unscheduled applause (to which Marc Taddei, after acknowledging the soloist and the clapping, remarked “But wait! – there’s more!”).

The slow movement featured lovely playing throughout the opening sequences from the winds, joined by the horns, and some beautiful Sibelius-like accompaniments in thirds for the soloist, whose utterances seemed bent on expressing some kind of private sorrow. The horns offered comfort at various points, as did the strings, so that the music’s abrupt recourse to a kind of droll waltz seemed almost Schubertian in its stoic, at times quirky and humourful resignation, the orchestra occasionally launching into moments of mock seriousness, none of which last for very long. One thunderous episode provoked an angular cadenza from the soloist, during which, at one point, she played simultaneously a drone bass, a repeated pizzicato note and some bowed figurations, all most divertingly and unselfconsciously. It was a remarkable performance from all concerned, and fully deserved a response which matched in enthusiasm that given to another Korean musician in the MFC just over a week ago, Joyce Yang, after her Rachmaninov concerto performance with the NZSO.

We reformed after the interval to the sounds of fireworks outside, which were soon well-and-truly put in their place by a performance of Stravinsky’s eponymous ballet “Petrouchka” from Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington which I couldn’t imagine bettered in terms of precision, skill, atmosphere and overall theatrical and musical impact. Every sequence, every scene, every tableau came alive, the music-making bringing into being both dance and drama, and forming a kind of triumvirate of successful evocation of artistic achievement. At its conclusion I felt sympathy for Marc Taddei and all the players who deserved to be brought to their feet and given individual acknowledgement – but the trouble was, there were too many of them! Nevertheless I thought that all the winds and all the brass players were simply heroes, and that Andrew Atkins deservedly got his dues after all, for his superb piano-playing. Very great honour, of course, to Marc Taddei and his all-encompassing direction of the score. For all these reasons and more, I could have clapped for much, much longer!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maximum Minimalism – simple, state-of-the-art complexities from Stroma

Posted on by Alan Wells

STROMA: “MAXIMUM MINIMALISM”

Bridget Douglas (flutes), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Reuben Chin (saxophone), Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion), Leonard Sakofsky (vibraphone), Emma Sayers (piano), Anna van der See , Rebecca Struthers (violins), Giles Francis (viola), Ken Ichinose(cello), Matthew Cave (contrabass), conducted by Mark Carter.

Steve Reich: Double Sextet (2007)

Alison Isadora: ALT (2017)

Julia Wolfe: Lick (1994)

Terry Riley: In C (1964)

City Gallery, Wellington,

Thursday, 19 October 2017

“Maximum Minimalism” was the wittily oxymoronic title for this concert by Wellington’s (New Zealand’s?) premiere contemporary music ensemble, Stroma. “Minimalism” was the name bestowed on a group of American composers who, in the 1960s, reacted against the forbidding complexity of atonal and serial music and began (largely independently of each other) employing the extended repetition of simple elements. Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley were the pioneers (La Monte Young is sometimes included, but this is confusing, because his work explores indefinitely sustained sounds, tuned to ratios from the harmonic series, rather than rhythmic repetitions).

Steve Reich preferred the term “process music”. His early compositions were as rigorous in their way as anything in the preceding period of modernism: tapes which went gradually out of phase (Come Out, 1966), or chirping chords progressively lengthened until they became an oceanic swell (Four Organs, 1970). Later, he started making composerly interventions into these strict procedures. In Double Sextet the forward driving momentum was interrupted by slower chordal sections, and the whole piece included a slow movement. The live instrumentalists (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano) played with precision against a recorded version of themselves (hence the “Double”), producing a dense, busy texture. This, and the interaction between Emma Sayers’ high piano and the piquancy of Leonard Sakofsky’s vibraphone, created an edgy, astringent world of sound.

If Double Sextet represented late minimalism, Terry Riley’s In C stood right at the beginning. His approach was very different from Reich’s. Here the complex counterpoint was the result, not of careful calculation, but of giving the performers freedom progress through a series of short melodic fragments, each at their own pace. I was impressed by how these classically trained musicians handled the improvisatory elements. While there was no particular overall shape, Stroma created the dynamic ebb and flow that could be expected from experienced improvisers. There were even segments of long notes where the tempo seemed to slow down, despite the persisting pulse of the high C’s on piano and percussion.

American cross-genre composer Julia Wolfe’s Lick began with short, arresting phrases before the syncopated rhythms kicked in. Reuben Chin’s saxophone and Nick Granville’s electric guitar contributed to the jazz-rock ambience. Again I felt the absence of a clear overall structure, but was engaged by the well-paced contrasts of texture and rhythm.

For me, the highlight of a Stroma concert is often the premiere of a New Zealand work, and this was no exception. Victoria University graduate Alison Isadora has spent much of her life in The Netherlands, but maintains her connections with New Zealand, and held the 2016-17 Lilburn House Residency. Many of her compositions have involved mixed media, often with a political undertone (“agitator-prop”, perhaps – one piece included an onstage washing machine). Her recent scores have been more introverted however, the string quartet ALT notably so. Ethereal and understated, ALT wove its texture almost exclusively from string harmonics, sometimes near the top of musical pitch-perception. But its quietly seductive surface was underpinned by a well-formed musical structure, propelled to a subtle climax by a gentle pulse in the cello, before resolving into a sustained sense of suspended time. It could almost have merited a place in Stroma’s next concert (“Spectral Electric”, City Gallery, Thursday 16 November), which will be a tribute to the Spectralist composers who base their sonorities on the harmonic series: this will feature a new concerto by Michael Norris for Wellington’s own, Mongolian trained, throatsinger, Jonny Marks.

Wilma Smith and Friends play fine programme for Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wilma Smith (violin), Caroline Henbest (viola), Alexandra Partridge (cello), Andrew Leathwick (piano)

Piano quartets: William Walton’s in D minor; Andrew Leathwick’s No 1 and Brahms’s No 3 in C minor, Op 60

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 15 October, 3 pm

We reviewed Wilma Smith and Friends at their Waikanae concert on 24 September. There they had played Beethoven’s not-much-played Op 16 piano quartet, Dvořák’s greatly loved Op 87 as well as the piano quartet by the group’s pianist, Leathwick.  I suppose I can wait till next August when I see that Wellington Chamber Music’s just announced 2018 Sunday series will hear the Dvořák played by the Leppänen, Thomson, Joyce, Irons quartet.

Wilma’s three colleagues, two of whom are New Zealanders, all have an association with the Australian National Academy of Music, in Canberra, while Wilma herself teaches at the two principal Melbourne universities.

This Wellington programme avoided playing anything too well-known: Brahms’s 3rd piano quartet is the least familiar of the three. Played here with such finesse and musicality that its relative neglect became hard to understand.

Walton’s 16-year-old creation
However, the concert began with a, to me, totally unknown quartet, by a 16-year-old William Walton. Though it might not display the brilliance and musical delights that Mendelssohn or Mozart were producing at that age, this was a very impressive achievement, even allowing for its getting revised much later in the composer’s life (when he was 72).

It was written in the last year of WWI and so might have reflected the Englishness of Bax or Ireland or Vaughan Williams, even Elgar. All I could say is that the music had a generalised English, as distinct from a Continental feel, and Herbert Howells’s own piano quartet has been offered as a possible influence. Would Walton have heard Bartók in 1918? something at the start of the last movement suggested it. It was too soon for the iconoclastic Walton of the Bloomsbury years to be audible anywhere, but there could have been touches of Ravel, for there was much in it of a surprising sophistication.

It began with a clear conception of certain melodic ideas that seemed authentic rather than arbitrary, and an understanding of the art of building music in a formal shape. It was indeed formal in having four movements –  a bright, positive opening, a scherzo that seemed singularly assured, then a calm Adagio in a nocturnal mood, with muted strings, and finally an energetic Allegro that might have attempted to emulate the radical composers of the Continent, even certain rhythmic elements from Eastern Europe (do I mean Bartók?though what was known of him in England in the First World War?).

Writing for the quartet as a whole was quite mature, and it was clear that the young composer had a refined appreciation of the characteristics of each instrument – a solo viola passage caught the ear. Music from the first movement returned in a natural-sounding was to bring it to an end.

Andrew Leathwick’s quartet
A quartet by the group’s pianist Andrew Leathwick, followed. He introduced it, but in rather too casual a way, without sufficient care for enunciation and for the rhythms of his speech to be easily followed. The music largely explained itself – an opening that was almost secretive, improvisatory, slowly awakening with long phrases carried high on the violin strings. The second movement, entitled ‘Freely’, began with muted violin and cautious piano notes and signs that the composer became aware of the need to retain the listener’s attention with an almost Dvořákian melody. The composer seemed sensitive to the particular character of each instrument, subtly varying colours and dynamics; the viola carried a vaguely familiar elegiac tune which I couldn’t attribute. The composer recorded that ‘the great Romantic composers’ had inspired the last movement – Con moto. Those influences were clear enough. The whole piece, written in an idiom (idioms?) of earlier music made me aware of the styles of music that music students now feel free to write, far removed from the strenuously avant-garde, ‘original-at-all-costs’, audience-alienating music that I used to subject myself to in my early years reviewing for The Evening Post in the late 80s and 90s.

The style adopted in this piece is now accepted in a more open and tolerant musical environment in music schools, though one naturally hopes that it will not discourage a freedom to explore more adventurous approaches that make judicious use of influences from the music of the recent past.

Rosemary Collier’s review of this piece will be found in the review of 24 September.

Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3
The last piece was Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3, Op 60.  As I noted above it’s not as well-known as the Op 25 quartet, or perhaps even as the second one. But here was a performance that did it credit. It launches itself in a distinctly C minor manner, commanding, weighty and serious minded, rather than seductive, first in the Adagio opening and then the Allegro non troppo main part. But it’s exactly what a paid-up Brahms-lover looks for; not what the censorious Schoenberg who orchestrated the Op 25 piece because he thought it too dense for chamber music, would have enjoyed at all.

For it is indeed almost symphonic in its textures although the quartet produced all the clarity that I needed. Though the second movement is more animated, it dwells in a similar  sound world, darkly impassioned, with energetic piano writing that Leathwick handled, though the piano lid was on the long stick, in excellent accord with the strings.

The third movement, Andante, opens with a soulful, though sanguine duet between piano and cello which offered Alexandra Partridge (and again the pianist) an admirable opportunity to be enjoyed. And the finale too confirmed that impression left from all that had gone before of a carefully studied approach in which the essence of Brahms had become thoroughly embedded. Rapport between strings and piano was always perfectly integrated in terms of balance and interpretive view.

It ended a very satisfying chamber music recital, offering a sound reason to take comfort in a cultural relationship with Australia.

 

 

China/New Zealand Ode to the Moon concert with a radiant Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

China Cultural Centre in New Zealand presents:
ODE TO THE MOON
Celebration of the 2017 Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival

Music by A.Ke-Jian, Zheng De-Ren, Ding Shan-De, David Farquhar,
Zhou Long, Bao Yuan-Kai, Huang Kiao Zhi, Anthony Ritchie,
Shi Yong-Kang and Zu Jian-Er

The Aroha Quartet
Haihong Lu and Ursula Evans (violins)
Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

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

Sunday October 1st, 2017

This was one of those concerts that, had I been an ordinary audience member I would have looked forward to immensely! However, being a reviewer and facing the prospect of commenting on a genre of music about which I knew very little, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation about what I might encounter! As it turned out I need not have worried, as the music written and arranged by the Chinese composers listed above possessed strength, energy and beauty as I could easily relate to – the sounds communicated to my ears something essentially meaningful, however “unfamiliar” the actual pieces themselves might have been.

Of course the music was refracted here through the medium of the string quartet, one wholly familiar and identifiable to my ears. Having said this, I was amazed by the extent to which the instrumental timbres were made by the players to sound exotic, especially those conjured up by the quartet’s leader, violinist Haihong Lu, whose instrument at times sounded thoroughly “folk-traditional”, not at all like the tones and timbres of a conventional violin.

The programme began with an adaptation of a folk-melody by composer A Ke-Jian and jazz musician Zheng De-Ren into a Song of Emancipation given the title “Fan Shen Dao Qing”, here a forthright and energetic statement of bold intent, its direct and vigorous manner not unlike that of Dvorak in some of his chamber pieces. The piece included a contrasting “slow” middle section, notable for the instruments’ used of “slides” between notes, creating to my ears a wondrously exotic character, while the return to a more vigorous manner included a lovely “dancing on tip-toe” effect, and a brief valedictory sequence with folksy violin to the fore once again, the whole concluding with an exciting stretto.

The life of Hua Yan-Jun, or “A-Bing” as he was known to his family, seems like the stuff of racy novels, albeit with a tragic, premature conclusion due to ill health. Regarded as one of the most important Chinese musicians of the 20th Century, his legacy includes a work for erhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle) “Reflection of the moon in the Er-quan spring”, which has become one of the most-loved pieces of Chinese music, arranged for many combinations of instruments. The Aroha played a quartet arrangment made by Ding Shan-De, a prominent composer and pianist who studied at the Paris Conservatoire and afterwards taught at the Shanghai Conservatory.

The arrangement by Ding Shan-De gave all of the instruments opportunities to express their characteristics, the violins playing very much in the Chinese style, a mournfully affecting, lump-in-the throat-inducing effect, as befitted the music’s nature, for me – a kind of lament / prayer / invocation expressing in music the beauties of the moon’s interaction with the waters of a spring amid life’s joys and tragedies.

Though whole worlds apart in style and content, David Farquhar’s “Ring Round the Moon” music seemed to fit like a glove in this company. As was the previous piece to its composer, Hua Yan-Jun, Farquhar’s is easily his best-known work, its genesis a commission by the New Zealand Players for their 1953 production of Jean Anouilh/Christopher Fry’s play “Ring Round the Moon”. Though what the quartet played for us was described as a “Waltz Suite” only two of the three movements could have been characterised thus, as the concluding “finale” was a boisterous galop! Each of the other movements was also “quick”, which denied us an effective contrast during the course of this otherwise attractive music – a pity we weren’t treated to at least one of the two beautiful slow waltzes from the full work. Incidentally I’ve not been able to find details of which movements Farquhar used in his versions of either the complete “Waltz Suite” or in his transcription for strings commissioned by Nova Strings in 1989.

Evoking reminiscences of Anatoly Liadov’s “Eight Russian Folk Songs”, the next item gave us a comparable overview of Chinese folk-music from the composer Zhou Long, in the form of his “Eight Chinese Folk Songs”, published in 2002. Having completed both traditional Chinese and formal music studies at Beijing University the composer then relocated to the United States, there continuing to write and arrange music in the traditional Chinese style for both folk- and western instruments, and promoting performances of this repertoire. He currently works as Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

I was taken by the emotional range of this music, almost Janacek-like in places in its direct, heartfelt use of the instruments’ full capacities, the opening of the first song “Lan hua-hua” demonstrating the sweep of feeling across vistas of anxiety, loneliness and grim determination, the original work concerning a girl escaping from an arranged marriage to be with the man she really loves.

Each of the song arrangements delivered a similar kind of strength and focus, while covering a wide range of human activity. The music abounded both in exquisite detailings as well as broader sweeping gestures – the second song, “Driving the mule team”, demonstrated, for instance, the composer’s exceptional ear for evocative rhythms in its combination of arco and pizzicato scoring, the resulting textures mimicking the sounds of the team’s harness bells.
The third song “The flowing stream” readily depicted a watery delicacy as a backdrop to what was originally a love song, while the fourth song “Jasmine flower”contrasted the rhythm of the dance with the performer’s awareness of the jasmine’s scent in the music’s more contemplative sequences. The remaining four songs continued with these kinds of evocations, mingling the ordinary with the fabulous in delightful and sometimes unexpected ways, as witness the hearty shouts of the quartet members-cum-herdsmen in the final jaunty “A horseherd’s mountain song”.

The programme’s second half again judiciously presented a New Zealand work amid music by Chinese composers, with the same resonantly positive outcomes. Three arrangements of traditional songs from various parts of China came first, followed by a depiction of an iconic New Zealand landscape via the music of Anthony Ritchie, a work evoking the countryside around Lake Wakatipu. The scheuled programme then concluded with an arrangement of music from a work called “The White-Haired Girl” – music originally cast in operatic form in 1945 before being reworked as a ballet, in which guise it has achieved the most popularity. This adaptation was the work of Shi Yong-Kang and Zhu Jian-Er, completed in 1972 at the time of American President Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking visit to China.

The three folk-song arrangements were played without a break – the first, poignantly called ‘Little Cabbage” actually enshrined a pitiable lament of a child (some sources say a girl, others a boy) who was ill-treated by her/his stepmother, and longed to be reunited with her/his mother. The music was appropriately wistful and played with great feeling (beautiful solos for both violin and viola) with an exquisite passage in thirds for both violins, with pizzicato accompaniment from the lower instruments. The second, “Camel Bell”, featured a great variety of exchange and dovetailing between the instruments to a jogtrot rhythm, in places freely modulating, the effect rather like a rapid-fire theme and variations treatment – as promised by the group’s second violinist, Ursula Evans, who introduced the group of pieces, we heard the actual “camel bell” at the end played softly on her instrument. The final song, “Happy Harvest” delivered what its title promised, after a “ready – steady – go!” kind of beginning – headlong tempi, real hoedown stuff, contrast brought about by an almost sentimental, more reflective section, in which the gestures reminded me of ritualistic happenings, with the instruments having turns to lead, and sliding notes of the most expressive kind figuring largely. A return to the stamping rhythms then brought about an appropriately bountiful conclusion!

Anthony Ritchie’s work “Whakatipua” came next, a single-movement work whose slow-fast-slow structure set the scene at the piece’s beginning – music of open, isolated spaces, with an almost lullabic character conveying a sense of nostalgia. Rather more matter-of-fact by contrast was a descending phrase heard at the outset and then returned to, suggesting a certain degree of depth and solidity, something enduring over time. A more active, urgent spirit awoke within the music, throbbing viola notes bringing ready responses from the other instruments, outdoor, angular figurations breathing copious draughts of fresh air, the sounds not unlike Douglas Lilburn’s “Drysdale” Overture in overall feeling. After the running exchanges between instruments had worked off some of the music’s energies, I liked the way in which everything gradually settled back into the serenity and spaciousness of the landscape, re-establishing a sense of isolation and distance (was that a hint of the erhu in one of Haihong Liu’s phrases?), the long-held notes at the end gradually dissolving into memory.

The final work on the programme carried with it something of a history, having been first set as an opera, then adapted to being a ballet, and in that form achieving classic status in China. This was a piece titled “The White-Haired Girl”, the story depicting the bravery and fortitude of a young girl who triumphs over adversity in difficult times. The music shared some thematic material with the folk-melody, “Little Cabbage”, which we heard earlier in the concert, and which link was demonstrated by one of the players.

A strong, forceful opening, achieved by vigorous bowing from the quartet members, opened the piece, followed almost immediately by a lyrical romantic theme, perhaps one which characterised the girl in the story, Xi’er. It was but one of many attractive, lyrical themes which provided a foil for subsequent sequences depicting conflict and struggle, the music making determined efforts to win through adversity through vigorous action – all very like Tchaikovsky in its heart-on-sleeve emotion, and requiring full-blooded responses from all four musicians! None were found wanting, as the piece took both players and audience through a gamut of feeling, the music freely ranging from hushed expectation to grand declamation at the piece’s end, rounded off by a brilliant running finish!

As if the players hadn’t given their all, they chose to entertain us with a stunningly brilliant encore which, to my ears sounded like gypsy music with eastern influences, something which I thought somebody like the Roumanian composer Enescu might have written, inspired by folk-themes depicting the utmost in visceral excitement. I subsequently found out that the piece (called Sa Li Ha, a girl’s name) was connected with Kazakhstan ethnic groups of the Xingjiang Uyghur Autonymous Region in northwest China. My informant told me I had been on the right track, but needed to go a little further eastwards! Still, the most important thing was what I thought of it all as music – to which I could reply unequivocally, “What a piece, and what a performance!”

Breaths of fresh air – the Imani Winds hit Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
IMANI WINDS
Valerie Coleman (flute) / Toyin Spellman-Diaz (oboe)
Mark Dover (clarinet) / Jeff Scott (horn) /Monica Ellis (bassoon)

VALERIE COLEMAN – Red Clay and Mississippi Delta
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (arr. Jonathan Russell) – Scheherazade
PIAZZOLLA (arr.Jeff Scott) – Contrabajissimo
NATALIE HUNT – Snapshots (CMNZ Commission)
PAQUITO D’RIVIERA – A Farewell Mambo
SIMON SHAHEEN (arr. Jeff Scott) – Dance Mediterranea

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Monday 26th September 2017

This was the New York-based ensemble Imani Winds’ first concert in New Zealand as part of a 10-venue tour organised by CMNZ. Every member of the group during their introductions for each of the concert’s items conveyed considerable pleasure and excitement at being part of this inaugural visit by the ensemble to New Zealand. They’ve come with something of a reputation for being innovative and adventurous in their programming, as well as devoting considerable energies in developing outreach and education programmes, one of which makes up part of their touring schedule in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, a special “Musical Journey Around the World” concert.

The ensemble has two recognised composers in its ranks, flutist Valerie Coleman and horn-player Jeff Scott, both of whose efforts figured on this evening’s programme, an original work by Valerie Coleman, “Red Clay and Mississippi Delta”, and two arrangements by Jeff Scott, firstly of Astor Piazzolla’s “Contrabajissimo” (originally a work for double-bass and jazz ensemble, here recast for bassoon and winds), and then of Simon Shaleen’s “Dance Mediterranea”. Whether originally written for an ensemble featuring the oud, a short-necked lute-like instrument, Middle-Eastern in origin, which Shaheen learned to play in his youth, or for the violin (an instrument the composer later took up as well), it’s unclear – Scott’s arrangement here gives the opening solo passage to the flute, before sharing the material between the other instruments – I particularly liked the oboe’s exotic-sounding pitch-bending sequence at one point in the dance.

Another avowed commitment of the ensemble’s is to new music, of particular interest being works by composers of diverse backgrounds, part of Imani’s interest in bringing together European, American, African and Latin music traditions. In keeping with this philosophy the ensemble programmed a new work by New Zealand composer Natalie Hunt, a commission by Professor Jack Richards – itself something of a cross-cultural work, a three-part piece called “Snapshots” containing impressions of the composer’s first visit to Africa.

Mention must be made of a curiosity which the Imanis served up for us – composer/arranger and horn player Jeff Scott during the course of the evening had bemoaned to us the fact that the wind ensemble repertoire simply couldn’t compare with that for string ensembles in terms of quality and variety, and that ensembles therefore had turned to arrangements for winds of various pieces for “other” instruments, an example being an “arrangement” of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” for winds by a London-based clarinettist, conductor, composer and arranger Jonathan Russell. From the point of view of cleverness of adaptation, the exercise would, for some, have had its merits and its interest, but in my opinion the adaptation all but destroyed the original work through extensive cutting of the material, removing much of the narrative aspect and severely reducing the dramatic range and emotional scope of the music, and its ability to deliver. There must be any number of shorter pieces “out there” (some by Rimsky himself, come to think of it), which could have served the purpose just as well, and able to have been played more-or-less in full, rather than bowdlerised so savagely, as here. Yes, I’m missing the point of the exercise, I know – but even despite the presence of a few incidental delights of adaptation, I didn’t REALLY enjoy hearing one of my favourite pieces of orchestral music mutilated thus in public!

Enough of my tub-thumping! – time to turn to the other individual pieces in the concert! The Imanis began with the wind version of a hiss and a roar, Valerie Coleman’s work, “Red Clay and Mississippi Delta” opening with wild, raunchy declamations which then settled into a swinging, sultry rhythm, one that allowed lots of melismatic detailings within a relaxed pulse. There were forthright virtuoso clarinet irruptions, rapidly-fingered and skilfully-tongued bassoon passages, and numerous sly detailings from flute, oboe and horn, all with distinctive and ear-catching instrumental timbres. We were even invited to join in at one stage of the piece during a finger-clicking sequence, the composer turning to us and saying “You can help!” as the music insinuated its way forwards, our “cool” aspect by turns backed up with atmospheric solos, and colourfully decorated by sequences of riotous, swirling activity.

Astor Piazzolla’s “Contrabajissimo” was introduced by horn player Jeff Scott who had arranged the piece for wind quintet. He outlined the piece’s original genesis for us, how Piazzolla had been asked by the bass player in his quintet to write a piece that, for a change, gave his instrument some of the “limelight” instead of being relegated to its usual accompanying role, and how the composer wrote a work that he came to regard as his favourite – in fact “Contrabajissimo” was the only music played at the composer’s funeral! There was no doubt, Scott told us, that the only wind instrument capable of doing a string bass justice was the bassoon! Judging from the opening bars alone, with the bassoon immediately taking the soloist’s role in a kind of free-ranging dialogue with the clarinet, the work would have taxed Piazzolla’s double-bass player to the utmost! The dance that followed slyly and suggestively pushed the syncopated rhythms along and encouraged more and more excitement until the flute spearheaded a rallying call to which everyone was suddenly listening, and wanting to contribute. When the mischievous rhythms resumed I like the way the bassoon “spoke” to the rest of the ensemble via the player, Monica Ellis, who pointed her instrument every which way when she played her solos, like someone obviously wanting their voice to be heard, be it in tones of poetic wistfulness or with sharp bursts or assertive vigour!

We then heard the music of New Zealand composer Natalie Hunt, winner of the NZSO/Todd Foundation Young Composer Award in 2009, and the recipient of various commissions from groups such as the New Zealand String Quartet and The Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson. This was a work called “Snapshots”, commissioned by CMNZ for the Imani’s New Zealand tour, and written by the composer while travelling through Africa last year. In three parts, each of the individual pieces sought to capture the aspect and mood of a specific place, the first, Namib, evoking for us the Namibian Desert, where, in the composer’s words, “the landscape creeps and morphs, the rocks glow in the evening sun, and the night sky is brilliantly clear”. This first piece was, for me, the most focused of the three, its precision of detail and beautifully-contoured shape placing us vividly in a specific and spell-binding soundscape. The other two pieces seemed not quite on this level of focus, with details (the “extra” instruments) seeming to me appropriately ambient, but not having the same instinctive surety of placement I experienced throughout the opening piece.

In “Mosi-oya-Tunya” (presumably Swahili for “The Smoke Which Thunders”, the African name for the Victoria Falls) we heard the exotic sounds of the “thunder drum” (a brightly-decorated drum with a kind of rachet-tail, able to make a surprising amount of deep noise) and the “rain stick” (a hollow tube which contains rice or some such grain, or else small stones, and which can be turned on its end or otherwise moved to produce a kind of white ambient noise) adding their disparate tones to the ensemble’s wind roulades and the oboe’s splendidly isolated solo line – something of the awe and mystery of the place was conveyed to us by the ensemble, despite moments where I thought the players of the “special” instruments seemed a little uncertain of their dynamics or durations.

The third part, “Delta Dreams” I thought a kind of African “road music” , going somewhere in an engaging fashion, via syncopated rhythms and angular melodies. Jeff Scott forwent his horn in this movement to “play” a wine glass, supporting ostinati by clarinet and oboe, as the flute improvised, the players rolling the sounds jazzily and euphorically towards a “point” where the experience seemed to breast a peak and die away, with only the sound of the thunder drum left, a kind of resonance of departure, again I thought, a detail that would be stronger with some “firming up” of its actual place in the scheme of things.

Clarinettist Mark Dover described the next piece, “A Farewell Mambo (to Willy)” by Pasquito D’Riviera, as a kind of “melting-pot” of local ethnic and established classical traditions. D’Riviera is both a jazz- and Latin-music-performer (his autobiography sports the engaging title, “My Sax Life”) and his piece reflected these disparate, yet interactive strands of his creativity – I was reminded of Hindemith’s music in places by the droll, quasi-academism of some of the instrumental interactions within the framework of those mambo rhythms. The music allowed the instrumental timbres to ring out in places – we heard things like piccolo and clarinet arguing over primacy before the latter plunged into a riff-like kind of apoplexy, reducing the basssoon and horn to a kind of awed accompanying ostinato. The music resembled to my ears interaction between strong-willed individuals vying for their voices to be heard in getting across a particular aspect of the eponymous tribute “to Willy” (Guillermo Alvarez Guedes, a singer, stand-up comedian and record procducer, and obviously an iconic figure in the world of Latin American culture).

Concluding the programmed part of the concert was the aforementioned work “Dance Mediterranea”, by Palestinian-born American composer Simon Shaheen, in an arrangement by Jeff Scott for wind quintet. Shaheen himself plays the violin on a Facebook clip of a version of the “Dance Mediterranea”, showing the violin taking the lead in the work’s introduction, which was here given to the solo flute. Shaheen wanted a synthesis of styles from different parts of the Mediterranean world, hence the piece’s title (something of an “Arab Spring” in music!). After a sultry, evocative opening, the music gathered momentum and brought the other instruments into the picture, to sometimes volatile effect – there are lines with bending pitches, swirling melismas, whispered concourses and sudden sforzandi – these wild expressions of freedom came together most excitingly in a kind of amalgam of riotous energies at the piece’s conclusion.

We were sent home with the strains of a Negro Spiritual resounding in our ears, “Go, tell it on the mountain”, the music laid back at its very beginning, touching on different stylish references along the way (even Klezmer-like at one point), and then with everybody increasingly “playing out” towards the culminative “Yes, Lord! Alleluiah!” kind of gesture, without which salvation might not seem assured! Here, there was simply no doubt!

Playing with fire – music that sears and burns, from the New Zealand String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZSQ’s Dangerous Liasions Tour 2017 – programme 2 (Wellington)
JANACEK – String Quartet No.2 “Intimate Letters”
JACK BODY – Saetas
MENDELSSOHN – String Quartet No.2 in A Minor Op.13

Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday, 10th September, 2017

The NZSQ’s 30th anniversary “Dangerous Liasons” national tour featured two programmes of works which encapsulated so much of what the ensemble has already achieved throughout its existence, including world-class presentations of some of the core string quartet repertoire, both in concert and on recordings, and an on-going committment to New Zealand music. Works by Beethoven, Bartok, Schumann and Mendelssohn have been given much-acclaimed performances in all parts of the country, and recordings of complete cycles of quartets by Bartok and Mendelssohn have internationally enhanced the group’s reputation. I would truly welcome a completed recorded cycle by the group of the Beethoven Quartets, to parallel Michael Houstoun’s already-completed recordings of the composer’s piano sonatas, for the sake of directly preserving the sheer quality of an achievement we’ve similarly acclaimed.

I thought that I’d previously encountered the first of Leos Janacek’s two string quartets as performed by the NZSQ at some stage – but a search of Middle C failed to turn up a review. Though I couldn’t specifically recall a previous hearing of either of the quartets I knew what to expect from the composer, having been variously excited and bewildered by my first encounters with his music (the Sinfonietta, plus a rhapsodic and volatile orchestral work called Taras Bulba), and sufficiently engaged by it all to explore further – piano pieces (Along an Overgrown Path, In the Mist), chamber works (Capriccio, Concertino) and opera (The Cunning Little Vixen).

Janacek (1854-1928), a native of Moravia, was one of music’s most remarkable “late bloomers”, producing in his 60s and 70s most of the works that would carry his name throughout the twentieth century and into the present day as one of the most original and innovative composers of his time. At an age when most people had long since sowed their wild oats and settled down to enjoy what has endured in their lives and would “see them out”, Janacek was experiencing a remarkable renaissance of activity and emotion normally associated with people in their twenties, through meeting a married woman, Kamila Stösslová, 37 years his junior, and falling deeply in love with her.

Both Janacek’s wife and Kamila’s husband “tolerated” the affair, largely because Kamila, though flattered by Janacek’s attentions, seemed outwardly unresponsive, as well as showing little interest in his music. But the composer was undeterred, writing hundreds of letters to her of a passionate and at times intimate nature. Kamila was obviously the driving force for his rejuvenated creativity, even if Janacek was to specifically enshrine his affair with her in just one particular work, his Second String Quartet “Intimate Letters”, writing to her and telling her that the music represented “all the dear things that we’ve experienced together”, and adding, “You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving”.

The NZSQ’s ‘cellist, Rolf Gjelsten introduced the work for us at this afternoon’s concert, quoting another passage from Janacek’s writings to Stösslová, which referred to the Quartet’s music as having been “carved out of human flesh”. The words seemed to make for the composer the ultimate claim on the woman that he loved, to thus write her into his music.

Surely the music that followed was a portrait not of Stösslová per se, but of Janacek himself, and his projected emotions towards his paramour – everything that came after the striving, heartfelt opening declamation was sounded impulse, here whispered intensity, and there obsessive ostinati-like passages, the fulsomeness of the gestures heightened by extremities of dynamics and “unvarnished” string timbres. Lyrical sequences found themselves suddenly grappling with heightened, overbearing figurations, or with gradually sharpening focus, an extended solo for Monique Lapins’ violin arching at one point into intensely passionate exchanges which threatened to become orgasmic in places – a beautiful viola solo from Gillian Ansell similarly succumbed to the pull of the cataclysmic surges, swallowed and digested by the music’s ongoing default-setting intensities.

These descriptions, of course, stem directly from the NZSQ’s fiercely-committed playing as much as from the composer’s music – having heard and seen the ensemble perform many times over the years I’ve come to expect a kind of base-line intensity brought to whatever they play, which invariably makes for thrilling results – here, it seemed to me that Janacek’s creative spirit had been spontaneously re-ignited in performance, engulfing us in a veritable tide of raw emotion , which was surely what the composer intended! To similarly anatomise the way the NZSQ delivered the remaining movements of the Janacek would be to go overboard in terms of review space and reader time – enough to say that the second movement took us on a rhapsodically obsessive roller-coaster ride, Janacek subjecting the opening viola melody to all kinds of expressive extremes, rather like a manic lover reiterating the same words in endlessly inventive ways. The third movement, too, opened with melancholic declamations and easeful rhythmic trajectories which soon found themselves under siege from extremes of rhythm and timbral projection, Helene Pohl’s violin emoting almost to stratospheric breaking-point over several anguished sequences!

The finale’s near-manic folk-dance opening had an almost nightmarish gaiety, the atmosphere to all and intents and purposes “spooked” by what had gone before and its still-to-come possibilities. What incredible energy and focus these players seemed to draw on, to put across what seemed like a barrage of unsolicited chunks of reconstituted emotion! Whatever dancings that were left were punctuated with feral, animal-like scamperings and frighteningly vicious tremolandi – T.S.Eliot wrote somewhere that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, and it seemed to me that these musicians had taken us perilously near to something like those realms of disturbance and disintegration via this extraordinary music.

After cheek-by-jowling with these full frontal intensities one wanted something removed from such hot-house emotions – Jack Body’s Saetas, while no less focused and involved with its subject matter, seemed to signal a throwing open of windows to let in air and light, following on as it did from Janacek’s somewhat claustrophobic series of confessional outpourings.

Gillian Ansell introduced us to Body’s work, which was commissioned by the Quartet as long ago as 2002, and which had come from the composer’s explorations of music associated with the Spanish flamenco tradition. Body had been researching material for a work, Carmen Dances, whose central character was the then iconic Wellington-based figure of Carmen Rupe, a transexual strip-club owner, who had also run as a mayoral candidate. Saetas (a word meaning “arrow” or “dart”) was composed as a separate project, with Body focusing particularly on music associated with religious feasts held in Spain during Holy Week – saeta are semi-improvised, highly ornamented flamenco songs, many of which were transcribed from different sources by the composer for his material.

Gillian Ansell talked about the quejío, or lament, aspect of these songs, sung by penitents as statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary are carried through the streets in the processionals. The first and last pieces featured the musicians exclaiming such a cry of lament at the very beginning. As well, in the opening bars of the first piece the composer quoted excerpts from both Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony, and a Hugo Wolf song from his work “The Spanish Songbook”, which, together with the quejío constituted a kind of effervescing “cocktail mix” of diverse but still intensely-focused emotion in line with the fervour normally generated by the occasion.

Body’s transcriptions also featured strong drum pulses, which were here represented by additional instruments in the performance, a drum and an accordion, played by Rolf Gjelsten, who demonstrated to us aspects of what these instruments would sound like before the group began the work. After playing the ‘cello during the first piece, he swopped instruments, taking up the accordion for the remaining three pieces.

The upward-rushing figurations at the music’s beginning actually made me think of Wagner as much as Tchaikovsky! The lyrical declamations were played “folkishly”, the instruments readily exploring timbres associated with raw, direct emotion, characterful and unvarnished. Most of the music moved slowly and processionally, a dirge of tightly-knit intensities (the violins directed to play as if their notes were “searing beams of light”), both focused and atmospheric!

Rolf Gjelsten having swapped his instruments, the second saeta began, with single jabbed staccato notes to which the viola replied with a sombre melodic line, the accordion adding its harmonium-like tones besides contributing a rhythmic “crunching” accompaniment, viola and violins repeating the mournful thematic material in different registers. The third movement’s source material is not strictly a saeta (rather, a fourteenth century song “O sad life of the flesh!”) but the subject and general mood of the piece certainly accorded with the rest, and began with a quejio which linked it to the tradition. We heard dense clusters of accordion notes at the outset vying with flurrying string rhythms, which begin to alternate gypsy-like running figures and searing single held notes – gradually the piece’s agitations and divergent threads were bound together, the strings playing in unison at the end over a long-breathed accordion figure.

The fourth and last Saeta opened with another vocalisation (marked “with anguished fervour”) from the quartet players, reinforced by drum-and footbeats in a great “Bolero-like” crescendo to the final thunderous thump immediately after the strings finished their lines and reached their cadence. Leading up to this cataclysm were swirling maelstroms of sound from the instruments, creating an overwhelming effect of a specific, yet universally human kind of life-force.

In my mind arose the question – was Mendelssohn’s music going to make any impression upon us in cheek-by-jowl company with such raw extrusions of attention-grabbing emotion? Ought his contribution to the evening’s music have been put in a less assailable comparative position in relation to the rest? Well, in a concert of surprises this music’s ability to hold its ground and create its own culture of intense feeling was among my afternoon’s most noteworthy discoveries.

The NZSQ has, of course not long since completed a recording project for Naxos involving the composer’s complete works in this genre, a venture I’ve yet to catch up with – but on the basis of what I heard the players do with this particular quartet (No.2 in A Minor, Op.13), I would be very keen to seek their recordings out, and get to know the music better, especially so when, as here at this concert, it’s presented in what seems to me the best possible light. Having encountered such playing and interpretation of this order “live”, I would want to encourage as many people as possible to explore more of Mendelssohn via the efforts of the NZSQ on their recordings.

Monique Lapins, the ensemble’s second violinist, introduced the work, which was actually Mendelssohn’s first “mature” string quartet (composed in 1827) despite its later Opus number than the so-called String Quartet No.1 in E-flat Major, Op.12 (written two years AFTER No.2! – classical music would, of course, be the poorer without such mind-tickling anomalies!). She quoted the words of a song “Frage”, written and composed by the precocious 18-year-old during the same year as the “second” quartet, a song whose opening words “Is it true?” appear throughout the quartet as a three-note motif (incidentally, both Liszt and Brahms used a similar 3-note phrase, each in a solo piano work).

A slow, richly-voiced introduction began the Quartet’s performance of the work, the three-note motif derived from the song occurring at the end of the opening paragraph, just prior to the players’ precipitous plunge into the movement’s allegro, during which I readily took in the playing’s strength and gutsiness, imbuing the music with a greater and more satisfying degree of those qualities than I would have expected. After some intense duetting between the first and second violins in the development, the reprise brought back those first urgencies, engaging our sensibilites at a white-heat rate which again I found exhilarating.

The slow movement’s rich, hymn-like melody, so very characteristic of the composer, came with surety and strength in performance. The mid-movement fugue, modelled after Beethoven’s example in the latter’s Op.95 (despite his father’s disapproval, the young Felix idolised Beethoven’s quartets), was put through its somewhat volatile, though always characterful, paces by the players before the lovely return of the hymn-like opening music, at the movement’s end.

I loved the limpid poise and gossamer grace of the third-movement Intermezzo, a dance that was a kind of antique gavotte at the outset, replete with lovely instrumental interchanges and dovetailed melodic figures. A scherzo-like change which came over the music brought deft, rhythmically ambiguous gossamer scamperings in a kind of “hide-and-seek” scenario, almost Schumannesque in its “merry pranks” aspect, before the music returned to the opening solemnities – a coda glanced fleetingly and mischievously back at the “merry pranks” episode before smiling, and disappearing!

Not unlike what Schubert does at the beginning of his Octet’s finale, Mendelssohn presented us with chaos and disorder in a tempestuous opening, the first violin beating its breast over agitations wrought by the tremolo accompaniments . However, Mendelssohn’s ensuing allegro wasn’t as genial as Schubert’s, the NZSQ players here pushing expectantly towards points of intensity with exciting unisons and horse-galloping sequences. Gillian Ansell’s viola called for clear-headedness by revoicing the fugato of the second movement, but soon became caught up with the ensemble’s rebuilding of the lines towards a return of the allegro and thence to the movement’s tremulous opening. Keeping us on the seat’s edge, the composer fetched up a disconsolate solo, sung with oceans of feeling by Helene Pohl’s volin, quoting the fugato before taking final refuge with the others in the quartet’s opening – and the requoting of Mendelsson’s three-note figure was like balm for the soul! – it was caressed and embraced by the players, to the point where we in the audience were made to feel as if we ourselves were young lovers all over again! – a treasurable experience!

Pleasure of a “return to our lives” kind was then afforded by the players doing a “swop-around of instruments for a klezmer encore, written, I think, by Ross Harris, Rolf Gjelsten back on the accordion, and Helene Pohl in the ‘cellist’s seat for a change, while Gillian Ansell and Monique Lapins also did an exchange – wot larks! No more madcap scenario was evoked, and no enjoyment was more relished than by these talented musicians sharing their fun and games with us, and afterwards, sending us home replete!