Tag: New Zealand music

The Apprentice, La Mer, Ibert’s flute concerto and an enchanting francophone premiere from National Youth Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZSO National Youth Orchestra conducted by José Luis Gomez with solo flute, Bridget Douglas

Dukas: L’apprenti sorcier
Ibert: Flute concerto
Salina Fisher: Rainphase
Debussy: La mer

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 2 July 2015, 6:30 pm

The National Youth Orchestra has generally played a major symphony in the second part of its main annual outing (and this is its 56th year). They’ve included Mahler’s First and Seventh, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth, Shostakovich’s Tenth, Rachmaninov’s Second, Brahms’s First and Second, as well as Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, Also sprach Zarathustra, many taxing concertos and other large and challenging works. Back in 2007, they played La Mer (I’ve only looked back a dozen years); and they played it again here.

This concert was conducted by José Luis Gomez, a young Venezuela-born, Sistema-inspired musician who has already made an impact in North and South America as well as in major European cities (Hamburg, Frankfurt, Liverpool, Stuttgart, Madrid…) in both opera and orchestral performance. Though he appears not yet to have worked in France, his programme was almost wholly devoted to French music (one can easily argue that a young composer like Selina Fisher, is essentially a disciple of the Debussyish, French tradition) which calls generally for a different and in some ways more difficult aesthetic approach to music.

New Zealand’s musical future is in good hands with the continued flourishing of this orchestra (and let’s not forget the youth orchestras in all the major cities of New Zealand), with major support from the Adam Foundation over seventeen years, as well as from the NZSO itself.

L’apprenti sorcier
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not really a true representative of Dukas the composer. (I elaborate some thoughts about the contrasts between the classicists and the impressionists and the place of Dukas in the aesthetic quarrels of the period at the end of this review).

But Dukas was a skilled orchestrator and a gifted composer nevertheless.
It’s a brilliant composition, fully deserving its real popularity. The woodwinds’ opening was careful and wonderfully refined, and the strings, given their full orchestral complement (16, 14, 12, etc, -approximately) produced a warmly confident chorus, solo flute emerged with a big romantic vibrato and bassoons too came out of the shadows that usually envelop them.

Though there were occasional partings of the ways in ensemble, the conductor inspired enthusiasm and energy that overcame all; the brass was emphatically present in the chaotic climax as the apprentice loses control of the situation, to complete an exciting performance of this popular piece.

Ibert’s Flute Concerto
The orchestra was then thinned out to chamber size for the fastidious but animated flute concerto by Ibert, who was one of several French composers born around the 1890s who did not join Les Six (who have been celebrated this week as RNZ Concert’s ‘Composers of the Week’).

Though I suppose it would be nice for a soloist with the orchestra to be a current or recent player with them, the selection of NZSO principal flute Bridget Douglas, who moved through comparable paths in New Zealand, beginning in Dunedin, was inspired; at the time she might have been a member of the Youth Orchestra, she was probably studying on scholarships overseas. However both her demeanour and performance display an exuberant youthfulness.

Her acumen clearly elevated the orchestra’s performance in what is certainly one of the most familiar and successful flute concertos. The playing hardly touched the ground in the first movement, capturing what can only be described as the quintessential sound of French flute music, leading the orchestra in high risk-taking exploits (remember this is the composer of the vivacious Divertissement). In the sharply contrasted, sombre, legato Andante, the light seemed to have dimmed, exposing the orchestra’s, and the soloist’s, expressive talents as they explored Ibert’s command of a more thoughtful strain of 1930s French music, absorbing both the neo-classical and the satirical, flippant character that post-first world war music had acquired.

The start of the boisterous and memorable third movement proved a bit tough for the horns, but they were vindicated later. Its jazzy rhythms, decorated with the most hair-raising flute passages are interrupted twice with pensive episodes, allowing breathing space, and for unexpectedly lyrical playing from the flute, often in charming duet or trio with other wind instruments or the strings.

Salina Fisher’s commission
The tradition of commissioning a piece from a young composer has become established. This year the composer, has, as violinist, been an orchestra member since 2010 and was concertmaster in 2012/13; she is the orchestra’s Composer-in-residence this year and has won composition prizes at the New Zealand School of Music and the NZSO’s Young Composer’s Award in 2013 and 2014. Her music has been played by several overseas soloists and chamber ensembles.

The array of percussionists signalled a more than average interest in the strange and exotic sounds available these days from that department. As well as bowing on the edges of the xylophone, the most magical effects, sort of disembodied flute sound, came from Rachel Thomas bowing on crotales; and episodes of bouncing bows on strings and bows brushing tonelessly across stringed instruments, in large, synchronised, circular movements. It was as entertaining for the eyes as for the ears.

I was impressed by the composer’s notes that elaborated, not on the wearisome explanations like: ‘exploring of extended techniques that might enrich the experience of hearing the contrabassoon with its reeds removed, underwater’, but a description of the source of the sound – here rain falling – arising from actual events; for example, she writes: “the variation in sound and movement of raindrops depending on the material upon which they fall, and the texture created when these countless individual timbres and rhythms happen all at once”.

There were rather enchanting melodic fragments, rising and falling scales played softly on the two harps. But as well as these singular devices for the depiction of rain falling, there were blocks of brass in warm harmony, which in the end contributed to a remarkably attractive sonorous chorus in an exciting
crescendo.

La Mer
I was intrigued, considering the watery nature of the previous composition, at the choice of La Mer as the big, symphonic work on the programme. I’m assured that neither was programmed to complement the other: pure serendipity. Though not at all a symphony, it is of near symphonic length and has three movements (like the Paris and Prague symphonies of Mozart, if you care).

This too uses a big orchestra, three trumpets as well as two cornets, three bassoons and a contrabassoon, again the two harps and an array of percussion including glockenspiel, all used with purpose and sensitivity. At every hearing of this masterpiece I gain a little more clarity about its melodic and rhythmic content, how the fleeting, fugitive gestures and arabesques, relate and contribute to the bewildering tapestry. In the first movement, the orchestra captured the dim awareness of dawn with the woodwinds countering the threatening sounds of timpani and bass drum, and though there were momentary slips, the growing illumination that the performance created, the brightening glow of the horns midway in the movement, was marvellous.

The Jeux de vagues, sometimes referred to as a Scherzo, to me a misnomer, has the role of an at times playful, at times calm, symphonic middle movement; it brings the full light of day, not in an obvious, brash way, but through the fluency of flutes, always to be remarked, over bassoons and cor anglais, suggesting a friendly sea. The third part, Dialogue du vent et de la mer, opened with very enthusiastic timpani and brass, but the gorgeous, swaying tune and the vivid evocation of conflicting forces were magnificently rendered.

It’s not just that this music might mean/should mean something special to one who has lived all his life close to some of the biggest seas in the world; as one of the first really major works of the 20th century, it marks for me a more important and influential development than the intellectually driven inventions of Schoenberg and co was to do a few years later; and at least as significant as The Rite of Spring.

Naturally, much of the audience at such concerts comprises family and friends of the players, but they could not have so filled the MFC, showing that growing numbers of ordinary music lovers are realising that if the music is your primary interest, rather than a social event, as much delight and revelation is created in a Youth Orchestra performance of this calibre as with the NZSO itself.

 

Reflections on Dukas and Debussy:

Above, I touched on the place of Dukas, between César Franck and Debussy and the intermediate composers like Fauré and Chausson.

After the 1880’s, Debussy picked up the sense that composers like those and others had been hinting at in previous decades. Influenced by impressionist painting and symbolist poetry, he believed music was about nuances, colours and emotions, story-telling and scene painting; organically evolving melodic ideas and rhapsodic shapes.

Dukas was born into the era of Debussy (he was four years Debussy’s junior) but, while they were good friends, Dukas adhered to the model of César Franck and the more classical, Teutonic, tradition, and he was a passionate Wagnerian; while Debussy, very consciously a ‘French’ composer, had come to reject both Franck and Wagner. But their totally opposite views did not seem to affect the happy friendship between the two.

And although Debussy wanted no school of Debussyistes and didn’t much like Ravel who was his passionate admirer, Roger Nichols remarks in his New Grove article: “a list of 20th century composers influenced by Debussy is practically a list of 20th century composers, tout court”.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not truly representative of Dukas the composer. True, it was written four years after Debussy’s Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune, about the same time as Nocturnes, but while
the finger-prints of a brilliant orchestrator can be heard, there is as much Strauss as Chausson in it, and a lively imagination is needed to ascribe much to Debussy.

The programme note relates a Messiaen anecdote that suggests The Apprentice was intended as mockery of the Strauss’s symphonic poems, particularly Till Eulenspiegel, that were sweeping Europe at the time, but it is hard to believe that Dukas would have expended all that effort creating such a masterly and highly sophisticated score merely as a put-down of Strauss. My reading of Dukas’s personality and nature don’t suggest that sort of behaviour; after all he remained a good friend of Debussy even though Dukas was a traditionalist, a Wagnerian, and thus not too distant from Strauss’s musical values.

A commentator writes, for example: “While Debussy was forging esoteric links with symbolist poetry, Dukas had the effrontery to compose a symphony in plain C major!” The symphony is a close relative of Franck’s Symphony in D minor; Dukas wrote it in the same year, 1897, as The Apprentice. As for Dukas’s great piano sonata in E minor, it sounds like a fine piano work that Franck never wrote (and as a passionné of the latter, I expect that to be read as great admiration).

Anyway, as one of the disappearing generation who actually saw (and heard), very young, an early screening of the Disney film, Fantasia, in which Stokowski conducted the music along with the marvellous animated version of the Goethe story, the music has been embedded in me for a long time.

In thinking about these things, I fished out my copy of Roger Nichols’ Debussy Remembered which trapped me for a while; there were not many pertinent bits of letters from Dukas relating to Debussy apart from evidence of great warmth and mutual respect and affection. But it’s the sort of book that engrosses you with all sorts of interesting people, events and ideas.

 

 

Unmissable violin sonata programme from APO’s Canadian concertmaster and Sarah Watkins

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Andrew Beer (violin) and Sarah Watkins (piano)
(Wellington Chamber Music)

Beethoven: Violin Sonata in G, Op 30 No 3
Lilburn: Violin Sonata (1950)
Good: ‘And Dreams Rush Forth to Greet the Distance’
Bartok: Two Rhapsodies
Ravel: Sonata in A for violin and piano

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 21 June, 3 pm

The violinist’s name would have been new to Wellingtonians – the recently appointed Concertmaster of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra; the pianist however, is very well known. But the audience was disappointing: see comments in my Coda.

I think this programme, entirely of worthwhile, interesting works, but containing only one familiar, major work, might have seemed missable to non-subscribers, unless driven by Lilburn-loyalty or special love of Bartok, and who would be paying $40 for a seat.

Beethoven
In the event, it was an excellent concert. The performance of Beethoven’s Op 30 No 3 was strong, spirited and with striking emphasis on rhythmic elements and the engaging melodies; the two players sounded as if they’d been playing together for years. The middle movement, a sort of minuet, adhered perfectly to its marking, ‘molto moderato e grazioso’, and piano and violin conversed equably, animatedly, tossing ideas to and fro. As the notes pointed out, there is playfulness in the last movement, as the two seemed to push each other a little, and drew attention to themselves with misleading expectations, and untimely modulations. All these features increase the pleasure to be found in a piece of music and one of Beethoven’s gifts was his ability to tease and mislead the audience while creating a masterpiece. All this was here in the performance.

Lilburn
This Lilburn violin sonata in B minor was actually his third. It was written in 1950 for Frederick Page (pianist and head of the music department of Victoria University College) and violinist Ruth Pearl, after Lilburn had become a lecturer at the university; they premiered it at the university and then played it again three months later in Wigmore Hall in London.

The others two sonatas, in C and E flat, were written in 1943; they were first performed, respectively, by Maurice Clare (violin) and Noel Newson (piano), and by Vivien Dixon (violin) and Anthea Harley Slack (piano).

Probably my first live hearing of the present one was at a Mulled Wine concert at Paekakariki in 2011, when Sarah Watkins accompanied Donald Armstrong. There’s an Atoll recording of both the E flat and the present one, issued in 2011, featuring Elizabeth Holowell (violin) and Dean Sky-Lucas (piano). Atoll ACD 941. It was reviewed that year in Middle C by my colleague Peter Mechen.

Andrew Beer’s comments in the programme notes about Lilburn, from a newcomer’s standpoint, are interesting. In his remarks I get a hint of surprise at what might be seen as a sort of obsession with finding a New Zealand voice, as if the job of a creative artist were to interpret or reflect his own land rather than simply to write attractive, listenable music. Such an idea, which is still current, would have puzzled Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Strauss, Prokofiev (among many others). “Telling our own stories” has become a tedious, clichéd justification for supporting New Zealand artists in all fields. There are far more important reasons.

Worrying about expressing and echoing one’s own country has been an aberration that started with the growth of nationalism in the mid 19th century, which has distorted attitudes in so many areas and fuelled the political hatreds that have dogged the world ever since.

However, Lilburn was simply a man of his times, in that matter.

Fortunately, by the time he was 35, Lilburn was writing music that exuded more self-confidence and less seeking for a New Zealand voice, and this sonata is a good example. It is now his own voice, mature, individual, yet echoing the sounds of his immediate predecessors, like Vaughan Williams, tonal and lyrical, though by no means conservative or sentimental. It has also absorbed the character of European music of the time, the tough-minded mid-century; there are moments of dissonance.

It is unusual in being in once movement, with five sections alternating between Molto moderato and Allegro. The performance establishes a searching quality which finds more confidence in the first Allegro section, with both instruments sharing a dance-like episode. The emotional undulations made the second Allegro sound like a concluding phase, but the repeat of Tempo I quickly justified itself.

In my review of that Paekakariki concert I described the sonata as “an impressive, vigorous, tightly-argued work that should have become one of the leading chamber pieces of the New Zealand repertoire.” That still stands.

The rest of the programme
The Lilburn was followed by a shorter piece by Canadian composer Scott Good, a competition piece. The notes reproduce the composer’s own views of the requirements of such a piece: very interesting and well-judged. It gave plenty of scope for virtuosity, drew on contemporary compositional trends, and it certainly, as stipulated, held the attention of an audience. Nor did it seem to think for a minute of attempting to find a ‘Canadian voice’. It simply expressed a confidence in its ability to find melody and treatments that would sound interesting. The performance delivered on all those counts, with the pianist as wholly involved in the idiom as the violinist himself.

After the interval, Bartok’s Two Rhapsodies, quite substantial pieces. Both were played with an aim of making civilized, lyrical (up to a point) music from peasant material that was unsophisticated even if complex in its own way. The first is considerably more conventional and ‘westernised’ than the second, which seems closer to its folk origins, more driven, avoiding any risk of charming the listener, with the piano in percussive mode and the violin, untypically harsh in places. One of my scribbled notes remarked that it was undoubtedly the most formidable piece on the programme, but perhaps, given that, it was over-long.

The programme ended with Ravel’s Violin Sonata, again, not one of his most familiar or engaging; somewhat severe with tunes that might be described as gestures rather than the real thing. So it’s one of those works that one has heard several times, but only the jazz-inflected second movement, is really familiar. Nevertheless, the performance extracted all its virtues, both of melody and structure – the element that allows melody to take a firm grip and holds the attention.

Coda
There have been a lot of opinions and argument about the functions of the critic, from at least the time of Plato, and no doubt in earlier civilisations. Over the years I’ve been tackled for making comments that are alleged to be outside the purview of a critic, perhaps touching on the political context of a composer’s work, his private life, the players’ circumstances, the question of state support for the arts, availability and cost of venues, the condition of music education, value judgements touching the various genres of music, and on and on… all matters of great importance in my opinion.

This is preliminary to an observation about the audience size.

The weather was cold; the venue, since last year after the closure indefinite (?) of the Town Hall, not perhaps ideal for reasons that I need not spell out, though acoustically and in seating comfort, very good. That leaves the programme; and here we find an awareness hiatus between some performers and some promoters who agree to a programme, and an average audience, about what appeals on the one hand, and what, on the other, looks a bit esoteric, worthy but not emotionally compelling.

Till last year I was on the committee of the Wellington Chamber Music Society (as it was) almost from the beginning of these Sunday concerts in 1983, and so have attended a great many of them. The number of subscribers in the Sunday series has declined steadily over many years, and so there is not a large, paid-up contingent who will come anyway, having paid for all the concerts. I can’t remember a smaller audience for a Wellington Chamber Music concert; yet they continue to be a vital element in Wellington’s music scene.

This is just one of the many musical and other organisations that is suffering from the Town Hall’s closure. Christchurch has resolved to restore its Town Hall for twice the cost of the estimate for ours. What’s the matter with our Council?

 

Jack Body – lightning leaping from the pages

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JACK! – celebrating Jack Body, composer
edited by Jennifer Shennan, Gillian Whitehead & Scilla Askew
published by Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, 2015

Available from:
Steele Roberts Publishers,
Box 9321, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand
e-mail: info@steeleroberts

Wednesday 10th June 2015

This beautifully-prepared and richly-annotated volume contains a remarkable array of testaments of love and regard for a man whose life and work deeply touched not only immediate friends and colleagues, but many people involved with music in New Zealand, throughout South-East Asia and around the world.

Happily, it appeared while its subject, Jack Body, was still very much alive, by all accounts – an acknowledgement is made by the editors to the composer’s “stamina and concentration” in making every effort to assist with the work. Hence the opening pages proudly carry the dedication “To Jack and Yono, with love” (Yono Soekarno being Jack’s long-term partner).

Appropriately heading the list of names on a subsequent “Acknowledgements” page is another Jack – a long-time friend and supporter of Body’s, and much-esteemed arts patron Jack C.Richards, recipient of the 2014 Arts Foundation Award for Patronage, and whose support for this project made the book’s publication possible.

A feature stemming directly from the attitude of the book’s subject to biography is its avoidance of what one of the editors, Jennifer Shennan, calls “conventional ordering”. In citing Body’s “low tolerance for boredom, cliche and comfort zones”, she relishes all the more his initial response to the project – “Oh, I don’t need a book – better to have a concert!” – before recording the composer’s inevitable “day-follows-night” movement towards interest and enthusiasm for it all.

It follows that the finished work is, like its subject, a unique phenomenon, inviting no comparisons and following no formulae – it assuredly won’t be the last word on Jack (other biographers will see to that!) but his proximity to its “making” gives it all extraordinary resonance, his presence almost talismanic throughout its many adroitly-woven parallel strands which cluster around and about “pools” (well, oceanic lakes, really!) of deep-currented osmotic activity.

The composer’s actual biographical details can be found amid these different contexts, both via a section of its own called “Beginnings: family and music” (significantly, NOT at the book’s very beginning!) and a transcript of a landmark interview of Body’s with Elizabeth Kerr, as part of Radio NZ Concert’s “Composer of the Week” Series during 2014.

So, Jack himself tells some of his own story, but by far the bulk of the observations regarding his life, activities and achievements are made by the hundred-plus people whose contributions (mostly the written word, but also photographic and musical) give the reader something of the true measure of the man’s manifold accomplishments regarding his own and other people’s music, his range and scope of things in those areas alone being positively Lisztian!

One would think that the impression made by such and so many laudatory statements would begin to pall upon a reading-through of them – but Jack’s net of contact with people was obviously cast so widely and deeply (and cross-culturally), that one is struck as much by the variety of response as by its positive consistency. As individuals recorded their responses so must they have been encouraged from the start by Jack’s openness and warmth to be themselves with him deeply and utterly – so what comes across is a rich diversity and vibrancy of response that simply encourages one to read more – and more……..

There are more gems of individuality among the tributes than I can list, but I offer a few, nevertheless – “musical spark-plug” – “a true rangatira” – “visionary nation-builder” – “bottomless bounteousness” – “a great “zhi yin” (bosom friend) of Chinese music” – “the song-catcher” – “totally subversive” – “gift of a man” – “changed my life by 180 degrees” – “wonderful Body-parts”……one senses that Jack’s inspiration often gave rise to creative impulses of affection and admiration for which music was only the starting-point.

Speaking of starting-points, one such is the direct initial impression made by the publication, a volume without a dust-jacket but still nevertheless eye-catching in appearance with its gold-leaf title “Jack” embossed upon an (appropriately?) burgundy-hued cover containing also a white-pencil sketch of the composer’s face, featuring the characteristic moustache. Inside, the paper is pleasing to the touch, and the fonts with their few variants are attractive and clearly set, invariably on white backgrounds, and never against colours or hues which clash with and obscure the letters.

The words having been given their dues, the accompanying graphics are telling and vivid throughout – each of the sections features an introductory title page bedecked with designs or motifs characteristic of and readily suggesting its subject, and almost every contributor is represented by a photograph, colour, sepia and/or black-and-white. Some bring a smile, while others raise the eyebrows with a start – a particular favorite of mine features Body as a mad, google-eyed gamelan player delightedly unnerving two hapless members of the ensemble.

In short, it’s a book which to my mind has considerable visceral appeal, even before one begins reading – one enjoys the ready “chaos of delight” of colours and textures which blaze forth, but is then drawn into the “mix and mingle” to find method in the tumbling warmth of it all, the strands encircling the different pools and resonating with the sounds of voices and music suggested by the words.

Cleverly, we’re taken to each of the different areas of exploration and activity Body involved himself in and with, beginning the process with a section devoted to Indonesia, the first of the composer’s “exotic” explorations, and here subtitled “discovering a new sensuality”. As well as warm and grateful tributes from his indonesian mentors and students, there’s a detailed appreciation of his work from a fellow-ethnomusicologist, who did work for the Smithsonian “Folkways” set of recordings from the USA. This was inspired by Jack’s recordings of the country’s ethnic music, his American colleague admiring the “integrity” of his gathered material and his methods.

And so the book proceeds through the various “theatres” of Body’s work, by way of similar sections devoted to China and to Cambodia, as well as activities and projects back in New Zealand and elsewhere.  In the “China” chapter, events of vital significance to this country’s cultural heritage, such as the premiere of Jack’s opera “Alley”, are highlighted. The premiere’s conductor Peter Walls thoughtfully and beautifully equates the genesis and societal context of the work with that of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” in seventeenth-century Italy. Another section, “In performance – embracing the world”, brings into focus Jack’s relationship with groups such as the Kronos Quartet, for whom he wrote a number of works that have since been performed in places far removed from New Zealand.

Running alongside and through these sections is the inspirational Radio NZ Concert interview with Body, conducted with insight and sensitivity by Elizabeth Kerr – again, no mere retelling of a life’s minutae, but one furnishing so many insights per minute (rather than the other way round!). I found most illuminating the sections where the composer outlines and explores his compulsions to firstly explore material and then use, or (as he puts it) “reinterpret it”. He goes on to confess, openly and modestly, that the music is transformed through his actions  to reveal something of himself, with all his limitations.

What’s refreshing is the candor of the man, a composer who doesn’t hesitate to express his creative angst of having to fill emptiness, and therefore turning with relief to something that’s already there and refashioning it “nearer to the heart’s desire”. And what about any associated “crises of confidence”? – in the same utterance they’re characterized as “no bad thing” for a composer, which is remarkable as a metaphor for strength of will overcoming self-doubt. It’s also part of the demystification processes which Jack Body saw as central to his particular “heart’s desire”. And this book gives us many such instances of the essence of Body’s particular no-holds-barred brand of creativity.

The most complimentary thing I can think of saying about the book is that it’s enabled me to feel as though I now know Jack Body a whole lot better than I did. People who knew him well will be far less surprised by what’s covered here, but to others like myself whose contact with him consisted of meeting occasionally at concerts, registering, however briefly, his warmth and friendliness, and who know some of his music through live performances and recordings, the sheer range and depth of his activities here presented is nothing short of revelatory – as fellow-composer Helen Bowater said about meeting him for the first time, it’s like “being struck by lightning – never the same again!”.

Editors Jennifer Shennan, Gillian Whitehead and Scilla Askew can, I think be extremely proud of the result of their labours, in tandem with Steele Roberts Publishers. Together they have done for Jack what he himself repeatedly did in his own work – expressed essential and enduring things, which his friends already knew, but which people such as myself can now discover and realize more fully for ourselves throughout these lively, warm-hearted and inspiring pages.

 

 

 

 

NZTrio’s fascinating collaboration with three young composers in a range of their and other contemporary works

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music New Zealand in New Zealand Music Month
collaboration with SOUNZ (Centre for New Zealand Music) and NZTrio

Conlon Nancarrow: Sonatina (piano)
Ravel: Pièce en forme de habanera (cello and piano)
Webern: Four Pieces, Op 7 (violin and piano)
Alex Taylor: burlesques mécaniques (piano trio)
Ligeti: Cello Sonata
Ravel: Sonata for violin and cello (movements 1 and 2)
Claire Cowan: ultra violet (piano trio)
Salvatore Sciarrino: Capriccio No 2 (violin)
Ligeti: Cordes à vide (piano)
Webern: Three Little Pieces, Op 11 (violin and piano)
Karlo Margetić: Lightbox (piano trio)

NZTrio (Sarah Watkins – piano, Justine Cormack – violin, Ashley Brown – cello)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 9 May, 4 pm

As a contribution to New Zealand Music Month, Chamber Music New Zealand, together with SOUNZ, developed a concert programme for NZTrio that would give the job of selecting the works to three young composers. So each selected three or four pieces, including one of their own, and at the start of each bracket, one of the members of the NZTrio read a short apologia by the composer, sketching his or her philosophy of composition.

At the end of this review you will find an appendix containing the words from the three composers who have curated this concert.

Alex Taylor’s choice
Alex Taylor introduced his choice, referring to his belief that music should challenge, disturb and cause discomfort rather than simply enjoyment; certainly an objective that seems common enough among composers of the modern era. (are you too an old fogie puzzled by the use of the word ‘groove’ which Taylor used, that one has heard in a pop music context, unenlightened?) Nancarrow was famous as a composer who came to feel that it was an advantage to remove an ‘interpreter’ from process of bringing his music to listeners, composing on to piano rolls for the player piano, and it is those that I am familiar with. But I had not come across this Sonatina, an early work, said to be the last he wrote for performance on an ordinary piano, prepared later for the player piano. It exhibited the characteristic sounds of his later pure player piano compositions. His very recognisable style suggests to me a dehumanised, dissonant Scarlatti, Ives-indebted, jazz-inflected, sometimes amusing. However, none of its technical challenges bothered Sarah Watkins.

The only mainstream composer represented in the concert was Ravel – twice (pace Webern, only eight years younger, but separated spiritually from him by a half century). The decisions on the programme were of course a collaboration between the three composers, as is noted in the appendix. Ravel’s Pièce en forme de habanera, originally entitled Vocalise-étude en forme…, was here played by cello and piano (in April I heard a visiting flutist play it) where Ashley Brown took care with its lyrical characteristics as well its bravura flights. In the light of Taylor’s manifesto, was it a surprise to find this charming, perhaps ironic piece among his choices?

Webern’s two pieces together, were probably of shorter duration than most of the other single pieces. One can listen to (though not come to grips with) his entire oeuvrein a few hours, and these, for violin and piano, were typical of his highly economical, compressed utterances, violin and piano often inhabiting separate domains though in whole-hearted accord and commitment.

The contributor of the first bracket, Alex Taylor, offered his burlesques mécaniques, the longest of the four pieces, involving the whole Trio for the first time. It comprised ten pretty short pieces that the composer described in his notes as ‘ a rather extroverted collection of grotesque miniatures … dances … mechanised, electrified…’. They were identified by names that were sometimes pertinent, sometimes difficult to recognise, titles that were not all that common in ordinary musical literature, like ‘a spanner’, ‘tumbledry’, ‘anglegrinder’, ‘scaffold’, but the main title had warned us. The writing for the instruments was hectic, though there were ‘stuck’ moments, a series of spaced piano chords; the character of the three instruments became important elements in the portrayal of each piece.

Claire Cowan’s bracket
Ligeti’s Cello Sonata was Claire Cowan’s first piece, which I’d heard only once before, in Wellington: it’s a fairly accessible, tonal work, drawing fleetingly on folk music, written before his escape from Hungary in 1956 to find refuge(?) with the Darmstadt/Stockhausen school. For many, like me, music written by composers who had comparable experiences, sometimes induces the feeling that some of the constraints of Soviet hegemony were not all bad, obliging young composers to master their craft based on the old masters and on popular music, as all composers had in previous eras. In any case, this was a fine, energetic, indeed virtuosic performance by Brown and Watkins.

The second Ravel work was the first two movements of the less familiar Sonata for Violin and Cello, written in the early 1920s, coloured to some extent by the prevailing return to aspects of the classical style.  Ravel’s music is almost always welcoming, full of delights and intelligent pleasures.

Claire Cowan’s own piece, commissioned by CMNZ, ultra violet (our young composers seem to have an e e cummings proclivity; is it a sort of mock humble demeanour?), written for the full Trio, plays with the phenomenon of ultra-violet light, beyond the normal range of light frequencies visible to humans, but ‘seeable’ by various creatures including the ‘most lusciously hued crustacean in the world’, the mantis shrimp. She extends this to the realm of sound, ‘navigating a musical landscape … on a journey to create and discover colours beyond the edges of our visible spectrum’. And so, the music made use of harmonics, very high, very quiet, but comforting, with strains of beauty, hinting at the sounds of contemporary minimalists of the Baltic rather than American kind.

Karlo Margetić’s contribution
Sicily-born Salvatore Sciarrino’s Capriccio No 2 for solo violin, dedicated to Salvatore Accardo, was Karlo Margetić’s first choice. It began with harmonics, very high, very fast, very detailed, hinting at the natural world with magical bird-like sounds: a startling performance by Justine Cormack.

Margetić’s second offering was Ligeti’s Cordes à vide, the second study from his first book of piano Études dating from his post-communist period, bringing the concert full-circle, back to Nancarrow’s influence. Though for piano, the title means ‘Open strings’. Ostensibly inspired by Nancarrow’s polyrhythms and African music, those features were so integrated in the music that its impact was as a piece that pursued its own inevitable evolution in an interesting organic manner.

The second Webern of the afternoon was his Three Little Pieces for cello and piano, Op 11. Characteristically, a lot of silence between cautious, economical though evocative notes offered by the two instruments, cello muted. Though the second piece, ‘Sehrbewegt’, began at least, exhibiting a sort of normal, agitated energy for 20 seconds or so before retreating to the composer’s customary notational frugality. In spite of this admirably sympathetic performance.

My life with Webern began when I saw, 60 years ago on the back corridor notice-board of what is now called the Hunter building (housing both the entire arts and law faculties) of Victoria University College (let me be accurate), what I took to be a misspelling of Carl Maria von…’s name in a notice about a Thursday lunchtime concert in the Music Department. In the intervening decades, his constricted emotional palette and what I feel as pretentiously minute expressiveness has never much touched me.

Finally Margetić’s own music, Lightbox, a word of which I have had to ask the meaning. I liked it, from the violin and cello opening, soon joined by the piano: a busy, varied story with touches of familiar, idiomatic harmonies and evolutionary processes; they helped to keep grounded a listener who needs one foot on firm familiar ground allowing the other to shuffle confusedly through an unmapped landscape. The composer’s remarks about the ill-assorted nature of the instruments of a piano trio were illustrated in occasional surprising outbursts by the piano, separating it from the generally happy duetting of violin and cello. The result was indeed, in the composer’s own words, ‘an unexpected and strangely beautiful assemblage’.

Jack Body
Next day, Jack Body died; he was an unparalleled inspiration to composers, musicians, music lovers and the arts world in general throughout New Zealand and in many exotic places. No student composer not only in Wellington, but also throughout New Zealand can have been untouched by his manifold talents, his example, openness, humanity and generosity. Though I was never close to him, whenever we met, I felt that his very own sympathetic nature, his warmth, induced feelings in me of greater generosity and tolerance, certainly of affection towards him. I never detected the slightest antipathy that might have existed for one who had sometimes expressed misgivings about aspects of the direction and character of contemporary music.

 

Appendix:

An overview describing the concepts adopted by the three composers, from Alex, Karlo and Claire:
“While this programme may look eclectic and forbidding on paper, in practice it draws together a range of threads that connect the three New Zealand composers. We have built an overall framework rich with contemporary resonances, within which each New Zealand work has its own mini-programme and narrative arc. We have tried to pack the concert full of energy and stimulation for any audience.
“We have decided against choosing standard repertoire piano trio works, most of which have only a tangential relevance to New Zealand composition in the twenty-first century. Instead we have broken up the trio into solos and duos, building up the ensemble for each third of the programme.. This approach provides textural relief between the ensemble pieces and helps to build continuity through each section of the programme.  The shorter accompanying pieces create dialogue and draw focus towards the longer (New Zealand) works.
“All of the composers we have chosen are highly individual but linked by a strong concern with colour and texture. Within this there are two general stylistic themes: continuations of the modernist tradition (Webern, Nancarrow, Ligeti, Sciarrino, Taylor, Margetić); and concern with older forms, especially dance forms and folk music (Ravel, Nancarrow, Ligeti, Taylor, Cowan). Two pieces in particular accommodate both of these ideas – Nancarrow’s Sonatina, with its echoes of hyperkinetic Jazz idioms (Art Tatum?) and foreshadowing of Ligeti’s etudes, and Ligeti’s Cello Sonata, taking traditional folk melodies as a springboard for discursive play.”  

 

Here are the texts of the short introductions from each of the three composers read by members of the trio before they played the works each had chosen:

Alex Taylor says::
Artistic expression in today’s world is not simply about beauty and emotion. It is not an easy way to pass the time. It’s about the discursive and the disturbing, the ephemeral and the offensive. I go to a concert to be jolted out of my everyday perspective. That’s what we’ve attempted to do in creating this programme. To give you a jolt. But also to give you a platform for exploration. To find your own way through. To get you started, here are a few threads to pull on.
First, modern vs. postmodern: there’s an interesting dialogue here between the desire to create something new and the desire to repurpose something old. Composing is a dialogue with tradition, but also a dialogue that leads outside of that tradition. Engage with the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Second, groove vs. gesture: some of these pieces rely on a groove to drive them forward. Some deliberately resist grooving, treating music as a collection of finely sculpted objects rather than a continuous rolling landscape. Some take the idea of groove or gesture and altogether confound it.
Third, straight vs. camp: although there’s some profound, deep music here, it’s also an opportunity for play, superficiality, artifice and irony. Perhaps not everything is what it appears to be.
So rather than asking you to sit back and relax, I’d encourage you all to lean forward and draw your own connections through this very special programme.  

Claire Cowan says:
I chose Ravel and Ligeti to stand shoulder to shoulder with my new work to represent my continued inspiration and fascination with colour. Ravel, the masterful French colourist; and Ligeti, whose solo cello work showcases the cello’s versatility beautifully (and I suppose I am biased, being a cellist myself). It reminds me of the Bach solo cello suites in its clarity of gesture and emphasis on melodic lines. It just goes to show – composers can have fun adopting other composer’s sensibilities; challenging expectations while at the same time also being true to themselves. Ultimately I think we write what we need to write, for ourselves..my composition is both my craft, my survival and my therapy!

Karlo Margetić says::
In some ways, the works that precede my piece form an exposition of its basic building blocks. All are transparent in texture, and simultaneously manage to be elegant and completely unrelenting in their approach. I’m quite drawn to music that has this continuous, unrelenting quality, from the cycles of fifths that form the bulk of Ligeti’s Etude, to the minutely varied repetitions in Sciarrino’s Caprice that make it feel as if time has been suspended. Writing Lightbox was like getting lost inside a maze designed by M.C. Escher, complete with impossibilities, improbabilities and optical illusions. I hope you will all enjoy being lost in it too.

 

NZSO with Lilburn’s Symphony No 2, his successor’s impressive piece plus striking Swedish composer and trombonist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZSO Aotearoa Plus

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; Christian Lindberg conductor and trombone, and David Bremner – trombone

Michael Norris: Claro
Jan Sandström: Echoes of Eternity
Lilburn: Symphony No 2

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 1 May, 6:30 pm

The title of this concert covered two-thirds of its music, though perhaps the most spectacular element was supplied by trombonist-plus, Christian Lindberg in a work by compatriot Sandström, Echoes of Eternity. The concert, in the two New Zealand works, spanned almost the entire post-war musical history of the orchestra and its home, Wellington. For the orchestra was founded in 1946 shortly before Lilburn moved from Christchurch to Wellington to become a lecturer at the newly established Music Department of Victoria University in 1949. There he finished his first symphony, played two years later by the then National Orchestra; the second followed quickly. Both Lilburn and the NZSO remained in Wellington, the orchestra rather slow to take seriously a responsibility for New Zealand music, but Lilburn and the school of music soon became the pre-eminent harbingers of New Zealand music. This year (2 November) is Lilburn’s centenary.  

The orchestra’s early dilatoriness can of course be understood, for its first task, obviously, was to establish its importance to the community at large which had, in a very short time, first to become familiar with the huge central body of classical orchestral music in live performance. Only having ingested the basic repertoire was there any real hope of audiences coming to grips with the music that our few composers were then writing.

The other New Zealand work in the programme was by a young composer, inheritor of that Lilburn-Victoria University Music School tradition: Michael Norris, 2003 winner of the Lilburn composition prize at Victoria, now senior lecturer in composition, as was Lilburn. As well as composing for orthodox instruments and orchestra forces, he engages with avant-garde techniques – sonic arts, electro-acoustic music, which he studied with fellow-New Zealander Denis Smalley at City University London.

Lindberg appeared as both conductor and trombonist. He ran on to the stage, bounded on to the podium, in a tight, glistening black jacket hinting at his self-image as some kind of bad-boy – at least a bit unorthodox – of music.

Norris’s piece, newly commissioned by the orchestra, reportedly composed for the same orchestral forces as Lilburn’s second symphony was, apart from anything else, a remarkable exercise in imaginative orchestration and harmonic ingenuity; with a more precise musical memory, I could have figured out whether its initial outlaying of pitches constituted a tone row. Even if it did, and in spite of its hardly throwing out any melodies that would persist in the mind long into the night, it was by no means music of the jagged kind that one longs to be finished. There was a recognisable recurrence of certain intervals that rose several times to a state of near resolution; a rising quasi-arpeggio passage with shimmering violin solo and harp; there were interesting passages for tuned percussion – xylophone and marimba. It was all propelled, somewhat miraculously, and mesmerizingly, by the man on the podium given to far-flung, angular arm gestures, commonly both arms mirroring in opposite directions.

The composer’s words in the programme suggested the title of the work, Claro, implied a “state of transparency, lightness and clarity”, and it would be hard to find more specifically descriptive language to characterise it.

That we are now in an era that has turned aside from the alienating styles of composition that drove audiences away, was clear through hearing admiring, if sometimes a bit bemused audience comments, broadly appreciative of all they’d heard.

Lindberg’s showpiece was a sort of concerto for two trombones and orchestra by the 61-year-old Swedish composer, Jan Sandström, written for the Extremadura Symphony Orchestra, the region west of Madrid, adjacent to Portugal. Its major city, Cáceres, has UNESCO World Heritage status, with important Roman, Islamic, Gothic and Renaissance architecture and these features, says the composer, inspire the music.

An off-stage trombone sounds as the orchestra awaits the conductor’s arrival, a long legato melody rising and falling. Now he enters, in a close-fitting white jacket brandishing trombone, continuing to play, accompanied by wood-blocks (virtually the only percussion on hand) and a bed of strings. Nothing could have been a greater contrast with the previous impressionist/virtuosic, multi-tonal Norris than this forthright, quasi-conventional orchestral tutti, big opulent melody verging, for some ears, no doubt, on blowsy. Later there are near-percussive throbbing passages from cellos and basses.  

We’d had a long wait for the other trombonist who eventually entered from the right: NZSO principal trombone David Bremner, and the two were soon involved in battle even as Lindberg continued, as best he could, throwing his right arm towards the orchestra behind him, which seemed enough to keep the players alongside. 

Prominent in the orchestral melee was the tuba, as the two trombones, occasionally inserting mutes, became increasingly frenzied, doing things at a speed one might have thought impossible. There was a calm point in the middle when Lindberg recited a poem that described Cáceres, which did not have quite the impact that a reading by a George Henare (recalling the ANZAC concert last week) might have had. Among later diversions was the winding of a air-raid siren driven by a sort of wind-machine that lent a note of terror – was the city attacked by murderous Falangist rebels in the Civil War?

Music that is conspicuously tonal, though now reinforced by some of the more expressive, perhaps aggressive, features of the difficult music of the past era, has returned, and is no longer scorned. Audiences can now feel welcome in the concert halls again.

Conductor Lindberg appeared in the second half in a plum-coloured jacket (I exercised myself conjecturing synesthestic implications) to conduct Lilburn’s second symphony, written in 1951 but not performed till 1959. Opening with vivid trumpet over firm strokes by strings, this symphony has now signalled Lilburn’s escape from some of the slightly repetitious decorative gestures that constituted an unneeded trade mark in earlier music, and a total maturity and self-confidence. I soon felt that I was hearing a fresh and unhesitant, thoroughly thought-out performance as proved by a conductor who’d committed the score to memory.

It was energetic, assertive in its handling long phrases, its breathing of dynamics, the contours studied and explored with care and traversed with confidence. Again Lindberg was a conductor whose gestures were compelling, for the audience at least (I haven’t asked players whether they were valuable or something else). My only pause came with the feeling that the main theme and the signature motifs in the last movement were overstated.

Never mind: this was a very fine performance, and it was great to have a committed and serious view taken by a non-Anglo conductor capable of grasping its character and inspiring a pretty electrifying performance.

Though the MFC was not full, the audience was no disgrace considering the absence of an acknowledged masterpiece. And the applause was generous. 

 

NZSO and Sydney Symphony Orchestra in moving shared ANZAC concert of new works by composers of both countries

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Northey

Spirit of ANZAC
Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man
Michael Williams: Symphony No 1 Letters from the Front (with Madeleine Pierard – soprano and George Henare – narrator)
James Ledger: War Music (with the New Zealand Youth Choir)
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Michael Fowler Centre

Wednesday 22 April, 6:30 pm

Note that this review is for the most part what I wrote and posted on this website two days later on Friday 24 April, but now modified in various ways in the light of listening to its broadcast by Radio New Zealand Concert on Saturday evening.
I delayed further, to listen to the broadcast on Monday afternoon of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s performance (presumably also performed on the Wednesday).

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra has joined forces with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to present the same programme, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. The SSO’s two performances of the concert take place on the same evenings as this concert in Wellington and, on Friday, in Auckland. Dominating the programme were the two principal works, commissioned by the two orchestras from prominent composers in each country.

A further link with Australia was through Australian conductor Benjamin Northey who has been seen here before, conducting both the National Youth Orchestra, in February 2014 and the NZSO in November last; and he takes over as Principal Conductor of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra this year.

Fanfare for the Common Man
The concert began with a shattering performance of Copland’s brief Fanfare for the Common Man, a title that reflects his humane, left-wing sympathies. (He was classed as subversive by the House of Representatives committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s and black-listed by the FBI, one of the 150 American artists so classified during those paranoid years).

It opened with a frightening seismic thunder-clap on timpani and bass drum, and continued with brilliant, spacious brass playing: a monumental performance.

Symphony No 1 by Michael Williams
Michael Williams has composed this, his first symphony, ‘Letters from the Front’, on commission by the orchestra. The commission may well have been prompted by the success of his opera, The Juniper Passion, about the Battle of Monte Cassino in the second World War. My first knowing contact with him had been a moving performance, featuring Paul Whelan, Joanne Cole and Stephanie Acraman, in his earlier chamber opera, The Prodigal Child, at the Taranaki Arts Festival in 2003.

His symphony opens with the rattle of a side drum, and the orchestra expands to create a trembling, fearful, chaotic environment which was much more than heterogeneous noise: it was music. There were snatches of melody, barking brass, rippling flute, poignant cor anglais; and short breaks of calm where beautiful strains of music emerged.

In the second and third movements, the orchestra was joined by soprano Madeleine Pierard who sang lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem, Arms and the Boy, interspersed with extracts from letters from New Zealand soldiers in the first World War read by narrator George Henare; one of the letters was from Williams’s great-grandfather who was killed at Passchendaele in 1917.

Henare’s delivery was carefully paced, reflected the grim pathos of the poem, without succumbing to any exaggerated or false sentiment. Pierard’s voice was perfect for the Owen poem, lyrical in a thin, penetrating way; I couldn’t help being reminded of the quality of voice and orchestra in Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; in addition, Pierard injected an unearthly, intense vibrato that lifted it to a spiritual realm.

The third movement starts with a sort of excitable mockery of a bugle call; oboe and cor anglais feature again, but their human dimension is obliterated by a depiction of a terrifying artillery bombardment, as Pierard resumes the poem accompanied by a trembling flute. There were moments, as it moved on, when a less penetrating voice might have been obscured by the orchestra. The relationship between soprano and the various instruments was tested throughout, somehow dramatising the pathos of the fates of the men whose lives were taken.

James Ledger’s War Music
It was Australia’s turn after the interval, with James Ledger’s War Music.

But here I am revising what I wrote following the concert and posted on Friday morning. These remarks follow my hearing the broadcast of the concert’s recording by RNZ Concert on Saturday evening. Though I usually argue that it is much more rewarding to listen to live music than via the radio or from recordings, I had to concede that I was getting a clearer impression and rather more purely musical enjoyment on the small radio at our bach at Waikawa Beach than at the concert.

First, the following is part of my original review:
The first movement was entirely orchestral, portraying the subject through a multitude of instrumental devices, some familiar, some unusual, such as patting the mouthpiece of the brass instruments to produce soft, muffled tones, passages of pulsating, throbbing sounds evoking fusillades, screaming glissandi by strings, the rattle of tom-toms. Though the composer’s note states that he recognised the difficulty of attempting a realistic picture of war, and concentrated on ‘the broader aspects of war’.

I had written that the use of so many unusual articulations and ‘extended’ instrumental techniques seemed to draw attention away from the subject to focus too much on unusual instrumental articulations and combinations, perhaps too much striving for the literal sounds of battle and so on. Nevertheless it was an interesting, colourful adventure in contemporary orchestral writing, brilliantly executed by winds and percussion in particular and handled spiritedly, with precision by Benjamin Northey.

And of the second part I wrote:
The second part depicted the horror and grief of war: the choral element called up music of a very different character from that in Part I; it had an impact that was moving and awakened a real emotional response. The youth choir’s participation and its music turned the work in a direction in which music can be more successful than words, the setting of a poem by Paul Kelly, of admirable simplicity and directness: its last two lines, poignant and unaffected: “Remember us, we died in smoke / We died in noise, we died alone”. The words, unless one was reading the words in the programme, rather escaped attention for they were not very clear but their force emerged through the music they inspired from the composer. The choir’s performance was extremely beautiful, suggesting the most careful and sensitive rehearsal under David
Squire and the evening’s conductor.

After hearing the broadcast, however, I found myself with considerably more admiration for both the commissioned works.

Michael Williams’s symphony was a thing of more vivid reality and immediacy, and I was paying more attention to the expressive orchestral writing and the way it supported, commented on what the voices were doing. Henare’s readings had more heart-wrenching impact, while my impression of the force of Madeleine Pierard’s singing was strongly confirmed.

But it was hearing Ledger’s music for a second time, through a different medium, and without the ‘distraction’ of watching the orchestra to see how some of the unusual sounds were created, that enhanced my appreciation. Rather than feeling that the highly sophisticated orchestral effects detracted from the emotional power of the music, I was moved simply by the resultant music, its coherence,and what is called (a little pretentiously I always feel) the ‘architecture’ of the music quite engrossed and enchanted me.

In fact, I was entranced now by the remarkably imaginative sounds that Ledger had created. The need to revise my views came as something unsettling, yet illuminating once I had removed myself personally from the process.

Tallis Variations
The choice of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis to conclude the concert was inspired. Here, regardless of the meaning of the Latin text, we have a work, written well before the world descended into the catastrophe of the first World War, that seemed to capture a profound lamenting that could represent an emotional depiction of any horrendous, man-induced disaster such as the Great War which ended by killing millions of people. For strings alone, it demonstrated how a composer can produce the most powerful, deeply-felt response through the simplest and most economical means.

As a final comment, now able to compare the two performances, the Wellington performance seemed just a little more robust, vivid and fully realising the horror and tragedy of the subject the than the Sydney one.

Considering the absence of a big popular work, there was a large audience in the Michael Fowler Centre that responded with great enthusiasm at the end.

 

Last three days of the triumphant 2015 Chamber Music Festival in Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part Three

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 February

Thursday 5 February

For the first time, at this festival, two trips out of Nelson were organised, primarily as part of the full festival pass package; on Tuesday it was St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti; today, to Upper Moutere to visit Höglund’s glass studio, the Neudorf Winery and a concert by The Song Company in a beautiful country church.

I decided to remain in Nelson in spite of that meaning foregoing the concert which included songs from the late Middle Ages – the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The song, Crist and Sainte Marie by St Godric, is one of four, ‘the oldest songs in English for which the original musical settings survive’, according to Wikipedia. I will record a personal reference, that Godric spent many years in the famous Lindisfarne Priory (indirectly giving me my name), where the beautiful illuminated eponymous Gospels were probably written in the early eighth century.  There was also a song by the enlightened Castilian King Alfonso X (13th century), English madrigals by Tomkins, Morley, Gibbons and Weelkes; and then a song cycle by Gareth Farr, the Les Murray Song Cycle, and modern madrigals from Australia and Denmark.

In Nelson the concert by the Ying Quartet that I heard on Tuesday at the lake was repeated.

French piano music
Thus there was only the 7:30 pm concert at Old St John’s, entitled Joie de vivre. That was on account of the full programme of French music in which Kathryn Stott was the still point of the turning world.

The earliest piece was five dances by Marin Marais (recall the film, Tous les matins du monde). Phillip Ying took Marais’s viola da gamba part on his viola which might not have altered it materially, but did remove the music from a particularly idiomatic 1700ish sound, partly the effect of a piano in place of a harpsichord or similar instrument of the period. The dances were varied and charming.

A Ravel rarity, which I’d not heard before: Trios beaux oiseaux du paradis, was sung by the Song Company, a cappella.

Kathryn Stott returned to join Rolf Gjelsten’s cello to play first, Fauré’s Après un rêve and then Debussy’s Cello sonata. Rolf read us a translation of the poem by Romain Bussine, a poet and singer who co-founded, with Saint-Säens, an important society in Paris, the Société nationale de musique, for the promotion of French music in the face of, mainly, Germanic influence. It included Franck, Fauré, Massenet and Duparc and several others. The former is very well-known and its performance was enchanting, not at all sentimental (which it rather lends itself to). The Debussy sonata may not be quite as assured a work as the violin sonata but this was a most attractive performance that both distinguished and brought together the distinct lines of the two instruments.

The New Zealand String Quartet joined Stott in César Franck’s Piano Quintet, in a performance whose spirit was very much guided by Stott’s playing, poised and restrained, with space between the phrases, her chords lean and clear. These remarks were true for the first two movements, following the composer’s indications, but in the third, Franck’s marking ‘con fuoco’ was licence for the release of the feelings it was rumoured that Franck had for a particular student at the Conservatoire. The big throbbing melody seemed steadily to increase in speed and dynamics, to quite a climax.

This most welcome performance added to the little effort initiated with Stott’s performance on Tuesday of the splendid Prelude, chorale and fugue, no doubt driven by the pianist, to pay attention to Franck’s unjustly neglected masterpieces.

Friday 6 February

Waitangi Day has usually fallen during the festival and offers an obvious excuse to explore New Zealand music, familiar and unfamiliar.

Nicola Melville remembers Judith Clark and shared friends
The 1pm concert served to showcase former Wellington pianist Nicola Melville who now teaches at Carlton College Minnesota, in music associated with her teacher and mentor at Victoria University, Judith Clark who died last year.

The programme note explained that the pieces were by composers dear to Judith’s heart. And there was a second set of pieces by composers who are among Nicola’s favourites.

The first played was Lilburn’s Three Sea Changes, the first two written in 1946 and the last in 1981. They have become familiar through the sensitive performances by Margaret Nielsen of 40 years ago, and it was good to hear them played by a pianist with a couple of generations’ longer perspective, of their acceptance as among the most characteristic of Lilburn’s piano music.

Then followed a new commission called simply, Gem, by Gareth Farr, a kaleidoscope of shifting tones, sentiment and sparkle. Its performance was full of affection and delight.

Ross Harris recorded in note about his offering, In Memory – Judith Clark, which was written for her 80th birthday, that she addressed him ‘you flea’. In it there was an immediate feeling of sadness, the notes spaced in a gentle and thoughtful way. It seemed to touch a deeper vein, especially in Nicola’s delicate and sensitive performance.

Eve de Castro-Robinson marked her tribute to Judith, “free, capricious, whimsical”, and that was the case. It might have been a characterisation as much of Eve as of Judith, with its scampering, quirky wit, that may well have enlivened the meetings between the two.

Jack Body’s offering was changed from the advertised Five Melodies to two pieces labelled ‘Old Fashioned Songs’, in Body’s inimitable treatment of them: Silver Threads among the Gold and Little Brown Jug. The expected and the unexpected in ‘Threads’, diversions from cadences that the ear and mind might have expected, yet enough of the original remained to tease. The ‘jug’ was treated to semi-staccato, spaced plantings of notes, it increased steadily in complexity, liveliness and interest, and Melville played them both with clarity and a keen sense of their wit and eccentricities.

Nicola in America
The music then moved abroad, to the United States. The first composer was an avant-gardist with wit and a mind to entertain: Jacob TV which is the American version of his Dutch name, Jacob ter Veldhuis. The Body of Your Dreams is a scathing look at the mindless world of TV advertising, using tapes and loops, rock idioms, of an advert for an electronic weight-loss programme, using repeated words a few of which I could pick up like ‘fat’, ‘press the button’ ‘no sweat’, ‘amazing’, the language of the bottom end of youth culture, advertising and the electronic media.

The piano was very busy in collaboration with the junk-burdened noises on the tape, good for a moment’s contemplation of the meaning of music, satire and what passes for culture.

And finally, a return to a composer I think ranks high in Melville’s pantheon: William Albright who wrote a number of rags, among much else. These two were entitled: Dream Rags, comprising The Nightmare Rag, with the parenthesis suggesting Night on Rag Mountain (though I detected no hint of Mussorgsky) and Sleepwalker’s Shuffle. They were, I have to confess, closer to the idiom of ragtime than the pieces by Novacek heard a few days before. In any case, Melville was very much at home with them and they delighted the audience.

Verklärte Nacht in the evening
The 7:30pm concert called on The Song Company and both string quartets. The Song Company sang songs from the 14th and 16th centuries. William Cornish’s ‘Ah Robin, gentle Robin’ with the singers taking varied roles, the men first and then the women while conductor Peelman accompanied with a drum; voices and the drum steadily rose in pitch and intensity, as the words revealed the singer’s despondency at the realisation of his lover’s likely faithlessness.

‘Where to shud I expresse’ possibly by Henry VIII followed, along with the anonymous, c1350 song ‘The Westron Wynde’, each a lament on a lover’s fickleness, or at least, absence. Here was the style of singing that best suited The Song Company, capturing lovers’ troubles with individual voices most advantageously on display, between their coming together to create beautiful vocal fusion.

Two New Zealand pieces were Lilburn’s Phantasy for Quartet, and John Cousin’s Duos for violin and viola of 1973. The Lilburn was a 1939 exercise written at the Royal College, for Vaughan Williams, winning the William Cobbett Prize. Here was a nice link with the previous song bracket, as Lilburn used the tune from The Westron Wynde, at first with restraint, and then increasingly energetic. The New Zealand String Quartet gave it a sweet, loving performance; apart from an early performance in Christchurch, I think it was said to be the near premiere in New Zealand.

Cousin’s three duos were Waltz Lee, Lullaby for Peter and Polka for Elliot, very much a family affair. These early examples of the composer’s work are charming, characteristic, offering a nice opportunity to hear other than his more commonly encountered electro-acoustic music. They were played engagingly by Janet and Phillip Ying.

The Ying Quartet returned in full to play their own arrangement of an Alleluia composed by Randall Thompson in response to the early years of the Second World War. There were hints of Samuel Barber sure enough, but its somewhat incongruous lamenting character in contrast to its title, led to an interesting, quite complex contrapuntal piece; the quartet may well have made it something of a personal utterance.

Which left the rest of the concert to Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht). The programme note described it rightly as ‘his glorious Sextet’, and this performance by the New Zealand String Quartet, plus the violist and cellist from the Ying Quartet, made a wonderfully rich and emotional job of it.

Saturday 7 February

Cornerstone Classics – Haydn and Mozart
Here, on the festival’s last day, was the chance to hear three New Zealand players not otherwise represented. Their style however, conformed with the approach to early music that was one of the hall-marks of the Song Company. Douglas Mews at the fortepiano and Euan Murdoch on the cello are well-known exponents of ‘period performance practice’; the violinist replacing the advertised Catherine Mackintosh, Anna van der Zee, is a regular member of the NZSO’s first violins, but proved to be fully sensitive to the playing style considered appropriate for the ‘classical’ period.

Two Haydn piano trios (Hob.XV/18 and 19) enclosed Mozart’s violin sonata in C, K 403. The feathery decoration applied to Haydn’s G minor trio enhanced the fortepiano’s lightness of sound, which in turn coloured the playing by the two stringed instruments. Even for one who is perfectly used to music played in accordance with historical practice, the first impression when a new and, I must confess, unfamiliar piece is played, is of a touch of the insubstantial. But the ears quickly adjust. Haydn’s trio in A (No 18), played after the Mozart, was as full or ornaments as was No 19, but more lightened with wit, and quirky gestures as well as the modulations that even one quite used to Haydn’s behaviour finds surprising.

I really enjoyed Mozart’s violin sonata, played in comparable, genuine style, it sounded closer to the Romantic era than Haydn, even though written ten years earlier; it’s part of an incomplete set that his friend the clarinettist Anton Stadler tidied up/completed. The first movement is marked by a strong rhythm, with an unusually emphatic first note in the bar, or at least that is the way it was played (I hadn’t heard it before). It seemed that the Andante might have been marked molto andante on account of its rather imposing slowness. I found the whole thing very attractive and so it did surprise me that I hadn’t come across it before.

Grand finale –cries of the cities
No doubt the big crowd at the final concert in the cathedral was there mainly for the Brahms Sextet. Yet there may well have been a good deal of curiosity about the set of seven ‘cries’; they filled the first half.

They involved, again, both quartets and the Song Company. The order departed from that in the programme. First came not the earliest, but the Cries of London by Orlando Gibbons, inspired by the earlier Cries of Paris. It’s a far cry from Gibbons’s familiar madrigals and keyboard pieces with its colourful and probably sociologically interesting words and atmosphere.

Louise Webster’s Cries of Kathmandu succeeded in using music of a generalised Indian character embroidered with Hindu religious imagery to paint an intriguing though on balance, distressing picture of a once charming subalpine city largely ruined by capitalism and mass tourism.

It was a short step to Jack Body’s Cries from the Border, a piece typifying the composer’s profound human and political concerns, now coloured by his own imminent mortality. The tale of the fate of German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, trapped on the French-Spanish border attempting to escape from Vichy France and the Nazis in 1940. Body wrote: “Unlike Benjamin, I am a traveller reluctant to transit. But the sentence has been pronounced…”. Musically it expressed these complex emotions committedly and convincingly.  Jack Body was there to stand for the applause.

The Cries of Paris of c. 1530 by Clément Janequin was a predictable sequel. Like that of its imitator Gibbons, it did contain the cries of the city’s street vendors, which were no mere medieval phenomenon, but petered out only around the First World War. The performance left no doubt about the reason for their survival and now renewed popularity.

Then came two New Zealand latter-day efforts: Cries of Auckland by Eve de Castro Robinson which dealt with the anti-Springbok Tour and the cries of the protesters throughout the country, still vivid in the memories of all of us who were involved: “1 2 3 4, we don’t want your racist tour! … Shame! Shame! …Amandla, Amandla”  and hints of later protests about asset-sales and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

And Chris Watson contributed a comparable political offering from Wellington. More words, and a wider lens: the morning commuter trials (cries of frustration?), the dramatic revealing of Wellington Harbour at the bottom of Ngauranga Gorge (cries of spiritual uplift?), but then the realities of political Wellington at the time of the negative, dirty politics, election campaign – the cries of debate, perhaps the cries of hopelessness, from the victims of the victory of inequality.

Brahms Sextet
The Ying Quartet plus the violist and cellist of the New Zealand String Quartet had the last word, with the glorious second string sextet by Brahms (Op 36). Reference is usually made, and was here, to the belief that it contained hidden reference to Agathe von Siebold with whom he had been in love with a few years before, encoded in the first theme of the first movement. Typically, Brahms shied away from commitment, which he apparently later regretted. The work’s high emotional intensity, especially the Adagio, slow movement, can colour the listening experience, but it hardly matters what specific narrative the listener allows to accompany a performance, for it is such a transcendent experience from the young composer, aged 33.

These festivals have often succeeded in bringing things to a conclusion with a musical creation of unusual splendour and emotional power. This one achieved that very movingly.

 

Nelson chamber music festival: the second three days, with a trip to St Arnaud

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson 2015
29 January to 7 February 

Part Two

The Nelson Cathedral and Old St John’s church

Monday 2 to Wednesday 4 February

Monday 2 February

PianoFest I: Dance
Sunday’s rain which had been threatened to continue today, disappeared and there was sun first thing, but clouds soon returned and umbrellas reappeared as we set off for the 10.30 PianoFest I: Dance.

It featured four prominent New Zealand pianists: David Guerin, Jian Liu, Stephen de Pledge and Sarah Watkins. ‘Dance’ was a rather approximate term as the first piece, Ravel’s Mother Goose, in the original piano duet form, was not designed for dancing; though Ravel’s later orchestration was in fact expanded into a ballet in 1912. I don’t know how successful it was or how much it is performed today. But predominantly it consists of charming, quiet depictions of some of Perrault’s (and others’) famous fairy stories. It was played by Jian Liu and Sarah Watkins, who brought to each scene a wonderful delicacy, precision, an awareness of the spirit of each tale and the pianistic colours demanded by that character. There were vivid revelations in each of the five movements – a special finesse in the depiction of the Beauty and the Beast (Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête).

There were three pieces by New Zealand composers: David Hamilton’s Three Rags were genuine dance material, closer to the Scott Joplin originals than the elaborate and over-sophisticated rags by Novacek, heard the day before. These were for eight hands at two pianos, positioned face to face, Watkins and de Pledge on the Steinway on the left and Guerin and Liu at the Yamaha on the right. Lilburn’s rather untypical Tempo di Bolero written when he was flatting in his twenties in Christchurch with Leo Benseman and Lawrence Baigent, both pianists. So it was for three pianists, in very close proximity; the three this time were, treble to bass, Guerin, Liu and Watkins. It was an energetic piece, that rather burdened the bolero rhythms with complexity, but nevertheless made one rather wish that Lilburn had been drawn into the business of composing for the theatre, to find the sort of popular success that Farquhar found with his Ring round the Moon music. Though the three Canzonettas, that were played on Wednesday in the Stabat Mater concert were teasing hints at what might have developed if the climate had been different.

The last piece in the programme was an extended exploration of Bottom’s characterisation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘A Tedious Brief Scene: Bottom’s Dance’ by Leonie Holmes. The employment of all four pianists (left: Watkins, Guerin; right: de Pledge and Liu) imposed a certain chaos on the music that depicted Bottom, the butt of jokes and teasing, through rhythms and in the handling of musical ideas.

Also in the hour-long programme was the third Slavonic dance from Dvořák’s first set, in the composer’s original piano duet form. It occurred to me that we could use a couple of nationwide recitals featuring the two pianists, de Pledge and Guerin, doing the entire two books of these small masterpieces.

The only music by Scharwenka that I knew till a few years ago was this Polish Dance (Op 3 No 1) that both my wife and I were surprised to confess to have played, after a fashion, in our youth. The programme note explained how commonplace our experience was, noting that it had been one of the ‘greatest hits’ of its time, the sheet music selling in millions.

Prokofiev’s own piano arrangement of parts of his Romeo and Juliet ballet is for one pianist – here, Stephen de Pledge alone. The Lily Dance of the Maidens: curious and careful, contrasting with the heavy, confrontational Montagues and Capulets.

In the afternoon we got PianoFest II
It was advertised as ‘World Voyage’, for the usual reason of widespread composer birthplaces, though the distribution was pretty normal: France and Germany, the United States and a couple of pieces by New Zealanders.

This festival has been given a certain quirky interest by pairing music that has been transformed, generally by the composer from the original instrumentation to something else.

Beethoven featured twice. Late in his life, he had rewritten his third piano trio (heard on Sunday), as a string quintet (heard on Saturday); and on Monday we heard his Piano Sonata in E, Op 14 No 1 which he later transcribed as a string quartet to be heard on Wednesday from the young Nelson quartet, The Troubadours.

The Piano sonata was the first piece in the PianoFest II programme and it was played by Jian Liu.

I was enchanted by Liu’s playing of this unpretentious sonata, evincing a very carefully considered, understated performance of beautiful delicacy, with fleet little decorative passages, that, again, made me long to hear Liu in performances of a lot more Beethoven.

The contribution from France was Messiaen’s Regard du silence from the huge canvas, the Vingt regards sur L’Enfant Jésus, played with enormous authority by David Guerin. From the United States: John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction for two pianos, from Stephen and Sarah who exploited the interesting sonic possibilities that Adams wrote into his boisterous piece.

New Zealand composer Sarah Ballard wrote a set of four pieces representing the four medieval elements: earth, air, fire and water, and here we heard the four pianists (treble to bass, left to right: de Pledge, Guerin, Watkins and Liu) in two that portrayed an ancient Mexican cave and Mount Erebus.

A different disposition of the four pianists then played Gareth Farr’s Bintang, probably danceable enough, but a stimulating and impressive listen.

Bach by Candlelight
The evening concert was the focus on Bach which has become a key element in the festival. It was made particularly distinguished as the first appearance of The Song Company; and the forces also included both resident string quartets Douglas Mews (organ), Robert Orr (oboe) and Loan Perernau Garriga (double bass).

To start, Ying Quartet’s leader Ayano Ninomiya gave an impressive performance of the Prelude from Bach’s Partita No 3 for solo violin, and followed with Eugène Isaÿe’s astonishing treatment of the music  in his second sonata for solo violin. The performances of both pieces were distinguished by extremely high technical brilliance and artistic integrity.

The first of Bach’s vocal pieces on the programme was Jesu meine Freude. This is one of Bach’s real masterpieces and demands exquisite balance and blending between parts and both richness and dramatic characterization. Inner parts sounded too prominent, and though each voice was technically assured, the tone was not uniform; I am not bothered by vibrato in baroque music, but here it obtruded occasionally. Here was an example, I felt, when the possibly authentic use of one voice to a part made it very hard to meet achieve a simple, beautiful, dramatic performance.

Hannah Fraser sang the best-known aria from the St Matthew Passion, ‘Erbarme dich’. I’d loved her Brahms songs the night before, but was not so convinced by this, perhaps on account of a voice that was so warm and emotional, beautifully adapted to the 19th century, but didn’t meet the stylistic expectations that have become normal for Bach today. Her lovely accompaniment was from a blend of players from the two quartets plus bassist Joan Perarnau Garriga and organist Douglas Mews.

Soprano Mina Kanaridis sang the gorgeous aria, ‘Mein gläubiges Herze’, from Cantata No 68, with a real sense of ecstasy and conviction. But the real triumph of the concert was the performance by bass Alexander Knight of the cantata Ich habe genug (Cantata No 82), with a simply superb voice, and a stage demeanour that commanded the entire space both by means of his penetrating gaze at his audience and the sombre expressiveness of his singing. He was supported admirably by oboist Robert Orr, and again bassist Perernau Garriga and Mews at the chamber organ, all three of whom had given comparable backing to Mina Kanaridis.

A second instrumental piece was the third of Bach’s not often played Gamba Sonatas (BWV1029): on Gillian Ansell’s viola, accompanied by Douglas Mews, it was modest and unpretentious, and free of artifice of any kind.

 

Tuesday 3 February

To St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti
This was the day of the lake: when the music and the pass holders go to St Arnaud on Lake Rotoiti where the Ying Quartet play in the lovely little chapel whose windows give on the beech forest and to the distant mountains. We walk to the School of Music where the bus will depart at 9.30am. The uncertainty of the weather, though the sun was shining then, means there is a wide variety of dress, from optimists to pessimists: I was in the middle with a light jacket and proper shoes.

Most of the way in through varied farmland and the series of villages south of Nelson till we turn off after about half an hour; the road becomes more winding and we travel through more plantation forest; almost no native trees apart from occasional patches of totara till within about five miles of St Arnaud. Why did the State allow land sales and native forest felling to make way for exotics so close to this beautiful lake? However, the immediate environment is largely beech.

After morning tea at the Visitor Centre we go to the little chapel where the Ying Quartet is already seated, backs to the windows, while the audience gets lovely views of close kanuka and more distant beech.

Quartets by Haydn and Tchaikovksy and a trio by Anthony Ritchie
 The acoustic is gorgeous in the small timbered space with its curved laminated beams that create the feel of a vaulted gothic crossing; and the first few minutes are spent wallowing in the immediacy of the individual and collective sounds of the Haydn first movement. Better than at earlier performances we could here enjoy the quartet’s elegant and sensitive playing, Haydn’s wit and teasing, all with such care for the ebb and flow of phrases and dynamics.

The programme is Haydn, Op 20 No 4, Tchaikovsky, Quartet No 1 and a trio by Anthony Ritchie, entitled Spring String Trio. The Tchaikovsky drew more power and drama from the players, their painstaking attention to fluctuating dynamics and rhythmic effects more exploited.

In introducing Ritchie’s little piece, in which leader, Ayano Ninomiya stood down, giving the violin part to second violin Janet Ying, Phillip Ying referred to the piece as Spring String Ying Trio. Though commissioned as a birthday present, its tone was initially serious though quite brisk: getting older is no laughing matter.

But it was a delight to hear Janet Ying’s fine, confident violin playing, unobscured by her leader’s dominance, which is the common fate of the second violin. Its slower second section cemented its place as a small but substantial work.

Helene Pohl talks with the four PianoFest pianists
Back in Nelson later in the afternoon, it was the turn of the four pianists participating in the PianoFest, to chat with Helene Pohl. As well as exploring each pianist’s early experiences, and how a commitment to a professional career emerged, there was interesting discussion on the sense or otherwise of multi-pianist performances such as we had at the first and second ‘PianoFests’: the consensus was that it was fundamentally an eccentricity and perhaps stupid, except for Schubert’s which were justified as a means of getting very close to members of the opposite sex.

Kathryn Stott
Kathryn Stott’s major piano recital was in the evening. It demonstrated her special interest in French music with Ravel’s Sonatine, a nocturne by Fauré, L’Isle joyeuse by Debussy and Franck’s formidable Prelude, chorale and fugue. Their variety, and the rare hearing of the splendid Franck made it a memorable and, for the many probably unfamiliar with Franck, a revelatory event. The second half was dominated by Stott’s illuminating playing of the original piano version of Grieg’s Holberg Suite, too rarely heard, that restored Grieg’s place as a great piano composer; the rest was from South America, Villa-Lobos’s Choros No 5, Guanieri’s Danza negra and Ginastera’s Dance No 2 from Argentinian Dances. It ended terrifyingly with a rather extended, killer piece she had commissioned from Graham Fitkin called Relent, evidently a mark of his sense of humour since its speed, ferocity, complexity and sheer impossibility for anyone less than a Stott, was utterly unrelenting.

Wednesday 4 February  

The anchors of the festival
Three main groups provide the backbone of this year’s festival. The New Zealand String Quartet of course; the Ying Quartet from the United States; and the Song Company from Australia. Some festivals are very particular in the range of musical genres, but most like to include players that lie perhaps a little apart from the popular central element of a festival’s character.

Several times it has been a singer or singers. That is excellent because the world of chamber music tends to give rise to somewhat narrow areas of acceptability for quite a few, who might just surprise themselves if they ventured out of their narrow comfort zone.

So the Song Company had an important role to play in a festival like this, and they tackle it on several different levels: inserting a couple of Brahms Lieder in a chamber music programme; doing several of Bach best loved choruses and arias alongside violin pieces; testing the water with a wide variety of styles and musical periods – Medieval and Renaissance polyphony and madrigals, the Baroque, the classical and the romantic periods, the modern or twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And of course, there are factions within each of those categories, those who turn off early music, or scorn romantic music, or art songs, or opera but love religious choral music, find English music boring, and so on.

Roland Peelman and The Song Company
A challenge to all these limiting fads and fashions was offered on Wednesday morning in the vigorous and wide-ranging discussion between Rolf Gjelsten and Roland Peelman, the director of The Song Company.

As with all these sessions designed to shed light on the making of a musician, this began with Peelman’s description of the unmusical life in a small Flemish town in Belgium where, from nowhere, a strong musical impulse arose, that sought out a music teacher at about age eight and induced the family to buy a piano. Then a quite rich musical life at a boarding school, a useless year at a local conservatorium (he mentioned almost no Belgian place names apart from Ghent), but more fruitful general education at university.

His learning went on to Cologne, the base of the post-Darmstadt, avant-garde school led by Stockhausen, and it included the important (for Peelman) teaching of Alois Kontarsky (you’ll remember him from a chamber group at one of the very early New Zealand Festivals in Wellington in the late 1980s).

Insights into conducting came mainly from those with almost no standing as a conductor but with a flair for giving invaluable guidance and inspiration. One had said he could tell him everything about conducting technique in an hour but it would take a lifetime to learn.

While he had initially said that the impression of Australasians that Europe was seething with culture was delusional, his later account of rich and flourishing arts and music scenes in at least the main centres of Europe, hardly supported his argument. Much of what he said seemed to place high value on wide general cultural awareness and knowledge instead of on narrow, music-only, highly technical, and detailed analytical study.

His own wide exposure to literature, several languages, history, the arts generally and music in particular was enviable, especially in a country with steadily narrowing cultural and intellectual horizons.

Peelman was interesting about the close relationship between musicians who inhabited the avant-garde and those who explored early music performance practice from the 1970s. The one had spawned and informed the other; especially the realisation that one could not live on the former but there were growing audiences for the latter.

To Australia
His account of his shift to Australia in 1982 was fascinating. His contact with Aboriginal ‘Dreaming’ music at Waggawagga left a mark on his brain; his first job was at Mt Gambier on the South Australia/Victoria southern border teaching keyboard and singing and conducting the brass band.

Life became serious when he was appointed assistant chorus master at Australian Opera in Sydney, in the far-off days when the company had 22 productions in its annual repertoire (now about half that in a good year; it was the late 80s when I started going to Australia to make wonderful opera discoveries). Though he allowed himself reservations about aspects of opera as spectacle and its perception as amusement for the wealthy (“music takes second place”, he said – maybe, but not for me), he gained varied and valuable skills, describing the hectic, non-stop life as intoxicating.

Then in 1990 came an offer of appointment with The Song Company, Australia’s only full-time professional small choir. He had much to say about its evolution, about the fundamental contrast between four and six voices. A finally he disclosed that, after 25 years, he’s ready to take on something else.

PianoFest IV
After lunch on this fine day, when the rain had gone, the fourth in the series of PianoFests, which had been planned and organised by Stephen de Pledge as a mini-festival-within-a-festival, took place in Old St John’s, as its deconsecrated embodiment is now known.

More multi-pianist performances, this one subtitled ‘Opera’. Official participants were: David Guerin, Jian Liu, Stephen de Pledge, Sarah Watkins.

The first, played by De Pledge by himself was Liszt’s transcription of Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde. Liszt had the taste to ensure that Wagner’s scoring did not lose anything in the process, and the piano version moved just as ecstatically from calm grief to necro-erotic frenzy.

Nor did the transcription of the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg suffer with four hands at two piano (Stephen on piano A, left, and David Guerin on piano B, right); in the transcription by Max Reger, its lines were if anything etched with more clarity than in the original.

Norma
But the real revelation was the fantasia drawing melodies from Bellini’s wonderful opera, Norma, by Czerny, a contemporary of Bellini, as well as of Rossini and Schubert. He was a piano teacher and composer of piano etudes and impossible exercises: this one for six hands at one piano. The emotions remained alive and well, and the rhythmic pulse under the final heart-rending melody, rather undid me.

It lay in the way he spread the melodies to the very limits of the keyboard, with not inappropriate adornments; inter alia, it called for De Pledge, in the treble position, to reach repeatedly with his right arm across Sarah Watkins to plant notes outside of his own territory; Sarah was wedged between, with David Guerin at the bass. The combination, towards the end, of exciting, pulsing bass rhythms and gorgeous, heart-rending melody, rather undid me. As I remarked yesterday, I felt, as the result of the glorious music that Bellini wrote for this great opera, and Czerny’s sensitive and exciting treatment, that this piece had a serious independent existence, vindicating the genre of six or more hands at one piano.

Freddie
Then came another kind of novelty, though it was not altogether clear whether Double F for Freddie, had another life as some kind of opera, it was, as described, a humorous romp at the very limits of one piano: viz. four at one keyboard – from top to bottom, Guerin, Watkins, Liu, with de Pledge offering, as far as I could see, just the final deep bass note at the end.

Carmen for the madhouse
Then came an indescribable, extraordinary party piece devised by De Pledge for all four pianists in riotous disarray. It’s mainly Carmen, but there are other impertinences: Die Fledermaus, and Sarah suddenly interrupting Stephen doing Micaela’s act 3 aria with the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, which was the signal for the arrival of other players, of growing chaos, of shifting piano stools, of forcible position changes at different keyboards, some corruptions like the Habanera delivered by Jian with feminine delicacy.

Carmen herself arrives (Rae de Lisle), tosses the rose to the pianists and then joins the riot. Five at two keyboards is unbalanced however, and De Pledge set out to find another pianist in the audience, and finally forcibly arrests Kathy Stott; she puts up a considerable fight to avoid this unseemly press-gang musical recruitment but joined the chaos of six at two keyboards with gusto to deliver the coup-de-grace to Carmen.

Troubadours
The third event of the day was at 6.30pm in the Cathedral, restoring a more orderly and civilised tone. The Troubadours, the noted student string quartet, who have been spotted around the city during the week, playing at schools and charities, were here to play Mozart’s Divertimento K 136, and the old filmic hit, Over the Rainbow. In particular, they played Beethoven’s own arrangement for string quartet of his piano sonata in E, Op 14 No 1.

These players, students variously at Auckland, Waikato and Victoria universities, were Julian Baker, Hilary Hayes, Jin Kim and Heather Lewis. Their playing was stylistically idiomatic, beautifully articulated, nicely phrased and judged for gentle rhythmic and dynamic variations.

Stabat Mater
This title referred of course to the great Pergolesi cantata that filled the second half. Sung by two sopranos from The Song Company, Mina Kanaridis and Anna Fraser, it was accompanied by the Ying Quartet, minus Janet Ying, plus Donald Armstrong and Douglas Mews at the chamber organ.

For a work that is so famous and so well-loved, I have heard it too few times, more in other countries than in New Zealand. I think it is no longer spoken of as it once was, with a degree of scorn or superciliousness, the result of a piece of music being too much loved on account of its beauty, not a virtue in mid-20th century avant-garde circles.

This performance was truly beautiful, fully justifying the employment mainly of the festival guests from Australia and the United States. The voices expressed the overwrought religious grieving that lies at the heart of the medieval poem, with sobriety and restraint, as well as extraordinarily sensitive control of tempi and expressive gesture. Led by Ayano Ninomiya’s strong but scrupulously handled violin, the ensemble gave a performance that would have impressed the most discriminating audiences anywhere in the world.

The earlier part of the concert had comprised a lovely Song without Words by Gillian Whitehead from Rolf Gjelsten’s solo cello. Donald Armstrong and Gillian Ansell played Lilburn’s entrancingly lyrical Three Canzonettas for violin and viola. Ayano Ninomiya delivered a Kreisler piece of high virtuosity and musical interest, breathtakingly.

Then the Song Company appeared to sing El fuego by Mateo Flecha, a 16th century (and so, contemporary with Tudor England) Spanish (Catalan) ‘ensalada’, in five parts, or was it six?  Vividly Hispanic, it and its performance were a delight.

All this highly heterogeneous material made it one of the most unexpected and delightful programmes of the festival.

 

Diverting and wide-ranging concert from the SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

SMP Ensemble: Nachtmusik

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht for string sextet, and other music by Salzedo, Britten, Biber, Brad Jenkins and Cilla McQueen

Jennifer Newth (harp); Gregory Squire and Tabea Squire (violins); Peter Barber and Megan Ward (violas); Jack Hobbs and Charley Davenport (cellos); Rebecca Steel (flute); Karlo Margetic (clarinet); Nick Walshe (bass clarinet); Chris Gendall (conductor)

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Friday 14 November, 7:30 pm

The SMP Ensemble’s programmes, often devoted to experimental, New Zealand music, are not always particularly easy for the average classical music lover to enjoy. This one, advertising Schoenberg’s best-loved piece, Verklärte Nacht, guaranteed pleasure. But word of it had obviously not got out as the audience was sadly small.

The first half did include a couple of, shall we say, unusual pieces, but it began and ended with harp player Jennifer Newth performing two established harp compositions that were intrinsically beguiling, but also played with astonishing virtuosity and exquisite delicacy. Carlos Salzedo was born in Paris of Sephardic Spanish parents, and later came to find an affinity with the Basques. He took up the harp as a child and gained a world-wide reputation becoming a famous virtuoso as well as composer for his instrument. Read the interesting entry in Wikipedia which draws attention to his wide-ranging musical activities as composer (for music in many genres), conductor, teacher, and to his international reputation in the general musical world and around the world.

Salzedo’s playing is described in that article as characterized by clarity, facility, articulation, fluidity, and subtle phrasing. They were some of the words that came to mind as I listened to Jennifer Newth’s enchanting and breathtaking performance of Chanson dans la nuit.

Jennifer returned before the interval to play the Nocturne from Britten’s Suite for Harp which he wrote in 1969. I was not familiar with the piece and might have been hard pressed to identify its composer. After the preceding two New Zealand pieces, it emerged as main-stream, genuinely musical, exposing Britten’s idiomatic and imaginative writing for the instrument. Its nocturnal setting did not prevent
its becoming muscular and emphatic as it progressed through this incisive and insightful performance.

Brad Jenkins (notes in the programme leaflet about the composers and the music were rather limited; and, incidentally, the meaning of the acronym SMP seems to be ever concealed: I am told it stands for Summer Music Project) is a young Wellington composer who won the Douglas Lilburn prize at the New Zealand School of Music in 2012 for the piece played here, Nocturne No 1. It belongs to the long tradition of experiments in sound that seem to be an essential part of a student composer’s equipment in the ‘coming-of-age’ process. It involved ‘players’ positioned on all sides of the audience: piccolo/flute Rebecca Steel (her second appearance for me this week), cellist Charley Davenport, dismembered clarinet Karlo Margetic, bass clarinet Nick Walshe, viola Peter Barber, violin Tabea Squire, all conducted by Chris Gendall. Jenkins’s aim was to deconstruct the character of each instrument by removing all its essential tonal sounds so little more than breath or the swoosh of bow cutting through the air was audible. Slowly, hints of pitches emerged and the sounds became more abrasive, scrupulously unmusical ion the normal sense. I wondered as I listened whether this was what the world would be left with after its conquest and domination by ISIS or the Taliban.

Cilla McQueen is known to me, and I suppose most, as a poet; but here was another departure from the orthodox. Her ‘score’ of Rain Score 2 was reproduced on the back page of the programme: a spiral formed by faint, interlacing seaweed or elementary life patterns. The septet stood in a semi-circle in the front: the two violins, the two clarinets, Peter Barber, Charley Davenport and flute. Again, orthodox sounds were few as the players improvised, imitated, in a sort of aleatoric process, though there were sheets of paper on music stands visible to some players that presumably offered a bit of notated guidance. The performance even involved the mysterious effect of bowing the cello below, but not apparently touching, the strings.

The main draw for the concert was the original, string sextet version of Verklärte Nacht. Here, the string players already mentioned were joined by cellist Jack Hobbs.  I was immediately entranced by the performance, in an acoustic that was beautifully adapted to it. There was something in the sound that drew attention, as it hasn’t before for me, to the marvelous variety of the piece’s scoring in which each instrument has the most interesting individual lines, and there were entrancing utterances and delights in many short passages from, for example, Hobbs’s cello and Megan Ward’s viola.

The episodes of the poem’s story, depicted graphically enough in the score, were dramatized with particular clarity and with the emotional generosity that had obviously attracted Dehmel and Schoenberg to explore the lovers’ delicate situation. It’s interesting that Schoenberg later dismissed the poem as repulsive and sought to have the music heard as independent of it. Thus commentaries that relate the sections to episodes in the couple’s nocturnal experience are, like most attention to the ‘programmes’ of music, unhelpful and distracting.

But those thoughts do not detract from the delight one feels at the evolving shapes and emotions, key changes, acidulous harmonies that Schoenberg presented to the Vienna of Johann Strauss and the Secessionist movement. This performance captured the floaty, suggestive transfiguration; and it must have been a delight to be involved in such a beautifully integrated performance.

The concert ended with a couple of German lullabies, in which Tabea joined as gentle, subtle singer. And then Heinrich Biber’s The Nightwatchman had Greg Squire singing the words from the rear, coming forward in woollen jerkin and cloth cap for the second stanza. The light slowly dimmed as players left one by one to diminuendo staccato notes, to end a diverting and highly enjoyable concert. One regretted deeply that so few were there to enjoy it.

 

Carnival for Guy Fawkes’ Day – the music of Alfred Hill

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St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series:
Alfred Hill on Guy Fawkes Day

ALFRED HILL (1869-1960)
Quartet No.3 in A minor “The Carnival” 1912 (orchestral version)
Movements: In the Streets / Andantino / Scherzo / Finale

The Dominion Strings, conducted by Donald Maurice

St. Andrews-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 5th November 2014

This work was the earliest of Alfred Hill’s string quartets to be expanded later into an orchestral version, and is better known as Symphony No.5 “The Carnival”. He frequently “recycled” existing works into new formats, and this transcription benefitted from the larger forces which could very successfully convey the bustling, crowded atmosphere of a fiesta.

The opening street scene was graphically depicted with vigorous, sunlit writing and attractive melodies, propelled along by dancing triplet rhythms. Closing gently, as though the fading light of evening were approaching, it could easily have been an evocative film score, no less effective for the absence of visual effects.

The Andantino was full of gentle melody passing from voice to voice, supported by rich harmonies that conjured up the balmy night air, and the pleasures of wandering hand in hand, somewhat apart from the noisy revellers. The languid, surging phrases eventually subsided into a pianissimo close, as though the moon were sinking, heavy with sleep, below the horizon.

The Scherzo woke to a new, sunlit morning, a bright breezy romp full of the new day’s energy, evoking colourful stalls selling wild flowers and sweet treats. It led quite naturally into the energetic Finale which opened with the vigour of almost flamenco rhythms and colour, then moved into a central contrasting section of lilting melodies, with almost a hint of pathos, before returning to the opening mood. There was a dramatic accelerando coda to round off the work with brilliant, festive flair.

This was a thoroughly attractive, almost programmatic work, from a composer who understood the appeal and art of skilful melody writing. The familiar tonal structure made it easy listening, while never sounding tired, but always fresh and creative. The players were clearly enjoying themselves, and their enthusiastic and lively engagement in the work spilled over easily to the appreciative audience.

This concert marked the release of Vol.5 of Hill’s string quartets from Naxos, recorded on CD by the Dominion String Quartet. The last recordings are just complete, with the final Vol.6 due next year. Before the concert, Donald Maurice spoke of the genesis and development of this project over a number of years, then Chris Blake (NZSO CEO) gave some background to Hill’s life and work.

The latter’s prolific output included ten operas (some on Maori themes), thirteen symphonies, seventeen string quartets, many choral works, concertos, chamber music, sonatas, songs and short works for a variety of instruments. Researcher and publisher Allan Stiles has noted that there are over 2,000 titles attributable to Alfred Hill and of those, many have never been published and relatively few commercially recorded. (Programme notes.)

Chris Blake spoke of Hill as “the only significant Australasian composer representing the Late Romantic era”, but I would put Richard Fuchs (1887-1947) very firmly in that category too, although he was a naturalised New Zealander who lived here only from 1939 to 1947. Like Hill he was prolific in many genres, and all his surviving works have been published by the Richard Fuchs Archive, though as yet only a handful of his beautiful songs are available on CD (see www.richardfuchs.org.nz).

Both these composers have been too little heard and enjoyed by New Zealand audiences, but those who attended today’s concert obviously appreciated this opportunity, judging by the turnout and their most enthusiastic applause.