Tag: New Zealand music

Madrigals-a-go! defined, declared and delivered by Cantoris with director Thomas Nikora

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Madrigals – \ ˈma-dri-gəlz \ n. Poems set to music, sung a capella for two to eight voices

Cantoris, directed by Thomas Nikora

Music by Mozart, Tallis, Gibbons, Morley, Bruckner, Saint-Saens, Purcell, Rachmaninov, Chris Artley, Manning Sherwin, Billy Joel

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

Wednesday, 6th September, 2017

The programme note was right to describe the evening’s entertainment as “a delightful Spring programme”, even if Wellington hadn’t thus far (and hasn’t since yet) had a weather response worthy of the name! Still, none of this was through want of trying on the part of Cantoris, whose singing at least warmed our insides and gave as good a precursor of the winds of change as any recent general election poll!

First up we were treated to a kind of “surround-sound” presentation of Mozart’s Cantate Domino, a piece of music I’ve not been able to find anything about, and certainly have never heard before – however, Cantoris’ treatment of the piece rendered such detail superfluous in situ, such was the impact of the group’s warm, open-hearted singing.

Beginning with a unison line, the sounds spread around the church’s interior, separating into parts and overlapping like an indoor version of “Forest Murmurs”, reaching a kind of saturation point at which the strands wound into a great unison statement of the opening – I found the effect of it all exhilarating!

Though the beautiful Thomas Tallis anthem/motet “If You Love Me” inevitably brought a reduction of ambient scale to the proceedings, following after such a spectacularly antiphonal opening, it also tightened up the vocal textures of the group to the point where we could register the balances and the different timbres of the voices, the women sounding a tad more secure than did the men, especially at the highest pitches. Towards the end, the overlapping effect of the voices produced a frisson of beauty which memorably coloured the music’s dying resonances of the music.

Orlando Gibbons’ “The Silver Swan” elicited properly silvery tones from the sopranos, with only the highest notes vulnerable to strain, while Thomas Morley’s rather less exposed lines in “Sing We and Chant It” allowed a more relaxed, rhythmically infectious mode, in which the lines found and balanced one another admirably.

Though I was far less familiar with Anton Bruckner’s choral music than with his majestic “symphonic boa constrictors” as Brahms unkindly called his symphonies (which, incidentally, I love!), I was charmed by “Locus Iste” a motet Bruckner wrote for the dedication of a new votive chapel at Linz – the words of the motet go on to translate as “This place was made by God”. Reminiscent of Wagner’s “Tannhauser” in places, the piece built impressively and characteristically, the voices fully relishing the piece’s dynamic range by appropriately “singing out”, while giving passages such as the concluding repetition of “a Deo factus est” a peaceful and serene aspect. I might have even guessed (well, maybe after two or three goes), had I listened “blind”, that the piece had been written by Bruckner.

The second Bruckner item, “Vexilla Regis” (The banners of the king) sounded quite a different kettle of fish – composed “out of a pure impulse of the heart” in 1892, it was the composer’s last completed motet, and demonstrated a markedly transformed style of writing compared to the earlier “Locus Iste”. Characterised by sudden unexpected shifts of harmony, the music recalled passages in the slow movements of Bruckner’s later symphonies (this time, I’m almost certain I would have guessed the composer first up!) How wonderful to hear the choir sing with such a confident sense of line, the voices taking all but the somewhat awkward concluding descent in their stride.

Asked to name composers of madrigals, I wouldn’t have thought to mention Camille Saint-Saens, though Cantoris would have you believe that he wrote at least one, “Calme des Nuits Op.68 No.1”, which we heard this evening (there also exists an Op.68 No.2, “Les fleurs et les arbres”, which one presumes would have been composed along the same lines…..). Anyway, due investigation suggested to me that Saint-Saens probably wrote the texts of both of these choruses himself, and invested them with a depth of feeling that isn’t usually accorded the composer’s music. Here, the “Calm of the Night” unfolded with long-breathed lines, the music freely modulating, the tones then burgeoning impressively for a few imposing measures before falling back again, and taking us to a concluding paragraph featuring some rapt, soulful soprano tones, most sensitively controlled.

Two madrigals of the “English” variety followed, each by Thomas Morley – the first was something of a workout for the soprano voices, having to sustain demanding exposed lines with support lower down from an answering group, a challenge the voices steadfastedly met, despite a “parched” sequence or two along the way. Rather less demanding was Morley’s “Now is the month of maying”, a jolly fa-la-la romp, with director Thomas Nikora on this occasion electing to sing as well as direct from within the ensemble’s ranks, making for plenty of fun and immediacy of dynamic differentiation!

The first of Purcell’s “madrigals” was, it seemed, a vocal arrangement of an instrumentally-accompanied solo, Fairest Isle, from a stage work “King Arthur”. The soprano solo was ripely-toned and gorgeous, with occasional bell-like qualities lightening the vocal ambiences. Then, with the second item “If Love’s a sweet passion” from “The Fairy Queen” the solo voice, joined in a reprise by the ensemble, brought strength and character to the words, qualities which underlined the music’s theatrical origins.

To finish the programme we were given an attractive bracket of performances with madrigal-like qualities across a spectrum of musical styles, beginning with Sergei Rachmaninov’s “Bogoroditse Devo” from his “All-Night Vigil”, a text known to English speakers as the “Hail Mary”, a gorgeous performance, filled with rapt fervour. New Zealand choral composer Chris Artley’s work “O Magnum Mysterium” resonated richly throughout its opening, towards some beautifully emphasised “Alleluias” and some echo effects between the men’s and women’s voices, before the piece finished with enriched clustered harmonies, beautifully shaped and resonated.

I knew “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” but not the concluding Billy Joel song. In Manning Sherwin’s pre World War Two hit, recorded by the “Forces’ Sweetheart, Vera Lynn”, a wordless vocalising sequence introduced a brief solo line before some flavoursome harmonic shifts tested the voices, who emerged with great credit from the sequences, nicely capturing the song’s atmosphere with plenty of nostalgic feeling.And so it was left to Billy Joel, with a song I thought worthy of the Beatles “And so it goes”, featuring a true-toned male solo voice briefly joined by a single woman’s voice, fetchingly harmonised and attractively resonated. It made a relaxed and good-humoured ending to the concert, one which I think the singers and their inspirational and energising conductor, Thomas Nikora, ought to be well pleased with.

“New Look” NZ Trio performs old and new at Wellington City Gallery

Posted on by Alan Wells

NZTRIO: “SPIRAL” AT CITY GALLERY

Natalie Lin (violin), Ashley Brown (cello), Sarah Watkins (piano)

Arnold Bax: Trio in B flat major
Jenny McLeod: Seascapes
Samuel Holloway: Corpse and Mirror (New Commission)
Beethoven: Piano Trio in E flat Op. 70 No. 2

City Art Gallery, Wellington,

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

NZTrio are undergoing a dramatic change. With the departure of foundation member Justine Cormack, attention at this concert was inevitably centred on the replacement violinist for this tour, Natalie Lin, a New Zealander currently living in Texas. She immediately impressed in the vigorous opening of the Bax trio with her strong, confident tone, going on to duet lyrically with Ashley Brown’s warm dark cello. This was densely-written, lush late-Romantic music for the most part, exceptions being a berceuse-like section in the middle movement, and an almost Bartokian staccato energy in the finale. Perhaps because Bax was a pianist, and the original commission was from a pianist, the overriding sonic impression however was that of the rippling arpeggios, trills, and interludes from Sarah Watkins’ Bechstein piano.

The programme began with this 1946 work from the afterglow of Romanticism. It ended with an 1808 one from the pre-dawn of Romanticism. Beethoven’s E flat trio is not well known (possibly because, unlike its “Ghost”-ly twin, Op.72 No. 1, it does not have a catchy title). Here the pianist’s articulation was aptly crisp and classical, the strings gracefully Mozartian, but everyone had Beethovenian heft where required (as in the second movement). Occasionally the interaction between the strings, on the one hand, and piano, on the other, reminded me of the treatment of voice and piano in some of the songs that Beethoven was composing around the same time (“Neue Liebe, neues Leben”, for example), or there would be brief declamatory passages (again not unknown in the lieder, such as “Andenken”).

New Zealand composer Jenny McLeod’s Seascapes (2015) are her arrangements of two of her 1995 Tone Clock pieces that were requested by Jack Body to commemorate Douglas Lilburn’s centenary year. They were good choices: the iterated piano notes in the first piece, and a hesitant Scotch snap in the second, are both reminiscent of characteristic Lilburn “fingerprints”. Having heard these rich, full-bodied versions for piano trio, it is hard to imagine them for piano only.

A welcome feature of NZTrio’s recitals is their commissioning of new New Zealand works. They have had a long association with Auckland composer Samuel Holloway, playing his remarkable Stapes at the 2005 Nelson Composers’ Workshop, and later including it on their excellent Lightbox CD(the strings, using non-standard tuning, make the piano sound eerily microtonal). Over time, Holloway’s style has become increasingly austere: in his string quartet Impossible Songs, long, often microtonal, solos on the strings are relieved only by the emergence of a sensuous female voice in the final movement. In more recent work still, there is often no such reward at the end. At last year’s Nelson workshop, for instance, duo pianists performed Holloway’s Things, in which each “event” – chord or note – had its own page: although potentially tedious, it encouraged focused, meditative listening to the inner life of the sounds.

Corpse and Mirror reminded me a little bit of Things, but here the “events” followed one another in quick succession, establishing a regular (though not slavish) rhythm. With the precision ensemble playing of the NZTrio, the piece had the effect of a “trio for one instrument”, each “sound object” finely nuanced, ever changing yet ever familiar, like a kaleidoscope, or like the obsessive cross-hatchings of the artist Jasper Johns that Holloway refers to in his programme note (Johns also provided the title). The result was rather like a jagged Webernian melodic line but with a pulse such as found in Steve Reich (one of the few minimalist Holloway holds in high regard). Not an easy listen, then, but one which had its rewards after all.

Mahler, Berg – and Salina Fisher, from the NZSO – music of innocence and experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SALINA FISHER – Rainphase
BERG – Violin Concerto “To the memory of an Angel”
MAHLER – Symphony No.1 in D Major “Titan”

Karen Gomyo (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 11th August, 2017

Spectres, once they’re established, can haunt the world of music for decades, for oceans of time, during which certain attitudes and values can be gradually eroded, or else further entrenched. The fact that each of this concert’s three items might well have reawakened specific “ghosts” lurking among the sensibilities of the NZSO’s many loyal supporters might well have accounted for the relative paucity of attendance (by my reckoning the hall was no more than two-thirds full).

In fact, two of these so-called “spectres” probably contributed far less to the numbers or empty seats than the one which I’ll come to in a moment. Time was when programming a piece of New Zealand music at a concert would ensure that a certain number of music-lovers stayed away. Nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that home-grown music, partly by dint of sheer persistence (thanks to various staunch advocacy from certain musicians and listeners) and partly due to its intrinsic attractiveness no longer “scares off” people to the extent that it used to do.

As for the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer was famously quoted at some point as saying in response to shafts of critical disapproval “My time will come”, a prediction which appears to have come true wherever Western symphonic music is regularly performed. It did take more than a decade after the then National Orchestra of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service was founded in 1946 for the ensemble to tackle a Mahler Symphony (the Fourth with conductor John Hopkins in 1958), though since then all the others, including the unfinished fragment of the Tenth, have been more-or-less regularly performed.

It’s interesting that Hopkins, according to Joy Tonks’ 1986 history, “The NZSO – the first Forty Years” – Reed Methuen), had to fight the Assistant Director-General of the then NZBC, John Schroder, to programme what the latter called “this long and boring music”…! – an indication of the extent at that time of the composer‘s “spectral” aspect in people’s minds. Now, it seems, concert audiences can’t get enough of Mahler, even though the presence of the First Symphony on the occasion of this concert didn’t help to make up for what appeared to be more potent misgivings on the part of a goodly number of patrons.

So maybe it was the presence of music by Alban Berg which could have been the crucial factor – though Berg was in many ways the least “hard-core-radical” of the famous Schoenberg/Berg/Webern trio whose work popularly defined the “Second Viennese School” of composition, his music is still regarded as “difficult” by association with his two contemporaries, enough, perhaps, to put off people of a less adventurous inclination from attending the concert. One woman sitting just down from me lasted ten minutes into the Berg Violin Concerto before she was gathering her things and was off – but at least she was prepared to give the music a try!

But what riches there were for those of us who stayed, firstly to marvel at the finely-wrought and freshly-contrived super-detailings of instrumental textures, timbres and tones of Salina Fisher’s miraculous new work Rainphase, and then to luxuriate in the miraculous contrivance of acerbic twelve-tone structurings interlaced with russet-coloured afterglowings throughout Alban Berg’s last completed work, his Violin Concerto. Both works required active listening of a kind which occasionally confronted rather than soothed the ear – and perhaps the Concerto might have attracted more people had there been a pre-concert talk of some kind, helping to shed some light in advance on some of the music’s ebb and flow. It was certainly a work which richly illustrated Berg’s teacher, Schoenberg’s dictum about there being “no such things as dissonances – merely more remote consonances!”

Beginning with Salina Fisher’s work, the first sounds were Keatsian in their “Fled is that music? – Do I wake or sleep?” quality, harmonic-like tones so ethereal and other-worldly – in point of fact, not unlike those at the very opening of the Mahler Symphony we were to hear later in the concert. The tones then multiplied and harmonically “clustered”, and seemed to initiate the process of a giant organism gently breathing, with still more textures and timbres joining in with the wonderment, and with percussion gradually becoming more prominent. The lower instruments provided a foundation while the lighter-toned sounds clustered, glowed and scintillated before receding into an almost transcendental world of gestural sonorities, for all the world becoming “naturalistic” in their textural and timbral explorations, sonorities best described by the words “swishing” and “murmuring” and “breathing” and “rippling” – all water-words describing both activity and aftermath.

Gentle string pizzicati turned the processses into a kind of promenade or dance – a “gavotte of the stormwater pipes”, or some such activity – with as much happening on the ground as there was in the air. Winds found their characteristic voices and intoned a kind of nature’s hymn, individual lines finding one another and growing in intensity, reaching what felt like a kind of fruition of a natural process, most satisfying to experience. Fisher’s assured instrumentation throughout these sequences made for breath-catching results in places, no more evocative than during the piece’s long drawn-out diminuendo, flecked with motifs of valediction. As strings and winds found a commonality and the textures dried slowly out, the piece magically returned to its origins, the ending surviving even the oddest irruption of vocalised noise from (one presumed) some audience member somewhere, made for whatever reason, accidental or intentional…….

Last year I had the good fortune to both hear and review a performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto here in Wellington played by Wilma Smith, well-remembered in Wellington as a former leader of the New Zealand String Quartet, as well as an ex-concertmaster of the NZSO, before her relocating to Australia in 2003. On that occasion Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington were the musical collaborators, so this time it was the NZSO’s and Edo de Waart’s turn, with the superb violinist Karen Gomyo, whom I’d previously heard playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the NZSO and Pietari Inkinen in June 2015. On that occasion Gomyo was a substitute for the newly-pregnant Hilary Hahn, and captured my interest with a reading of the great work which provided a distinctive and memorable experience.

Throughout the work’s opening Andante movement one would think that there was little the average concertgoer would find troublesome or unpalatable. It wasn’t music which “played itself”, and did require some concentration – but the rewards for listeners were considerable. Berg began the work with a series of open fifths alternated between the solo violin and various orchestral instruments such as the harp and the clarinet, Gomyo keeping her higher tones exquisitely pure, while squeezing more emotion from on the lower notes. After musing on the opening in exchange with muted brass, the soloist connected with the orchestral winds, taking part in both gentle, bitter-sweet exchanges, and a couple of trenchantly-delivered arched lines, throbbing with feeling.

Out of this the clarinets began the dance that ushered in the second movement. A somewhat angular figuration in places built up to some vigorous to-ings and fro-ings, with the peasant-like dance-steps tossed about, and the violin taking charge of the rhythm for a “this is how it goes” sequence. As if it had been playing quietly for a while and nobody had noticed, the solo horn suddenly introduced an affecting counter-melody which the muted trumpets then picked up – like a memory of long ago suddenly coming into focus! The composer when young had had an affair with a peasant girl, which produced a child and it was believed that this tune was a reference to that particular memory.

As well, Berg had already begun the concerto when he heard of the death from infantile paralysis of Manon Gropius, the daughter from a second marriage of Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, a girl he knew as Mutzi. The violin’s quixotic dancings in this movement seemed like the composer’s attempt at capturing for all time a young girl’s vivacity and sweetness, the music lightly evoking fond remembrance and nostalgic sadness, and watched over by guardians such as the stern tuba and a wraith-like pair of Sibelius-like clarinets. As the trumpet hauntingly sounded the folk-tune once again the soloist suddenly danced away, as if wanting to preserve the impulses of memory which brought happiness and escape from what was to follow.

Whereas the music had thus far been vivacious and volatile on the one hand, and thoughtful and nostalgic on the other, the third movement’s opening produced a shock with its harsh ferocity – the stuff of nightmares come into the midst of contentment. Gomyo’s playing bit deeply into the music’s textures like a wounded animal, then withdrew into hiding, accompanied by spectral tones from the oboe and flute, the music feeling “cornered” and subdued, the textures slightly “ghoulish” , the lines from the soloist suspended in space. With another irruption welling up from below, the music appeared in utter turmoil, the solo violin screaming in agony and despair, and the brass in ghoulish-march mode. The soloist’s tones were overwhelmed by the orchestra’s sheer weight and harshness – such horrible, merciless music!

Out of the vistas laid waste by the turmoil Gomyo’s violin sang resolutely to herself a strongly sustaining ascending line, one which the clarinets then took up and played with such beauty and poignancy – this was the chorale used by JS Bach in his Chorale “Es ist genug”, one which soloist and orchestra here made their own, playing it warmly and tenderly, resisting attempts by the individual instruments to drag the melody back to earth. As the strings sang the last vestiges of life, the soloist beautifully ascended the melody, to a point after which the winds and brass broke into radiant support of “the angel” of the music’s title, the silences at the work’s end carrying with them only her memory.

After these somewhat overwrought utterances, the opening of the Mahler Symphony which followed the interval seemed to take us back to the world of childhood, of first impressions of consciousness and the wonderment induced by nature and creation. De Waart and his players gave the music an almost timeless quality, the sounds here seemingly conjured out of the earth’s elements.The work’s many moments of reflective beauty brough out this performance’s most distinctive quality, an incrediby rapt, breath-holding sense of listening to the silences and the soft sounds in between. Writing this now, it all comes back to me so vividly – playing and conducting of the utmost concentration and refinement.

The work’s more bucolic passages were also rendered with an ease of utterance (more elegant than earthy, I felt, probably because the MFC isn’t renowned for its warmth and richness of sound). Apart from a brief (and uncharacteristic) first-movement woodwind slip, the orchestral playing was simply to die for, so much of the detailing heavenly in effect (the off-stage trumpets, for instance)! Had it all taken place in the Town Hall I’m sure this performance would also have heaved, grunted and roared all the more readily. As it was, the exquisite refinement of those soft passages (onstage brass performing miracles of quiet, withdrawn playing) gave the first movement’s peformance a distinctiveness of its own that won’t easily be forgotten.

De Waart’s second-movement country dancers moved briskly and easily, encouraged by the winds lifting the bells of their instruments as directed by the composer, and by the string players bouncing their bows on the instruments’ strings, adding to the rustic effect. A solo horn most elegantly called the dancers indoors for a more genteel waltz, the playing rich and velvety in effect, and the string-wind counterpoints to the dance a delight. The return of the countryfied Landler brought forth, among other things a splendid cymbal crash and, to the heads of all the dancers, a fine rush of blood at the end.

Timpani strokes, both eerie and purposeful, ushered in the third movement, a double-bass solo voicing the instrument’s spectral tones throughout a minor-key version of the folk-song Frere Jacques (apparently always sung that way in rural parts of Austria), counterpointed by a piquant oboe line, before giving way to the strains of a small klezmer band, almost offstage and passing by, in effect. Again, conductor and players achieved wonders with the quieter sections of the score, most notably the rapt, break-of-day beginning of the trio section of the movement with its near-heartbreaking quotation of the song “Die zwei blauen Augen” from the composer’s own Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – here, the play of different emotion, the surge of hope and the minor-key pang of anguish from the original song was as affecting as with the original.

Out of the movement’s deathly hush at the end came a blaze of ferocity from the brass and a crash from the percussion that made everybody jump, launching the finale in no uncertain terms! Though the hall doesn’t give much back, the percussion section did a great job, Lenny Sakofsky punishing the cymbals for all they were worth and both Larry Reese and Thomas Guldborg fetching up great roaring avalanches of tone from each of the two sets of timpani. The movement’s ebb and flow was strongly characterised – the tumultuous flare-ups of excitement and agitation were tellingly counterweighted by the more inward, lyrical sequences, each mood in a sense “overtaken” by another in what seemed like an inevitable and organic progression of things. As for the final all-together, it most spectacularly featured the horn sectio “standing and delivering” as the music roared forth, driven by the timpani and upholstered by every orchestral section singing and playing its heart out.

As I’ve said, in the Town Hall we would have been overwhelmed by these sounds, perhaps even too much so for some people – but not for this writer. Conductor Edo de Waart made an interesting gesture with his actions immediately after taking his bows in front of an enthusiastic audience, by giving his bouquet of flowers to the double-bass player, Joan Perarnau Garriga, in acknowledgement of his restrained but telling contribution to the performance – maybe for de Waart those rapt, inward-looking sounds were the ones that enshrined the true soul of this remarkable music.

Enthusiastic reception of nicely varied programme from Takács Quartet

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Takács Quartet (Edward Dusinberre and Károly Schranz (violins), Geraldine Walther (viola), András Fejér (cello)
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Haydn: String Quartet in D, Op.76 no.5
Anthony Ritchie: Whakatipua, Op. 71
Webern: Langsamer Satz
Dvořák: String Quartet no.14 in A flat, Op.105

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 4 August 2017, 7.30pm

My initial reaction at the concert was a longing for the Town Hall to be restored to use; chamber music does not sound nearly so well in the cavernous Michael Fowler Centre unless one is near the front, which I was not; it simply does not provide the resonance, and makes ‘chamber music’ a misnomer.

The concert began with vintage Haydn – musically, and chronologically, being written around 1797, (he was born in 1732) part of a set of six quartets.  Its performance immediately demonstrated the lovely cohesion of the players and their subtly varying dynamics.  This is the seventh visit of the world class quartet to New Zealand, but the first visit, I think, for violist Geraldine Walther.  The quartet was founded in Hungary in 1975, but for the larger part of its life has been based in Colorado, USA.  The only remaining original member is the cellist, András Fejér.

After quite a fast allegretto first movement, the placid and charming largo, cantabile e mesto impressed with its lyrically beautiful melodies and harmonies, a touch of melancholy pervading it here and there.  The warmth of tone of the members of the Takács was always apparent in their expressive playing.

The Menuetto and Trio (allegretto) were full of movement.  The higher strings carried the melody and harmony while the cello grunted away underneath in the Trio.  A return to the minuet brought sunnier, uncomplicated music

Chords opened the presto Finale dramatically, then interesting rapid themes with sprightly rhythms took hold.  A change of key added piquancy.  The whole performance was faultless, played with panache, and in an appropriate style.

Anthony Ritchie is an established New Zealand composer who writes in several different genres, always with musical interest, and not tied to any school such as minimalism, but always something worthwhile to say.

His Whakatipua was a musical depiction of Lake Wakatipu, and its town, Queenstown.  The dramatic scenery, the busy tourist town, and the gold rush history all found a place in his musical essay.  In the early part, there was juxtaposition of pizzicato against the bowed lower instruments that was most effective.  Cohesiveness of the instruments with each other was a feature.  Lightness and lift, along with the business-speak aspect of the town seemed to be features of the inspiration.

There was vigour aplenty in the piece.  The last section returned to a more serene depiction of the landscape, as at the beginning, and called forth an atmosphere of peace and calm, before the piece petered away on a high note.

If one heard only of Anton Webern’s works his Langsamer Satz, one would have no idea of his later atonal, twelve-tone music.  This piece began with a Romantic, mellow melody and accompaniment.  There followed a fine passage with pizzicato from the first violin while the other instruments were bowed.  The mellow, somewhat chromatic  music persisted, with its rather introspective mood.  Plaintive tones arose.  This was warm-toned, vibrato-aided playing, which gave the work a richness that contrasted with the classicism of Haydn and the relative austerity of Ritchie’s composition.

In places the music reminded me of Schönberg’s Transfigured Night, composed in 1899, six years before Webern’s piece.  The programme notes state that, after commencing study with Schönberg in 1904-05, Webern began ‘producing work of structural rigour and musical cohesion, uniting meticulous craft and profound emotional expression.’  These elements were apparent in this one-movement work as was the influence of Mahler, especially in the final part of the work, of which the notes use the word ‘transcendence’.  The clarity of the music was a delight, and the ending quite magical as well as satisfying.

The major work on the programme was the Dvořák String Quartet no.14, one of the composer’s many exhilarating, cheerful, melodic compositions.  The first movement starts with an adagio that is low and sombre, beginning on the cello, followed by viola then violins.  Then an allegro appassionato breaks forth energetically, with plenty of work for all the players to do.  Again we had demonstrated such accomplished playing; they made the music glow.

The Scherzo second movement was a lively Bohemian dance, followed by a gorgeous lyrical melody.  Lento e molto cantabile was the marking for the third movement, where a calmly beautiful theme was developed.  The quiet, pensive mood took on a more solemn character after a time.  As in the first movement, the two violins sing a song while the lower pitched instruments accompany, initially with pizzicato.  The movement has an ecstatic pianissimo ending.

The opening to the Finale was quite lovely, and the movement was full of sprightly Bohemian motifs.   The cheerful and optimistic mood carried on to the triumphant ending.

The audience received it all with much enthusiastic applause and cheers, and we were granted an encore: the spirited, fast last movement of Haydn’s quartet Op. 20, no.4.  It made for a jolly ending to a first-class concert and was received with delight.

 

 

Beauty, poignancy, energy, focus – Kenneth Young’s CD “Shadows and Light”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shadows and Light
Symphonic Compositions by Kenneth Young

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

Atoll ACD 216

Over much too protracted a period I have lived with this disc of Kenneth Young’s music, playing single tracks at times when opportunities arose, and, in random-step-wise mode very gradually familiarising myself with the music’s sounds. It’s only recently that I’ve had the oportunity to tease it out from my constantly-attenuated “must-hear” collection of recordings, and given it the uninterrupted attention I’ve felt it deserves. Playing a track at a time, I remember being caught up in each one’s very different version of an intense experience, though in isolating my listening to the pieces I had little sense of “carry-over” from one world of intensity to another – it’s as though I was “beginning again” with each piece, and therefore having to re-establish my relationship with the composer’s sound-world before properly taking in any specific content.

Of course, away from recordings, and the luxury of repetition they provided, this was the old way of things, by which listeners got to know any “body” of work from a single composer – a public performance here, followed by another one there, and so on, except on those red-letter occasions when a concert featured a number of that same composer’s works! So in due course came my first chance to get a decent and protrated “listen” of Young’s new CD from beginning to end. What can I say as a result of it all? – just that the experience has had an overwhelming effect on me, putting me in no doubt as to the cumulative beauty, poignancy, energy and focus of the composer’s achievement over the span of this disc’s contents.

I had previously reviewed another all-Young CD, one from Trust Records which appeared as long ago as 1998, again featuring the composer as conductor, with the NZSO. I was, on that occasion, extremely taken with the composer’s “skilful and evocative way with orchestral colour”, and expressed admiration for “Young the executant as much as Young the composer”, who, to my ears had “so admirably controlled and balanced…..the sounds, even in the most heavily-scored passages”. At the risk of repeating myself, I can’t help but reiterate my pleasure at Young’s executant skills in relation to the more recent Atoll disc, along with, of course, his creative abilities. If anything, the touch is even surer, and the results honed with even clearer and more focused distinction.

Right from the beginning of the new recording, Young the composer takes his listeners to a place one feels is exactly where the composer wants us to go – he alludes as much to this feeling in his own words, reproduced in the booklet – “….it (Remembering) is the one work I’ve written in which I would not change a note”. From its drifting, evocative opening, in which NZSO concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppanen’s solo violin sings its “lone soul” melody, through sequences of quixotic interaction and constantly-shifting textures (Debussy’s Jeux occasionally comes to mind), to its cumulative and enriched “return” to tranquility, the music weaves its compelling amalgam of detailed re-engagement and visionary oversight in a richly compelling, and properly “memorable” way.

If Remembering seems very much the stuff of “things past”, then Lux Aeterna works on a much wider canvas, an amalgam of some kind of deeply-ingrained awareness of things past with a conscious present, and an exploration of various connective pathways between the two. Only a handful of minutes longer than Remembering, this second work at once seems to dwarf its predecessor, the chant-like unison melody mysteriously sounding as if from ages past (like the opening of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture) before a kind of “opening up” of the world, winds and strings filled with wonderment at the vast, colourful incomprehension of it all.

What impresses me is how Young manages to create sound-vistas which express these visions with the utmost clarity and conviction – the first section of Lux Aeterna sets a whole world of motoric activity in a backdrop of vast spaces that expresses an age-old question, that of life’s purpose and destination. Then after the chant-like melody reaffirms its continuum of consciousness, more vigorous impulses spread across the spaces, galvanising the textures and reactivating the “here and now” voices, until the solo ‘cello seems to patiently transcend such worldly preoccupations, dissolving their substance into a strange alignment with those greater, more transcendent spaces, the recurring chant encouraging the string textures to gater around and suffuse thew whole scenario with a kind of “peace that surpasses understanding”, its long-breathed lines trailing into a kind of eternity…..

Symphony No.2 came from a 2001 commission which marked the beginning of Young’s full-time career as a conductor and composer. A First Symphony had been written in the 1980s while Young was still an orchestral player, a somewhat Mahlerian “symphony is like the world” utterance, things paralleling further with the earlier composer when Young himself took up a conducting post (Conductor in Residence) with the NZSO. The new Symphony followed in the wake of Young’s active involvement in performing and recording seminal New Zealand works, along with fulfilling the occasional commission for an original work. Slow in its gestation, but enriched by experience both creative and recreative the Symphony came when it had to, and was finished in 2004.

With a phrase resembling a bird-call a solo clarinet began the work, setting up a world of dialogues with different variants and textures, the heavy percussion adding both scintillation and deep, spaced-out ambience beneath the chatter of the instrumental comings-and-goings. Urgent brass-calls brought forth eloquence from individual instruments – a solo violin, a bassoon, and a ‘cello all took their opportunities, separately and together, as the rest of the instruments tossed melodic and rhythmic scraps around, at times in the manner of a “concerto for orchestra”. An irruption of intent heaved upwards and energetically resounded among the brasses as string ostinati pattered like rain on the roof, and the winds squawked like ruffled birds, before the vigorous musical argument was becalmed by strings and tongued winds, and something of a new world brought to view.

Throughout, the music evoked a kind of volatile biosphere of activities, the instruments and their groupings skilfully and characterfully employed by the composer to interact, contrast, oppose and throw into bold relief. Always there was a characterisation involving declamation or interaction, brought about by Young’s well-honed instrumentation skills, the sounds enjoying a coherence of intent and/or effect, the silences bringing forth breath-catching moments of further tremulous expectation.

The concluding sequences presented a kind of nocturnal world, bolstered by tight brass harmonies, and ennobled by an extended ‘cello solo threading its way through ambient orchestral textures, soft percussion scintillations, and celeste-like colourings. After the energies and volatilities of the work’s central sequences, these defty-wrought impulses (including a delicious “tuba dreaming tuba dreams” passage) came across partly as very much a “recharge-batteries time” tempered with undercurrents of unease – nothing lasted, tranquility least of all, and the “we want to go home” statements grew in agitated frequency and intent to the point of anarchy until the detailings surrendered as quickly as they had thrust themselves forward. What had been fractious and abrasive became conciliatory and accommodating, as the end approached, and all things gave way to the silences.

Invocation, written during Young’s “Composer-in Residence” period with the Auckland Philharmonia during 2014 highlighted the skills of the NZSO’s principal oboist, Robert Orr, here playing the oboe d’amore, a slightly larger and mellower version of the standard orchestral oboe. At first the melodic line was free and exploratory, and inclusive of other lines, sometimes in tandem, at other times in a hand-over sense, but as the music continued a fantastic sense of tumult broke out as if across an overhead sky, stunning the watcher into silence. The agitations filled out to what seem like cosmic proportions, both overhead and from underneath, deep percussion seeming to activate the very ground beneath the observer’s feet – as with the symphony, the sounds seemed to reduce human proportions to a size which seems insignificant, were it not for the return of the oboe d’amore’s plaintive voice, suggesting a kind of steadfastness and strength amid those vast, self-sufficient spaces, a place in whatever scheme of things might be. Commentator Roger Smith’s description of the piece, reproduced in the booklet, spoke aptly of a search for light, life and positive energies through music.

The disc’s final work, Douce Tristesse, inhabited a much gentler and readily inhabitable world, the music inspired by what Young calls “an idyllic Bay of Plenty holiday spot” much visited and enjoyed by his family. Confessing that an “English pastoral zephyr” gently moves through the music, Young mentioned the names of Finzi and Butterworth as two of the shades of the friendly ghosts peering out from copses, hedgerows and water-shaded willows, perhaps delighted at being asked to cast illumination upon Antipodean vistas for a change! Perhaps at times these found themselves a little disconcerted by the relative intensities of the light, which, however broughts out its own unique versions and sensibilities.

Whatever attention I’ve given this disc over the duration, I’ve found it pays back most handsomely, be it a “one work at a time” experience or as a representation of a “single concert”. The latter experience is something to aim for, as the works are judiciously placed to have a kind of cumulative effect, with the Symphony as the great central crossbeam, before the final two shorter works return us, as it were, to our lives. On all counts to my ears – compositional, performance and recording quality – the disc makes a compelling case for the cause of Ken Young’s music.

Xenia Pestova – an interpreter for all ages, at St.Andrew’s, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
THE GREY GHOST – Xenia Pestova (piano)

DEBUSSY – La cathedral engloutie (from Preludes 1910)
ED BENNETT (b. 1975) – Gothic (2008)
SCARLATTI – Keyboard Sonatas in D Major (K.9) and D Minor (K.10)
PATRICIA ALESSANDRINI – Etude d’apres Scarlatti (2002)
DARIA DOBROCHNA KWIATKOWSKA (b.1969) – After Brin (2000)
BERIO – 6 Encores: Brin (1990) / Feuerklavier (1989) / Wasserklavier (1965)
JS BACH – Sechs klein Praeludien BWV 939: No.6 in C Minor
GLENDA KEAM (b.1960) – Mind Springs(2016-17)
ANNEAR LOCKWOOD (b.1939) – RCSC (2001)
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier BWV 933
No.5 in E Major / No.6 in E Minor
HEATHER HINDMAN – Two and a Half Miniatures 1 (2005)
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien BWV 939: No.4 in A Minor / No.6 in C Major
ARLENE SIERRA (b.1970) – Birds and Insects (2003-15) Painted Bunting – Cicada Sketch – Titmouse
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier BWV 933 No.4 in D Major
CLARA WIECK SCHUMANN – THree Preludes and Fugues, Op.16: No.3 in D Minor
MIRIAMA YOUNG (b. 1975) – The Grey Ghost (2017)

Xenia Pestova (piano)

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

Sunday, 30th July 2017

Xenia Pestova’s programme in itself commanded a good deal of interest, with its many and varied juxtapositionings of old and new adding adventurous touches to the concert’s overall excitement along with the anticipation of many individual delights. I’d not had any previous encounter with the pianist’s playing, but read with interest her “artist’s bio” resume as per programme, which outlined a goodly number of notable artistic achievements, enough to whet the appetite for what might come of the afternoon of music-making about to be set before us.

The pianist readily and eloquently talked with us throughout the concert, introducing each of the items and giving it a context which I thought enhanced the effect of her performances – though she spoke freely, everything seemed to the point, and in fact enhanced the helpfulness of the programme’s written notes without excess point-making. No doubt that some people would have preferred that she simply played the programme without spoken introductions – I found her direct and brightly-focused manner refreshing and, in instances where I wasn’t familiar with the composer or the music, generally helpful.

In her own programme-note, Pestova spoke of the interconnectiveness of existence, and how this is expressed in music, citing her presentation of works by eight contemporary composers which offer “personal commentaries on the past”, and how their music can be heard “sharing with us their unique visions of the music yet to come.” Certainly, in this context her performances for me almost invariably “struck chords” across time-frames, opening the pores, it seemed, of my listening, to register those resonances and almost “feel” the inter-connective tissue. Even so, I suspect there was more to this process here than mere “cheek-by-jowling” the pieces in question.

What delighted me was that, in the instances where I knew the music, Pestova’s actual playing seemed to me to completely inhabit the work and its evocations, physical, intellectual and spiritual, so that her performances had a “stand-alone” quality which satisfied in their own right, and not merely served as forerunners of “x” or resonances of “y”. Here was a remarkably sensitive, thoughtful and totally involved interpreter at work, whose understanding of the there-and-then of each piece seemed as potent as her awareness of its connections with the past or the future.

Her playing of the concert’s opening work, Debussy’s La cathedral engloutie, for instance, brought a potent amalgam of clarity and atmosphere to the evocation of this subterranean miracle – the tolling bell at the work’s outset at once focused our sensibilities amid a spacious ambience charged with mystery. Right through the work Pestova seemed able to balance all kinds of like exclusives, with, in places, breathtaking results, no more so than during the aftermath of the main climax, where the playing became suffused with a quality akin to an interior world of sound, quite unearthly – her control of both dynamics and tone-colour I thought remarkable, both in forward movement and, as here, in retreat. I found the ending very Lisztian, resonant and beautiful.

Pestova’s interpretation was then further enriched by her programming of the next work, an uncannily different-but-similar piece called Gothic, written by Irish composer Ed Bennett who just happened to be present in the St.Andrew’s audience! Prior to the work’s performance, the composer came forward to tell us of his fascination with the atmosphere of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, and of his attempts to recreate something of that unique resonance, particularly when those spaces were near-empty, and the building itself could “speak” without interruption.

Big, jagged chords alternating with the pianist’s vocalisations created uncanny echo effects, while repeated note passages brought forth echoes of Musorgsky’s Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language) from Pictures from an Exhibition. Generally the composer used the piano itself as an enormous cathedral interior space, using a variety of dynamics and textures, and creating sounds which were left to resonate over these same spaces, augmented by the pianist’s vocalisations – which actually had the last word.

Domenico Scarlatti’s music was the starting-point for the group of pieces that followed – two keyboard sonatas which again highlighted Pestova’s skills as an interpreter, her performances gently and cooly activating the music’s textures and colours rather than setting sparks flying, and clearly contrasting the middle section of the D Major work with its outlying territories, generating a real sense of exploration of the differences.

American-born contemporary composer Patricia Alessandrini’s “response” to this same D Major Sonata took the form of an Etude after Scarlatti, beginning with a pensive kind of dialogue set up by the pianist between the direct activation of exterior keys and interior strings, straightaway creating wondrously spacious atmospheres and amazing Cage-like silences! Pestova’s note on the music talked about “the changes of colour between (the gestures)”, evident in the “charged atmosphere” wrought by what framed these silences, a kind of dichotomy between focus and distance, resulting in something I found magical and elusive.

The pianist then, I think, played the Luciano Berio piece Brin (1990) before another work After brin (2000) by Daria Dobrochna Kwiatkowska, a Polish-born UK-based composer. Berio’s piece was one of a set of six encores, of which Pestova gave us three. My unfamiliarity with the music resulted in a modicum of confusion regarding the programme’s actual order, here – but it seemed to me that we heard the first Berio encore and the Kwiatkowska “response” to that piece. Berio’s work featured repeated notes played with the intensity of searchlights, alternated with single notes that were sounded here as if they were bells – the contrasts of different registers and ambiences of these groups creating a heightened response to each one, as well as to the phenomenon of what Daria Dobrochna Kwiatkowska beautifully characterised in the Berio work with the words “Music happens between the notes”.

Kwiatkowska’s piece After brin was a student exercise involving a response to Berio’s work, the younger composer seeking to capture a certain diffusiveness of Berio’s same pitches and note-positions, but with clusters of notes rather than isolated tones. I thought it echoed the original inspiration in slow-motion, with Debussy-like colourings irradiating the stillnesses, and billowing the intensities upwards and outwards – a most attractive piece.

Returning to Berio’s work with the remaining two “encores”, we heard Feuerklavier (1989) and Wasserklavier (1965), each of the pieces “saying its name” in performance, Pestova’s playing again seeming in both cases to reach into the music’s substance and activate those same particular qualities – thus Feuerklavier rumbled, bubbled chattered and fermented, with occasional irruptions of energy, the figurations darting about, seeking everything out, and tumbling in all directions, while the Wasserklavier was all limpid textures, almost Debussy-like in its liquidity and subtlety.

JS Bach’s Little Prelude” BWV939 in C Minor flowed and chattered its course up to the cusp of Auckland composer Glenda Keam’s new work Mind Springs, a piece which began explosively, resembling the sudden onslaught of a nightmare in a scenario which might have promised order and structure. Keam’s programme notes spoke of water in bubbling, babbling mode, accounting for the piece’s moments of whimsy, though these soon found themselves besieged by ever-insistent figurations, becoming in places trenchant and demanding – the music’s title kept the listener waiting for the next leap into a different mode, be it textural or gestural. Our kaleidoscopic listening journey took us to a number of these expressionist realms, filled for example with murmuring insect activity in, around and between mystical chords whose trunks rose from leaf-laden ground, then without warning transfixed by the onset of supercharged birdsong, strident, jagged-edged outcrops and liquid ostinati – amid a raft of suggested influences the composer gave significant prominence to “distorted echoes of JS Bach”.

The interval brought with it the opportunity to re-establish our bearings in the wake of the variegated candour of what we’d encountered so far in the recital – so much full-fronted creativity and recreativity, perhaps even awakening echoes of T.S.Eliot’s words, “human kind cannot bear very much reality” in its direct impact. Having girded our loins we awaited what was to follow – pieces by two New Zealanders, Annea Lockwood and Miriama Young, and by two more off-shore contemporary composers, and still more from an iconic nineteenth-century performer who happened also to compose, if well-and-truly in the shadow of her more illustrious composer-husband.

So, our sensibilities refreshed, Xenia Pestova welcomed us back to the crucible of experience that we’d embarked on earlier in the afternoon and were about to continue, beginning with a piece by Annea Lockwood, called RCSC, the combined initials of American composer Ruth Crawford Seegar and pianist Sarah Cahill (who commissioned the work in 2001 as one part of seven pieces in honour of Seegar.) Annea Lockwood achieved fame bordering on notoriety for a work she wrote to parallel the achievements of Christian Barnard, the world’s first heart transplant surgeon – Lockwood called her 1960s/70s work Piano Transplants, one which involved submerging, burying and/or setting alight defunct, irreparable, and unwanted pianos. The instruments were in many cases abandoned, most of them along London’s Thames River. Pestova assured us that she would not be setting fire to the piano on this occasion, when playing Lockwood’s work!

It wasn’t what I expected – I’d read enough about Lockwood’s music to imagine her work as anarchic and uncompromising, and featuring all kinds of unconventionalities – and it was to my utmost surprise that this work came across to my ears as ambient and beautiful, spacious and thoughtful. At the beginning, Debussy-like sonorities were contrasted with the metallic tintinabulations of string-plucking, augmented by the use of dampeners for a contrasting effect.Widely-spaced chords conjured vast spaces into which the dampened notes “drubbed” as if the music was trying to dance while in sacks – and yet another section featuring slides and glissandi from string manipulation brought to mind the mysteries of the col legno sections of the Introduction to Stravinsky’s Firebird.

Then followed two sections which depicted responses by contemporary composers to older and more established musical realisations, each of the latter being the music of JS Bach.A third “parallel presentation” featured a less-than-contemporary but profoundly of-its-time work by none other than Clara Wieck Schumann, whose creative efforts were for many years ignored as being of little worth compared with those of her husband, Robert, and of far less importance than her skills as a pianist! Concluding the recital, then, was a new work by Australian-based New Zealand composer Miriama Young, a work called The Grey Ghost, more about which below…..

Demonstrating once again her characteristic feeling for the essences of the recital’s “older” pieces, Xenia Pestova gave us some more JS Bach – firstly, a cheerful, propulsive E Major Prelude BWV 933 No.5, bringing out the music’s ceremonial qualities, and highlighting the contrasts with the companion BWV 933 E Minor Prelude, a lovely, piquant “stroll” whose trajectories enabled the music’s world of feeling to sound right up to the last note and beyond, to my ears totally avoiding the new-age “authentic-performance” tendency to rattle through pieces such as these, leaving the trampled-on fragments on the floor in the playing’s wake.

Then came Canadian composer Heather Hindman’s 2005 work for solo piano Two and a Half Miniatures, a piece chosen by the ISCM (International Society of Contemporary Music) to feature in a recent (2012) World New Music Day. The music’s more overt aspects – vigorous single-note declamations which spanned and then distended octave-leaps, hammer-blow cluster chords and spectacular glissandi, repeated rise-and-fall figurations punctured by more hammer-blow chords whose accelerated repetition resembled a giant steam locomotive attempting to move off – appeared to be “haunted” by an ambient background kept alive and resonant by the sustaining pedal, and to which the composer referred as the “underneath” – besides the resonances there were string-activated glissando-like voices towards the piece’s end reminding one of Schlegel’s comment re Schumann’s Fantasia in C – “the soft note for one who listens secretly…..”

Two more Bach pieces followed, a brief, questioning A Minor Prelude (No.4 from the Sechs kleine Präludien BWV 939), and a graceful C major Prelude (No.6 of the same set), music in which Pestova seemed to bring out its exploratory instincts, the player enjoying the music’s modulatory impulses, and pensive,”somewhere-else” ending.

For any musician, performing a piece of music dedicated to and written specifically for them must be an experience like no other – and though Xenia Pestova wasn’t giving a “world premiere” here, it was at least a New Zealand “first” for American-born composer Arlene Sierra’s Birds and Insects, in this instance three of the ten individual pieces that make up the entire work. The first of these three pieces, Painted Bunting, was dedicated by the composer to Pestova, something of a compliment in more ways than one, the bird itself (albeit the male!) having been described as the most beautiful in North America, accounting for its nickname “nonpareil” (without equal)!

The pianist, not unexpectedly, greatly relished the motifs, textures and energies of the eponymous bird’s music – characterful, attention-seeking treble scintillations set the silences tingling, in the midst of which disturbance was set a somewhat mournful mid-range call. Gradually the lower voice energised and became more insistent and mirror-like in relation to the scintillations, creating definite and formidable synergy, there – a stunning display of avian personality.

Sierra’s other two portraits, Cicada Sketch, and Titmouse, were no less evocative in effect, the first featuring solitary ambient calls over dark landscapes, impulses that resisted any underlying agitated irruptions, suggesting spacious, dogged persistence. As for the Titmouse portrait, it seemed like a sound-sketch of a supremely-determined obsessive, Pestova’s playing remarkably split-second in its dovetailings of detail.

The more Bach Pestova played, the more I wanted her to continue! – here, it was another from Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier, the fourth Prelude in D Major of BWV 933. While listening and enjoying, I kept on making mental notes of parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier I wanted to hear her interpret! However, such mental wanderings on my part seemed singularly unhelpful regarding the job in hand, which was to express and relate the music to that timelessness of being which Pestova herself alluded to in the recital’s introduction.

Interestingly, the third of Clara Wieck Schumann’s Op.16 set of three Preludes and Fugues seemed to me almost uncannily like a minor version of the Bach piece we had just heard. Pestova brought to this work the same qualitites that had illuminated the previous work. I would make a guess that the shade of that great Bach interpreter Franz Liszt would be nodding its approval at the ear-catching amplitude of the music’s different voices as presented here on the piano. The Fugue began from a quiet and simple place of origin, and proceeded with remarkably-inflected eloquence to the point where it had given its all – no wonder that I wrote, while spell-bound by the music’s revelatory progress, “she (Pestova) makes fugues make sense”!

Though Pestova’s recital seemed to have the subtitle Gothic, as per programme, I preferred the title of the work by Miriama Young already referred to, The Grey Ghost, which was the final presentation of the afternoon. This was described by the composer, who was present, as “a meditation in piano and electronics drawing on the ancient song of the once prolific North Island Kokako”. The actual “Grey Ghost” of the title refers to the South Island Kokako, a sighting of which was last recorded at Mout Aspiring National Park fifty years ago, and unfortunately not  seen or recorded since then.

Speaking with us about her work, Miriama Young confessed to us that this presentation was the fulfilment of a dream of hers regarding involving an audience with sound performance. She had prepared what people who know about these things call an “App” on her website for people to download and play on their smartphones as part of the overall performance of the work. We had a brief tuition session from the composer regarding what was necessary for us to do, and it seemed to bear fruit and effectively “sound” in some quarters of the auditorium. Needless to say, my technophobic efforts with my own smartphone were unsuccessful, but it left me able to properly take in the concerted efforts of the pianist and her cyber-cohorts to recreate Miriama Young’s work “The Grey Ghost”.

Those of us who had managed to secure the “App” had ‘phones poised ready for Xenia Pestova’s downbeat – the bird’s song came out of the ‘phones extremely softly and atmospherically, a haunting, ambient environment through which the piano could sound, the figurations rolling and resonant, with occasional declamatory tones seeming to echo the bird’s tessitura. Gradually the piano built up towards a climax not dissimilar to that of the “Engulfed Cathedral’s” which had begun the programme. after this, the piano itself seemed to become like a bird, rather than a resonator – the pre-recorded sounds were assisted by being played through the church’s sound system as well as the individual ‘phones. As the piece gradually subsided the piano contented itself with resonantly-produced fragments of the figurations we heard in the piece’s first half, everything having a deep and almost magical presence, the various “sources” of the sounds creating a beautifully diffuse and ultimately elusive atmosphere.

We were all thanked, pianist, listeners and sonic artists alike, at the piece’s end by the composer, who was obviously thrilled and moved by the happening and its effects. A brief encore later – a Chorale for something quiet,  written by Wellingtonian Thomas Liggett (who was present) – slow, deep rich and meditative music, whose privacy and inwardness was breached at the end by the merest pinprick of light – and this remarkable recital was over. That this review’s been a long time in coming is indicative of the spell cast by Xenia Pestova’s playing of old and new items alike, making this listener think afresh about what was familiar, and ponder deeply (and at great length) over the new and introduced works and their thought-provoking realisations. Bravo!

Splendid Bartók; evocative New Zealand piece; guitarist substitution perhaps not a misfortune

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Shelley (conductor), with Pablo Sáinz Villegas (guitar)

Leonie Holmes: ‘Frond’ from Three Landscapes for Orchestra
Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 29 July 2017, 7.30pm

The programme for the concert obviously did not appeal to everyone; there were a lot of empty seats, and even more after the interval when it became obvious that many devotees of the guitar, and of the Rodrigo work, did not wish to encounter Bartók, which was a great shame.  Not so tonight’s soloist, who joined the audience after the interval of this, the final concert of his tour.  He made apparent how much he had enjoyed working with the NZSO.

Leonie Holmes’s work was written in 2004, and recalls her feelings as a child in the bush.  It began with a tubular bell sounding, and a single violin, reminding me rather of a karakia.  Then piccolo was added, and strings entered quietly, followed by some of the brass, solo cello and piano.

Harp, celeste and percussion all had their moments, and there were extensive passages for solo and duet violins plus cello..  Xylophone and marimba both had important roles.  The piece ended in mid-air, with the piccolo.

I found the short piece (11 minutes) evocative and attractive; it was played with impeccable attention to detail.  It is worth noting here the important role played by Kirsten Robertson, as player of both piano and celeste.  She had to do a lot of moving between the two instruments – but the composer had spared her from having to play both at once!  Her playing was lucid and contributed a great deal to the work.

Since a considerably smaller orchestra was needed to be set up for the concerto, conductor Alexander Shelley took the chance to speak to the audience.  He spoke briefly but interestingly about each of the works on the programme.  He commented that our solo guitarist was ‘one of the best alive.’

Initially I was disappointed at the change of programme (due to the illness of the scheduled soloist) from a new guitar concerto by Howard Shore, of LOTR fame to the rather hackneyed Rodrigo concerto.  Not that I have heard it performed live, but it is programmed far too frequently on RNZ Concert.  The Shore was premiered in Canada quite recently, by the intended soloist for this concert, Miloš Karadaglić.  Wikipedia rates the Rodrigo as ‘easy listening’, and I daresay the work by the prolific film composer might well have been in the same category.

However, I tried to listen with fresh ears, and the delight of watching the orchestra, and even more the soloist in action soon charmed away any ennui.  To watch Villegas play was to be astonished; his fingers at times flew faster than the speed of light.

The concerto begins with an introduction from the soloist with flamenco-style strumming of chords, the strings of the orchestra playing spiccato beneath.  Very quickly we were introduced to the great range of dynamics this guitarist is able to produce from his instrument.  The memorable themes are repeated rather frequently.

The second movement opens with a most effective, wistful theme from cor anglais, accompanied by guitar.  This is repeated and varied.   The different timbres of the two instruments is most appealing.  Villegas produced a remarkable, soulful tone when using vibrato, and when playing pianissimo.  The final movement recalls courtly dances, but in a chirpy manner.  Strumming is interspersed with melodic use of individual strings, and includes a brilliant cadenza for the soloist.

The audience greeted the performance firstly with absolute silence through the playing, and secondly with enthusiastic applause at the end, many standing.  It was only then that it was pointed out to me that there were two microphones at the edge of the small podium on which the soloist was seated.  The amplification was very sensitively done, and not apparent through the performance; thanks to the composer very seldom having full orchestra and soloist playing together, it could have passed not being amplified in a smaller auditorium.  The MFC is rather too large for it to be the case here.

Our superb soloist then played quite an extended encore: a Jota, or Aragonese dance, made famous in orchestral circles by the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka’s Jota Aragonesa written in 1845.  I did not hear any composer mentioned for this one – was it the soloist’s own improvisation on a traditional dance theme?  It was electric; lively, and much fresher in character than the Rodrigo.  Its playing included some astonishing techniques, such as fingering notes with the left hand, which sounded, while the right hand was rapping the body of the instrument.  There were many variations incorporated.   An enraptured audience rose to cheer this astonishing performer.

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is described by Wikipedia as one of his best-known, most popular and most accessible works.  It was also one of his last.  In five movements, it truly lives up to its name, highlighting different sections of the orchestra, constantly passing between sections to give wonderful variety and contrasts; probably more variety of this sort than any symphony in the canon.

The sombre opening of the Introduzione to the first movement is even ominous. Chromatic woodwind and incisive brass followed.  Two harps added to the variety of aural pleasures as the andante non troppo and allegro vivace sections of the movement proceeded.  Hungarian folk melodies appear – and elsewhere in the work.

The second movement, called (in Italian) ‘Game of couples’ (i.e. pairs of instruments), allegretto scherzando opened unusually with bassoon, along with percussion and soon other woodwind instruments.  The character was of a slightly lugubrious dance, followed by a brass choir playing a hymn-like sequence.  Still the side-drum kept tapping its irritating little rhythm, as if drawing attention to something more ominous that was about to happen.  There is much pizzicato for the lower strings.   Later, the movement is loud and passionate.

The third movement (Elegia) introduces many colours, while the humour is apparent in the fourth (Intermezzo interrotto), with syncopated strings and a raspberry from the tuba.

In the finale, there are fugal passages intermittently; one in which bassoons and clarinets feature prominently.  Harps had a brief moment to themselves before another fugal section, beginning  for strings only.  All was magnificently played.  A splashy, somewhat bombastic ending finished this work of many exotic and exciting sounds.  Certainly some passages could be regarded as discordant or atonal, but there is much that is cheerful, even humorous.  Yet other sections sound like traditional symphonies.  There were many opportunities for players to shine as soloists or sections and they were rewarded by the conductor walking around the orchestra giving individuals and groups their own separate bows to the applause.

The programme notes shall have the last word: “ Triumphant, fantastically detailed and unfailingly optimistic, this is the work of a composer at his very best”.

 

 

 

Adventurous, revelatory concert by Troubadour String Quartet in Lower Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Troubadour String Quartet (Arna Morton and Rebecca Wang – violins, Elyse Dalabakis – viola, Anna-Marie Alloway – cello)

Haydn: String Quartet in G, Op 77 No 1
Alfred Hill: String Quartet No 3 in A minor (The Carnival)
Britten: String Quartet No 2 in C, Op 36

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Monday 24 July, 7:30 pm

At the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson this year, the Troubadour Quartet gave two free concerts, one giving the same Britten quartet that they played here, the second, Schubert’s A minor quartet (Rosamunde). I was there for a few days and really regret not hearing them.

Haydn
For it took only a few bars of the Haydn quartet (one of his very last) to show me that these were players of real talent and insight. Its first movement came as a revelation of care, sensitivity, delicately springing rhythms, subtle humour; an interesting range of instrumental colour, in part at least through the contrast between the bright first violin and the warmer, almost viola-like second. In particular, I delighted in the quartet’s agility, tossing the parts from one to another.

In the second movement, cellist Alloway had a few bars of prominence, enriching its meditative character, and she also supplied a throbbing undercurrent. After about three minutes all movement seems to cease and the players held us breathlessly awaiting the return of the main theme and its slow pulse.

There was a seriousness and emotional depth in the Adagio that reminded me that it was written, 1799, around the time of Haydn’s last, beautiful masses; no more symphonies, concertos, operas or piano trios. And after this came just two more string quartets, one unfinished.

The Menuetto took us back to the more familiar Haydn, energetic, overflowing melody and rhythm; and then the rather astonishing trio section, hard down-bowing, no longer any semblance of aristocratic minuet; as the programme remarks, it approaches the Beethovenish Scherzo which replaced the minuet and trio of the earlier, Classical period. Then in the last movement, Haydn reminds us that he was to become most famous for his 104 symphonies, as both in the denser scoring, playfulness and rhythmic energy; it sounds like a symphony trying to break out. It all emerged in a performance that was clearly thoroughly rehearsed and thought out. The applause rather suggested that the audience was pretty surprised at such an accomplished and committed performance.

Alfred Hill
The quartet by Alfred Hill probably aroused more uncertainty in many listeners, as till very recently, it has been fashionable to dismiss him as an inconsequential imitator who was unable to measure up to the great figures of his generation (born 1869, close to Sibelius, Reger, Busoni, Roussel, Vaughan Williams, Scriabin, Rachmaninov… and Schoenberg!).

The Wellington-based Dominion String Quartet has recorded all 17 of Hill’s quartets and have been sturdy advocates for his music; however, some of his 13 symphonies, mostly derived by Hill from his quartets, have been championed by Australia (recorded by the Melbourne and Queensland symphony orchestras). Australia likes to claim him as one of theirs as he was born in Melbourne, but his family came to New Zealand two years later and Hill spent most of his first 30 years in New Zealand, in Wellington, with a period at the Leipzig Conservatorium. He spent most of his latter 60 years in Australia because he was offered better opportunities, being co-founder of the NSW Conservatorium and was an important figure in Australian music. His 90th birthday was celebrated by a special concert of his music played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Henry Krips.

No comparable attention has been paid to him here, and as far as I know none of his symphonies have been played by a New Zealand orchestra.

Listening to this quartet is to feel its place in the Hill’s era, if in the company of the rather less famous and ground-breaking. The first movement intrigued me with a feeling of its rhythmic uncertainty, as if there were permitted alternative ways of handling the metre. Unadventurous perhaps, but not to be dismissed. The dreamy Andantino, second movement verged on the sentimental until a modulation made me pay attention, and indeed, it became more interesting, with a genuine emotional feeling. And Dalabakis’s viola became prominent in its last phase. The third movement was marked with a distinctive character, even if not radical or especially original; yet the players exploited its individuality with commitment.

The last movement was another matter: was there a certain Maori quality in its rhythm and melodic feel? Or was it more akin to Balkan, Gypsyish sounds; and still looking for resonances, there seemed melodic hints of Viennese operetta. There was even an episode in which stamping called up eastern European folk dance, even though the notes drew attention to the piece’s original title The Carnival or The Student in Italy. It was a very lively and committed performance of a piece that should encourage more exploration and performance of Hill’s music.

Benjamin Britten wrote three string quartets; this one was written to mark the 250th anniversary in 1945, of Purcell’s death. And it was the third movement, a chaconne, that offered references, though probably not especially conspicuous for most listeners, to the earlier composer.

The performance opened dramatically, not simply in the somewhat mysterious, even anguished, wide-spaced themes that introduce it, but with leader, Arna Morton, breaking a string. A repeat of the opening measures was rewarding, as it had been so immediately arresting, and the emotional impact was simply duplicated; and after a little while it gathers both speed and emotional force.

Even though written in a tonic vocabulary, it sounds of its time, the end of World War II, through its generally sombre feeling rather than any particular lamenting. As for its context, Morton, who has studied Britten for her PhD, drew attention to his feeling of isolation, as a homosexual, a pacifist, a committed left-winger (did she also say, his aversion to the prevailing ‘pastoral’ character of English music of the period?), all of which might account for the mood of the music.

Without a score it’s not easy to describe the structure of the first movement, and I’m limited to remarking the episodes (‘variations’ in essence) of markedly different speed, motifs that are chased, canon-like by each player in turn, the throbbing beat of four-note quavers, the biting commentary by the cello here and there. There are surprises such as the series of glissandi around the middle, and a meditative, viola-led diminuendo as the end approaches.

Nothing was more striking, perhaps chilling, than the slow subsidence to a high, lonely, ppp note from Morton’s violin, followed by a motivic scrap from the central section, on the cello. One anonymous remark from the Internet: “Britten’s number 2 is an isolated masterpiece of a genius. This is as powerful, astonishing and emotionally draining as any work for the genre ever written.” I admire such definitive, risky assertions like this, instead of the more usual cautious, ambivalent judgements that most of us shelter behind.

The second movement, Scherzo, seems to be a reworking of the more spirited parts of the first – on the cello, much more agitated, with ferocious down-bowings, driven by fast triplet quavers, referred to in the programme note as a ‘Danse macabre’: to me, not really….

The third movement, Chacony: Sostenuto, honouring Purcell, quarter-hour long, seems an extraordinary creation by a youngster of 32. The first section is a chorale-like lament with almost incessant dotted semi-quavers: calm, edgy, verging dissonance, in which all contribute till Alloway’s cello plays a long, plaintive meditation leading to an agitated section that becomes increasingly impatient.  If a set of variations in the slow triple time that’s characteristic of the chaconne is what you expect, it wasn’t the main focus for this listener, even after the pulse rate drops in the meandering, polyphonic writing around the middle of the movement.

Rebecca Wang’s second violin had a long, grieving solo passage, soon passed to others, importantly the cello again, then viola. Some parts – variations, though the individual sections are profoundly evocative, yet elusive – might seem rhapsodic, though the sense of its imposing structure was always clearly felt, and impressively so in this performance that seemed so thoroughly studied, ingested and technically mastered.

In spite of hints of a wide range of musical eras and genres, try as I might to spot influences, I couldn’t mistake such prevailing unity of mood and sense that left no one but Britten as a candidate composer. In all, it was a concert that emerged with far greater variety and richness than I’d expected: revelatory, fascinating and compelling.

 

Adventurous, quirky, energetic – a musical-life experience for the 2017 NZSONYO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2017 presents:
YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA

CELESTE ORAM (NYO Composer-in-Residence 2016)
Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra (World Premiere)
JAMES McMILLAN – Veni, Veni Emmanuel*
REUBEN JELLEYMAN (NYO Composer-in-Residence 2017)
Vespro (World Premiere)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell Op.34
(The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra)

*Colin Currie (percussion)
James McMillan (conductor)
NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2017

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday, 14th July 2017

Thank goodness for Benjamin Britten’s variously-named The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra / Variations and Fugue on a theme of Purcell Op.34! At the recent pair of NZNYO concerts in Wellington and Auckland it was music which, unlike the works making up the rest of the programme, was reasonably familiar to the audience. As such, the piece provided a benchmark of sorts with which the youthful orchestra’s playing could be more-or-less assessed in terms of overall tonal quality, precision of ensemble and individual fluency and brilliance. These were qualities more difficult to ascertain when listening to the players tackle the idiosyncrasies, complexities and unfamiliarities of the other three programmed pieces.

I’m certain that the NYO players relish the opportunity every time to give a first performance of any piece written especially for them, even one as unconventionally wrought as was Celeste Oram’s piece The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, which opened the programme. In this instance, however, there were TWO new works by two different composers, awaiting a first performance, presumably due to last year’s concert being wholly taken up with a collaboration by the orchestra with the NZSO to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’au-delà (Illuminations of the Beyond) – obviously, a thoroughly exhilarating experience for all concerned, youthful and seasoned players alike.
So as well as the 2016 composer-in-residence’s work having yet to be performed, there was also a work by this year’s composer-in-residence, Reuben Jelleyman, waiting for its turn. In the event, putting all the possibilities together made for an interesting programme of symmetries and contrasts – a percussion concerto and a work inspired by an older classic, with each of these in turn regaled by a separate “guide” to the orchestra, the two latter having interesting “corrective” capacities in relation to one another!

To be honest, there was a considerable amount of speculation expressed by people I talked with at the interval as to whether the first item on the programme could be classed as “music”! Celeste Oram’s piece The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, far from being an updated version of Britten’s celebrated instructional work, took a kind of “field” approach to experiencing music instead, refracting a history of many New Zealanders’ initial contact with orchestral music as conveyed by radio (as the composer points out, the first permanent orchestra in this country was initially known as “The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra” – actually it was “the National Orchestra of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service”, with the word “Corporation” first appearing as part of the orchestra’s name in 1962). This phenomenon was depicted through transistorised recordings from what sounded like a number of largely out-of-phase broadcasts of an announcer’s voice from smartphone-like devices sported by the orchestra players, sitting onstage waiting for their “actual” conductor to arrive.

I hope the reader will forgive this relatively literal (though not exhaustive!) account of these happenings, linked as they seemed to the composer’s intentions! Still conductorless, the orchestra players then took up their instruments and launched into the first few bars of Britten’s work, an undertaking lost in the cacaphony of distortion emanating once more from the radio-like devices. As “Haydn Symphony No.25” was announced, the conductor, Sir James McMillan, arrived, waited courteously enough for the announcer to finish, and then directed a somewhat Hoffnung-esque opening of the Britten which then morphed into all kinds of wayward musical illusions in different quarters, fragments that were constantly being broken into by the announcer’s voice introducing other various classical pieces, a somewhat “catholic” section including the Maori song “Hine e Hine”, Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique”, and so on.

After Beethoven’s “Tenth” Symphony (“the Unwritten”) had made a static-ridden appearance, the announcer stated portentously, “Having taken the orchestra to pieces, the composer will now put it all back together again”, then promptly tuned us into the National Programme 5 o’clock news beeps and prominent newsreader Katriona McLeod’s voice. Some orchestra players at this point appeared to get fed up, and go for walkabouts down from the platform and into and through the auditorium, ignoring the efforts of their conductor to keep the music going. Soon, all the players were standing in the aisles of the auditorium, even the concertmaster, who was the last to go, leaving her conductor waving his arms around conducting a very loud, and out-of-phase-sounding recording of the Britten work. At the music’s end, we in the audience applauded him, a bit uncertainly, then watched him sit down and pull out a newspaper and read it, while the players standing in the aisles began to paraphrase parts of the music, and the radio continued to blare, the voices largely unintelligible – some sort of impasse was reached at which point it was unclear what would happen next, if anything!

From this sound-vortex Concert announcer Clarissa Dunn’s voice sounded clearly, with the words, “….and you have NOT been listening to Radio New Zealand Concert!…..”, and that, folks, was it! – a rather lame conclusion, I thought, but perhaps that was the point! It seemed to me that the piece lost its way over the last five minutes – but perhaps THAT also was the point! Celeste Oram explained the ending to her “piece” using a quote attributed to Gaetano Donizetti, who wrote in an 1828 letter that he wanted “to shake off the yoke of finales”. The determinedly “non-ending” ending of Oram’s work did seem to put the concept of the “symphonic finale” to rout!

Thoughtful, innovative, provocative, incomprehensible…..whatever characterisation one liked to give Celeste Oram’s work first and foremost, I felt it should be in tandem with descriptions like “entertaining”, “absorbing”, “spectacular”, “engrossing”. It seemed to me that the composer had achieved, by dint of her explanation printed in the programme, what she had set out to do – and what better a way to attain satisfaction by means of what one “does” as an occupation?

After this, Sir James McMillan’s own work, the percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel would have seemed like a kind of relief-drenched reclamation of normality to some, and something of a “safe” and even predictable example of what Celeste Oram was criticising with her work, to others. Percussion concertos have become extremely popular of late, thanks partly to the skills and flamboyant performing personalities of musicians such as Evelyn Glennie and Colin Currie, who’ve had many works written for them. For some concertgoers they’re thrilling visual and aural experiences, while for others (myself included) they seem as much flash as substance, in that they seem to me to rely overmuch on visual display to sustain audience interest to the point of distraction from the actual musical material.

Perhaps I’m overstating the case, but after watching Colin Currie indefatigably move from instrument group to instrument group, activating these collections with their distinctive timbres, my sensibilities grew somewhat irritated after a while – one admired the artistry of the player, but wearied of the almost circus-like aspect of the gestures. I began to empathise as never before with Anton Bruckner, who, it is said, attended a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth, his eyes closed the whole time so as to avoid being distracted by the stage action from the music!

I wrote lots of notes regarding this performance, which certainly made an effect,in places spectacularly so – the opening a searing sound-experience, with shouting brass and screaming winds, and the soloist moving quickly between instrument groups for what the compser calls an “overture”, presenting all the different sounds. My gallery seat meant that the player occasionally disappeared from view! – rather like “noises off”, a sound-glimpse of a separate reality or disembodied state! In places the music became like a huge machine in full swing, which appealed to my “railway engine” vein of fantasy, while at other times the sounds seemed to drift spacewards, the winds playing like pinpricks of light, and the soloist at once warming and further distancing the textures with haunting marimba sounds. I enjoyed these more gentle, benediction-like moments most of all, the gently dancing marimba over a sea of wind and brass sostenuto tones – extremely beautiful.

At one point I wrote “All played with great skill, but everything impossibly busy!” At the work’s conclusion the soloist climbed up to the enormous bells at the back of the orchestra, beginning a carillion which built up in resonance and excitement, aided by individual orchestral players activiting their own triangles. A long, and slowly resonating fade – and the work came to a profound and deeply-wrought close. While I wouldn’t deny the effectiveness of certain passages in the work I found myself responding as to one of those nineteenth-century virtuoso violin concertos the musical forest obscured by trees laden with notes – and notes – and notes……..thankfully, my feelings seemed not to be shared by the audience whose response to Colin Currie’s undoubted artistry was overwhelmingly warm-hearted.

So, after an interval during which time I was engaged in discussions concerning the nature of music (in the light of Celeste Oram’s piece) in between wrestling with feelings that I perhaps ought to give up music criticism as a profession through dint of my inadequacy of appreciation (the result of my response to James McMillan’s piece), I settled down somewhat uneasily for the concert’s second half, which began with a work by Reuben Jelleyman, who’s the Youth Orchestra’s 2017 composer-in-residence, a piece with the title Vespro, deriving its inspiration from Monteverdi’s famous 1610 Vespers.

Describing his work as akin to a restoration of an old building “where old stone buttresses mesh with glass and steel”, Reuben Jelleyman’s piece at its beginning reminded me of a basement or backroom ambience of structure and function, where solid blocks and beams were interspersed with lines and passageways, the whole bristling with functional sounds, much of it aeolian-like, (whispering strings and “breathed” winds and brass) but with an ever-increasing vociferousness of non-pitched sounds.

Great tuba notes broke the spell, underscored by the bass drum, like a call to attention, one igniting glowing points in the structure, with each orchestral section allowed its own “breath of radiance”. A repeated-note figure grew from among the strings, spreading through the different orchestral sections, the violinists playing on the wood of the bows as fragments of the Monteverdi Vespers tumbled out of the mouths of the winds and brass – such ear-catching sonorities! As befitted the original, these reminiscences contributed to ambiences whose delicacy and sensitivity unlocked our imaginations and allowed play and interaction – a “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” sense of amalgamation of present with past, the new music, centuries old, continuing to live…..I liked it very much.

To conclude the evening’s proceedings, James McMillan got his chance to show what he could REALLY do as a conductor with Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, a performance which brought forth from the youthful players sounds of such splendour and brilliance that I was quite dumbfounded. Each section of the orchestra covered itself in glory during its own introductory “moment” at the work’s beginning, the four sections (winds, brasses, strings, percussion) framed by a tutti whose amplitude seemed, in the classic phrase, “greater than the sum of its parts”, which was all to the good.

Singling out any one section of the ensemble for special praise would be an irrelevant, not to say fatuous exercise under these circumstances. McMillan’s conducting of the piece and interaction with the players seemed to bring out plenty of flair and brilliance, with individual players doing things with their respective solos that made one smile with pleasure at their ease and fluency. I noted, for instance, the bassoon’s solo being pushed along quickly at first, but then the player relaxing into an almost languorous cantabile that brought out the instrument’s lyrical qualities most beguilingly. The musicians seemed to have plenty of space in which to phrase things and bring out particular timbres and textures, such as we heard from the clarinets, whose manner was particularly juicy and gurgly!

A feature of the performance was that the “accompaniments” were much more than that – they were true “partners” with their own particular qualities acting as a foil for the sections particularly on show – in particular, the violins danced with energy and purpose to feisty brass support, while the double basses’ agilities drew forth admiring squawks from the winds. The brasses covered themselves in glory, from the horns’ rich and secure callings, to the tuba’s big and blowsy statement of fact – trumpets vied with the side-drum for excitement, while the trombones arrested everybody’s attentions with their announcements, the message soon forgotten, but the sounds resounding most nobly. Finally, the percussion had such a lot of fun with the strings, it was almost with regret that one heard the piccolo begin the fugue which eventually involved all the instruments, and was rounded off by a chorale from the brass choir featuring the theme in all its glory.

I’ve not heard a more exciting, nor skilful and involving performance of this music – an NZSO player whom I met on the stairs after the concert agreed with me that, on the evidence of playing like we had just heard, the future of music performance in this country is in good hands. Very great credit to the players and to their mentor and conductor Sir James McMillan, very much an inspirational force throughout the whole of the enterprise. Not, therefore, a conventional concert – adventurous, quirky, energetic and idiosyncratic – but in itself an experience of which the young players would be proud to feel they had made the best of and done well!

Destination Beehive 2017 at Circa Theatre – too serious to be taken seriously

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
DESTINATION BEEHIVE 2017

Written by Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry
Directed and choreographed by Jan Bolwell
Music played and directed by Clinton Zerf
Lighting and Set Design by Lisa Maule

Circa Two
Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 9th July 2017
(until 5th August)

Legend has it that American songwriter and political satirist Tom Lehrer gave up satire when American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s perhaps just as tempting for any present-day satirist to take a similar stance in the face of the antics of those real-life dodgers, shysters, con-artists and masters of illusion we know as politicians – why bother, she or he might argue, drawing attention to their absurdities when they themselves do it so much better simply by BEING themselves?

Fortunately for us here in Godzone, that intrepid duo of Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry, having tasted blood in the run-up to the 2014 election with their expose of the goings-on in the “swinging seat” of Port Nicholson give these personalities even MORE rope with which to hang themselves from various vantage points on the brand-new electorate of “Tinakori Heights”. By way of the “Kiwi Media” Show, driven (flailed?) along at a great lick by personalities Katrina Coleman (Lorae Parry), Tina Fisher (Pinky Agnew) and Bryce Allen (Tom Knowles), we are brought close-up and personal to this year’s power-hungry hopefuls, ready and willing to try and fool all of the people all of the time!

The authors themselves seemed well aware of the danger of being outflanked, at any given moment, by their moving targets’ next unscripted moves – a case of “expect the unexpected” thus prevailed, both onstage and out there in cloud-cuckoo Beehiveland, a flux which kept our ears pricked, our toes stretched and (thanks to newly-developed rear-end surveilance methods installed, so we were informed, in our audience seats) our buttocks ready for lateral activation – left, or alternatively right, for you-know-who, blurring ideological divisions and all! Like the redoubtable election-night coverage “worm” of a few rounds ago, one was mesmerised by the process, whatever the outcomes!

After the cinematoscopic hype of introduction from Katrina, Tina and Bryce, the whole cast launched into a bubbling, energetic “Hokey-Tokey” – sorry, make that a “Votey-Votey”! – giving the well-worn adage “turning the other cheek” a whole new lease of theatrical and political life. Throughout the show music and movement was a constant delight, with old, seemingly played-out numbers (eg., “I will follow Him”, “Anyone who had a Heart”, “I got you, Babe” and “Santa Baby”) springing back to life with freshly-worked words , messages delivered with dangerous feistiness that delightfully belied the original banalities.

This was just part of a show which featured nine singers/actors (with stage Manager Neal Barber sometimes roped into the goings-on) playing over thirty characters between them and delivering over a dozen songs, the whole co-ordinated by director/choreographer Jan Bolwell with tremendous energy, vision and authority, and backed up by musical director Clinton Zerf’s brilliant and fluid keyboard realisations. Together with co-authors Pinky Agnew’s and Lorae Parry’s effervescent and outrageously provocative dialogues and song-lyrics, it makes for an “everything you wanted to hear” entertainment package which ticks all the appropriately risible boxes.

Of the actors, the doyen is of course Dame Kate Harcourt, celebrating her real-life status as a nonagenarian by conjuring up a populist tide of electoral enthusiasm (motorised chair “bestriding” the stage) as the Tinakori Heights NZ First Candidate, Maude Hornby. In what seems a remarkable “coup”, she was introduced by none other than a pre-recorded Winston Peters, appropriately scripted, and joining in the fun with a will, – with such advocacy, one was prepared to surrender all to the visceral jungle-drum rhythms of an updated “I will follow Him”, sung by Harcourt and her entourage with Messianic conviction!

Dame Kate’s fellow-thespians are a mixture of familiar and new, the former including the show’s two aforementioned writers, both of whom assume the trappings of a bewildering array of personalities in very different ways – Pinky Agnew is the shapeshifter of the two, effecting breath-catching transformations from TV show host to none other than the resplendently red-clad Hillary Clinton, adroitly re-aligning her geographical surroundings with the help of flash-card prompting , before morphing into the Mrs.Mopp-like Faye McFee, who’s the ACT Party candidate’s campaign manager, and then (most stunningly of all) reclaiming the international limelight as Angela Merkel, complete with anti-Trumpery antennae.

By comparison, Lorae Parry’s no less able assumptions involve relative micromanagement of appearances, mannerisms and pronouncements enabling simple, strongly-etched portrayals of personalities such as her alter ego Helen Clark (here to introduce a “surprise” Labour candidate, who’s already been mentioned), a co-anchor of Foxy TV, Parris la Touche, the “gnat-in-a-bottle” Lynette Scott who’s the Tinakori Heights ACT candidate , and then none other than Theresa May, still a force to be reckoned with, and here with Angela Merkel to help further the cause of the local pussy-hat brigade by confronting the actual cause célèbre in person.

Carrie Green’s another election veteran with a couple of long-(self?)serving characterisations such as “born-again centrist” Metiria Tureia, along with a somewhat addled-value Paula Bennett with resplendently fluid thigh-support, a sequence that Green herself wrote. She also gave us a scary Marama Fox (who scatters the National sympathisers like chaff in the wind), as well as partnering Lorae Parry as the “other” Foxy TV anchor, Felicia Fanning, and is the centre of focus for the Justin Bieber take-off “Youth Song” – high energy input, here, with exhilarating results.

Similarly traversing the spectrums of ideology and character with versatility and elan was Tom Knowles, one of the three “Kiwi Media” presenters (Bryce Allen) at the start, and then by turns an opportunistic Grant Robertson (I’ve got you, Labour”), a platitudinous National candidate Dick Webster (“We aim to make our rivers WATERSKIABLE! – by 2040!), a feline-phobic Gareth Morgan with a feline-phobic moustache, and (Trumping everything else!) the world’s No.1 pussy-predator on a fake-news-finding visit to Godzone, involving “your President English!”, with riotous outcomes!

And then, there were the newbies, four student actors from the “genius tutelary” of Whitireia, whose song-and-dance skills added considerable “schwung” to the proceedings and whose characters all hit the ground running! – Molly Weaver relished both her TOP candidate Jilly Caro-Cant and a starry-eyed Jacinda Ardern in thrall to Labour’s latest “recruit” with style and surety, while Alexandra Taylor’s alarmingly abandoned Jekyll-and-Hyde take on United Future candidate Celine Smith rivalled in effect the legendary Salome’s besottment with the head of John the Baptist in her all-but-visceral orgasmic reaction to images of a bemused-looking Peter Dunne!

Shawn Keil traversed the interchangeable credibility gap between Green (“May the Forest be with you”) and ACT party personalities with schizoid skill, drawing from both Bizet’s “Carmen” and the late, lamented Trevor Rupe, in a rose-between-teeth realisation of David Seymour as a fantasy figure to Habanera accompaniment, augmented by Agnew and Parry in their vociferously operatic “Seymour!” – an equally far cry to Keil’s “always-going-somewhere” Bill English take, bouncing between put-downs by various world leaders. And the elegant Charles Masina as Dr.Riki Te Rapa, the Māori Party candidate, made the most of his advocacy from Carrie Green’s Marama Fox and his expedient coming-out reaction of “I’m bi!” to questions regarding ethnicity.

In all, a show which elevates politics to the status of love in terms of its sufferers – a tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect! Those who saw the 2014 version of the show and enjoyed it (and how could anybody not?) can take heart that it’s more of the same but very different. And for those who are first-timers – well, along with everything else one expects from entertainment, it’s also something of a healing experience!

See also reviews by Ewen Coleman (The Dominion Post)
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/stage-and-theatre/94551736/theatre-review-destination-beehive-2017
and John Smythe (Theatre Review)
https://theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=10397