Tag: New Zealand music

The Plight of the Dischords, aka, New Zealand Clarinet Quartet

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Music by Natalie Hunt, Iain Matheson, Evan Ware, Philip Brownlee, Jenö von Takács

The New Zealand Clarinet Quartet (or The Plight of the Dischords) (Debbie Rawson, Tui Clark, Hayden Sinclair, Nick Walshe)
(New Zealand School of Music)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Thursday 18 August, 7.30pm,

For the approximately 30 souls who braved yet another night of freezing temperatures, strong winds and driving rain, this was a rewarding occasion. The acoustics of the relatively intimate Council Chamber seemed just right for this combination of clarinets, played by such proficient performers. Despite the group’s subtitle, this was a demonstration of the euphonious and very flexible instruments that are clarinets.

Being a concert of contemporary music, with the oldest piece having been composed in 1975, a number of techniques were employed that were different from those one usually hears. The performances of works by New Zealand composers were premieres.

Interspersed through the programme in three groups were Natalie Hunt’s ten pieces named for birds – mainly New Zealand native birds. The composer, who was present, is herself a clarinettist, as well as an honours graduate in composition. The first, ‘Kawau’ [shag] was titled ‘Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar’. The printed programme did not divulge whether these phrases in quotation marks were written by Natalie Hunt, or by some other person.

This first piece began with breathing – the four players breathing through their instruments in contrasting rhythms. This was followed by a bird sound made through a clarinet mouthpiece only, and then all the players joined in. ‘Raven’ featured harmony; four clarinets in harmony, one being a bass clarinet, made a gorgeous sound.

The ‘Kaka’ began with a passage that interspersed vocal sound, breathing, and instrumental sounds. This time, the soprano clarinet was one of the instruments, and some delightfully unusual tones were emitted.

Iain Matheson is a Scotsman who studied with New Zealander Lyell Cresswell, in Edinburgh. His piece ‘And Another Thing’ was quirky, with bird-like sounds. There was great use of the various timbres the clarinet is capable of, but to my mind a little too much repetition.

We returned to Hunt’s ‘real’ birds, firstly ‘Flamingo’. This employed four ‘normal’ clarinets, one player making unusual sounds through his instrument rather than playing it in the usual fashion. These sounds were mysterious, rather like a marimba being played in the distance. ‘Toroa’ [albatross] featured breathing through the instruments once again, this time while two of the instruments, including the bass clarinet, playing conventionally, before all joined in. There were similarities with the ‘Raven’ piece heard earlier. The last in this group was ‘Piwkawaka’ [fantail]. The piece was appropriately flitty, with a jazzy rhythm.

The final piece in the first half was ‘Returnings’ by Evan Ware, an American composer influenced by John Adams, we were told. Apparently this composition was first created for Facebook – the medium becomes the message. It was certainly a minimalist work, but the sounds produced were enjoyable, including oscillations and high-pitched notes. The bass clarinettist conducted at several points – presumably when it was time to move on to the next section of music after reiterations of phrases.

After the interval, the first piece was ‘The stars like years’ by Wellington composer Philip Brownlee, who was present. The programme mentioned ‘an elongated sense of time and space’; certainly much of the music was reminiscent of the music used in space movies. The oscillations reminded me of ‘the music of the spheres’ which has inspired numbers of composers, based on the theories of the Greek philosophers up to and including Plato. Once or twice the instruments appeared not to be quite in tune with each other on unison notes – or was this deliberate? Certainly there were some very astringent discords. It is quite amazing what you can get out of a clarinet – not all of it easy on the ear. There was plenty of minimalist fabric in the piece, some of which was improvised ‘using sets of notated gestural materials’.

The programme returned to the last four of Natalie Hunt’s birds. ‘Swallow’ began with a solo that was evocative and attractive. The bass clarinet also had interesting and pleasing passages. The next bird was mythical: ‘Phoenix’. The phrase read ‘The rain washed you clean’ – was this from the ashes out of which the bird arose? This featured a solo also, and more oscillations (of which I was tiring by this time). Here, the bass clarinettist played an even smaller clarinet than Tui Clark’s soprano: sopranino?

The ‘Kahu’ (hawk) spoke in close harmony – and disharmony, while the last bird, ‘Kereru’ (pigeon) had a very active piece, with an authentic bird call, and fluffing sounds like the bird’s wings. This was a charming composition.

An Pan (To Pan) by Takács was in two movements: Pastorale and Bagpipes (Dudelsack). In this piece the four regular clarinets were used. Again there was oscillation, but also pastoral melodies, and shrieking discord on intervals of a second. The second movement carried the traits of the instrument described, being loud, even raucous.

It was an innovative concert, with a variety of new or nearly-new music performed with great skill and élan. The pieces by Natalie Hunt were particularly skilled, varied, descriptive, and thoroughly musical.

NZSM string players mark 10th anniversary of Lilburn’s death: ambient problems

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Remembering Lilburn: String quartet in E minor; String Trio; Violin Sonata

New Zealand School of Music Students and Staff: Martin Riseley, Jun He (violins), Donald Maurice (viola), Inbal Megiddo (cello), Jian Liu (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Friday, 10 June 2011

This year marks ten years since the death of leading New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn. As part of commemorations, the School of Music arranged this concert to remember a long-serving former staff member of the Victoria University School of Music.

The quartet in E minor, published in 1946, includes plenty of virtuosic material; the players more than rose to the challenge – they played well, with facility and commitment, including the School of Music’s new cellist, Inbal Megiddo from Israel.

The quartet contains many felicities, yet endless repeated notes and phrases, and repeated rhythmic figures. Martin Riseley’s programme note says “…the Quartet carries a new kind of optimism, one rooted firmly in the past, quasi nostalgically, but which senses hope for what is to come.” What with the sombre nature of the work, the young children in the row behind me, the coughers and someone’s cellphone ringing loud and clear in my ear towards the end, I can’t say that I found this a major musical experience. A move to another seat improved things for the rest of the concert.

The trio, published a year earlier than the quartet, begins in a dour vein, progressing to sombre and even to mournful, despite the first movement marking of allegro non troppo. The programme note by Martin Riseley says “…the Trio carries the bitter presence of the unendurable loss of life from the war,…” There is more variety in the writing here than in the quartet. To my mind it is a
much more appealing and accomplished work. It develops to a charming mood, and its allegro finale has a delightfully optimistic ending.

The violin sonata is written in one movement with five contrasting sections. It is more animated and upbeat than the other two works. It is innovative and lively. Much of the writing is extremely taxing for both players, but they brought it off, through all the changes, splendidly. The peaceful ending finished the concert on a calm note.

Lilburn’s position as a composer, teacher and promoter of New Zealand composers and  compositions is admirable and unassailable. However, the music we heard in this short concert was not, in my opinion, among his greatest.


Made in New Zealand – Enchanted Islands

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MADE IN NEW ZEALAND – ENCHANTED ISLANDS

Music by Ross HARRIS, Anthony RITCHIE, Douglas LIBURN, Lyell CRESSWELL,
Gareth FARR, Chris GENDALL

Stephen de Pledge (piano)
Kirsten Morrell (soprano)
Tama Waipara (baritone)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Wellington Town Hall

Friday 13th May 2011

In a real sense this concert epitomized what a “Made in New Zealand ” concert ought to be about – presenting its listeners with plenty of excitement, frustration, argument and satisfaction, putting life alongside art in fine style. Everybody will, of course, make up their own cocktail mix from the aforementioned ingredients when recalling the concert and its afterglow (some will add other things, while others will make do with less, or even with none of the above). But I thought there was a palpable buzz within the audience at the start (a peculiarly “Town Hall” phenomenon, it seems to me) followed by plenty of effervescent discussion at the interval in the wake of a first half of colourful composition and splendid music-making. Even at this stage of the proceedings there was excitement aplenty, all that one could wish of a contemporary music concert’s effect upon an audience.

As for the frustration, I’m sure there will be people, like myself, with their own list of favorite, neglected pieces of New Zealand music hoping for the same to be given an airing via these concerts – perhaps next year, or the year after? It could be that we listeners don’t drop enough hints to those who are the musicmongers that sort out the catch brought in by those trawling the creative currents in this particular ocean – maybe I need to tell twenty times the number of people I already do how much of a crime I think it is that some of our “founding symphonic documents” are unaccountably ignored by our orchestras year after year after year. If I mention David Farquhar’s First Symphony in particular (no public performance since its premiere in 1959!), I’m equally determined that I’ll be fair and report back to these pages any response, written or verbal, to my piece of opinionated partiality, so that others can have their say as well about what they might like to hear in subsequent “Made in New Zealand” concerts.

I mentioned argument as an ingredient of the occasion; and conversations at the concert’s end seemed to have a different tenor to those during the interval, largely thanks to Gareth Farr’s Sonnets, settings for two singers and orchestra of a number of Shakespeare’s eponymous poems. This work divided opinions I heard into not just two camps, but a number of sub-groups, with discussions freely flowing. For myself, I thought the piece didn’t work well within the normal concert-hall setting that was imposed upon it – as if the musicians were trying to perform something like Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Given that both singers (soprano Kirsten Morrell and baritone Tama Waipara) were “miked” because neither seemed to have the vocal “heft” to compete acoustically with the orchestra, I thought the concert’s organizers ought to have taken their cue accordingly and emphasized the piece’s rather more mainstream popular-music-genre. I would have liked the singers not only in their own performing-space away from the conductor and players (even perhaps individually separated for antiphonal/visual effect and spotlit with appropriate lighting), but also have them given properly-modulated microphones that would enable their voices to be actually HEARD. With the precedent in mind of last year’s “Made in New Zealand” concert with its spectacular, if somewhat ill-conceived, visual imagery accompanying most of the music, I would have imagined such a recreation to be perfectly possible this time round.

What’s ultimately most important, however, is the degree of satisfaction given by the music and the music-making – and despite these diverse ingredients, or perhaps because of them, the concert gave to us the feeling as though it had indeed satisfied by the end. It started with a wonderful wallop, courtesy of Ross Harris’s Fanfare for the Southern Cross, a work for brass ensemble whose sombre, almost Brucknerian opening blossomed spectacularly into a brilliant toccata-like display. The music seemed to scintillate like a comet crossing the night sky, before disappearing, much too quickly! – would that it were a prelude to a suite of movements, or something, so that our pleasure at the composer’s exuberant mastery of those radiant textures could be enjoyed for longer!

I took great pleasure also in Anthony Ritchie’s A Shakespeare Overture, a thirty year-old work from the composer’s student days receiving its first-ever performance (with revised touches). I found myself admiring the young Ritchie’s exuberant orchestral writing and sure sense of balance between passages of chamber-like delicacy and piquancy, often involving winds, which were set against more heavily-scored strings-and-brass episodes, occasionally rhythmically spiked with percussion. My notes contain phrases such as “colourful scoring”, “energizing percussion”, and “beautifully dovetailed motifs leading the ear onwards” – besides such detail, I had a sure sense of the piece being well-organized throughout, so that the orchestral forces at the end were able to unerringly build things towards a thrilling climax, a grand exposition of sounds. In all, I thought the piece a worthy addition to this country’s home-grown concert repertoire.

Has any performance of Lilburn’s Four Canzonas featured more beautiful string-playing than what we heard on this occasion? – I doubt it, even if I thought Hamish McKeich’s tempo for the Willow Song (Canzona No.2) a tad quick, Donald Armstrong’s lovely solo playing for me not quite “laden” enough with foreboding at this speed, as befits the work’s original inspiration.I was struck anew by how Sibelius-like the third Canzona sounded, like something out of the latter’s Rakastava, certainly Nordic, rather than Shakespearean in atmosphere. But these were certainly very beautiful performances.

With Lyell Cresswell’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (significantly, not entitled a “piano concerto”) the evening’s music-making lurched well-and-truly into relatively unknown territories, soundscapes of the heart and soul, it seemed, considering the circumstances under which the music was written. The work was commissioned by that generous patron of the local arts, Jack Richards, for pianist Stephen de Pledge to play at this concert, so that the performance was a world premiere. It seemed that Lyell Cresswell wanted more of a concertante than a concerto-like work, and this was shown in the extent to which the orchestra reflected and extended what the piano did, very much a concourse rather than a contest.

The work commemorates the memory of a friend of the composer, who actually died while the piece was being written, but whose terminal illness overshadowed the work’s entire conception. No wonder, then, at the extent to which both piano and orchestra gave voice during the work to harsh, jagged outpourings, in grief and anger at a friendship’s loss. Even so, Cresswell found plenty of scope for expression of episodes whose eerie beauty astonished the ear, by way of both recollection of times past and resigned reflection in the wake of death. The work’s seven movements had an intensely volatile quality, indicating parallel strands of feelings and instincts as likely to be in violent opposition as in an uneasy accord. I scribbled phrases like “jagged defiance” and “tolling pulses” while listening to the opening Funeral March, then “bird-song piano figurations” and “ethereal string ambiences” during Adagio 1. And I noted the savagery of the brass attack and the dominance of the heavy artillery throughout Scherzo 1, all the while marvelling at the compositional virtuosity of Cresswell’s writing for orchestra.

The work’s centre, Addolorato (meaning upset or distressed), was the work’s emotional core, expressing both quiet and violent grief by turns, while throughout the following movements variants of the relationship between head and heart were further explored – a characteristic contouring might feature the piano playing the visionary, creating a rapt, magical atmosphere more of the mind than of the world, echoed by Ligeti-like string chords before being splintered by vitriolic brass with toccata-like textures that curdle without warning into amazing air-raid siren-like sonorities. Some of the orchestral figurations might well have owed something to Messiaen’s similarly visionary sound-worlds, but in this case one felt the tones and textures were exploring a very real emotional context of their own. Again my scribblings attempted to capture aspects of this incredible set of soundscapes – “maniacal instrumental energies in a ferment”, or “brass cackle like hooting harridans”, or even “strings become swirling stinging bees”…..all of which hopefully serves to give the reader an idea of the range and scope of sounds created by the piano/orchestra combination. The final presto, though flung at the listener almost peremptorily was able to link briefly with the opening in the midst of its toccata-like tagging, indicating (as the program notes suggested) that from questions can come still more questions rather than answers.

Wanting to earn my keep as a critic, naturally enough, but struggling to offer any comment of sufficient worth in a critical sense about the piece, all I could think of saying was that the music did seem to me to begin to overwork the material towards the end – but then the composer would confound my reaction by producing yet another magical sonority which opened up a fresh vista of wonderment – and despite my occasional instinctive feeling of there having been enough said, I couldn’t bear the thought of any of those sounds being excised! I hope someone moves to have Stephen de Pledge record this work before too long, so that we can get to know it by hearing it often and gradually unlocking at least some of its secrets. I thought it a very great work indeed.

As for Gareth Farr’s Sonnets, somebody I spoke with briefly at the end of the concert said that the performance of the Farr work seemed to them a pale shadow of the music’s previous incarnation as The Holy Fire of Love, which on that occasion featured the vocal talents of Rima Te Wiata and Kristian Lavercombe. It would seem from the reviews I’ve read that these singer/actors projected the songs rather more successfully and theatrically than happened with the fatally straight-laced quasi-classical treatment accorded the words and music on Friday evening in the Wellington Town Hall. To me it seemed all so wrong-headedly presented, to the extent that to comment any further would, I think, be to do the composer and his music an injustice.

Finally in the concert, one of the country’s most exciting younger composers, Chris Gendall, was represented with a work that in a sense was a foil for the Lyell Cresswell concerto in the first half – this later work Gravitas was tough, uncompromising and unyielding, abstracting orchestral sounds and their meaning where the older composer sought direct, straight-from-the-shoulder emotional engagement from his audience with his instrumental tones. I thought that Gendall had written some kind of Etude for Orchestra here, an idea emphasized by the composer’s own note about the music, describing the relationship between a piece’s construction and its most audible elements. Less cerebrally-minded listeners, such as myself, would probably register and enjoy more readily the sharply visceral aspects of the music, its cutting-edge accents set against both deep-throated sonorities and troughs of pregnant silence, its obsessiveness with repeated notes and an interval of a third, and the feeling of these and other notes eventually breaking free of such hegemony and enjoying episodes such as “chaos of delight” pizzicati passages and volatile hide-and-seek scamperings across the orchestral blocks.

As with many a “tough” piece I’ve come to enjoy, it’s necessary to live with the music for a while and get used to the sharp edges – I hope Chris Gendall’s piece gets its chance to be heard rather more often than has been the case with other works I’ve mentioned from time to time, one of them (David Farquhar’s First Symphony) earlier in this review. Gravitas certainly played its part in helping to make the occasion one of the best and most interesting “Made in New Zealand” Concerts of recent years. All credit to conductor Hamish McKeich, to pianist Stephen de Pledge, and to the orchestral musicians, for giving us such magnificent playing throughout the evening.

Colours rich and strange, from the SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SMP Ensemble presents: XPΩMATA – Colours

Music by Tristan Carter, Jack Hooker, Carol Shortis, Anton Killin, Iannis Xenakis (Greece), Pauline Oliveros (USA), Michael Norris, Ewan Clark, Robbie Ellis, Andrzej Nowicki

The SMP Ensemble

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

Saturday 9th April 2011

Continuing its work on behalf of classical music’s contemporary voices, the SMP Ensemble produced yet another absorbing and thought-provoking line-up of works from home and abroad with its program XPΩMATA – Colours. Without resorting to mega-anarchic practices, the group seems always to manage (via its own version of an incredible lightness of being) to blow invigorating gusts of fresh air through normal concert procedures and presentations, making each event a unique delight.

Darkness giving some of its space to candlelight set an expectant scene for the opening item, Tohoraha, by Tristan Carter. Away from the program note one might guess the players who had assembled and were delicately activating different acoustical properties of their instruments were concerned with representing either a subaqueous or a stratospheric state of being – these were sounds I reckoned to be outside of my direct biospherical experience! The coalescence of these sounds generated a micro-excitement which prepared the scene for something of a give-away conch-shell set of signals – very spectacular, if irrevocably conjuring up an oceanscape. A cursory knowledge of Te Reo Maori would have by this time alerted most people to an association of the piece with whales, and the connections readily translated into the idea of some kind of “dialogue among higher beings”, here, for all kinds of reasons, acoustical, environmental and emotional, a “transporting of the mind” experience, rich and strange, in any case for this listener.

Jack Hooker’s Field Murmur, ambiently titled, used electroacoustical means to evoke its world, arresting and splendid at the very beginning, as well as disconcerting, with something like a door or cupboard opening and shutting. I imagined animal or bird or even insect activity, though my carefully-constructed soundscape was peremptorily shut off by a revereberation-less halt to the sounds, which was presumably intended, as the effect was repeated with different kinds of evocations – it generated a kind of schizoid response to the medium as opposed to the message, the uncertainty of imminent closure creating its own set of tensions.

Carol Shortis’s The Riddle of Her Flight was a setting for soprano, piano and vibraphone of part of a poem by Mike Johnson. The music readily courted both pictorial and emotional responses, grumbling bass notes on Jonathan Berkahn’s piano at the beginning stimulating shafts of light from deft touches upon the vibraphone criss-crossing the soundscape. The sound of the soprano Olga Gryniewicz’s voice was perhaps siren-like, or maybe that of a wood-nymph’s, haunting and pleading. The singer emphasized the idea of “sanctuary”, aided and abetted by the instrumentalists, Takumi Motokawa’s vibraphone occasionally bowed as well as struck, producing lovely tintinabulations, and stimulating bell-like diction from the singer at the words “You must find the island”. At the end of a richly-extended lyrical episode, the final cadence following a culminating high note felt like a real homecoming. The music couldn’t help but repeatedly take my sensibilities to what seemed like “other realms” associated with Shakespearean fantasy, such as Prospero’s Island, or the Magic Wood of Oberon outside Athens.

Andrzej Nowicki was the clarinettist in tandem with his own pre-recorded playing of fragments from the same work, for composer Anton Killin’s absorbing Absence; Primes. The soloist listened at first to the recorded performance, then began a dialogue with the original, fascinatingly exploring the idea of feedback, discussion and even “second thoughts” regarding one’s own creative impulses. At first ruminative, Nowicki’s “live” clarinet-playing animated the textures, the discussion a “brightly-lit” affair until a brusque declamatory statement brought the dialogue to a sudden end.

The programme’s first “offshore” work was Yannis Xenakis’s Echange, in effect a bass clarinet concerto, bringing the first half of the concert to an end with plenty to engage the thoughts. The composer called the work “terrifying and mysterious”, and indeed, the single-note clarinet opening brings forth a disquieting subterraneous soundworld from trombone (Xenakis wanted a tuba, but…) and bassoon into which the cello oscillates and over the top of which the soloist exuberantly barks – perhaps a European manifestation of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s “gods of the middle world” flexing their might and muscle into a colour-change chord irreverently “curdled” by the soloist’s contribution. The clarinet ruminates deeply as its ambient surroundings ring changes of tempo, texture and articulation, creating memorable vignettes of incident – a wonderfully seismic “wobble-chord”  from the ensemble, and a “blues in the night” response from the soloist, very jazzy and lively playing, which, however develops into a kind of ritual of attempted domination on both sides, the impasse declared by implacable brass against whose black tones the soloist slashes and stabs. We fear for the safety of the music itself, at the point of dissolution the sound-world’s resonating voices asking questions we can only numbly acknowledge. A good place for the interval!

We were prepared even less for what was to follow – audience participation! – fortunately, humming was all that was required, the SMP ensemble members walking around the auditorium antiphonally encouraging us to add our unique vocal vibrations to Anton Killin’s realization of Lullaby for Daisy Pauline by the American composer Pauline Oliveros, one of the composer’s “Sonic Meditations” aimed at engendering a focus among listeners on “the intimate reality of sound”. Philosophically, Michael Norris’s work which followed, Blindsight, explored the antithesis of Oliveros’s shared ambient construct, describing his work in a context of fragile individual sensory reality. Norris’s work translated this “process of sensory faith” into a musical work involving strings and winds, with the piano as a kind of intermediary. The winds played chords using halftones, to which the piano and strings responded in a kind of instinctive manner, “feeling” their way towards a kind of kinship with the original sounds. The piano seemed then to take the lead, the winds responding to the instrument’s chords and patterning with characteristic sonorities (a kind of “opening up’ of an essential sound-nature for both groups, the winds sostenuto, the strings oscillating and flurrying melismatically. Whether growing in confidence or in desperation, the responses by both groups to the piano reached a fever-pitch of animation before sinking, exhausted. The piano maintained a dispassionate “devil’s advocate” kind of stance, allowing the winds to blow themselves out, leaving the strings fulminating amongst themselves, then relinquishing their voices with a last sotto-voce gesture – I was given the feeling of micro-processes continuing, after the overt activities had ceased…..

Reversing the program order, Robbie Ellis’s Maeve set recorded voice against solo piano, to the former’s disadvantage, unfortunately, the piano’s declamatory style in places obscuring the speaker’s tones (the loudspeaker would have been better-placed in front of the piano, eliminating the “competitive” aspect which seemed to be set up regarding the soundspace – a pity we were thus distracted, because the piano-part was gorgeous-sounding in places, Debussy-like in its focus and delicacy, while Leila Austin’s story, read by the author, would have filled out its place in the sound-tapestry in a much more balanced and contextual way – a further performance needed, I feel. Following this, Ewan Clark’s Reverie set parts of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s Elegy for soprano, clarinet and piano, Olga Gryniewicz’s clear and pure voice making the most of the vocal line’s beauties at “Sweetness to the root – may the tree climb high against the sun”, while Andrzej Nowicki’s clarinet-playing conjured up whole eternities of bird-song underpinned by Jonathan Berkahn’s rich and  resonant piano realization. A lovely performance of a beautiful work, capturing the lonely beauty and desolation of the poet’s evocations.

Concluding the generous program was a work by the group’s director, Andrzej Nowicki, appropriately entitled Unknown Realms, the ensemble (strings, organ, piano and winds) conducted by Karlo Margetic. We expected a kind of “road” piece, with much and greatly varied terrain covered, and weren’t disappointed. A nascent, almost tentative piano presence at first addresses only dark organ tones and subterranean bass clarinet sounds – forces of darkness holding sway, almost daring other, brighter impulses to ignite and energize the textures towards the light. The clarinets stimulate the strings’ awakening, the latter holding steadfastly to their notes as the drama unfolds, the clarinets having a “field day” both instigating and repelling various agitations, the organ joining in with weighty presence, provoking the conductor’s patience to breaking-point in the face of such concerted anarchies – a marvellously petulant “Will you stop it!” ejaculation from the podium restores order amid chaos. Great fun, nicely “placed” amid the trials and tribulations.

The group’s director, Andrzej Nowicki was warmly and ceremoniously farewelled by all at the concert’s conclusion, on the eve of overseas explorations – the best of all possible send-offs, one would think, via this musical feast from the SMP Ensemble.

NEWS: Broadcasting New Zealand music from Radio NZ’s archive

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

MUSICAL TREASURE TROVE UNLOCKED

A joint venture by Radio New Zealand Concert and the Centre for New Zealand Music

The first collection of recordings of New Zealand music that have come to light through SOUNZ’s Resound project, will be released to the airwaves on Radio New Zealand Concert’s Sound Lounge on Tuesday evenings over the next ten weeks.

Funded by NZ on Air, Resound is a joint project between SOUNZ, the Centre for New Zealand Music and Radio New Zealand Concert that aims to make a vast resource of recordings of New Zealand music available for broadcast and website streaming.

The very first recording to be re-broadcast is Jack Speirs’s Three Poems of Janet Frame, in a performance by Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich, in 2001. (It was broadcast this evening, Tuesday 19 October).

“This is a really exciting time for everyone involved in this project”, says Julie Sperring, Executive Director of SOUNZ. “There is a treasure trove of recordings made over the past fifty or so years that has been locked away unavailable for broadcast – this project brings them back to life.  A long and detailed process has seen 1200 hours of music from RNZ’s NZ Composer Archive safely preserved as digital files, and re-licensed for future use. The upcoming broadcasts are the first steps towards making this unique cultural resource publicly available online.”

Originally, recordings held in the NZ Composer Archive were licensed for two broadcasts only, so many of them represent the first and only performance of a work. A major re-licensing effort, which is part of the Resound process, has secured permissions from composers and performers for the renewed use of this rich resource.

The digitisation from tape, DAT and CD, is now all but complete, and the recordings are gradually being approved for broadcast through an ongoing auditioning and selection process undertaken by an expert panel.

SOUNZ, the Centre for New Zealand Music is also soon to make a sizeable amount of this collection, plus other audio and video recordings free for streaming on its new ‘Media on Demand’ platform, which will be launched over the next couple of months.

For more details about the SOUNZ Resound project contact:

Chris Watson, Project Manager  801 8602, or

Julie Sperring, Executive Director  801 8602

(From press release issued by the Centre for New Zealand Music – SOUNZ)

Sweet Dreams from The Song Company

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Song Company – Chamber Music New Zealand

English and Italian Madrigals: William Byrd, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes,

Thomas Vautour, Claudio Monteverdi

Horatio Vecchi – A Night in Siena

Peter Sculthorpe – Maranoa Lullaby

Jack Body – Five Lullabies/Three Dreams and A Nightmare

Anon. – Israeli Lullaby

The Song Company, directed by Roland Peelman

Anna Fraser, Louise Prickett – sopranos / Lanneke Wallace-Wells – mezzo-soprano / Richard Black – tenor / Mark Donnelly – baritone / Clive Birch – bass

Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 16th October, 2010

I spent the first part of this concert luxuriating in some glorious madrigal singing from the talented Australian vocal ensemble The Song Company, touring the country under the auspices of Chamber Music New Zealand. The ensemble’s programming enabling me to enjoy and marvel at both the similarities and differences between the English and Italian schools of renaissance vocal composition. The English group, which began the programme, contained some exquisite gems, from the heartfelt immediacy and world-within-a-flower simplicity of John Wilbye’s Draw On, Sweet Night, to the virtuoso inventiveness of Thomas Weelkes’ Thule, the period of cosmography, the group encompassing and beautifully expressing both kinds of intensities and fluidities. Wilbye’s major-minor colourings and antiphonal dynamic variations were most sensitively given, readily evoking the chiaroscuro of both outer and inner worlds commented on in the excellent programme notes. By contrast, Thomas Weelkes’ writing suffused the soundscape with intricate dovetailings and overlappings of tones and rhythms, beguiling one’s ear with echo and contrast, the unbridled mock-satire of Ha!Ha!This world doth pass a kind of Dionysian jest on the opposite end of the see-saw from the idiosyncratic philosophy of Thule. And I loved the sharp-etched character of Sweet Suffolk Owl, with its “te whit, te whoo-ings”, the group’s articulation and dynamism making the most of Thomas Vautour’s vivid portraiture of an iconic bird.

It’s probably too simplistic to declare that the main difference between the two madrigal schools seems to be the actual sound of each language; but the liquidity and sonority of those Italian vowels seemed straightaway to add a whole tonal dimension to the music – a different kind of intensity, rather less subtle, but richer and darker-toned seemed to me to come across almost straight away. The gloriously declamatory Sfogava con le stelle, with its evocation of the beauties of the night sky, milks the rhetoric to stunning effect, the singers full-toned and committed throughout. No less heartfelt was the following Si, ch’io vorei morire (the text’s erotic suggestiveness adding to the emotional charge), ascending sequences and repetitions in thirds heightening the expressive power of it all. Momentary relief was at hand from the weather and its interplay with the rest of Creation, with Zefiro torna, though the initial gaiety and playfulness of the nature-descriptions suddenly gave way to darkness and despair as poet and composer bemoaned the loss of the beloved amid Springtime’s felicities – the setting’s final line stretched the music’s expressivity almost to its limit before the heart-stopping final resolution. Mercifully, Oimè, se tanto amate and Amorosa pupilletta were better-humoured, the first giving rise to amusement with its repeated mock-serious “Oh my!”s, and the second featuring a drum accompaniment and wordless Swingle Singers-like “do-do-do-dos” providing a rhythmic carriage for a sombre dance of longing, beginning with a solo, then a duet, and then the ensemble, the singing keeping the impulses of feeling nicely ebbing and flowing throughout.

The group’s director Roland Peelman introduced Horatio Vecchi’s entertainment A Night in Siena, composed in 1604, a kind of musical catalogue of instructions for people to follow a game of mimicry – as the programme note puts it, “a 16th-Century version of musical theatre-sports”. I found the spoken introduction difficult to properly hear, so the programme note and texts of the songs were life-savers. The sequences were most entertaining, poking gentle (and, topically, probably not-so-gentle) fun at different types of people, be they travellers from other lands or simple girls from the country. One didn’t have to “read between the lines” to glean prevailing native attitudes towards these people, the German imitation taking us remarkably close to Basil Fawlty’s “Don’t Mention the War!” by the end, and the introduction to the exotic Spaniard persona making naughty reference to his abilities “as a very cunning linguist”. It was all tremendously good-humoured fun, the quasi-Spanish “effects” to finish rousing the participants (and their audience) to great enthusiasm, and a warm reception at the end.

After the interval the focus shifted from nocturnal entertainments both amatory and theatrical to the earnest business of sleep itself, by way of lullabies, dreams and nightmares. Peter Sculthorpe’s arresting Maranoa Lullaby fully exploited the spacious ambiences of the Town Hall, with the singers stationed at various points around the gallery. Dramatic lighting heightened the impact of each voice, the opening single-voiced bell-accompanied lullaby (originally an indigenous melody collected in Queensland during the 1930s) counterpointed by the other voices, all taking turns to add their melodic strands to the tapestry. A plaintive, strident episode caught up these strands and pulled them tightly together, focusing and hardening the harmonies, before bringing the work back to the unison theme once again. The whole sequence created a dream-like inner world which, despite its short duration, cast a powerful and evocative spell.

More complex and discursive, but with comparable subconscious explorations in places was the clever fusion of two works by Jack Body, the older (1989) Five Lullabies now interspersed with the freshly-commissioned Three Dreams and a Nightmare. The “invented” word-sounds of each of the lullabies demonstrated the composer’s interest in different folk-idioms and traditions relating to chant, while the dream/nightmare sequences explored the subconscious realms of sleep itself, using poetry by authors such as Shakespeare and ee cummings set with marvellously-wrought accompaniments, both vocal and instrumental – I loved the wordless exhilaration of the first Dream, Flying, with its vertiginous lurching and gong-like tintinnabulations, the singers occasionally sounding warning sirens in close proximity to reefs on treacherous sea-coasts. This was followed by the impulsive and volatile Brain worm, involving endlessly inventive vocalisings, layered, multi-harmonied and seemingly tireless. Throughout, the Lullabies gave a continuing “fled is that music?” ambience to the work’s progressions, rather like arias between recitatives, so that the saucy eroticism of ee cummings’ poem may I feel had an extra element of fantasy which for me gave those somewhat outrageous Rochester-like physicalities a more poignant, escapist connection (then again, perhaps I was simply feeling my age!)….still, those glass harmonica-like sounds, together with the volatile seduction-vocalisings made the whole Erotique episode properly suggestive and delightful.

The Nightmare pulsated and palpitated appropriately, the performance virtuoso in its control of detail and atmosphere, with drums and woodblocks beating out obsessive rhythms, threatening inescapable and intransient anarchic realms familiar to all who have experienced such disturbances – the poetry, well-known from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, evoked that wondrous imagery of “the cloud-capp’d towers” yoked with the stuff of dreams, the ensuing vocal writing suggesting a similar wonderment at the words’ fusion of the timeless and the ephemeral. Interesting that a composer would come back to an existing work and augment it thus – though there was a lot going on both in an immediate and a cumulative way, the contrasts had the effect of refocusing the listeners’ attentions and drawing them ever onwards.

Both the anonymous Israeli lullaby which followed, and the Eurythmics-inspired encore, brought us back from the labyrinth-passages of the subconscious sufficiently to enable us to properly and whole-heartedly register our approval at the end of the concert – the Song Company gave us “Sweet Dreams” which were entertaining, enchanting and inspirational.

William Green (piano) on The Enchanted Island

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand and other solo piano music

The Enchanted Island: music by J S BACH, FRANK HUTCHENS, ERNEST JENNER, DOUGLAS LILBURN, ROBERT BURCH, ALFRED HILL, SAMUEL BARBER, WILLIAM GREEN, GEORGE GERSHWIN, JENNY McLEOD, JACK BODY, HELEN BOWATER, MICHAEL NORRIS, RICHARD WAGNER (arr.FRANZ LISZT)
(A Caprice Arts Trust Concert)

William Green (piano)

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

Friday, 24th September 2010

This was a recital that had more than a whiff of magic, mystery and atmosphere about it, thanks in part to a tempestuous Wellington spring wind that roared around and about St. Andrew’s Church throughout the evening, activating creaks, groans and occasional muffled bumpings and rumblings. It was as if an army of musical ghosts had congregated amid the rafters of the church and were making their presence felt none too silently (shades of the composers, perhaps, come to hear their music given an all too seldom public airing in many instances).

Other things contributed to the magic of the occasion, not the least of which was William Green’s playing. An Auckland-based musician who gives frequent recitals exploring the surprisingly rich legacy of New Zealand piano music, Green was here making his Wellington debut as a solo recitalist. He brought with him a programme whose substance and presentation deserved far greater support than the paltry numbers who did attend the concert were able to generate, appreciative though the audience was of the pianist’s efforts. Whether the sparse attendance (no more than thirty people) could be attributed to lack of advertising, the pianist’s and the repertoire’s largely “unfamiliar” status, the recital’s injudicious timing or the less-than-salubrious weather, the response remained disappointing and reflected less than positively on the capital’s reputation as a centre for arts and culture.

But what magic there was in the music as well! – in the Caprice Arts Trust’s advertising preamble, William Green referred to the programme as focused “on the small and the lyrical – often clothed in the unusual!”. Most of the works were written by New Zealand composers, many of which pieces were new to me; and the pianist’s own work, a set of three Rags Without Riches was given its world premiere performance (he also played an exerpt from another of his compositions, No.5 from Five Miniatures). The idea of including in the recital works by JS Bach, Samuel Barber, George Gershwin (three song arrangements, fascinatingly different treatments) and Richard Wagner (Liszt’s famed transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde) certainly “placed” the home-grown pieces in wider contexts of both time and space, and not at all to their detriment.

Not inappropriately, the recital’s “anchor-stone” whose opening tones readily suggested a sense of “something rich and strange” was a Busoni transcription of JS Bach’s Nun Komm der Heiland, the music’s deep-throated, solemn stride evoking at once the mystery of unfathomable being and the beauty of ritual, a recipe for gentle bewitchment if ever there was one. The piece which gave the recital its name followed, Frank Hutchens’ The Enchanted Isle, atmospheric, impressionistic music, figurations beneath which sang a sonorous melody, and awakenings of echoes and distant voicings, the pianist’s ultra-sensitivity presiding over a beguiling harmonic kaleidoscope of colour-change. Wilder and more energetic was the same composer’s Sea Music, a kind of pianistic “jeux de vagues”, rippling figurations concerned with playful, impulsive dialogue between melody and counter-melody, nothing too adventurous harmonically, but with the occasional guileful twist. And Ernest Jenner’s Foxglove Bells, though hinting at touches of the exotic with some of the opening harmonies, was a gentle, pictorial English pastorale, the bells at the mercy of the breezes across the meadow, their tones rising at the piece’s lovely, questioning ending.

Terser, more enigmatic fare was Douglas Lilburn’s Piece ’81, a piece whose soulful, upward-arching impulses gave themselves and their resonances plenty of air and light, contrast and distance generated by almost sepulchral bass notes that opened up the textures, the pianist allowing the music plenty of room for thought, then gently nudging a couple more upward impulses into the silences. A contemporary of Lilburn’s was Robert Burch, respected as a fine horn-player as well as a composer – William Green played the third of Burch’s set of Four Bagatelles, a piece redolent of tolling bells, with an inquiring, angular figure that walked backwards and forwards across the soundscape, leaving the bells to carry on with an ever-diminishing dialogue, the pianist beautifully controlling the resonantly receding ending. Rather more salon-like was Alfred Hill’s Come Again, Summer, a welcome song in the manner of Cecile Chaminade, though with some telling harmonic shifts in places, especially towards the end.

Green next figured as a transcriber of a bracket of Samuel Barber’s songs, including an aria from the composer’s opera Vanessa. A powerfully bleak, almost Messiaen-like The Crucifixion, complete with birdsong, was succeeded by the well-known, warmly resonant Sure on that Shining Night , rolling and romantic in style; and the group was concluded with the tightly-focused, theatrically interactive To Leave, to Break, the interchanges between bass and treble voices suggesting the piece’s stage origins. Another set of transcriptions, later in the programme, were of George Gershwin’s songs, this time by three different transcribers, each of which had something distinctive to offer, the first, Love walked In, featuring for instance Percy Grainger’s “woggle” (the composer’s irreverent name for a tremolando).

To conclude the recital’s first half, Green played us his new work, Rags Without Riches, three cleverly-written, almost pastiche-like dances paying homage to different New Zealand locations, the first, Starvation Bluff, beginning with what seemed like a pianistic cry of pain, the dying fall as pathetic in effect as the tortured opening. The music evoked hard times and bitter disillusionment, occasional bright-eyed utterances exposing their shadow side, the ghostly ascents taking us into tonal realms where warmth was stripped to the bone and feeling bleached to the point of numbness. Then came Poverty Bay Shuffle, music beginning with droll rumblings and upward rollings, the rhythmic energies projecting a laconic, weathered sensibility, again without warmth or illusion, a structure liable to disintegrate without warning, occasioning desperate gestures such as Grainger-like hand-clustered chords, hollowed-out exchanges of melodic fragments and a final, cursory downward slide. The final Poor Knight’s Rag took on a manic aspect, cluttered, insistent and claustrophobic, a “Singing Detective-like” musical hallucination which recklessly ran itself headlong into the waiting clutches of oblivion. And then it was, as Tom Lehrer would have remarked, more than forty years ago, time for a cancer!

Apart from the Gershwin transcriptions, and Liszt’s well-known keyboard traversal of Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan, the rest was New Zealand music – William Green gave us two beautiful Tone Clock Pieces by Jenny McLeod, the first (No.2) tolling its notes and enjoying its own ambiences, then exploring antiphonal voices and various resonating reflections, ending with deep, rich soundings; while the second (No.4) rolled, spun and orbited its arpeggiated figures, registering fragments of echoings and chordal replies, rather like a meeting of two disparate elements. Jack Body’s classic Five Melodies was represented by the fifth piece of the set, the oscillation of the notes very beautiful and haunting, the figurations “travelling”, as does sunlight upon water-surfaces, spontaneously recreating the scenario’s basic patternings. Another “Piece No.5” was William’ Green’s own composition, from 5 Miniatures, a lovely, open-textured piece whose explorations of space and becalmed ambiences had to compete with a considerable amount of wind-noise from various parts of the building – the performance nevertheless beautifully sustained by the composer-pianist. By contrast, Helen Bowater’s rapid-fire, high-energy tribute to an Asian housemate’s attempts at communicable language No Problem From Little Bit bubbled with excitability and joy at the prospect of being understood. The pendulum swung back to circumspection for Michael Norris’s Amato, a Caprice Arts Trust commission, here receiving only its second public performance – music whose stillness suggested worlds of frozen time, repeated right-hand water-droplet notes a constant while the left hand tentatively explored middle and bass registers. Clustered etchings of sound began to fill up the piece’s spaces, the pauses defining the dimensions tellingly before being made to resonate with rich tones – some marvellous sounds from the pianist and his instrument! To finish, quiet,firm-voiced declamations, and gentle scintillations of light, everything judiciously controlled and beautifully-breathed.

The Wagner transcription became a “back to the world” undertaking, a piece whose quiet but rapidly burgeoning insistence can produce an overwhelming effect, even in keyboard guise, thanks to the genius of Liszt. William Green’s playing unlocked most of its its magic here, even if I wanted somewhat longer-breathed phrasings at the beginning and a touch more rhetoric at “the” climax, rabid sensationalist that I am! Our over-saturated sensibilities at the conclusion were then refurbished by a “cleansing” encore from the pianist, another of Frank Hutchens’ pieces, called “Two Little Birds”, one whose sounds and realisation expressed exactly what the title said the piece would do – in terms of the recital’s avowed pursuit of “the small and lyrical”, a perfect way to end. And hats off to William Green and Caprice Arts for their splendid enterprise!

SOUNZtender – NZ Music going for a song…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SOUNZtender – the Concert

The Music:

John Psathas – Songs for Simon / Gillian Whitehead – Tumanako: Journey through an unknown landscape / Eve de Castro-Robinson – and the garden was full of voices / Ross Harris – Four Laments for solo clarinet  Chris Gendall – Suite for String Quartet

The Winning Bidders:

Jack C. Richards – John Psathas / Helen Kominik – Gillian Whitehead / Barry Margan – Eve de Castro-Robinson / Wellington Chamber Music Society – Ross Harris / Christopher Marshall – Chris Gendall

The Performers:

Donald Nicolson (piano) – Songs for Simon (Psathas) / Diedre Irons (piano) – Tumanako (Whitehead) / Gao Ping (piano) – and the garden was full of voices (de Castro-Robinson) / Phil Green (clarinet) – Four Laments (Harris) / The New Zealand String Quartet – Suite for String Quartet (Gendall)


Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 30th May 2010

New Zealand composers putting their creative talents up for auctioning online? Local music patrons, sponsors and benefactors competing amongst themselves for compositional favours from our top composers? Amid the recent shivers caused by icy blasts directed by politicians and bureaucrats against music practitioners and disseminators such as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Radio New Zealand Concert, this composer-inspired project from the Centre For New Zealand Music represented a skyful of sunbeams brightening up a naughty world. Five composers, all previous winners of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, proposed to each write a work for solo instrument (or, as it turned out, small ensemble) for the five top bidders in an online auction. It took little more than a fortnight for the bidding to bring in more than $20,000 to further assist with the work of SOUNZ in promoting and collecting and making more readily available the work of New Zealand composers.

The resulting concert was the culmination of more than a year’s preparation of the project, whose inauguration took place on May 14th 2009, the ensuing bidding taking place throughout the remainder of that month. The five successful commissioners won the right to work with a selected composer in relation to a particular composition. In each case  there was a degree of collaboration between commissioner and composer, details of which were in some instances (though not all) outlined in the concert’s programme notes. I found the details of all of this fascinating, recalling as it did my readings of past composers’ dealings with people who commissioned works from them – thought-provoking tracings of interaction between creativity and expectation, a process with an extremely colourful history.

So, a little more than a year after the inauguration of the scheme, composers and performers were ready with the fruits of their labours – the overall result was a concert featuring three diverse piano pieces, and a work each for solo clarinet and string quartet. No wonder that each of the performances of these new pieces promised a particular intensity, a sharp-edged focus that would require concentrated and committed listening, the process made all the more direct and immediate by the “shared-space” ambiences of the Ilott Theatre. Those who had been charged with the task of delivery were about to prove the worth of their discharge.

The first of the pieces, John Psathas’ “Songs for Simon” I found something of a disarming experience at first, the pianist (Donald Nicolson) launching into a simple, repetitiously patterned sequence in tandem with pre-recorded percussion. It established a kind of passacaglia form throughout which attractive melodic lines appeared, built up a certain textural ambience, and then gradually diminished, leaving the percussion to “round off” the sequence. The second part, entitled “Minos” by the composer, was much freer rhythmically and harmonically; and presented the fascinating spectacle of a “live” performer interacting in unpredictable, non-rhythmic ways with the pre-recorded sounds. Whereas the first part of the piece (interestingly titled “His Second Time”) had seemed a shade “formulaic” in its regularity, this whole second episode I found extremely compelling due to its improvisatory air. Such was the concentration with which Donald Nicolson seemed to be “listening” to his “partner” the latter’s utterances seemed also to take on a live, spontaneously-wrought quality. I liked the assertiveness of the percussion cadenza towards the end, and the piano’s dreamy, equivocal response which concluded the work. It would have been interesting to have had some inkling of the interaction between commissioner and composer regarding the work, its titles and sections, and its musical content.

Gilian Whitehead’s piece which followed relied entirely on “conventional” piano acoustics, the only departure from tradition being two sections in the work where the performer is invited to extend and further elaborate upon what is already written. Such was the extent to which pianist Diedre Irons seemed to have “swallowed” the work’s whole ethos I found it impossible to tell which sections these were in performance. Commissioner Helen Kominik dedicated this work to her great grandchildren, Kate and Tom Fraser, the composer thoughtfully making reference in her written notes to the music’s journeyings reflecting the progress of time and the coming of new generations. This renewal of life is suggested also by the piece’s title, “Tumanako”, which means “hope”, though a subtitle “Journey through an unknown landscape” gives further dimensions to the music. Arising from a recent trip through the Yunnan province of China, the composer’s inspiration was stimulated by the plethora of images and sensations, partly traditional, partly unknown, that were encountered  and experienced in a short time. The music was intended to reflect this profusion of encounters, and their relatively unrelated juxtapositioning, though I thought  detected a certain recurrence of some motifs. In general, the piece seemed to encompass whole worlds, with ideas often running in accord – sometimes as in a sense of great stillness existing at the centre of rhythmic activity, while at other times with contrasting characters kaleidoscopically changing, bell-like descents alternating with delicate birdsong-effects. Diedre Irons seemed to catch all of the piece’s moods, hold them for our pleasure, and just as tellingly let them go, playing throughout with such freedom and understanding – those deep, upwardly-echoing chords and the slivers of birdsong which ended the work made for one of many such breath-catching moments throughout.

On the face of things putting three piano pieces together at the beginning of the programme seemed a more pragmatic than artistic piece of programming designed to avoid constant piano relocation! In fact, such were the contrasts wrought by each composer’s music that the instrument seemed almost to be reinvented with each piece, perhaps most radically with Eve de Castro-Robinson’s work “and the garden was full of voices”. Bearing the description “for vocalising pianist”, the music requires both performer and instrument to go beyond conventional sound-parameters, the player asked to recite, to whistle and to vocalise, as well as play; and the piano “prepared”, as well as having its strings directly manipulated by the player. Commissioner Barry Margan, himself a fine pianist, took an active part in the music’s initial formulation, suggesting titles for two of the work’s three movements, and working with the composer on various sonic, literary and metaphysical inspirations. The outcome was a piece rich in poetic allusion, the associations intensified by the use of Bill Manhire’s poetry in the titles for both the overall work and its second movement, “moon darkened by song”. On this occasion the pianist was fellow-composer Gao Ping, who, closely miked, entered fully into the performance’s more theatrical aspects, whispering the opening words “I stayed a minute” and using both the piano’s conventional tones and the “prepared” registers of the instrument (which the pianist did in full view of the audience before the music started). The first part resounded with tui calls, antiphonally rendered through the different timbres created by the strings’ augmentations, and contrasted with richer ambiences created by cimbalon-like tremolandi – by contrast, the delicacies of the gently-strummed treble strings gave an other-world effect at the movement’s conclusion.

At the beginning of the second movement I began to wonder whether the pianist’s microphone had actually been set at slightly too high a level for the whistlings and vocalisings – although there was plenty of expressive impact the sounds seemed over-wrought, a shade too “enhanced” next to the piano-tones. Even so, the composer’s “ritualistic” description of parts of the music was adroitly brought into play, as the pianist initiated an almost primitive singing-along with the music’s melody line, as well as speaking in low, chant-like tones and clapping slowly with raised hands, as if invoking an elusive spirit of delight. In between, the piano sounds suggested different kinds of ruminations, surface musings rubbing shoulders with deep thoughts and charged silences, the spoken incantation “moon darkened by song” providing an apt description of the mystery. The “ancient chants” of the finale featured a whispered title from the soloist at the outset, and oscillating repetitions from the piano, the right hand occasionally seeking air and light in the treble, then resubmerging, the repetitions resembling a kind of dance-chant, which builds into an impassioned interplay of half-tone patternings, with resounding bass notes suggesting the abyss below our feet that stalks our existence. As it began, the piece ended as might a ritual, with doomsday-like gong-stroke notes that resounded, lingered and faded away.

Though the solo clarinet featured in Ross Harris’s work which followed provided plenty of contrast with piano timbres, there was no let-up in intensity, as suggested by the “Four Laments” title. Described by the composer as consisting of “four short and rather quiet movements” the music reflected upon and interacted with the sound of each of the movement’s titles, the word for “lament” in four different languages. The first, “Klaga”, was Swedish, slow-moving, very out-of-doors music, its wide-ranging notations suggesting the isolation of vast spaces, and associated loneliness, and a sense of a spirit communing with nature. This was followed by the Yiddish “Vaygeshray”, a rhythmically droll and quirky piece, engagingly angular in places, choleric in others, and with lovely sotto-voce stream-of-consciousness episodes that set off the more energetic outbursts. The “Tangi” movement featured long-breathed lines, flecked occasionally by birdsong, and echoed with haunting “harmonics”, two notes sounded simultaneously, along with the player’s audible breath as a third timbral “presence” (superb playing by Phil Green), creating an almost prehistoric ambience. The last movement was the Gaelic “Corranach”, somewhat redolent of a wake, with its lyrical opening giving way to snatches of mercurial, dance-like sequences, with ghostly jigs and reels fleetingly remembered. Phil Green’s playing conveyed a real sense of living the music throughout, with each sequence drawn into a larger, more equivocal and suggestive world of different life-and death enactments, deeply moving.

Although these SOUNZtender works were originally designated as commissions for solo instruments, Christopher Marshall, the winning bidder for composer Chris Gendall, decided to specify a work for a string quartet. Marshall’s idea was to propose four ubiquitous forms of music and commission a response to each, with a different instrumentalist in the quartet taking the lead in each piece. Gendall’s response was to abstract certain stylistic elements of each form, rather than attempt to imitate with a set of pastiche-style pieces. The result was a set of boldly-etched pieces whose characteristics seemed to leave their original inspirations behind, but whose sharp, if oblique focus still compelled attention in each case.

Canto, the first movement, spotlit the solo ‘cello, whose music represented a struggle to coalesce into any kind of song, despite the efforts of the higher instruments to entice their partner into lyrical mode. The swaying, sighing character of the next movement, “Scorrevole”, conveyed its eponymous character with great delicacy and beauty, while the third movement, “Tango”, seemed to be a kind of “noises off” realisation of the dance, the skeletal left-handed pizzicati evoking something gestural more than sounded. Here, the solo viola juicily intoned the beginnings of a melody amidst the “danse macabre” of the other instruments, which then all rounded on a single note, each voice colouring the contributing timbres and “bending” the pitch to somewhat exotic effect. There was plenty of ‘snap” to the playing from all concerned, suggesting a certain volatility, and rich chordings that broke off their sostenuto character to fragment in different and adventuresome directions. The final “Bagatelle” largely inhabited the stratospheres, the first violin’s harmonic-like shimmerings drawing similar sounds from the other instruments, whose subtly-shifting colourings brought different intensities to bear, before clustering around the tightly-focused tones of the leader in a nebula of other-worldliness.

What worlds, what evocations, what alchemic realisations! All composers except for Chris Gendall were present to share audience plaudits, along with the respective performers, a unique distillation of contemporary New Zealand music-making. People I spoke with afterwards admitted to favourites among those heard, though interestingly no one work seemed to resound more frequently than others throughout the discussions. As with all new music, though, premieres are one thing, and further performances are another – so it will be interesting to listen out for these works played in different settings and circumstances (although Ross Harris’s work “Four Laments” has already stolen a march on the others, being repeated by Phil Green at an Amici Ensemble concert in Wellington again, tomorrow). The commissioners proudly received their presentation scores of the works performed at a function in the Town Hall Mayoral Chambers after the concert – and the project was thus completed. Very full credit to the Centre for New Zealand Music, the directors Scilla Askew (recent) and Julie Sperring (current), its Trustees and volunteers and contributing commissioners and composers, for a notably historic and successful undertaking.

Songs My Mother Taught Me – Mother’s Day Music from Nota Bene

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Music for Mother’s Day

Music by Grieg, Bruckner, Pärt, Tavener, Holst, Gounod, Biebl, Gorecki, Dvorak, Haydn, Vautor, Hely-Hutchinson, Hrušovskŷ, Richard Puanaki, David Childs, David Hamilton, Carol Shortis

Nota Bene Choir

Frances Moore (soprano) / Julie Coulson (piano)

Christine Argyle (director)

Lyndee-Jane Rutherford (presenter)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Sunday 9th May

Christine Argyle’s “Nota Bene” Choir got the mix right for their Mother’s Day concert,  with a programme of music whose first half did strong, sonorous homage to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, before paying tribute after the interval to ordinary, everyday mothers, with songs of affection, remembrance, and wry humour – and finishing with “Rytmus”, Ivan Hrušovsky’s well-known “choral etude” in praise of Eve, the first human mother, as a brief, but exciting finale. With a waiata-like guitar-accompanied opening (actually called “Ka Waiata” and written by Richard Puanaki), and featuring greetings and spoken commentaries by theatre and television personality Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, the event kept an appropriately light touch throughout, the music expressing an attractive amalgam of fun, energy, sentiment, nostalgia and profundity in nicely-gauged doses.

The programme skilfully rang the contrasts throughout, so that we had juxtapositionings such as solemn, Wagnerian Bruckner leavened by excitable, energetic Aarvo Pärt, and then David Hamilton’s West Indian rhythms next to Henryk Gorecki’s rapt, richly-harmonised mesmeric lines. The choir’s configuration would often change between items (womens’ voices only for Gustav Holst’s “Ave Maria”, for example), and soprano Frances Moore contributed several solo items accompanied by pianist Julie Coulson, which were interspersed throughout the concert.

After the opening preliminaries,  Grieg’s “Ave Maris Stella” demonstrated the choir’s finely-nuanced control of tone and texture, not over-moulded, so that those piquant harmonies of the composer’s sounded as fresh as ever – a far cry from the rich upholstery of Bruckner’s very Wagnerian writing for voices (like something out of “Lohengrin”) in his “Ave Maria” setting, featuring some testing top-of-the-stave lines for the sopranos, who emerged from the encounter with credit. All the more excitable, then, seemed Aarvo Pärt’s hymn to the Virgin “Bogoroditse Djevo”, very “Slavic” in its energy and love of contrast.

I equally enjoyed the work of another “holy minimalist”, John Tavener, whose conversion to Russian Orthodoxy inspired works such as the chant-like “Hymn to the Mother of God” (the narrator touched briefly on the importance of Mary in the Eastern Orthodox liturgy), here delivered with wonderfully suffused resonances, the choir relishing the clustered harmonies and glowing evocations of worshipful prayer. The sparer textures of Gustav Holst’s music (sung by womens’ voices) exposed a touch of stridency during the more “striving” lines of the opening, but the withdrawn ambiences at “Et benedictus fructus tui Jesu” readily captured the setting’s beauty.

Frances Moore’s turn was next, with Julie Coulson providing admirable support for her soprano partner in Gounod’s perennial favourite “Ave Maria” – a lovely performance by both musicians, the singer having plenty of upward heft and true tone on the high notes, though her breath-taking was a bit obtrusive in places. Still more changes were rung by the next item, Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria” setting, in this performance for men’s voices only, the singers arranged with a trio of voices set apart, and soloists within the choir, giving the textures a degree of spaciousness and making for lovely antiphonal effects. Each exchange between the voices had a slightly different character, varying dynamics and colours in a perfectly delicious-sounding way. The trio of voices (tenors Nick McDougal and Andrew Dunford, with baritone Isaac Stone) got a rich ground-sound, while the higher-voiced group had more plaintive, almost reedy tones which emphasised their placement and their different lines.

Music by two New Zealanders and two “Davids” followed, firstly David Childs’ “Salve Regina”, an attractive minor-key setting with a soprano soloist, Gilian Bruce, from the choir, some momentary ensemble imprecisions of little moment when set against the heartfeltness of the singing. The last few utterances  were notable for the terracings of the words “O clemens, o pia” and “dulcis virgo”, the descriptions nicely differentiated.The work made a good pairing with the “other” David’s piece that followed, the “Carol of the Mother and Child” by David Hamilton, the Caribbean rhythms fetching up some delicious syncopations from out of the setting’s infectious gait.

Concluding the concert’s first half was Henryk Gorecki’s sublime “Totus Tuus”, a hymn of devotion to the Virgin Mary, written to commemorate Pope John Paul’s third visit to his homeland of Poland in 1987. “Totus Tuus” translated from the Latin means “totally yours”, and was the Pope’s apostolic motto, the opening words of a prayer declaring utter devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity. Declamatory and arresting at the beginning, with cries of “Maria”, much of the work was rapt and devotional, using conventional but extremely rich harmonies which varied in colour and intensity as the piece progressed. The contrast was marked between the work’s forthright opening and utterly mesmeric conclusion, the word “Maria” at the end repeated more and more softly, like the conclusion of “Neptune” from Holst’s “The Planets, with the womens’ voices disappearing gradually into the ether. The effect was of having undertaken a significant journey through realms of timelessness, thanks to the strength of the voices’ response to Christine Argyle’s confident, patient direction throughout.

Not surprisingly, the concert’s second half had a rather more secular feel, with the focus directed firmly towards earthly mothers, beginning with a song written by David Hamilton “When My Mother Sings To Me”, featuring a unison opening verse, whose words were then given canonic, and then harmonic treatment in subsequent verses. A natural ally for this item was, of course, Dvorak’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me”, here sung by Frances Moore, tremulous, and with some breathless phrase-ends, but sweet-toned and with wonderfully secure high notes. Her two other solo items, a folk-song by Josef Haydn and a somewhat quirkily theatrical setting of the “Old Mother Hubbard” nursery rhyme by Victor Hely-Hutchinson, were brought off with aplomb, the Haydn song-birdish and radiant, and the Hely-Hutchinson setting mock-Handelian with a dash of dramatic rhetoric, singer and pianist relishing the fun of it all. A pity the quintet of voices which came together to perform 17th-century composer Thomas Vautor’s “Mother I will have a Husband” didn’t bring more temperament, more “spunk” to their otherwise nicely-sung performance – it all needed to be a bit more boldly characterised.

But the highlight of the second half of the concert was a piece composed by Carol Shortis, in response to a commission from one of the Nota Bene choir members, Judy McKay. This was for a work dedicated to her mother, Dulcie Reeve/Coutts, described as a “pianist, piano geacher, gardener, mother, grandmother, homemaker and friend to to many – generous of Spirit, loving of Heart”. The music was to a text by the Bengali poet and author Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a poem called “My Song”. Pianist Julie Coulson’s arabesque-like figurations made for an atmospheric, almost bardic beginning to the music, the voices exploring a wide range of expression, from whispered to full-throated tones, colourings subtly changing as the composer gently drew together the choir’s cluster-harmonies (with a particularly telling harmonic “shift” towards the end). The whole work was suffused with glowing feeling, by turns radiant with the soprano soloist soaring aloft, before gliding gently downwards, and a softer tranquility of remembrance and wonderment which lingered after the sounds had ceased to be.

NZSO demonstrates a century of New Zealand music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: In a New Light

Concert of New Zealand music by Arnold Trowell (The Waters of Peneios), Ross Harris (Violin Concerto; The Floating Bride, The Crimson Village), Claire Cowan (Legend of the Trojan Bird), John Psathas (Seikilos)

Conducted by Tecwyn Evans with Anthony Marwood (violin)

Wellington Town Hall

Friday 7 May, 7.30pm

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra made a striking contribution to New Zealand Music Month.  It attracted a pretty full house, perhaps many freebees, but at least they came.  And I spotted a couple of Auckland music critics too. Instead of the usual concert of New Zealand music, devoted to music of the past 20 years, at most, this exposed a near-century-old work by a very obscure composer who was a much more famous cellist, and one born in Wellington: enterprising!

A common thread was Greece, as three of the pieces had reference to Greek myth and music.

I was greatly intrigued by the unearthing of this very interesting piece by the Wellington-born composer Arnold Trowell (his real name was Tom – he adopted Arnold as a more ‘artistic’ name), who was the object of largely unrequited adoration by the young Kathleen Beauchamp (Katherine Mansfield), a year his junior. He was already a gifted cellist and inspired Katherine to take it up; Trowell’s father was the teacher and she displayed considerable talent too, to extent that music as well as writing became a serious ambition. Both Trowell and Beauchamp went to London around 1903 and the relationship continued for about six years, he sending her his compositions.

As a student I remember cello pieces, either composed or arranged by Trowell; I still have one.

The Waters of Peneios (the river that flows through the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly) was written when Trowell was about 30, by then a renowned cellist, and Katherine had only about five years to live.

It proved an attractive tone poem of quite singular accomplishment. If it suggested orchestral colours of Debussy, perhaps a facile (in the listener’s mind) connection with Debussy’s faune, as shimmering strings in the opening passages underlay a flute, and then oboe, that is fair; but just as conspicuous were touches of Delius and Strauss and of the climate of the more advanced music to the First World War.

In a time when originality is something of an obsession, audible influences of predecessors are sometimes deprecated, but in all previous eras it has been the way a composer learns his trade; and it is surely to be expected of a composer who had not written much orchestral music. In the central stormy episode there were strains of melody and orchestral colour that were Straussian, and the later river evocation might have been akin to Siegfried’s Rhine episode.

According to the pre-concert talk by the work’s discoverer, Martin Griffiths, it was first performed in 1917, and as many as 27 times since then, including one by New Zealand conductor Warwick Braithwaite, and last in 1976. He said there were many other extant orchestral pieces by Trowell. Though his New Zealand connection obviously became tenuous, their exploration and recording by the NZSO could be an interesting exercise.

It offered musical images of water, of a river in calm and turbulent modes, though hardly of the character that were displayed on the big screen behind the orchestra – mountain tops, mighty waterfalls, racing clouds: to my mind an unfortunate, distracting, even quite misleading element.

The music seemed to show a composer fully conscious of the need for careful shaping of ideas and of the overall structure. And so it held the attention, offered much delight, throughout its revelatory quarter hour.

The playing of New Zealand music or at least music by New Zealanders, needs to reach back to earlier generations. The orchestral music of Alfred Hill, 20 years older than Trowell and whose string quartets are now getting attention, is still ignored by our orchestras: there are a dozen symphonies. There are other composers of the years before Lilburn and in two decades after him who are neglected, giving the false impression that Lilburn came out of nowhere and that it has taken till the last quarter century for composers of comparable talent to appear.

Though the screen was used again to accompany both the music of Claire Cowan and John Psathas, with little more purpose, it was thankfully absent from the first performance of Ross Harris’s Violin Concerto. Here in fact was a highly impressive performance – a huge credit to orchestra and conductor – of a highly impressive work, commissioned by Christchurch arts patron Christopher Marshall.

Its opening called up more hints of a 20th century violin concerto such as Berg’s, Szymanowski’s or Ligeti’s than of neo-romantic examples by Barber or Korngold, Khachaturian or Shostakovich: its quiet opening in wide-spaced pitches, from harmonics to sonorous G string bowings, then a more lyrical comment on similar material from clarinet. These fragments slowly coalesced with the increasing involvement of the rest of the orchestra, heaping layer on layer till a full, almost opulent, string chorus took over.

Written in one movement, through a 20 minute span, its story passed through phases of fragmentation and reassembly, in predominantly fast tempi and highly virtuosic writing both for the violin, brilliantly realized by English violinist Anthony Marwood, and for the orchestra under the assured command of Tecwyn Evans. Contrasting episodes of agitation, even frenzy, and lyrical, pensive moods and later a magnificent, rich brass chorale, in which scraps of themes slowly came to be recognized, maintained the feeling of a narrative, and of a satisfying form; the violin often adorned, with dancing, Mefisto-like, the ideas as they evolved in the orchestra.

The common device of employing the opening ideas in modified form at the end did indeed serve the piece well, bring a sense of peace and resolution.

After the interval Jenny Wollerman sang Harris’s orchestral incarnation of the set of songs to poems by Vincent O’Sullivan, inspired by Chagall’s paintings. I heard her sing these in Nelson at last year’s Adam Chamber Music Festival, accompanied by Piers Lane at the piano. Naturally, the richness of an orchestra transformed them into songs of more immediate attractiveness, and it was easy to be seduced by the beauty of the scoring, transparent, very supportive both of the imagery in the poems and of the voice. Silly as such a comment might seem, there was a quality in the orchestration that brought reminders of another work inspired by paintings – Mussorgsky’s in Ravel’s garb: in the fourth song, The Rabbi, for example. The orchestration of Give me a Green Horse was particularly entertaining, while the evocation of As the Night in low woodwinds helped form a picture of deep Chagall blue.

Wollerman’s voice is in fine shape, and carried easily over the generally discrete orchestra; if sensuousness was not very required or available, her singing was expressive and her diction clear, though the words, sensibly, were in the programme.

The concert ended with two further programmatic or narrative works. Claire Cowan’s Legend of the Trojan Bird was accompanied by no mention of the significance of a Trojan bird, or a source in Homer: I can recall no mention of a bird in The Iliad; yet the music stands on its own feet. One was free, perhaps with the help of some poetic lines by the composer, to conjure one’s own pictures; what was not helpful was the reappearance of someone else’s images on the screen, either sadly literal or irrelevant.

The music was tonal, skillfully orchestrated, coloured by several excellent solos from orchestral principals, episodes that were variously aerial and ethereal, earth-bound and ominous, droll and sensuous.
Finally a twelve-year old piece by John Psathas, written for performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, based on a verse etched on an ancient Greek tombstone with rudimentary hints of its accompanying music. The message of the verse is ‘live for the day’; Seikilos is vintage Psathos, rich in orchestral effects, especially percussion, strong, complex rhythms, it radiates boisterous joie de vivre, and this was really the only time that the visuals, mainly a sparkling sphere that exploded like sunspots from the sun, and swelled and contracted to reflect comparable emotions in the music, its outbursts of delight and their subsidence.

I don’t think I had heard the work before and was intrigued to contemplate the endurance of the orchestral hallmarks in his music. Psathas is a striking example of a composer who found a voice fairly early and has seen no reason to abandon it significantly.  It serves very well to create images through tuned percussion and the more subtle metal and wood percussion instruments, as well as often beautiful string choruses. Its success as a piece of latter-day impressionism lay in the inconspicuous construction of its musical evolution, ending in fading undefined murmurings.

Visuals accompanying music are almost always a distraction and an irritation, especially moving images. I doubt that many composers would really have welcomed it, and wonder whether these composers were particularly happy with an idea that may have sprung from an effort to popularize the music – i.e. to dumb it down, to protect the little darlings in the audience from being bored by plain music.

Static images might have been acceptable, and a friend remarked that the one opportunity to use the screen sensibly was missed – to display the Chagall paintings as each was sung. I agree.

Otherwise, this was an enterprising concert of worthwhile music that demonstrated the reality of a century or more of serious composition by New Zealand composers; it deserved and got a large audience.