Tag: orchestral

Wellington City Orchestra spinning musical tales of adventure, love and vengeance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Antar” Symphony (1875)
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN – Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor Op.20 (1896-97)
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK – The Golden Spinning-Wheel Op.109 (1896)

William Berry (piano)
Andrew Atkins (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrews-on-The -Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 19th September, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

None of these three works are likely to be the ones that the average concertgoer would straightaway think of if asked to name pieces of music associated with each of these three composers – and yet they’re all entirely worthy of performance in their own right, and have things of interest to tell us about their creators. Of these, the work of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is probably the least widely known, with perhaps the grandiose symphonic poem for orchestra  “Poem of Ecstasy” having achieved a measure of fame (some of it in the form of notoriety at the time of its creation) with its “mystical” associations, representing “escape” from the physical world and union with a “vast cosmos”! In more recent years the composer’s keyboard works, represented most comprehensively by his nine Piano Sonatas, are increasingly being played, along with his single (and eminently approachable) Piano Concerto.

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) is of course the composer of the much- and rightly-loved  orchestral work “Scheherazade”, though he has other “classics” next to his name such as “The Fight of the Bumble Bee”  (and who WOULDN’T take time out to enjoy a spanking performance of “Capriccio Espagnol”? – yet another piece to add to an indispensable list of “Spanish” music NOT written by Spaniards!)  Closer to the composer’s home is a work I would definitely be including, the magnificent “Russian Easter Festival Overture”, which STILL sends shivers down the back of my spine in places, even after listening to it for more than fifty years! And then we come to the music by Rimsky scheduled for today, which bears the title  “Antar” – whether a symphony or, like “Scheherazade”, a “Symphonic Suite”, it’s difficult to decide; and the composer was of little help when it came to actually designating the work, himself fluctuating between both “symphony” and “ symphonic suite” (more when we get to the performance!)

The third of these enterprising concert choices for today was a work by Antonin Dvořák, one of a number of “symphonic poems” the composer completed upon returning to Bohemia from New York, where he had served for three years as Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Obviously wanting to “reconnect” with his native land, he straightaway wrote four tone-poems, each one drawn from poet Karel Jaromir Erben’s grisly stories based on Czech folk-lore, with today’s featured work “The Golden Spinning Wheel” among the nastiest content-wise chosen by the composer. This was after his having earned through the better-known symphonies , concertos and chamber music the approbation of no less a critic than Eduard Hanslick, a fierce opponent of the Lisztian school of “programme music”, who had described such works as products of “the swindle of false erudition”. Consequently, Hanslick was not impressed with Dvořák’s sudden forays into tone-poems, writing of “the dangers of this latest tendency” and also that “Dvořák now indulges in ugly, unnatural; and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is.”

With such an enterprising and interestingly-stocked programme, the concert could scarcely fail to please – and so it proved, with conductor Andrew Aitkins’s infectiously boundless enthusiasm and direct, clearly-delineated gesturings drawing from the players sonorous, detailed and characterful responses, all of which excitingly and satisfyingly “warmed up” as the afternoon’s music unfolded – a case in point was the somewhat tentative beginning of the concert with “Antar” whose tones steadily and patiently transformed themselves into a splendid orchestral panoply, finding full expression in the exuberant Dvorak work with which we began the concert’s second-half!

Rimsky’s 1875 revision of his original version of “Antar”, a work based on a Middle Eastern legend, was presented in today’s concert – conductor Andrew Atkins contributed a commendably cogent programme note summarising the work’s genesis and subsequent “development”.) The composer eventually produced FOUR published versions of “Antar”,  the ”original” 1868 version and its 1875 revision –  then a SECOND revised version in 1897, and (confusingly!) a reworking of the 1875 version! Armed with sufficient scores and recordings (plus a designation-change by the composer) the enthusiast would have an absorbing time coming to grips with the versions and their history!

“Antar” was based on a Middle-Eastern legend concerning an eponymous warrior-cum-philosopher who has renounced humanity and taken refuge in the desert, where he saves a gazelle from a giant bird – the gazelle then reveals its true identity as the beautiful Queen Kul-Nazar, and grants her saviour the “three joys” he most longs for, which, true to form, are vengeance, power and love, and which the music depicts over the remaining movements.  I noted the effectively dark, spacious timbres of the opening from bassoons and horn, the violas’ tender playing of the “Antar” theme’s first appearance, the winds reinforcing of the upper extensions of this theme, with the flute performing evocatively exotic” figuration” , the strings’ steady articulation of the lines in the music’s first agitated tutti, and their lovely Borodin-esque “lilt” in the following dance-tune, with the horns splendid delivery of the “Antar “ theme as an occasional  counterweight – and to cap off the movement, the grand tutti statement of the “Antar” motif at the movement’s end!

The second movement coalesced rather than began, with deep, murmuring beginnings and surges of tone bringing forth a march-like figure, its subject set upon warfare and revenge, as manifested by the occasional “general welter of sound” (to quote Sir Thomas Beecham, who championed the music of the “Russian Five”, of which group Rimsky-Korsakov was a member). The players kept their martial momentums going splendidly, throwing in plenty of suitably combatative exchanges between strings and winds, capped off by rousing percussive crashes and deliciously portentous touches from the heavy brass, the music ending not in triumph, however, but with a melancholy strings-and wind reiteration of the theme. It brought out all the more the “Russian festiveness” of the third movement’s swaggering opening (reminiscent of works like the composer’s own “Tsar Saltan” and Borodin’s “Prince Igor”), with gorgeously lyrical contrasting themes from the strings, and from an evocative wind-decorated solo horn! Such was the excitement that continued and built up over the last couple of pages, that we all broke into spontaneous applause at the movement’s end!

Gorgeous wind-playing from various soloists marked the finale’s opening (from where I was sitting I couldn’t see who was playing what instrument, the players’ music-stands obscuring all but the tops of bobbing heads! – though it all sounded most evocative), in places rivalling “Scheherazade” for atmosphere and allure, with the strings doing so well with their long, sinuous lines. As the story concluded with the hero’s death in his beloved Queen’s arms the finale had no hint of any sort of stirring “grandstand finish” but rather, a kind of gradual expiation, which conductor and players despatched as meaningfully as the composer’s surprisingly prosaic treatment allowed them to do – C’est la vie, c’est la mort!

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was an almost exact contemporary of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) studying piano under the same teacher in Moscow, Nikolai Zverev and continuing together at the Moscow Conservatory, each graduating with honours for piano-playing. However, they soon developed along different lines as composers, with, in general terms,  Scriabin the more adventurous, Rachmaninov the more conservative. Scriabin’s music, though largely misunderstood in his day, is enjoying increased interest  and appreciation,  while Rachmaninov’s, more conservative in outlook and enjoying a popularity that has largely endured, is still considered old-fashioned and regressive in some circles.

How interesting that both composed youthful Piano Concertos which shared the same F-sharp Minor key,  Scriabin at the age of twenty-four in 1896 (his first work involving an orchestra) and Rachmaninov much earlier, at the age of eighteen in 1891-2 (the composer’s 1917 revised version does an excellent job of removing the youthful longeurs and tightening up t the piece’s overall trajectories!). Scriabin’s work was written before he had embarked upon quasi-mystical, harmonically-radical explorations of chromaticism and tonality in his later work. Though each was critical of the other’s work Rachmaninov made a point of going out of his way to  promote his colleague’s music after the latter’s untimely death, giving the repeated heresay account of Rachmaninov casting aspersions on his friend’s state of mind difficult to take entirely seriously.

More to the point is that Scriabin’s only Piano Concerto was here given a performance by 22 year-old William Berry of the utmost finesse, control and sparkling brilliance, one accompanied hand-in-glove by conductor and orchestra. The work’s dreamy opening, brought into being by the horn and strings, was answered confidently and then increasingly passionately by the soloist, interacting with the orchestra  both in full-blooded and playfully filigree  exchanges, with a poetically responsive horn obbligato in attendance! – I loved the spacious rolling exchanges between orchestra and piano – and how Rachmaninov-like were the glorious melodic string lines prompting full-blooded responses from the pianist (and vice-versa!), These were activated into fairy-like dancings from the soloist. to the strains of pipers playing, and alternated with surges of Romantic feeling whose continued insistence  eventually drew pianist, players and conductor into a grand summation of arrival – a thrilling place to have been taken, with William Berry graciously acknowledging the audience’s appreciation at the music’s end!

The work’s slow movement drew from me a response similar to that I’ve often experienced with the Chopin Second Piano Concerto’s slow movement – beautifully limpid opening phrases from the strings, repeating the heart-stopping high point of the melody, and then repeating the sequence for the clarinet, and with the piano decorating the moment with a gossamer-like finish – such exquisite beauty! And what fun it suddenly seemed for one’s spirit to jump up up and dance with the piano’s spirited cavortings, then to pause and contemplate the stillnesses as the melody drifted all about its self-created loveliness, the piano joined by the clarinet before the strings returned to further savour the moment.

A swinging ¾ rhythm from the piano began the finale, with one of its measures repeatedly dancing to the top of the keyboard and down again, an exuberant flourish which kept the movement’s momentum alive and unfettered for a flurry of milliseconds!  – interspersded among this was a heart-bursting, burgeoning piano melody whose ascent flung open the vistas and urged the instrumental lines to take the plunge and augment the journey. The piano eventually persuaded the orchestra to abandon all caution and throw open everything widely and fill the spaces with this glorious melody! Having done this and found it good, piano and orchestra reminisced together – both the “open vista” melody and the exuberantly-dancing piano flourish were revisited and treated as old friends, the composer paying homage, consciously or otherwise, to his friend Rachmaninov’s gift of piling up climax upon climax and allowing the emotion full rein right to the forthright conclusion

Our pianist had something special in store for us at the concerto’s end, returning to the platform to give us some music by another composer whose music also deserves to be heard more often – this was a piece by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), a work whose title I couldn’t hear from where I was sitting as announced by William Berry, though I was able to fully appreciate the music’s quietly rhapsodic opening minor chords, whose wandering, exploratory melody flowered into lusciously-coloured tones, the music exploring both depths and heights on its path towards a monumental climax of sound and feeling – it all unwound slowly and pensively, letting the tensions release their grip and fall away, eventually returning to the piece’s opening, with the journey redeemed at the end by the solace of a major key…..a special conclusion to a memorable overall performance!

After the interval came the Dvořák tone-poem “The Golden Spinning-Wheel” – what a great piece of music it all was, if not perhaps as tone-paintingly graphic in places as  fellow-countryman Smetana’s depictions of events in the latter’s orchestral  work “Ma Vlast” (eg. the pictorial descriptions of Smetana’s “Vltava” and of the brutal events of “Sarka”). Still, Dvořák’s delineations of his story gave enormous pleasure to this listener in what was obviously a characteristically grisly tale of betrayal, murder and revenge – and the extent to which the music could be enjoyed “as music” and away from the story’s specifics was, I thought, remarkable!

The story told of a peasant girl Dornička, whom a king encounters on his travels, falls in love with her, and proposes to make her his Queen – the girl is then murdered by her stepmother who installs her own look-alike daughter as the king’s projected bride, but a magician retrieves the murdered girl’s body in exchange for a golden spinning-wheel whose magic then betrays the stepmother’s crime and restores Dornička to life, so that, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism, “the good end happily and the bad unhappily”. Andrew Atkins and the orchestra grasped the mettle firmly and plunged into the music’s glorious opening, strings and percussion establishing the trajectories, with horns and winds sounding the approach of the king, before the strings enable the royal party to sweep onto the scene, and the king to catch sight of and fall in love with the beautiful peasant girl at her spinning wheel, beautifully portrayed by detailings such as the interaction of solo violin and cor anglais, with colourful and atmospheric touches from the harp and percussion. The rest of the story unfolded with readily-evoked energies and panoplies of detail and colour, in many places satisfying as “absolute music” besides serving the narrative – but we particularly enjoyed those characteristic Dvořákian touches, such as the glorious string theme in thirds which heralded the king’s return from the wars to greet his supposed bride, and whose spinning-wheel then unexpectedly “spins out” the grisly tale’s details, resulting in the King’s rightful bride’s reinstatement, and the punishment of her would-be-murderers.

Though much was new to me, and probably to most people in the audience, this afternoon’s music successfully captivated and held our attention with its exotic fascination, colourful orchestration, and here, sturdily and enthusiastically committed performances  – all credit to Andrew Atkins’ enterprise and his players’ dedication and sheer elan in bringing it all so enjoyably to life for our pleasure!

Orchestra Wellington’s “Colossal” triumphantly ticks all the descriptive and presentation boxes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Marc Taddei with Orchestra Wellington and Wellington District Brass Ensemblepresents “Colossal”
JOSHUA PEARSON – Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fau (world premiere)
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Requiem: Grand Messe des Morts
Kyle Stegall (tenor)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington (Brent Stewart, director)
Te Kōkī Orchestra / Wellington Brass Band / Trust Porirua City Brass
Hutt City Brass / Levin and Districts Brass
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, September 12th, 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

With the confidence, surety and irrepressible flair that has characterised his work with Orchestra Wellington over the past few years, conductor Marc Taddei brilliantly succeeded in both masterminding  and spearheading an event which  bounteously fulfilled the ineffably effable title “Colossal” for the concert itself. In every way it was an appropriate description of an event that in my experience has perhaps been recently matched for grandeur here in Wellington only by the performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” in 2010 when Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, together with a team of vocal soloists, the Orpheus Choir and various other choral groups in a similarly unforgettable occasion.

Of course pride of place in respect to the concert’s title was inevitably accorded French composer Hector Berlioz’s intrinsically prodigious “Grand Messe des Morts”, or “Requiem”, and borne out by the extent of musical forces employed by the composer. Such large-scale events were not uncommon in France of the composer’s time and before, being an expression of La Gloire, that source of pride, honour and distinction associated with one’s nation. From the era of Louis XIV (“the Sun King”) French composers would seek to emphasise and reflect in their music the earthly and divinely-appointed virtues of the monarch, bringing to the public spectacular musical depictions by such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau – and not forgetting, in more revolutionary times, the famous La Marseillaise of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Berlioz’s music was to serve a ceremonial, rather than a liturgical function, a reflection of the changed, post-Revolution place of the Church in French society (as was the use of the composer’s own setting of the words instead of the traditional “Dies Irae” Catholic liturgical setting, in use since the fourteenth century). The Requiem was in fact a commission from the French Government in 1837 for a work of remembrance honouring soldiers who fell in the July 1830 revolution – but due to the disapproval of various anti-revolutionary interests, the dedication was then changed to honour a hero (General Damrémont, the French Army’s commander-in-chief, killed during the country’s recent war efforts aimed at colonising parts of North Africa).

Though Berlioz’s music in general displays occasional touches of La Gloire his Requiem here paid singular attention to a number of varied influences, both musical and social, reflecting his individual feelings towards a “new Romanticism” in art and culture.  The work’s large and diverse forces produced a remarkable range of musical and aural responses, in particular a sensitivity and restraint in certain places, which of course made the almost seismic upheavals of parts of the Dies Irae all the more overwhelming in their effect. The composer described his initial enthusiasm for the text of the work in characteristically excitable tones – “I fell upon it with a kind of fury – my brain felt as though it would explode with the pressure of ideas!” – given these declarations of such creative ferment (here reproduced in the concert’s excellent programme notes), it continued to surprise with how much of the work was so introspective, delicate and ethereal. Here was a composer-sensibility capable of generating intensities at practically every place along such a spectrum, a kind of compendium of emotional response whose spontaneously-wrought effect compelled constant attention.

Along with this “Grande Messe des Morts”  and its historical and cultural associations, the concert brought to us the very great pleasure of an additional work, moreover, one from this part of the globe which nicely balanced things with the Berlioz work – this was the world premiere of a work by young Aotearoa New Zealand-born Samoan composer, Joshua Pearson, one whose title Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fou concerned the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and translated from the Tuvaluan language as “Navigating the changing Environment”. The issues facing Tuvalu have been exacerbated by climate change over recent years – they concern rising sea levels, coastal erosion, drinking water shortages and extreme weather patterns. Joshua Pearson’s astonishing and instantly impactful orchestrations plunged all of us into a series of swirling turbulences, with insistent chimes heralding the onset of currents and counter-currents of watery impulses, coloured by megaphonic vocalisations from different parts of the orchestra as strings sounded eerie harmonics and a solo violin floated a stratospheric solo line. Players alternated between conventional instrumental sounds and creative rustlings and crinklings from crumpling cellophane clusters (how onomatopoeic these description words themselves sound!) .

What could be taken on surface value for a magical fairytale sound-world of course had darker, bleaker and more ruinous implications, with Pearson’s evocative instrumentations graphically illustrating both the destabilising action and effects of increasingly confrontational weather-patterns and resulting conditions threatening present living environments with eventually uninhabitable conditions. Hand-in-hand with the ”thriil” of these near-virtuosic orchestrations came, of course, the realisation for us that these spectacular evocations were portents of doom in a sobering, “for whom the bell tolls” kind of way – all the more credit to the composer, therefore, in sounding so graphic a warning to humanity at large. The conclusion of the piece underlined its grim message with the players gradually enveloped in darkness as the sounds faded to silence. As befitted the piece, its presentation and performance, the reception at the end was overwhelming, with the composer making a warmly-acclaimed appearance!

There was no interval, but a kind of changeover process during which the Orpheus choir and brass band personnel filed respectively into their places, while Marc Taddei gave a brief outline of the freshly-published 2027 Orchestra Wellington concert prospectus – an exciting and stimulating season based upon “Dance” and affording all of us many a delightful listening prospect. That done, and a goodly proportion of the composer’s requirements regarding voices and instrumentalists having been brought into the performing arena, the stage was set for the “Requiem” to be set in its “leviathanic” motion.

The work’s mournfully-phrased opening gave notice of its proverbial “depths”, with lower and higher voices in tandem properly emphasising their “polar opposite” tones, the singing,  with variously deep and pure tones combining with strings and winds to make an immense “carpet of sound”,  as the cries of “Requiem” vied with the winds’ piercing, downwardly-cascading  phrases  After the tersely-delivered “Kyrie Eleisons” came the “Dies Irae”, introduced by black-toned double-basses, with Berlioz again using his sopranos, this time in tandem with winds, as a dramatic contrast, before bringing in the other voice-lines. Each group of verses was given its own level of purposeful intensity by agitated string passages, the “Quantus tremor” passages urgent and vigorous, leading up to the first of the work’s truly monumental passages, with brass choir antiphonally following and exchanging phrases with brass choir, two upper groups interacting with two lower groups and leading to the thunderous entrance of the percussion – a scalp-prickling moment, to which the men’s voices then added their stentorian cries of “Tuba mirum” as part of an enormous crescendo of sound, one which resorted to hushed tones for “Mors stupebit” but which then flared up excitingly once more at “Liber scriptus proferetur”. And how pathetic, energy-drained and fearfully wonderful was “Quid sum miser”, with its bleakly forlorn cor-anglais and bassoon accompaniments!

The tumultuous “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” outbursts, followed by the increasingly urgent ‘Recordare, Jesu Pie”, leading into “Confutatis maledictis” made for episodes of great and desperate excitement, the “prayer” becoming a compelling “theatre of supplication” before returning to “Rex Tremendae” amid piteous cries of  “Salva Me”.  The following “Quaerens Me” brought us some of the evening’s loveliest singing, the voices in unaccompanied . lyrical mode, pleading for forgiveness as was accorded Mary Magdalene and the Good Thief at Christ’s crucifixion, and a necessary respite when considering what was to follow.

This was the mighty “Lacrimosa”, the “day of tears”, Berlioz unsparingly giving the verses a harsh, jagged syncopated accompaniment from strings, winds and brass in rugged 9/8 time – two quieter passages gave some respite, but soon returned to the merciless onslaught with additional brass and percussion joining the fray as the choir wass spared nothing!   The prayer rose towards its punishing finality, with every singer and player in the hall, it seemed, hanging onto those final utterances for all they were worth – a transfiguring moment, leaving at the end an exhausted, but still reverberating  silence!

Into this “void left by a maelstrom” came the Offertorium, a deeply-moving  work whose obsessively-repeated and anxiously unresolved vocal lines representing a kind of great anxiety, with the voices seemingly left abandoned in a wilderness, intoning a figure that oscillated between two notes without settlement or deliverance – meanwhile all around these voices the instrumental lines “wandered” as if enchanted or bewildered, the strings and winds aware of and responding to the text’s invocations of the “promise” made by God to “Abraham and his seed” – the beautiful moment at the words “promisisti et semini ejus” was here like balm for our senses, the music moving into the major key and generating a flowering of hope for deliverance into light and warmth – wonderfully and superbly-delivered!   The following “Hostias”, with its hauntingly celestial key-changes  generated by angelic winds (always reminding me of – and, of course, pre-dating – “Lohengrin”!) gave even further hope for salvation (but what creepily sepulchral brass-playing was sounded here at the end, affording scary glimpses into the abyss!).

Then came the equally spell-binding sequence with solo tenor Kyle Stegall, the single voice resplendently furthering Berlioz’s transfiguring fusion of the ordinary and the fabulous, backed up by celestial echoes and resonances from the choir (apart from a brief moment of strain for the sopranos in their “Gloria” utterances) – their “Hosannas” here joyously danced and exalted in response, as did the adjoining brasses at the end!

It was left for the “Agnus Dei” to usher in the drama’s final moments, with magical wind and brass chordings underpinned by strings giving the choir’s heartfelt utterances a kind of enduring luminosity, as did in contrasting ways the succeeding, entirely characteristic exchanges between the lighter strings and winds and the darker, more sinister brasses. More grounding was the return to the work’s opening, with the cries of “Requiem” punctuated once more by those well-remembered descending wind chords, but reaching a finality with the voices’ utterances resolving into “Quia pius es, in aeternum, Domine” (Because thou art forever merciful, Lord) and a series of heart-easing “Amens” with blissfully rising-and-falling string roulades underpinned by gently-throbbing timpani and string pizzicati which together concluded the work.

Such an accolade-exhausting achievement left one grasping vainly for further acclamations! To all the performers, enablers and organisers one needs must bestow very great gratitude at being presented with such a work brought off with all the elan, brilliance depth and variety that it needed to succeed. It takes its honorable place in the growing pantheon of memorable presentations by Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir, here enriched by the stellar contributions of so many local musicians who obviously relished their integral part in the proceedings. Both Marc Taddei’s and Orpheus Choir director Brent Stewart’s stewardship of this historic event will be remembered and appreciated for a long time to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “Creation” concert boldly crosses cultures and genres

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “Creation”

DARIUS MILHAUD – La Création du Monde
BÉLA BARTÓK – Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion
CARL NIELSEN – Symphony No. 4 “Inextinguishable”

Ballet Collective Aotearoa
John Psathas Group – Akvilė Šileikaitė, Michael Houstoun (pianos)
Fabian Ziegler, Katarzyna Myćka (percussion)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – conductor

Michael Fowler Centre. Wellington

Saturday 22nd August, 2026

Orchestra Wellington’s latest presentation spanned fascinating varieties of time, place and human expression in bringing together different manifestations of creative impulse ranging from the trans-Atlantic cosmic (Milhaud) through flavoursome folkish interaction (Bartók) to an individualised and spectacularly conclusive life-perspective (Nielsen).

This occasion wasn’t the first on which the orchestra and Marc Taddei had invited dancers into the concert-hall (I remember a remarkably atmospheric dance presentation of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin in 2023)  but as one of the current items (Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde) just happened to be an original ballet score, the challenge of a dance presentation was taken up and readily accepted by the Ballet Collective Aotearoa on a surprisingly-accommodating stage in front of the orchestral platform. Further out-of-the-ordinary performance configurations followed with the appearance of two grand pianos and numerous percussion instruments on the platform, making ready for Bela Bartók’s fascinatingly collaborative Concerto for two Pianos and Percussion. Here the version with the composer’s own orchestrations was played (the original was for four players only), the music exploring a complex network of creative instrumental combinations bringing together classical, folk and futuristic elements.

In conclusion, the concert presented us with a singular view of the creative process via an orchestral symphony whose title eponymously described its very character – this was  Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, given the name “Inextinguishable” by its composer, a direct affirmation of, in the composer’s words  “life and movement” readily suggesting the “will to life” as being “indomitable and inextinguishable”.

Such is the increased “global” focus of present-day humanity, it’s hardly surprising that there’s increasing interest shown by creative groups worldwide in exploring the commonalities of intrinsic human activities, views regarding existence in general and including stories from different places relating to origins of the world and the life it has supported and developed. French-born composer Darius Milhaud’s 1923 ballet “La Creation du Monde” conspicuously represented a kind of amalgam of pioneering discovery on his part involving both his exposure to New World jazz music when visiting New York in 1922, and his fascination with a collection of West Central African Creation mythologies – these  had been compiled by the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in vogue with a fascination in 1920s French artistic circles regarding “primitivism” perfectly expressed by African art and legend. In response to a commission from the impresario Rolf de Maré for his Ballets Suédois  (Swedish Ballet Company) in Paris, Cendrars devised the ballet’s scenario with cubist sets and costumes designed by Fernand Léger. The ballet unfolded across five movements whose connections charted a “creation” course from “Chaos” through awakenings of Nature, and the creation of Man and Woman – a scenario not unlike the biblical story of Genesis.

Fascinatingly, the ballet’s scenario was here adapted for the Ballet Collective Aotearoa by choreographer Tanemahuta Grey, with the dancers depicting the Te Ao Maori creation story of the separation of Rangi-nui and Papa-tuanuku. The choreographer’s voice spoke the introductory incantations in Te Reo (a translation not provided that I could see, which was a pity!) However, the Te Ao Māori story is well-known enough by audiences to make an involving and sonorous connection with the music possible and meaningful, and was brilliantly essayed by the dancers (as well as by the musicians on their part) throughout. It was interesting that, as the group had more female than male dancers Tanemahuta Grey stressed the aspects of the story involving the births of the two female deities Hine Ahu-Ons and Hine Titama, more than the activities of Tane and his brothers at the story’s beginning – a differently-weighted focus to what one usually encounters in the story.

Though the detailings of the myth were differently emphasised to that of the well-known story (Rangi-Nui the Skyfather, and Papa- Tuanuku, the Earth-Mother are forced apart by the efforts of their son Tane Mahuta, after the attempts by various of the other children had failed), the union and separation of the parents (Olivia Platt as Papa-Tuanuku, and James Buechell as Rangi-Nui)  readily conveyed both the closeness of their union and the agony of their separation. This was achieved by Tane-Mahuta (Tabitha Dombroski), with suitably forceful connivance from additional dancers Amelia Chandulal-Mackay and Lyndon Foley.  Then, the coming into the world of the daughters of the union, Hine Ahu one (danced by Zoe White) and Hine Titama (Ruby Clarke) was conveyed with due exchanges, minglings and separation sequences. A more detailed explanation of the scenario would have enhanced our understanding of specific movements towards union and separation, but the somewhat abstracted gesturings and concerted movements managed to convey the ritualised essence of origin and representation we needed to give the movements their symbolic meaning – and the music-making was wonderful!

Creation was followed by re-creation in terms of the next item, both in the performing space’s adaptation for the presentation, and the original work’s “enlargement” by its composer Bela Bartók. This was the Concerto for two pianos, percussion and orchestra, and was a work which I’d heard not long ago in its original 1937 format, for two pianos and percussion, and which the composer and his wife Ditta Pásztory had premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 1938 with great success. This led to the composer’s publisher Hans Heinsheimer suggesting that Bartók recast the work with orchestral accompaniment after he had left Hungary for the United States in 1940 to give his music increased performance opportunities – the original solo parts for the work were largely unchanged, and the work was premiered in its new format in London late in 1942. Bartók and his wife Ditta gave the American premiere of this work in January, 1943 at Carnegie Hall, New York, the last occasion on which the composer appeared in public as a performer, as he was to die of leukemia in September 1945.

This performance featured an ensemble with the name John Psathas Group, formed by an international ensemble of artists dedicated to “bringing contemporary chamber music to life” with the promotion of John Psathas’s music a “raison d’etre” for the ensemble along with other recent works. Fittingly, New Zealand’s Michael Houstoun was invited to participate in this concert with fellow-pianist Akvilė Šileikaitė, and percussionists Katarzyna Myćka and Fabian Ziegler. As I’d never before heard the “concerto” version of this work the occasion had more-than-usual interest for me.

The work began with soft drum rolls and low piano notes, suddenly “lit up” by the first of two scintillating irruptions, each conveying an idea of something eventful awaiting its appointed time – the pianists gradually built up their figurations in presence and excitement with increased detailings from both percussionists and orchestra, becoming giant stride-like beats as the “presences” amplify and accelerate their intensities, alternating energetic piano dovetailings with percussive colourings from the soloists and fanfare-like crescendi brilliantly bursting forth from the orchestra. What sounded like a “devil of a fugue” introduced by the side-drum roll made for hair-raising irruptive sequences, both playful in their “falling back” to folkish expression and startling in their contrasts of extremes! We were kept on tenterhooks for most of the movement’s course, so volatile and differentiated were the sequences and their interactions!

Bartók’s “night music” drew us into a fantasmagorical amalgam of impulse and stillness, sounds that owed nothing to convention and everything to nature, the music gradually creating its own trajectorial instincts towards a kind of unease which now and then  “spooked” the textures either with isolated sforzandi or eerily swirling chromatic piano figures which pursued glissandi-like impulses of disquiet – everything sounded so “feral”, so unconcerned with form or shape, predisposed instead towards a self-
contained ambient presence set in timeless surety by long-held wind tones claiming  proprietal rights at the end.

A flurry of energies sent tones, scintillations and percussive patternings dancing in the last movement’s opening! – the xylophone and timpani danced alternate steps goading the pianists into following suit, and elongating the festive, almost Shostakovich-like air of joyous release.  Akvilė Šileikaitė and Michael Houstoun took up the mischievous variations of their respective trajectories, one second direct and business-like, and the next “playing” with droll and loping rhythms before dashing excitedly together  into an urgently-conceived crescendo of energies whose concerted impulses resonated through the spaces most satisfyingly! The pianist’s “cake-walk” pastiche-like sequence got everybody’s rhythmic instincts in synch most splendidly, almost as if “jam-sessioning” would keep us going indefinitely! – however, Bartok chose to make a tongue-in-cheek gesture of wry acceptance over the work’s last few bars, with a few piano notes and a muttered percussion gesture ending the work and leaving us all bemused but happy!

We spent the interval musing over conductor Marc Taddei’s words addressed briefly to us before the Bartók item  regarding recent funding decisions from Creative New Zealand reducing its annual support for Orchestra Wellington by almost 40%, and alerting us that the cuts would carry serious implications for the orchestra’s ability to stage the kind of innovative and ambitious presentations we’d enjoyed from OW of late. Such sobering realities didn’t, however, inhibit the impact of the second-half performance of Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, one that, under such circumstances, aptly bore the name “Inextinguishable”. As it meant to go on, the symphony exploded into being in the conductor’s and players’ hands, the full-blooded playing announcing in no uncertain terms that this music had something to say!

The work as a whole felt like a “stream of consciousness” with its composer intent upon demonstrating the inexhaustible process of life and its variety – so, the four “sections” in the symphony featured the same notes, themes and progressions repeatedly “turning up” in different guises in boundless displays of energy and reflection, underlining the sharply-contrasted nature of the exchange. In the wake of a cello solo supported by the flutes, the clarinets took up the great descending theme which dominates the work, followed by the strings, intermingling fragments of the opening things before a brusque repeated viola figure broke into the mood, preparing the way for the following energetic version of the same glorious clarinets’ theme, here made rumbustious and raucous. Throughout, Marc Taddei’s control of his forces steered the music unerringly through its by turns steady and frenetic manifestations, with strings, winds, brasses and timpani unhesitatingly throwiing themselves into the fray, each vying for our attention! Eventually, we were moved  towards and through a great E-major orchestral statement of exhausted but triumphant finality which proclaimed its victory before sinking downwards towards the next movement’s beginning!

As timpani and violin  mused  quietly on what had gone before the wind choirs suddenly broke out in cheerful song, via fresh, out-of-doors flavourings from both reeds and flutes, playing in what sounded like an “old-world” fashion, but with subtle hints of later harmonic language, evident in the more “exploratory” string pizzicato passages, everything here so deliciously and disarmingly delivered, right up to the clarinet’s entry with rather more sobering and tentative phrases, as if the player had realised some kind of “brink” was threatening – which it was!

As if a giant cosmic firmament was suddenly opened up before us, the Orchestra Wellington strings turned the intensities upon us with a vengeance! – though there weren’t masses of strings their focused sounds galvanised our sensibilities as they delivered the third movement’s spectacularly resonant opening utterances, reinforced by irruptions from the timpani and lower strings, motifs from the symphony’s opening. The violas and cellos joined in, just as whole-heartedly, and a fugal section piled the emotion up higher and higher towards a wonderful moment of release, though the performance didn’t let up with the intensities – despite a piquant oboe solo lifting its beseeching voice the strings brushed the moment aside and launched into a furious fusillade-like violin unison passage, skin and hair flying, and which the lower strings then took up as well – breathless excitement! (I read about a telling exchange  between conductor Sir John Barbirolli and his Halle orchestra leader Martin Milner who, when rehearsing the work requested that the conductor take this passage with the strings  “a little slower, for clarity’s sake” – to which Barbirolli replied “Oh, no! – if we take it any slower, people will hear what you’re playing!”).

Here the music exuded joy and energy, the performance “taking wing”, expressing the “inextinguishable” qualities of life itself, though the composer still had a wild-card to play – the addition to the orchestra of a second set of timpani, which had been silent up to this moment, but which now joined in with the vigorous expressions of delight and energy. Though my seat in the Michael Fowler centre gave me an excellent view of the first timpanist, I could only just catch glimpses of the tops of the flailing drumstick- heads of the second player, placed as he was partly under the upstairs audience overhang – so I missed the spectacular visual effect of the additional player’s joining with the movement’s opening festivities, and, more importantly, the later, combatative sequences between the two players’ instruments. After the two timpanists seemed to size each other up, the music momentarily calmed down, the winds making reassuring noises as the strings hovered uneasily, as if reluctant to launch into the work’s great “life” theme and face the challenge of the heavy artillery! Brass and winds then sounded warnings of what was to come as the “battle” began in earnest – though I couldn’t clearly see the second timpanist, the surges of sound that raged back and forth across the vistas were impressive in themselves, the conflict flavoured by shouts from the strings and cries from the brass! A final percussive crescendo and the drums broke off their onslaught, while orchestral forces lifted their voices in triumph with the composer’s all-pervading “life theme”, the timpani then joining in with the final peroration as partners rather than foes, the players all sonorously savouring the spoils of victory!

A classic concert experience, then – and, for me, one to savour in the memory as a revelation!

 

A feast of classic and contemporary Finnish music – from Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  – Myths and Legends 2026

Pietari Inkinen conducts the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  – Photo, Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

SIBELIUS _ Pohjola’s Daughter
MAGNUS LINDBERG – Violin Concerto No.2
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin)
SIBELIUS – Four Legends (Lemminkäinen Suite)

  1. Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari
  2. Lemminkäinen in Tuonela
  3. The Swan of Tuonela
  4. Lemminkäinen’s Return

Pietari Inkinen – conductor
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 15th August, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

I’d already become reacquainted with Pietari Inkinen’s rostrum presence in front of the NZSO the previous evening in the orchestra’s spectacularly-delivered  Wagner concert “Radiance” –  so this evening’s “Myths and Legends” concert was certainly an added pleasure. It was heightened by Inkinen choosing a programme which featured the music of perhaps his most illustrious countryman, Jean Sibelius, as, during the conductor’s earlier, seven-year tenure with the NZSO ( from2008 to 2015) he had programmed in concert and recorded all seven of the composer’s symphonies, as well as also presenting in that concert series tonight’s Lemminkäinen Suite, (though, sadly, I wasn’t the Middle C reviewer for THAT concert!). So, learning that Inkinen was proposing to repeat these Four Legends  (as they’re also often called)  was an added fillip to the occasion for me this time round!

There was more! – along with the Legends another of the composer’s tone-poems, one which hardly ever gets performed here in Wellington, was promised, the atmospheric, superbly-crafted “Pohjola’s Daughter” long a favourite work of mine due to its presence as an “extra” on the first recording I ever owned of a Sibelius Symphony, the magnificent Fifth. So as far as this composer was concerned it was a case for me of a cup that “runneth over”, making the occasion unmissable!

I could have, of course, lamented the choice of an ostensibly unrelated work to “fill out” this concert’s contents – I would of course have opted, had I been given the power to choose, for some of the incidental music the composer had written for either  “Festivo” or “The Tempest”, both of which suites contain some fabulous and rarely-performed music.  However, it seemed apposite for all sorts of reasons for Inkinen to opt on this occasion not for more Sibelius, but for a violin concerto by a well-known contemporary Finnish composer, Magnus Lindberg, and to employ the services as a soloist of another countryman, the wonderful Vesa-Matti Leppänen, long-time Finnish-born concertmaster of the NZSO, and one who had of course previously worked with Inkinen during the latter’s tenure as the orchestra’s principal conductor.

So it was decreed – and many of us thus found ourselves attending the Michael Fowler Centre on two nights running, here filled with expectations already fuelled by the previous evening’s musical riches ( see https://middle-c.org/2026/08/radiance-from-the-nzso-with-simon-oneill-tenor-and-pietari-inkinen-conductor-two-glimpses-of-richard-wagners-youth-to-maturity-journey-as-an-innovative-opera-com/)  and more than ready for further pleasures.

Inkinen was warmly welcomed to the platform to begin the concert – straightaway I liked the sense of “purpose” that seemed to emanate from the figure on the podium, highlighted by his patient, immobile stance before a note of the music was played – when it came, its darkly-focused tones created a world at once removed from time and place but at the same time “present” in the hall’s ambiences as the music filled the spaces. This was the world of a Finnish hero, Väinämöinen, he of the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, an adventurer advanced in years but still attracted to female beauty, one who on his travels encounters the beautiful “daughter of the North” a region known as “Pohjola”. We heard Väinämöinen’s steadfast and determined “adventuring” theme on the orchestral brasses, and then, suddenly came the beautiful theme associated with “Pohjola’s Daughter”, who in the story was depicted sitting on a rainbow weaving a cloth of gold. Her charms attracted Väinämöinen, who invited her to join him in his travels homeward – however she told him that he needed to perform certain magical tasks before she would agree to accompany him, so he set to work to perform his part of the bargain. We were drawn by focused, evocative instrumental lines into the interplay of Väinämöinen’s and the Maiden’s dialogues as the venerable hero steadfastly undertook his labours – however with the final task ( that of using his magic to build a boat from the distaff of the maiden’s spinning-wheel), Väinämöinen faltered and sustained an injury, causing him to renounce his quest (to the sounds of the maiden’s mocking laughter!) and sadly continue his homeward journey. The playing-out of this tale’s retelling was brilliantly graphic, the instrumental evocations palpable and moving, especially those regarding the sense of failure and ultimate resignation of the hero towards the end of this, possibly (with the exception of Tapiola)  the composer’s most accomplished single orchestral work outside the great symphonies.

We next welcomed a popular audience favourite to the platform, violinist Vesa-Matti Leppänen, normally the orchestra’s Concertmaster, to perform a work described by one critic as “a romantic violin concerto in disguise”.  Magnus Lindberg’s Second Violin Concerto came across as a thickly-woven, luscious-sounding work which has hyper-charged energy fields connecting order out of seeming cross-referencing chaos to produce various impressive focal points which I found could inspire, excite and disconcert simultaneously. The composer wrote the work for Frank Peter Zimmermann, one of the foremost German violinists of today, who gave the work’s premiere in 2015 – in a talk Lindberg gave about the work before a New York performance he aptly described the concerto as “a lot of things boiling”, and this performance by Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Pietari Inkenen bore out that notion of several simultaneously-percolating elements during the work, confusingly so throughout this performance for a reviewer new to the work!

Beginning with a three-note phrase from the soloist that recurred in various elongated form throughout the work, this  theme found its way via various instrumental echoings and developments to an exciting, full-toned orchestra sonority. Then, to the accompaniment of a dancing violin solo the orchestra traced a rich panoply of sounds, in places trading dance-trajectories with the soloist while in others giving different voices tongue, as with some delighted/irascible swirls from the piccolo along with the other winds in one frisson-dominated moment! Whether dancing or soaring, soloist and orchestra complemented one another’s preoccupations (including some interactions between soloist and the orchestral first violin!) and afterwards there were beautiful stratospheric notes from Vesa-Matti’s violin mingling with harp arpeggios, and then leading  to the orchestral vaults being grandly thrown open as if some stupendous visitation was being heralded by the music.

The solo cadenza, towards the end of the slow movement, followed some Korngold-like gestures from the orchestra. Vesa-Matti mixed arco and pizzicato notes among other explorations, including some spectacularly high harmonic-like sounds, almost a string-playing fireworks display, with occasional three-note motif-references thrown in for effect! Near the movement’s end the luscious late-romantic sound-world was again evoked, with another, briefer solo cadenza – we heard due pomp and ceremony in some concluding orchestral phrases, with the solo violin in places almost beside itself with excitement, allowing the orchestra its “grand peroration” before unexpectedly handing the work’s ending back to the soloist for a wry three-note concluding gesture! It was a work whose complexities of detailing both fascinated and overwhelmed this listener! – for me a definitely candidate for a wish-list of further listening opportunities!

After the interval, we were returned to Sibelius’s world of myth and legend by way of the composer’s “Lemminkäinen Suite”, with the eponymous hero’s adventures drawn, like Väinämöinen’s in the earlier Pohjola’s Daughter, from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The hero, Lemminkäinen, is something of a Maui-like character, described variously in the Kalevala epic as young, good-looking, heroic and reckless, but with numerous other folk-lore versions of his exploits. Sibelius’s sequence of events in the story doesn’t follow the Kalevala’s – in the epic his return home at the end was not from Tuonela, but from a reprisal against the people from Pohjola, who had burnt his village to the ground while he was carousing with the Maidens on Saari. Consequently the suite is more absolute music than narrative, and whose separate evocations can be equally enjoyed as such.

Sibelius here has him firstly travelling to the island of Saari (Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Saari), where he seduces as many women as he can before fleeing to escape the vengeance of the men of the island. The music, built around two groups of themes presents firstly the young man’s longing for the excitement of adventure, and his journeying to the island, and his encounters with various women  – “Then, the minstrel, Lemminkainen/ roamed throughout the island hamlets/ to the joy of all the virgins/all the maids of braided tresses”  (Kalevala – Rune 15). There’s an almost Tristanesque Wagnerian quality expressed by the seduction music as it builds towards a suggestively orgasmic kind of release at the end, the brass signalling a final consummation of desire in returning to the home key as the energies of the piece subside. Inkinen and his players capture it all, at a tempo which enables the detailing of both the hero’s journeyings and his carousings to be fully savoured.

The composer changed the order of the two middle movements at various times, resulting in differences in recorded versions – my first recording (Thomas Jensen and the Danish Radio Orchestra) put “The Swan of Tuonela” first but others have since reversed the order, as did Inkinen on this occasion. Either seemed to fit the story (which we’re told doesn’t follow the Kalevala anyway!) – here we were plunged eerily and scarily into the “Land of the Dead” with music that was malevolent in character and obsessive in its repetitions. Such was the playing’s  concentration and focus we were irrevocably gripped and held by the spectral tones and harsh textures, though respite eventually came from a sudden and transformative episode of unearthly calm, strings and winds magically and uncannily countering the evil with some kind of strangely “healing” textures, representing the mother of the hero in search of her son, entering Tuonela, retrieving his dismembered body and sewing the different parts together as per the Kalevala’s story.

As if proclaiming the dominion of Tuonela’s embodiment of death, the following movement featured the suite’s easily most celebrated section, The Swan of Tuonela, here given the most sublime performance I could ever imagine hearing from all concerned, and especially from the orchestra’s cor anglais player, Michael Austin. Inkinen got his strings in the latter stages to “dig into” the phrasings in classic Barbirolli-style (the conductor of my long-time favourite recording of this work!), steadily and patiently maintaining the macabrely beautiful ambiences right through to the piece’s resounding silences at the end.

After this, some sort of deliverance was urgently needed as a “return to life”  metamorphosis, and duly provided in surgings of renewed energies with the work’s concluding movement, Lemminkainen’s Homecoming, the playing replete with feelings of both release and anticipation, as well returning to life our own beleagued sensibilities in the wake of such gruesome adventurings into and through a Finnish version of a dismal Underworld, from which emancipation was a truly joyous experience.  Indeed, such it also was in general terms for me with the reappearance here in Wellington of Pietari Inkinen, whose music making seemed for this listener to have a new surety of confidence that brought an extra dimension of the music’s “release” to his ever-vigilant “control” – he seemed well-pleased to have made his return as did his warmly-appreciative audience.

RADIANCE, from the NZSO with Simon O’Neill (tenor) and Pietari Inkinen (conductor)  – two glimpses of Richard Wagner’s youth-to-maturity journey as an innovative opera composer.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RADIANCE, from the NZSO in Wellington
Simon O’Neill (tenor) with Pietari Inkinen (conductor) and the NZSO
Photo: Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883)

TANNHÄUSER – Act I – Overture
Act II –  Scene IV “Weh! Weh, mir Unglücksel’gem!”
ACT III – Overture
Scene III “Ich hörte Harfenschlag…..”
“Zurück von mir! Die Stätte wo ich raste ist verflucht!”……
“Hör an, Wolfram. hör an!”

PARSIFAL – Act I – Prelude
Act ii – Prelude
“Amfortas! Die Wunde! – Die Wunde!”
“Ja, diese Stimme! So rief sie Ihm!”
”Mit diesen Zeichen bann’ ich deinen Zauber!”
“Du weisst. Wo du mich wiederfinden kannst!”
Act III  – Prelude and Good Friday Music
“Nur eine Waffe taugt”….
O! – Welchen Wunders höchtes Glück!”……

Simon O’Neill (tenor)
Pietari Inkinen (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday 14th August 2026

Two significant players in recent worldwide Wagner presentations returned to Wellington last week with the NZSO – tenor Simon O’Neill and conductor Pietari Inkinen. Together they presented  an innovative programme with the generic title “Radiance” featuring excerpts from two iconic works, Tannhäuser and Parsifal, at opposite ends of Richard Wagner’s creative career as the nineteenth century’s most influential music dramatist. In each case we were given a part-portrayal of the work’s titular hero via significant utterances which reflected Wagner’s own incessant search for redemption and fulfilment in his music as an artist and human being.

Each of the artists involved in this concert has recently earned international recognition in his particular discipline   Tenor Simon O’Neill has enjoyed success in practically every major opera house world-wide, particularly in the great Wagner heldentenor roles, while Pietari Inkinen has earned international critical acclaim for his conducting of Wagner, leading productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen for Bayreuth and for Opera Australia, as well as performances of Die Walküre and Das Rheingold elsewhere.

Putting these two artists with an NZSO that has gone from strength to strength following Inkinen’s nine-year tenure with the orchestra made for an inspired piece of “showcase programming” which brought out the abilities of the participants and their respective advancements and ripenings. The confidence and surety of interchange between conductor and orchestra at the concert’s beginning with Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser grew with the music, from a plain and pure opening of the Pilgrims’ Theme  on the horns, through more warmly-nuanced chromatic string passages and wind ensembles’ gathering of the tones towards the brass’s gloriously rich and rounded full delivery.  As the winds’ reprise of the same softly receded, the glittering Venusberg music began, dancing, cajoling and insinuating its way into the soundscape, with Pietari Inkinen’s control of the music’s tones and trajectories building to bacchanale-like irruptions of energy and colour, eventually tamed by the return of the Pilgrims’ Chorus’s insistently resounding strains – splendid stuff!

Pietari Inkinen conducting the NZSO  in “Radiance”
Photo: Phoebe Cassidy, NZSO

Tannhäuser’s story, set in medieval Germany, appealed strongly to nineteenth-century tastes in its dichotomy between delight in pleasures of the senses and a higher, spiritual quest for redemption. We had heard in the Overture this conflict unashamedly expressed, with the Pilgrims’ song of praise interrupted by the strains of music from the court of Venus, to which the troubadour Tannhäuser had been drawn in his travels – but then, having grown tired of Venus’s charms, the knight had returned to his former home to seek redemption and solace in the form of the chaste Elisabeth. However, in a proposed singing contest the troubadour scandalised the company in a spontaneous outburst of praise for his recently-enjoyed “goddess of love”.  Defended by the ever-loyal Elisabeth he was then filled with shame at his intemperate outburst, vowing to take the pilgrimage to Rome to seek forgiveness from the Holy See – Simon O’Neill appeared at this point in the orchestral discourse with his impassioned “Weh! Weh, mir Unglücksel’gem!” (Woe, woe is me, unhappy mortal!), his voice thrillingly riding over the orchestra, striding from the stage with the words “Nach Rom!” (To Rome!) at the end of the excerpt.

The orchestra then told the next part of the story, sounding the music of Tannhäuser’s friend Wolfram (including the well-known “O du mein holder Abendstern” (known popularly as  “O, Star of Eve”), and of Elisabeth, both waiting for Tannhäuser’s return with the Pilgrims from Rome – but to Elisabeth’s sorrow, Tannhäuser is not with them. She leaves and Wolfram’s harp is then heard along with the “Abendstern” melody, bringing Simon O’Neill back onto the platform with the words “Ich hörte Harfenschlag” (I  hear the strains of a harp). In distressed tones, Tannhäuser tells Wolfram not to come close to him as he is accursed – “Zurück von mir! Die Staat, wo ich raste, ist verflucht!” Then follows the Troubadour’s woeful tale of going to Rome with the Pilgrims, but declining to share any of their comforts along the way, hoping it would alleviate the penance due for his sins! “Ich Tat’s – denn in Zerknirschung wollt ich büssen, um meines Engels Tränen zu versüssen”  (I did it because, filled with remorse, I wished to sweeten my angel’s tears!). However, all was to no avail, as the Pope pronounced eternal damnation on Tannhäuser as long as the staff in the pontiff’s hand  “no longer bedecks itself in fresh green” (“nie mehr sie schmuckt mit frischen Grün”). In response to the Pope’s rebuffal, Tannhäuser has reaffirmed his desire to return to the Venusberg and to the charms of Venus, to the horror of Wolfram who tries to stop him. Suddenly, Elizabeth’s name is heard, and the Venusberg and its goddess vanishes!  (In the opera a chorus of Pilgrims bring the news that the Pope’s staff has sprouted with green foliage, so that Tannhäuser’s soul has been saved.)

I’ve written this somewhat “pocketbook version” description of the action to try and convey something of the vividness of the performance of the singer, conductor and orchestra – overwhelming in its power of engagement (everybody playing and singing with extraordinary commitment, every emotion resonating, from hushed whispers through golden-toned exclamations of joy and hope  to forceful urgencies and desperate cries of despair and pain!) It was, in effect, Wagner at his most effusive in his career’s early stages, grappling with his hero’s issues as if they were his own regarding earthly delight and spiritual illumination – a lifelong quest in his art. Simon O’Neill’s absorption and delivery of his character’s utterances flowed with the orchestra’s every nuance under Pietari Inkinen’s many-faceted direction, so that we were ourselves taken up in it all, and left at the end thrilled by the journey’s intoxications.

After the interval we encountered a same-but-different Wagner with his final major work “Parsifal”, one certainly better-known in general terms to many Wellingtonians who, like myself, had seen the first complete performance of the opera in the country’s 2006 International Arts Festival here in the capital – with a major feature of tonight’s performance being Simon O’Neill’s singing of excerpts from the title role he had given complete in that 2006 production! Here were excerpts from Acts Two and Three, the first being Parsifal’s encounters with the embittered ex-Grail Knight-cum-enchanter Klingsor, and his enslaved sorceress Kundry; and then in the Third and final act Parsifal’s return to the Grail-Knights’ wounded leader Amfortas with the Holy Spear that Klingsor had stolen many years before, and which heals Amfortas’s wound.

We first heard what I’ve always regarded as some of Wagner’s greatest music in the Prelude to Act One of the opera – a performance from Inkinen and the players here that seemed to embody Wagner’s own words sung by the Grail-Knight Gurnemanz to Parsifal in Act One – “Du siest, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (You see, my Son, here, Time becomes space”) – and still after so many hearings of this music I found myself “taken over” by a sense of being in a unique and precious space, and an inexplicable kind of longing……it was an enchantment that rang through the precincts of the MFC, seeming to dissolve time for the music’s duration – a treasurable experience, via heartfelt music-making! The only slight quibble I had was at the very end of the Prelude, where a kind of “concert-ending” was tacked onto the music – I thought it was a pity that Inkinen didn’t employ the open-ended stage version ending, which I thought invited a sense of continuity with what was to come…..

Rather than being “broken”, the spell was then refocused to Act Two and Klingsor’s realm, the orchestral playing suffused with sulphurous menace and evil intent – here we dispensed with both Parsifal’s heroic deeds in dispersing the fortress’s hapless guardians, and his encounter with the alluring Flower-maidens, and the charms of the seductive Kundry, up to the moment of her first and only kiss with the hero! – At this point we were plunged into the very heart of Parsifal’s quest as he cried out with anguish the name of Amfortas, the wounded King of the Grail-Knights who had succumbed to Kundry’s charms and was wounded with his own spear by the treacherous Klingsor.  O’Neill’s opening words as Parsifal here were “Amfortas! Die Wunde!” (The Wound!), at the climax of the music for Kundry’s kiss, the intensities as heart-rending as I remembered from his stage performance, as was his impassioned self-reproach, all mirrored by Inkinen’s and the orchestra’s meticulous support. After naming her and her “kiss” as the bringer of Amfortas’s torment he rejected Kundry’s further advances with “Ha! Dieser Kuss! – Verderberin! – Weiche von mir! Ewig, ewig von mir!” (Ah, this kiss! – Corrupter! – Get away from me! – Forever, forever away from me!). The orchestra thundered Klingsor’s theme as the enchanter entered with the spear to kill Parsifal, but with the words  “Mit diesem Zeichen bann’ ich deinen Zauber” (With this sign I rout your enchantment!) the latter disarmed Klingsor and, brandishing the spear, brought the walls tumbling down in disarray. As Parsifal left, he turned to the distraught Kundry telling her  “Du weisst, wo du mich wiederfinden kannst!” (You know where you can find me!).Devastating stuff!

What happened next was like an inverse of this remarkable work’s opening with those incredibly intense, heart-rending tones and textures of the opening Prelude  – Wagner brings those intensities to a kind of fruition in sequences popularly known as the “Good Friday Music” as the music returned to the place where the opera began, a Montsalvat-like castle in northern Spain. Here, the Grail Knights have fallen upon hard times, with their leader, Amfortas still ailing from the effects of his wound, and the community of knights lacking leadership and purpose. With the return of Parsifal, the old Knight Gurnemanz expresses joy and hope, and he reminds Parsifal that nature responds to the Saviour’s sacrifice on Good Friday for all humankind, with “Holm und Blume auf den Auen”  (….the Grasses and Flowers in the Meadow)  blooming as “all Creation gives thanks” (“Das dankt dann alle Kreatur” ) with the winds (oboe and clarinet), and then the full orchestra allowing the themes to richly and fully bloom and sing – wonderful moments, in places not unlike Delius in some of the falling chromatic harmonies. This preludes the sombre entrance of the Grail Knights with Amfortas, their ailing King, by this time refusing to perform his office and uncover the Holy Grail. Unnoticed until this moment. Parsifal steps forward holding the Spear, and, singing the words “Nur eine Waffe taugt – die Wunde schliesst das Speer nur, der sie schlug.” (But one weapon serves: only the Spear that smote you can heal your wound) touches Amfortas’s wound with the point of the Spear.  It’s left to Parsifal to proclaim the miracle – “O! Welchen Wunders Hochstes Gluck!”   (O supreme joy of this miracle!), and the music drifts to its sublime conclusion.

While Wagnerians would prefer to experience complete performances of each of these works, it’s nevertheless difficult to imagine concert excerpts such as these better done than here –  and simultaneously fascinating and rewarding to witness Simon O’Neill”s portrayals of each of the title characters, distilling in the chosen sequences  their essences with surety (interesting how the juxtapositioning of the two works in a single evening brought out their similarities in terms of the composer’s overall preoccupation with his heroes’ quest for redemption and enlightenment!) The voice was superbly employed, equal to all Wagner’s demands, and alive to the singularities of expression in each case – that I responded rather more freely to O”Neill’s Parsifal surely reflected my hearing him sing the complete role – but the evening also whetted my appetite for a Tannhäuser under similar circumstances.

As for Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO players, I dips me lid! I had last heard Inkinen conduct Wagner’s music as long ago as 2012 when he conducted a splendidly-performed Die Walküre here in Wellington, also with Simon O’Neill in the cast as Siegmund on that occasion. Here, together, the two distilled the essences of the evening’s characters magnificently, encompassing all their different aspects and further whetting our appetites for more –  presently, still in our dreams, but with our up-and-coming singers demonstrating their abilities in other repertoires, and an orchestra as capable as any in the world, might we not set our sights on Aotearoa’s first complete Ring Cycle, and stimulate some much-needed Trans-Tasman Wagnerian flow in  this direction?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NSZO’S Let There Be Light illuminates Saariaho, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shan Liu (piano) with Jaime Martín and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – photo, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

KALJA SAARIAHO (1952-2023) – Lumiere et Pesanteur
SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891-1953 – Piano Concerto No. 3 In C Major Op.26
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893 – Symphony No. 4 in F Minor Op.36

Shan Liu (piano)
Jaime Martín (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara)
Friday, 24th July 2026

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C / Seen and Heard International)

This concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was given the title “Let There Be Light”, a quotation from Genesis 1:3 in the Bible, depicting the creation of light upon the earth and its division from darkness – a theme which took different manifestations in the three works given in this evening’s concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and its guest conductor Jaime Martín, along with a major contribution in one of the items from the remarkable sixteen year-old New Zealand pianist Shan Liu, here making his mainstage debut with the orchestra.

Beginning the concert was a piece by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Lumière et Pesanteur  (Light and Gravity) – the composer’s own notes regarding this work referred to it as a ”gift” from her to fellow Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to honour his advocacy as an interpreter of an earlier work by Saariaho, the oratorio La Passion de Simone, which was inspired by the works of 20th Century philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). The music of Lumière et Pesanteur  was reworked by the composer from part of that same oratorio, the “Eighth Station”, described by one commentator as the piece’s “most orchestral and least-defined“ section.

Saariaho’s work here  began with the merest murmur of a percussion twinkle from celeste and strings, an evocation of space into which joined a lone trumpeter, sounding a fantastical line with the utmost freedom – this gave way to various wind instruments whose floating tones spontaneously interacted, forming delightfully speculative colouristic and textural ambiences, with brasses playing ever so softly! Over the top of these iridescences piped a piccolo, a foil for the occasional subterranean growlings welling up from beneath, but countered by the continued effusions of wind tone supported by the harp and the softest and most mysterious of brass sonorities.

One could have supposed some kind of narrative at work – my feeling, being new to this music,  was a fairytale-like scenario, one in what seemed in a constant state of sublime and seamless coalescence.  It felt for me as if existence itself here was portrayed in the act of emitting hugely all-embracing sighs of pleasure from the various instrumental groups, occasionally led or spearheaded by specific lines.

Throughout, these tones seemed poly-harmonic, giving us hardly any consciousness of specific keys or modes – instead, opening our imaginations to scenarios of sonorities, textures and timbres engaged in some kind of cosmic interaction, and at which we were spectators mesmerised by the phenomenon’s inception, its growing to various stages of fruition and its equally enigmatic departure! – one in which the sounds didn’t cease as such but seemed to play on at the end beyond what we could actually hear……

After this came the Prokofiev Concerto, a different kind of journey, with its volatility and “take-it-as-it-comes” attitudes towards darkness and light, bestowing insights upon both players and listeners via an experience akin to something of a roller-coaster ride! Such a process seemed all the more Herculean a scenario here through the work in question being undertaken in our presence by such a youthful soloist! Of course Shan Liu had by this time demonstrated his exceptional qualities as a pianist on both the home and international pianistic arenas, even though he was here tackling repertoire that one would think was the preserve of the super-virtuosi (I had, for instance, seen none other than Martha Argerich play this concerto – so I was hedging my bets as to how this young man would in my mind fare against that memory!)…..

Anyway, what a concerto! The opening Andante featured  firstly a clarinet, and a second soon joining in, with the strings then sounding that characteristic sweet-and-sour quality of Prokofiev’s in the opening melody – then in came the strings again with the Allegro – such terrific energy and momentum announcing the pianist’s first entry – could Shan Liu do it? My goodness, could he what! – straightaway, such sparkling, clear and brilliantly fluent fingerwork – and then he really opened up the pianistic throttle for the toccata-like exchanges with swirling winds and slashing strings and tremendous orchestral support in general!  And so it went on – the military-like dotted march rhythms shared between the piano and mischievous instrumental detailing brought out humour aplenty – the march rhythms turned to scampering ones, with each upward-thrusting  gesture eliciting cataclysmic cries from the orchestra, the last of which featured  a return of the opening theme as a full-throated kind of “hymn-tune” – Shan Liu took up the cantabile mood, interacting with the waves of orchestral sound and producing a kind of ethereal, almost mystical sea-change in the music, until the return of the urgent allegro rhythms which recommenced the argument.  And so it went on, through various succeeding episodes too numerous to describe, except to say that the last sortie set the seal on the movement, with the pianist’s running two handed unisons gathering up the orchestral forces in the tremendous and excitingly irresistible propulsions that took the music to a triumphal final chord – at which point the Michael Fowler audience simply exploded with delight and pent-up exhilaration, deservedly giving the musicians their due!

The slow movement was all wistfulness and charm at the outset, the soloist completely at one with conductor and orchestra in the music’s bitter-sweet lyricism, until a sudden outburst brought a wild dance, which the cellos and basses helped along, giving plenty of “hoof to the swing” – as they also did with the succeeding triplet rhythms. By contrast a sequence of pure magic then meandered into and over the sound-vistas, everybody in a kind of drifting dream -a moment of fantastic, other-worldly music-making!  And how spontaneously the rhythmic impulses seemed to come to life again, with dancing impulses sprouting from all about the orchestra – those amazingly jaunty passages then fused their energies with the return of the wistful melody that began the movement – what seemed like opposites enjoying a perfect partnership!

The winds had done a superb job of introducing most of this work’s themes thus far – and the finale was no exception, with the bassoon setting a wry, insouciant opening tone for the movement’s beginning, the piano joining in the fun with big-boned dance measures and playful competition with the orchestra via several glissandi-like skirling phrases added to the “quick-march” exchanges.  There was so much to enjoy, with the winds (again) initiating a plaintive, bitter-sweet melody,  the piano nonchalantly replying with a “walking” theme, taken up by the winds, and a full-blooded return to the bitter-sweet theme on the strings – this was both voiced and embellished until the theme here got the gloriously “full Rachmaninov” treatment from soloist and orchestra (though I’m certain that neither composer would thank me for THAT heartfelt observation!). Those ubiquitous winds then bumptiously reintroduced the opening theme – by now sounding positively turbo-charged! – and with soloist, conductor and players working up to full stretch in alternating the music’s heightened momentums, the concerto by the end had simply overwhelmed us with its power and brilliance!

We couldn’t let Shan Liu go for a while after this! – not until conductor Jaime Martín visibly INSISTED the young pianist play an encore! – most appropriately we were given Schumann’s Traumerei from Kinderszenen, an appropriate antidote to the concerto performance’s intoxication in its simplicity and naturalness of utterance – even though it inhibited not a whit of animated discussion throughout the interval regarding what we’d heard!

Surprisingly, and as it turned out, delightfully, conductor Jaime Martín made a gracious and entertaining “guest’s speech” for us at the second half’s beginning, firstly praising Shan Liu’s remarkable performance, and then properly introducing himself, by way of amusingly recounting his first interactions upon his arrival with various New Zealanders who, upon learning that he was Spanish, acceded, to his utter amazement, fulsome congratulations upon him in relation to the recent Football World Cup Spanish victory!  –  “..almost as if” he said “I myself had played in the final!”. He then talked about his own impressions of the Tchaikovsky Symphony he and the orchestra were about to play,  actually getting the players to sound a few of the work’s themes and motifs by way of highlighting them for us – all this was done in a perfectly straightforward and unpatronising way – a further amusing moment was when the conductor mentioned the word “fate” in his description of the symphony’s main recurring motif, and paused for dramatic effect – in the silence one of the cellists dropped their bow on the floor!

All such byplays done with, Martín began the symphony, getting truly spine-tingling brass-playing and dramatic whiplash-chordings from the full orchestra in the work’s introduction. The strings expressively and plaintively took up their own “first subject”, handing over to the winds and helping to further build up the tensions which became a kind of “pitched battle’ between the “fate” theme and the orchestra’s lamentations! It was a properly dramatic and sonorous journey throughout, the eloquent orchestral detailing in every section by turns confronting (the “fate” music and its insistent accompanying theme) and consoling (the folksy second subject theme and its major-key variant) right to the tumultuous conclusion of the first movement.)

Martín had asked his strings beforehand to play the accompaniments alone to the long oboe solo that distinguishes the second movement, encouraging his audience to “register” the simplicity and loneliness of these pizzicato passages, adding to the beauty of oboist Robert Orr’s actual performance – listening to this movement I was freshly taken aback by the qppeql of Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations, especially the many interactions between strings and winds so gorgeously and heartfeltly realised in this performance. Likewise in the famous pizzicato-led third movement the impact of the instrumental contrasts between strings, winds and brass were positively flavoursome (Johanna Gruskin’s piccolo in particular picturing a superbly loquacious “beastie”!).

Martín then introduced the finale almost as attacca (not marked in the score), conveying the music’s tremendous urgency, the playing marked by fierce exchanges and great brilliance – similarly, the conductor brought the contrasting “Birch tree” melody in almost in tempo. maintaining the music’s delicacy but enhancing the excitement! Later in the movement this melody led with increasing intensity to the final, tumultuous statement of the “fate” motif, momentarily halting the music’s headlong flow, but leading to a quiet reiteration of the festive-like music which represented the composer’s words “If you cannot discover the reasons for happiness in yourself, look to others…” The orchestral frenzy unleashed for us at the conclusion of this movement tonight embodied that fatalism with the utmost euphoria and excitement. Since then, my memory has been wandering back to my first encounter with this work via the legendary Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, whom I saw give what seemed like a cataclysmic-sounding performance with the then NZBC Symphony Orchestra here in Wellington in 1973 – his shade would, I think, have relished tonight’s equally memorable presentation.

 

 

 

Virtuosi – Orchestra Wellington’s celebration of the capital’s individual and interactive instrumental brilliance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

VIRTUOSI – Orchestra Wellington

ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra Op.47
ELGAR – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra in E Minor Op.85
BARTÓK – Concerto for Orchestra Sz116

New Zealand String Quartet : Peter Clark, Martin Riseley (guest player), violins;
Gillian Ansell, viola; Martin Smith, ‘cello
Inbal Megiddo, ‘cello
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei, conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 27th June 2026

This concert was replete with memories of formative music-listening experiences which have sung and danced throughout my musical life for almost fifty years – so the reader must forgive what seems like a self-indulgent bias regarding these works, and especially in the wake of such committed, heart-warming performances!

Originally a borrowed word from the Italian virtuoso (referring to both “virtue” and “skill”) the term “virtuosi” has “taken flight” in common usage, and is regularly used to denote skill and proficiency of the highest order in practically any human activity, and not just the performing arts. Here, it’s less fulsomely and more appositely applied to both individual and group distinction in musical performance, happily and resoundingly borne out by tonight’s stellar presentations.

One could go further and suggest that the term applied as readily to the creative and technical skills of each of the two “similar-but-different” composers whose music featured in tonight’s concert – on the face of things the “Englishness” of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) and the Hungarian “folkishness” of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) would seem to have little in common, even if their lifetimes partly coincided. Unlike his younger native contemporaries Holst and Vaughan Williams, Elgar showed little interest in ethnomusicology, whereas Bartók eagerly immersed himself in the folk-music of his native soil, both in his studies of comparative musical folklore in Hungary and his fusion of these elements with his own personal style of expression. Both composers were “countrymen” in their inclinations towards the “great outdoors” but it would seem the Malvern Hills near Worcester, beloved of Elgar, were probably somewhat removed in spirit from the isolated Carpathian Mountains of Hungary which Bartók explored, finding his most “authentic” Magyar folk music amongst those isolated communities.

Where Elgar and Bartók meet, I feel, is in the uniqueness and strength of each composer’s distinctive musical “character” – most of Elgar’s work has that instantly recognisable combination of nobility and introspectiveness which looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, in the manner of an artist at once confident and insecure, forthright and nostalgic, expressing a dichotomy that would reach its peak in the composer’s  ‘Cello Concerto played this evening. By contrast, Bartók’s music is characterised by asymmetrical themes and rhythms, modal scales, drones, and energetic folk-dance trajectories – as with Elgar, there are opposites at work, the “classical” structures expressed by “folk” music, the tonalities that contain dissonances, and the polarities of emotion which frequent the musical journey.

Coincidentally,  both Elgar pieces in tonight’s programme, though far-removed from one another in time,  began with similarly vigorous and trenchant opening  minor-key chords. First up was the composer’s earlier “Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra”, its opening straightaway proclaiming an almost Baroque-like splendour and severity of utterance, one that meant business right from the outset! How appropriate, then, that kicking off the evening’s “virtuosi” scenario in this music were members of the New Zealand String Quartet, taking the concertante role of the music’s solo quartet of strings. This ensemble has steadfastly continued  its activities with various guest players, following the departure early in 2025 of two of its long-time members – happily, one of the vacancies has been filled by recently-appointed  ‘cellist Martin Smith, while the second violinist role for this concert featured a distinguished guest, Martin Riseley, a member of the celebrated Te Koki Trio. Violinist Peter Clark did the honours as leader this evening, while, happily, the mainstay of the ensemble, violist Gillian Ansell continued as the rock-like fulcrum around which the group’s comings and goings have been deftly managed over the past two years.

Both the quartet and the accompanying Orchestra Wellington strings under conductor Marc Taddei brought off the  resonantly muscular opening of the work with great elan, leading into tantalising interchanges, baroque style, between solo strings and the ripieno (larger ensemble), with pre-echoes of the themes given ear-catching contrasts of emphasis and colour. Then came the famous “Welsh tune” (the composer reported as hearing this sung by a distant voice while on holiday in Wales) played here firstly by Gillian Ansell’s viola – so tenderly and heart-stoppingly – before being given the full-blooded ensemble treatment.

This sense of wonderment continued right up to the beginning of the Allegro (at Fig.7 in my Novello score), with a quietly-stated, flowing version of the theme first heard hinted at by the solo quartet just after the opening flourish – here, begun as simply and as straightforwardly as the first few steps of a momentous journey. This took us most excitingly to the work’s resplendent major-key all-together central statement of the opening theme, marked with Elgar’s favourite “Nobilmente” direction, and given plenty of ceremonial swagger, and vigorous energy.

After a tremulous reappearance of the “Welsh tune”  Marc Taddei took the players into what Elgar famously described as “a devil of a fugue”, one whose initial composure seemed to suddenly take fright halfway through its course and “spook” its own trajectories – fantastic playing, here, from the band, with hair, gut and resin given no quarter!  The eventual recapitulation of the Allegro led this time to a full-throated version of the “Welsh tune”, with solo strings and ripieno tossing parts of the reprised themes back and forth, before the coda bound up all the players in a compulsive concerted dash towards a resounding final pizzicato chord – great excitement!

The 1919 ‘Cello Concerto which followed inhabited a different world, the older Elgar having to lay bare his feelings regarding the ravages of the Great War (1914-18), while at the same time tormented with growing self-doubts as a composer as his music was gradually and increasingly regarded by critics as “old-fashioned”. As a consequence, the concerto took a long time to establish itself in the repertoire, especially after a disastrous premiere helped put paid to any of Elgar’s own hopes for the work as giving an impression of being “good and alive”. It turned out to be the last major work he created – a direct and honest statement of feelings regarding his place in a world forever changed, both in a public and private sense.

‘Cellist Inbal Megiddo had the measure of the work’s sombre mood right from the outset, her tones and phrasings circumspectly coloured, enough to convey the emotion without excess throughout the movement, though the orchestral tones in the first tutti were lovely, as was the soloist’s rhapsodic response. She allowed herself  greater warmth in the major key exchanges that followed, and rose to match the intensities of the orchestra’s subsequent climax, though falling away as quickly back into introspection for the pizzicato chords that heralded her accompanied recitative – here her ‘cello even cajoled the orchestra in places before initiating the scampering scherzo with its wry “catch me if you can” exchanges exhibiting a droll kind of mischief. With her all the way was Marc Taddei’s suitably reactive echoing of the solo instruments’s quixotic moods in the myriad orchestral detailings, earnest and intense in the opening movement and playful in the second (the slightly untidy final chord at the latter’s conclusion of little consequence….)

The third movement seemed at first almost reverential – here, from Megiddo and her fellow-participants, it was a superbly-controlled outpouring of nostalgic beauty, capturing both the music’s audible rapture and its central stillness – so much so, that I was surprised by the performers’ “bookending” this exquisite movement rather than letting its open-ended conclusion drift into ineffable space at the end and “give rise” to the finale as a matter of course – there’s no “attacca” instruction in the score, but we could have done without all the “next movement” rustling and re-adjusting (my only misgiving regarding the performance!)

The finale’s “swing” soon restored all through-lines, real or imagined, with this performance’s rumbustious girth, playful “hide-and-seek” routines and wry interchanges between the soloist and the groups putting  me in mind in places of the composer’s “Falstaff” to a never-before extent – particularly so in the almost tavern-like scene of inebriated jollity when the soloist joins the orchestral cellos for a mock-serious choral-like unison sequence, brief, but good-humoured! All the more heart-rending, then, was the “drifting -away” of this mood, as the composer emulated his Shakespearean alter ego, lamenting the passing of the “good times” with upward-thrusting phrases that descended, weeping unashamedly, on both ‘cello and strings….

A brief episode re-evoked a distant memory of the Adagio’s loveliness, before the soloist seized the mettle and, after the work’s heartbreak accepted the inevitable with a stirring and courageous gesture of grim acceptance! A sterling performance!

A different world awaited us after the interval, with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, written by the composer in 1943 in the United States at the invitation of the renowned conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky. Bartok was seriously ill by this time, and in exile from his homeland due to the Nazi threat throughout Europe, so the commission came as a much needed boost to his waning creative energies – he was able to write several other works  as well as the Concerto (its title referring to the “concerto grosso” aspect of the music, similar to Elgar’s work, but much larger in scale and across the whole orchestral spectrum.)

My introduction to this work was through Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, who was actually a pupil of Bartók’s in Budapest, and who recorded the Concerto several times, besides coming to New Zealand in 1973 and conducting the work with the NZSO in Wellington (for me an unforgettable concert experience!). Still, in line with my memory of Orchestra Wellington’s outstanding Shostakovich series from last year I was eager to hear what Marc Taddei would inspire his players to achieve with Bartók’s masterpiece – and I wasn’t disappointed. Again, as with the Elgar works of the first half, the most compelling quality of the music-making was the bringing out of the character of the work’s sound-world right from the beginning – the mysterious opening proclaimed kinship to the composer’s characteristic “night” pieces, the lower strings enunciating a series of fourths in response to which the upper strings and winds sounded similarly atmospheric undulating figures. Throughout the first movement these leaping fourths and their immediate inversions played an important thematic role, both in exciting fugal sequences for strings and stirring brass passages, as did gentler moments like the oboe’s lullabic mid-movement figure which echoed throughout the more lyrical sections. Everything was given the space it needed to proclaim its significance to the moment as well as to the whole.

The Concerto’s two Allegretto movements are the best-known to audiences and most readily remembered. Both were spectacularly presented here, the second being the famous Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Couples) with its sequence of folk-oriented melodies for pairs of instruments, each playing in finely-wrought parallel with its partner at different intervals; and the fourth a somewhat notorious Intermezzo interotto, whose fame rests on Bartok’s “lampooning” of a theme of Dmitri Shostakovich’s in his wartime “Leningrad” Symphony, a simple marching tune drawing forth cackling trills from woodwinds and vulgar sliding raspberries from the brass (on this occasion, from the trombones, easily the most gloriously blatant and visceral spoofings I’ve ever heard in concert or on record!), before being sent packing, with little more than a whimper!

The work’s two remaining movements were no less spell-binding – and I was simply and truly blown away by the orchestral response Taddei got from his players in the central palindromic Elegia, right from the ”night-music” ambiences of the opening (in which we seemed lifted up through the darkness and into extra-terrestrial regions), and through a coruscating series of searing cries from a string section playing well above its weight  and reinforced by full-blooded wind-descents  and biting brass chords with timpani – incredibly intense string-playing along with extraordinary timbral ambiences (and with lovely work from the violas at one point). But the intensities summoned up by the string-playing here in particular brought back to me something of what Dorati got from his NZSO players all those years ago – as then, with an extraordinary amalgam of incisiveness and eloquence!

After all of this, the finale represented something of a release, with plenty of ebullience from all the players, Taddei creating a veritable ferment of excitement  from all sections, the winds also enjoying their fugato-like passage before introducing a new theme which went like wildfire through the rest of the orchestra – such an infectious mood of exhilaration with the brass and timpani capping it off splendidly! The tongue-in-cheek string fugato got a querulous response from the winds, who took the argument into subaqueous regions, until what sounded like an orchestral dishwasher on rinse-cycle was suddenly thrown open and everything and everybody tumbled out, picked themselves up and skedaddled towards something of a well-deserved grandstand finish – a younger audience would have perhaps leapt to its feet after such a comprehensive orchestral display, but the ovation was still suitably warm-hearted and appreciative. I had a feeling that, in the midst of all the excitement Marc Taddei might have forgotten to acknowledge his horn section at the end – or perhaps its members simply missed their cue! Whatever the case, all the musicians were heroes – and my previous cheek-by-jowl memories of hearing this work performed will now have to be updated in the most positive and enduring way!

A world-encircling winter solstice concert compendium – from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra with Virginie Pacheco, Sam Zhu and Ewan Clark

CLAIRE COWAN* ( Aotearoa New Zealand) – Legend of the Trojan Bird (2008)
EDWARD GREGSON (England) – Concerto for Tuba (1978)
AMY BEACH (United States) – Symphony in E Minor “Gaelic” (1896)

Sam Zhu (tuba)
Virginie Pacheco* (assistant conductor)
Ewan Clark (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 21st June 2026

Winter Solstice day in Wellington! and with it a venturesome programme of music from the Wellington City Orchestra! True, there was little or no ostensible relationship as regards the pieces’ content to the Solstice date and its marking of the venue’s furthermost separation from the sun – but as the concert featured three pieces new to the orchestra’s schedules, the musical territories we were taken to today seemed to have an appropriate sense of something out of the ordinary. This was further underlined by the cosmopolitean nature of the works and their origins, almost as if the music-making was putting a kind of Shakespearean girdle about the earth, beginning very properly with homegrown sounds and straightaway circumventing the globe before returning to our south seas via the Americas!

I thought it all fell excitingly in line with the general adventurousness of the orchestra’s recent repertoire, in terms of the programme’s relative unfamiliarity, and its attendant technical and interpretative challenges. Each WCO concert over the last couple of seasons has sparked interest in what has seemed to me like an encouraging rejuvenation of Wellington’s concert-going scene – with an increased proportion of both new and less familiar works in concerts a stimulating feature

This concert was no exception, with a trio of works notable for its diversity as such, besides representing different eras of musical history, and a variety of genres, in this case a miniature version of an orchestral tone-poem (Claire Cowan’s 2008 ”Legend of the Trojan Bird”), a 1978 concerto for tuba and orchestra (from Englishman Edward Gregson) and a fully-fledged romantic symphony (1896) by the American composer Amy Cheney Beach. I’ve not been able to find any other instance of this latter work being performed in this country, which possibly gives the occasion the additional distinction of being an Aotearoa New Zealand premiere – though I would have thought the organisers would have made mentioned of such a circumstance had it been the case.

As with previous recent concerts, one of the items was assigned to the orchestra’s Assistant Conductor, Virginie Pacheco, in this case Claire Cowan’s concise and evocative work “Legend of the Trojan Bird”, one dating from Cowan’s student years, during which she wrote the piece for the Auckland Youth Orchestra in 2008. Though not printed in the programme, a poem, presumably written by the composer, outlines the music’s trajectories, the music in effect elaborating what the poem’s words describe – the coming of the bird to “the ancient city” bringing a “moving shadow” of darkness along with the visitor’s  “dangerous beauty”. The music by turns depicted both the bird’s obvious mechanical attributes  – “wooden wings flapping, squeaking, lurching and shuddering”  along with more transformative modes, resulting in trajectories of soaring flight. Here, the rhythmic mechanical aspects become more vertiginous as the sounds “swoop, hover, soar”, before achieving, in its song a lovely “conversation with the neighbourhood of stars”- after which it disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. In every sense the scoring was magically ambient and ear-catching, holding one’s attention right to the mystical “stellar conversation” at the piece’s end. Conductor and orchestra achieved, I thought, miracles of evocation throughout every moment of the piece – a wondrous experience.

A different, more down-to-earth encounter was enacted by the performers in the next item, bringing both tuba soloist Sam Zhu and conductor Ewan Clark to the platform.  This was English composer Edward Gregson’s 1978 concerto for tuba, a piece obviously indebted to the latter’s historic compatriot Ralph Vaughan Williams with his similarly-wrought work for the instrument – Gregson at one point in the first movement unashamedly quotes the earlier work in an appropriate act of tongue-in-cheek homage, bringing a smile to the faces of those “in the know”, though there were many more felicities to be enjoyed, such as the wondrously cavernous notes Sam Zhu coaxed out of the ambient depths slumbering within his instrument!

A second movement demonstrated in places the expressive range of the instrument, its lyrical, and, in places, somewhat anguished tones far removed from the humour and rumbustions of the opening, partnered by some haunting wind playing sequences, and featuring a great percussion-capped climax at one point before the music drew up its folds of sound and returned to its dark silences. We were given a “return to life” by the finale, with marching pizzicato at the outset accompanying some jolly “tuba-triplets” and which then morphed into a festive dance! Sam Zhu’s instrument then gave us an almost lullabic moment with some pendulous winds as well as a briefly-philosophical like cadenza, before being marched off triumphantly at the end by the band as if “spoils from a day’s successful tuba-watching” – a great success!

So to the concert’s much-awaited second half and a symphony by the remarkable Amy Beach,a work which, at the time caused quite a stir with its first performance in Boston in1896, as it was the first symphony composed by an American woman to be performed by a major orchestra. Beach  had begun her musical career primarily as a pianist, and had already appeared as a soloist with the Boston Symphony when just seventeen years of age. However her marriage shortly afterwards resulted in her giving up her performing career for a number of years and concentrating upon composition. Largely self-taught, she drew her inspiration from both the “classics” and from the music that was still new in the 1880s, Brahms, Wagner. Liszt and Dvorak. Her compositions beside the Symphony included a Piano Concerto, a Mass and many chamber works and songs, which, after a period of neglect, are finding their way back into recent concert schedules everywhere.

Beach was a member of a group of composers from New England whose goal was to develop a uniquely “American” style of composition through combining traditional classical structures and forms with indigenous melodies and rhythms (such as Afro-American spirituals and folk melodies (Antonin Dvorak, who lived and worked for a period in New York was a passionate advocate of this principle in his composition teaching at the American National Music Conservatory).  Beach’s contemporaries included George Whitfield Chadwick,  Horatio Parker, John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote and Edward MacDowell  – despite the esteem she was held in, she still had to overcome prevailing attitudes towards her “women composer” status, even when positively expressed – it was Chadwick who, when congratulating Beach on the success of her Symphony, described his “thrill of pride” that such a fine work had been produced by someone whom he considered had become “one of the boys”! However, Beach was determined also to advance women’s composition activities, helping to establish a Society of American Women Composers in 1925 and supporting the compositional careers of several who became known and admired, among them Margaret Ruthven Lang, and  Mabel W. Daniels, as well as the French-born Cecile Chaminade.

Beach’s Symphony in E-flat was given the name “Gaelic” because of her use of the technique of using “music of the people” for thematic and rhythmic inspiration as advocated by Dvorak, though with a significant difference – her “indigenous” affinities were with the folk-song and-dance material brought to America by her English, Scottish and Irish forbears, and the predominately ”irish” origins of the songs and dances quoted in the Symphony resulted in the work’s subtitle. She quoted the idea of the folk-themes expressing “the laments of a primitive people – their hopes and their dreams”.

Written between 1894 and 1896 this was Beach’s only Symphony, and fully expresses her determination to capture the flavour of the “music of the people” she knew best – the “Allegro con fuoco” opening of the work immediately expresses a rich, dark chromatic Romanticism, reminiscent of some of Liszt’s and Wagner’s music, mysterious swirlings punctuated by great calls and declamatory gestures. Solo winds then quoted from both Beach’s own music, a song “Dark is the Night” and from a Gaelic dance-tune, with solo clarinet, oboe, flute and horn splendidly doing the thematic honours, their traditional exposition, development and recapitulation roles coming to the fore throughout the movement, and with remarkably assured support from strings, brass and percussion in various sequences.

The second movement charmingly began “Alla Siciliana” before transforming itself into an Allegro vivace – lovely work at the outset from the solo horn, followed by the oboe quoting a beguiling Irish tune “The little field of barley” (along with other winds), after which the strings magically ushered in dancing, scampering and rumbusting textures to captivating effect! – a sudden  luftpause then brought horn, clarinet and flute as harbingers of a gorgeous cor anglais rendition of the “Little field” melody, to which the strings and brass addeed their voices, and the various winds “paired up” with fragments of the melody, until the scampering strings returned to round off the movement’s fairytale enchantment!!

The brasses announced the opening of the third movement’s “Lento”, which the winds carried on, before the solo violin presented a kind of recitative, joined by the solo cello – we then got an evocative  melody called “Cushlamachree” led by the ‘cello and joined by the oboe, and strings. This led to an epic, almost “Smetana/Ma Vlast-like” section featuring a series of “great views” from the whole orchestra, the solo horn leading the way in a series of wind and brass solos cycled about the orchestra! soundscape, with beautiful solos aplenty! The solo violin adroitly introduced a major-key melody – presumably one called “Which way did she go?” –  which built up to an almost angst-flavoured climax, before restating the first melody, Beach here displaying her compositional mastery with variants of the themes in major and minor, and with the interchanges brought to a particularly piquant conclusion.

I had found the symphony’s finale something of a protracted puzzle on first hearing a recording, but this performance held the structure together steadfastly and seemed to make everything work, right from its vigorous and declamatory “ready! – set!” introduction, indicating the onset of an adventurous journey – after this vigorous opening came a lyrical counter-subject in a major key, not unlike that in the finale of Sergei Rachmaninov’s E Minor Symphony, written a decade or so later. A strange, moodily restless passage followed, which took some time to build back the energies of the opening, the players keeping their heads and fiercely concentrating upon the music’s “search for redemption” which came with the horns sounding the alarm and rousing the brass and the rest of the orchestra to readiness! With that, and the major-key second subject’s return, the skies suddenly cleared, and the music raced to its close as jubilantly and decisively as might have been expected.

I thought, at the end of the work, that Ewan Clark and the WCO players had completed something of a major achievement, here   – such an enthusiastic and spankingly capable performance! We were left to all babble our way homewards at the joy of such a discovery, and of experiencing a whole afternoon’s feisty and absorbing listening!

NZSO reaches for Mahler’s “Titan” via Ades and Korngold

Posted on by Peter Mechen

James Ehnes (violin) and  Gemma New (conductor)  play Korngold’s Violin Concerto

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents “Titan”

THOMAS ADES –  The Origin of the Harp (NZ Premiere)
ERICH KORNGOLD – Violin Concerto in D Major
GUSTAV MAHLER – Symphony No. 1 “Titan”
James Ehnes (violin)
Gemma New (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday 22nd May 2026

Reviewed by Leila Lois
for Middle C

The evening opened with promise, with a bright and warm introduction from Gemma New, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s conductor and Artistic Advisor. As the first woman to hold the post of principal conductor at NZSO, New never fails to show charm and voracity. She beamingly announced the programme for the evening, which included the New Zealand premiere of Thomas Adès’ The Origin Of The Harp, Korngold’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the “Titan”.

The night’s selection was delightfully whimsical, the first piece following the tale – a Celtic water nymph (of Ondine proportions) who falls in love with a mortal and tragically struggles to leave behind the ocean. One might have expected something dark and turgid but instead, the piece shimmered with phrases that at first lapped like gentle waves, then writhed and tumbled. In this tone-poem, composed in four short parts, the harp itself was not featured but suggested, appearing at the start of the fourth and final section, as a surprise, melting into the symphony as an epic denouement.

For this piece, the programme notes told us Adès implies the harp by damping the strings of a piano with BluTack, a perfectly innovative and slightly off-kilter complement to Mahler’s inventiveness in the symphony to come. A short, soothing piece that opened the evening perfectly.

Next came the Violin Concerto in D Major by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Famous for creating Romantic style film scores, Korngold fled Nazi Germany for the Hollywood Hills in1934. The concerto found the perfect receptor in soloist James Ehnes, who realised the piece with rare care and attention, such that it was mesmeric to watch and hear. He is truly virtuoso in violin, his tone regal yet sweet – honeyed yet clean. His playing is also remarkably expressive. Beyond this, the connection between New and Ehnes was so compelling that it felt like they were the only two in the concert hall. New’s whole frame was tenderly tilted towards Ehnes, almost lovingly leaning into the melody. A synergistic moment. The piece ended with an encore where Ehnes played with feverish brilliance.

The focal piece of the night came last in the billing, Mahler’s First Symphony, also known as the “Titan”. The piece famously starts in a flood-lit forest, and the woodwind section spiralled through this deliciously on the night. Allegedly the inspiration for this first movement in the symphony came from Gustav Mahler’s childhood memory, where his father took and left him in the forest, and he spent the whole day immersed in the woodland world, enraptured.

In the second part of the opening this really shone through in the gorgeous wooden structure of the inside of the Michael Fowler Centre and exuded a sense of warmth, and calm, despite the notorious volume of Mahler’s scores. The next movement was more energetic, with the rustic party and raucous feel of the cheerful ‘ländler’ (a kind of folkloric waltz), somersaulting through the hall. The warmth of the strings and heartiness of the percussion in this section was led well – special kudos to those string players and percussionists respectively!

Onto the third movement – the emotional heart and most unnerving part of the symphony. The famous distorted solo double bass solo led expertly by Joan Perarnau Garriga played “Frère Jacques” in a minor key, giving it a grotesque, dirge-like quality. My friend, who went in “cold” to the symphony quickly picked up the unsettling familiarity of the melody, and so Mahler’s way of playing with our expectations was evident. The sardonic funeral march quality was well executed, with the famed drunken-sounding trumpets guided by section
principal, Michael Kirgan.

The final movement broke the strangeness of this with an anguished stormy brass-heavy sound, that roiled over the audience like a tempest. Again, the percussion was precise and impassioned, full of the unmistakable spirit of Mahler.

Overall a wonderfully curated night that left audiences inspired, with the Mahlerian counterpoints, tinges of the unexpected and whimsical, folkloric shades.

Wellington Youth Orchestra with Mark Carter serves up an orchestral feast.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra with Mark Carter at St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace  –  photo credit:  Cindy Young Waldron

SIBELIUS – Finlandia
ELGAR – Suite No. 2 from “The Wand of Youth”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – A London Symphony

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter, conductor

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, May 3rd, 2026

“Pines to Pastures” was the Wellington Youth Orchestra’s programme-title for its first 2026 concert – it succinctly described the book-ends containing the action-packed musical journey we were taken upon by the orchestra and its inspirational conductor Marc Carter throughout an eventful Sunday afternoon. The programme featured the music of three composers whose names often appear on the lists of “master orchestrators” –  Sibelius, Elgar and Vaughan Williams – with each of the pieces’ very different evocations bringing its own particular technical and interpretative set of challenges for the players to grapple with. The end result was a triumph – throughout the concert the playing regaled us with wall-to-wall instances of ear-catching detailings, characterfully-wrought vignettes and larger scale scenarios of beauty, drama and excitement. Every note sounded was accorded, to my ears, a kind of living, pulsating quality, with the players’ concentration seeming never to flag  nor the energies falter.

Opening with Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia”, the big, dark-browed brasses at the start straightaway  focused our attention, contrasting sharply with the plangent pastoral sounds of the winds, and then the passionately insistent strings, and with the winds and strings building the urgencies towards the brass’s sharp-edged calls – the wonderfully “grinding” lower strings conveyed a sense of a force about to be unleashed as the rest of the strings and the brass traded outbursts of pent-up energies. All of this led into the precipitous allegro, with tumultuous percussion heralding the driving orchestral forces, joyously and vigorously responding to the great horn calls, and surging excitingly into and through the climaxes! That done, and the exhausted forces having given their all, the way was open for, firstly the winds, and then the strings to sonorously intone the famous ”tune” that has subsequently found its way into all kinds of celebratory and worshipful scenarios world-wide. It was fitting that, having regained their composure, the more combatative sections of the orchestra were then able to rouse themselves for a return to the allegro in its most celebratory tones, capped off by a splendidly conclusive, and full-blooded “Amen-like” coup de grace!

Stirring though the Sibelius performance was, I subsequently felt that it was during the playing of the various dances comprising the next item (an adorable suite of dances by Edward Elgar called “The Wand of Youth”), that the orchestra seemed more relaxed and assured, having “played themselves in” during the Sibelius for the concert’s remainder.  While “Finlandia” was exciting, it felt very “tightly-wound” throughout – with the Elgar, however, conductor and players seemed to “expand” further, and fill parts of the music up with a different kind of relaxed exuberance. I particularly noticed how both “The Little Bells” and “The Wild Bears” pieces exuded such great warmth, whole-heartedness and unbuttoned “swagger” in places. While “The Little Bells” has always been a favourite of mine, due to its heart-wrenching echt-Elgarian “second” theme (such a beautiful counter-theme on the lower strings the second time through! – and I was especially taken by the excellent playing of the glockenspiel by a nimble, if unsighted percussionist), I did so enjoy the orchestra’s spectacularly exuberant playing of “The Wild Bears” –  it was wonderful stuff (though I had to strain to make out that very first and well-remembered triangle “ping!”)!  These dances were from two orchestral suites based on some of the composer’s childhood musical sketches he had made when aged eleven, for a kind of “fantasy play” which he and his siblings were to perform, and which were miraculously relocated much later, and reworked for our pleasure!).  A small point here – I realised after the concert that I had NO memory of the orchestra playing the enchanting “Fountain Dance” listed in the programme – was the spell cast by the music so great that I actually took leave of my senses for a few minutes during the proceedings? – or did Mark Carter and the orchestra simply omit the dance?

No matter – there were even greater landmarks looming on the musical horizon for the players, in the form of a four-movement symphony that’s become almost as iconic as anything written by Elgar – this was his younger English contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A London Symphony”, first completed and then extensively revised by its composer after its first performance in 1914 (this ‘original version” still exists, found nowadays in a revelatory Chandos recording made by the late, lamented conductor Richard Hickox).  The symphony continued to be revised (and even occasionally performed in “newer” manifestations) until a final authorized performing version appeared, published in 1936 (Wikipedia has an absorbing account of the genesis and various appearances of different versions of this work!). Richard Hickox’s fascinating reading of the “original” gives the work’s supporters cause for both lamentation (that so many passages in the original were removed) and relief (that the work displays increased coherence and stature with those same passages excised)!

One doubts whether the “original” 1914 version will ever outstrip the 1936 “finished” work in popularity, but it certainly adds to the fascination of the work in particular and the trajectories of the composing process in general. Vaughan Williams was certainly no Bruckner regarding the latter’s woeful lack of confidence in his own, composing abilities, but he did listen to advice from friends, including interpreters of his music who occasionally might suggest the occasional change or an edit here or there. He certainly retained a great affection for this work, and is on record as declaring, later in life, that it was perhaps still “the favourite” of all his symphonic offspring!

The work gives a confident impression from the outset as indeed being a “Symphony by a Londoner” (as the composer later mused over what he thought should perhaps have been the work’s “proper title”). The opening Lento, here. with lower strings and murmuring winds sounding atmospheric chords and lines was an evocation of a city before dawn magically emerging from the darkness, the instruments gradually opening up the vistas as the ambiences lightened and everything gradually came alive – the Westminster chimes sounded, and amid fanfare calls the sun’s rays seemed to suddenly break through and reveal the pulsating heartbeat of a city! We got plenty of activity from the strings in response to the joyously percussive fanfares, and the jaunty “walking movement”, firstly from the winds, then the strings, and then the brass carried the exuberant rhythms onwards towards a return of the great introductory fanfare of the city’s awakening! The  players enjoyed the folk-dance-like ditties and the exuberant shouts alike as the city boisterously flexed its human muscles, then took us to quieter, more subdued vistas where the melancholy strains from the cor anglais initiated moments of reflection, leading then to a ‘cello solo joined by other strings – a poignant episode, practically chamber-music! – and beautifully sounded by the players, obviously revelling in such gorgeous string-writing!  The fanfares sounded again in the distance and the energies reawakened, gradually rebuilding and redoubling the previous excitements and working up to a last, protracted fanfare resonating through to the end of a long-held final chord.

“Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon” was the composer’s description of the slow movement’s opening – a beautiful solo from the cor anglais rose out of quiet string passages, the strings repeating the melody and extending the tranquil mood – a gentle horn and trumpet passages, and the strings returned more impassioned than before – altogether a heartfelt evocation – a solo viola fluently began a series of atmospheric street-call-like phrases, answered by other instruments and punctuated by the percussion’s gentle jingling of cab harnesses passing by, and drawing forth a rapturous burst of nostalgic tones from the whole orchestra – it was scalp-pricking stuff! – all beautifully evoked! It was left to the cor anglais, horn and solo cello to re-establish the prevailing atmospheres, giving the movement’s last few sounds to the solo viola once again.

The scherzo was a lively nocturne, with specific instructions from the composer to the listener, to “imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of the Strand….with its crowded streets and flaring lights….” Conductor Mark Carter encouraged a delightfully insoucient swagger from his players throughout this engaging music relying on accent and nuance rather than speed to invest the music with plenty of characterful “bounce” – this music always reminds me of certain books I read when young about English childhood adventures, such as “The Otterbury Incident” and “Stig of the Dump”, with their somewhat rollicking, devil-may-care attitudes adopted by the protagonists! I particularly enjoyed the orchestra’s detailing throughout, (including an especially spectacular piece of horn-playing of the main theme at one point!) – and the winds and percussion also had great fun with the trio-like interlude featuring the sounds of a busker’s wheezing accordion! And conductor and players “coaxed” the dying strains of the day from out of the movement’s end so very sensitively.

Every time I hear this work’s finale, with its “cry of pain” at the very opening, I find myself wondering just what Vaughan Williams was meaning – it’s almost Mahlerian in its unexpected angst and darkness of aspect! Not unlike Mahler’s Fifth Symphony’s opening, it has an explosive beginning, then settles into a march-like episode of grim, dark-browed intent! – was this REALLY VW’s view of London? I remember reading somewhere very early on that VW was here expressing the city’s darker, more tragic side – the march-like rhythms hinting at the misery of those down on their luck, hungry, unemployed, and even homeless. Other commentators have referred to the city’s traditional pomp and ceremonial gravitas over centuries, which are expressed here in tones of sombre grandeur. Typically, the composer kept his thoughts largely to himself regarding much of his music, though in this particular movement’s case he famously referred to H.G. Wells’s 1908 novel Tono-Bungay, which contains a passage describing the novel’s narrator sailing down the River Thames and seeming “to be passing all England in review”, as influencing the work’s elegiac closing pages, beginning with a reiteration of the first movement’s “Westminster Chimes” and then simply drifting unhurriedly to a close……the concluding words in the novel are – “The river passes…..London passes….England passes.”

I hope I’m forgiven for dwelling on this aspect of the music besides writing about its performance – these references to aspects of the composer’s inspiration for the work can’t help but further inform my opinion of the excellence of the Youth Orchestra’s performance and the surety of the guiding hand of conductor Mark Carter throughout. It’s precisely that tragic and  lament-like aspect that hovers over this music which was what these players brought out so movingly – the silence at the piece’s end in this performance was indicative of the effect it all had on its audience – we had been witness to something extraordinary, something that deserved its moment of contemplation as well as acclaim at the very end. I’ve refrained from describing anything specific at this point in the work – it all seemed integrated and inevitable, just as night follows day, with the players’ energies and concentration seemingly unflagging! And afterwards, who could blame them for wanting to conclude the afternoon with something a bit more festive and rousing! – especially since it was the return of  “The Wild Bears” which came to the rescue of the symphony’s “stricken” conclusion with even more panache than in the first-half performance – and THIS time I definitely and unequivocally heard that wonderful, nostalgic tintinnabulation of the triangle first time round! I went home after hearing all of that as happily as any concertgoer had a right to be – no affirmation could be more appropriate or deserved!