Tag: New Zealand music

Splendid, richly satisfying NZSO concert of four strongly contrasted works played with mastery and conviction

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carlos Kalmar with Steven Osborne (piano)

Michael Norris: Matauranga
Mozart: Piano Concerto No 12 in A, K 414
Osvaldo Golijov: Last Round
Nielsen: Symphony No 4, Op 29 (‘The Inextinguishable’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 13 July, 7:30 pm

Anniversary: Cook’s first voyage and Matauranga 
The first piece in Saturday’s concert was entitled Matauranga, which means ‘knowledge, wisdom, understanding, skill’, according to the programme note. It was in part to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage one of whose purposes was to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti in June 1769. His reaching New Zealand was timely to observe the transit of Mercury on the Coromandel Peninsula in November 1769, and the names Cook’s Beach and Mercury Bay celebrate it.

The intelligent programme note also places in perspective Cook’s voyage (voyages) as a product of The Enlightenment in Europe. The notes write: “The ideals of the Enlightenment sprang from a rejection of institutional religion, entrenched tradition and superstition in favour of rational thought, logic and the empirical, organised advancement of knowledge”.

Michael Norris’s approach to the subject was to combine taonga puoro with the orchestral strings and live electronics. Nevertheless, the score created an attractive pattern of subtle sounds, the Maori instruments having the most conspicuous role while the strings and the electronics seemed present in principle rather than in their actual impact. However, this piece offered an interesting range of sounds generated by taonga puoro, a wider range of these instruments than I think I’ve encountered before; scored with considerable sensitivity and clarity and played confidently by the versatile Alistair Fraser.

This is not the first time that I’ve rather wished that a little time had been taken in naming and sampling the sounds of each instrument, and for the programme book to have illustrated and named each one. I have the same feelings about the value of identifying with visual and sound examples the huge range of less familiar orchestral percussion instruments which, apart from timpani, are referred to merely as ‘percussion’.

The orchestra might have hoped that the inclusion of a quite approachable piece highlighting taonga pouro might have attracted a number of Maori to the concert; it didn’t. Furthermore, the concert as a whole attracted a much smaller audience that is usual for NZSO subscription concerts.

This was a surprise and a disappointment given the programming of a charming Mozart piano concerto by a particularly gifted pianist, and an arresting, strong-minded yet beautiful Nielsen symphony.

Steven Osborne in Mozart
Mozart’s piano concerto no 12 is one of the first group of three that he wrote for his own very successful subscription concerts after he moved to Vienna from Salzburg. Conductor Carlos Kalmar didn’t reduce the size of the string sections to the extent than has become common for music of the ‘Classical’ period. Instead, he concentrated on a warm, quite opulent sound that the modest-sized orchestra produced, while Steven Osborne’s piano offered quite a contrast with crisp, semi-detached playing that was nevertheless in perfect accord with the orchestra. His articulation was varied and subtle, and that modesty characterised the not especially bravura cadenza. The Andante, second movement, though at a walking pace, gave off a restful air. Here, as with the first movement, the orchestral part is very much simply a polite accompaniment, and though there’s quite an extended solo episode, it wasn’t the occasion for anything flashy.

The unostentatious character of the concerto ran through the Finale too; again, little work for the winds: just oboes and horns. Though Mozart also scored optionally for bassoons, none were audible (I couldn’t see).

This performance of this very charming concerto was, along with the other three very significant pieces, the reason for being dispirited about the size of the audience. It also prompts a comment about the failure of the NZSO to make better use of their soloists, especially ones as distinguished as Steven Osborne, in solo and other recitals in Wellington and other parts of the country. A few decades ago it was normal; now, with declining audiences for good music and their increasing unfamiliarity with what one could formerly consider standard, popular repertoire, it strikes me as even more important for concert promoters to exploit every means to get people through the doors. For many people, even one unfamiliar or New Zealand piece is a turn-off.

I would love a subscription series to be devoted to Mozart’s piano concertos, with particular attention to these earlier Viennese ones, before the much more played ones from No 20 in D minor. But does the poor audience tell us something about the general level of cultural awareness? I think it does.

Golijov and the culture of the tango
Osvaldo Golijov was born in Argentina to Romanian-Jewish parents and has quite suddenly put contemporary Latin American music on the map. Many will remember the impact made at the 2014 festival by a semi-staged performance of his opera Ainadamar (the place where Federico García Lorca was killed by Franco’s Falangist assassins in 1936).

Last Round was inspired by the sudden death in 1992 of Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla and refers also to notable Argentinian singer and composer Carlos Gardel, the most important main-stream tango musician.  We were fortunate in having this performance from the hands of a particularly vigorous and inspiring conductor whose background lends a special insight into the spirit of the music; and the orchestra responded with great enthusiasm.

Last Round is tango in character though obviously unorthodox. Symbolic conflict dominates the first movement, Movido, urgente, between the divided strings: violins, violas and cellos, half on each side with double basses in the centre, behind. The tango rhythm remains steady for long periods before accelerating and becoming agitated or violent, with characteristic sudden screeching glissandi – very bandoneon. Without an actual pause, the pulsing first movement rhythms subside and the tragic spirit of the second movement, Deaths of the Angel emerges, much slower and exhibiting less overt tango in rhythm and articulation. In the words of the programme note, the tango flavour returns as Golijov “yearningly quotes the refrain from Carlos Gomes’ ‘My beloved Buenos Aires’”.

This is no forbidding, intellectually pretentious avant-garde music: it seems to summarise aspects of contemporary music, through an Argentinian lens that injects a powerful emotional spirit in a perfectly coherent accent, perfectly accessible yet of our age.

Nielsen No 4
Nielsen is a symphonist who is in many ways the equal of Sibelius, and not just through being born in the same year and coming from the broad Scandinavian region; his six symphonies are so different in character both from any other symphonist and from each other that they are difficult to characterise. I would like to think that an enterprising Wellington orchestra might perform all six in the course of a season, but I’d have my work cut out, looking at the size of the audience here.

The fourth, the Inextinguishable, is probably his best known: particularly dramatic, coloured by the First World War, calling up words like ‘violence’, ‘intensity’, ‘headlong energy’, ‘the indomitability of life itself’. The massive brass call to attention at the start might have set the scene, but there are extended passages of beautiful, calm music, such as we are suddenly presented with from the lovely woodwinds of the NZSO in the shorter second movement and in the pensive, beautiful third movement. In all the quicksilver variety of emotion and musical character Carlos Kalmar led the orchestra with energy and rigour, yet with a sense of freedom, giving rein to all Nielsen’s detailed and instrumentally vivid orchestration.

If I had to choose, it would be the Nielsen that I found the most richly satisfying in the concert, and that’s from a field of four very successful, strongly contrasted works each of which was performed with mastery and conviction and should have pulled in all but deeply prejudiced, half-hearted concert goers.

Medlyn and Greager give rewarding and intelligent recital of early 20th century songs, plus four by Vincent O’Sullivan/Ross Harris

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Wednesday Lunchtime Concerts at St Andrew’s

Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano), Richard Greager (tenor), with David Barnard (piano)

Songs by Berg, Ross Harris, Poulenc, Strauss, Puccini and Rachmaninov

St Andrews on The Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 10 July 2019, 12;15 pm

A song recital by two internationally renowned singers based in Wellington is a significant musical event. The programme was like a snapshot of the music of the first half of the twentieth century across a wide range of countries, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, with a more recent item from New Zealand.

The concert began with Margaret Medlyn singing Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs (1907). These songs were written under the influence of Arnold Schoenberg, but also show echoes of Mahler, Wolf, Richard Strauss, and even Debussy. They were sung with understanding. Margaret Medlyn is a commanding singer with a powerful voice. Her beautiful deep register is penetrating and moving. The songs are set to texts by Carl Hauptman, Nikolaus Lenau, Theodore Storm, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johannes Schlaf, Otto Erich Hartleben, and Paul Hohenberg, a mirror of the Austrian literary world in which Berg was immersed. They reflected a great variety of emotions.

Richard Greager sang four short songs by Ross Harris, set to poems by Vincent O’Sullivan. Three of these were about father and son relationship, gentle domestic thoughts, one had a rollicking sea shanty feel. Vincent O’Sullivan and Ross Harris have a close association, and the songs were written for Richard Greager, all very Wellington, very Victoria University, but they were lovely and unpretentious.

This was followed by Poulenc’s Cinq poèmes de Paul Eluard. Poulenc moved in artistic and literary circles and had set the poems of many of his contemporaries to music. These songs are about down-and-outs, a subject that was meaningful in the Paris of the first quarter of the twentieth century. These songs are very much dialogues between voice and piano, and this was demonstrated by the sensitive piano playing of David Barnard responding to the singing of Richard Greager.

Margaret Medlyn then sang three songs by Richard Strauss. The first, ‘Befreit’, is a setting of a poem of Richard Dehmel, and one of Strauss’ most popular songs. The second, ‘Heimliche aufforderung’, the text by John Henry Mackay, was a wedding present to Strauss’s wife, the singer Pauline de Ahna. The third song, ‘Ich trage meine Minne’, ‘I bear my love /Silent with joy’ is one of the many songs that Strauss wrote for his wife. These songs appear to be simple, but they all have the hallmark of the special Richard Strauss sense of harmony and unexpected chords and twists in the melody.

Richard Greager sang three songs by Puccini. Puccini is hardly known for his songs, but he used these as sketches for arias in his operas. Richard Greager’s warm light tenor is well suited to these songs. In the second, ‘Sole e amore’, one can clearly hear ideas later used in La Boheme.

The final bracket of songs, again from Greager, consisted of three songs by Rachmaninov. These are imbued with a sense of nostalgia for the countryside. Though the setting is Russian the melodic line is often more Italian. It is the rich piano accompaniment that makes it characteristically Rachmaninov.

This was an ambitious programme and a rewarding concert. It was notable for the intelligent approach to the music, the clear phrasing and diction of the two singers. David Barnard’s piano playing, his sensitive support of the singers is worth a special mention. With teachers such as these at the New Zealand School of Music, it is not surprising that it turns out so many fine singers. Some of these singers will be performing Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi at the Hannah Playhouse next week.

 

 

Wellington Chamber Music’s fine, imaginative violin and piano recital from Beer and Watkins

Posted on by Steven Sedley

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

Ravel: Sonata No. 1 in A minor
Leonie Holmes: Dance of the Wintersmith
Gareth Farr’s Unforeseen Evolution
Franck: Violin Sonata

St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 7 July, 2019, 3 pm

Andrew Beer, Concert Master of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and Sarah Watkins, highly regarded chamber musician played an interesting recital in the Wellington Chamber music Sunday Concerts series. Two new New Zealand works were sandwiched in between a rarely heard sonata by Ravel and one of the most popular pieces of the violin repertoire, César Franck’s violin sonata.

Leonie Holmes is a prolific and versatile composer, teaching composition at the University of Auckland. Sarah Watkins and Andrew Beer commissioned her to write a piece for them. She happened to be reading Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith at the time and decided to take that as a subject of her composition. She found the book funny, but meaningful. She had not written program music before, but this challenge appealed to her. Her Dance of the Wintersmith opens with a long violin solo, soulful, meditative, that explores the singing quality of the instrument. The piano enters with a dialogue that seems to question the violin. In Pratchett’s story the young witch girl joins the dance of otherworldly men in the forest. In the music this is depicted with a quirky dance section that leads to the gentle melodious epilogue in which the violinist joins in humming and later whistling a tune, a huge surprise to listeners. Does one need to know the story that inspired the music or does the music stand on its own? Even if those who have not read the program notes and know nothing about Terry Pratchett would find the music haunting and beautiful. The work was one of the finalists of the SOUNZ Contemporary Awards for 2018.

The Dance of the Wintersmith was followed by Gareth Farr’s Unforeseen Evolution. This is a very different piece. Farr’s music is coloured by his studies as a percussionist and an immersion in the sounds, textures and rhythms of the Indonesian gamelan ensemble. For him the violin is not a melodic but a percussive instrument. He aimed to pit two wildly contrasting ideas against each other without transition, everything abrupt and unforeseen. The piece has rhythmic drum like elements contrasting the ethereal mysterious violin harmonics and delicate arpeggios on the piano in the first section, then violent rhythms around the entire range of the two instruments. It is a work in which rhythm and beat prevail over melody.

The concert had opened with the relatively seldom heard, Ravel’s Sonata No. 1 in A minor. It is an early student composition discovered long after the composer’s death. Written in 1897 it already has the hallmarks of impressionism. It has an aerie, mysterious quality, some of which is very difficult to bring off. This performance was a sound rendition of the work, but for this listener a touch of the inexpressible magic was missing.

The final work on the program was César Franck’s much loved Violin Sonata. It was played with passion, appropriate for this heartfelt piece. The performance was notable at times for its beautifully phrased singing quality. It had had some real magic moments.

The audience was rewarded at the end of the concert on the program with an encore, the second of Prokofiev’s Five Melodies for violin and piano.

Perhaps it was the cold weather, or the unknown New Zealand compositions that kept people away, but it is regrettable that this fine concert didn’t attract a larger audience. The Wellington Chamber Music Society is to be complemented on their imaginative programming for their concerts on Sunday afternoons.

NZSO marks Blake’s retirement with his haunting ‘Angel at Ahipara’, plus splendid Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Winter Daydreams

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Fawzi Haimor, conductor and Carolin Widman, violin

Christopher Blake: Angel at Ahipara
Stravinsky: Violin Concerto in D Major
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Op.13, ‘Winter Daydreams’

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday, 20 June, 2019

Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and a piece by a significant contemporary composer, Christopher Blake, might seem like popular programming, but as was evident by the large number of empty seats, the programme lacked wide appeal. Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony is seldom performed, Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto is very different from other more popular twentieth century violin concertos and Christopher Blake’s music is unknown territory. Yet it is important both for the orchestra and the audience to be confronted from time to time with the little known or unknown.

The theme common to all of these three works is the idea of exploration. Blake and Tchaikovsky attempted to give voice to a national identity, New Zealand and Russian, while Stravinsky looked for the bare bones of a violin concerto outside the lush romanticism of his contemporaries.

The inspiration for Blake’s Angel at Ahipara came from a black and white photo of a sculpture on a grave at a remote settlement of Ahipara, as well as from Colin McCahon’s colourful Northland Panels. Blake attempted to represent in music the idea of the Angel that Morrison expressed in photography and McCahon in painting. It is written for a string orchestra and describes seven aspects of the Angel in continuous development of largely minimalist themes, ranging from, peaceful, gentle, meditative, to the turbulent, reflecting the Angel giving hope, the soaring of his spirit, his vigil, the joy he brings and the storm that he calms. It is haunting, beautiful music that stays with you.

Stravinsky had misgivings about writing a violin concerto, but encouraged by Samuel Dushkin, for whom the concerto was commissioned and by Paul Hindemith, he produced a stripped down neo-Baroque work with chamber music texture. The concerto avoids virtuoso display and focuses on the dialogue between the solo violin and the orchestra. The four movements reflect Stravinsky’s interest in the Baroque. The sparkling Toccata has changes of meter, pulsating repeated notes and joyous violin acrobatics. The middle movements, the two Arias are lyrical, while the final movement, Capriccio is full of dazzling demonic energy. Carolin Widman played these with great authority and energy. It was a fine, insightful performance.

Tchaikovsky was just 25 when he embarked on his First Symphony. His teachers didn’t like it. It was different, it didn’t fit the German symphonic tradition. Tchaikovsky wrote a Russian work within the symphonic framework, using Russian folk song themes and strong dance rhythms. Unlike his teachers, Tchaikovsky liked the work and kept revising it. It is a long symphony, over 40 minutes long, but to the credit of the performance and Fawzi Haimor’s direction, it never flagged. An early work, it has its weaknesses. At times the flow of the music seems to stand still while another theme, another ideas is introduced, but these hiatuses lead to glorious, rich passages; and the second movement is one of the Tchaikovsky’s most enthralling pieces. The symphony required superb playing by brass and wind, and a luscious string tone from the strings.

At the end of the concert one came away with the feeling that your musical experiences had been greatly enriched, a testament to the playing by the orchestra under the direction of a fine conductor and with the contribution of a dazzling soloist.

 

 

Stroma enhances Wellington with music inspired by where sea meets sky

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Stroma Conducted by Hamish McKeich

Ingram Marshall: Fog Tropes (1981)
Mark Carter, Mathew Stein, (tpt), Samuel Jacobs, Julian Leslie (hn), David Bremner, Shannon Pittaway (trb)
Deidre Gribbin: What the Whaleship Saw
Anna van der Zee and Megan Molina (vn), Nicholas Hancox (va), Robert Ibell (vc)
Eve de Castro-Robinson: Pearls of the Sea (2005)
Bridget Douglas (fl, bass fl), Carolyn Mills (harp)
Tristan Murail: Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (1978)
Bridget Douglas (fl), Patrick Barry (cl), Anna van der Zee (vn) Robert Ibell (vc), Kirsten Robertson (piano)
Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Reflections (2016)
Anna van der Zee (vn), Nicholas Hancox (va), Robert Ibell (vc)
John Rimmer: Where Sea Meets Sky 2 (1975)
Bridget Douglas (fl), Patrick Barry (cl), Megan Molina (vn) Robert Ibell (vc), Kirsten Robertson (piano) Thomas Guldborg (percussion)

Hannah Playhouse

Thursday 30 May, 7:30 pm

Stroma is a mixed chamber music ensemble drawn from musicians of the NZSO. It performs contemporary experimental music. This programme included music by New Zealand, American, Irish, French, and Icelandic composers, but in particular, it honoured the 80th birthday of John Rimmer, one of New Zealand’s most iconic composers.

The programme started with fog horns, recorded in San Francisco Bay. A brass sextet of two horns, two trombones and two trumpets engaged in a dialogue with the fog horn against a background of the swirling sea and the squeals of sea birds. Ingram Marshall is an American composer influenced by minimalism trends of the 1960s. He says about Fog Tropes that “It is possible to listen to your pieces as a kind of tonality ‘behind the fog’, with gradual changes in layers of sound and ‘shadows & lights’. It seems that sometimes there’s a kind of impressionist colour in which we could find smaller sound particles.” It is these shadows and light that the listener can seek in this work.

From fog horns the programme moved to disaster at sea, the sinking of the whaling ship, Essex, in 1820. Deidre Gribbin is from Belfast. What the Whaleship Saw is a work for string quartet. It depicts the calm sea, then the storm that led to the tragedy. It is an impressionistic work. The strings generate sounds of sheer beauty without melodic progression, the peaceful calm sea is shattered by the disaster of the wrecked boat, then calm music again as the boat sinks but echoes of sea shanties appear in the background to illustrate the ill-fated sailors.

New Zealand composer Eve de Castro-Robinsons’s Pearls of the Sea follows up the sea theme. It writing for an unusual combination of instruments, a bass flute and a harp is a challenging exercise. The work is inspired by a poem by Len Lye. It exploits the aural potential of both instruments, the flute explores the range of sounds that can be produced, like the Japanese shakuhachi, trombone, foghorn and even low tom-tom. The harpist stretches the limits of the usual use of the harp by banging on the frame of the harp, and sweeping the strings to create a swooshing sound.

From the sea, the programme moved on to colours. Tristan Murail, a French composer, is associated with the ‘spectral’ techniques, the use of properties of sound as the basis of harmony. His Treize couleurs du soleil couchant tries to capture colours in sound. Like Monet in his painting, it uses patterns of sound as building blocks of music and repeats the same musical idea thirteen times as Monet did in paint the same scene over and over again. It is scored for a combination of instruments widely used by modern composers from Schoenberg to Messiaen, violin, clarinet, cello and piano.

Reflections by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir is a string trio in which instruments form overlapping ‘waves’. The music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by lyrical material.

The final work is by John Rimmer, leading New Zealand composer and Associate Professor of Music at Auckland University. It is a tribute for his 80th birthday. His Where the Sea Meets the Sky 2, is an impression of a plane journey across the Tasman Sea. In this, he tries to capture the qualities of light seen through an aeroplane window. It was prompted by a poem of Ian Wedde in which the sea does not meet the sky. Originally Rimmer wrote this work for an electronic synthesizer, which he reworked for a live ensemble, a combination of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, which aims to capture the electronic sounds of the original version.

Hamish McKeich, musical director of Stroma, and the thirteen musicians from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra challenged the audience to think of the nature of music. The music was far from the usual concert repertoire, strange for some, lacking in usual points of reference, but it enhanced the musical experience of those who took the trouble to listen. The Wellington musical scene is richer for having an ensemble such as Stroma in its midst.

 

NZSM Orchestra speaks its concert presentation’s name with skill and conviction at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand School of Music presents:
DARKNESS AND LIGHT
Music by Mozart, Britten, Rod Biss and Tchaikovsky

MOZART – Symphony No.35 on D Major K.385 “Haffner”
BRITTEN – Sinfonia da Requiem
ROD BISS – Four New Zealand Bird Songs
TCHAIKOVSKY – Fantasy Overture “Romeo and Juliet”

Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

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

Tuesday, 21st May, 2019

Though having just tut-tutted elsewhere over the NZSO’s somewhat loose “title” attached to its most recent concert, I’m much less inclined towards adverse comment regarding the NZSM Orchestra’s publicity legend  for ITS latest presentation, “Darkness and Light”.  It’s a reasonably apposite description of the moods of what was being played at the evening’s concert, conveying something of the music’s range and impact as was performed, here brilliantly and most satisfyingly, by the NZSM forces.

Wellington continues to lack a satisfactory mid-sized venue with enough room for orchestral performance, though ensembles such as the NZSM Orchestra still manage to cope with cramped spaces and  acoustics at places such as St.Andrew’s, and, as here, make the event “work” in the face of these drawbacks. In fact, the NZSM Orchestra under Ken Young’s direction seems to have achieved a level of expertise and consistency over their last few concerts I’ve attended which generates a tangible aura of expectation and excitement around each occasion – in itself, a significant and substantial affirmation of the worth of the School and what it achieves.

The programme cast its net widely, over time and physical space – first performed in 1783, Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony (named after a childhood friend of the composer’s from Salzburg in honour of the former’s elevation to the nobility) has become one of the best-known of his symphonic works, while New Zealand composer Rod Biss wrote his “Four New Zealand Bird Songs” in 2014, over two hundred years later, and on the other side of the globe. The remaining two works bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the music’s various connections and associations including Europe , the United States and Japan – a cosmopolitean affair!

Beginning the concert with the Mozart “Haffner” Symphony, Young and his student musicians flung themselves at the music with all the exuberance and energy those notes demanded, their figurations by turns skyrocketing and cascading, the first movement a brilliantly joyous celebration, the moments of circumspection as delicate and inwardly “charged” (a beautiful minor-key exchange between strings and winds) as the energetic runs were exciting and “bubbly”. Grace and poise were on show throughout the Andante, winds and horns steadfastedly “floating” their lines over the strings’ ethereal exchanges, while the Minuet was here given more energy and spunk than one usually hears in this movement, even if one missed some of the music’s charm, especially in the Trio. Of a piece was the Finale’s performance, the opening hushed and expectant, the energies bursting out like a firecracker, looking forwards to Beethoven’s as yet unwritten Second Symphony in its irrepressible momentum. The players’ propelling of the rushing passages was terrific, both soft and loud, and their split-second alternations great fun, like a musical cat-and-mouse chase! Altogether, this was as brilliantly-focused and compellingly-played a performance of this work as I’ve ever heard live, invigorating and “edge-of-the-seat” right to the end!

Nothing further from all of this could have been imagined than the opening of Benjamin Britten’s “Sinfonia da Requiem” which followed, percussion and lower brass mercilessly assailing our sensibilities, and plunging us into the darkest realms of tragedy and privation. Britten’s work, dedicated to his parents, expressed the despair he felt at their separate passing, more recently at his mother’s unexpected death when the composer was 24. The titles of each movement reflect something of Britten’s coming to terms with his loss through intense suffering towards gradual acceptance.

Oddly enough the work’s actual genesis was via the Japanese Government, who were commissioning music to mark 2,000 years of the Japanese Empire. Britten’s offering of the Sinfonia was predictably rejected by the Japanese, who were offended by the unequivocal Christian nomenclature (Latin titles for each of the movements) accompanying the work – the composer had rather naively expressed to a friend the idea that the music had “plenty of peace propaganda in it”. The Japanese refusal of the work “rescued” Britten from the subsequent embarrassment of his music’s association with a country who had since entered into the war against the Allies.

This performance went on as it began – from the opening’s fearful depths the music began its torturous treadmill-like journey through the music’s “vale of tears” in search of some kind of illumination, whatever its shape or form. The players took up the challenge, braving all privations in giving conductor Young the searing intensities and fearful abyss-like depths that the music’s progress required.  The second movement’s Dies Irae (marked Allegro con fuoco) then awakened, with tongued winds and bouncing strings leading to great tattoos of percussion, and ghoulish triplet rhythms from the brasses mocking the laments we’d heard in the first movement, a “quick march” fiercely pushing the music towards a frenzied build-up and reiteration of a hammering motif and an eventual disintegration of a serial-like motiv, whose repetitions gradually ran out of steam.

Amid this entropic scenario, a new world began to take shape, the wind players giving voice to the sounds of fresh air blowing over the devastations, echoed nobly by the horns. Strings joined in with the echoings, Young inspiring his musicians to build towards a magnificent peroration, a kind of paean of renewed hope in faith, love, and the glories, warts and all, of human existence.

After an interval we were treated to a different, closer-to-home response to human behaviour, one dealing with its impact upon the natural world, our own immediate wilderness inhabited largely by birds, and increasingly besmirched and despoiled by human greed. It’s becoming an all-too-common scenario, and one whose recent manifestation at a beach north of Auckland inspired local composer Rod Biss to collaborate with poet Denys Trussell during 2014 and produce a set of songs, the second of which represented a protest at what seems to me to be an obscene “rich development” of Te Arai Beach, the natural home of one of New Zealand’s mot endangered birds, Tara-iti, the Fairy Tern.

Tara-iti was the first of the set to be written – on its completion, both composer and poet thought its impact would be enhanced by being made part of a set, and so three other songs followed. The work was first performed, as here, by mezzo-soprano Margaret Medlyn as part of a SOUNZ recording project involving the NZSO strings and harpist, and associate conductor Hamish McKeich. This evening’s performance was (as far as I can make out) its public premiere, with both the composer and poet present (both summonsed to the platform at the end – and even though it was rather clumsily done, with only the composer actually mentioned by name, we in the audience DID get the idea that the “other” man was Denys Trussell!)

The opening Dawning featured diaphanously drifting chords preparing the way for a beautifully buoyant vocal line, the words superbly delineated by Medlyn, making every utterance count throughout the music’s soaring, swooping, drifting progress. The beginning of the second song, Tara-iti, had a similar drifiting kind of gait, the accompaniment infused with a sense of fragrant, vulnerable beauty, though the vocal line had an angularity and a sadness whose quiet lament-like delivery hinted at unresolved tensions.

Pizzicati notes accompanied the pukeko’s awkward peregrinations throughout The Purple Swamphen as Pukeko, the words and sounds paying tribute to the bird’s clownish behaviour and maverick aspect. However, by far the most impactful of the songs was the last one, Karearea, (New Zealand Falcon), the vocal line unaccompanied at the outset, the singer’s voice magnificently alone in the skies before the strings opened the vistas below to thrilling effect. Medlyn didn’t spare her considerable resources throughout, pushing ever higher to upper reaches in the company of some dramatically searing string work, before her final, serenely majestic utterance allowed the strings and harp a last defiant counter-flourish. All of this made for an epic tribute to a bird regarding itself, in the face of things, as master of its own natural world – alas, a world now under threat from a different kind of arrogance from another quarter.

After Ken Young had heartwarmingly made a point of paying a public tribute to the work of one of the stalwarts of the School of Music who had just announced his retirement, senior technician Roy Carr, present at the concert to acknowledge the tribute and our response,  there remained one more item on the programme. It was left to Young and his players to present the much-loved “Fantasy Overture” by Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet – and by crikey, did they put the music through its paces! I’ve sat through a number of live performances of this work and heard so many recordings as well, to the point where I usually find myself preferring to listen to something else – with the piece’s popularity, unfortunately, has often come deadening routine, the gestures sounding empty and clichéd and the melodies chipped and worn through over-use. Yes, I know there’s always someone listening who’s come to the music fresh (as I did once, spellbound by its beauties), but it’s the “that old warhorse” aspect that I often find comes through, even when played by the most prestigious of orchestras.

Here, somehow, it was if conductor and players had “found” some hitherto neglected piece and were resurrecting it for a new era of listeners! – I was gripped right from the beginning (though smiling at a woodwind mishap in the very first chord!), compelled by the urgency with which the players shaped their phrases, the whole having a dramatic “line” which vividly characterised the well-meaning actions of the young Romeo’s mentor Friar Lawrence, and imbued the music’s course with through-line tension that never abated. The battle music had tremendous attack and verve, the agitations really catching fire, while the contrasting love-music wove a gossamer spell over the proceedings, including a seraphic touch from the harp and some beautiful cor anglais tones. The renewal of internecine agitations between the houses focused the sharpness of attack even more, giving the militant version of Friar Lawrence’s theme terrific punch and the warrings even more desperation – and while the lovers’ theme had its great moments before being swept away with everything else in the maelstrom, Young encouraged his players to keep the music’s driven, merciless aspect, to the point of sheer exhaustion. Even the funeral music gave us no peace, but a haunted, throbbing ache throughout. And despite the beauties of both the wind and string-playing throughout the epilogue, the final timpani onslaught proclaimed the death of love and beauty in no uncertain terms.

After this performance, life could never be quite the same again – so, very great credit to the players and their conductor for a splendid concert!

Wilma and Friends win all hearts at Wellington Chamber Music’s first 2019 concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents
WILMA AND FRIENDS – The Opening Concert of 2019

Wilma Smith (violin) / Anna Pokorny (‘cello) / Ian Munro (piano)

Ludwig van BEETHOVEN – 10 Variations on “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” Op121a
Ian MUNRO – Piano Trio “Tales from Old Russia” (2008)
Gareth FARR – Mondo Rondo, for Piano Trio (1997)
Jean FRANCAIX – Piano Trio in D Major (1986)

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

Sunday 10th March 2019

Beginning the year with the musical equivalent of a hiss and a roar is always a good sign for what might follow – and Wellington Chamber Music organisers can feel well-pleased with their opening offering for 2019, regarding both repertoire and the performances. In fact I sat there throughout this concert imagining, for some reason, how much “better” it all possibly might be were one in London, Berlin or New York listening to a similar kind of programme at some prestigious venue or other, and then finding myself again and again beguiled by some felicitous individual turn of phrase or arresting surge of augmented tones from these players which totally disarmed any thoughts of wanting to be anywhere else! What better feeling to take away from a concert experience?

“Wilma and Friends”, a performing concept devised by violinist Wilma Smith, features the now Melbourne-based former New Zealand String Quartet leader and concertmaster of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in a yearly series of chamber music concerts with different colleagues, performed throughout Australia and New Zealand The idea’s in its eighth year, now, and shows no sign of letting up, if the present concert’s ready excitement, focus, variety and colour are any true measures of continued life and success  – for me, the programming had a tantalising “something for everybody” flavour, covering a wide range of eras and a stimulating variety of places of origin.

Wilma’s partners in this latest venture represented what seemed like a well-nigh irresistible pair, with their combination of youth and experience – ‘cellist Anna Pokorny from Western Australia, a graduate of the Australian National Academy of Music and the International Menuhin Music Academy in Switzerland; and Australian pianist Ian Munro, a composer, writer and music educator, with numerous international awards as a performer to his credit, most notably a second prize at the 1987 Leeds International Piano Competition.

Whatever conventional wisdom suggests regarding outcomes of performances by musicians who join together for “limited tenure” periods, we listeners seemed on this occasion to reap all the benefits of the arrangement’s inherent spontaneity, newly-wrought discovery and sense of adventure in the music-making, with no apparent disadvantages or limitations. I’m not sure how many concerts the trio gave before this Wellington appearance, but they appeared to have already and handsomely “played themselves in” regarding a unanimity of purpose, of feeling and on-the-spot impulse to a most delightful degree.

First up was the exotically-named “Kakadu” Variations for Piano Trio by Ludwig van Beethoven, a work I had never before encountered in concert, and scarcely knew via recordings – I was, I admit, predisposed in the work’s favour through the title, intrigued by the quotation “Ich bin der Schneider, Kakadu”, and attracted by the prospect of another Diabelli-like transformation of a simple theme by the composer. Of course it didn’t turn out exactly like the latter, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the music’s sombre opening, Beethoven obviously taking a lot of trouble with his mood-setting and the musicians registering the elaborations of the mood with great sensitivity.

Then the cheeky march rhythm presenting  composer Wenzel Müller’s led the way to the other variations, all of which, as played here, by turns beguiled and tweaked the ear most pleasantly. Among others, I particularly enjoyed the “dialogue” variation between violin and ‘cello with its sweet playing, and the succeeding “running” variation, leading to the minor-key gravitas of the ninth episode, the piano phrases answered beautifully by the harmonising strings; and I also responded to the playfulness of the succeeding variation, with its working of a canon-like tune into the skipping rhythms and working up quite a head of steam! – most entertaining stuff!

Ian Munro’s credentials as a composer were cemented in 2003 by his winning First Prize for his Piano Concerto “Dreams” in the Queen Elisabeth International Composers’ Competition in Brussels that year. Here, we were treated to a performance of his 2008 Piano Trio “Tales from Old Russia”, a work that had been premiered in New Zealand as a result of a commission from Christchurch concert organiser Christopher Marshall, and reflected Munro’s interest in folk- and fairy-tale as part of a wider desire to write music for children. Each movement of the work is inspired by a particular tale, the first that of the Cinderella-like Vassilisa, a story complete with cruel stepmother and spiteful stepsisters. The second, titled “The Snow Maiden” is more quintessentially “Russian”, though the third, “Death and the Soldier” also has counterparts in other cultures.

Beautiful, eerie, crystalline sounds began the work, with the “Beautiful Vassilisa” in the story seemingly brought straightaway to the fore, and then set against the starkly contrasting sounds of the witch Baba Yaga. The writing exploited the strings’ ability to evoke dark, sinister ambiences contrasting those with purer, freer sounds. In other places the sounds startled with their intensely physical bite and pounding ostinato-like rhythms, reminiscent in places of Shostakovich’s writing. Both piano and strings forced the pace towards a climax and a becalming, returning us to the eeriness of a diametrically-opposed sound-world of breathtaking beauty, the atmospheres stark and awe-struck.

A second movement, which I assumed was an evocation of the Snow Maiden, began with dialogues between violin and ‘cello, the violin’s harmonics readily evoking ice-clear scintillation and cool beauty, with the piano conjuring up the play of light upon the Maiden’s person – perhaps the ‘cello’s darker, more sobering sound suggested the Maiden’s eventual fate as the fire melted her into the form of a cloud, the transformation accompanied by receding piano chords.

Munro’s timbral inventiveness as a composer made the third movement “Death and the Soldier” even more of an adventure, the music accompanied in places by various skeletal “knockings” wrought by fingers and knuckles tapping and knocking the wood on the instruments, the story’s central conflict between the soldier and the ghostly spirits building up to a wonderfully macabre free-for-all, everybody playing full out! The march morphed into a swirling dance before the footsteps portentously return, throwing the dancers out of step and enforcing an abrupt, spectacularly sudden conclusion!

High-jinks of a vastly different kind were in evidence straight after the interval, with a welcome performance of the Piano Trio version (which I’d never before heard) of Gareth Farr’s String Quartet “Mondo Rondo”. Here, a restlessly playful spirit was at large, quixotically throughout the first movement, a recurring motif doing its job in driving us almost to distraction, the sequences all being part of the music’s persona as a garrulous but nevertheless highly entertaining guest. A second movement employed pizzicato and finger-tapping techniques to emulate the sound of the m’bira (African thumb piano), generating an intriguingly minimalist-like discourse broken by the music suddenly “crying out” and “jazzing up” in a no-holds-barred way, before subsiding into a cantabile violin solo over the pizzicato-fingertapping movement beginnings.

The third movement kick-started with high-energy gesturings, over which exotic-sounding lines were floated, these being soon “compressed”, shortened, what you will – their tensile energies thereby heightened and “sprung”. Of a sudden the violin introduced a sinuously “sliding” theme, sounding for all the world as thought the player made it up on the spot! The performance treated the themes with exhilarating “pliancy” amid the driving  rhythmic energies, bringing things up to an exhilarating full-throttled burst before the music’s quixotic and enigmatic withdrawal. All-in-all, full marks to the Piano Trio version!

I’ve loved Jean Francaix’s music ever since hearing my first recording, the Melos Ensemble playing two of the composer’s Divertissiments, one for winds, the other for Bassoon and String Quartet, on a famous HMV LP of the late 1960s featuring a triumvirate (Ravel, Poulenc and Francaix) of French composers’ music. The composer’s been criticised in some quarters for what some people consider a certain vapidity in his writing, but I love its unfailingly droll humour, and its refusal to take itself too seriously in most instances. The Piano Trio was a late work, written in 1986 when the composer was 74 years old, but it possesses the youthful energy of a creative mind in its prime, right from the very opening – a restless, exploratory 5/4 rhythm  keeping a light touch amid all the energies! The playing was superb in its amalgam of strength, delicacy and wit.

A charming, insouciant waltz danced its way throughout the ensemble, the music even-handedly sharing its charms with each of the instruments – a beautiful Trio allowed the strings to soar above angular piano figurations, generating a wonderful “singing in the rain” aspect in the music. As for the Andante, its delicately romantic, bitter-sweet modulations seemed directly derived from nostalgically-charged memories, both full-blown and diaphanously delicate! – such a gorgeously-woven web of fine feeling from these players!

The finale seemed to me straightaway to proclaim a sense of life and living – pizzicato exchanges were joined by the piano’s driving energies, the strings going from pizz. to arco almost, it seemed, at will. Francaix seemed to be able to characterise the minutae of living with sounds of variety and colour simply by opening his heart to his surroundings, finding what he needed within the arc of a few physical gestures and driven by a lively imagination. A few seconds of magical string harmonics and a peremptory gesture of finality – and the sounds were deftly released to forevermore resonate in the silences. We loved every note of it, and said so via our applause, thrilled to be able to express appreciation for such stellar performances

 

 

Creative, thrilling and heart-warming conclusion to Orchestra Wellington’s 2018 season

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “New World”

MOZART (arr. Busoni) – Overture “Don Giovanni”
MICHAEL NORRIS – Violin Concerto “Sama” (World Premiere)
DVORAK – Symphony No. 9 in E Minor Op. 95 (B.178) “From the New World”

Amalia Hall (violin – Michael Norris)
Andrew Atkins (conductor – Mozart)
Marc Taddei (conductor – Michael Norris, Dvorak)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 1st December 2018

Well, it was quite a night for Orchestra Wellington! – in front of an enthusiastic and appreciative audience at the Michael Fowler Centre on Saturday evening the musicians put everything they had into making the final night of the orchestra’s 2018 concert season one to remember. We were presented with a line-up of pieces which, if perhaps not all sure-fire crowd-pleasers, perfectly expressed the desire of the orchestra’s organisers to provide a rich and varied concert experience! There was a fascinating arrangement of one of Mozart most famous operatic overtures, along with the first-ever performance of a New Zealand work, a violin concerto by Wellington composer Michael Norris, both counterweighted after the interval by what is certainly one of the most popular symphonies of all time, Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony in E Minor, best known by its subtitle “From the New World”.

Before the actual music-making began, Marc Taddei, the orchestra’s Music Director, warmly thanked the audience for its support throughout the year, promising that the about-to-be-launched 2019 programme would continue to deliver the excitement and enjoyment of past seasons – in fact, even more so this time round by, in Taddei’s words, “pulling out all of the stops!” The 2019 season sported the title “Epic” by way of indicating something of the range and scope of the presentations, the conductor remarking that in each case the work or works featured in that particular concert introduced something “important” and “pivotal” to music, significant to the art-form’s development.

As an example (I thought this a particularly mouth-watering prospect!) the opening concert in April of next year was to feature both Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” AND Its rarely-performed sequel, “Lelio, or Return to Life”. Even on its own this choice of repertoire amply indicates the innovative spirit that informs the orchestra’s work in general and pays tribute to its enterprising music director and his supporting musicians and artistic management. A further innovation came with the display of a special recording of the orchestra playing a couple of Beethoven Symphonies (these are “live” performances from previous concerts….) captured on both CD and “180 gram vinyl”, the latter especially striking regarding colour and packaging, giving it extra distinction for a collector, though for some people the former at a mere $16.00 (as opposed to $40.00) might be perfectly viable a souvenir of the orchestra.

So, the 2019 season having been “launched” and associated things been given honourable mention, the concert began, Taddei at this point handing over the “conducting reins” to his Assistant Conductor, Andrew Atkins, who was scheduled to conduct the first item. With gestures whose flowing aspect often reminded one of a bird in flight, but which secured as finely-honed and dramatically-sprung a performance of the music as one could wish for, Atkins got a properly dark-browed aspect from the players at the work’s beginning, followed by an engagingly buoyant rendering of the music’s “giocoso” manner – in fact, Mozart himself interestingly styled the work as both a “dramma giocoso”, a dramatic comedy, and an “opera buffa” (comic opera).

Opera overtures are often linked by their composers to the ensuing stage action, Mozart’s music in the theatre in this case flowing seamlessly into the story’s beginning. However, to be performed like that in concert with no opera to follow would result in a kind of unresolved cadence at the piece’s end – so either the composer or a subsequent editor would “recompose” the concluding sequence to make a satisfying conclusive ending to the music. This time round, however, the orchestra played a version I’d never encountered before, one arranged by the brilliant Italian pianist and composer Feruccio Busoni, and which seemed to me to successfully incorporate more of the opera’s whole “flavour” for concert-hall performance. Busoni, at the Overture’s end returns us to the opening, darkly monumental “Stone Guest” music, reminding us of the Don’s eventual fate, and follows this with the music accompanying the opera’s “epilogue” (which Mozart added to the opera AFTER the premiere) – here, the Don’s adversaries, plus his much-maligned manservant, Leoporello, entone a moralistic conclusion – “This is the evil-doer’s end – sinners finally meet their just reward, and always will”, the sentiments (as befits a “dramma giocoso”) delivered with something of an ambivalent twinkle in the eye, a feeling conveyed here by the energetic, high-spirited playing.

By way of providing something of a contrast, next up was Michael Norris’s new Violin Concerto (an Orchestra Wellington commission), one which the composer had subtitled “Sama”, the Arabic word for “listening” and the name given to a Sufi ceremony involving different ritualistic elements. This work was expressly written for Amalia Hall, the orchestra’s Concertmaster, who, though still in her twenties has already developed an international reputation as a soloist, going on from competition successes in New Zealand to win various international awards in various parts of the world. Of coursed she’s already appeared as a soloist with Orchestra Wellington this year in a stunningly-delivered performance of Bartok’s formidable Second Violin Concerto (see the review at https://middle-c.org/2018/06/orchestra-wellington-a-golden-beginning-to-its-2018-season/), so we were thoroughly spoilt by having this second opportunity to enjoy her magnificent solo playing of music that was, to say the very least, extremely challenging. Incidentally, the Orchestra Concertmaster for the evening was none other than Justine Cormack, ex-APO Concertmaster and NZ Trio violinist, obviously happy to “help out” her conductor-husband and his orchestra in their time of need!

In three movements this concerto evoked a world of exotic ritual inspired by the “Sama”. We were straightaway transported into a mystical realm via “tolling” undulations from the harp and the orchestral winds, joined by ambient strings and then by the solo violin, entering quietly at first , but constantly responding to different aspects of the “Ard” expressed by the orchestral textures and impulses – it seemed to me a kind of “rite of passage” for the soloist and her instrument, both here in accord with the orchestral happenings, and there ostensibly “assailed” by overwhelming forces, which the solo violin did its best to combat, either by accordance or stoic defiance. Perhaps the orchestral irruptions were more manifestations of life-force than they were adversarial, though I still thought there were some baleful moments! However, these were balanced by writing for both violin and orchestra which expressed a gamut of illustration and incident characterising what Norris called “life and growth” throughout the movement, with variety, colour and energy abounding.

The second part, Fada, came cataclysmically into being via a hugely reverberant opening chord, the solo violin exploring the ensuing resonances in the manner of a spirit inhabiting a strange, almost surreal world in a trance-like state of being. There was as much “incident” as stillness throughout, the impulses mostly contained within the parameters of the dream-like writing, though the brasses stirred uneasily at one moment and roused one another in an outburst of disquiet before leaving the violin to join with the harp and the gently-thrumming strings, connecting as much by the sound of breath as by actual tones with the music’s cosmic heartbeat.

Perhaps the solo part’s “display element” was manifest more consistently in the final movement “Semazen”, the composer commenting on the “constant state” of “vortical force” expressed by the music, a reference to the well-known “whirling dervish” aspect of Sufi worship. Beginning with trance-like ritualistic invocations both ruminative and forceful, both soloist and orchestra gave us a rollicking parade of interactive impulses involving quicksilver figurations, galloping drums, galvanising irruptions from the winds and brass, and energetic underpinnings from the strings. The violin seemed “central” to the ritual, obviously a “Master of Ceremonies” but very much an integral thread in the work’s “one among equals” tapestry. The composer used his manifest musical forces with both elan and discretion, not least of all at the work’s very end, with the violin, having decided that its work is done, ascending and disappearing into the silence of the stratospheric spaces – what a work, and what a performance!

The final act of the orchestra’s 2018 season – the performance of Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” – was preceded by a touching tribute made by Taddei to his Principal Second Violin Leader, Pascale Parenteau, who was stepping down from the position after a number of years, though still intending to continue in the orchestra as a rank-and file player. And then it was all hands to the pumps for the Symphony, though the quiet opening of the work was here lightly and fluidly played by the strings, like something almost airborne. A stentorian horn call awoke an answer from the winds, before strings and timpani flexed their muscles and strongly announced their intentions, moving the music on more urgently to and through the allegro molto.

Tempi were kept swift and straight, and the rhythms incisive, Taddei relaxing the trajectories just a little for the more lyrical wind-led themes of the second subject group, allowing the flute enough space in which to phrase most beautifully the famous “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” sound-alike theme, repeated just as sweetly by the strings. What a pleasure to be able to hear all of this again, courtesy of the first-movement repeat (not always played), with the players generating just as much rhythmic excitement and lyrical feeling the second time through. Throughout these more lyrical episodes I loved the prominence given to the wind counterpoints, obviously encouraged by the conductor to “play out”, giving the music such a winning and distinctive “al fresco” feeling.

Dvořák went to a lot of trouble to get the opening of the Largo slow movement right, indicated by the variants of the “chord progressions” in the composer’s sketchbooks – he also thought seriously about using a clarinet for the famous main theme before finally turning to the cor anglais (and in doing so, of course, ensured the instrument’s immortality!). As with the symphony’s opening, the brass kept things moving throughout their richly-wrought introductory chordings, allowing the cor anglais player Louise Cox to follow in kind, the playing lyrical without overt sentimentality, her tones beautifully-rounded while still suitably plaintive-sounding. Her playing was nobly supported throughout, the winds just as feelingly framing the soloist’s melody, the strings echoing the strains with rare beauty and the brass and timpani adding touches of grandeur to it all.

From the rapture of the slow movement’s conclusion we were plunged into a different mindset by the Scherzo, a tighter and more “symphonic” affair than any in the series of symphonies by the composer we’d heard thus far this year, though Dvorak had in mind a passage in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that the composer called “the feast where the Indians dance” and thus builds the excitement of the dance’s opening rhythmic gestures into something wild and forceful, contrasting this with charming interludes, including a Trio whose spirit seems more akin to his Czech homeland. I thought the playing outstanding in all aspects, feeling that the wind players, particularly in these interludes seem to “inhabit” the composer’s evocations, via the out-of-doors character of the playing. And Taddei and his players delivered the “surprise” coda, with its reminiscences of the symphony’s first movement, in a properly exciting and dramatic way, the brief (and uncharacteristic) moment of untogetherness by the horns mattering little in the drama of the exchanges.

This same energy carried over and into the finale’s opening, delivered absolutely without rhetoric, directly and powerfully, the brass resplendent, the strings intense and full-bodied, and the trajectories with their cross-rhythms between the sections most exciting! I loved the flexibililty of Mark Cookson’s clarinet solo, and the cheekiness of the winds later in the movement, answered in almost Mahlerian style by the brasses, who built up their opening statement magnificently. And what a resonant and heartwarming exchange between strings winds and horn which followed afterwards!

At this point I thought the whole ensemble imbued with a kind of “playing for keeps” spirit, which of course befitted the last few moments of the season – and out of it came the last charge towards the work’s stirring peroration, begun by the winds, galvanised by the horns, and flung skyward by the strings and the brass, unable to contain their excitement during the final measures until Mark Taddei and the players farewelled us with the last wind chord, held so beautifully and resonantly. It was a moment which will, I’m sure, sustain the orchestra’s many followers over the time before the band again picks up its instruments for the aforementioned new and tumultuous 2019 season!

 

 

Beautiful, visceral, hypnotic, disconcerting – Stroma’s “essential experimental” at Wellington’s Pyramid Club

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
ESSENTIAL EXPERIMENTAL
An intimate evening of song, water, glass, harmonics, beat frequencies and vases

Music by John Cage, Peter Ablinger, Antonia Barnett-McIntosh,
Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Chiyoko Szlavnics

Stroma: Michael Norris (sponges), Barbara Paterson (soprano, voice), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh (voice) Rebecca Struthers, Kristina Zelinska (violins)
Reuben Jelleyman (accordion), Emma Barron (viola), Matthew Cave (double-bass)

Venue: The Pyramid Club, Taranaki St., Wellington

Thursday 29th November 2018

The venue really brought it all alive, in a way that I thought a more conventional concert-chamber-like place wouldn’t have done. In the most positive way we in the audience seemed to be “put at ease” by the “late-night club” surroundings at Taranaki Street’s Pyramid Club, and, rather than attending a concert, were instead made to feel we were “eavesdropping” on the ongoing creative processes constituting and shaping each item. It was a feast of visceral interaction between performers, media and audience; and even if the results at times gave rise to as much bemusement as illumination (speaking for myself, here!) I felt these moments pulled our apertures further apart and teased our sensibilities with even more of the workings and their trajectories.

This was the first of two performances scheduled that evening, and the venue was packed in the most encouraging and atmospheric way possible. Stroma’s presentations, under the leadership of Michael Norris have constantly sought to stimulate, engage and challenge audiences, and have steadily earned the group a loyal following based on its remarkable set of capacities for renewal in the form of fresh explorations and bold, and compelling performance practices. This evening’s programme, entitled “Essential Experimental”, was no exception, the items generating sounds from sources and practices in some cases far removed from conventional means, even when a number of familiar instruments were involved in the process.

Michael Norris called the outcomes of these presentations “unusual but beautiful sound-worlds”, and the first of these, featuring a 2002 work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger called Weiss Weisslich 31e, certainly made good that description by way of a most intriguing and diverting set of procedures. Norris himself was cast in the role of “performer”, with the title given in the programme of “kitchen-sponge hanger-upperer”, his function being to fix a number of wetted sponges to places along a line strung over a number of amplified glass tubes laid on the ground, allowing the drips of water from each sponge to land on corresponding individual tubes. Because the “operator” can only hang or remove one sponge at a time, the acceleration and deceleration of “drip incidence” from each sponge takes place at a different time from each of its seven fellows, making for complicated “canonic” results involving different tones from the amplified tubes. Norris further varied the interplay of the drips and their sounds by rehanging the freshly-wetted sponges in a different order a second time round! Magical!

At times the very slow drips found themselves “paired” with rapid ones – and with the different amplifications directed through speakers placed in different parts of the room, both the different speeds, pitches and physical placements of the speakers made for some atmospheric antiphonal effects. Interestingly I found that in sequences where many different drips were sounding, I often noticed specific ones ONLY when they stopped or the sponge was removed, indicating that it was as much my subconscious as my conscious hearing that was “registering” the drips. The composer himself wrote that his material here “was not sound but audibility” and that he could “set audibility then inaudibility”, further explaining that “inaudibility can arise through…too little occurring, but also through too much occurring…” The drips created pulse, melody, counterpoint and texture at various times, ranging from altogether what one commentator somewhere called “a turbulent polyrhythmic forest”.

From these abstractions we were taken to John Cage’s 1958 composition Aria, originally dedicated to one of the most renowned performers of contemporary vocal music, soprano Cathy Berberian, and here performed with remarkable assurance by Barbara Paterson, her voice dealing most adroitly with the work’s many changes of mode, style, timbre and character – at certain points I was in fact reminded of composer/pianist Donald Swann’s virtuoso rendering of his similarly exploratory song “Korkoraki” (part of the well-known Flanders and Swann “At The Drop of a Hat” presentation). Here were far more divergencies from the conventional “art-song”, including words from different languages and rapid fluctuations between different styles of delivery – the emotional effect of Paterson’s cornucopian rendering was not unlike witnessing a performer attempting to piece together some kind of coherent message while in the process of either suffering from a kind of schizophrenia, reliving a series of traumatic experiences, or giving us the full gamut of what any singer’s physical and vocal equipment is put through in performance, most of which the performer has ordinarily been taught to suppress! – an incredible display!

Continuing to ring the changes, the concert next featured a work by Alvin Lucier, featuring the ‘cello-playing of Ken Ichinose, performing in tandem alongside a number of empty, differently-sized vases, all amplified – somewhat literally, the work was called Music for ‘Cello with One of More Amplified Vases.  The cellist was required to begin with his lowest note and slowly play an upward glissando, right up to halfway along his top string. At certain points along this journey, the resonances created by the notes reverberated within the empty jars and created an additional “presence” surrounding the tones already being sounded by the player. To my surprise I thought I distinctly heard the nostalgic “drone” of the engines of a distant DC3 taking off from Milson Airport in Palmerston North, a regular occurrence for me when a small child. Sometimes the vases seemed to be “duetting” or “quartetting” with the soloist, while at other times the effect was that of a companion ghost or guardian angel. Perhaps the work ought to be retitled “Unlocked…” or “Liberated” Voices………..

I must confess to the readership that I found the next piece, by Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, the current composer-in-residence at the Lilburn House in Thorndon, a REAL challenge! This was a work given the title yesterday blocks, and one to which the term “composed” seemed to me, for some reason, an inadequate description of the process! In Barnett-McIntosh’s own words, her work is described as presenting “the specificity of sound gestures and their variation, translation and adaptation, often employing chance-based and procedural operations.” As with John Cage’s Aria the only instrument in evidence was the voice, here the composer’s own voice in tandem with that of Barbara Paterson’s. The two “artists” produced narratives that seemed at several degrees’ removal from one another, though towards the end of the different discourses there seemed to be glimmerings of TS Eliot-Waste-Land-like attempts at communication, of the “Speak to me – why do you never speak?” kind of impulsiveness. Up to then, the composer’s disjointed narratives had run teasingly and tantalisingly alongside the other speaker’s half-conversation with what seemed like unheard inner voices. Was it delineating a fragmentary relationship between thinking and vocalising, an out-of-phase attempt to bring together recall and the present, or a conversation between parts of the same personality? – somebody playing with/being played by their alter ego? I found the crossover aspects involving both spoken theatre and music fascinating, as the voices seemed to me to increasingly coalesce, as if they were starting to “decode” one another – in effect very daring! – but for me very confusing!

More “conventional” (if such a word is allowed ANY currency pertaining to this concert!) was the next piece, Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics’ Triptych for AS, written in 2006 for two violins and an accordion (“AS” is the composer’s mother, incidentally). Described as a “visual artist” as well as a composer Szlavnics is credited by the programme note with an “idiosyncratic” method of working, something about converting lines on a drawing to glissandi that exactly replicate the drawing (to say the first thought that came into my head, which was “Oohh, what about the “Mona Lisa” in sound?”, is to trivialise the concept, which I won’t!) What I also thought (hardly rocket-science!) was that there would be three “somethings” in all of what we were about to experience, as per the title.

The sounds were to be produced both acoustically (Rebecca Struthers and Kristina Zelinska the violinists and Reuben Jelleyman the accordion-player) and electronically (a bank of five sine tones). The opening chords straightaway had an “electric” quality, the upward glissandi generating incredible intensity, sounds with long, burgeoning lines, reminiscent of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”. They seemed cyclic in effect with the strings re-entering the fusion and working their glissandi gradually upwards again. Both the second and the third pieces seemed to use higher pitches with a more intense result and a clearly augmented string-sound, the “quality” agglomerated by the electronic resonances. I liked the growing tensions, and the uncertainties of the points where the lines for the individual instruments “crossed” and the sounds “reared up”, Then, at the third piece’s conclusion, the accordion was suddenly left to carry the thread, a lone plaintive and isolated voice.

So we came to the final presentation in this hugely enjoyable panoply of creative innovation, a work by American James Tenney that’s part of a multi-movement piece called “Glissade”, in fact the first movement of the work, itself called Shimmer. Its three instrumentalists (Emma Barron, Ken Ichinose and Matthew Cave playing viola, ‘cello, and double-bass respectively) shared the sound-stage with ”delayed” computer-recorded reminiscences of what the strings played, the ensuing “womb of resonances” the agglomerated and on-going result of this five-second delay.

The viola began with a drawn-out repeated note, before moving into harmonics in a repeated arpeggiated pattern, before the ‘cello did the same, as did the double-bass – with all three instruments contributing plus their overlaid recorded echoings, I found the effect uncannily similar to parts of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” Prelude, hypnotic and compelling, drawing one’s listening into the web and waft of it all. The discernible flecks of colour and tone added to the ongoing magic, as did the ever-increasing prominence of the glissandi, the sounds eerily ascending, before becoming like impulses of sunlight dancing on cloud-tops! As the tones gradually surrendered their intensities we became aware of being returned to a “place of origin”, eventually reaching a point where the players ceased, and allowed their own resonances to continue for a brief further moment in time, a treasure as much in the hearing as the letting go……what better a way to end such an absorbing collection of sound-adventures?

 

 

Circa Theatre’s “Under Milk Wood” a vital and rumbustious celebration of “LLareggub”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
UNDER MILK WOOD
A play for voices by Dylan Thomas

Featuring: Kathleen Burns, Jeff Kingsford-Brown, Simon Leary,
Carmel McGlone, Gavin Rutherford
and the voices of Jeffrey Thomas and John Bach

Directed by Ross Jolly
Music composed by Gareth Farr
Audio-Visual design by Joanna Sanders
Costume design – Sheila Horton
Lighting Design – Marcus McShane
Set design – Andrew Foster

Circa One, Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday, 13th October, 2018

People who grew up with the sounds of the voices of either Dylan Thomas himself, or of Welsh actor Richard Burton, as the “First Voice” on any of the two recordings of Thomas’s verse-play “Under Milk Wood” that were available in New Zealand from the 1950s, were given the work pretty much as its author would have expected it to be performed – as a play for voices, to be read and “acted” with voices alone, the parts distributed in live stage performances among five readers (though the Burton recording used instead over twenty individual voices with only a few duplicated actor-roles, every one a distinctively “Welsh” voice).

A later, 1988 recording, featuring this time Anthony Hopkins as the principal narrator, also used a near- entirely Welsh cast, mostly one-voice-to-a-part, the producers taking the opportunity to employ several “star” entertainers  in certain roles to add prestige to the venture – though this had the unfortunate effect of bringing into play commercialised singing-styles and accompaniments completely at odds with the play’s rural village setting and its homespun characters, tempting one into labelling the production (complete with its soupy symphony orchestra-played sequences) as “Over-Milked Wood”.

I hadn’t previously seen (or heard) any “live” performance of the play, read or staged, before encountering this production, and so it took me a while to get into its “swing”, though my initial reaction was delight at both the imaginatively-conceived video backdrop settings in tandem with the use of Gareth Farr’s sensitively-contrived music, light-years from the all-purpose sugary sounds that for me helped to disfigure the Hopkins recording! But I was dismayed by the use of recorded voices for the two principal narrators,  neither of whose voice was captured with any great “personality” –  whether this was the fault of the recording process (which seemed to lack any real immediacy – ought not at least the “First Voice” have a quality of dream-like music sounding inside one’s head?) or the somewhat unvaried tones of the readers, I’m not sure.

Whatever the case, things “came alive” with actor Jeff Kingsford-Brown’s evocation of the blind sea-captain, Captain Cat, the production wisely leaving the recorded voices behind for significant periods and giving much of the accompanying narrations to the actors themselves, sometimes speaking their own introductions, sometimes working in tandem with others. Kingsford-Brown’s calling up from the dead of his dream-ghosts gave us a wonderful “Samuel Beckett” moment, the figures rising from the depths of the subconscious (i.e. behind a screen), an effect which conveyed the other-worldly quality of the writing most hauntingly.

To go meticulously through the whole play, sequence by sequence, would be to suffocate some of its wonderment and spontaneity – even now when listening I find certain sequences “come upon me” as if by surprise, either in wraith-like fashion or with rude, cut-to-the-chase vigour. On the Circa stage the five actors maintained a tireless fluidity of movement and characterisation, in a sense “reinterpreting” the playwright’s original conception as something heard which then stimulated the imagination. Here, much more than sounding the words was done for the listener/observer, the actors literally embodying their roles, characterising at least as much with gesture, movement and costume.

I feel impelled to get this off my chest early, so as to concentrate on what the production and its actors DID do. Presenting the play with actors in costume moving about a stage gave people like myself a vastly different experience to that by which we first encountered the work. I thought it a true “swings-and-roundabouts” scenario, with the “stage movement” approach externalising the characterisations, giving them a vivid, readily accessible quality, the drawback being for me that the playwright’s words lost a lot of their power and beauty.

With speakers using the words to convey every inflection, emphasis, variation and colour of Thomas’s richly-endowed language, one was literally swamped with sensation of a kind that engaged the listener’s imagination, and worked in tandem with it to recreate time, and incident. Here, by contrast, were actors, by dint of being able to convey so much with their physical presence, far less meticulous and more cavalier with the words’ potential for evocation. The “Welsh” flavour of the voices, too, was a hit-and-miss affair, being at times something of an amalgam of British rural accents,  for me somewhat blurring the dimension of the scenario’s at once lyrical and earthy exoticism.

That said, under director Ross Jolly’s fluid guidance, the “dramatis personae” of the town of Llareggub wholeheartedly launched themselves into our imagined village-world with gusto and elan. Following Captain Cat’s evocations we found Kathleen Burns and Gavid Rutherford as Myfanwy Price and her lover, Mog Edwards dreaming of one another. Rutherford’s focused blandishments were a delight, such as “I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster”, and Burns played to her lover’s obsession with money with “a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money, to be comfy”. The couple’s final meeting at the play’s other end was also heart-rendingly brought off with a beautifully-staged misalliance of bodies as Mog turned to hug his money instead of his disappointed but always-hopeful Mfanwy.

Rutherford also gave us a superb Mr Waldo, the voice savouring the words spoken to his disapproving late wife – “Hush, love, hush – I’m widower Waldo, now”, and the subject of  gossip which I thought less effective delivered by a couple, than, in Thomas’s original, a pair of gossips – the reproving “Using language” was but one example of somewhat bland characterisation, which should have reminded us all of our old-fashioned maiden aunts, but didn’t quite, here. But later, the naughtiest, most suggestive song of the evening had to be Waldo’s reminiscing “Come and sweep my chimbley”, sung by Rutherford with engaging “nudge-wink glee” in the Sailor’s Arms with an actively participating audience!

Kathleen Burns also winningly played the susceptible Polly Garter, loving anybody back who will give her the babies she adores, but reminding us constantly of her one true love, “little Willie Wee who is six feet deep”. While singing Polly’s music, Burns’ voice did drift perilously close to an Andrew Lloyd Webber-like singing delivery at times, a manner at odds, I thought, with a rural Welsh village ambience – but she remained on the side of the Llareggyb angels when not forcing her tones and allowing us to properly “eavesdrop” on her singing.

Her versatility produced a winsome Milly Smalls beautifully at odds with herself when looking in the mirror – “Oh, there’s a face! – Where’d you get that hair from? – Got it from an old tom cat!”, a querulous and volatile  Mrs. Cherry Owen, an ingenuous Mrs Dai Bread One, especially so in the lovely “crystal ball” scene with her “menage a trois” partner, Mrs Dai Bread Two (McGlone), and a “martyr(ed) to music” Mrs Organ Morgan, dealing with her “head in the clouds” organ -playing husband (Simon Leary) who turns a deaf ear to her gossip, while thinking of Bach and Palestrina!

Leary’s most riotous undertaking was that of the insouciant Willy-Nilly Postman, who opened everybody’s mail (with the help beforehand of the scheming, steaming Mrs Willy-Nilly), telling Mr Mog Edwards that Miss Mfanwy Price loves him with all her heart, and Mr Waldo that he’s getting another paternity summons, and afterwards spreading the gossip accordingly. By contrast, the same actor’s shifty, shameless Nogood Boyo appeared and disappeared as mysteriously as the Cheshire Cat, even taking us out rowing in the bay with him at one point, and then treating us to a sublimely delivered, profoundly ultimate existentialist statement of being.

As Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, asleep with two dead husbands at her side, Carmel McGlone gave the character a sweetness which masked her character’s determination that occasionally bubbled to the surface – her “Tell me your tasks, in order” was steeled ever so subtly by reminders such as “And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes!” From such a benign dictatorship with her two deceased subjects Gavin Rutherford and Jeff Kingsford-Brown, both in thrall to her and her directions, McGlone moved easily to the controlled viciousness of Mrs Pugh, whose husband, Mr Pugh, played by Kingsford-Brown enacted a Doctor Crippen-like double game of surface imperturbability and secret murderous passion – it wasn’t his fault that he found himself telling us he was taking the breakfast UP to his wife while walking DOWN the onstage stairs! – the onus was on we in the audience at that point, to reimagine the world!

Kingsford-Brown’s most moving “Captain Cat” moment, of course was his realisation that the memory of his “one great love”, Rosie Probert, was receding into the dark, Rosie (Carmel McGlone) herself telling the old man “what he already knows” – a superb piece of tragic writing from Thomas. While I still prefer the plainer, starker spoken version of the exchange between man and ghost, the “semi-sung” treatment of “What seas did you see” given here was beautifully “choreographed” by both Kingsford-Brown and McGlone, causing “water to come in me eye”, at the end of it all.

There were as many such vignettes I haven’t commented on, merely wanting to convey with the above descriptions something of the presentation’s flavour. Johanna Sanders’ Audio-visual designs and Gareth Farr’s music I’ve already described on as evocative and appropriate, while Sheila Horton’s costumes struck me as entirely apposite to the characters’ situations. Andrew Foster’s set gave the character’s movements plenty of helpful levels to work at, as well as wry concealments as required, while the different atmospheres were beautifully evoked by Marcus McShane’s lighting.

So – a beautiful, and in places funny, quirky and moving, realisation by Ross Jolly with the help of his team, a venture well worthy of attention.
(Circa One, until November 10th)