Tag: New Zealand music

Enterprising concert of New Zealand music at St Andrew’s lunchtime

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

 New Zealand Music for Woodwind: Ken Wilson, John Elmsly, Douglas Lilburn, Natalie Hunt, Ben Hoadley, Jeremy Mayall, Anthony Ritchie

Peter Dykes (oboe), Deborah Rawson and Peter Scholes (clarinets), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), Reuben Chin (saxophones), Kirsten Robertson (piano)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 16 March 2016, 12.15pm

An annual series of New Zealand Music for Woodwind, instigated by Ben Hoadley, had its eighth iteration with this concert. The enterprise and enthusiasm of wind players in introducing the audience to both new and older woodwind works by New Zealand composers is to be commended.

The occasion made for an interesting programme. Sadly, due to another commitment, I missed the first item, Ken Wilson’s Duo for clarinet and bassoon; doubly sad because Ken was a former neighbour, and good friend. I know from his widow that this work was recently recorded by today’s players, Peter Scholes and Ben Hoadley, in Auckland. Such was Ken’s modesty that I didn’t know until reading today’s programme note that he had a doctoral degree in composition from Indiana University, though I knew he had studied there.

Next we heard a premiere performance, one of three to which we were treated. This was an extraordinary work, by John Elmsly, currently Creative New Zealand/Jack C. Richards Composer-in-Residence at the New Zealand School of Music. He wrote One mouth, two voices in collaboration with brilliant young saxophonist Reuben Chin, currently undertaking post-graduate study at NZSM.

The work required Chin to play both soprano and alto saxophones at the same time. There were several short sections of the two saxophones being played, described in the programme note by Elmsly as the ‘choruses’, interspersed with ‘verses’ played alternately on the solo instruments.

Such was the complexity that Chin needed the score to be on three music-stands – he had no spare hands for turning pages! According to the programme note, ‘the party trick’ of playing both instruments simultaneously is not unknown, but it seems an astonishing feat. Coupling both instruments is interesting, but of course, there is a limit as to what notes can be played on each instrument, with only one hand apiece.

There were a lot of effects in the piece, but also fine melodic sequences. The solos exhibited exemplary playing, and delicious soft passages on both instruments. This contrasted with the almost raucous quality of their loud notes. The ‘choruses’ tended to be loud, and featured standard chords, as required by the limited notes available. It was an effective work, well worth hearing again.

A short and sweet Canon for two clarinets by Douglas Lilburn followed. It was notable for attractive interweaving of the two instruments. Two “Clarinet Duets in Red and Black”, Ladybug and Muchacho (Spanish for servant or maid), by young Wellington composer Natalie Hunt, a clarinettist herself, were really delightful. The first of the two short pieces was a wonderful dance for the insect (ladybird, if you prefer). One could see the insect hopping and flying around in what seemed a random fashion. The second was a premiere performance, and revealed superb writing for the instrument, bringing out its sonority and lyrical qualities in a very satisfying way. Played by two leading clarinettists, the pieces were a pleasure to hear.

Today’s bassoonist also composes; Ben Hoadley’s brief duet for two clarinets, was lively and fun, titled 10.10.10. To an organist that reads like the metre of a hymn tune, but in fact it was inspired by the film documentary One Day on Earth, filmed over a single 24-hour period in every country, on 10 October 2010.

Jeremy Mayall, recently Mozart Fellow at Otago University and now teaching at the Waikato Institute of Technology, wrote The Effect of Bundled Sticks on Sound for bassoon and effects pedals, which also had its premiere at this concert (the bassoon is the bundle of sticks). Ben Hoadley’s expertise as a bassoonist brought out the beauty of the instrument. I was not sure that the pedal effects (recorded sound, some of it recorded live from the instrument) added to the attractiveness, though they did to the volume and resonance, not to mention adding sundry extraordinary extraneous noises. The composer’s note says ‘…at its essence this piece is an exploration of sound’.

The final work (that made the concert rather too long) was Anthony Ritchie’s Sonata for oboe and piano. An energetic allegro vivace opened the work, with both Peter Dykes (NZSO associate principal oboe) and pianist Kirsten Robertson (née Simpson) all over the place on their instruments, at considerable speed. Its spiky changes were spirited and exciting. The adagio middle section is described in the programme note as ‘featuring a soulful oboe melody’, though to me, the oboe’s biting tone, particularly in the St. Andrew’s acoustic, belied this description somewhat, especially if auditorily compared with the saxophone. It was a tuneful sequence, though mostly (as with the rest of the sonata) fairly loud. The last section, maestoso-mesto-allegro, was musically diverse, but to me became a bit tedious with repetitions; I thought shorter would be more satisfying.

It was marvellous to have a group of such expert players all performing in one concert, and to hear new and not-so-new New Zealand music.

Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies – resonant and moving at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Festival 2016 presents:
RELICT FURIES
Music by Gareth Farr
Libretto by Paul Horan

Strings of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)

also:
ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for Strings Op.47
SCULTHORPE – Sonata for Strings No.3 (from String Quartet No.11 “Jabiru Dreaming”) – 1. Deciso  2.Liberamente – Estatico
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,

Tuesday 15th March, 2016

This concert at the Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul all but replicated the programme of an Edinburgh Festival Concert last year, performed on the 26th August at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, and featuring the premiere of Gareth Farr’s work Relict Furies. On that occasion the Scottish Ensemble was joined by well-known mezzo soprano Sarah Connolly in the performance of Farr’s piece, to great critical acclaim: – “a heart-stabbing evocation of the First World War” proclaimed one notice, while another read “fantastic music….permeated with breathtaking orchestration….” Farr’s work was a joint commission by the Edinburgh and New Zealand International Arts Festivals.

Last night Wellington heard the New Zealand premiere of Farr’s Relict Furies, in a programme which featured the strings of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  playing (as was done in Edinburgh) music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Sculthorpe (the Scots, one noted, had cannily treated themselves to a truly resplendent bonus, that of Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra.). These works, it might be guessed by now, all feature string orchestras divided in some way, which certainly made for fascinating and ear-catching results throughout.

The programme’s centre-piece was, of course, Gareth Farr’s work – its title Relict Furies, came from the librettist Paul Horan, who attributed the reference to his mother’s influence. He remembered how she hated the use of the word “relict”, which meant “widow” – so that it seemed the word was employed here as a kind of “confrontation” of response ranged against situation, especially in the context of women’s writings of the period, and about the effects of the war.

The poetry by Paul Horan I found very moving, but no more than I did Gareth Farr’s incredibly receptive and sensitive identification with the words throughout. Right from the opening I was caught up in feelings engendered by those deep tones, still, rich and lovely. The first song “Onward” spoke of the conflict between public duty and private feelings, how the door dividing the two represented a welcome barrier between the cheering crowd and the privacy of life and love, and how that barrier was opened to allow the two worlds to fatally mingle.

Here were deep string tones redolent of the love between husband and wife, and the jarring counter-harmonies of the upper strings representing the strident tones of the cheering crowd – an impasse that was boldly negated in a spirit of adventure, but was, of course, to go horribly wrong, with jabbing accents attaching the music’s flowing lines as the beginning of the second song taking us right into the marrow of things.  Those eerie string harmonies hovering about the singer’s words “Tomorrow I wear my wedding shoes to your funeral….I’ll be on display on the lip of your grave…” contained echoes of the Last Post, magical and ghostly at one and the same time, as if the tragedy of death had a kind of inevitability.

Farr’s beautiful handling of the work’s contrasts confronted us with impassioned outbursts such as – “I’ll be on my own on the lip of your grave…” leading to the bleak ostinato-led transition into the third song “Remains”, a sequence which burgeoned in feeling towards the outburst at “White, dark terror”, and then exhaustedly subsiding into a wasteland of on-going resonance of loss. I particularly loved the string-writing at the work’s very end – the woman sung about “an unpitied life, picking up where we never started”, as the two orchestral halves magically evoked both the living and the dead, and kind of wreathed them all around with contrasting tones and timbres – as if the real and “ghost” worlds were linked for a while by memory and evocation…..

In general I was enraptured by the score – I thought the writing for the two sections of the strings was outstanding – the opening division of “low” and high tomes between the two groups added to the sense of dislocation and menace and impending doom. The balance between the two was never excessive or lop-sided, so that the “layered” aspect of the experience of loss, bereavement and widowhood was characterized as profound and affecting without being over-wrought and destructive.

Margaret Medlyn, called in to sing at short notice, due to another performer’s indisposition, gave a splendidly committed and impassioned performance, movingly tempered in places by a rapt sensitivity. The ample acoustic of the cathedral made it difficult for us to follow her exact words at moments of great agitation, but the sense of anguish was palpably conveyed.

As for the other pieces, I though both the Sculthorpe and the Vaughan Williams came off most successfully. The Sculthorpe Sonata was a string orchestra version of a string quartet, made in 1994, one called “Jabiru Dreaming”, in two movements, whose titles are Deciso and Estatico. This work is an entrancing depiction of the Australian outback, and uses different string-playing techniques to recreate indigenous sounds – col legno effects that bring to mind tribalistic rituals involving stick games and ceremonial dancing, and rapid repeated glissandi in the violins to bring to mind birdsong – the string-writing had a wonderfully outdoor atmosphere that put me in mind of Sibelius’s “saga” music in places, and later on, Copland’s “new land” evocations.

The Vaughan Williams work was superbly played, especially the haunted dialogues between the two string orchestras. This was a work where the ample acoustic of the cathedral worked almost totally in the music’s favour. The lines had a glow, a halo of intensity around them and a resonance that unholstered the on-going atmospheres of the work in a timeless kind of way, so that we were able to forget ourselves and luxuriate in these sounds. Throughout this and in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for strings, the solo playing was superb, the give-and-take between the principals of the orchestra a delight.

I thought the work that came off least well was the Elgar, mainly because of the acoustic of the cathedral. Parts of the work again glowed with a refulgent beauty – the sequences which have come to be known as the “Welsh Tune” were all simply ravishingly done – but unfortunately the quicker parts of the work turned to confusion all too readily, especially the central fugue of the work. It might have been better in this context had more deliberate, more rhythmically-pointed tempo been chosen in places (I have heard such performances, and if directed with enough focus and intensity they can work brilliantly). Which leads me to state that this was the work, I think, which most missed the absence of a conductor, the guiding hand and ear which would have enabled more clarity to the textures and a bit more shape to the overall design of the performance – in places I wanted keener attention to phrasing, and less reliance on speed (inappropriate in the cathedral’s potentially treacherous acoustic)…….

But it’s for the Farr work that this concert will be most readily remembered – one that I’m sure we won’t have heard the last of. I for one would welcome the chance to hear it again and enjoy those moments of wide-ranging intensity in the context of a beautifully-constructed whole.

Brass Poppies – ordinary people at war

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Festival 2016 presents:
BRASS POPPIES (Ross Harris – music / Vincent O’Sullivan – libretto)

James Egglestone (William Malone)
Sarah Court (Mrs Malone)
Robert Tucker ( Tommo)
Anna Leese (Mary / Luck)
Jonathan Eyers (Billy)
Madison Nonoa (Joyce)
Wade Kernot (Fred)
Mary Newman-Pound (Lucy)
Andrew Glover (Turk/Patriot)
Benjamin Mitchell, Taniora Rangi Motutere (dancers)

Jonathan Alver (director)
Maaka Pepene (choreographer)
Jon Baxter (AV design)
Jason Morphett (lighting)
Elizabeth Whiting (costuming)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Shed 6, Wellington

Thursday 3rd March 2016

Poet Vincent O’Sullivan and composer Ross Harris have collaborated on no less than eleven words-and-music works since 2002, the most recent being the chamber opera “Brass Poppies”. The work received its premiere at Shed 6 in Wellington last week, and after finishing a four-night season has gone on to Auckland’s Mercury Theatre where it will play for two more nights later this week.

Though the opera was actually completed by O’Sullivan and Harris before their previous Festival presentation Requiem for the Fallen, was given in 2014, it effectively complements the latter. Brass Poppies treats the subject of war and its effect upon people in a remarkably intimate and personalized way. While the Requiem was notable for its diversity of means (string quartet, brass and percussion, various taonga puoro, chamber choir and tenor solo), the opera, though no less telling in its impact on the listener, is more “conventionally” written for voices and chamber ensemble.

Harris commented in an interview beforehand that he thought the work had more in common with Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, rather than with “conventional” opera. It seemed to me that there were a few such influences, consciously or otherwise applied – for example the meeting of the young soldier, Billy and the young girl Joyce at the dance I thought reminiscent of the meeting of the young lovers in “West Side Story” – and the all-pervading dance-rhythms which drove the opening scenes so surely and buoyantly seemed also to me to draw from the composer’s involvement with things like Klezmer music. Particularly affecting was Tatiana Lanchtchikova’s accordion-playing, rhythmic pulsings and harmonic flavorings which conjured up a bitter-sweet ambience that flavoured the whole ensemble’s music-making throughout.

O’Sullivan’s libretto, though an anti-war statement, never thumps a tub, or loads the scenario with suffering or horror of a cathartic kind – his words have the lightest of touches, with everything insinuated or suggested at the start, and stated simply and poetically at the end. And Harris’s music does the same, the lyrical lines and dance rhythms keeping the narrative flow on the move, and maintaining forward movement even when, in places, suggesting the gentlest of  pulsatings amid the silences. And so the sense of tragedy is heightened for us, because the lives and circumstances of the four soldiers are so very like ours, easily identifiable with – and yet somehow the monstrousness of what they and their families are drawn into is conveyed, the “snuffing out” of lives on a hitherto unprecedented scale is numbingly registered.

It’s the kind of thing that Wilfred Owen wrote about in his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” with the words –

“The pallor of girls, brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”

Together at the opera’s beginning, the soldiers and their families (represented by the women) are taken away from the ordinariness of their lives and gradually drawn into different worlds, each replete with remembrances of and longings for what was and might be again – at the beginning we heard rhetorical-sounding statements, deeply-felt but already with a hollow ring, such as  “This is what we’re fighting for”, and similarly-felt exchanges between the couples “What we told each other we remember”. When parted, the dialogues (via letters) took on the poignancy of  separation and the mutually-shared hope that “luck” would keep the men company and keep them safe, a spirit characterized by one of the women as a “presence” circulating among the men at Gallipoli.

Such sentiments were, of course, lump-in-the-throat in effect, as were the longings expressed for a “return to what was”‘ on both sides. One husband-and-wife exchange was shared by both singers, one taking over the words of the letter from the other; while another soldier’s letter recalled memories of walking with his girl in orchards filled with apples – he then made reference to walking under a different kind of orchard, those of the stars overhead at Gallpoli. It was all very heartfelt on a deeply personal and individual scale, with hopes, fears, sorrows and resignation gently brought together in a wholly natural way.

A jingoistic note was expressed by a British Empire figure repeating vainglorious cliches of valour and sacrifice, set against verses whose words underlined the cynicism of the “victory” rhetoric, as did the ditty about the Kings “in their counting houses, counting out their money”, making something fairytale-like from out of the turmoil and tragedy. All of this struck such hollow resonances as the soldiers, all having been killed by this time, countered these sentiments by announcing  the grim finality of their position with the words “we’re not likely to change our minds as the grass keeps growing” – and later, commenting on “the deep snows of forgetting”. Emotions ran in parallel, the women in mourning and the shades of the soldiers (sightless to their bereaved partners) in lament for what has been lost, with the women singing of the subsequent evenings as “silent as a shattered gun”. The quiet interlocking of thought and emotion, and the avoidance of overt, visceral grief gives oceans of realm for  individual feeling to well up and flood the spaces, so that we in the audience were overcome with the cruel emptiness of it all, on both sides.

Describing his words for the libretto as “only the scaffolding for something bigger” O’Sullivan paid tribute to his collaborator’s music, though to this listener’s ears what came across was a tapestried amalgam of words and music, wrought  out of similar impulses. The music, as strongly as did the words, told us who these people were – ordinary people being asked to go and perform in extraordinary situations. So Harris’s music was catchy and recognizable and readily identifiable – period pieces, such as waltzes, marches and other different dance-forms, the music of the people, so to speak. The rhythmic verve of the dance was physical in its impact, and its sudden changes of metre both ironic and volatile in its effect. I thought I heard those Klezmer touches on various occasions, the genre’s intrinsic bitter-sweet ambiences here very much to the point.

Director Jonathan Alver’s staging of the work made creative theatrical use of the ostensibly unpromising Shed 6 venue. I hadn’t heard any live music there previously, so my first reaction to encountering what seemed to be such “barn-of-a-place” surroundings was of dismay – fortunately, these concerns weren’t realized in performance. The clarity of both vocal and instrumental lines was, I thought,  exemplary, though the surtitles played their part in clarifying lines throughout the more concerted singing passages. Balance between singers and instrumentalists seemed well-nigh perfect, with conductor and players being visible “on stage” throughout, over to one side rather than down in a pit of any kind – part of the work’s choreography of movement.

The production wasn’t “in the round” as the Requiem of two years ago had been in Wellington Cathedral – this was more conventionally staged, with singers and dancers appearing on a stage via entrances diagonally placed between column-like walls on which were projected various scenes and scenarios. In this way the singers and dancers seemed to come in from the midst of whatever scheme was projected onto the surfaces of the columns, and in places return to them via their exits, which I thought worked beautifully as an idea – no more poignantly than when the soldiers took their leave of their women through exits framed by contemporary photographs of freshly-enlisted men in uniform marching down Lambton Quay in Wellington. Besides the four couples and the Turkish figure / British patriot character, there were also two sprite-like dancers whose movements expressed both gentleness and strength, delicacy and vigour, the latter sometimes combatative and warlike. Costumes were simple – khaki uniforms for the men, period dresses for the women, as expected. After the soldiers were each killed they remained as “presences” on stage, haunting their women, though not being able to communicate – very simple and powerful.

This was very much an ensemble opera, though with a number of stand-out vocal moments for individual voices. The conversations among the characters were as significant as were the individual soliloquies, each acting as a foil for the other, though the solo sequences tended to “carry” the more profound utterances. The couples interacted with admirable ease and fluency, each with a particular character, from the tremulousness of the two youngsters, Joyce (Madison Nonoa) and Billy (Jonathan Eyres), to the no-nonsense working-class codes and understandings used by Fred (Wade Kernot) and Lucy (Mary Newman-Pound). Australian tenor James Egglestone as Captain William Malone relished his occasional stentorian moments, though most memorable was his tender interaction with his wife (Sara Court), particularly during the reading of a letter home, the husband taking over from the wife halfway through with the reading  – it was all a perfectly-tailored piece of give-and-take.

Robert Tucker (as Tommo) beautifully put across his letter/song which recalled memories of the apple orchard where he courted Mary (Anna Leese), and making the most of his declaration of surprise and resignation at looking upwards at a different kind of orchard at Anzac Cove – the night sky. As for Anna Leese, her strong-willed Mary, vigorous and feisty, “morphed” this character at one point in the story with Lady Luck, a female personification of good fortune, taking it upon herself to circulate among the Allied soldiers, singing about the “mantel of luck”, in between wordless chantings, everything beautifully and lyrically sounded. Again, one got the sense of the impact made on individuals, with Mary’s description of an excursion up to Brooklyn an almost Janus-faced aspect of her “Luck” persona by association – things that ordinary men and women would think of and hold onto in extraordinary situations, and expressed in a naturalistic context. FInally, Andrew Glover made the most of his cameo-like opportunities as the ghost-like Turkish soldier and the British patriot, enigmatic figures at opposite spectrum-ends.

Every instrumental sound was vividly realized by the Stroma Ensemble under Hamish McKeich’s direction – the musical realizations played their part in enhancing the production’s consistently underplayed yet powerful inner resonances. It’s one whose message will continue to resound, and repay revisiting.

Worlds brought more closely together – the Miyata-Yoshimura-Suzuki Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music NZ and the New Zealand Festival present:
MIYATA-YOSHIMURA-SUZUKI TRIO
Music from Japan and New Zealand

Mayumi Miyata (shō)
Nanae Yoshimura (koto)
Tosiya Suzuki (recorder)

CHRIS GENDALL – Choruses
OSAMU KAWAKAMI – Phoenix Chicken
SAMUEL HOLLOWAY – Mono
TOSHIO HOSOKAWA – Bird Fragments 111b
DYLAN LARDELLI – Retracing

TRADITIONAL – Banshiki no Choshi (for shō)
Tsuru no Sugomori (Nesting of Cranes – solo recorder)
Chidori no Kyoku (for koto and voice)

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

Sunday 28th February, 2016

For a time it seemed as though the world had realigned its meridian intersects and taken St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace and its occupants north of the equator to somewhere in Japan. Woven into this enchanted web of things were a trio of musicians, a clutch of composers and a spell-bound audience, united for a brief time to wondrous and magical effect by means of exotic strains and realizations, wrought by the performers. The latter were inspired by both traditional work and present-day creativity, performing a programme of music with age-old folk-music presented side-by-side with new compositions from both Japanese and New Zealand composers.

Not for these musicians a performing world of merely antiquities, featuring only museum pieces or cultural artifacts from bygone ages – the trio has encouraged living composers to write for their instrumental combinations as well as for the solo instruments – a glance at a list of composers who have worked with these musicians indicates their involvement in music-making as a living and creative tradition, besides paying homage to the great works of the past.

All of this would be of specialist interest only, were not the actual sounds created by the instruments in this ensemble of such beauty, poignancy and atmosphere. Whether playing together or individually, the sounds and timbres brought with them such strongly-flavoured and sharply-focused evocations as to hold our attentions in thrall for timeless durations. The concert’s opening took us straight to such a sound-world, by way of Mayumai Miyata’s playing of the shō, a traditional Japanese mouth-organ, the musician giving us a traditional work, Banshiki no Chosi.

I found the listening experience arresting, if at first a little disconcerting through not being able to clearly see the player’s face (I can’t think of another instrument that’s similarly designed – the mouthpiece is at the bottom, so that the instrument’s “body”, when held up to play, almost completely obscures the player’s facial expression and any movement associated with the physical act of breathing. Still the strains made by the instrument are so ethereal and unworldly, that this “disembodied” effect given by the player isn’t inappropriate. The timbres were not unlike the highest notes of an organ played softly and sustained for great, long-breathed periods of utter calm and serenity.

Chris Gendall’s piece Choruses, which followed, was anything but serene, resembling choruses of  wild things uttering long-drawn cries, punctuated by excitable flurries of energy. The shō player.Mayumai Miyata had exchanged her instrument for a lighter, wood-grained affair, though I couldn’t discern a difference in sound-quality to that of the previous item – the instrument exhibited the same kinds of ethereal ambiences, with many variations of intensity.  I had difficulty observing the recorder-player, Tosiya Suzuki, as the composer, (Chris Gendall, who was conducting) kept getting in the way, though the sounds made by the player via his instrument certainly had a mournful and volatile impact upon the whole.

No such impediment obscured my view of the koto player, Nanae Yoshimura, who coaxed from her instrument a range and depth of expression which I found remarkable, not only in the music’s more forceful sequences, but in the sustaining resonance of the lower timbres. The music seemed to me to set different time-frames together, as if they were warring relativities – as with peace and war, calm and tumult, chaos and clarity, we experienced through the music a series of “altered states” which left its impression upon us long after the sounds had ceased. Each of the instruments contributed to the contrasting effect of these opposing realities, a point from a different view, or state of mind, one that left this listener more-than-usually sensitized to disruptive potentialities!

The trio again took the stage to perform Osamu Kawakami’s somewhat disconcertingly titled work Phoenix Chicken – the only clue to this mystery was the equally enigmatic comment in the composer’s printed biographical note: – “Kawakami is deeply interested in living creatures, and many of his works (including Phoenix Chicken) have been titled after them”. Tosiya Suzuki had exchanged his flute-like recorder for one of the largest I had ever encountered – whether a great bass, or sub-great-bass, contra bass, or sub-contra bass I didn’t know, but it impressed with its looks alone, and it made a splendid noise!

How helpful the Phoenix Chicken title was for the listener I wouldn’t have liked to have guessed at in general – perhaps some contextual reference of which I remained blissfully aware! To me the piece seemed to deal with different kinds of rhythmic complexities and tensions, building them up through interaction and then dissipating them, the recorder augmenting the textures with various kinds of bird calls, gurgling  and chuckling, as if pursuing a kind of separate internal rhythmic pulse. The koto mused over melodic figures in a cimbalon-like way, varying the figurations beautifully with strummed chords augmented by interjections from the shō, a texture through which the recorder lurched and strutted like some kind of living creature, the music’s last few measures resembling some kind of poultrified climax!

Birds of a different kind of feather then glided gently into our ambient sensibilities with the magically-distanced beginning of the folk-inspired Tsuru no Sugomori (“Nesting of Cranes”), Tosiya Suzuki here exchanging his hookah-like contraption for a recorder about the size of a clarinet. He used this new instrument to convey at once a sense of the spaces into which the birds flew to build their nests, via graceful phrasings and resonant tonguings. The music introduced new calls throughout, including one sounding uncannily to my ears like a quote from Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela”, amid the diametrically different surroundings of the Japanese piece.

A similar kind of spatial experience using a very different harmonic language was provided by Samuel Holloway’s Mono, the music beginning with what seemed like a tentative exploration of a scale and octave, the instruments making their unisons and individual notes like depth-soundings in reverse, pushing gently upwards and outwards as if creating spaces in a void, energizing the inert spaces where there was nothing except the will to receive and to be impregnated with impulses. After establishing some kind of acoustic domain, and pausing to consider how best to proceed, the music then tried some semitone ascents, involving slow repetition of single notes before moving upwards, a fascinating/frustrating/despairing process of laying bare that which silence had hitherto concealed – almost like Michelangelo’s famous slaves slowly emerging from the raw marble, frozen with tremulous wonderment at having been given their freedom in any degree or part.

Toshio Hosokawa used just two instruments to express his work Bird Fragments IIIb, the shō paired with the recorder, enough to evocatively set ground-fowls against a high-fliers! The ethereal tones of the shō at the outset conjured up images of elegance and graceful beauty, until the entry of the recorder’s timbres brought an angular, at times raucous presence to the sound-picture. This intensified with the introduction of a smaller recorder, capable of the most ear-splitting squeals, until the tones of the shō finally prevailed and order of sorts was restored.

With a third traditional piece, Chidori no Kyoku, Nanae Yoshimura demonstrated to us the expressive qualities of the solo koto, a kind of Oriental dulcimer, capable of conveying a vast array of tones, timbres and colours. I was pleasantly surprised to find the piece was actually a song, which Nanae Yoshimura delivered with pleasantly plangent tones, at first activating her instrument with a brief introduction containing a flourish and a short but dignified processional sequence before beginning to sing. The music gave an impression of great depth of melancholy, the player varying the vocal line with the occasional tremolando effect, before breaking into a quicker dance tempo – one might have interpreted the sliding figure at the end as a dry death-rattle or else a strengthening of resolve to dispense with the song and go on throughout life, taking it as it comes.

It was left to Dylan Lardelli and his beautiful work, Retracing, for the ensemble plus a guitar (played by the composer) to conclude the evening’s music. At the beginning the recorder (here, played as if it were a transverse flute) and then the shō breathed on the wind to one another, the guitar adding its voice with a few low notes as the “dialogue of winds”  grew in intensity, before being joined by the softly-strumming koto. Occasionally the recorder and shō made attention-grabbing sounds, goading the guitar and koto into a response, and animating the discourse, a dynamic which all too soon reverted to those half-lit ambiences of the opening. Particularly beautiful were the guitar’s pin-pricks of light gently punctuating the firmament of sound, everything generating a sense of emotion recollected in tranquility.

Was it a kind of re-exploration of youthful impulses? – the gently pulsating sounds seemed to re-evoke memories, but at the same time surrender them to the inexorable tread of time – it was all, at once, beautiful and desolate. Still, one wouldn’t have wanted the afternoon’s music-making to end otherwise, as the musical worlds we were taken into were, for the most part, of such a delicate and fragile nature. In fact they demonstrated something we need to be reminded of occasionally, in this frantic, insistent world we’ve created for ourselves, that simplicity and understatement have a power and resonance all of their own to refresh and renew our human spirits.

Bach Choir hits the Christmas Spot

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir of Wellington presents:
A BABE IS BORN

Traditional Carols
and Christmas music by VICTORIA, DOUGLAS K.MEWS, MESSIAEN,
POULENC, RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT, WHITBOURN and DAQUIN

The Bach Choir of Wellington
Peter de Blois (conductor)
Douglas Mews (organ)

St.Peter’s-on-Willis, Wellington,

Saturday 28th November, 2015

Into the beautifully-appointed spaces of St.Peter-on-Willis’s Church came the Bach Choir, with conductor Peter de Blois and organist Douglas Mews, to perform an inventive and intriguing selection of Christmas music.

Audience participation was definitely on the agenda – at the top of the list of items, and styled as an “audience carol” no less, was “O come, all ye faithful” – which contributed greatly to the concert’s overall ambience, a kind of “all-in this together” feeling, central to the festive season, of course.

Conductor Peter de Blois made an excellent job of facilitating this “coming together” of performers and audience, with an easeful, undemonstrative manner which encouraged rather than bullied people into giving the singing their best shot.

The whole concert was, in fact, rather like a kind of family gathering, most evident during the interval and at the conclusion, with plenty of “mingling” of audience and choir members, as, indeed was the case with the music throughout the afternoon!

Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) left his native Spain at the age of seventeen to study with Palestrina in Italy, remaining there for twenty years while he honed his compositional craft. When only twenty-four he published his first musical anthology, including the motet O Magnum Mysterium, a work which has come to be a favorite of choirs since the revival of interest in Victoria’s music in the twentieth century. Though originally composed for the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ its text unashamedly refers to Christmas, and accordingly suits the last part of the year.

This was a lovely performance, sensitive and ethereal-sounding throughout the opening, the singers judiciously varying the tones and dynamics, delivering a sensitive, contrastingly withdrawn “Beatus Virgo” and thrilling surges of energy for the Alleluias at the work’s end, allowing the music a fantasia-like effect to finish.

A group of Four European carols followed, arranged by Douglas Mews père et fils, lovely realizations of two Italian, one French and one German carol, each of the first three having catchy rhythms somewhat removed from the more “stolid” and four-square aspect of carols I had been brought up with. Having said that, I must admit that the “audience carol” which followed this set was “Angels from the Realms of Glory’ which had us all roller-coastering the “Gloria in excelsis Deo” refrains at the end with great exuberance.

Douglas Mews fils then played Olivier Messiaen’s La Vierge et l’Enfant (The Virgin and Child) from the composer’s La Nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of the Lord) group of organ pieces, an evocative meditation which I found extraordinary in its mystery and wonderment, the composer exploring a plethora of emotions and reactions to the Christ Child’s birth, including the deepest of meditative explorations as well as hope and joy at the “glad tidings” – Douglas Mews’ playing seemed all-enveloping in its trance-like suggestiveness, making me want to listen to the whole set of nine pieces.

Another setting of O Magnum Mysterium came from Francis Poulenc, one of a group of settings, Quatre motets pour le temps le Noël. In this work, we heard beautifully hushed tones at the outset from which came beams of light radiating from the sopranos – the singers did well to “pitch” these exposed entries, which, though repeated later in the piece had more support from the rest of the choir, everything sensitively done.

Our sense of “the ordinary and the fabulous” was nicely blurred by the juxtapositioning of audience carols with the rest of the programme, our rendition of “Away in a Manger” followed as it was by five lovely settings by Richard Rodney Bennett of Christmas texts from earlier times. Interesting to compare two of these (There is no rose, and That Younge Child) with the settings by Britten in his “A Ceremony of Carols” – both of Bennett’s were, I thought more severe and austere in effect than the older composer’s treatment of the texts. The others were slightly more “user-friendly”, especially the lively Susanni, which concluded the set, alternating single-voice and harmonized lines most adroitly and enjoyably. Earlier, the gently canonic Sweet was the song charmed us in a different way, with its lovely “lulla lulla lullaby “adjuncts to each verse.

After we in the audience were again let off the leash via a full-throated “Ding Dong Merrily on High” we were then treated to a short Christmas Cantata by Douglas Mews père, three very different texts most imaginatively treated and, here, securely performed – from the the first, “After the Annuniciation” by Elizabeth Jennings, exploring aspects of the God/Man relationship embodied in the VIrgin Mary’s begetting of Jesus, through a “dance-carol” treatment of an early Spanish text “St Joseph and God’s Mother” (winningly sung and played, here), and finishing on a more serious note with “A Babe is Born”, beginning with what seems like a conventional setting of a 15th Century text, but then interpolating Latin chants and the occasional spoken phrases from individual voices in the choir.

The concert’s second half was take up with a curious work, one by British composer James Whitbourn, a setting of a Latin mass employing carol melodies from various parts of Europe. I must confess to enjoying parts of it more than I did others, finding it hard to rid myself in places of the Christmas associations of the melodies, as if my sensibilities were saying, for whatever reason, that the amalgamation of the Mass text with carol melodies seemed almost improper. (I’m sure I would have been in a minority in this, but there you go!)

There were, by way of confounding my instincts, some gorgeous sequences – the piping organ at the beginning was engagingly folkish, very “out-of-doors”, as was the processional, “Guilô, pran ton tambourin!”, spacious and atmospheric, using the tune “For to us a Child is Born” as a kind of plainchant, the treatment varying choir with a solo voice (very difficult), capped off at the end by the organ, which introduced the “Kyrie”. After this the “Gloria” featured the melody “God rest you, Merry Gentlemen” with a bit of Elgarian swagger, but becoming dance-like at the Gloria’s conclusion, the part-singing at this point very assured and enjoyable to listen to.

We registered and enjoyed “In Dulci Jubilo” at the beginning of the Sanctus, in tandem with great ceremonial swirls of tone from the organ. Atfer this, the “Benedictus” struck a sombre, more reverential note, leading to an organ solo by Louis-Claude Daquin, a piping little tune “Bon Joseph, écoutez-moi” given firstly a dancing variation, then a thunderously resplendent one. The “Agnus Dei” tested the voices, both a solo voice from the choir and the sopranos, with especially cruel high entries towards the piece’s end, though the solo voice was steadfast and pleasing, and was supported most satisfyingly at the piece’s conclusion by a hummed note from the supporting voices.

To sum up, the performances from all concerned resonated most pleasingly with the beauties of the venue and its overall atmosphere – most enjoyable!

Trombone meets harp – the intractable made enjoyable!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

OPPOSITES ATTRACT
Peter Maunder (tenor / alto trombone)
Ingrid Bauer (harp / narrator)

Basta  (1982)              Folke Rabe (1935-)
La Source Op.44                Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912)
Ngarotopounamu (2009)           Peter Maunder (1960-)
Ancient Walls (1990)            Sergiu Natra (1924-)
Three Songs                  Cole Porter (1891-1964)
So in love,
In the Still of the Night,
Begin the Beguine
Henry Humbleton’s holiday        Guy Woolfenden (1937-)
Tarantula (Fourth Mvt. from “The Spiders’ Suite”)     Paul Patterson (1947-)
Intermezzo Op.118 No.2         Johannes Brahms (1823-1897)
Take Five              Paul Desmond (1924-1977)
At Last               Mack Gordon (1904-1959
                            &Harry Warren (1893-1981)

(all arrangements by Peter Maunder)

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

Saturday, 14th November, 2015

I suppose there must be even more outlandish combinations of pairs of musical instruments than trombone and harp playing somewhere else in the world at this very moment, though none would, I think, bring together and reconcile such profound differences more successfully than did Peter Maunder and Ingrid Bauer with their respective instruments.

Each player performed a “solo” at the programme’s beginning, seeming to tease us further with the unlikelihood of the “Opposites Attract” title by emphasizing the specific character of each instrument – the trombone predominantly abrasive, forthright and assertive, and the harp liquid-sounding, limpid-textured and enchantingly atmospheric. How were these two very different personalities ever going to “get on”?

Peter Maunder began with Basta, a piece written in 1982 by Swedish composer Folke Rabe, himself a trombonist as well as a composer, one who writes a good deal for brass instruments. Rabe wrote this piece (the title “basta” means, of couse “Enough!” in Italian) to convey the idea of a messenger arriving to deliver a piece of news and then wanting to hurry away again, the person’s manner conveying a degree of stress and haste and volatility. But, not only did the player seem to want to convey a sense of urgency and impatience – one sensed there was a burning desire to tell listeners about things that gave rise to frustration and woe – so in contrast to the bluster and agitation, there were passages of remarkable introspectiveness,  sustained, chord-like notes producing harmonied effects most remarkably, having a “baring of the soul” effect upon the hearer in places.

No greater contrast with these candidly-expressed volatilities could have been presented than with Alphonse Hasselmans’ La Source, Ingrid Bauer making the most of the characteristics that we all associate with the harp – magic, wonderment, romance and liquid flow – by playing a piece that exploited these qualities in an almost definitive way, the work”s melody supported throughout by a rich tapestry of arpeggiated beauties.

Having thereby demonstrated to us these potential intractabilities, the musicians proceeded to make delightful nonsense of them with a series of musical partnerships that surprised and delighted the ear. For reasons outlined by Peter Maunder, in his excellent and entertaining spoken introductions to the pieces, most of the items in the concert were arrangements, made by Maunder himself. In nearly all instances I thought them highly effective as presentations, and of course their delivery, in the hands of these skilled players, was well-nigh everything one could wish for.

As one might have expected, Maunder cited the chief difficulty encountered by a trombone-and-harp partnership as lack of repertoire.. Included in the programme were at least two original works for trombone and harp, one written by Maunder himself – I did a quick internet search which turned up only one further work, though, interestingly enough, I found several other examples of, on the face of things, unlikely partnerships with a trombone, one of them involving a marimba..

So, the first two pieces played by the duo in the concert were written specifically for trombone and harp – Maunder’s own piece was Ngarotopounamu, whose English translation locates the name as belonging to the Emerald Lakes which intrepid trampers encounter when making the famous Tongariro Crossing among the Central North Island volcanoes. Such an evocation called for both epic grandeur and shimmering beauty – and in general the trombone evoked the vastness of the terrain and the outlines of the contours, while the harp filled these spaces with ambiences which suggested both beauty and loneliness in tandem.

The second original trombone-and-harp piece was by the Roumanian-born Jewish composer Sergiu Natra, whose early life was spent in Europe before emigrating with his family to Israel in 1961. His work Ancient Walls was written in 1990, a work reflecting the composer’s great fondness for the harp, and manifesting itself in a number of other compositions for the instrument. A prominent Jewish harpist, Adina Hraoz, wrote of her involvement with Natra’s music, comparing the experience with “watching a wonderful plastic arts creation”. In this particular work, the trombone seemed to me like a voice of antiquity, perhaps even Jahweh-like in places (shades of Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast”, perhaps?), interacting with the harp’s figurations in, by turns, volatile and concordant ways, and achieving a kind of synthesis of feeling at the piece’s end.

Worlds apart were three transcriptions of songs by Cole Porter, lovely things which indicated Maunder’s fondness for American popular songs of the 1930s and 40s. In general the melody line was carried by the trombone through these arrangements, with the harp preluding and post-scripting as well as occasionally punctuating the episodes with counter-melody or cadential decoration. After the opening “So in love”, Maunder’s use of a mute with his instrument for the second song “In the Still of the Night” took us to just such a scenario, the harp giving us Ravel-like delicacies creating both time and place in which the trombone could lazily and smokily etch out the contours of the melody amid the fume-filled gloom.

FInally, “Begin the Beguine” featured a change of mute (something Maunder called a “harmon mute”), which produced a “wah-wah” sound, and worked deliciously well with the song’s Latin-American rhythm – I particularly liked the harp’s “taking over” of the melody line in places, here, and wondered if that could have been exploited a bit more by the arrangements in places – the varying of textures created added interest to the melody line, the harp here playing the song’s “high” reprise, with enchanting results.

After this we were further entertained by a bit of music-theatre, a work by British composer Guy Woolfenden, entitled Henry Humbleton’s Holiday, a presentation which the performers here had (I presume) cleverly adapted to suit a New Zealand scenario. So, Ingrid Bauer left her harp to become the narrator, and  Maunder and his trombone were the “dramatis personae” of the story, a charming tale of a bank clerk who, after sleeping late, succumbed to the temptation afforded by a beautiful Monday, to naughtily “escape” from his work to the beach, accompanied by his faithful trombone!  By way of enhancing the theatrical atmosphere of it all, we as the audience even got a turn to join in the fun at a couple of points, all of which was very jolly and invigorating.

After all that trombonic self-indulgence on Henry Humbleton’s part, it was appropriate that Ingrid Bauer gave her harp a turn, which she did performing the fourth and final movement of a suite Spiders, a work for solo harp by British composer Paul Patterson called “Tarantula”. Naturally enough, the piece has a fantastically obsessive rhythmic quality, denoting the tarantella dance made by the victim of a bite from this particular creature – for the player it’s obviously a real tour de force technically, and it was despatched here with great brilliance.

At this point in the program Maunder switched trombones, from tenor to alto, to perform what I thought was perhaps the most ambitious of his arrangements, a well-known Intermezzo (the second piece) from the Op.118 set  of Brahms’ Piano Pieces. Maunder set himself a couple of challenges, here, not the least of which was the extremely difficult high entry on the first note of the melody’s inversion, when everything “turns” for home most affectingly – he actually managed it, a bit shakily the first time but nicely the second time! I liked the harp’s “interlude” in the piece’s central section, and thought the piece might be even more effective with more frequent exchanges between the instruments – for example on that exposed note, trombone and harp could have alternated, or even played it together (Brahms harmonizes the melody, so the notes are actually there to use). But I really didn’t like the piece’s final note transposed up an octave – the melody didn’t, for me, find its true, easeful destination at the end. It was the one thing which for me didn’t quite altogether work as an arrangement as it stood, lovely though some moments were.

But Take 5 was a delight from beginning to end, with plenty of interchange between the instruments and some lovely improvisatory “explorations”. After this the Gordon/Warren number At Last  (which kept on reminding me of the Marcus/Seller/Wood number “Till then”) was beautifully done, introduced by a great harp solo, then generating a deliciously indolent gait, though building up to an impressive level of intensity at the melody’s reprise, with a properly declamatory and valedictory pay-off at the end.

Peter Maunder and Ingrid Bauer are to be congratulated upon an inventive and absorbing evocation of worlds within worlds, keeping their audience entertained, intrigued, satisfied and re-educated! They’re repeating the concert in the Wairarapa this weekend, in Greytown on Saturday afternoon. For anybody in the vicinity, it’s well worth giving the enterprising pair – yes, these opposites DO attract, the trombone and harp! – a try!

Aroha Quartet , with SOUNZ and RNZ Concert, does local composers proud

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SOUNZ, Radio New Zealand Concert, and the Aroha Quartet present:
RECORDINGS CONCERT 2015

New Zealand Works for String Quartet:
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Whakatipua
JEROEN SPEAK – Auxetos
ROSS CAREY – Toccatina (Elegy)
ALEX TAYLOR – Refrain
BLAS GONZALEZ – Spasms
HELEN BOWATER – This Desperate Edge of Now
KIRSTEN STROM – Purity

The Aroha String Quartet:
Haihong Liu, Anne Loeser (violins)
Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

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

Sunday 26th October 2015

This concert was the initial fruitful outcome of a new collaborative project between SOUNZ (Centre for New Zealand Music), Radio New Zealand Concert, and the Aroha Quartet. It was undertaken in association with CANZ (Composers’ Association of New Zealand) and Chamber Music New Zealand.

The Aroha String Quartet rehearsed and workshopped seven pieces for string quartet prior to recording sessions (held over the weekend of October 24th/25th) during which the performances of these works were recorded (RNZ Concert) and filmed (SOUNZ). From these activities came today’s public performance at St. Andrew’s.

Introducing the concert and the Quartet on Sunday afternoon at St.Andrew’s was Diana Marsh, the executive director of SOUNZ, who expressed her delight with both the processes and the projected outcomes of the project. Obviously the focus was on string quartet works this time round, but in future years there would hopefully be opportunities for other ensemble configurations.

Two of the works I had heard previously – Helen Bowater’s This desperate edge of now and Jeroen Speak’s Auxetos. The other five were new to me, though all, I think, had been recently played variously elsewhere, with Kirsten Strom’s Purity and Blas Gonzalez’s piece SPASMS being the most recently-written. Together, the works made a most absorbing programme, demonstrating the versatility of the string quartet genre and, of course, of the Aroha Quartet players.

Anthony Ritchie’s Whakatipua began the concert, a ten-minute distillation of the composer’s feeling for a typical South Island mountain landscape, specifically that found around Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu – the work, in fact was commissioned as a birthday present for someone who lives in that same district. The work is written with a real “feel” for the expressive qualities of string instruments, both in tandem and as individual voices. Instrumental lines dovetailed their utterances with a focus that served the piece’s larger lyricism, while providing plenty of energy and contrast with motor and syncopated rhythms. The opening’s “sighing” featured a number of mellifluous “exchanges” of  lyrical nature, for instance, while there were plenty of energies generated by both motoric and syncopated rhythms during the piece’s central section. One day I should like to hear, as well, the composer’s arrangement of the piece for string orchestra.

From sounds relating to a specific place we were taken by the next piece, Jereon Speak’s Auxetos, to music being plucked out of the air all around, it seemed – some sounds were born soft, some achieved ambient glow and some had agitation thrust upon ’em, to coin a phrase! The composer’s title “Auxetos” means “that which may be stretched”, the idea having its genesis in a South American folk-song recording made by the composer in which a common melody line was shared by the musicians but not synchronized. It meant that the various voices all contributed to the piece while pursuing different individual courses, held together by what the composer called an “inextricable bond of likeness”.

Over a sustained and ambient line, the music’s differently “voiced” episodes seemed by osmosis to extend the range, scope and frequency of their utterances and interactions, in places generating considerable aural excitement by various means – enormous irruptions of energy and just-as-sudden reversions to sotto voce expression, an impassioned solo ‘cello line at one point, an agitated response from the violins in reply – the sostenuto lines of the opening replaced by a ferment of agitation – a single stratospheric sustained violin note then refocused the music, the tones “wrapping around” what sounds like a reaffirmed purpose, the viola holding its long-breathed ground while the remaining instruments each pay some kind of homage to that which has endured, then fade their particular tones away to nothing. Most satisfying!

Ross Carey’s work Toccatina (Elegy) was next to be played, a piece dedicated to the memory of Australian Aboriginal singer/songwriter Ruby Hunter who died in 2010. Hunter and her partner Archie Roach were both members of the “stolen” generation of Aboriginal children, placed in homes with white foster families at an early age – her music and performances brought out these circumstances and addressed the issues that arose from them. Ross Carey’s work doesn’t actually use or quote Ruby Hunter’s music, but conveys an emotional response to her life’s work and her passing.

The music opened with a driving rhythmic pattern rather like train wheels, over which sounded melodic lines whose character changed from dogged insistence to a gentler, more soaring manner, and back again, then moving into a delicately-nuanced Martinu-like central sequence whose momentum was more circumspect of manner and intent – more relaxed and dreamy, with the melody’s shifting harmonies adding to the dream-like ambience. Inevitablty, the “train wheels” took up from where they left off, though the accompanying melodies were more assertive this time round and wasted no time building to a more impassioned climax. That done, the music gently took a bow and faded as enigmatically as it had begun.

Next came Alex Taylor’s refrain, the composer’s own program note amusingly reproducing three dictionary definitions of the word “refrain”, each of which could be cited as an “influence” upon what was to follow. Written during what Alex Taylor himself describes as a “social paralysis” time, the music explores ideas of action and inaction in the manner of an on-the-spot “gestation” – at once wry, circumspect and very involving! The music’s bruising, aggressive opening caused the lower strings to “take cover”, while reflecting a “hanging back”, an inertia, an unwillingness to engage. The process of confrontation and withdrawal was repeated by the instrumentalists, before the “broad chorales’ referred to by the composer began to work their magical spell – enchanting, and in places, halo-like ambiences which gave the moments of agitation a contrasting force and vehemence.

At one point the drifting material was spectacularly “sliced up” by slashing chords, though despite such irruptions order and reason seemed to hold sway. We heard such things as a beautiful cello solo growing from the concourse of sounds, followed by a canonic sequence from the violins, indicating some willingness to interact – and though this business became volatile and over-wrought, the music again found resolution, this time in gentle pizzicati, feet firmly touching the ground. By way of conclusion came a lament-like line, whose course seemed to turn back on itself, leaving us with equivocal feelings as to what it was that had been resolved.

Argentinian-born Auckland composer Blas Gonzalez contributed a most intriguing programme note regarding his piece SPASMS – he alluded to two sections of the work, the first “Mensurabilia” based on chromatic sequences polyphonically arranged, and the second (somewhat alarmingly) called “Olivier’s Dreadlocks”, referring to a fusion of Messiaen-like rhythmic impulses and what he described as “pseudo-reggae”. The work’s first part, Mensurabilia, put me in mind of a slowly revolving ball with patterns that repeated but which also interacted, so that one was immediately fascinated by the osmotic nature of it all – intensities built almost before one realized they had begun (rather like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings – everything was recognizable but somehow different, as the music made its unhurried way along our listening-spectrum. Much briefer and rather more “visceral” was Olivier’s Dreadlocks, a cool, pirouetted dance-like assemblage of lovely detailings between instruments, with second violin and ‘cello having a particularly engaging interaction!

We turned then to Helen Bowater’s work This desperate edge of now, inspired by the words of a poem from Mervyn Peake . Having read the latter’s gruesomely fascinating “Gormenghast” novels some years back, I wasn’t surprised to find the poem was somewhat dark and pessimistic. The words seemed to describe either an exterior or interior neo-apocalyptic scenario, a worst-case evocation guaranteed to resign one afresh to one’s invariably commonplace but relatively untroubled lot in life, even if one reflects that the events of the last few days in Paris have unexpectedly blown apart handfuls of lives in a way that does give Peake’s concluding words “Only this sliding second we share: this desperate edge of now” a kind of context that produces shivers of unease, and throws up shadows of disquiet.

Evidently the composer responded along not-too-dissimilar lines, the work’s opening resembling a cry of pain, with subsequent dark moments bringing forth nothing but angular impulses railing against one another angrily and despairingly at the prospect of human loss and the impotence of feeling. There’s no solace, here, as, in between the big, dark-browed gestures of anguish, there’s an ongoing sense of disquiet among the inner voices. It’s a skilfully-wrought study of turmoil between without and within, a bleak soundscape which the ‘cello addresses, and to which the viola responds – the ambience has an eerie quality, as if creation is giving some room to the participants in the drama (“I and they”), to nullify the fear, shock and desperation, to counter-charge the destruction and hold onto some kind of supporting through-line.

The ‘cello, then viola, and finally the other strings with their resounding pizzicati and haunting octaves, did their best to remold nearer to the heart’s desire – but the energetic charge of the “fierce instant”  that galvanized the music and its players drove things towards the inevitable. The “sliding second” (like a kind of ecstasy of awareness) fused the moment and tossed the remaining words and music in to a kind of oblivion. The viola’s abrupt concluding gesture, disquietingly, spoke volumes!

Asking us to return to our lives after experiencing such traumatic evocations of the tenuous hold we have on the same was obviously a bit much! – so, it was a relief when Kirsten Strom and her work Purity ( as per programme, originally scheduled as the third item) came to our rescue! The quartet took the opportunity to retune before playing this work (the violinist said to us “We like to make sure – especially with this piece!”). I could see what she meant when the work started – a single note was played by all instruments (in a note the composer had written “Beauty can be found in simplicity: a single note contains more than enough.”). Well,here it was, and the result was enchanting, with instruments sliding to different notes in an almost ritualistic kind of way, as if music itself was being worshipped.

The ‘cello enjoyed a broad theme, as the upper strings gave out an undulating figure, with the viola following the ‘cello. The music began to dance, the exoticism of it all maintaining a ritualistic feel, and giving rise to the listeners’ predispositions, either meditative or rather more active flights of fancy, the result  engaging and mesmeric. And all from a single note (which the quartet players made sure was “in tune” for our very great pleasure!). I liked very much the work’s patient, steadfast focus and, yes, purity! And, in conclusion, one must say that no words can express too strongly the extent of the Aroha Quartet’s commitment to the task throughout the whole of the afternoon, which, in their capable hands became a time and an occasion for celebration and delight.

Hamish McKeich’s final WYO concert a knockout

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
COMMEMORATIVE AND WARTIME CLASSICS

Music by BERNSTEIN, ELGAR, HOLST, LILBURN, SHOSTAKOVICH, and SPOHR

Patrick Hayes (clarinet)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

BERNSTEIN – Overture “Candide”
ELGAR – “Nimrod” (Variation IX) from the Enigma Variations
HOLST – “Mars and “Jupiter” from The Planets
LILBURN – Overture “Aotearoa”
SHOSTAKOVICH – Festive Overture
SPOHR – Clarinet Concerto No.4 in E Minor

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill St., Wellington

Monday 19th October 2015

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and enlivening programme, and as it turned out a  most appropriate way for the Wellington Youth Orchestra to (a) conclude a successful playing-year, and (b) farewell conductor Hamish McKeich, who’s been the orchestra’s inspirational music director for the past four years. Having heard nothing about Hamish’s departure beforehand, I was surprised when the concert’s master of ceremonies, Peter Dykes made the announcement at the evening’s beginning – and the news was confirmed by orchestra manager Tom Gott at the concert’s end, in a speech thanking Hamish for the sterling work he’d put into the orchestra over the time he’s worked with the players.

Nothing lasts forever, of course, even though with McKeich at the helm I’d gotten accustomed to looking forward greatly to each concert given by the orchestra of late. However, what he’s achieved with these musicians will undoubtedly linger and be shared with other, newer players, and add to a kind of on-going “tradition” of quality, such as that represented by this concert – a kind of showcase of the work done over the duration, and one that didn’t disappoint. With the help of a handful of NZSO players among the orchestral ranks, the playing had plenty of brilliance, enthusiasm, and sensitivity and depth of feeling as required, and put across a sense of knowing how to best present each piece instead of relying merely on a “one size fits all” approach.

The programme’s title “Commemorative and Wartime Classics” applied to some but not directly all of the items that were performed – though there’s a fair degree of warfare and carnage in Volatire’s story “Candide”, set to music by Leonard Bernstein, it’s a deeply satirical work whose purpose is to ridicule rather than commemorate. And Louis Spohr’s mellifluous Fourth Clarinet Concerto, though written for  a prominent virtuoso of the instrument, Johann Hermstedt, to play at an 1829 Music Festival, could neither be said to be either commemorative or associated with great conflict of any kind.

Described as “the perfect concert-opener”, Bernstein’s bright, racy Overture certainly filled the bill, both as a spectacular curtain-raiser on what was to come, and a real test for the youthful orchestra’s collective mettle. What was wanted was no-holds-barred playing, and the musicians engagingly tumbled over themselves in their eagerness to get the sounds up, running and together – while keeping the rhythms snappy, the conductor gave his players enough time to get their fingers around the notes and make the figurations coherent, relying on rhythmic point more than sheer speed to invigorate the music.

Being a “virtuoso” piece designed to put professional groups through their paces, the music here inevitably had moments where there were roughnesses in performance. It was more a problem with rhythms not quite dovetailing between sections than with notes being missed, as with the first appearance of the “Oh Happy We” tune, which went at several speeds on different instruments before the players got things together. Still, the music’s essential ingredients (a bubbly, raunchy, almost burlesque kind of feeling) were strongly in evidence, and McKeich and his players brought off both the excitement of the coda’s accelerando and the whiplash ending with great panache.

Next up was the concerto, one of no less than four written for the instrument by Louis Spohr, for his friend the virtuoso Johann Simon Hermstedt. The work’s dark, mysterious expression points directly towards the Romantic Movement that was to take hold of, and sweep through the nineteenth century. Though born fourteen years after Beethoven, Spohr wrote music which occupied a similarly pivotal position between classicism and romanticism, and his music was, for a time, just as highly regarded as Beethoven’s (like a number of his contemporaries, Spohr didn’t understand Beethoven’s late works, regarding them as “esthetic aberrations” and blaming the older composer’s deafness for their “faults”!).

Clarinettist Patrick Hayes, the winner of the Wellington Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition, showed us almost straightaway the skill of his playing and the extent of his musicianship, with beautifully withdrawn tones and lovely velvety runs throughout his opening utterances. As well, he dovetailed his lines beautifully with those of the orchestra’s at appropriate moments,  while making his instrument “speak out” when called upon to do so. He seemed more inclined to bring out the music’s mystery and depth of feeling rather than its brilliance and “show” – though not everything was note-perfect, he conveyed sufficient aplomb with the display aspect so as to make the more withdrawn moments “tell” at the appropriate times.

The slow movement of the work, a Larghetto, resembled a kind of poised, long-breathed dance with sinuous lines woven by the soloist over gently-pulsating accompaniments, a lovely contrast to the livelier Spanish rhythms of the finale, both soloist and orchestra relishing the rhythmic swirl of the triplet passages, and the sultry Preciosa-like jog-trot figurations accompanying the second theme. There was, too, ample display opportunities for the soloist, spectacular, firecracker-like ascents both with and without trills, and rapid, roller-coaster-ride figurations written for the player to proclaim his or her instrumental flair and command. In short, throughout the work we were treated to a real musician’s playing.

MC Peter Dykes raised a laugh when he described the Shostakovich Festival Overture which followed as, from an orchestral player’s point of view “a piece that teaches one the art of bluff”. I was reminded of a story I once heard about a wind player who was asked how he managed the more difficult parts of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe” ballet music, to which he replied, “You just waggle your fingers and hope for the best!”. To be honest, there didn’t seem very much “bluffing” on the part of these players when Shostakovich’s work started, so full-on was the orchestral sound in all departments! – having been suitably galvanized with the opening fanfares, we were plunged into a regular conflagration of instrumental excitement, with swirling winds and stuttering brass leading up to overwhelming percussive climaxes.

As well there was splendid solo work in places from the winds, the clarinet especially heroic, along with some lovely lyrical exchanges between lower and upper strings, singing out atop the driving rhythms! But conductor and players didn’t let up for the return of the opening fanfares and throughout the excitement of the coda that followed – a rip-roaring conclusion that left us all limp with excitement!

Douglas Lilburn’s 100th birth-anniversary year was acknowledged here with a bright and breezy performance of the “Aotearoa” Overture, from the outset lovely open-air playing which captured the spacious ambiences of the music, and the epic nature of the landscapes therein. I particularly enjoyed the string-playing in this performance – every chance these players got to sing full-throatedly they took, with rich and resonant results, leaving the winds to describe the movements of air and water and the brass and percussion to fashion the mountainscapes. Though the rather cramped acoustic of the Cathedral didn’t really allow the music to expand as it should at the end, the resonances still told splendidly, and brought the composer’s vision excitingly to life for our pleasure.

No greater contrast could have been wrought than was made next with Elgar’s famously elegiac “Nimrod” from the “Engima” Variations. Inspired by a mutual love of Beethoven’s slow movements on the part of the composer and his publisher and friend, August Jaeger, Elgar’s music raptly and intensely builds from near silence at its beginning to a magnificent outpouring of nobility. Difficult for any orchestra to sustain over long periods, this feeling was given to us in spadefuls by these young players, Hamish McKeich beautifully “terracing” the music’s course, and the players holding their lines tenaciously and full-throatedly, building towards the climax, then rapidly withdrawing and returning the sounds to whisperings – a terrific performance!

Finally came two movements from a work frequently associated, by dint of both subject-matter and time of composition, with war, Holst’s Symphonic Suite, “The Planets”. Most appropriately, we heard “Mars, the Bringer of War”, and its diametrically opposed “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”, the latter making a suitably riotous and good-humoured conclusion to the concert. What an impression the opening of “Mars” made on us all, with those dry, skeletal sounds of the players bouncing the wood of their bows on the instruments’ strings, an eerie, death-rattling kind of utterance accompanying the sense of rising panic, terror and alarm throughout the rest of the orchestra. At the other end of the sound-spectrum, the hammer-blows at the piece’s end were brutal and final in their impact – an extraordinary effect.

Thank goodness for Jupiter and the “laughter holding both its sides” aspect, which took us from tragedy to comedy, Holst’s extraordinary orchestral writing readily evoking a life-enhancing sense of well-being and elation, rebuilding confidences that that been shaken to their core by the onslaught of Mars at the opening. And what an extraordinary outpouring of pride and nobility of the spirit with the central trio’s “big tune”, here perhaps just a shade glutinous at its beginning, but gathering momentum and strength with every stride towards the powerfully-stated climax.

But just as impressive were the transitions from jollity to nobility and back again, in each case the winds playing a major part with tricky, syncopated figurations, firstly “shushing” the merriment, and then re-igniting the exuberance with a will, the brass and percussion in the latter case fetching up all the tethered energies and unleashing them once more. The loping stride of the laughing tune got a bit out of sync the second time round, due to the vagaries of the accelerando, but conductor McKeich quickly called the different voices to heel and steadied the course to the end – and what a wondrously vertiginous “swirling” aspect the players got before those last crashing hammer-blow chords put an end to the music! – as I said at this review’s beginning, thoroughly enjoyable!

So, salutations to Hamish McKeich and to his band of stalwart musicicans! – next year things will undoubtedly be different, but one feels certain that what has been achieved by conductor and players over the last few years won’t be easily forgotten.

NZSM Voice-Students at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Arias from Opera, and Songs
New Zealand School of Music: Vocal students of Richard Greager,
Jenny Wollerman, and Margaret Medlyn,
with Mark Dorrell (piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Tuesday 6 October 2015, 12.15pm

A varied programme was provided, both in terms of the styles of voices, and of the composers whose music was sung.  The items were all solos, unlike the equivalent programme two years ago, when ensembles were included in the programme.  There was a nice mixture of the familiar and the less familiar.

Each singer sang two or three (or in one case, four) items.  I have grouped the items by each singer, but in most cases they sang one song and returned later in the programme to perform more. It was a pity that no programme notes, words or translations of the songs were provided.

Luka Venter was, sadly, the only male on the programme.  His light tenor voice was suitable for the Monteverdi opening aria, ‘Vi ricorda o boschi ombrosi’ from L’Orfeo, which he sang in robust style, with clear words. Despite this not being a big voice, it was used well, amounting to an effective presentation.

Later Luka sang the sublime and well-known ‘Morgen’ by Richard Strauss.  It receivedappropriate phrasing and emphasis.  I couldn’t help being reminded of Renée Fleming’s wonderful performance with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra recently.  Here, it was sensitively sung and played, but perhaps it required a fuller voice.

However, Luka must be congratulated for tackling the greatest variety of songs (and languages) in the programme, including the earliest one, the Monteverdi.  Finally he sang Manuel de Falla’s ‘Seguidilla Murciana’ from Siete Canciones Populares Españolas.  While sung accurately and with panache and commitment, the voice was not sufficiently mellow or sultry for this song.

Next we heard from Hannah Jones, the first of the five women, all of whom were sopranos. Singing Donizetti’s ‘Chacun le sait’ from La fille du régiment, she was not always spot on with intonation in the difficult, high introductory part of the aria.  Later on, the high notes were very secure.  Her sound was very pleasing, and pronunciation and enunciation of words were excellent, as was the case with all the singers.  A little more variation of tone would have added to a dramatic performance.

Her second piece was a song by Rachmaninoff, which translates as ‘Oh, never sing to me again’.  She conveyed the Russian language and idiom well, and the drama of the song; this was a very fine performance.

Elyse Hemara, like Hannah Jones, had been noteworthy in the School of Music’s  operas this year – Dido and Aeneas, and L’enfant et les Sortilèges (Elyse in much smaller roles).  Her voice has a lovely quality throughout.  Expressive singing was enhanced by excellent words.  Her singing was very accurate and ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Il Barbiere di Siviglia by Rossini demonstrated her considerable range.

Later she sang three short songs by Ned Rorem, a contemporary American composer notable particularly for the huge number of songs he has written.  ‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’, ‘Ferry me across the water’ and ‘Love’ featured clear words, while tone and presentation were excellent.  Elyse appeared to know the songs really well, so that she could concentrate on communicating them to the listeners.  Her tone was attractive, and her vowels immaculate.

She was followed by Alexandra Gandionco, who gave us first ‘Mondnacht’ from Liederkreis Op. 39 of Robert Schumann.  This singer has a pure, open sound which is gorgeous.  After the excesses (sometimes) of opera, this was a beautiful pool of calm delight.  It illustrated what I had just been reading about soprano (and mezzo) Christa Ludwig, that there is an opera voice and a lied voice.

Her second song was from Gounod’s Faust: ‘Faites-lui mes aveux’.  This did not suit her as well as did the lied, and her tone was a little breathy, though it improved.  Her top notes were very good.

Rebecca Howie sang Schumann’s ‘Widmung’ from Myrthen with feeling and gusto, but intonation was occasionally slightly wayward.  Just a little rubato here and there would have made the performance seem less breathless.   Her next piece was the lovely Mozart aria ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ from Die Zauberflöte.  A pleasing tone was evident, but again, some notes were not quite nailed.  As with her lied, the performance was a little mechanical, as though she was not right ‘inside’ the music (another Ludwig quote), and having to think about it too much.  Nevertheless, she had a variety of tone colours.

Katherine McIndoe was ‘L’enfant’ in the recent opera, and performed extremely well.  Today’s first offering was also in the French language, though written by Benjamin Britten: ‘Parade’ from Les Illuminations.  The drama of the poem (by Rimbaud) was in her vocal tone and in her face.  She was thoroughly involved in that drama, and her French pronunciation was excellent.  Katherine then sang ‘Summertime’ from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.  It’s a song heard frequently, but here it was beautiful.

Katherine was the only performer to choose three twentieth-century songs – or was the last one twenty-first century?  It was by recently-retired Professor of Music at Otago University, John Drummond, with words by well-known comedy playwright, Roger Hall.  It was entitled ‘Prima Donna’.  There have been other songs that spoofed opera themes and the role of the soprano heroine, but I don’t recall any of them being as intelligently funny as this one!   

Katherine’s soprano wished to make a living from dying, and demonstrated this energetically, including with a rather convincing knife.The music was appropriately operatic, and the excesses involved were hardly greaterthan they are in some operas.  The humorous words were very clever.  Katherine sang in a thoroughly believable way, with great timing and panache.  The piece was difficult and demanding, and was given a very musical and entertaining performance.

Brilliant writing made this parody of opera heroines a great way to end the concert. Mark Dorrell’s accompaniments were sensitive or dramatic as occasion required.  He was never too loud for the singers, but had plenty of spirit when opportunities arose.

Worlds of Music – Lilburn, Vaughan Williams and Mozart from the NZSM Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
MOUNTAINS AND MOZART

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Norfolk Rhapsody No.1
MOZART – Piano Concerto No.20 in D Minor K.466
LILBURN – Symphony No. 1

Xing Wang (piano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 1st October, 2015

So, what on earth has Mozart got to do with Douglas Lilburn? By a happy coincidence, the concerto (Mozart’s K.466) with which the brilliant soloist Xing Wang earlier this year won the NZSM Concerto Competition First Prize was again performed by her during this concert, to stunning effect. But alongside Lilburn? Mountains and Mozart?

Anybody who has read Lilburn’s beautifully-wrought treatise on being a composer here in New Zealand (first given as a talk at the 1946 Cambridge Summer Music School, and subsequently published as “A Search for Tradition” – Douglas Lilburn : Lilburn Residency Trust, 2011) will recall the sequence describing a journey made by the young composer on the night train northwards from Wellington, and his thoughts upon experiencing a clear, moonlit night’s view of the central North Island mountains on that journey and the vivid aromas of the surrounding bush country – particularly resonant are the words concluding his description……

At that moment, the world that Mozart lived in seemed about as remote as the moon, and in no way related to my experience.

It struck me, therefore, as a fitting kind of resonance from those words to have a concert which is part of the “Lilburn 100” centennial presentation we’ve been enjoying so much this year featuring his music cheek-by-jowl with none other than Mozart’s. And to add flavour to the situation, Lilburn’s work took the form of a symphony, constructed along the lines of principles known and used by Mozart in his own works of that genre. Rather than signalling a capitulation to any kind of un-New Zealand way of doing things, Lilburn’s treatment of and provision of content for symphonic form both acknowledged the precedents and instilled a genuine, home-grown flavour of newly-minted discovery to the sounds allied to the music’s structure.

Another, more direct connection to Lilburn and his music was provided by the presence of a work by Vaughan Williams at the concert’s beginning, the Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. Readers who either attended the Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s concert of less than a fortnight ago, or read my subsequent review of the event, will recall that the Vaughan Williams Rhapsody and the Lilburn Symphony were played then as well (possibly creating a “shortest duration” record for the time between two public performances of any Lilburn Symphony by different artists!). Vaughan Williams was, of course, Lilburn’s composition teacher at London’s Royal College of Music.

So, by either chance or contrivance, the NZSM concert was flavoured with interlinks of various kinds between the items, themselves, of course, making a splendid programme per se. And what a beautiful job the players made, under Ken Young’s guidance, of the opening of the Norfolk Rhapsody!  I couldn’t help thinking, as the music unfolded via haunting strings and winds, how wide of the mark that oft-quoted jibe “the English cow-pat school” is in many cases, particularly in relation to Vaughan Willliams (one also thinks of Peter Warlock’s dismissive comment  “a cow looking over a gate” regarding the older composer’s work in general).

Here, the melancholic beauty of the opening, with the strings and winds stealing in from afar, and welcomed by harp, lower strings and clarinet, lost no time in building up the music’s intensities, richly-coloured by a beautifully-played viola solo. As the sounds of winds, brass and timpani dovetailed with the strings and Ken Young allowed the orchestral throttle some juice, the music galvanized our sensibilities, the strings taking on that “anguished” quality on also finds in the same composer’s Thomas Tallis Fantasia, with full-throated support coming from the brass and timpani at the music’s passionate extremes.

By contrast, the “sailor-dance” central section was great fun, having plenty of swagger and roistering intent, before the jog-trot rhythms are effectively squared off amid swirling string-tones intent upon returning us to the opening, the brass managing a beautifully-voiced farewell reminiscence of the “dance” as the mystery of the piece’s opening surged softly backwards – so finely-controlled, and with the sounds beautifully floated by all the players. No cow-pats, and no cud-chewing eye-ballings over wooden gates – instead, a treasurable evocation of different kinds of ecstasies, some of them lump-in-the-throat, thanks to the beauty and focus of the playing.

It’s possible to feel that Douglas Lilburn may have been a little hard on Mozart’s music in suggesting its essential remoteness from certain aspects of the New Zealand landscape, though it would be fair enough to consider that the latter’s D Minor Piano Concerto K.466 (the work next on the program in this concert) is more about the world of the opera “Don Giovanni” than anything else. However, I could imagine certain Adagio movements from other works like the Wind Serenade K.361 wouldn’t have gone amiss as an ambient backdrop to moonlit mountainous slopes amid native bush – and if grandeur was wanted, the opening of Symphony No.39 would do very nicely, there being plenty of majesty and upward thrust in that music (however, NOT in one of these so-called “authentic” hell-for-leather performances afflicted upon us during more recent times, I hasten to add!).

Still, the concert triumphantly achieved a coming-together of both composers’ worlds and time-eras, demonstrating that differences can happily co-exist and be savoured, when there’s a will. In fact Mozart’s K.466, together with the C Minor Concerto K.491, made the greatest impression on nineteenth-century sensibilities, which “connected” with the music’s dark urgency, stormy tones and volatile character, rather more than with some of the composer’s more rococo-like utterances. The works were, in fact, seen as a precursor of romanticism, and were both greatly admired by Beethoven.

At the piano was the 2015 NZSM Concerto Competition winner, Xing Wang, whose focused and totally committed performance seemed to me to wholly “own” the work. From where I was sitting (over to the right-hand side – I had no view of the soloist’s hands but was able to “read” the music in her face most enjoyably, as she played) the piano in this particular acoustic – a carpeted floor – seemed mellow-sounding almost to a fault, so that the soloist found it difficult to generate a truly assertive tone in places. Still, the exchanges with the orchestra had real tension and purpose, amid all those dark D Minor tones and syncopated rhythms! I thought the violins were occasionally inclined to “stretch” their phrasings a bit more than the other orchestral sections, but the effect amid Mozart’s tense, anxiety-ridden dovetailings simply added to the music’s danger, without ever letting chaos get the upper hand.

The first-movement cadenza, dynamic and Beethoven-like, allowed Xing Wang to bring out the instrument’s colouristic qualities, the concluding phrases excitingly matched by the orchestra’s attack at its re-entry, keeping the sombre mood. Pianist and conductor then kept the music moving during the opening exchanges of the slow movement, seeking to keep the tempo of a piece throughout, rather than romanticize the lyrical opening and over-dramatise the turbulent middle section. Only my critical conscience prevents me from commenting that I actually prefer the movement with greater contrast between the two “faces” of the music, however stylistically correct Xing Wang’s and Ken Young’s (and Mozart’s!) way with it all might have seemed to most listeners.

Most importantly, at this flowing tempi nothing dragged, and the strings’ phrasing of the melody had in places a most attractive lissome grace. Yes, some of the “surprise element” was lost, with the central section plunging in at the same basic pulse – but the winds did so well to keep their long-breathed lines steady throughout. I did feel the “return” to the opening couldn’t help sounding a little perfunctory at this speed – but there I go again! I think I missed being reminded of the ending of “Figaro” here, where the warmth of the opening’s return seems to engender a sense of reconciliation of characters in conflict, Mozart’s music tugging at one’s heartstrings as the slow movements of these concerti so often do.

At the finale’s beginning Xing Wang kept the music’s momentum steady rather than “breakneck” with her upward flourishes and rounding-off phrases, trusting in her ready ability to phrase and point the music to generate excitement. Ken Young and his players echoed her trajectories with beautifully-timed responses that caught a sense of things spontaneous erupting, the exchanges reflecting the enjoyment and exhilaration all around. After an assertive and exciting cadenza (which I didn’t know), the “coming out” into the radiance of the major key was a great moment, all sunshine and happiness after the journey’s shared travails.

Mozart having been given his dues, we thus came to the proper “mountains” part of the concert, Douglas Lilburn’s first-ever symphony, completed in 1949, and given its first performance by the National Orchestra under their conductor Michael Bowles in 1951. It was the first-ever performance of a symphony by a native-born New Zealand composer, and received a lot of attention of the “not bad for a New Zealand composer” variety, most commentators obviously cautious regarding their own abilities to make a judgement concerning a work by a fellow-New Zealander, though one notice discussed the work’s “shortcomings”, such as the “abstruse” and “discursive” principal themes. Critic Owen Jensen probably gave the work its fairest appraisal at the time, praising its “originality and vitality” regarding the themes, and their integration and working-out, while commenting that the symphony “contains nothing that is startlingly new”.

A remark rather more of the “seeing ourselves as others see us” variety came from British conductor Sir Charles Groves, who directed a performance with the National Orchestra on a visit here in 1988, and made the observation “Lilburn seems to me to have captured the natural genius of the landscape”. This attitude, which is where the mountains loom into significance, was largely borne out by Dr.Robert Hoskins of Massey University in an illustrated talk about the symphony given just before the concert’s second half began, and in which he made reference to “the nurturing forces of nature”, a statement in accord with what Lilburn himself called “the naive, generous country that gave one its joyous force.”

As I’ve mentioned before, this was the second performance of the work I’d heard within a fortnight, making amends for some long fallow periods of neglect. Lilburn’s Second Symphony has definitely found more favour with the critics, regarded as a less derivative, more home-grown manifesto of one creatively “standing upright here” and being counted – but the presence of this later, more monumental work ought not to deny us opportunities to enjoy the young composer’s exuberant energies in his earlier symphonic outing. After all there are plenty of similarly youthful works in the established repertoire which pay audible homage to older music without their effectiveness being compromised one jot.

Taking his immediate inspiration from Christchurch’s Port Hills, the composer immediately throws open the vistas at the beginning, everything taken in at a glance and straightaway acted upon by the music’s confident forward momentum – here, the opening trumpet call was clear and purposeful, the winds fresh and out-of-doors, and the strings athletic and vigorous, a mood celebrated by brass and timpani in no uncertain terms – a great opening from Young and his players! Their playing brought out both the majesty and the isolation of the scenarios, encouraging the lines’ occasional striking out on their own, evoking the skylarks’s songs, and demonstrating, in Lilburn’s own words, the “well-nigh bewitched” feeling of “that air so far up with that view before and that music above”.

Yes, there were energetic Coplandesque moments and Sibelian-like evocations of the processes enacted between air, land and water, but time and place nevertheless seemed securely set, here in this performance, the dying echoes at the end nicely-judged and resonantly-voiced. The second movement’s hymn-like ruminations steadily unfolded at a pace that allowed air and space but maintained the work’s overall momentum – conductor and players enabled the music’s amalgam of physical strength and ritualistic transcendence, unerringly building both outward and inner intensities towards a tutti of almost pantheistic splendour, before horns and violas quelled the strings’ anguish – how lovely, and elegiac an atmosphere was wrought at the end!

That wonderful unfurling of the textures at the finale’s beginning had its full effect, here, the composer seemingly drawing, however subconsciously, from Sibelius’s Tapiola in places, with dark, brooding string phrases and wood-sprites darting between the trees, though there always seemed more light and warmth than gloom in this particular wanderer’s heart. And though we also experienced great Oceanides-like swells from the strings, there were recognizably “Aotearoa” brass calls which drew us out from the darknesses, evoking thousand-ton building-blocks of majestic rock, the fanfares energizing the strings and similarly inviting our spirits to rejoice and dance – a great moment, reinforced by the lower strings’ climbing the heights to join with the other voices in the celebrations!

As it all unfurled at the finale’s beginning, so the music then suddenly called itself to order, and took stock of where it had come to, taking us along as well – those last pages of the work then built into a kind of consecration, a merging of spirit and surroundings, an expression of hope in our eventual achievement of oneness with our surroundings, and of a heritage that those “born in a marvellous year” will be able to claim as their own. In that sense, how appropriate it was for an orchestra of youthful players such as these to be able to give sonorous and assured tongue to this visionary message.