Tag: New Zealand music

NZ Trio with Xia Jing – violin, ‘cello, piano and guzheng

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZ Trio with Xia Jing – Fa (“Open up”)

ZHOU LONG (China/USA) – Spirit of Chimes
XIA JING (China) – composition for Guzheng
JEROEN SPEAK (NZ) – Serendipity Fields (World premiere)
DYLAN LARDELLI (NZ) – Shells (World premiere)
DOROTHY KER (NZ) – String Taxonomy (World Premiere)
GAO PING (China) – Feng Zheng (World premiere – commissioned by the NZ Trio and dedicated to Jack Body)

NZ Trio
Justine Cormack (violin) / Ashley Brown (‘cello) / Sarah Watkins (piano)
with
Xia Jing (solo guzheng)

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

Friday 16th September, 2016

This concert was part of Victoria University Confucious Institute’s China/New Zealand Musical Exchange programme, and sponsored jointly by the Confucious Institute and the China Cultural Centre in New Zealand, with support from both the Asia New Zealand Foundation and Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music.

A special feature of the concert was the presence of Xia Jing, one of the foremost exponents of the guzheng – a kind of Chinese zither or dulcimer, whose documented use dates back over two thousand years. The instrument is growing in popularity in modern times, and is frequently used in popular and modern classical music, as either a solo or chamber music instrument. As one of the concert’s items Xia Jing played one of her own compositions for solo instrument, one which enabled us to experience at first hand the guzheng’s unique tonal and timbral characteristics.

Also on the programme was a work for piano trio, and four other pieces for the ensemble with guzheng, which were world premiere performances. The work for Piano Trio was written by Chinese/American composer Zhou Long and was called Spirit of Chimes, while Chinese composer Gao Ping contributed a piece commissioned by the NZ Trio and dedicated to the memory of New Zealand composer Jack Body, which was called Feng Zheng. And no fewer than three New Zealand composers  wrote works for the Trio to be performed at this concert – so the event represented a kind of feast of creativity come to the table to be savoured and enjoyed.

Zhou Long’s Spirit of Chimes opened the programme, the composer telling us in a written note that his inspiration came from “the sounds of chime-stones, bone-whistle and chime bells from ancient China”, though he additionally confided in us that, because of the disappearance of early pre-Tang Dynastic Chinese music, he had to imagine in his head the “real sound” of such ancient instruments when composing for the piano trio.

Beginning with soft, mournful sliding notes on the ‘cello, echoed by the piano and joined by the violin with its delicate sliding figurations, the music before too long took on a kind of processional aspect, as if bringing to us from the past the different sound-characters that could unlock our appreciation of these ancient gestures and tones. The strings interacted warmly and readily, firstly in full-blooded vocal terms, and then in a more folksy, homely, throw-away manner – the piano joined them, partly to support the interaction and partly to push things on, to plant and then to till elsewhere.  This seemed to provoke division in the ranks as the cello broke away from the discourse of three and disrupted the dovetailed interactions –  suddenly the musical exchanges were volatile and angular, with the different lines and timbres of the instruments colliding and opposing one another as much as they were colluding and intertwining. Though a measure of calm was restored  we got the feeling that those same disruptive elements were waiting for their chance to strike again, something that an enormous tam-tam stroke more-or-less- confirmed.

I enjoyed the “danse macabre” sequences which followed, the piano instigating the dry-bones manner and enjoining the strings to take part, which they did, adding weight and extending the motif to a six-note tattoo, which got all kinds of treatment. As if in payment for pleasure, the music irrupted again, almost vengefully, as if a veritable battery of physical assault, characterised by savage trills and tremolandi………did we want to be there? But what amazing sonorities!

Strings mused on the quiet that followed, the cello occasionally bursting out, more in sorrow than in anger, the other instruments following suit, and, it seemed to me,  transforming by osmosis the mood to one of great longing, almost to the point of weeping! The piano’s ambient colourings were left, pushing out the spaces and leaving us drifting, contemplating a certain “tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect” ambivalence……whatever my stance I was left contemplating the startling presence with which the players enabled the voices of those “ancient chimes” to speak to me, whether real or imagined……

‘Cellist Ashley Brown then introduced the guzheng player, Xia Jing, who demonstrated to us by way of some kind of improvised solo, what her instrument could do. Sitting flat at the instrument like one might at a Western dulcimer or Japanese koto,  Xia Jing plucked the strings with her right hand and pressed the strings down with her left hand at certain points to produce pitch variations and different kinds of vibrato. Her hands seemed to alternate between melody and accompaniment, producing timbres not dissimilar to a balanaika or a cimbalon. I was astonished at the degree of energy she seemed to be able to produce, in terms of both strength and excitement.  She brought the music’s energy down to a more ritualistic level,  finishing her piece with a beautiful kind of postscript or epilogue.

Justine Cormack, the Trio’s violinist,  told us briefly about the four pieces especially composed for the trio in collaboration with the guzheng, inviting us to enjoy the pieces on their own terms as well as relishing the differences between them.  For me to try and repeat the kind of “gesture-by-gesture” commentary I noted down throughout the course of the first piece, would, I think, run the risk of depleting both my vocabulary and the number of people prepared to stay the course in any case!  The first three pieces of this group seemed to me to reflect certain philosophical attitudes towards “sound content”, though Jeroen Speak’s work Serendipity fields I thought more inclined towards out-front expression than was the case with the relative reticence of the other works, each displaying a reluctance to “resound”. Both Dylan Lardelli’s Shells and Dorothy Ker’s String Taxonomy seemed in fact more like physical choreography than sound generation, each composer stressing the importance for their piece of “semblance” (Lardelli) and “shared gestures” (Ker), ahead of creating tones from notation, a more oblique, almost “underbellied” manifestation of things.

Serendipity fields made each instrument say its name at the music’s beginning with terse but characterful impulses, which I liked, the guzheng dalicate and lyrical, the piano percussive and the strings angular and sinewy – then tossed these characteristics about, resulting in the music veering from vehement, through whimsical to wraith-like……Speak’s music had an extremely volatile inclination allied to an interior quality whose character seemed furtive and inward, setting up situations where the sounds seemed to “goad” one another, and build up sequences whose textures and ambiences produce what sounded like some kind of “chaos of delight”. Any semblance of permanence was short-lived, as the instruments swooped, burgeoned and withdrew their tones as required and then as quickly disapeared, with a final, characteristically short-breathed pair of impulses. What teamwork there was between the players in the realisation of these scenarios!

Compared with Jereon Speak’s engaging ‘serendipities”, the impression left by Dylan Lardelli’s Shells was dry and taciturn, which underlined the appositeness of the piece’s title. Whatever “substance” gave rise to these gestures, whatever fleshed-out intentions that once perhaps spoke their names, had long since disappeared, leaving only encasements and frameworks, like a luggage-room filled with empty suitcases and leaving behind little more than spaces for conjecture.  Pianist Sarah Watkins used her hands to resonate the piano’s “box” rather than any actual tones, apart from occasional single, transfixing notes, while the string-players pursued a kind of “silent music” course – for someone as sleep-deprived as I was just at that time, the effect was hallucinatory, filling my half-lit consciousness with surreal light and dumb-show gesturings, a narrative at which I felt I was little more than a mute spectator.  Dorothy Ker’s String Taxonomy seemed to me less of an “inward” experience, the movements of the players more out-going and exploratory than in Lardelli’s mutescape, vis-à-vis the use of knitting needles by both the ‘cellist and violinist, making for a dry, metallic effect involving little or no flesh-and-blood. The pianist activated the strings inside the box, the three string-players joining in with the effect through brushing or scraping, creating what the composer styled as “a sonic alchemy”, an interaction of which worked on my sensibilities to produce a kind of looking-glass-land effect – a language of meaning through gesture rather than its conventional result, counter-intuitive when it came to making sense of it all.

Again, one had to marvel at the sounds that were conceived by such original means, right from the outset, with its “knitting pattern” exchanges and determinedly non-pitched language – furious irruptions of energy biting and snapping and resonating from the stringed instruments were followed by their antitheses – coded whisperings took the place of shouted or semaphored riddles. Together these sequences gave the impression of some kind of dynamic coagulation which could surely have blossomed forth in a kind of “transfigured night” synthesis of gesture and melismatic fruition – but apart from a startlingly brilliant metallic scintillation, the work’s conclusion was as enigmatic in its effect as was the whole.

To Gao Ping’s work Feng Zheng we then came, to conclude the concert, the piece’s title transliterating into English as “Wind Kite”, as fitting an image as any for a work dedicated to the recently-departed Jack Body, a friend of Gao Ping as well as a fellow-composer. A Chinese tradition was to fly kites during the time of Qingming, when the living pay respect to their deceased ancestors by way of the kites bearing their thoughts and feelings to the realms of the departed.  Here, the music was divided into four sections: – (1) Still Clouds, (2) The Breeze, (3) Breaking the Air, (4) Broken Line. Gao Ping underlined the connection of the music with his late friend by devising a motif from his name (jACk BoDy) used at the beginning and end of the piece.

The opening “Still Clouds” captured the ‘calm magnificence” of the sky, and the wonderment of those still earthbound beneath its splendour – the music’s resonant, drifting textures suggested a peace and order away from earthly conflict – string pizzicati spiked these ambiences, attempting to disrupt the undulating tones of the guzheng and piano, violin and ‘cello irruptions tumbling over themselves before being borne away on the piano’s “wind-borne drift” of tones to which the strings contributed tremolandi and the guzheng mesmeric repeated notes.  The instruments seemed to rise from out of the music’s layered textures and then submerge again, the argument growing more and more involved – a kind of “communion of impulse”, one which brought forth some heartfelt responses from the players, such as Sarah Watkins’ exciting, toccata-like irruptions from the piano. The music developed real “schwung” with what I presumed was its “Breaking the Air” sequences, everything propulsive and exhilarating, with emphasis on the ensemble rather than individual strands, reaching a kind of crisis-point of function with trenchant tremolandi from the strings, the  weight of sound becoming more and more stratospheric, abetted by echo-chamber effects from the guzheng, almost like voices humming off-stage! It seemed very much a valedictory point, one which the composer, by some alchemic means, was able to suggest to me a “here-and-now” feeling not unlike that which infuses the final song “I Remember” in Lilburn’s settings of Denis Glover’s “Sings Harry” verses – something that could have taken place nowhere else but here – something one knew, by dint of awareness and experience. The musicians played out this mood with a deep sense of having travelled and of, at the end of it, returning home.

The Chinese title “Fa” and its associated character for this concert suggested the English words “open up” – which, it seemed to me, the NZ Trio, Xia Jing, and the composers and their music encouraged our imaginations to do here most rewardingly.

Tony Chen Lin – piano evocations, visions and premonitions at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts

TONY CHEN LIN (piano)

BARTOK – Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs Op.20
JS BACH – French Suite No.5 in G Major BWV 816
GAO PING – Distant Voices (1999)
TONY CHEN LIN – Digression (2016)
SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in B-flat D.960

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

Sunday, 11th September, 2016

Tony Chen Lin was one of two supremely gifted young Christchurch-based pianists (the other was Jun Bouterey-Ishido) who “slugged it out” for first prize at the 2008 Kerikeri International Piano Competition, an event which I had the good fortune to attend. The adjudicator, Australian pianist Ian Munro, awarded Jun Bouterey-Ishido the first prize by what he acknowledged was the narrowest of margins, a decision I was glad I didn’t have to make, as I remember not being able to fault either of them, performance-wise, at the time. Both have gone on to significantly further their pianistic and musical careers, this afternoon’s recitalist Tony Lin completing his Master of Music at the Hochschule für Music in Freiburg in 2013, as well as recently performing as both pianist and conductor in Germany (Freiburg and Stuttgart) and in Switzerland (at the Semaine Internationale de Piano et de Musique de Chambre), at which he’s appearing this year once again, as a conductor.

Coincidentally each of these two young pianists has appeared as a performer on concert and recital platforms in Wellington this year, Jun Bouterey-Ishido as the pianist in the Calvino Trio, which played here in July, and Tony Lin with this solo recital a week or so ago. Unfortunately I was prevented by circumstances from hearing the Trio, which made me all the more determined to partly counter my loss by “making good” at the other pianist’s concert. (I will, in time, get to the point where I can mention one of these musicians by name without having to cite what the other is, or has been doing! – your patience, gentle reader!).

I thought Lin’s recital programme fascinating – the choices suggested that the pianist enjoyed making connections and drawing attention to influences and cross-references. Both the Bartok and the Gao Ping works featured the use of folk-melodies from the composers’ respective homelands as starting-points for improvisations. The pianist’s own’s programme notes underlined the importance for each composer of maintaining the integrity of his original source material, Bartok regarding the melodies “as motifs to be surrounded by the results of their working” and Gao Ping exploring “the rich, microtonal palette of the folk tradition”. Each composer’s “workings” resulted in a distinctively flavoured sound-world that one could readily associate with those uniquely characterful regions.

Separating the two sets of improvisations was JS Bach’s French Suite No.5, a bright and cheerful collection of baroque dances in G major, presenting a more stylised and courtly mode of expression which contrasted surprisingly well with the more earthy/exotic source material of the two works on either side. Then, in the second half, we heard a piece by the pianist himself, a brief, improvisatory meditation-cum-declamation called, appropriately enough, Digression, and whose dying sounds led straight into the concert’s largest-scale work, Schubert’s final Piano Sonata in B-flat, D.960.

The recital began with Bartok, his Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs Op.20, a work which progressed from simple harmonisation of melody to manipulation of their shape, rhythmic patterns and harmonic associations – in effect, the composer gradually “took over” the potentialities of the material, transforming them to meet his own compositional needs while still preserving their basic idiomatic spirit. Tony Lin conveyed something of this spirit amid the volatile rhythms and favoursome harmonies and dissonances of the second song, and the “Night Piece” aspect of the third, with its quicksilver responses in the midst of the gloom, delivered here with razor-sharp reflexes and a powerfully-wrought sense of atmosphere. I particularly liked his “thinking on his feet”-like playing of the sixth improvisation, with its spontaneous series of knockabout “turns”as if from a clown, the music leaping from the black to the white keys and then back again! And, how poignant were those moments of wistful reflection in between the drolleries and caperings!

The Bach French Suite seemed, under Lin’s hands, wrought of some kind of elfin magic in places – gossamer-like threads of musical lines that were woven freely and then tweaked and pulled into place, the playing always flexible yet mindful of the music’s overall shape. Following the opening, minstrel-like Allemande, the Courante resembled a merry brook bubbling over stones, with the occasional refraction caused by natural attrition from the play of light and the ceaseless flow of water. The beautiful Sarabande’s dignified contourings put me into some of the music’s “spaces” most beguilingly, from which the pianist’s quixotic delivery of the Gavotte’s opening gently brought me back, alerted to the movement of the dance-steps and the even more energising garrulity of the Bourée!

Though more circumspect in manner, the Louré had a beautiful spring in its step, Lin allowing the figuration plenty of freedom while keeping the music’s pulse – he seemed to be able to un-regiment the most rigorous of the music’s rhythms. Then, his delivery of the Gigue was a marvel of clarity,  demonstrating a keen instinct for allowing voicings sufficient weight and momentum. I particularly enjoyed the second part’s more deeply-registered explorations, whose working-out seemed to acquire an almost orchestra sonority in places, amid the player’s varied command of colours and timbres.

Gao Ping’s Distant Voices demonstrated the composer’s use of Chinese folk melodies as “points of departure”, as did Bartok with his Hungarian Peasant Songs. The first reflection, Nostalgia, drew from a melody belonging to Inner Mongolia, Gao Ping employing “neighbouring” notes to the existing melody, and creating depth, resonance and tension from all registers of the keyboard, both delicate and full-throated. The playing brought out the composer’s “opening up” of spaces, recalling in places Ravel-like sonorities and delicacies. The second evocation, Love-Song from Kangdin, is apparently one of China’s most well-known melodies, from the composer’s own Sichuan region – here were haunting “echo” effects, sonorous melodic lines resounding and filling their own ambiences, enhanced by occasional impulses that suggested bird-song or air-and-water nature-patterns.

Gao Ping’s third realisation, given the title Blue Flower, used a melody from  the Shanbei region to evoke the dynamism and exuberance of dancing and drumming, the sounds reaching to the lowest piano-pitches for added resonance and weight, and opening up the sound-world of the music in an orchestral way. The rhythms drove the music through “little dancings” sequences vividly ccontrasted in Lin’s performance with great swirls of repetitive and dynamic energy, featuring primitive pulsatings set alongside cluster-tines and multicoloured harmonies. At one point the music recalled themes from the two previous movements, intertwining the worlds and regions, and pausing for the reminiscences to take effect before the toccata-rhythm again took the reins, finishing as a scintillation whose energy tapered away to silence – all beautifully realised by the pianist.

After an interval, Tony Lin retumed to the keyboard to fascinate and absorb us with his own piece, called Digression, inspired partly by the pianist’s involvement with Schumann’s Humoreske, and partly as a result of Lin’s own self-confessed inclinations to digress during scheduled practice sessions! The pianist called the work a mere diversion from “the main, more important subjects”, but its value for him was its marking a reawakening of his urge to compose. Between shivers of scintillation, claustrophobic chordings and single-note declamations looking for the light, the piece sounded like a true diversionary exploration, one that, somewhat unexpectedly, led straight into the opening chords of the final work on the programme!

This, of course, was the Schubert B-flat Sonata D 960, one of three such works written during the last few months of the composer’s life, music which was destined to languish in relative obscurity until the mid-twentieth century. It’s always seemed to me astonishing, for instance, that one of the greatest of all pianists, Sergei Rachmaninov, reputedly confessed to not knowing anything of the existence of these or any other Schubert sonatas – but performances of them were rare until the renowned Artur Schnabel’s advanced their cause around the time of the centenial of the  composer’s death, in 1928. They are now, of course, considered in some quarters to be on the same level of achievement as the very different late sonatas of Beethoven.

Lin brought a highly-wrought degree of sensitivity to the work’s opening – gentle, dream-like nudgings of the melody were underpinned by a murmuring accompaniment, and “ghosted” by rumbling trills in the bass, indicating a kind of “darkenss” waiting in the wings. Then the return of the opening theme burgeoned out of repeated lead-in chords and flooded our sound-vistas with torrents of tone, which continued right up to the sudden, dramatic hush of the second subject. This was played lightly and swiftly, giving the music an “elusive” character which a series of recitative-like question-and-answer phrases attempted to explain, until shouldered aside by the most wonderful, if  disturbing irruptions – those angular gestures signalling the onset of the first movement repeat, that ominous bass trill mentioned above here roaring from below like some baleful subterranean Minotaur waiting for its prey. (Of course, the presence of this repeat has been a recurring bone of contention amongst performers and commentators, one with which Lin took himself, in my humble opinion, onto the side of the angels by playing it!).

When the development did come it seemed to take on an almost spine-chilling aspect, as if the pianist was reluctant to go there! – a brave face saw him through the initial hesitations, and the rich, comforting warmth of parts of the central section emboldened his resolve! But as the music began to climb out of these warmer regions the chill returned and began to exert its grip, with a desolate, minor-key repetition of the opening theme, accompanied by the ominous trill – we felt the growing unease as the ways seemed to close in on us, and present to us nothing but oncoming darkness.

The return of the opening theme relieved our immediate anxiety – but there seemed a frailty about the proceedings, an almost “tenderised” aspect, the spirit somewhat undermined by the privations of the journey. And the pianist seemed to suddenly tire as well, losing a couple of notes to an ungainly turn of the music, though with the declamatory sequences at the exposition’s end he rallied, and brought about a beautifully-poised lead-in to the coda – in all, it was quite a journey!

The slow movement’s opening confronted us once again with that world of desolation and imminent darkness. The throbbing rhythmic figurations had a heavy, overburdened gait beneath a theme whose upwardly thrusting supplication to the firmament had an anguished magnificence. Lin’s playing had such incredible “hurt”, making the occasional short-lived recourse by the composer to some sweet previous memory so very moving.

After this, the scherzo’s rapid, almost manic energies seemed blurred at the edges, as though things were slightly out of focus – it was though the pianist was suddenly almost running on a kind of “empty”, and trusting in little else except his instincts. The Trio was angular and heavily accented, almost dysfunctional in its presentation, redolent of a kind of recklessness, or devil-may care attitude. Against which the finale’s opening bell-strike sounded a warning-note, from which the music tried to steer away, the major-key sequences attempting to establish a brave face, but being repeatedly reminded of darker realities – Lin attacked the heavy chords mid-sequence savagely, but the music then steered the mood back to a kind of resigned acceptance, the bell-strike once again “centering” the focus and dictating the terms. What a kaleidoscopic array of emotion was here! – with the pianist having to steer a course between hope, and despair, happiness and anger. After another outburst, followed by a curious variant of what Schubert wrote in its wake, Lin marshalled his resources and set the music stampeding to its destiny – “thus though we cannot make our sun / stand still, yet we will make him run”, wrote a poet in an entirely different context, but in a poignant way just as applicable here.

Rather than leaving us amid such a bleak and cheerless scenario, Lin played as an encore for us a Bartok transcription of a folksong, whose words described a poor boy’s wish for a starry night so that he may find his way back home to his beloved – it was played with great spontaneity and quietly-expressed feeling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Temples on the heights and simple dwellings – Ludwig Treviranus at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
LUDWIG TREVIRANUS (piano)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Grand Variations and Fugue for Piano, Op.35 “Eroica”
PAUL SCHRAMM – Mania
EDVARD GRIEG – Lyric Pieces Op.54
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”

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

Sunday 26th June 2016

For three-quarters of his recent Wellington Chamber Music St.Andrew’s piano recital, Ludwig Treviranus bestrode the performing space like a young colossus. It seemed the young man could put hardly a finger, gesture or word wrong, such was the pleasure given by both his playing and his speaking to the audience. I’m aware that there are people who don’t ever want to listen to anybody speak at concerts, but nobody present could have seriously objected to listening to someone with such a charming and enviable gift for natural, spontaneous-sounding communication.

Treviranus spoke clearly and entertainingly about each of the items he was going to present to us, putting the music in the context of what was happening for its composer, after which he delivered vivid and characterful performances of the pieces in question. And though his rendition of the programme’s final work, Beethoven’s titanic Op.57 Sonata, the Appassionata, didn’t quite display the consistency of execution enjoyed by the other pieces on the programme, it was nevertheless performed with much the same whole-heartedness and engagement with the music.

Beginning the program was an earlier Beethoven work, though one hardly less epic in its way than the Appassionata. This was the piece which came to be known as the Eroica Variations, due to its theme’s subsequent reappearance in the finale of the composer’s eponymous Symphony No.3 (the Eroica), which Beethoven completed in 1804, two years after the “theme and variations” piano work. There are fifteen variations and a fugue, and , as with the symphony’s finale, the first few variations focus on the bass-line, gradually adding fragments in each succeeding variation until the “theme proper” grandly comes into being – a most exciting and satisfying process to listen to.

Treviranus took us through this process of fruition with tremendous élan and vivid detailing, at once galvanizing our sensibilities with an arresting opening chord, then deliciously playing with the bas theme’s opening notes, contrasting their delicacy and reserve with his forthright response to Beethoven’s three “call-to-arms” notes in the melody’s second half. We were thus straightaway ignited, energized, charmed and exhilarated by the music in the pianist’s hands in a way that focused our listening for what was to follow.

The Variations then took the stage, each with its own singular character, Treviranus bringing out the detail as vividly as the whole – my notes contained responses such as “I like his strut!”, “beautiful liquidity”, militaristic jog-trotting”, “amazing hammering of the bass chords”, “a murmuring, almost Schubertian left-hand”, “poised and ritualistic” ….and so on. It was like a fantastic carnival procession of different, but equally purposeful presentations.

The complex “maggiore” finale sounded very modern in places in Treviranus’s hands. The music presented us with what seemed like incredible transports of delight on the composer’s part – Beethoven speaking with the “Spirit” – before the fugue tripped its way into the picture, voices dovetailing with both charm and quirkiness. I like the pianist’s enjoyment of pianistic sonorities, conjuring up sounds that the composer may well have himself imagined, far in excess of the limited range and dynamism of the instruments he would have heard before his hearing became impaired.

Last year Treviranus gave a recital which included pieces by Austrian-born Paul Schramm, and did so here again, with a different set of works this time round. Refugees from Nazi oppression, Schramm and his Dutch wife Diny settled in New Zealand in the late 1930s, but were treated with suspicion by the New Zealand Government during the war years. Leaving his wife and son in New Zealand after the war Schramm went to Australia to reactivate his career as a piano virtuoso. However, the privations of the war years had taken their toll, and his success was short-lived. He eventually gave up music as a career and rather ignominiously became a door-to-door salesman. He never returned to New Zealand and died in Brisbane in 1953.

As if to help redress the balance of wrongs a little, Treviranus had recently resurrected some of Schramm’s compositional output for piano – most of which is still in manuscript in the Alexander Turnbull Library’s music collection. This new offering was presumably put together as a kind of suite by the composer with the somewhat disturbing title Mania. They’re rather Bartokian-sounding pieces, with hints of other composers thrown in, psychological in effect, rather than pictorial, and in the case of the final piece, oppressive and gloomy.

First up was a piece with the title Savage March, music which reminded me by turns of Gershwin and Percy Grainger – Treviranus’s playing generated real swagger and energising momentum, bringing out the angularities of a 7/4-like section and a cataclysmic csacading sequence at the end. The second piece, Gaiety, seemed ironic as a title, as the music suggested a kind of “mouse-in-a-wheel” claustrophobia, though relieved by a groovier middle section.

Two diametrically opposed opposites followed: Hilarity presented a dancing, if dogged kind of humour, with a three-note chant repeated somewhat artlessly at the end, while the black opening chords of Defeat came as a terrific shock, its grim and oppressive trajectories reminiscent of Musorgsky’s “Bydlo”. The music’s loneliness and despair was relieved only by occasional pinpricks of light, notes from a toybox kind of tune sounded as if part of a dream relieving sorrow. But it was to no avail, as the bleakness loomed up spectre-like once more, dragging the music towards a kind of oblivion.

Respite from such privations came for us with the interval, and then with some of Edvard Grieg’s adorable Lyric Pieces, the Op.54 set of six. (Incidentally, the first four of these went on to achieve wider fame when orchestrated as the Lyric Suite.) The composer said he wanted with these pieces to create “simple dwellings in which people might feel happy” – he certainly would have been charmed with Ludwig Treviranus’s playing, which caught whole worlds of flavoursome atmosphere, incident and feeling.

Beginning with the Shepherd Boy, the pianist realised the music’s gentle, solitary melancholy from the beginning, though I would have liked him to have given more air and space to those gently cascading triplet runs whose impulses adroitly modulate the music upwards and “tell” so poignantly…but this was otherwise a beautiful and thoughtful performance. The other pieces were unalloyed delight – Treviranus quite deliciously orchestrated the Ganger (March), the forward movement so easeful and redolent of its surroundings, allowing plenty of both airy textures and deeper resonances.

As for his playing of the very first note of the Nocturne, his touch proclaimed the presence of a poet at the piano, while his rumbustious approach to the March of the Dwarves forcefully brought out the piece’s “Mountain King” grotesqueries. Two lesser-known pieces remained, the Scherzo glinting with magical, elfin qualities, while the simple, but richly evocative Ringing Bells seemed to anticipate Arvo Pärt’s tintinabulations in a similarly bracing, out-of doors way. In all, I thought it a most treasurable performance which gave the music its proper stature.

And so we were brought to the granite-like entranceway of Beethoven’s imposing Op.57. Treviranus “squared up” to the opening measures with impressive gravitas, conjuring up the “elemental” nature of the sounds with great conviction. The second subject, a cleverly inverted version of the opening, was here kept on the same kind of trajectory, allowing for little false relaxation, and keeping the overall purpose in view. I did think some of the pianist’s responses to the music’s agitations more febrile than elemental, as if at times the fingers ran ahead of the notes (even losing the line momentarily during the development, but getting the argument back on the rails with real determination!)……it was as if he felt the need to “push” the music in places rather than trusting in and going with the piece’s own inner momentum.

After wrestling titanically with the first movement’s combatative aspects, Treviranus took us into the relative tranquility of the theme-and-variations second movement, which, apart from an anxious moment or two from the pianist’s fingers, flowed inexorably towards the threshold of the maelstrom to follow. The finale’s incredible swirling aspect was vividly engaged, the playing leading us square-shouldered through the flailing agitations and brooding intensities which by turns took the music over. Though a flourish was dropped through misdirection at one point, other sequences were splendidly realised – for instance, the “stamping” passages preceeding the recapitulation thrilled with their power, the music not rushed but kept steady and inexorable, allowing those cosmic impulses to speak with their own inherent force.

To my great delight, Treviranus included the movement’s second-half repeat this time round (I heard him about a year ago play the work without it). I thought a bit more right-hand assertiveness was needed from the pianist in sounding the alarm before plunging the music afresh into the development’s black-browed tumult – but still, this gesture most satisfyingly pushed out the music’s vistas, past any residual concert-hall confines that might have hung grimly onto the proceedings up to this point. From here, the performance moved into the realms of classical tragedy, the arpeggiated recitative passages charged with foreboding, the rhythms gathering power and weight with uncompromising focus, and the coda positively juggernaut-like in its relentless physicality. It was playing that risked everything and delivered for all of us a cathartic sense of coming through with the ringing out of those final, defiant chords.

Typically, the pianist then did two things which perfectly expressed both his and our somewhat rung-out state amid those magnificent resonant ruins of the music’s dissolution – he first of all announced that he was “ready for a beer, now!”, and then sat down to help us return to our lives by playing for us a beautifully expressed encore (straight after the Appassionata? – was the fellow mad?)…..this was another of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, one called Summer Evening, which gently brought our sensibilities back from wherever they’d been flung in the cosmos, so that we could all go back to our “simple dwellings” once again and feel happy.

Emma Sayers – piano recital of connections, dedications and premieres

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
CONNECTIONS, DEDICATIONS – a piano recital by Emma Sayers

W.A.MOZART – Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” K.455
JACK BODY – Five Melodies (1982) – No.5
ROSS HARRIS – For Judith Clark (2011)
DAVID FARQUHAR -Telephonic No.13 (721-230) – Eve Page
DOUGLAS LILBURN – 9 Short Pieces – Nos 1,2DAVID FARQUHAR – Black, White and Coloured – (Homage to G.G.)
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Three Pieces for J.A.R. – Fanfare / Aria for Anita / Perpetua

Emma Sayers (piano)

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

Wednesday, 22nd June 2016

Emma Sayers began her recital with the Mozart Variations, then spoke briefly to us by way of welcome, outlining how the remainder of the program had come about. She had been approached by composer Anthony Ritchie to perform a set of pieces written in memory of his parents, the whole (Three Pieces for J.A.R) named for his father, John Ritchie, with one of the set (Aria for Anita) remembering the composer’s mother. Incidentally, the work was originally commissioned by (and dedicated to) Margaret Nielsen, a long-time friend of John Ritchie.

Almost straightaway the pianist was, she told us, reminded of other music written by people either associated or contemporaneous with John Ritchie, which she thought would “sit alongside well” in a larger tribute – hence the “Connections, Dedications” title of the recital. The Mozart Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” was, however, a separate goal marking a return to solo public performance, and put in an amusing context by the pianist as, in her own words, “something I couldn’t manage when I was pregnant, because my tummy kept getting in the way of the arm-crossings”.

I was surprised that it had been such a long time (May 2005) since I’d last written about an Emma Sayers solo recital – her playing of the Variations certainly underscored the things I wrote about her then, and served to remind us of what we had been deprived on in the interim. That particular solo appearance was prior to Middle C’s formation, so I feel justified in quoting from my notes for the radio review, regarding her playing of Bartok’s Op.6 set of 14 Bagatelles – “…Sayers took us on a marvellous journey through what seemed like the “landscape of a musical mind” with all its individualities and influences….” as those words applied equally to what she gave us here of Mozart’s at St. Andrew’s.

The first thing which struck me was her playing’s vivid and forthright character, contrasting the contained, tasteful treatment of the theme with the full-blooded flourishes of the first variation’s phrases, done with flair and theatricality. At the risk of thumping a particular tub of mine, I feel compelled to venture the opinion that this was “timeless” Mozart-playing in an entirely appropriate grand piano context, the piano used to “orchestrate” the music in a way that the composer could well have imagined himself, though never actually experienced as sound coming from his own instruments.

Again and again I found myself marvelling at Sayers’ ability to invest her phrasing with some ineffable impulse of characterization which compelled one’s attention, at one and the same time realizing and transcending the composer’s “classical” context and bringing into play something intensely and universally human about the music. It all seemed so “free”, so spontaneous and alive – and yet Mozart was always Mozart, even if such energy and physicality might be thought more the preserve of Clementi or even Beethoven. By way of “exploring” the theme rather than merely decorating or prettifying it, Mozart employed a range of expression here brought out by the pianist in as direct and unmannered a way as seemed possible.

If it seemed like a recital of two, or even three parts on paper, in practice there was no lessening or burgeoning of intensity in Sayers’ playing from the Mozart throughout to the home-grown items assembled to “connect with” and pay tribute to John Ritchie and his music. Beginning with the last in the set of Jack Body’s Five Pieces for Piano, we were taken by the music to a world of light and shade, its components turning and flickering like a magic kind of kaleidoscopic wheel, and bearing our sensibilities unobtrusively but gradually into different realms, from which we emerged changed, our delight replaced by sobriety at the transitory nature of things, at the piece’s end.

Ross Harris’s work For Judith Clark, was written by its composer for the 80th birthday of one of Wellington’s foremost piano teachers (and, appropriately enough, played here by an ex-pupil, who had also played the piece at her former teacher’s’s funeral, in 2014). It’s a beautiful, sonorous piece, taking shape like some kind of frozen soundscape being brought into view and explored from different points. Deeply-rooted frameworks were laid down, and set against the play of light on the various surfaces, the pianist ensuing the serenity of the hues were occasionally enlivened by volatilities, an evocation of a goddess whose aspect occasionally flashed and scintillated, giving fair warning to those in close proximity.

Next we heard a work Sun and Shadow by David Farquhar, one of a number of pieces called Telephonics that he composed for various friends and associates, using their telephone numbers as a basis for the pieces’ composition. Farquhar stressed that the pieces were intended as a series of “musical offerings” rather than as “portraits” of the people involved. This was a piece dedicated to the artist Evelyn Page, and, by association, her husband Freddie Page, who established the Victoria University Music Faculty in 1945, which Farquhar himself was to join in 1953 after his return from a period of study at London’s Guildhall. The music conjured up an impressionistic effect, with resonantly flowing harmonies and brilliantly-etched flashpoints, Sayers allowing their interactions plenty of room to “play out” and eventually subside within the piece’s enfolding silences.

The last time I heard Emma Sayers at an actual keyboard was when she gave a performance of Douglas Lilburn’s Nine Short Pieces in conjunction with Stroma, who performed responses by various composers to each one of the pieces. Here, she revisited the first two of the Nine Pieces by way of paying tribute both to the composer and to Margaret Nielsen, to whom Lilburn in 1967 gave a bundle of unpublished pieces of piano music, collectively labelled “Crotchety at 51!” along with the words “See what you can make of these”. Nielsen was, of course, Lilburn’s “preferred interpreter” of his piano music, and had given the premieres of many of the individual works, so it seemed logical that he would entrust her with the task of creating some order from the apparent chaos.

Sayers in her notes talked about the “searching quality” and the “quirky character” of the pieces, and her remarks were borne out by the performances we heard, the first piece epic, jagged and far-flung, the second impish, angular, questioning and wryful. Again, it was the “character” of each piece which was unequivocally presented to us – under Sayers’ fingers, the music in both instances seemed to know exactly what it was doing.

David Farquhar’s music again featured, this time a piece from a different collection of pieces, entitled Black, White and Coloured. This was one called Homage to G.G. (George Gershwin) – a brilliant transcription of the song I got rhythm, flavoured by the technique of writing for one hand on the white keys of the piano, and for the other on the black, resulting in some ear-catching sonorities. Sayers gave the accented phrasings just the right amount of “ginger”, bringing out the piece’s drolleries at the beginning and unerringly building the music’s trajectories towards the bluff humour of the ending.

And so to Anthony Ritchie’s commemorative Three Pieces for J.A.R. – music intended by the composer to reflect different aspects of his father, John Ritchie’s life. Before the pieces were played, Anthony RItchie spoke briefly and movingly about Margaret Nielsen’s friendship with and support of his father over the time of their association. The first part of the work, Fanfare, marked John Ritchie’s long involvement with brass players, both in bands and orchestras, using a simple, chant-like figure at the beginning subjected to all kinds of different harmonic modulations, some progressive, others all elbows and knees, harsh and abrupt. A deep-toned, briefly sounded sequence made a humourful ending to the piece.

The second piece, Aria for Anita, brought Anita Ritchie, John’s wife into focus – making reference to her soprano voice, Anthony RItchie quoted part of Solveig’s Song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, one of her favourites. The music’s recitative-like opening suggested a high voice at first, then varied the line with an alto-like response, the phrase-ends coloured at several points with the interval of a fifth. The music seemed to accrue its own ambient warmth, figures sounded out and then left to resonate as a context in which newer motifs could appear – a deep, rich bitter-sweet climax grew out of the exchanges,  as a strummed accompaniment to the soprano/alto voice exchanges allowed the music to deepen and linger before gently disappearing.

From the silence came Perpetua, the final movement, the upward-thrusting opening shared between the hands before changing into an attitude-driven march rhythm whose insistence scintillated into cascades of figurations, the repetitions making their own rhythmic patterns in lime with the “perpetual motion” suggested by the piece’s title. Having scattered all before it, the music then irradiated the textures with Ravel-like scintillations, even-handedly defining the heavenly vistas while at the same time plumbing the depths. Anthony RItchie in his notes alluded to the old prayer which included the phrase “perpetual light”, suggesting the soul’s continuing journey through what the composer called the “starry nothingness” of the ending.

All of this was delivered by Emma Sayers with what seemed and felt like complete identification with the music’s natural, spontaneous outpourings. Nothing in the music was forced or unduly amplified, but allowed instead by the pianist its own range of mellifluous voice-soundings which readily  put across the composers’ intentions. In a relatively short time we had been taken through an exploration of some magnitude across the face of people’s lives and sharply-focused creative achievements. I felt at the end of it all we couldn’t have had a more inspirational guide at the piano throughout our journey.

Feast of music, art and ambiences – NZTrio’s “Zoom” at Wellington’s City Gallery

Posted on by Alan Wells

NZTRIO: “ZOOM” AT CITY GALLERY
NZTrio: Justine Cormack (violin), Ashley Brown (cello), Sarah Watkins (piano)

John Musto: Piano Trio (1998)
Chris Watson: Schemata – three views of an imaginary object (2009)
Elliott Carter: Epigrams (2012)
Alexander Zemlinsky: Trio in d minor, Op. 3 (1896)

City Gallery, Wellington

16 June 2016

Appearances of NZTrio at the City Gallery are always a special event. There’s the wine, the fruit juices, the food, the opportunity to meet interesting people, the art (in this case, quirky, occasionally beautiful, watercolours by Francis Uprichard). Oh, and there’s the music.

A feature of NZTrio presentations (this one titled “Zoom”) is their inclusion of New Zealand work. Often it is specially commissioned, as were the David Hamilton and Ken Young pieces in their preceding concerts. Schemata, however, was composed when Chris Watson was Mozart Fellow at Otago University, and premiered by another group. From his early work as a recent graduate (such as …vers libre… and Derailleurs, heard at the Nelson Composers Workshops around 2002 and 2003, Watson has demonstrated an ability to create an ebb and flood of tension while using an atonal, semi-serial idiom – no mean feat in the absence of a sense of harmonic direction (an exception is the bass clarinet solo Mandible, which I’ve never warmed to: it seemed to me like a collection of effects). In the three movements and three minutes of Schemata, pauses separate terse gnomic gestures (Webern lives!), with Cormack’s violin, Brown’s cello and Watkins’ piano each taking turns to begin each movement. The tension and resolution comes in the late climax of the last few moments, where dense flourishes are beautifully resolved into piano resonance. A miniature masterpiece.

Epigrams was Elliott Carter’s last composition, written when he was 103. The first of the twelve short pieces felt very much in the same world as Watson’s. But I soon got an impression of a different, distinctive musical voice. Chamber music is commonly described as a ”conversation among musicians”, and Carter took this one step further: the rhythms are characteristically speech-like, the “conversation” often brought to a peremptory full stop by a flourish, chord or note from on of the instruments (typically the piano).

John Musto, another American composer, has some 41 years to go to reach 103. His two-part Piano Trio might be thought of as “polystylistic”, but within a fairly narrow range of styles – there is little that is Watsonian or Carterish here. The minimalistic rippling arpeggios on Watkins’ Bechstein (Steinway? Nein way!) might have been something from Philip Glass, with elegantly flowing melodic lines from Carmack’s violin and Brown’s cello – these elements return in a kind of informal rondo. There are light fast sections that suggest Prokofiev, there are jazzy syncopations, there is a hint of tango right near the end, and there are passages of rich, almost schmaltzy Romanticism: was Musto being sincere, or was he being ironic, “sending it up”? I can’t make up my mind. But the members of the Trio played it with absolute conviction.

Rich (and sincere) Romanticism was the hallmark of Alexander Zemlinsky’s 1996 Trio. Brahms saw the score (in the original version with clarinet) and was impressed. Though Zemlinsky was a pupil of Bruckner, and later a teacher (and brother-in-law) of Schoenberg, I heard little of either composer in this Trio (at a stretch, a few sequences, and descending pizzicato lines on the cello, could have come from Bruckner). What I heard was overwhelmingly Brahmsian, densely written, even overwritten, especially in the first movement. In the second, Watkins’ solo piano interlude, and Carmack’s ghostly high violin, offered welcome relief, as did the lively finale, with more of Brown’s cello pizzicato.

This concert showcased one of New Zealand’s top ensemble’s mastery of a wide range of repertoire (familiar and – in this case – unfamiliar), as well as their admirable commitment to New Zealand music.

Enso String Quartet highly impressive in all eras particularly 20th century France

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Enso String Quartet: Maureen Nelson and Ken Hamao (violins), Melissa Reardon (viola), Richard Belcher (cello)

Beethoven: Quartet in E flat, Op 74 ‘Harp’
Dutilleux: Ainsi la nuit
Alex Taylor: a coincidence of surfaces (CMNZ Commission)
Ravel: String Quartet in F

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 May, 7:30 pm

One of the first things that many people would have asked about this concert, was ‘what’s the name mean or is an acronym for?’ Nowhere in the programme could I find the answer.

However, their website does ‘sort-of’ explain:

“The ensemble’s name is derived from the Japanese Zen painting of the circle, which represents many things: perfection and imperfection, the moment of chaos that is creation, the emptiness of the void, the endless circle of life, and the fullness of the spirit.”

But it doesn’t explain why it has the name; a four letter word ‘s connection to a Japanese painting of the circle doesn’t really help, except in a misty impressionist way.
Perhaps they meant to add, “Enso is Japanese for a circle, or ‘a painting of a circle’”.
The second violinist, Ken Hamao is of Japanese descent; is that a connection?
One of the leader’s, Maureen Nelson, teachers was Yumi Ninomiya Scott: another connection?

But the concert.

Familiar classics opened and closed the concert; first, one of Beethoven’s ‘middle period’ quartets called the ‘Harp’ on account of a lot of pizzicato particularly in the first movement.

It began secretively, as if to allay any discomfort about what probably sounded rather radical, though hardly alienating, to audiences of the first decade of the 19th century. I was immediately won over by the scrupulous attention to every marking and, one felt, dynamic and bowing refinements that Beethoven might have hardly conceived. There were moments of frenzy, with general pizzicato and touches, like the surprise-like fortissimo single chords, that awoke an awareness of the Beethoven-to-come more emphatically a decade later – the ‘Late’ period.

Perhaps, I wondered after a while, there are a few listeners of acute, self-acknowledged sensibility who feel there was just too much particularity, too much fussiness in articulation and subtle rubato and dynamic delicacy; not I.

The second movement’s unobtrusive opening melody points more towards the future, as if careful to avoid a full-blooded tune, but then it arrived – the really gorgeous melody, emerging perhaps from the earlier hesitant theme, and its treatment was almost too voluptuous as the second violin took charge of it while the first played a rocking accompaniment.

The quartet tackled the scherzo movement, Presto, with all the ferocity needed. To make an impact, what might be called the Trio is a forthright section that departs from the triple time of the main part, to common, 4/4 time; though it’s in quaver triplets which turns ghostly again to simply peter out, leaving just a moment before the Finale begins. The Finale, a theme and variations, was again treated in a spirit that exploited its surprises. It too contains moments of pianissimo that become startling and the players handled it all with wonderful variety, a seeming utter inevitability.

Dutilleux’s only string quartet is not entirely untypical of his other, rather small quantity of music, considering he almost reached 100. The two symphonies, the cello concerto (Tout un monde lointain), and the piano sonata are reasonably approachable, warmer, more comfortable.

In 2012 the Amici Ensemble played the quartet at a Wellington Chamber Music concert; I did not hear it. (See Middle C’s review of 12 August 2012).

The demands of a string quartet prompted Dutilleux to refine his voice and devote himself to cultivating all the subtleties of colour, to chisel the most detailed contrapuntal contours, seeking a composing equilibrium through an act of dizzying balancing. The structure of the music, designed uniquely by the composer, as is not uncommon in this age, does at the start present an intellectual hurdle, if the listener is of a mind to follow the music’s argument as the composer has presumably intended.

There are two alternatives:
i) either you give over, without paying much attention to the composer’s notes, to whatever impressions the music makes, hoping it will prove rewarding;
ii) or you study the notes beforehand, preferably listening to a recording (I would even add, ‘and reading the score’, if that was not likely to be quite useless in a work of such phantasmagorical capriciousness), and attempt to relate the descriptions to what you hear. For a great many quite serious listeners this course would probably create a pre-ordained sense of defeat. I chose the former course this evening, though I had listened to a recording a couple of times, the explanatory notes to hand.

The first five of the seven movements are linked by what Dutilleux calls ‘Parentheses’, recognition of which in the withering density of the music is hard if not impossible at first hearing. In a French commentary: “the parentheses – often quite short – which link the parts one to another are important for the organic role which devolves on them. The allusions to what is to follow – or what has preceded it – take their place like points of reference.”

It’s the sort of work, by a highly regarded composer, that many would not want to be judged for confessing to mystification; showing they lack sensibility or taste or discernment or insight into contemporary music. There are almost constant tremolos, pizzicato, muted passages, false harmonics, spiccato; one hears fragmentary themes emerging, and returning later, and much atmospheric evocation, occasional calm passages in which the four players have a chance to communicate more calmly with one another

In other words, many would have found it hard to ‘follow’, though to gain a sense of its generally brittle emotional character is not so hard, and a performance such as we heard, from a highly talented, youngish ensemble for whom Dutilleux’s language is probably as familiar as Haydn, could not help being highly persuasive.

The CMNZ commission from young Auckland composer Alex Taylor presented a soundscape that was not all that remote from Dutilleux. A short piece of about six minutes, it had time to make an impression from the hands of these musicians who were apparently in sympathy with the music’s character and inventiveness, and towards the end seemed to drift into a narrative that sustained its last page. Though the first few minutes offered little opportunity to gain a familiarity with its musical ideas so that one could follow its structure (a feat that some claim to achieve at once though others tell the truth). One of the advantages of a short piece is the opportunity for it to be played again.

And so it was, but even better. At the end of the concert the audience was invited to remain while the Aroha came to the stage to join Enso in a performance of the octet version.

The Aroha Quartet had been involved in Elizabeth Kerr’s pre-concert talk (which I didn’t hear) where they played another version of Taylor’s piece, rather slower, more lyrical, less hectic. The two versions had been written so they could be played together. Each quartet sat in a separate semi-circle. The two accounts could thus be quite easily distinguished and for me, perhaps with the benefit of hearing the music, in a rather different guise, a second time, it became distinctly more coherent and, well, musical.

Ravel’s String Quartet ended the programme. Seventy-four years older than the Dutilleux, 113 years older than Taylor’s.

Enso launched into it with energy and affection, finding all its expressiveness and subtlety. Ravel’s failure to win the Prix de Rome, with this work on the desks of the adjudicators, is one of the great mysteries of musical history, since it’s so rich in vitality, not to mention melody. One can perhaps understand Dubois’s failure to get it, but hardly Fauré’s, even acknowledging that the Assez vif second movement is a bit spiky, and studiedly un-romantic; Enso handled it commandingly. The strange, ghostly episodes in the third movement were among the most arresting points, returning slowly to the real world at the end, as a lovely viola passage caught my ear, in a breathless, exquisite spirit.

The finale, Vif et agité, was just that, bringing a memorable performance to an end; and I wondered whether, in another thirty years or so, the Dutilleux will sound as scintillating and varied and memorable as the Ravel does now.

 

 

NZSO ‘wastes its sweetness upon the desert air’ with some splendid, approachable, 21st century music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Aotearoa Plus
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bramwell Tovey with Stephen de Pledge (piano)

Bramwell Tovey: Time Tracks
Magnus Lindberg: Piano concerto No 2
Christopher Blake: Voices (premiere)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 6 May, 6:30 pm

Above all, this concert again raised for me the old controversy about the handling of new music. Whether it is best to ghettoize music that is unlikely to find a large audience, or to place these pieces carefully in concerts that include an irresistibly popular masterpiece.

If the intention is to persuade the timid to expose their minds to something unfamiliar, the size of Friday’s audience showed again that approach No 1 does not work, for very few of the ‘conservatives’ would have been there, and so the hope of getting the reluctant to open their ears, failed.

It’s not as if much music being composed today uses the kinds of artificial notions of what the basic patterns of melodic structure should be, so widespread at mid-century. Though polytonality is often used and conventional melody often seems avoided in case it suggests that a ‘serious’ piece of music is really lightweight, much music, including what our own composers produce can actually be enjoyed by simply opening the ears, without prejudice.

Tovey’s opera suite from The Inventor
This first visit to New Zealand by English-born, Canadian conductor, pianist and composer, Bramwell Tovey, revealed an accomplished, versatile musician who has conducted a number of distinguished orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Montreal and Melbourne Symphony, and the Philadelphia orchestras. He has been conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra since 2000. His compositions range across many genres, including the 2011 work for Calgary Opera, The Inventor, which was well received there. This concert began with the premiere of an orchestral suite, Time Tracks, the second suite that Tovey has drawn from his opera. The opera tells the true story of a charismatic con-man with a variety of versatile criminal talents than culminated in an unintended climax on the Bremerhaven docks: an insurance swindle goes wrong with an explosion that kills about eighty people.

Tovey introduced his piece entertainingly, useful for those who had not bought a programme. I’m not sure that the music was much more enlivened by accounts of the opera’s subject, as it stood on its own feet as an obviously dramatic sequence, opening with bold and colourful statements. It revealed a facility in handling narrative and situational elements through the use of a wide variety of tuned percussion, as well as tam-tams and hand bells and the usual range of drums, occasional solos and episodes from orchestral sections that were attractive or arresting in their own right. A couple of times, Tovey stepped off the podium to play a honky-tonk piano to his left, a sort of bluesy lament and later evoking a dreamy quality, no doubt reflecting the opera’s depiction of the flawed character’s insight into his own weaknesses. Among the many evocative phases in the score are touches of big-band jazz and motifs and harmonies that hint at the influence of John Adams. A particularly vivid moment is the depiction of a train gathering speed.

Piano Concerto No 2 by Lindberg
Lindberg’s second piano concerto was written with the character of its soloist (Yefim Bronfman, who has played with the NZSO), with the New York Philharmonic, very much in mind. In the words of the programme note, it was a response to Bronfman’s “muscular performances of Bartok and Prokofiev”. The sound and energy of those two composers were certainly audible in the music, but at the beginning, also Ravel (though not, as the programme note suggested, Debussy); Lindberg himself has mentioned Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand as inspiring the music. Inevitably, one can also be persuaded of the influence of other 20th century composers, even Rachmaninov in the last movement, perhaps Szymanowski too.

A throbbing motif imposes itself early on, but soon the piano attempts to impose itself. For much of the time, it failed, not because De Pledge lacked the ability to bring the right amount of energy and incisiveness to the performance, but because a great deal of the time, Lindberg cannot resist imposing a massive accompaniment that smothers the piano. I came to feel that this was perhaps more the result of a failure to impose restraint on and require greater discretion and subtlety from the orchestra; it was after all, a larger than normal orchestra with extra brass instruments and pains were needed to find whatever chamber-music-like qualities existed in the scoring.

The piano had its moments nevertheless, such as the start of the second movement, and between what one felt were obligatory hair-raising, bravura passages, there was sufficient evidence of the presence of a real instinct for the great piano concerto tradition as it has evolved in the past century. There was a passage of attractively warm playing from cellos; horns contributed with finesse, and there was no question that the score lay well within the orchestra’s interpretive abilities.

Christopher Blake’s second symphony
Finally, the second half, was Christopher Blake’s second symphony, entitled Voices, based in sometimes quite literal ways on Eliot’s The Waste Land. A daunting task, one might think, to find musical intimations or coherence in that still-disturbing poem, laden with abstruse classical and modern literary and musical references. Blake doesn’t employ the titles Eliot gave to the five cantos of the poem, but focuses on the people who populate each part.

Here, in contrast to the music in the first half however, was a piece that employs as large an orchestra with wonderful discretion, only rarely allowing full tuttis to emphasise aspects. Blake’s notes draw attention to the way his symphony has cross references between the movements and, though reassuring us that the music does stand alone, without reference to the poem itself, that “it is amplified and harnesses other worlds of meaning when viewed through the lens of Eliot’s poem”. So I look forward to the performance being released by the NZSO and Radio New Zealand Concert, accompanied by a gloss with annotations to help the listener elucidate more of the music’s secrets and its connections to the poem.

Its character was announced right at the start with a prolonged, unison horn evocation, followed by a startling attack from wood blocks; then mysterious string murmurings. It’s in the first part that Eliot quotes four lines of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, “Frisch weht der Wind…”, with electrifying musical impact, and the music is there. The second part, ‘Albert and Lil’, (A Game of Chess in Eliot), is coloured with gently sleazy blues sounds, involving various instruments, including an alto saxophone, played seductively.

Perhaps the fifth section was the most intriguing and enigmatic, starting with a shocking attack from tuned percussion, and soon one of the few passages for the full orchestra with propulsive, racing strings, with its references to things not in the actual poem, but in Eliot’s notes, like the journey to Emmaus and Shackleton, a fine oboe solo, and a great variety of brilliant, cleanly-used, individual instruments, raising in one’s mind more questions than answers, especially in one’s effort to recall the poem.

Each section bears its own tone and significance, as does the poem itself, and I remained, quite simply, thoroughly engaged by the sound world that was created as well as by an admiration for the composer’s evident intention to employ the orchestra to display so well the strengths of its soloists and of each section. A very nice way for a chief executive to compliment his employees for their skill and dedication, not simply in his own composition but for the huge contribution that the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra makes in the protection, against the sort of decaying and decadent cultural forces described by Eliot in 1922, of some civilized standards in this country.

 

 

NZSO and Madeleine Pierard with Ross Harris’s anguished Second Symphony to mark ANZAC Day

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
‘Spirit of ANZAC’

Frederick Septimus Kelly: In Memoriam Rupert Brooke
George Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad, Rhapsody for Orchestra
Ross Harris: Symphony No 2

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 21 April, 6:30 pm

I have been heard to utter unpatriotic feelings about the seeming endless attention paid in New Zealand to war and in particular the First World War and Gallipoli, which took place around 100 years ago. I have no problem with the stimulus the centenary has given to serious re-examination of the political background to the war, its pursuit and the catastrophic results of the Treaty of Versailles that sought to fix the world afterwards. But I wish more attention was given to those other aspects, involving other parts of Europe and the Middle East, for it is the outcome of the war in those spheres, and the self-seeking, diplomatic manoeuvering, the persistent imperial ambitions of all the main players that have created today’s ever-more insoluble crises, particularly in the Middle East. We are still led to believe, at least in much of the English-speaking world, that the war was all about Gallipoli and parts of the Western Front.

However, this evening’s music was concerned mainly with the war’s impact on individual people – soldiers and their families.  Not just with an amorphous ‘loss of life’ and ‘national tragedy’.

In Memoriam Rupert Brooke
It began with a string composition by one Frederick Septimus Kelly, an Australian, who was with his friend Rupert Brooke when he died and was buried on the Greek Island of Skyros. It was rather a moving piece, echoing some of the music of the early 20th century, Vaughan Williams, perhaps Elgar: pastoral, warm and reflective. An elegiac viola melody in the middle lent it a certain strength. It achieved its purpose very well, as McKeich led the orchestra through a sympathetic, unaffected though expressive performance.

Butterworth
George Butterworth, who was killed, with Kelly, at the Somme in 1916, has become a more famous name and his better-known A Shropshire Lad, for full orchestra, demonstrated a gift that might have had him rated with Bantock, Ireland, Moeran or York Bowen, perhaps even in the class of Holst, Howells or Vaughan Williams if he’d lived.

It begins in the character of Butterworth’s lovely The Banks of Green Willow, with strings and solo entries from clarinet, bassoon and cor anglais and follows an emotional path that reflects much of the pervasive emotion of Housman’s poems. In the middle section it expands notably with heavier brass and its pastoral charm is lost. This rather vivid section might have felt a little at odds with the character of many of the poems, though, admittedly, many in the big collection extend far beyond nostalgia and the English countryside, and are primarily reflections on mortality, on the loss of young lives in war (though of course they were published 20 years before the First World War): nevertheless, the rather extravert brass felt a shade too literal and specific.

Harris: Second Symphony
The major work was Ross Harris’s 2nd symphony. Like all his symphonies, this was commissioned and premiered by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, in 2006. It has rather surprised me that neither Wellington-based orchestra has commissioned a symphony from this major Wellington composer, as one after another has been written for Auckland; this one has even had a second playing in Auckland. (His sixth is scheduled for APO performance later this year). And I don’t think any have even been performed here; if so, this was a momentous occasion – the first Harris symphony to be played in Wellington.

This was one of the earlier collaborations between poet Vincent O’Sullivan and Ross Harris. Though cast in four movements, and obviously with an important orchestral element, it could as well be described as a song-cycle, as a symphony. There are eight stanzas, distributed through the four movements.

It tells a story, based on a newspaper report, of a young soldier in France, falling in love with a local girl, deserting, having a brief love, and coming to a sad, predictable end. I suppose it’s superfluous to say it reminds me of M K Joseph’s poignant novel, A Soldier’s Tale.

On stage was a large orchestra including large percussion, with tubular bells, though just double winds, under conductor Hamish McKeich who confirmed quickly his commanding grasp of the score and delivered a taut, dramatic and very moving performance.

Also on stage is Madeleine Pierard who sings the poetry through all the movements, taking first the soldier’s, then the French girl’s roles. It’s vividly descriptive music, starting in hushed strings, cor anglais, interrupted shockingly with mighty bass drum, violent brass, with military sounds, ironic marches; while the poem speaks soon of dreamy advances through poppy fields, with flashes of soldiers’ graves and snow and the sudden awakenings to reality. Pierard’s earthy, penetrating soprano kept the story anchored to real people and their emotional crisis, and even to their brief ecstasy.

The second movement deals with the love story, and the music opens in spell-binding unreality, in dread presentiment of its brief span, employing a limited tonal range, a momentary, almost subliminal echo of one of the Sings Harry songs. There were moments when the music seemed to strive too hard to reflect the words, though it was still the music that made the deepest impact, sometimes heart-stoppingly awful; so it was in the third movement where the violence of the soldier’s capture and killing are dealt with swiftly, violently, and the orchestral tumult is all that’s needed to understand.

In the fourth movement, poem 7, tubular bells, clarinet, strings, express the tragedy and the girl’s grief, perhaps better than the clarity of words can ever do. Though the last stanza, “Who, who is this young man…” with a cello solo accompanying the girl’s stricken loss, and her slow walking from the stage, to the fading music, was inevitably the most affecting part of the composition. The last lines are sung from back stage, as if from the grave.

Predictably, there were many empty seats, though the audience responded enthusiastically to soprano, conductor and orchestra, as well as to poet and composer who filed onto the stage.

 

After fifty-seven years of public neglect – Farquhar’s First Symphony from the NZSM and Ken Young

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
RARITIES AND ROMANCE

Martin Riseley (violin)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

MOZART – Overture “The Magic Flute”
BEETHOVEN – Romance for Violin and Orchestra in G Major
FAURE – Masques et Bergamasques
YOUNG – In Memoriam David Farquhar
FARQUHAR – Symphony No.1

Basilica of the Sacred Heart
Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 14th April 2016

At last! – the drought has been broken! – the well has been newly dug! – and the field has been freshly ploughed! So, just what, you’re bemusedly thinking, am I on about this time round? I’ll tell you! – David Farquhar’s First Symphony, performed only once previously in concert in 1959, has finally received its SECOND public performance! – that makes, by my reckoning, fifty-seven years of shameful, and never-to-be-restored neglect! Well, there’s always a “better-late-than-never” component to this sort of thing, provided that whatever it is that’s been neglected actually delivers the goods when given the chance.

That chance was given the work in truly resplendent fashion by maestro Ken Young and his redoubtable band of heroes in the NZ School of Music Orchestra at Wellington’s Sacred Heart Basilica in Hill St, last Thursday evening. Farquhar’s Symphony shared the programme with several other items, in the first half an overture (Mozart’s Magic Flute), a miniature concertante work (Beethoven’s Second Romance for Violin and Orchestra) and a suite of incidental pieces by Gabriel Faure (Masques et Bergamasques). Then, after the interval the symphony was appropriately prefaced by a work for brass ensemble titled In Memoriam David Farquhar, one written by Ken Young in 2007 shortly after the composer’s death.

The effect of all of this was to judiciously “prepare the way” for the symphony – first came the overture whose mix of gravitas, festivity and fun shook and stirred all of the venue’s ambiences to perfection, followed by the violin-and-orchestra piece which delightfully brought out solo and ripieno textures to maximum effect. Though I confess to finding Faure’s Masques et Bergamasques of lesser interest than I did its first-half companions, I was still grateful for the opportunity of hearing something not often performed in the concert-hall. The most startling precursor to the symphony was, however, the In Memoriam David Farquhar piece, one which made a splendidly sombre and valedictory impression. So, when the time came to begin the symphony, our ears were nicely primed for what was to follow.

A few comments regarding the performances – I enjoyed the rhythmic “snap” of the chording at the very opening of the Mozart Overture, and the beautiful hues of both the wind and brass amid the string figurations, leading to the allegro – the conductor’s luftpause caught some of the players on the hop at the start, but things soon settled down, with crisp ensemble and plenty of ear-catching dynamic variation from the players. The voices tumbled over one another nicely throughout the “second-half” exchanges, and the trombones and timpani made the most of their moments towards the end – lovely playing.

Violinist Martin Riseley seemed to my ears a shade tense at the very beginning of the Beethoven Romance, his phrasing a little too tightly-wound for comfort – his second entry seemed to unwind the double-stopping rather more warmly and relaxedly, and the orchestra replied beautifully, the horns sounding particularly mellifluous. I enjoyed the capriciousness of the alternating “gypsy” episode, the violin-playing sweetly leading things back to the reprise of the opening, the music none the worse for its little romantic “adventure”.

Faure’s divertissement Masques et Bergamasques (“Maskers and Revellers”) originally included a piece that became one of his most well-known works, the Pavane, but it was published separately – the suite from the original 1919 stage work consists of just four movements, three of which come from a long-abandoned (1869) symphony, and one, the Pastorale, newly composed. We heard a bright, perky Overture, a limpid, atmospheric Minuet, with a grandly ceremonial Trio, a vigorous, high-stepping Gavotte also sporting a Trio, one with a beautiful melody, and finally a Pastorale, the only newly-composed piece, a flowing tune on strings nicely augmented by winds, followed by piquant phrases suggesting touches of melancholy. I thought it all pleasant enough without being greatly memorable.

Not so Ken Young’s In Memoriam David Farquhar, a piece for brass ensemble which immediately struck a deep and richly resonant vein of serious intent, while avoiding sentimentality. Trumpets took the themes to begin with then allowed the trombones some glory, the music featuring some well-rounded solos from both instruments. Composer Ken Young sought our pardon at presenting a piece of his own music at the concert, though he was forgiven readily under the circumstances. He also introduced the Symphony, making no secret of his admiration for and belief in the work as one of the most significant pieces of orchestral music to come out of this country.

Right from the opening bars of the work one sensed the purpose and focus of the sounds coming from the players, who were obviously inspired by the occasion – the opening phrase’s wonderfully angular and whimsical falling fifth/rising seventh combination here immediately opened up the music’s vistas to a range of possibilities, such as a delicious brass fanfare which the strings took over and tossed around. Then the orchestra suddenly lurched into a syncopated, upwardly progressive theme which galvanizes the music’s trajectories, the brass taking their cue, and excitedly giving the theme a Holst-like welcome.

Ken Young imbued each of these ideas with plenty of thrust and accent, the angularities building up the music to its last great climax, and to a kind of breakthrough into a strange and resonant ambient realm – a magical moment, as if one had suddenly looked up from some all-engrossing preoccupation and discovered that it was already evening. The players, after piling on their energies in layers, beautifully enabled a kind of glowing, almost crepuscular atmosphere, a territory to where the music was obviously headed, the opening angular theme now sounding like a bugle call heralding a fulfilled purpose.

To the second movement, now, and a world of magical and disconcerting transformations – ghostly shivers, mutterings and dry-as-dust timpani at the outset suddenly were swept up by toccata-like chattering fanfares which disconcertingly broke into dance mode a la commedia dell’arte, the dancers laughingly and mockingly circumventing the phantom figures of the opening, who eventually banded together and hoarsely cried “Enough!”

Here, Young and his musicians found exactly the right blend of mystery and sharp-edged attack which this music required to “speak” and work its enchantment. They brought off episode after episode with great aplomb, especially the sequence involving the Wagner-like brasses and chattering winds which conjured up Battle-of-Britain-like scenes, Spitfires and Hurricanes bursting though the clouds like avenging Valkyries. Again the commedia dell’arte dancers appeared, with their ironic laughter echoing down the music’s passageways, putting the portentous brasses to flight with a final flourish – a sequence of delicious ironies and enigmas, the orchestral writing masterly in every way.

Equally heroic was the orchestra’s full-blooded response to the finale’s tremendous “land uplifted high” gestures and textures, right from the moment the trumpet sounded the “call” to action. No more epic and heroic orchestral writing can be found in a home-grown orchestral work than in this movement, and after a trenchant ascent with the struggle made manifest every step of the way we were taken to the heights, and left there in wonderment at the place we’d reached and the wide-reaching range and scope of the journey.

I felt at the piece’s conclusion (a deeply-felt silence grew most movingly out of the final bars) that no more thrilling and satisfying realization of this long-neglected and deservedly relished work could have been achieved than here. Very great honour to Ken Young and to the musicians of the NZSM Orchestra, who enabled this music to come to life once more with the kind of commitment and sense of adventure and occasion that would have gladdened the composer’s heart.

Aroha Quartet revisits Waikanae Music Society with polished, well-balanced programme

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Waikanae Music Society

Aroha String Quartet (Haihong Liu and Simeon Broom, violins; Zhongxian Jin, viola; Robert Ibell, cello)

Haydn: String Quartet in G, Op.33 no.5
Piazzolla: Tango ballet suite
Anthony Ritchie: Whakatipua
Mendelssohn: String Quartet no.6 in F minor, Op.80

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday, 10 April 2016, 2.30pm

It is always a pleasure to hear the Aroha String Quartet and their varied programmes.

The Haydn quartet had a rather sotto voce commencement; the movement was described in the programme notes as a greeting, such as ‘how do you do’. All of Haydn’s jollity and wit were present.

The second movement was enchanting, with a chirpy ending that brought chuckles from the audience. The scherzo was full of changes and interruptions, while its trio was a graceful contrast, with an abrupt ending. The final movement featured a dotted rhythm, and appeared to be a slow dance with variations. It provided a good precursor to the dances to follow.

The sections of Piazzolla’s composition had movement titles, but it was not always apparent where one ended and another began. In a radio interview, Robert Ibell said that he was not aware of the work having been played in New Zealand before; they had difficulty because the supplier of the scores sent only a full score. The parts arrived only days before the performance. So in the meantime they had to cut, copy and paste the full score to create their individual scores.

Contrasting vigorous and dreamlike passages were features of Titulos (Introduction) and elsewhere. Throughout, there was a great variety of writing and of instrumental sounds, all having plenty of individual input. The other sections were: La calle (The Street), Encuentro/Olvido (Encounter/Forgetfulness), Cabaret, Soledad (Solitude), and La calle, again.

There were some great sounds from the viola. A review of a CD of the work found through Google states: ‘The work alternates between vibrant and forceful passages that recall ‘The Rite of Spring’ by Stravinsky and a passionate melancholy for the slower movements. … the “Cabaret” movement … comes closest to mirroring pure tango music.’ The work exemplified the composer’s fusion of tango music with that of the Western classical tradition. One could find echoes of Haydn here, although the music was written only 60 years ago.

Balmy passages quickly gave way to more turbulent ones. As noted by the website, some movements are more dance-like than others. It was remarked to me in the interval that the Aroha Quartet was a little too restrained for this music; bandoneóns would have been more spirited, abandoned and rambunctious.

Anthony Ritchie’s work opened with the most gorgeous sounds, followed by a lilting, dance-like section. Each instrument was distinctive in its part, but when blend was required, it was there. Some parts were modal in tonality, with hints of Douglas Lilburn’s music present.

Mendelssohn’s final string quartet has a spooky opening, the remainder of that movement alternating ‘between rage and lamentation’ as the programme note said, the whole quartet being influenced by his sorrow at the recent sudden death of his sister, Fanny. The melodic invention for which Mendelssohn is noted was ever-present, even lushness of expression, but also a new anger, anguish and tension brought out particularly in the second movement. Quiet passages served to point up this tension.

The adagio recalled some of Mendelssohn’s other slow movements, but its intensity was much greater. I detected Schumann-like elements. The first violinist in particular judged skilfully the rendering of the subtle nuances of this movement, but all played stunningly well. At times there were the most delicate touches; the movement had a peaceful end. Not so the finale last movement. There were solemn, even bitter chords, but also moments of calm contemplation, that soon changed to rapid declamation – perhaps even rejection – with an almost furious ending.

 

It was a most enjoyable concert, with a variety of interesting and approachable music, beautifully played.