Tag: New Zealand music

Triumphant NZSO concert by Inkinen in Mahler, Stravinsky and Lilburn

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen

Symphony No 3 (Lilburn); Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Mahler); The Firbird ballet music (Stravinsky)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 14 April, 8pm

Lilburn’s Third Symphony is certainly the least heard of his three, written after he had begun experimenting with serialism and had virtually abandoned himself to electronic music.

If its first performances was predictably labelled gritty or avant-garde – in its pejorative sense, or harsh (in the composer’s words), the years have softened its impact on ears attuned to modernism that previously went only as far as Stravinsky or Britten. The echoes of Sibelius or Vaughan Williams heard in the first two symphonies have now been replaced by echoes of, in some opinions, late Copland and Stravinsky.

No doubt as a result of its inclusion on one CD with Lilburn’s other two symphonies, it has gained familiarity, as listeners allow the CD to come to its end with the quarter-hour Third Symphony.

The recordings seem to be favourites of those putting together the midnight-to-dawn music on Radio New Zealand concert.

Lilburn’s technical skills as orchestrator and in all aspects of large-scale orchestral composition have always been conspicuous, but what struck me about this performance was the confidence in handling of the musical ideas, and especially, the way in which Inkinen maintained the pulse, exposed the essential lyrical and eventful features of the score and highlighted individual instrumental motifs, which seemed sensitively directed to giving rewarding moments for a great many players, particularly winds.

The piece is famously built on modified serial principles, but we have become so used to atonal music – music without constant, implicit reference to a home key – that tonal ambiguity does not sound as tuneless or alien as it did when one first encountered it. Certainly there are no lively melodic episodes such as the Second Symphony’s Scherzo, but there is no need to dwell on its serial elements. The actual tone row doesn’t appear for some time and only through reading the score would the average listener recognise it, or even come to hear the way these scraps slowly coalesce into the row proper. They are the atoms that come together eventually as molecules – tunes – and after a few hearings the evolution of the flow and generally light-textured composition starts to reveal its absorbing beauties.

On the other hand, Lilburn’s signature whole-tone oscillations are there from time to time and certain rhythmic and intervallic habits appear. Its five sections are not distinguished by pauses, only by changes of tempo and mood, but once identified, they help the listener to grasp the argument, and the luminous, animated and well-thought-out performance did the rest.

Mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke had replaced soprano Measha Brueggergosman to sing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Sasha made a mark as Kitty Oppenheimer in Adam’s recent opera Doctor Atomic at the Met; she has sung a lot of choral and symphonic repertoire that calls for solo voices, like Mahler’s Second and Beethoven’s Ninth, and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, which she sings at the next NZSO concert. Her opera repertoire is interesting, ranging from Strauss’s Composer, Mozart’s Dorabella, Massenet’s Charlotte.

Hers was a strong and characterful voice, warm and communicative in the middle and low ranges, and capable of comfortable excursions high into soprano territory and of captivating pianissimos. So she explored the four songs that Mahler set to his own words, bringing out their sharply contrasted moods with vivid individuality. Her transformation from the sunny optimism of ‘Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld’ to the panicky grief of ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’ was quite astonishing, the repeated cry, ‘O weh!’ filling the air with palpable alarm.

And Inkinen guided the orchestra’s accompaniment, so discreetly written as to avoid burdening the first words of each phrase, with scrupulous care; not that her voice would have failed to penetrate a more rowdy orchestra.

The major work, if that is a fair description after the two beautiful/interesting pieces in the first half of the programme, was Stravinsky’s first ballet for Diaghilev, which suddenly made him famous. It was appropriate to recall in the programme notes Stravinsky’s conducting of the conclusion of the ballet in his 1961 concert with the orchestra, which I was at.

From the very first moment I knew I was in for a radiant, exalted experience, with the almost soundless murmuring of basses slowly emerging, rather like the opening of Das Rheingold. But if hints of Wagner can be heard (as they can in almost everything written in the half century after The Ring, it is Russian rhythms and melodic shapes that soon dominate. The air of foreboding through magic sounds that suggested Liadov’s Enchanted Lake both made me long for an evocative production of the ballet in Bakst’s designs, but also persuaded me that the music, so beautifully played, was more evocative on its own than any staging might be.

Moving and arresting solos came from various players – Julia Joyce’s viola,  and the rapturous horn playing of new principal Samuel Jacobs; sinuous flutes, and major bassoon contributions and the subtly varied strokes of the timpani.

And the orchestra lifted the dark veil of evil as Kaschei dies and  a new sunny mood emerged in playing that expressed the renewal of the lives of the Prince and the captive princesses.

The splendour of this, and indeed, all three works at this triumphant concert confirmed Inkinen’s unobtrusive mastery of the podium, and I find it disturbing that a cabal still exists that seeks out the odd adverse reviews that inevitably appears in overseas media, mostly in unmoderated blogs. Reliable critics wherever he has worked have found his leadership and interpretive talents convincing, clear and imaginative.

Great enthusiasm at Jenny McLeod’s “Hōhepa” premiere

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JENNY McLEOD – HŌHEPA (opera) – World premiere performance

New Zealand International Festival of the Arts / NBR New Zealand Opera

Cast: Phillip Rhodes (Hōhepa) / Jonathan Lemalu (Te Kumete) / Deborah Wai Kapohe (Te Rai)

Jane Mason (Jenny Wollerman) / Nicky Spence (Thomas Mason) / Martin Snell (Governor George Grey)

Narrator (Te Tokotoko /Te Waha): Rawiri Paratene

Director: Sara Brodie

Members of the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Conductor: Marc Taddei

Wellington Opera House

Thursday, 15th March, 2012

I’m not sure whether I ought to admit to readers of this review that, earlier in the same day that I attended the opening of Jenny McLeod’s “Hōhepa” I took up a friend’s invitation to accompany him to a screening of the latest New York Metropolitean Opera production of “Götterdämmerung”.

Perhaps my abrupt juxapositioning of the two experiences was foolhardy, considering the chalk-and-cheese aspect of the works involved. But I found the inevitable comparisons thrown up by these “close encounters” thought-provoking, residues of which have undoubtedly coloured my reactions to Jenny McLeod’s work, outlined below.

The first thing that must be said of “Hōhepa” is that it’s a pretty stunning creative achievement on McLeod’s part, in line with Wagner’s achievement of writing his own texts for his stage works. And as with Wagner in his “Götterdämmerung” I felt an incredible emmeshment of words and music throughout the work, if at the opposite end of the grandly operatic textural and tonal spectrum.

Employing a moderately-sized cast and chorus with a small orchestra, McLeod created an evocative and enduring variety of ambiences throughout the story’s presentation, the sounds shaping and enlivening the narrative with firmly-focused contouring and colorings. In a sense I thought the orchestral score the most consistently dramatic protagonist, one from which nearly everything on the stage seemed to take its cue. One’s ear was constantly being drawn forwards and into that “world of light”, the sounds suggesting an order presided over by ancient gods and disrupted by unexpected change.

To briefly outline some background – Hōhepa Te Umuroa was a Whanganui Maori living in the Hutt Valley during the 1840s, one who, though well-disposed towards the European settlers he met and befriended, opposed the land-confiscation policies of Governor George Grey and took arms against the British militia. Captured, he and others, including his friend Te Kumete, were exiled to a penal colony in Tasmania, where Hōhepa died. His forgotten grave was rediscovered by a New Zealand child visiting Tasmania, whose parents alerted the authorities, and began a process that would see the remains of the exiled chief returned to New Zealand in 1988.

Through her involvement with writing church music for use by Maori people in the Ohakune district, Jenny McLeod had developed an association with Ngati Rangi. She was asked by Matthew Mareikura, elder, and leader of the mission which brought home Hohepa’s remains, if she would undertake to write the history of the entire saga – not as an opera, but hopefully in book form, a task she accepted. She was then approached by the current director of NBR New Zealand Opera, Alex Reedijk to write “a New Zealand work” for the stage, and she thus decided that it would be appropriate to adapt Hohepa’s story for the purpose.

In the course of her compositional career, McLeod has, in a sense, covered more territory than most, her works ranging from avant-garde innovation and her own brand of neo-primitivism, through popular styles, including hymn-writing for present-day worship, to a re-thinking of an avant-garde “tone-clock theory” involving innovative use of the chromatic scale, something she found influenced her writing of “Hōhepa”. She’s refreshingly pragmatic about her use of such techniques in as much as they have an impact on what the ordinary concert- or opera-goer hears in her music – in a recent “Listener” interview she talked about listeners not needing to know too much about the technicalities, expressing confidence that people would instinctively sense a “structural coherence” in her work.

I wondered, as I listened to the evening’s finely-wrought tapestry of sounds, whether this “structural coherence” of McLeod’s would generate sufficient energy of itself to implant a stage work with requisite dramatic possibilities. What I felt must have posed an enormous challenge for director Sara Brodie was how to respond to McLeod’s writing – how to render it onstage as “dramatic” or “theatrical” in an operatic sense. The presentation involved a great deal of “storytelling” via a narrator, one self-styled as a “talking stick” – Te Tokotoko, who is also the hero’s spirit guardian. Actor Rawiri Paratene looked and sounded the role to perfection, though I wondered whether his prominence throughout actually diminished the impact made on the proceedings by Hōhepa himself, whose dramatic character could have “taken on” more of his own story and enhanced the depth of his onstage presence in doing so.

In an article in the programme, Diana Balham writes of Hōhepa that he “is really an ideal opera leading man” – an ordinary man caught up in events which lead to his wrongful exile, imprisonment and eventual death, his fate leavened by a kind of post-mortem coda of wrongs addressed and put to rights. On the face of things that’s perfectly true – but the writer’s words created an expectation that, as a character Hōhepa would behave more “operatically”, which didn’t seem to be the composer’s (and following on, perhaps not the director’s) intention.

McLeod’s work itself seemed to me stylistically more like a kind of “dramatic legend” – something of the ilk of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust”, a work which is equally successful in concert as when staged. There were occasional moments during Hōhepa of physical energy and dramatic movement (a brutal killing was depicted at one point), but in general the stage movement and configuration had a gradually unfolding aspect suggesting pageantry or ritual more than theatrical cut-and-thrust.

This impression was heightened by the composer’s use of some of the drama’s supporting characters, as well as the chorus, to advance the narrative – while the effect wasn’t unlike stylized classical drama, I felt the balance between storytelling and theatrical depiction was pushed away from the latter to the point of dramatic dilution. Ironically, I also thought that Hōhepa himself wasn’t given sufficient prominence throughout the first two acts to capture our attention, to train our focus upon him with sufficient force so that his fate as the tragic embodiment of a victim of gross injustice would later have its full dramatic impact.

Phillip Rhodes, who played Hōhepa, did everything he could with the part – he looked and sounded splendid throughout, and had both powerful and touching moments, the most enduring of which for me over the first two acts were the imposing warrior’s delight in his Christianity-inspired “Holy Family”, and his teaching of the names of birds to his children. But the Pakeha settler couple, Jane and Thomas Mason, made even more of a lasting impression on me, dramatically (splendid singing from both Jenny Wollerman and Nicky Spence), while Deborah Wai Kapohe’s Te Rai (Hōhepa’s wife) and Jonathan Lemalu’s Te Kumete (Hōhepa’s friend), both richly-characterised roles, seemed just as prominent in the scheme of things as the eponymous hero.

And yet – perhaps one shouldn’t be making such an issue of this. After all, in Maoridom it is the whanau, hapu, iwi, and the associated whakapapa which matters more than the individual; and Hōhepa’s tragedy was essentially a communal one, given that he endured great personal privation of both a physical and spiritual kind up until his death in exile in Tasmania. In that sense it’s appropriate that the character be portrayed as an integral member of a group as much as an individual, particularly as the Western operatic concept of a “hero” doesn’t sit well with the scenario that McLeod evokes. Should the work, then, be actually called “Hōhepa”? Is it more about a darker aspect of this country’s history than about what actually happened to him? Is it even more universal than that?

At the time, in the opera house, I felt myself musically entranced by it all, despite some bemusement – upon reflection, and having read back through what I’ve already said in this review, I feel myself beginning to incline towards taking the things I saw and heard on their own terms, and greatly enjoying them. Above all was, as I’ve said, the beauty and variation of McLeod’s illuminated tapestry of instrumental sounds, rendered with the utmost skill by a chamber-sized group of players drawn from the Vector Wellington Orchestra, here under the guidance of conductor Marc Taddei.

Then there were the voices, at the beginning of the work as people of the land enacting the rituals of acknowledging the tipuna, and paying homage to their living descendants. These choruses then merged with the drama, as Hōhepa’s descendants witnessing the recovery and repatriation of his bones, and afterwards as his contemporaries, expressing in heartfelt tones the shared ignominious humiliation of displacement, and the sorrow of his loss to exile and death.

Each of the solo voices suggested oceans more capacity for characterization than was allowed by the composer – apart from those I’ve mentioned, Martin Snell as Governor George Grey quickly established the character’s arrogance and implaccable nature, again largely with audience-directed pronouncements, though in places with engagingly jaunty (and ironic) Stravinsky-like accompaniments.

Given that McLeod’s treatment of the subject-matter demanded a good deal of recitative-like storytelling on the part of the characters, director Sara Brodie wisely responded with stagings designed by Tony de Goldi that emphasized and underpinned the ritual-like aspect of the drama. Her “less-is-more” instincts gave our imaginations space to augment the physical movements of the characters with impulses of our own, suggested either by music, words or backdrop images, sensitively applied here by Louise Potiki Bryant.

Opera is meant to be a visual as well as an aural experience – while this unconventional work of McLeod’s seemed to me to work just as effectively as abstract music and storytelling as it did as a theatrical event, the production’s feeling for ritual and atmosphere grew beautifully from the sounds made by voices and instruments. An enthusiastic and heartwarming reception was accorded the composer, along with her singers and musicians and her creative team, by an enthralled audience at the final curtain. I thought it richly deserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jenny McLeod’s “Peter Pan” music on Naxos

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Music by JENNY McLEOD

The Emperor and the Nightingale (narrator and orchestra) / Rock Concerto / Three Celebrations for Orchestra

The Emperor and the Nightingale: Helen Medlyn (narrator) / Kirstin Eade (solo flute)

Rock Concerto: Eugene Albulescu (piano) / Bridget Douglas (flute)

Conductor: Uwe Grodd

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

 NAXOS 8.572671

After the splendid concert given by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra featuring Jenny McLeod’s The Emperor and the Nightingale as part of the NZ International Festival of the Arts Series, it was interesting re-adjusting one’s thoughts towards an audio-only presentation of the work, included on this splendid recent CD. In fact, coming back to it in the wake of the concert enhanced my enjoyment of both experiences, and stimulated a lot of thinking regarding the respective merits of sound and vision as communication tools in themselves.

Jenny McLeod has herself been a nightingale of sorts, one whose song has taken a variety of tones, characters and intentions over a compositional career which has seen her delve into and work through a number of stylistic preoccupations. Formative studies in Europe with Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen advanced her early avant-garde impulses, alongside of which she was able to identify and explore aspects of this country’s bicultural heritage with music-theatre works like Earth and Sky (1968) and Under the Sun (1970).

She concerned herself for a while with attempting to integrate popular styles of music into classical forms (e.g. her Rock Sonatas for piano), but then became interested in an innovative harmonic theory propounded by Dutch composer Peter Schat, the “Tone Clock” Theory. McLeod based a number of her compositions on this method. More recently she has become involved with writing church music for use by Maori groups, an involvement which led her to being asked to write a piece about an historical event involving an ancestor of Whanganui Maori, Hohepa Te Umuroa (the result being the recent NZ International Arts Festival opera Hohepa).

Here on this new CD, it’s McLeod’s “popular neoclassical” period that we’re largely concerned with, music whose approachability would surprise anybody whose experience of the composer’s work hadn’t included her “pop-influenced” output. As McLeod herself put it in her program notes, “this is the music of a composer who for a time refused “grow up”, declaring that writing and performing music should be “enjoyable”…”

That enjoyment comes across in spadefuls throughout McLeod’s setting for narrator and orchestra of Hans Christian Anderson’s famous story The Emperor and the Nightingale. The Arts Festival concert referred to above paired the work with perhaps the most well-known of “narrator-and orchestra” stories, that of Peter and the Wolf with music by Prokofiev – though comparisons were scarcely in order, as the latter was completely reworked, dispensing with a narrator and featuring an animated film to present the story along with the music.

In McLeod’s Anderson setting, Helen Medlyn’s storyteller-delivery bars no holds, her projection as vivid and as wholehearted as if she were performing the piece for a packed auditorium – rather than overpowering the listener in a domestic environment, I found the larger-than-life characterizations she evokes a perfect match for the orchestral panoply with its multifarious colorings and textures and its extremes of loud and soft, weight and delicacy – in fact her voice is used as another orchestral instrument, and the Naxos recording comes to the party most satisfyingly (unlike some other “speaker-and-music” recordings I’ve heard which seem to deny the participants any sort of sonic relationship!)

McLeod cleverly differentiates the music for the “clockwork” as opposed to the real nightingale: the clockwork bird’s melodies are proscribed, angular and turning in on themselves, as opposed to the freer, more improvisatory figurations of the real bird – and the sense of everybody “taking-up” the mechanical tune is splendidly conveyed, with weight and colour. It’s all the more shocking, then, when the clockwork begins to malfunction, and the bird’s song ceases – the music characterizing the emperor’s resulting malaise could have come from Kodaly’s Hary Janos.

I’m pleased flutist Kirstin Eade is credited in the booklet with the flute solos depicting the nightingale, because they’re wonderful – gorgeously turned, and deftly characterized with so many colourings. Alongside her, the orchestral detailing, so magically and unhurriedly wrought by the composer, is here beautifully realized by the NZSO’s contingent of star players.

Three Celebrations for Orchestra date from 1983, though the work was revised by the composer a couple of years ago. The opening “Journey through Mountain Parklands” is classic “road music” at the start – sounds which push forward and throw their ambiences in all directions, defining the range and scope of what’s to follow.  It’s all gloriously tonal and accessible, with strands of texture that arrest the ear, such as the saxophone solo lines, which lead to gentler,more settled evocations before the scene’s underlying grandeur takes over again, percussive textures adding their voices to the driving momentums.

Nostalgia informs the gentler second movement, an invocation of Pukerua Bay, near Wellington. A kind of wistful tenderness winds through the opening, the music allowing for occasional irruptions of pleasure and excitement – would Malcolm Arnold have written in a similar vein had he visited the country and concocted some “New Zealand Dances”? The third episode has the title A&P Show –  the opening a riot of glittering energies, combining the bustle of visitors with the strut and swagger of performers and showpeople – there are Copland-esque, rodeo-like touches at one point! The music allows for both reflection and purposeful impulse, with the final pages generating plenty of colourful activity, the “rodeo-motif” prominent again just before the whiplash close.

Last on the disc is the Rock Concerto. The music actually began life as a “Rock Sonata” for solo piano, written for the gifted seventeen year-old pianist Eugene Albulescu at the instigation of his teacher, Bruce Greenfield; but Albulescu subsequently requested that McLeod recast the work as a concerto. McLeod calls aspects of the music “very much of our own time”, while referring in both spirit and style to composers of earlier times – “distant friends” as she calls them.  The spirit of Gershwin colours some of the more reflective, lyrical moments of the work, though I confess to finding other parts of the writing surprisingly slight of expression. McLeod warns the listener, it’s true, that “those in search of something deeper and darker must look elsewhere…”

Not so the middle movement – subtitled “Elegy for Charlie French” (a friend of the composer’s who died of Aids), the music gradually colours its deceptively simple opening with darker hues, the expression eventually reaching a point of utterance whose candor and sobriety are appropriately moving. The darknesses dissolve somewhat, as the poise of the opening returns, though l liked the bitter-sweet strands the composer threaded though the utterances of the closing pages.

The finale is all angular energy – the composer marks the music allegro giocoso, and translates it herself as “swinging and robust”, an apt description. In true pragmatic, Baroque-composer fashion,  McLeod indicates that each of the movements of the work can be played independently. Is it all too much of a good thing? One senses that, as with whatever she was engaged with, McLeod was “on a mission”, the music enthusiastically encouraging her dictum “it should be enjoyable”. And there will be plenty of music-lovers prepared to go along with that.

 

 

 

 

 

Words, music – and film : Jenny McLeod and Serge Prokofiev

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand International Festival of the Arts presents:

JENNY McLEOD – The Emperor and the Nightingale

SERGE PROKOFIEV  – Peter and the Wolf

Helen Medlyn (narrator – “The Emperor and the Nightingale”)

Suzie Templeton (director, Breakthru Films, UK – “Peter and the Wolf”)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 9th March 2012

I’ve never forgotten my delight in reading, a number of years ago, a Charles M. Schulz “Peanuts” comic featuring Marcie and Peppermint Patti at a Symphony Concert, waiting for a performance of “Peter and the Wolf to begin. In the comic strip Marcie, her face suddenly brightening, whispers conspiratorially to her companion, just before the music starts,  “Maybe this time the wolf will get him!”.  I didn’t feel her comment was an indictment of either story or music – merely a reaction to the prospect of yet another humdrum performance.

Had Helen Medlyn narrated “Peter and the Wolf” on that or this present occasion (as I’m sure she’s done at some stage or other), I feel certain that no-one would have thought the occasion in any way humdrum or routine. As it was, her input regarding this concert was confined to the narration of Jenny McLeod’s setting of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor and the Nightingale”. Her performance was, I thought, riveting – she made every word of the story “zing” in places and “ping” in others, and gave the impression that she’d established some kind of “universal” eye contact with her audience all at once, so that we were undoubtedly transfixed by her storyteller persona’s sheer presence.

Though some time ago, I well remember playing in the percussion section of the Manawatu Sinfonia for a performance of McLeod’s delightful realization of Andersen’s story – I can’t recall the exact year, though it was around 1991 or 1992, at the time the Mayor of Palmerston North was Paul Rieger – because he was the narrator! (He was no Helen Medlyn, of course – but as much as a standard “celebrity appearance” could deliver he didn’t let the side down). I don’t remember the composer being present for this performance, but my memory is that it was done beautifully, our modest orchestra surpassing itself for the occasion.

With that experience in mind, what truly astonished me during this recent NZSO performance was the actual sound and impact of the orchestra – the timbres and colours uncharacteristically (for this venue) bright and sharp and to the fore, with the brass-playing in particular making a delightfully visceral impression throughout. Had the orchestra been “brought forward” on the platform, as it were? I didn’t think so – what I put it down to was Hamish McKeich’s encouragement of the players to “play out”, and make certain details really tell. Quite apart from being arresting in itself, the playing was thus able to match the narrator’s “larger-than-life” deliver of the text with similarly characterful instrumental tones.

A scintillation of exotic wonderment from the orchestra launched the music; and after Helen Medlyn’s beautifully-delivered opening statement, there was more of what seemed like the full panoply of orientalism in music refracted through Western sensibilities – pastiche it might have been, but the composer’s grasp of orchestral use was mightily impressive and resulted in some beautifully-focused and characterful sounds. Though in places reminiscent of Ravel’s “Ma Mere l’Oye”, the music readily found its own idiosyncratic character in some episodes, such as the angularities of the courtiers’ journey into the forest following behind the little kitchen-girl, and the inventive, slightly off-beat sonorities given to creatures such as cows and frogs.

Kirstin Eade’s flute-playing (depicting the voice and character of the little nightingale) was gorgeously turned at all points, and deftly characterised with many different colorings. Alongside her, the orchestra’s detailing was woven of similar magic, beautifully unhurried in its unfolding throughout, and (as I’ve said) flaring up excitingly in the bigger, grander moments. Much less obviously a quasi-instructional exercise for those unfamiliar with orchestral and instrumental sounds than the Prokofiev work, McLeod’s music nevertheless seemed beautifully tailored to the Anderson story, perhaps not as “leitmotiv-driven” than was “Peter”, nor as pungently and vividly characterized – but sufficiently colourful and incident-detailed to work successfully, especially in these performers’ hands.

Chalk followed on from cheese, so to speak, with British film-maker Suzie Templeton’s adaptation of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” story, in a trice taking us all to the movies, via a big screen, and with the luxury of a live-performance soundtrack (the film did have its own non–musical sound effects). For anybody expecting a standard, narrator-driven presentation of the work, it would have come as a huge shock, less on account of the spoken words’ absence, and more due to the harshness of the film-maker’s setting. In a half-urban, half-rural setting, Peter and his Grandfather live in a house on the outskirts of a town, making Peter prey to both the Wolf from within the forest and the town bullies from the urban jungle. What Prokofiev depicted as an idyllic rural existence for a boy and his animals, here is shown to be a somewhat fraught, law-of-the-jungle, siege-mentality scenario, almost of the “film noir” variety in places. There were children (and adults) in the audience who found it all a bit too much, though a lot of the (very audible) angst would, I’m sure, have been due to thwarted expectation – on its own terms, the presentation, though not without contentious elements, was, in my view, stunning.

Conductor Hamish McKeich, God bless ‘im, did at the outset nudge us in the direction of the composer’s original intentions by getting the orchestral soloists (as well as the strings) to play the “themes” of the story’s characters (though, for the benefit of us sight-restricted “ground floor concertgoers” it would have been great if every player had been able to stand up while giving us each of the character portraits). Of course, the presence of a film reduced the importance of this process; and indeed the compelling on-screen character-animations and evocative settings throughout put the orchestra’s contribution somewhat in the shade, beautifully though the score was realized by conductor and players.

The experience, cheek-by-jowl with the Jenny McLeod work, made me realize the extent to which our senses and perceptions interact with one another depending upon the nature of whatever stimuli we’re encountering. Suddenly, the orchestra who had played the “Emperor and the Nightingale” music during the first half so vibrantly and engagingly now sounded relatively distant and once-removed, the sounds coming to us as if in a kind of dream, refracted through those images we were all so readily involved with. At times it seemed as though this was no children’s story, but a life-and-death struggle against archetypal forces of darkness, the film-maker, for example “squaring Peter up” to his town-bully tormentors, whose brutality was unvarnishedly depicted. And there was no room for sentimentality – the drop-dead cuteness of Peter’s duck was unremittingly savaged by the wolf (causing the bulk of noticeable audience carnage), those cathartic sounds of a poor creature swallowed whole and therefore still alive, here given no fulfillment of expression, no cause for rejoicing.

Audience participation and involvement throughout, it must be said, was gratifyingly palpable – and if, at the end Charles M. Schulz’s Marcie didn’t get her wish, there was certainly a new twist to the old tale, if one which seemed to unfortunately tie up a loose end that hitherto belonged to the hapless duck, and put paid to her one chance of survival. It seemed to me that Peter’s loyalty towards his small, awkward but obviously lovable friend was sacrificed by the film-maker in favour of a new denouement evoking some kind of libertarian impulse on the part of the hero, in favor of the wolf. Still, it’s hardly surprising in a day and age that seems to actively concern itself with the welfare of perpetrators of crimes, and pay lip service to the suffering of the victims. (In this case, no less a philosopher than Basil Fawlty might have observed, “Well, if you’re a duck – you’re rather stuck!”)….

Technically, the animation resembled those early stop-frame cartoons with the jerky movements that older children like myself remember from our earliest times; and the results are certainly engaging, the figures and their movements having an uncanny realism, a properly tactile effect. I think it was the direct, somewhat primitive aspect of it all (wrought by extremely sophisticated technology and painstaking skill) which heightened the characters’ capacities for expressive gesture, which, of course, had to serve for actual words throughout. In effect, the film represented the substitution, for a well-known story’s retelling, of one powerful communication tool for another, the latter very much for our time. It’s well worth tracking down and watching, and especially with friends who enjoy heated discussion!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Houstoun’s musical journeyings at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society Inc.

MICHAEL HOUSTOUN plays music by Jenny McLeod and JS Bach

McLEOD – Six Tone Clock Pieces Nos.19-24 (world premiere)

JS BACH – Goldberg Variations

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday 12th February 2012

In her notes for the program composer Jenny McLeod pays a heartfelt tribute to the occasion and to those taking part, reserving special thanks for Michael Houstoun. Her words “a musician of such immense gifts, high reputation and tireless dedication” would have surely been echoed by those present at the recital, as we were able to sense in Houstoun’s playing something of McLeod’s “pleasure and privilege” in writing music for him to perform.

This music was “Six Tone Clock Pieces”, and was the culmination for the composer of over twenty years of work, this set completing a larger collection of twenty-four pieces. McLeod tells us that “Tone Clock” refers to a chromatic harmonic theory pioneered by Dutch composer Peter Schat, one which she adapted for her own purposes.

Having explained in her notes that composers such as Bach, Chopin and Debussy also wrote pieces in groups or multiples of 12, based on the subdivision of the keyboard into twelve semitones, McLeod dismissed further theoretical explanation of the music’s organization as “essentially of interest only to composers”, adding that she believed “structural coherence can be sensed intuitively by the listener”. Well stated.

The individual movements are evocatively titled, though McLeod admitted that these “names for things” arrived sometimes months after the music had been completed. She talked about precedents for such descriptions set by people like Debussy and Messiaen, and obviously regards her own music as similarly able to stand and be appreciated on its own unadorned merits. I did, I confess, find each of the titles a helpful starting-point for my listening fancies.

The first piece, Moon, Night Birds, Dark Pools, mixed evocation and delineation with great skill (Houstoun an ideal interpreter for such a blend of opposing sound-impulses), our sensibilities taken to the edges of a world of chromatic nocturnal fancies but keeping our status intact as spectators rather than participants in the scenario. Set against these stillnesses was the bustling energy-in-miniature of Te Kapowai (Dragonfly), which then gave way to deeper-voiced portents of oncoming day (Early Dawn to Sunrise-Earthfall), a primeval chorus of impulses gradually awakening the earth’s light, the piano tones suffusing the listener with richly golden energies, Messiaen-like in their insistence.

Haka opened darkly, the music thrustful and threatening at first, before the jazzy off-beat rhythms began rubbing shoulders with more playful figurations. Houstoun skillfully controlled the vacillating light-and-dark moods of the music, then allowed the silences of the disturbed land to creep slowly backwards. The next piece, Pyramids, Symmetries, Crevices of Sleep reminded me on paper of Debussy’s Canope, a composer’s parallel meditation upon an object honouring the dead. Of the pieces, I found this the most abstracted and self-contained, appropriately enigmatic, even more so than the final Dream Waves, with its “surfing the planet” subtitle, whose angularities and contrasts were more readily engaging on a visceral level for this listener.

At a first hearing I was fascinated by the variety of the piano-writing, the titles of the individual pieces giving me some intriguing contexts in which to place the sounds. I thought the music in general terms intensified in abstraction as piece followed piece, the last two of the set very determinedly stating their independence of any kind of glib representation whatever. Incidentally, the first eleven from the complete set of Tone Clock Pieces can be heard on a Waiteata Music Press disc (WTA 005)  available from either The Centre For New Zealand Music (SOUNZ) or the New Zealand School of Music. I haven’t yet gone back to these earlier pieces to listen, but it will be fascinating to compare them with these latest sounds of the composer’s.

Michael Houstoun gave us rather more familiar fare after the interval, a work that’s recognized as one of the cornerstones of Western keyboard literature, JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  This was a performance which I thought was taken in a single great breath, one whose flow of substance never let up, right to the point where Houstoun allowed the final restatement of the simple “Goldberg” theme to steal in even before the jollity of the concluding Quodlibet had finished resounding in our ears – a magical moment.

Of course, this s a work that demands a considerable amount of ebb and flow of mood and motion from the player; and Houstoun’s achievement was to encompass the enormity of variety between these moods, while keeping the audience’s interest riveted (on the face of things, an ironic circumstance with a work whose original purpose was popularly supposed to be that of putting a nobleman to sleep!). The evidence actually suggests that the Count Von Keyserlingk wanted not “a sleeping draught” as is popularly supposed, but music “soothing and cheerful in character” for his young chamber harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to play. This would account for the good-humored, even robust nature of the final Quodlibet, with its menage of well-known, characterful melodies, more suitable for a kind of cheerful sing-a-long than a cure for insomnia.

Throughout I thought Houstoun’s different emphases of rhythm, touch and tone-colour illuminated each of the variations. One would hardly expect a note-perfect performance of such a colossal undertaking, but the very few inaccuracies and the one-or-two rhythmic uncertainties that sounded had that “spots on the sun” quality with which commentators used to characterized wrong notes played by Alfred Cortot. Basically, Houstoun made every note sound as though it mattered – there was nothing of the mechanus about his playing, but always a strong undertow of something organic – a varied terrain, but one with a living spinal chord.

To mention highlights of the playing might seem to be placing trees in the way of the forest – nevertheless, I found the buoyancy of Houstoun’s delivery in the energetic variations created a real sense of “schwung” – the very first variation had strut and poise, No.15 had marvellously energetic orchestral dialogues and rapid-fire triplets, terrific scampering momentum was generated in No.18, and the whirl of further triplets made No.27 an exhilarating and vertiginous experience. As for some of the slower, grander, or more meditative pieces, these were delivered with a focus and concentration which played their part in ennobling the whole work. Longest and slowest of these was No.25, in which the music takes performer and listener to depths of feeling and self-awareness that give the “return to higher ground” an unforgettable, life-changing poignancy. The aria itself was strong and confident at the outset, then other-worldly and meditative at the very end, as if spent from having finished recounting a lifetime’s experience.

Michael Houstoun is repeating this program at Upper Hutt’s Expressions Theatre on Monday 16th April. For those who couldn’t get to this Waikanae concert, I would say that going to Upper Hutt to hear two very different, but equally thought-provoking works marvellously played would be, on many different levels, a very worthwhile journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Douglas Lilburn’s “Winterreise” twice-told by Roger Wilson and Bruce Greenfield

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Flowers of the Sea :  A Celebration of New Zealand Music

LILBURN – Sings Harry (words by Denis Glover) / Elegy (words by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell)

DOORLY – The Songs of the Morning

FREED – The Sea Child (words by Katherine Mansfield) / War with the Weeds (words by Keith Sinclair)

BODY – Songs My Grandmother Sang

Roger Wilson (baritone)

Bruce Greenfield (piano)

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn Rd., Lower Hutt

Wednesday 5th October 2011

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

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 

One should never underestimate the power of headlines as attention-grabbers! Experience suggests that some of these printed declamations are blatantly untrue, some patently absurd, and still others somewhat far-fetched (the few that are left have the merest grain of verisimilitude).

In the present case, equating Douglas Lilburn’s 1951 song-cycle Elegy with Schubert’s Winterreise might be an impertinence for some people – in which case they will qualify the heading of this review for one or more of the three counts listed above – but at least they’ll have read this far, and might be tempted to go on, ready to “pounce on the howlers”, on further absurdities and exaggerations. I take full responsibility for the said impertinence.

Whatever the reader’s thoughts might be concerning the relative merits of both Schubert’s and Lilburn’s similarly “well-weathered” cycles, the parallels between each composer’s work are fascinating. Certainly, the theme of anguish through loss expressed over the course of a number of songs is not uncommon in the European art-song tradition, something that Douglas Lilburn, being no mean Schubertian as suggested by some of his own compositional inclinations (especially in his piano music) would have been well aware of.

Grief to breaking-point – that is what we encounter in Schubert; and the grief of loss is all too palpably expressed in Lilburn’s settings of Alistair Campbell’s Elegy poems as well. These were written by the poet to commemorate the death of a friend in a mountaineering accident among the Southern Alps in 1947. It’s true that the consequences for the poet in the latter are rather less injurious in mind or body than the death and derangement depicted in the Schubert cycles – possibly because in Elegy a young man’s death is the work’s pre-given starting-point – and a good deal of the grief and anger seems to be “shared” by the rugged New Zealand alpine landscape, dramatically beset by elemental storms, enabling a fierce and harrowing process of reconciliation in the face of a harsh natural order of things.

Giving rise to these thoughts was a pair of performances I heard recently of the Elegy cycle by baritone Roger Wilson, with pianist Bruce Greenfield. The first occasion, in Lower Hutt’s Church of St.Mark, Woburn, was apparently a hastily-organised affair in response to a cancellation of an already-scheduled concert; while the second took place in Wellington under similar circumstances, as a “filler” for another cancelled concert, this time at St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace. Incidentally, Bruce Greenfield was a last-minute ring-in at Lower Hutt, as pianist Gillian Bibby, who’d performed most of this program with Roger Wilson earlier in the year in Wanganui, had commitments elsewhere. Singer and substitute pianist had performed some of Elegy together before, but the pair had never collaborated in Lilburn’s “other” song-cycle, Sings Harry, (a 1953 setting of six of Denis Glover’s eponymous poems). As well, there were two other brackets of works, each of which had a “family connection” with the singer, and, in conclusion, Jack Body’s quixotic Songs My Grandmother Sang.

(At this point I ought to warn readers that this is going to be a longer-than-usual review – the two Lilburn song-cycles are of such importance, to “pass lightly” over them seems to me a near-criminal offence! So, I’m recording my impressions of both works and comparing the two performances as best I can.)

Having recently made a study of Lilburn’s Elegy for a radio programme I was thrilled to be able to hear the work performed “live”, especially from an artist who hadn’t recorded the cycle. Just as fascinating was the context of the performances, in each case paired with Sings Harry, a combination of contrasts that I’d discussed in conversation with a number of singers and pianists. Here, I thought each work the perfect foil for the other, both stronger and more sharply-focused by juxtaposition, as it were – even if the effect of the pairing underlined the lightweight nature of the remainder of the programme’s music.

Wisely, the pair began in each case with Sings Harry, Bruce Greenfield’s piano-playing salty and pungent from the beginning, the notes of that opening strummed like those of a guitar. Roger Wilson’s voice was of a balladeer’s of old, the words self-deprecatory but intensely noble, deserving of the moment of stillness at the end. The following “When I am old” glinted with droll humour and defiance of age, the rollicking rhythms suggesting flashes of past energies and impulses (“Girls on bicycles turning into the wind….”). I thought the Lower Hutt performance of this a little more “buccaneering” than the Wellington one, the latter seeming more wry and even detached, the mood slightly more resilient.

Pianist and singer arched “Once the days were clear” beautifully, emphasizing the writing’s structural integrity, very Bach-like in its fusion of strength and poetry. The lines rose and fell with a spacious and noble grace, though the singer’s phrase-ends in both instances seemed to be given not quite sufficient “breath” to sustain a floating quality on the last couple of notes. By contrast, energy and confidence abounded throughout the performances of”The Casual Man”, a kind of “credo” of the free spirit, the singer’s aspect very masculine and devil-may-care, voice and piano managing the “throwaway” mood to perfection.

Occasionally performed on its own as an “encore” item, the achingly beautiful “The Flowers of the Sea” sets the “then against now” of the hero in a context of timelessness. The voice points the contrasts of youthful strength and aged compliance, and the volatile passions of former times with the resignation of experience; while the piano delineates the omnipresent rise and fall of the tides and the calls of the sea-birds throughout. Roger Wilson made much of the “youth-and-age” progressions, every line’s meaning given its proper emphasis and gravitas. In the Lower Hutt performance the voice’s final sustained note sounded to my ears a shade flattened throughout “….for the tide comes and the tide goes, and the wind blows…”, whereas in Wellington, the line seemed truer-toned, but not quite as emotionally charged.

For a long while the only commercial recording available of Sings Harry was on a Kiwi Records EP featuring tenor Terence Finnegan and pianist Frederick Page; and that performance burned itself into the collective musical consciousness of New Zealand music aficionados, retaining people’s affection (and allegiance) for the last fifty-odd years, notwithstanding the subsequent appearance of one or two competitors. Despite some idiosyncratic touches on the part of both singer and pianist, their performance of the final song, “I remember” seemed to me to capture not only the childhood reminiscences of a still-vigorous old man, but the ambiences of those times and since – “…and a boy lay still, by the river running down – sings Harry” – if a more matter-of-fact delineation of the passing of childhood than Dylan Thomas’s in his poem “Fern Hill”, it’s one that’s just as telling in its own way.

Like Frederick Page was able to do, Bruce Greenfield observed the staccato patterning of the piano part without sacrificing its warmth and resonance, the notes “hanging together” rather than picked out drily and unatmospherically. The golden tones this song sets in motion always remind me of a Don Binney painting, “Sun shall not burn thee by day, nor moon by night…” the light and heat warming the far-off days brought to mind by the poetry, sparking further memories of uncles leaving the farm to go to war or look for a place in the sun elsewhere. Roger Wilson’s “My father held to the land” had a stirring “Where are the Yeomen – the Yeomen of England?” kind of declamatory force, contrasting this with a boy’s delight in growing up “like a shaggy steer, and as swift as a hare”, both sentiments vividly and first-handedly realized in each performance. How affecting, then, the singer’s distancing of his tones at “But that was long ago…” on each occasion both musicians drawing us into the world of dreams and “child of air” evocations, and leaving us there, a cherishable moment inviolate in the memory…….

Roger Wilson introduced each of the cycles at each recital, thoughtfully sparing us some of the end-to-end impact of contrast between the two. Lilburn’s earlier setting of Elegy is anything but elegiac at the outset, a savage, biting evocation of a storm, the piano angrily preparing the way for the singer’s declamations, the voice here wonderfully sepulchral in places such as the line “whose colossal grief is stone”. The following “Now he is dead’, funeral-march-like at the outset, builds the rugged landscape rock by rock, the voice rolling majestically up and over the phrase “the storm-blackened lake” (somehow making a more visceral impact at Lower Hutt, though the scene’s wild grandeur was vividly presented on both occasions). Similarly, the brooding wildness of “Now sleeps the gorge” grew inexorably towards the majestic “O this bare place…” both musicians drawing on elemental energies and impulses, and washing the sounds over our sensibilities like an ocean wave over a swimmer.

There’s little physical respite for both singer and pianist throughout the cycle – though “Reverie”, with its JS Bach-like opening (as pianist Margaret Nielsen pointed out to me, with a pair of prominent oboes in thirds in the piano part) plots a course through rivulets of uneasy calm, briefly rising at the end with “wind’s disconsolate cry”. Roger Wilson again delivered the great surgings whole-heartedly, though the voice sounded curiously disembodied at the beginning, seemingly reluctant to “fill out” the tones, and making for a somewhat bleached effect. Incisive, glittering tones from Bruce Greenfield’s piano introduced “Driftwood”, all energy and volatility at the beginning, the singer’s diction clear but avoiding self-consciousness, making the poetry really work instead of over-pointing its slightly “arch” quality. The low notes really told, driving the energies inward to dark, almost sinister places, establishing a properly tragic mood at the end.

The last three songs move us more closely to the spirit of the young climber whose life was lost so tragically – though still making reference to landscape features, the language integrates the setting more readily with aspects of a personality – “a storm-begotten grace /and a great gentleness” in “Wind and Rain”, for example, and “the mind like the spring tide / beautiful and calm” in the final “The Laid-out body”. And if opinions differ regarding the implications of “bright flesh that made my black nights sweet”, the overall abiding impression is of a youthful intensity of feeling radiating through Campbell’s language – one that Lilburn’s overwhelming and full-blooded musical response to matches most appropriately.

There’s something ritualistic about key episodes in each of these final songs – there’s the quiet resignation of “Wind and Rain”, the remarkably agitated “Farewell”, whose pianistic convolutions repeatedly dash themselves against a steady, remorseless vocal line, and the noble declamations of “The Laid-out body” (the latter something of a poetic “conceit” as the young climber’s body was unfortunately lost by the recovery team down a crevasse). Throughout these and their contrasting sequences, the music’s beauty, nobility, anguish and resignation was conveyed in rich quantities by both musicians, each of the two performances carrying its own particular distinction. Surprisingly, I found the earlier Lower Hutt occasion more involving, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the vicissitudes of the venue, such as the less-than-responsive piano. But, especially in the case of Elegy, each performance did ample justice to a work whose stature, for me, grows with every hearing.

Had the concerts presented only the two Lilburn song cycles, I would have had no complaint – but we were generously treated to some lighter fare by way of contrast to the coruscations we’d just experienced, which was a reasonable enough scheme. The first of two groups of items with which the singer had a family connection was called The Songs of the Morning, referring to a collection of songs written by Roger Wilson’s grandfather, Gerald Dooley, intended for performance during a sea voyage to the Antarctic in 1902, on a ship (the SY “Morning”) upon which he was the 3rd Officer.

The ship’s engineer, J.D.Morrison wrote the words for most of the songs, two of which, “The Ice King” and “Yuss”, were performed for us here, with considerable gusto. The first, very British and patriotic-sounding, redolent of Sullivan, went with a fine swing, pianistic drum-beats and all; while the second “Yuss” was a proper British Tar’s song, complete with sailor’s accent, and quirky, almost Schumannesque piano part.

Dorothy Freed (1919-2000) a prominent music librarian and composer, was the aforementioned Gerald Doorly’s daughter, and therefore Roger Wilson’s aunt. Her song The Sea Child won an APRA prize in 1957, and some time later was recorded by Margaret Medlyn and Bruce Greenfield, on Kiwi-Pacific SLD-110. Compared with what I remembered of Medlyn’s lyrical-voiced rendition, Wilson’s voice on both outings seemed to me too dark and earthy, and even occasionally unsure of pitch (the vocal line is beautiful but challenging). Better was the second song, Freed’s setting of Keith Sinclair’s War with the Weeds, a stirring march redolent of endless combat and eventual compromise with nature. I found the words not ideally clear, but the singer conveyed enough of the sense of things for the work to make an appropriate impression.

To finish, we in the audience were given the opportunity to fill our lungs afresh and join in with a few choruses from three of Jack Body’s Songs My Grandmother Sang. Before we began, Bruce Greenfield cautioned the audience not to take any notice of his accompaniments, describing them for us as “quite mad” – though anybody familiar with Benjamin Britten’s folksong settings wouldn’t have been too perturbed by Body’s “exploratory counterpoints”. I think we enjoyed the third song, “Daisy Bell” the best, as much because of hearing the rarely-performed verses belonging to the chorus that most people would readily recognize, thus:

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,

I’m half crazy, all for the love of you;

It won’t be a stylish marriage – I can’t afford a carriage!

But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two!”

But ultimately it was the pairing of the two Lilburn works that I thought gave these concerts such distinction – especially as they were performed with the kind of conviction that makes the stuff of musical history. Is that yet another headline I can feel coming on?……..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imaginative New Zealand choral music from innovative Tudor Consort

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Renaissance Influences IV: Made in New Zealand

Music by Gillian Whitehead, David Farquhar, Ross Harris, Douglas Mews sen., John Ritchie, Anna Griffiths and Jack Body

The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

St. Mary of the Angels Church

Saturday, 8 October 2011, 3pm

It was surprising to find the Tudor Consort performing works by New Zealand composers, and even more surprising to read the title of the concert.   However, there was no question, when one heard the works, about the influence of the renaissance composers on these down-under writers.  There was even less question, but rather joyful astonishment, at the skill of these works, and of The Tudor Consort in presenting them.  It was innovative to devise such a programme as this, and to commission two new works – the Ross Harris and Jack Body pieces.

The programme opened with the Kyrie from Missa Brevis by Gillian Whitehead.  The mass was performed section by section throughout the programme, interspersed with other items, as it would be in a church service, though of course there it would be interspersed through the liturgy.  Initially, this seemed odd, not to carry on the Gloria from the Kyrie, in a concert performance.  However, I think it worked well, giving each movement of the mass a freshness and pointing up the individual qualities of its parts better than would be the case if it had been sung through as a whole.

It was a most accomplished work for a composer who was still a student at university at the time of composition.  As the programme note said, “The unmistakeable influence of 16th century polyphony is clear from the outset…’   The full import of this influence grew as the various movements were presented.  But the skilled writing was apparent straight away.   There was much use of clashes of the interval of a second, and splendid dynamic contrasts.

The choir exhibited great attack and superb clarity of words.  In the Sanctus it was noticeable that some singers paid scant attention to the conductor, but the wonderful rise and fall of both pitch and contrapuntal complexity were well conveyed in spite of that.  This movement had a most rapturous ending.

Early on, the soprano tone was rather metallic at times, and one voice in that section had a tendency to dominate.  Nevertheless, in the main the choir’s balance was impeccable.  Only briefly at the end of the Agnus Dei was the choir not quite together.

Following the Kyrie, we heard Winter wakeneth all my care by David Farquhar, a setting of an anonymous 14th century English text.  This was a quite lovely setting of glorious words.  There was an interesting independence of parts, which gave frequent delicious clashes and juxtapositions.  The performance was magical.

The commissioned work from Ross Harris, Vobiscum in aeternum, was based on the well-known Tudor motet If ye love me.   Using the Latin version of the same words, this piece began with a gorgeous soft introduction.  The lattice-work of long-held notes in each part wove a beautiful, reverential solemnity in the fine acoustic of St. Mary of the Angels church.

The singing was beautiful blended, apart from one soprano who still dominated, from where I was sitting.  Otherwise, it exhibited the excellent attribute of carrying the sound and the words seamlessly forward, something the Australian judge of the recent Big Sing Secondary Students’ Choral Festival in Wellington commented on being absent from some of the otherwise excellent choirs that he heard perform.

Ross Harris could hardly have wished for a finer première performance.  The high standard continued in the adjoined Tallis original ‘If ye love me’ in English, that concluded the piece.  The brief for this and for the Jack Body commission was to take an ancient piece of music as a starting point.  I must admit to a sneaking feeling that it was a little pretentious that one composer used Latin instead of the English of St. John’s gospel in the King James version of the Bible, as used by Tallis, and the other to use Hebrew instead of the well-known and loved words, from the same version, for  Psalm 137 (or indeed the Russian of the introductory chant; see below).  However, this may have been the composers’ way of introducing an individuality that separated their compositions from the originals on which they were based – and it would be pretty difficult for a New Zealand composer to write for the Russian language.

Michael Stewart, in speaking to the audience, acknowledged that the next item, The Love Song of Rangipouri by Douglas Mews, did not have a Renaissance connection, but disarmingly stated that he liked it so much that he included it.  This work featured a soloist, Ken Ryan (baritone).  His facility with the Maori language and with the micro-tonality of the chant was astonishing, and his singing was very fine.   Based on a Maori chant recorded at Makara, the words are poetic and mystical; some of the lines were repeated in English.  I learned recently that even in the Far North, the pronunciation of ‘wh’ in Maori as ‘f’ was not traditional, if the early missionary Henry Williams is to be believed.  He wrote regretting the increasing tendency in his time for the ‘f’ sound to be used.

This was a difficult piece, but the choir brought it off, despite a few entries not being absolutely together.

The women of the choir sang two songs from John Ritchie’s Canary Wine song cycle: “I – Queene and Huntress”, and “III – Make Room for the bouncing Belly”.  The texts were by Ben Jonson.  I found it humorous to contemplate what now would be considered doggerel being written by the great Elizabethan playwright and poet: “Room! Room! Make room for the bouncing Belly, First father of sauce and deviser of jelly”.   There were unfamiliar words in the text, such as boulter and bavin, but thanks to a friendly pew-sharer and his I-pod, I now know that they all apply to domestic implements.

The music, good-humoured as is usual with Ritchie père, was utterly appropriate to the words.  It was good to have a lighter item in the middle of the programme; the singing was sparklingly accurate.

Anna Griffiths is a music graduate of the University of Auckland, and sings in The Tudor Consort.  She has won prizes for her compositions, and has had this and another choral piece performed overseas by the New Zealand Youth Choir.  Naseby is a setting of a poem by James K. Baxter, and depicts the Otago township.  I enjoyed the alliteration of the poem’s second-last line: “Then the dark peaks will hold their peace…”.  This was a very skilled and sympathetic setting, idiomatic with regard to the words.  The ending chord was not resolved, thus carrying through the music the timeless feel of the words.

Now for something completely different…  The men sang the Russian chant from the 17th century “Bogospod’i yavisya” (God, Lord, show yourself to us) which Jack Body used as the basis for his piece for full choir.  The men had a robust sound and relished the words, but perhaps could not obtain quite the resonant depth of tone of a Russian choir.

Psalm 137 was sung in Hebrew, influenced by the chant, but not in a Jewish style.  It began with three male voice parts interweaving “answered by a keening figure from the women” as the programme note stated.  It reached a climax at the end with the words “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (speaking of the daughter of Babylon) – words not usually incorporated in choral settings of the psalm.

The piece was very quiet in parts, yet there was plenty of volume when required.  Intonation was unassailable.  The whole was most effective.

We are fortunate to have composers of this level writing imaginative, highly skilled and effective music for choirs.  New Zealand composers certainly know how to write choral music!  The strong choral tradition in this country no doubt lends strong inspiration, and the fact that there are choirs capable of singing the complex, accomplished music we heard at this concert.

Some of the pieces were written for more than four parts, adding to the achievement for a choir of only 20 voices.  It was certainly different for this choir to perform New Zealand works; works that were difficult and very interesting, including a variety of languages.  They made for a most worthwhile concert.

All the works were well worth hearing, and it is to be hoped that other choirs will take them up – they should be heard again.  One or two only (the Ritchie and the Mews) I thought I had heard before.

The level of expert performance by this choir is all the more amazing considering the comparative frequency of its concerts.  This was only an hour-long concert, but it was a solid programme, and there was a great deal of concentrated and expert singing.   Bravo!

Seven Strings by Candlelight: New Zealand String Quartet plus 3 at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

John Psathas: Kartsigar (2004); Dvořák: String Quintet in G, Op 77; Strauss: Metamorphosen for string septet

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman, Gillian Ansell, Rolf Gjelsten) plus Julia Joyce (viola), Andrew Joyce (cello), Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass).

Church of St Mary of the Angels

Friday 30 September, 6.30pm

Imaginative programming can often bring surprising results.

Candlelight in a beautiful church is a certain winner through producing a spiritual atmosphere, especially if timed so that the evanescent sunlight through the stained glass fades in the course of the first half hour. As for the programme, all three pieces had been played before by the quartet; Metamorphosen at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson in February this year, and Kartsigar at a 2005 Sunday concert from the Wellington Chamber Music Society (who had commissioned the work). The Dvořák String Quintet was played in a Sunday afternoon concert in May 2009.

Together they were an interesting collection of out-of-the-way chamber music, either on account of the instrumentation or the composer.

Psathas’s two-part piece has an unusual provenance – by origin a transcription of recorded performances by two Greek musicians, Manos Achalinotopoulos and Vangelis Karipis. (Psathas’s own programme note refers to the first surname which can be translated as ‘he who cannot be bridled’ – I find the adjective ‘achalinotos’,  in my Modern Greek dictionary, meaning unbridled or uncontrolled). That quality could hardly apply to this piece which is a very finely crafted composition with nothing outlandish or out of control.

Those, like myself, who have had a long love affair with the popular music of Greece, which I think pinnacled in the 1960s, would not have recognized those characteristics in this piece which has its roots, I imagine, in sources that may be much older, more primitive and at the same time more sophisticated than the music of Theodorakis, Hajidakis or Xacharchos.

It starts with deliberate cello pizzicato, quickly joined by second violin and viola playing a distinctly Anatolian, modal melody, in unison or at the octave. All four instruments soon become involved, each with a distinct role, and these distinctions were sharply delineated by the quartet, Gillian’s viola often throaty, suggesting a Greek folk instrument perhaps, Douglas Beilman’s second violin luxuriating in seductively warm sounds, each contributing a strand of the hypnotic, meandering chant that continued underpinned by Gjelsten’s cello throughout.

Psathas’s note points to an ostinato motif that opens the second movement, which in the hands of the violins floats higher and more freely than the first movement, free of the cello’s grip that had anchored the first movement.

Since my first hearing, the piece, through its performance, has gained a focus and conviction that I do not recall sensing before; the acoustic, too, offered a gorgeous background which did the music so harm at all and made it an altogether more enveloping experience than I get from the (excellent) CD of Psathas’s music, Helix, for Rattle Records.

Dvořák’s String Quintet – the only one that employs the double bass – is an attractive piece, but not one of his masterpieces. Its engaging handling of the five instruments, its quasi folk-song character, particularly in the first movement, forgives any lack of gravity.

That doesn’t altogether overcome the feeling that for all its lighthearted charm, the tripping tune of the Scherzo doesn’t return once too often. But the slow movement avoided that problem, and the performance captured its pensiveness. One might suppose that the double bass part, being unusual, might have led the composer to have highlighted its sonic capacities and whatever virtuoso skills might have been at the disposal of the first performer, that seems not the case. Its presence was always conspicuous however, and Hiroshi Ikematsu’s intensely musical contributions were always arresting and beguiling.

Strauss was moved to write Metamorphosen after Allied bombing destroyed the Bavarian National Opera in Munich in 1943 and so much else in the following years. Strauss’s first draft was discovered in 1990; it was found to have been scored at first for string septet. It was Paul Sacher, the famous Swiss musician and patron, who commissioned Strauss in 1945 to produce the version for 23 solo strings.  After the septet’s discovery Rudolf Leopold used the 23-string work as the basis for a re-creation of a version for string septet. Even for one who is very familiar with the big version, the impact of this, which I heard at the Nelson performance in February, was extremely persuasive; it expanded richly and opulently in response to the church’s acoustic which once again contributed very powerfully to the effect of this profoundly felt music.

Oddly, I do not hear this music as expressing unmitigated grief, and I find it extraordinary that the composer, in the face of such wanton and needless destruction, could have written music that is first of all so beautiful. But its character aligns very much with my own belief that tragedy, violence, cruelty, evil are most convincingly handled, not in music that is violent, abrasive, aurally disagreeable, employing distorting articulations, but through sounds that express pain or grief or even anger by using voices and instruments in orthodox ways that are above all beautiful.

Strauss does this by building a powerful climax which is easily heard as a sort of ecstasy of grief and which has a more profound impact because it envelops the listener in sounds that are moving and beautiful.

Often I’m uncomfortable drawing attention to individual performances in an ensemble, because like so much else in the arts, it draws attention away from the important thing – the music – and towards personalities; but the voice I heard most strongly and musically was that of cellist Andrew Joyce. All others emerged with distinction, either alone or in ensemble that was simply transcendent, and in which there could be no mistaking the anguish Strauss felt as he contemplated the destruction of a civilization that had been so remarkable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new generation’s Lilburn, from Atoll Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DOUGLAS LILBURN – Violin and Piano Works

Elizabeth Holowell (violin)

Dean Sky-Lucas (piano)

Cameron Rhodes (speaker)

Atoll ACD 941

(….apologies for the length of this review! – PM)

If there’s ever a composer who seems to have been “rediscovered” by a fresh generation of performers, then Douglas Lilburn is the one, his music seeming to appeal as readily to today’s young players as it did to many of the composer’s similarly delighted and steadfast contemporary champions.

New recordings of many of Lilburn’s major works have appeared over the last few years, a couple of these projects containing substantial returns (Dan Poynton’s landmark survey of the composer’s piano music with Trust Records, for example). No less an important body of the composer’s work consisted of music for violin and piano, much of which recorded by the musicians for whom the works were written at the time. Now, thanks to a brilliant recently-released disc on the Atoll label featuring Australian violinist Elizabeth Holowell (currently living and working in Auckland) and her fellow-countryman, the multi-talented Dean Sky-Lucas displaying his skills as a pianist, a group of these works have been brought together on a single recording for the first time. With the help of New Zealand actor Cameron Rhodes, the musicians were able to perform Lilburn’s musical tribute to a number of New Zealand poets who were his contemporaries, Salutes to Seven Poets, in conjunction with readings of exerpts from those poems which provided the original inspiration for the composer.

Previous recordings of all of these works include violinist Ruth Pearl and pianist Margaret Nielsen’s recording for Kiwi Records of the 1950 Violin Sonata. Ruth Pearl was the work’s original dedicatee, along with pianist Frederick Page, with whom she performed the music for the first time. Unfortunately, this is but one of many landmark recordings of New Zealand music locked in the limbo that is Kiwi Pacific Records, at present, awaiting some kind of saviour – considering the unique heritage value of these historic sound-documents, I think they’re worthy of urgent attention at the highest level. The Douglas Lilburn recordings in this particular archive are but one of the many which desperately need reactivation.

Other recordings can be found among broadcast archives of this and other works, the 1950 Violin Sonata, well represented by partnerships such as Ronald Woodcock (violin) and John Wells (piano) in 1976, Peter Walls and Margaret Nielsen in 1982, David Nalden and Bryan Sayer in 1984, Tim Deighton, also with Margaret Nielsen in 1989, and Natalie Tantrum and Stephen de Pledge in 1992 (and there are probably others).  Salutes to Seven Poets has been well-championed by violinist Dean Major (see also the Waiteata Music Press listing below), broadcast performances featuring partnerships with Rae de Lisle (1989), and David Guerin (1990), while the earlier Violin Sonata in E-flat (1943) was recorded for radio by Dean Major and Rae de Lisle in 1985. Incidentally, the same artists recorded in the studio (the date isn’t listed) another of Lilburn’s Violin Sonatas, in C Major, which the composer completed in 1943 before he tackled his E-flat Sonata of the same year.

On Jack Body’s Waiteata Music Press Label (the disc’s catalogue number WTA 009), violinist Dean Major and pianist Rae de Lisle can be found performing Salutes to Seven Poets with a compelling generosity of spirit and feeling for atmosphere and colour. On this recording there are spoken commentaries by the composer, quoting but a few lines of each of the poems, as well as recording some brief impressions of the work and creative personality of each poet, unlike on the new Atoll recording, where reader Cameron Rhodes gives us part of the text of each poem.  Only some momentary less-than-ideally steady intonation in No.4, the Salute to M.K.Joseph, breaks the confidently-woven spell of Dean Major’s playing, while Rae de Lisle’s keyboard conjurings of feeling and imagery via rhythm and colour remain treasurable. The recording pronounces itself essential for the composer’s contribution alone, however more “complete” a performance concept the newer Atoll disc might present. The disc is available for a song from the Waiteata Music Press at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, or from the Centre for New Zealand Music (SOUNZ), both in Wellington.

The new Atoll disc begins with Salutes, so that the first sounds we hear are the mellifluous tones of actor Cameron Rhodes’ voice. The business of marrying speech with music on record seems in most cases I’ve heard to be problematic, the stumbling-block invariably being a lack of commonality of ambience between what’s spoken and what’s played (a particularly alienating example of this was the recent NZSO Naxos disc of Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the melodrama actors’ voices really did sound as if they had been recorded in a completely different “space” to that of the orchestra). For me, it’s important when listening to something like this to feel (however illusory, in fact) a sense of unity, of spaces being shared and contact between impulses being made – and the Atoll recording, though registering a slightly warmer “background” for the musicians, makes the connections between speaker and players as satisfyingly as anything I’ve heard. These are powerful realizations, with Rhodes’ intense readings of the poetry followed by Elizabeth Holowell’s richly-committed string tones intermeshed with Dean Sky-Lucas’s fantastic keyboard work. It all makes rather more concentrated and focused a unity than the Waiteata Music Press performance, LIlburn’s own commentaries and wider-ranging interpolations wryly leavening the intensities of Dean Major’s and Rae de Lisle’s equally committed playing. A pity the booklet-notes writer for the Atoll CD slightly fudges poet A.R.D.Fairburn’s name by interpolating his more familiar “Rex” (one or the other format would have done) – but then to apply the same treatment to an unfamiliar-sounding “Ronald A.K.Mason” borders on the pedantic.

What’s important is that a sense of the composer’s involvement with poets he knew personally is captured by the performances, the result, of course, being a kind of synthesis of such impressions formed by Lilburn’s own personality – and Holowell and Sky-Lucas are both able to command an attractive “balladic” quality about their playing which speaks both of vivid recollection of treasured interaction, and a parallel sense of time having passed on. Listening to both performances alerts one to different intensities sought by the players – Dean Major and Rae de Lisle project a focus suggesting an all-consuming immediacy (listening to the opening of the Andante tribute to Keith Sinclair, following his Although you have floated the land, one can feel how those latent intensities are brought out – searingly by Major, in places, compared to Elizabeth Holowell’s richly-toned but more dispassionate view). Following Michael Joseph’s A shepherd on a bicycle, a delicious amalgam of the ordinary and the fabulous, Holowell and Sky-Lucas concentrate on pastoral beauty rather than rustic energies, the violin-playing more secure than Dean Major’s in places, though he and Rae de Lisle conjure up a stronger rhythmic sense of a mustering, the day-to-day business of the farmer. As for the Copland-esque tribute to James K.Baxter – Upon the upland road I find myself going between Holowell’s and Sky-Lucas’s more easy-going wayfarer, who takes things pretty much as they come, in true Kiwi fashion; and Major and de Lisle’s more impulsive wanderer, given to bouts of day-dreaming and spontaneous irruptions of energy.

Most characteristic of all in a compositional sense are the repeated-note patterns with which the piano begins the Allegro commode tribute to Kendrick Smithyman. Dean Sky-Lucas fashions a beautifully pulsating piano trajectory along which the haunting repetitions flow, and over which Elizabeth Holowell’s violin can soar, sometimes spectacularly, as with her confidently-addressed octave ascent, giving rise to thoughts of other poetry – “…as a skeet’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind….” – the way Holowell’s line sweeps and soars at that point would do justice to the greatest verses. At first, I didn’t like Cameron Rhodes’ somewhat jerky, limp-rhythmic delivery of R.A.K. Mason’s Song of Allegiance, preferring in my mind’s ear an ironic vain-glorious display of goose-stepping bravado, with imaginary drums flailing as if in mockery of the poet’s presumption. But subsequent hearings have suggested other kinds of ironies, more slowly, but surely appreciated, and the musical tribute’s evocation of a kind of “man alone” aspect, suggests artistic fortitude and stoic control, and allowing only towards the end of the piece a brief display of furrowed-brow emotion.

Holowell and Sky-Lucas plot this course unerringly, again, managing to suggest whole worlds more of words and ideas, were tongues to be allowed to utter thoughts. Those who knew the struggles Lilburn experienced as a composer in a land largely unresponsive to such efforts would have recognized, in the ritualized lament of the music, the voice of one crying in the wilderness (“…toil I on, with bloody knees…”), dignity giving way only briefly to anger and despair at the very end. Dean Major and Rae de Lisle are more direct, harsher and sharper, but in a way that ironically gives the almost Mahlerian concluding cry of anguish somewhat less impact upon the whole, despite its agglomerated weight of utterance.

The final, overall “Salute” to all of the poets has a different spoken prelude in each performance. On the Waiteata disc, the composer acknowledges in a few words the overall contribution of all seven poets to his creative inspiration; while the new Atoll features Cameron Rhodes’ reading of Allen Curnow’s poem To Douglas Lilburn at Fifty. Each is perfectly in accord with its own overall performance ethos, Curnow’s poem laconically exploring the implications of a milestone in the life of a creative artist, which the music then succinctly parallels with out-of-doors tones so dear to the composer’s heart. Holowell and Sky-Lucas are lighter-footed, even airborne in places, the violin-playing a touch more elegant, somewhat less laden than Major’s “wrung” notes, though he and de Lisle, true to their overall interpretative focus, project an intensely visionary quality whose resonances aren’t easily forgotten. We listeners are enriched in having both performances to experience and enjoy.

The other works on the Atoll disc have no commercially available alternative versions, though many people will remember Ruth Pearl’s recording with Margaret Nielsen of the 1950 Violin Sonata on a Kiwi LP (SLD-32), the disc still kicking around second-hand shops, awaiting adventurous explorings by enthusiasts.  This still sounds well, the violin and piano images a bit more left-and-right than on the newer recording, but with the instrumental timbres nicely intact. Ruth Pearl was a powerful player, and her lyrical lines soar with plenty of heft, deftly supported by Margaret Nielsen’s warm, flexible piano sound – a lighter touch than Dean Sky-Lucas’, but capable of summoning up reserves of tone when needed. Pearl and Nielsen are more quixotic and volatile throughout the allegro, occasionally tightening the pace and creating whirls of energized excitement. Margaret Nielsen’s chords at the beginning of the largamente episode are glittering stalagtites of suspended sound, the mood dramatic,and the detailing ruggedly etched. There’s no release of tension with the allegro, which drives forward irresistibly in Pearl’s and Nielsen’s hands, the focus firmly fixed, the goal unequivocal, Pearl’s violin occasionally under a bit of strain, but realizing the drama and intensity of it all. Her and Nielsen make something almost sacramental out of the lyricism of the last couple of pages.

On Atoll, Dean Sky-Lucas’s opening unfurls a spacious ambience, one into which Elizabeth Holowell’s violin projects a rhapsodic and varied line, the players beautifully etching in the colour and texture changes as the music enlarges its picture. Bucolic energies bubble forth with an allegro whose inventiveness leads the ear on through a rhythmic and thematic garden of open-air delights, the playing delightfully alfresco in both its energy and its resonance – a beautiful sound. The largamente section that follows is notable for Holowell’s eloquently-realised line (so many felicitous detailings) shining like a sea-bird’s wings over the top of a deeply-hued oceanic blue-green, the line dipping and soaring, spreading widely and closing up into a fine thread, moving now towards, now with, now away from its surrounding ambient body. When the allegro returns violin and piano play a game of hide-and seek in different guises, an attractive, genial folkish element energizing the themes before sinking into a realm of repose and reflection, the piano’s hymn-like foundation drawing elegant flourishes of an almost ritualistic kind from the violin, the instruments forging a sound-discourse of nostalgia-tinted instinctive wisdom. I played both versions all again, immediately I’d finished first time through, and was moved as profoundly each time, as much by the emotional surety of the argument as its beauty and variety.

And for the rest, Holowell and Sky-Lucas have the field to themselves, at least for the moment. The biggest surprise is the Othello incidental music, accompanied by a few exerpts from the play, read with great verve and emotional variety by Cameron Rhodes. The violin-and-piano combination works well as a “dramatic” vehicle, the violin having enough bright resonance to convey fanfare-like ceremony, and the piano limitless resources of colour and ambient warmth. After Cameron Rhodes’ savagely sardonic exposition of Iago’s plans to bring about Othello’s downfall, the somewhat chiruppy Allegro risoluto seems an inappropriate response, but all is made good by the melancholy beauty of the playing of Lilburn’s remarkable Willow Song. Distinctive in a different way is the following Interlude, emotionally ambivalent and unsettled, its ruffled poise mirroring the turmoil of the tragedy about to be enacted. Rhodes puts his everything into Othello’s final speech – “….of one that loved not wisely but too well….”, a fraught moment which the Finale (andante) distils in gravely circumspect tones. Rarely do repetitions of theatrical lines wear as well as does music, however expertly delivered – and the separate tracks on the CD enable the listener to enjoy the music alone for its own sake.

Finally, another big, richly satisfying listen – Lilburn’s Sonata in E-flat for violin and piano, dating from 1943. Does the key bring out the best in composers, I wonder? – it’s certainly a sound that gets the blood flowing, as is the case here, with a juicily-voiced opening violin statement supported by rich piano undulations, the mood both heroic and rhapsodic. On first hearing I was swooping and soaring with Elizabeth Holowell’s violin in a kind of ecstasy, and therefore disappointed to hear the instrument break off its discursive flight (none too elegantly, at 2’07” – as though Orpheus had momentarily dropped his lyre…), considering the rest of the movement’s wonderfully-spun lyrical flow. But what worlds the composer subsequently takes us to – Holowell may have played the hushed stratospheric figurations leading up to the luftpause at 5’54” with more purity of tone on other occasions, but surely never with quite such “innigkeit” as here. Lilburn’s characteristic “modal” harmonies time and again disarm our sense of place, the air about us bringing, by turns Debussy-like fragrances, then surges of earthier impulse, the musicians’ generous outpourings enabling we listeners to share a richly-detailed emotional journey. Throughout this movement I had the sense of sharing the sound-world of a young composer with a great deal of both accumulated and on-going thought and emotion to let out to the world.

We exchange warmth for cool melancholy at the slow movement’s beginning, though there’s warmth welling up from the instruments’ lower reaches as the music proceeds. Holowell brings out the folksiness in places in the writing, her fiddle double-stopping and droning with flavorsome focus, then expanding and soaring over Dean Sky-Lucas’s resonantly grumbling and tintinabulating keyboard voices. The folk-lament flavour carries the music to the finale’s beginning, a call to action from the piano, Sky-Lucas’s sparking finger-work gathering up Holowell’s responsive tones in a dancing web of interactive strands (the same dancing delight Lilburn was to give to the finale of his first Symphony a half-dozen years later). But Lilburn widens the music’s scope as he proceeds, revisiting the first movement’s rhapsodic gesturings with enviable exploratory flair, string harmonics vying in places with explosive piano irruptions, the young composer revelling all the while in his kaleidoscopic shifts of harmony, the energies and impulses of the playing gathering up and carrying one’s sensibilities along quite irresistibly to the pay-off – an exhilarating listening experience.

I enjoyed such a great deal about this disc, from the quirky attractiveness of the frontispiece illustration (a painting, The Four Kings, by Auckland artist Chuck Joseph) to the wholeheartedness of actor Cameron Rhodes’ evocations of both the various New Zealand poems and the Shakespeare Othello exerpts – but my overriding feeling is gratitude to Atoll Records for capturing in true-to-life, state-of-the-art sound such an inspired partnership between two wonderful musicians, enabling a number of important works by New Zealand’s greatest composer to be heard to their inestimable advantage.

Gao Ping’s winning presentation of Debussy, New Zealand and east Asian piano music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Gao Ping – piano (Wellington Chamber Music)

Debussy: Book II of Images for piano and L’Île joyeuse; Jack Body: Five melodies for piano; Eve de Castro Robinson: And the garden was full of voices; Gao Ping: Outside the window; Takemitsu: Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

Sunday 11 September, 3pm

The first thing to remark is the unfortunate clash between this concert and that in the Michael Fowler Centre by the Vector Wellington Orchestra with pianist Diedre Irons. But in addition to that, there was a concert by the Wellington Community Choir next door, in the Town Hall main auditorium.

Though there were only two pieces, both by Debussy, that could be regarded as standard repertoire, the audience was nearly as large as at most other recent recitals, though that is rather fewer than was usual a few years ago.

There were two works by New Zealand composers.

Gao Ping introduced Jack Body’s Five Melodies for Piano by describing his first contact with the composer in Chengdu, not in person, but through a music tape that he’d left during a visit. He was moved and impressed and spoke warmly about Body, who was in the audience; it was an engaging way of putting the audience in a positive, receptive state of mind. Working the inside of the piano was novel forty years ago; now, there should be reason other than the novelty of a sound that’s distorted from its normal character. Happily, Gao Ping’s manner and his clear enjoyment of the music, its memorable riffs and motifs and drones, the muted strings produced by his left hand helped to make the pieces sound almost standard repertoire, familiar, even congenial. And, in the third piece, the stopping of partials on the piano strings to produce harmonics, and the plain comfortableness of his demeanor at the piano, as awkward as it often looks to be leaning sideways across the keyboard to do things that the instrument’s inventors never dreamed of (they might have said – why not use a harp? or lute? or theorbo? or guitar?)

Eve de Castro Robinson’s And the Garden was full of Voices is a three-part work evoking, with success, the sounds of birds in a garden inspired by a line in a Bill Manhire poem (with contribution from pianist Barry Margan). The composer still finds the need to manipulate the strings of the piano with the hands, but she also uses techniques that have become fashionable a generation after the body-contorting, piano-interior fashion: the integration of the pianist’s voice in the texture. In the second section, ‘Moon darkened by song’, the pianist resumed his seat and treated the instrument conventionally, with a prayerful gesture and two sharp claps from raised hands, bringing it to an end. Especially dramatic in the third section, ‘The ancient chants are echoes of death’, was the dark throbbing, the heavy beat, and the echoes of death evoked from the extreme ends of the keyboard. It made music that expressed both visual and unusual emotional perceptions.

Gao Ping, who seems at least a fairly permanent New Zealand resident, introduced his own piece Outside the window engagingly, recalling the childhood sense of a different – more real or more distant – world outside, and the music was now speaking in a language that offered more familiar resonances.

The first movement (of four, ‘On the way’) suggested a certain Janáček flavour (am I subject to suggestion, partly by the similar subject/title On an overgrown path?), at times touches of jazz, in its rhythms and melodic finger-prints. ‘Chorus of Fire Worms’ was a surprising avian evocation; Debussy was inevitably nearby in ‘Clouds’ (Nuages?), though I was not really reminded of clouds, unless they were of the fast-forward kind. The girls dancing on rubber bands (iv) was a flight of the imagination which Jack Body’s sound-world might have had some influence on.

Gao Ping again diverted us with a story related by Takemitsu: after the devastation and deprivation of the post-war, he had no piano and wandered the streets knocking on doors where he heard a piano, to ask whether he could play for 15 minutes; 40 years later he was greeted, at a concert, by one of his piano benefactors. The two Rain Tree Sketches are among his more popular pieces, not reflecting a particularly Japanese character but impressing with their coherent and confident musical substance and Gao’s playing seemed somehow to incarnate the composer himself, who has always seemed to me a man of warmth and deep humanity – like Gao Ping.

The three pieces of Debussy’s Images Book II, not the best known of his piano pieces, was a clever way to induct the audience into the climate and landscape of the New Zealand and East Asian music in the rest of the concert. The bells of No 1 were sounded in disembodied abstraction; another essential quality of Debussy’s piano music lay in the black-and-whiteness character that’s suggested by the second part – ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ – the coldness of the moon, static harmonies, stillness. ‘Poissons d’or’ is the most familiar of the three, quite formidable in its spirit in spite of the shimmering dance rhythm that portrays the golden fishes whose flashing movements became quite corporeal and substantial; yet all the time, firmly rooted in the black and white piano keys. Gao Ping’s unobtrusive virtuosity illuminated them all.

And so it was fitting to return to Debussy at the end with his brilliant hail of notes that bespangle the glittering and very difficult L’Ile joyeuse; Gao Ping gave it strong pulse and danced excitedly through it with an almost visceral joyousness.

The encore was what Gao Ping called a vocalizing-pianist piece, written by him to a poem, “perhaps-song of burial”, by Wen Yi-duo. Again, the role of the pianist’s voice complemented his piano-playing; it lamented the death of the poet’s daughter, sustained by a steady rhythm throughout in rolling motifs in the left hand. Whether the words expressed profound grief or a more metaphysical emotion one knew not, but the music seemed to express a calm stoicism rather than unrestrained distress; it was no doubt all the more impressive and moving as a result.

With each of these various composers, Gao Ping, demonstrated an intuitive awareness of the music’s essence, and a refinement, enlivened by virtuosity that was always at the service of the music.

Composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski (who was a guest at Victoria University a few years ago) said: “Gao Ping is one of a new generation that is breathing new life into the classical tradition. An evening with Gao Ping’s music is a true adventure!”

I couldn’t put it better. It was his music, in particular, this afternoon that seemed to me to point in a most fruitful, human, and optimistic direction for the future of ‘classical’ music that will again succeed in reaching out to the large audiences it enjoyed a century ago.

Another snippet.

He was asked in an interview posted on his website how he would define ‘interpreting’. His answer: “In terms of performing? Well, it is a vague word. I prefer ‘recreating’. Playing a Beethoven sonata is to recreate something, not really an interpretation because interpretation seems to suggest ‘explaining’, which is not what one can do with Beethoven sonatas performing it.”

Just one of many tendentious, pretentious words beloved of critics that have always made me uneasy, even though I’ve been guilty occasionally.