Tag: orchestral

Wellington’s Youth Orchestras show the way through is together!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

“SYMPHONIC FUSION”
Wellington Youth Orchestra and Wellington Youth Sinfonietta
Mark Carter (WYO) and Christiaan van der Zee (WYS) – conductors
Xavier Ngaro (violin)

SUPPE – Overture “Poet and Peasant”
BRUCH – Violin Concerto No. 1 Op.26
WALTON – Suite from “Henry V”
PONCHIELLI – “Dance of the Hours” (from “La Gioconda”)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Waltz No. 2 (from “Jazz Suite”)
BIZET – “L’Arlesienne – Suite No. 2”

Alan Gibbs Centre, Wellington College, Dufferin St., Wellington

Saturday, 19th October, 2024

At a time that could be regarded as reaching an apex of dissatisfaction in a turbulent year for the capital, Wellington’s youthful orchestral musicians who make up both the Wellington Youth Orchestra and the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta came together triumphantly for a concert on Saturday afternoon at Wellington College’s Alan Gibbs Centre. The young players and their music directors demonstrated the kind of unity, strength and brilliance of purpose and achievement that comes with close co-operation and mutual understanding  –  a kind of example well worth emulating in public life! The  efforts of these young musicians at once highlighted and freely gave quantities of joy and motivation and fulfilment, to the enjoyment of all present.

Wellington Youth Orchestra is the major orchestra in the region for young musicians of Grade Eight and above status, the players working with Music Director Mark Carter on a number of projects each year including a concerto award for an orchestra member who excels at a particular instrument – this year the Concerto Award was won by Xavier Ngaro, who today performed the Bruch First Violin Concerto. The orchestra’s membership is “fed” by players whose training takes place with the “other” youth ensemble in the capital, the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, whose members have achieved a Grade Five-plus level of proficiency, and whose conductor is Christiaan Van der Zee. Both groups encourage opportunities for soloists and composers and would-be conductors to develop their skills, with the Sinfonietta occasionally collaborating with other youth ensembles from other regions in valuable combined training weekends.

A “manifestation” of all of this was Saturday’s concert, a concentrated youth-fest of artistic expression during which the musicians’ committed energies and efforts seemed to thrill its audience to pieces! – a gathering which, what was more, included people like myself who were there for the music alone, and not “connected” through any ostensible on-stage representation – in fact after the concert I walked down to the road to my car alongside a young man whom I happened to ask “how he had enjoyed the concert and whether a family member was participating” to which he replied that he had no such connection with the event but merely an interest in the programme that was being played, which, he told me, he had seen advertised, and had, upon attending, enjoyed immensely!

The older “Youth Orchestra” under Mark Carter’s direction took the stage for the first half, which opened with an item promising plenty of excitement and variety – the colourful evergreen favourite by Franz von Suppé, the Overture “Poet and Peasant”. Such a beautifully-nuanced, velvet-like brass sound at the music’s very beginning, we got here! – and answered with gorgeously-hushed strings. The orchestral tutti, as was the case all through the concert, sounded somewhat muffled due to the stage’s curtained surroundings, but it didn’t lessen the excitement of the playing, and allowed the beauty of the cello-and-harp passage which followed to make its effect,  with the winds adding a gracefully-shaped melody along the way, the cellist’s awkward ascending phrase midway a shade unconfident-sounding but still resolute and determined! And what a great start there was to the allegro, with furiously buzzing strings and thunderous brass and percussion, and plenty of “snap” to the brass chording – Carter didn’t rush the players through the orchestral turmoil, but allowed it all plenty of weight and tremendous momentum, after which the famous waltz-theme glided in most beguilingly, with properly winsome textures, and with the phrasings allowing the “Viennese” charm of the music its proper effect. The closing passages of the work were no less impressively done, the strings’ “swirling figurations” leading to a scalp-tingling acceleration into the coda, and a “bringing the house down” effect at the end – great stuff!

A space then had to be cleared on the platform for a soloist for today’s concerto, which was Max Bruch’s G Minor Violin Concerto No. 1, here performed by the winner of the orchestra’s 2024 Concerto Competition, 17 year-old Xavier Ngaro from Lower Hutt, Wellington, an orchestra member and a pupil of ex-NZSQ violinist Douglas Beilman. The work is, of course one of the most popular works in the violin concerto repertoire, and (judging by the number of performances I’ve heard from young violinists over the years) obviously a popular choice for budding virtuosi wishing to demonstrate their skills, Xavier Ngaro on this showing certainly being no exception.

The work’s famous “laden” opening atmosphere properly set the scene for the violinist’s first entry – Ngaro’s opening notes were richly sounded and filled with properly burgeoning intent, inspiring a full-blooded response from the orchestra, and a forceful series of further “challenges” from the soloist. The latter sounded completely in command of his passagework before dropping into a beautiful cantabile tone for the second subject material, all sensitively and resolutely accompanied, as were the feathery sinuous solo passages which followed, leading up to a great and vigorous orchestra “tutti” with the conductor getting trenchant playing from his strings, the stuff romantic concerti are made of!

The soloist’s cadenza-like flourishes which followed then led to the orchestra’s great and luxurious announcement of the slow movement’s introduction (beautiful playing!), which the violinist joined via both hushed and forthright passages, a performance which here had plenty of emotional give-and-take (I could imagine the young man over time finding even more “heartbreak” in this music, more “hushed” tones than we got here – but these will doubtless develop naturally in due course…) Though his tone was “swallowed up” by the orchestra’s counter-themes in the movement’s climax, where there appeared some awkwardness when trying to reassert his lines, his re-entry just after the ‘tutti” was suitably big-hearted – and he managed a wonderful “soft-to-loud” transition passage which brought the movement to a close.

A well-rounded tutti was built up at the finale’s beginning, with Ngaro’s solo passages nimble and confident, if perhaps needing to develop a surer touch on the once-repeated three-note ascent of the opening theme, which seemed very slightly “skipped” (an interpretative choice, perhaps?) – elsewhere, there was confidently-essayed passagework leading up to the “big tune” of the movement, gloriously played by the orchestra and nicely “varied” by the soloist on repetition. He then confidently attacked the reprise of the finale’s opening, though I thought perhaps a degree of fatigue at this stage might have momentarily slowed his responses to some of the trenchant passagework which followed – however, towards the end I thought he pulled off that treacherous double stopped ascending hand-position that precedes the final orchestral tutti really well, which then in turn led to the coda – soloist, conductor and players gave these final bars plenty of excitement, earning everybody concerned a great ovation! It was appropriate that the young soloist was then presented with the Tom Gott Cup by none other than the award’s donor, in honour of the player’s Concerto Competition success – a memorable occasion!

An occasion of a different kind then followed – a performance of William Walton’s Suite for the film Henry V, with each of the movements preceded by speakers/actors reading lines from the play associated with the music. Two speakers were used, both giving their readings plenty of pleasing “oomph”, though I preferred having their faces and expressions visible at the front of the hall instead of (as one did) having them wandering down the aisle out of sight and to an extent out of earshot! But the added theatricality of it all was splendid, and certainly added to the impact of the music!

The famous “Prologue”, the “O for a muse of fire….” set the scene, paving the way for the music’s evocative beginning with gorgeous strings and a ravishing flute solo, followed by suitably ceremonial gesturings from brass and percussion, and stirringly martial expressions of intent. These were followed by a description of the death of Falstaff, King Henry’s spurned friend, the words in the play spoken by Mistress Quickly, but here by the second speaker regarding the Knight’s demise – “…all was cold as stone” – the music, a Passacaglia, touchingly capturing the mood of the scene.

Next came Henry’s “Once more into the breach, dear friends!….” from the first speaker, then augmented by the second with “On, on, you noble English!…..”, and concluding with the famous statement, “Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!”. Walton’s music was here wonderfully “pregnant” with foreboding and portent, the players capturing the scene’s growing excitement as the warlike gestures grew in intensity before breaking into action, the brass signalling the charge and the orchestra building the trajectories towards a grand tattoo of drums – fantastic playing from all concerned!

A subsidence to a contrasting sweetness was ushered in by lovely wind-playing, leading to a quote by Walton from Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne”, the lovely Bailiero melody – perhaps a third female actor/reader was again needed as the object of Pistol’s Act 2 Scene 3 farewell to his wife, Mistress Quickly “My love, give me thy lips…..” (its generality here provoked some amusement!), and his comrade Nym’s abashed refusal to do the same, with  “I cannot kiss – but that’s the humour of’t!…..Adieu!” – however, these words were the prelude to some of the score’s most beautiful music “Touch her sweet lips and part”, with the envoy-like strains most poignantly sounded by the players.

The work concluded with perhaps the most rousing of all of Shakespeare’s speeches, the famous “St.Crispin’s Day” exhortation made by Henry V at Agincourt to his soldiers, here  rather more thoughtfully proclaimed by the speaker than was perhaps usual, though still with its own resounding effect! Great ceremonial roulades then surrounded and threaded through the melody, all very festive and redolent of celebrations with accompanying  bell-like cascades of bells, brought off with true splendour by Carter and his musicians! This performance was actually my introduction to this music, due to my long-misplaced lack of regard for film music in general – and the occasion certainly shook my prejudices from off their foundations in this case, thanks largely to the playing’s vitality and atmosphere.

The interval saw the stage almost transmorgrified with the appearance of a different orchestra and conductor – this was the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, with their director, Christiaan van der Zee, a group exuding a similar “aura” of animated anticipation of a kind that one relishes so readily with youth performers! The group’s programme featured two “Sinfonietta-only” items, and a combined performance with the older orchestra to conclude the concert, a most enticing prospect for all concerned.

First came Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli’s justly famous “Dance of the Hours”, an orchestral interlude from his one-operatic-hit stage-work “La Gioconda”, something of a concert-hall classic, and made popularly famous some years ago when its principal melody was parodied by American comedian Allan Sherman in a hit song “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda” – one that has seemed to have, these days, mercifully sunk almost without a trace! this was a slightly “smoothed out” arrangement of the one I knew from the opera, missing out a whole middle section but finishing with the original’s fast-and-furious galop! Despite the simplifications it still all caught the original piquancy of the opening and the hell-for-leather excitement of the chase in the finale! After this, it was a great idea to feature Shostakovich’s wonderfully tongue-in-cheek “Waltz” from his “Jazz Suite No. 2” – I didn’t know the piece well enough to compare the performance with an “original”, but it all sounded “echt-Shostakovich” to my ears, with a sense of lurking unease, something almost sinister, about it – and, of course, the ironies of these “sweet young things” playing such music were almost palpable!

Came the finale of the concert – and we were warmly enjoined to “bear with us” by the organisers as they undertook the task of fitting two complete orchestras onto the concert platform (there was some inevitable “spillage” onto the auditorium floor in front, which neither mattered nor deterred the palpable excitement of it all!)  Christian van der Zee took the podium when all was ready, and the players plunged into the opening movement of Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne Suite No.2”. This set had become a sequel to the composer’s own selection of pieces from his incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet after the original production was a failure. Bizet’s first “Suite” of pieces proved entirely successful, but the composer died before he could make a second selection from the music – his friend Ernest Giuraud chose three more movements and added a Minuet from other music Bizet had composed, making a four-movement “L’Arlesienne – Suite No. 2”.

The opening Pastorale began grandly and somewhat unexpectedly, given its rustic title! – a big, rolling ball of orchestral texture, relieved somewhat by a charming  wind version of the opening and piquant changes between the winds and a saxophone – the two orchestras together made a splendid sound at the opening’s reprise – again the music detoured to more pastoral realms with a trio-like dance for winds  over “chugging” string rhythms almost resembling a polonaise, before the music modulated imposingly back to the opening!

The second movement sounded no less formidable at its a solemn full-orchestra unison beginning, eventually giving way to a lilting melody for the saxophone (a relatively “new” instrument to orchestras at that time), all very “nostalgic-sounding” in a slightly disturbing way, and even more so when the great orchestral “unison” reappeared! The young players, however, sailed through the piece’s emotional ambivalences, giving it all they had! The beautiful Minuet which followed featured the harp and flute, both enchantingly sounded, and then joined by the ubiquitous saxophone. As for the final riotous Farandole, introduced by an excerpt from the composer’s own Prelude from the First L’Arlesienne Suite, it began quietly, gathered inexorable momentum throughout the sequences and finally burst out with both the Prelude and Farandole themes combined, to prodigiously festive effect! Such was its impact that at the conclusion the players spontaneously took up their instruments and repeated the piece, creating a “second wave” of energy and exuberance that rocked the auditorium with delight at its conclusion. A better advertisement for the general, all-round efficacy of youthful music-making could never have been devised!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wellington City Orchestra’s mix of enchantment and exoticism at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Overture “Cosi fan tutte” K.588
MOZART – Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major K.299
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Symphony No. 3 in C Major Op.32

Karen Batten (flute)
Michelle Velvin (harp)

Wellington City Orchestra
Andrew Atkins (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 22nd September. 2024

To the title of this review I was tempted to add the word “enterprising”, in referring to the inclusion in Wellington City Orchestra’s programme of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s little-known and until recently rarely locally-performed Third Symphony (“You mean there are two others?” someone quipped to me at the concert during the interval!). I was therefore amazed when a search of on-line recording catalogues revealed no less than five recordings featuring the work, and in most cases as part of a set of all three symphonies – until recently only “Antar”, the Second Symphony, had any kind of recorded history. So, while not exactly a neglected and forgotten work per se, the Third Symphony had been something of a rarity in Aotearoa’s concert halls up to the present, and certainly deserved its airing on this occasion, thanks to the advocacy of conductor Andrew Atkins.

The concert’s other two works needed no such special pleading, though of Mozart’s instrumental concertos perhaps K.299, the Flute and Harp Concerto has a special place because of its attractive instrumental combination. It obviously needs a harp, an instrument less prolific than others in the composer’s “concerti canon”, but somehow its “specialness” seems an extra drawcard, adding to the beauty of the sounds generated by both the instrumental combination and the composer’s music.

As for the concert’s opening item, another work by Mozart, the Overture to “Cosi fan tutte” perhaps is the least “known” in concert-hall performance of the composer’s “big four” operatic overtures (it was the one of the four that didn’t make the “cut” in a recent Classic FM list of “Ten greatest Opera Overtures”) though it’s still a work of immense distinction, and one that has its own challenges. I liked conductor Andrew Atkins’ overall projection of the music, the introductory fanfare chords snappy and alert and the flowing oboe solo characterfully shaped (both gestures are repeated), before the whole orchestra stated the opera’s “signature phrase” emphatically sung by the male principals at a later stage in the opera – “Co-si-fan-tu-tte!” – and the mischievous allegro theme skips in, alternating with emphatic syncopated chordings and repeated perky phrases from the various solo woodwinds, which continue throughout the overture until the return of the “signature phrase” and a coda whose ending signals the “opera proper” to begin. While keeping the trajectories alive and bubbling, Atkins still gave the strings plenty of space in which to articulate their phrases with those tricky, syncopated opening entries, something that was less troublesome for the wind-players, whose chattering solos invariably began ON the beat!  It all set the ambiences tingling for the delightful Flute and Harp concerto to follow.

A bright, freshly-voiced opening paved the way for the soloists’ unison entry, scintillations of colour and energy whose interplay gave as much active stimulation as more passive enjoyment, thanks to both the composer’s inexhaustible invention and his soloists’ spontaneous-sounding relishing of so many details, whether in individual exchange, or in tandem with the orchestra – the sense of delight at times over-rode my duties as a reviewer, so that I had to often break the spell and remember to write a comment regarding this and that felicity! I particularly enjoyed the first-movement cadenza which began slowly an almost suggestively and teasingly wrought between the players – Karen Batten’s flute was well-nigh vocal at times with her turns of phrase, and Michelle Velvin’s harp sparkled and glistened in response, her concluding flourish before the orchestra re-entered a wonderful irruption of tongue-in-cheek temperament!

Conductor Atkins got a most charmingly poised and gracious opening tutti from the players at the slow movement’s beginning, to which the soloists brought episode after episode of enchantment, after which the finale danced in, the sprightly opening getting even livelier as the figurations took on even greater excitement! The harp took the lead, showing the flute the way, with both soloists then relishing Mozart’s unfailingly ear-catching invention in their exchanges. A lovely “where have we got to?” shared cadenza concluded with another spectacular harp flourish and the final tutti an “all-in” affair with the soloists at the forefront of the “payoff” chords – splendid! I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it so much!

An interval allowed time and space for the resplendent harp to be spirited over to one side, and for musicians and audience alike to prepare for the second half, and the eagerly-anticipated Rimsky-Korsakov Symphony. The work got off to an atmospheric start with horns calling across the orchestra soundscape to firstly winds and then strings, everything lovely and rhapsodic, with Atkins then encouraging plenty of momentum and muscle for a well-managed accelerando into the allegro  – this was classic “Russian festival” stuff with the reprise of the big, prancing tune especially invigorating. Some beautiful wind-playing then introduced a second subject, begun by the clarinet and forwarded by the oboe and strings, then a solo violin and flute, all poignantly sounded before Atkins danced everybody into the  development section, with firstly the strings and then the winds having a lot of fun with all kind of variants of both of the themes we’d so far heard. The brass and timpani then  called things together resplendently for a massive return of the allegro’s main tune – stirring stuff, here! – after which the winds, led by the clarinet, brought back (for our pleasure) the lovely second subject, commented on by various other winds and the solo violin. And then, Instead of the “great peroration” method of finishing a movement, conductor and players wound it all down quietly and poetically, concluding with gentle, po-faced pizzicato-and-wind notes.

Something of a challenge was posed by the composer’s 5/4 rhythms in the quixotic scherzo (marked “vivo”) which followed – unlike the stately step-wise processional of Tchaikovsky’s Allegro con grazia 5/4 movement in his “Pathetique” Symphony, these rhythms conjured up a positively mercurial momentum, whose trajectories I thought the players did a fantastic job of maintaining. I did wonder while listening whether it was out of mischievous intent towards or something akin to dislike of  orchestral players that led Rimsky-Korsakov to set them such a task, but on this occasion, to the WCO’s credit (and their conductor’s), the players kept those handfuls of semiquavers simmering for our delight – and at least the Trio’s contrastingly languorous melody gave all and sundry a bit of a rhythmic breather!

I thought the Andante  movement lovely, with horns and winds creating a gorgeous introduction here, from which the strings elaborated the melody, repeating its opening in different keys (a “soaring aloft” set of phrases made a particularly fetching impression) – the theme continued to draw in responses from all sides, alternating more excitable moments with the previous “soaring” mode – though largely monothematic, the mood had an enchantment of its own which held one’s interest to the point where the pulse quickened more purposefully and drove the sounds into a celebratory finale. Though the opening martial melody was perhaps over-worked, it all certainly demonstrated the composer’s skill as an orchestrator, and managed to weave in fragments of counter-themes by way of contrast, with playing sufficiently committed and colourful from all sections of the band keeping us mightily entertained right to the end. In all, I felt it was definitely worth a listen, and may well even be tempted into further symphonic investigations, having been reminded earlier that “there are two others!” So, definite kudos to Andrew Atkins, his soloists and supporting players for an absorbing and rewarding afternoon’s listening!

Revisiting Romance with Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Romantic Generation – Orchestra Wellington – August 2024

STRAVINSKY – The Fairy’s Kiss
KORNGOLD – Violin Concerto (1945)
HINDEMITH – Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria Von Weber

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 17th August 2024

With its latest concert presentation, “The Romantic Generation”, Orchestra Wellington has reached the halfway stage of what could justly be called its “richly inventive” 2024 season, with nary a foot put wrong in bringing to its audiences a repertoire which at once constantly challenges and almost invariably delights those who are drawn into the compulsive convictions of both its vision and brilliance of performance. Music Director Marc Taddei excels in this kind of exploratory undertaking, knowing just how far to push the boundaries of interest in and tolerance of the unfamiliar, and how to integrate such daring explorations into more familiar contexts.

The previous concert “The Classical Style” adroitly illustrated this idea, pairing the relatively unknown Piano Concerto by the “Les Six” French composer Germaine Tailleferre with standard classical repertory symphonies by Prokofiev and Beethoven. And the year’s opening concert “The Grand Gesture” even more daringly included a recently contemporary composer Lukas Foss’s responses to baroque masterpieces by JS Bach and Handel, as well as including some more consciously neo-baroque entertainment in the form of Igor Stravinsky’s 1920 “Pulcinella” Ballet Suite.

Now, here, with “The Romantic Generation” Taddei and his Orchestra turned the spotlight on romanticism by highlighting certain of its characteristics – its strains of exoticism, its cult of performance and its overtly heroic and emotional focus – from the perspectives of a later era. In a sense the evening’s presentation took our own ears simultaneously backwards and forwards in time, as the viewpoints we heard all came not directly from the Romantic era itself but from various twentieth-century composers applying their own interpretative styles to these already bygone romantic sensibilities. And, of course we ourselves have since moved into a new century, forming our own circumspect (and further enriched by experience) reactions to these processes.

The music of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky made a second appearance in the orchestra’s 2024 series tonight with the composer’s complete ballet “Le Baiser de la Fee” (The Fairy’s Kiss), a work inspired in this case by Stravinsky’s hero, Tchaikovsky. The story was based on Hans Christian Anderson’s dark tale of a child who is “marked” at birth by the kiss of a mysterious Fairy, one who returns later in life to claim him for her own. Stravinsky adapted a number of lesser-known piano and vocal works by the older composer (the best-known being the song “None but the Lonely Heart”) producing an attractively ambient continuum of danceable numbers, some of which conjure up Petrushka-like scenarios (much of the ballet’s Second Tableau “A Village Fete”), and some which go towards suggesting the high drama of Swan Lake (the conclusion of the Third Tableau “At the Mill”, when the Fairy returns to claim the by now young man for her own).

Mark Taddei and his players seemed to my ears to catch the music’s every mood at the performance, whether echt-Stravinsky or faux-Tchaikovsky – I must confess that the music “grew” on me the more I returned to it by way of preparing myself for the actual concert, overcoming my initial feeling that Stravinsky had “emasculated” much of Tchaikovsky’s overtly-expressed emotion with relatively dry, intellectually-conceived reconstructions. In fact I baulked at one writer’s assertion that ”Tchaikovsky’s faults – his banalities and vulgarities and routine procedures – are composed out of the music and Stravinsky’s virtues are composed into it”….my first reaction was that I preferred Tchaikovsky’s whole-hearted “banalities” to Stravinsky’s dry-as-dust tidy-ups! However, repeated hearings have softened this view, and I warmed to Marc Taddei’s direction and Orchestra Wellington’s superbly-articulated playing – too many stellar instrumental solos to list, and moment after moment of radiantly-voiced or scintillatingly-wrought ensemble. Particularly memorable was the return of the Fairy towards the end disguised as the young man’s fiancée (accompanied by the “None but the Lonely Heart” theme in various instrumental guises), with the tensions building up to the moment of the young man realising that he is, in fact, in the Fairy’s power and cannot escape – at that point not even Stravinsky could deny Tchaikovsky’s music its full emotional thrust, as the music takes the Fairy and her captive to “a land beyond time and place”.

A different world of sensibility was brought to view by Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, a work which brought into play both its composer’s richly-endowed sense of romantic and heroic adventure in his scores written for a number of legendary Hollywood films during the 1930s, and his ability to replicate a spectacularly virtuosic level of musical expression in a romantic concerto reaching back to the nineteenth century tradition begun by violinist Nicolo Paganini. We’ve become accustomed to Amalia Hall relinquishing her orchestral concertmaster’s role to tackle as soloist some of the world’s greatest violin concertos in the past – her performance of the Britten Violin Concerto last year remains a hauntingly resonant memory – and with fellow violinist Justine Cormack again substituting for her, we got another masterly display of virtuosity and sensibility from Hall which brought out all the work’s brilliance and lyricism. I loved that feeling of nothing being “forced” by the musicians, of everything instead unfolding as naturally and spontaneously as seemed to be required.

Amalia Hall with Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington playing the Korngold Violin Concerto – photo by  R.Bruce.Scott

Korngold used several themes from his film music for the work’s material throughout each of the three movements, the slow movement in its middle section having the kind of suggestible magic I associate with a certain episode in a work by Korngold’s greatest contemporary, Richard Strauss, his opera “Der Rosenkavalier” – the haunting wind chords that accompany the famous “Presentation of the Rose” scene in that work – even if Korngold’s work has a darker, more volatile quality. The rollicking finale which followed began with a kind of staccato jig whose trajectories delightedly seemed in places almost MC Escher-like in simultaneously ascending and descending, with soloist and orchestra never missing a beat, besides including episodes featuring beautiful lyrical variants of mood and colour before the work concluded with helter-skelter passages punctuated by exuberant horn calls.

Amalia Hall then treated us to an encore whose in situ identity was a mystery to everybody I spoke with afterwards, but was revealed in due course – this was Fritz Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice Op.6, obviously something of a virtuoso violinist’s calling-card, with ample variation of mood and detail – apparently it’s the famed violinist’s only extant opus for solo violin, and was something of a surprise for people like myself who know of Kreisler’s compositions only through his Viennese-salon and imitation-Baroque pieces. This was a full-blooded rhapsody-with-fireworks display which under Hall’s expert fingers brought the house down at the end!

Further ravishment of a slightly different kind awaited us before the concert’s final scheduled item, a work by Paul Hindemith with a title which one might think describes something impossibly turgid or dreary – Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by Carl Maria von Weber. In fact we were given a glimpse of the piece’s true character by the appearance of a strange, dulcimer-like instrument brought to the front of the stage, and the subsequent entry of a beautiful young Chinese woman who proceeded to play for us one of the “themes” used by Hindemith in his work. This was a melody that composer Carl Maria von Weber had “borrowed” from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionaire de Musique of 1767 (Rousseau considered music to be an ideal manifestation of different human cultures) to use as part of the former’s incidental music for Schiller’s adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot (Puccini used the same source for the story of his 1926 opera).

The instrument was a guzheng, on which the player, Jia Ling, beautifully realised the melody that Weber had got from Rousseau (who had procured it from an unnamed Sinologist), and which Hindemith made as the basis of the second movement of his “Symphonic Metamorphoses”. It all seemed to me entirely characteristic of Orchestra Wellington’s and Marc Taddei’s going that “extra mile” to illuminate and enrich our experience as an audience at these concerts. Certainly Jia Ling’s and her guzheng created an enchantment which resonated for me long after the orchestra had played the entire Hindemith work.

The rest of the “Symphonic Metamorphoses” work used material from a volume of Weber’s piano duets, whose themes remain recognisable (like Rousseau’s “Turandot” theme) but with radical changes made to the harmony and in places the addition of countermelodies. The opening movement brazenly announced its presence, Taddei getting an infectious “swinging” rhythm from the players, and giving the music ample space to round out its phrases and flex its muscles, with a piquant oboe solo, augmented by flute, piccolo and bassoon, and joined by some deliciously “off the beat” percussive action from the players. And, by contrast, I loved the utmost delicacy with which the opening of the slow movement, with its “Turandot” theme, was delivered, Taddei keeping the ever-burgeoning detailings on the leash throughout the plethora of irreverent instrumental trillings towards the mid-movement explosion from which grew that gorgeously tongue-in cheek fugue, the players covering themselves in glory, not least of all the percussion section, relishing their interactive “moment” along with all the other gradually-liberated impulses across the orchestral spectrum whose turn it was to have their say until overtaken by the silences.

The following Andantino saw clarinet, and then bassoon soberly restore some of the music’s dignity, with the accompanying orchestral colours sounding so “right” in sympathy, and the strings and then the winds then giving us a “balm for the soul” subsidiary melody that would here have unruffled the most troubled sensibilities. After that came the joyous “hold onto your seats” shout from the brass introducing the finale, the sounds swinging around the corner, as it were, and bearing down upon us with intent, the lower strings rolling the rhythms along with gusto! With the winds tonguing like crazy the horns then brought in the triumphal home-coming theme to which everybody added their voice, building the excitement in almost “circus-coming-to-town” fashion and leaving us at the end breathless but exhilarated by the sheer orchestral energies of joyful music-making!

 

 

Orchestra Wellington and Marc Taddei – legacy of The Classical Style

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington Music Director, Marc Taddei – photo credit: Latitude Creative

SERGE PROKOFIEV – Symphony No. 1 “Classical”  Op.25
GERMAINE TAILLEFERRE – Piano Concerto (1924)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Symphony No. 9 in D Minor “Choral” Op. 125

Somi Kim (piano)
Emma Pearson (soprano), Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano),
Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono (tenor), Robert Tucker (baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 6th June 2024

Orchestra Wellington’s visionary and compelling 2024 survey of concert music and some of its significant milestones certainly lived up to expectations with “The Classical Style”, a most attractive and “something for everybody” selection highlighting pieces whose composers took their inspiration from classical forms through which they were able to refract their own individuality and distinctive voices.

The highlight of the evening for me was undoubtedly the Piano Concerto by the French composer Germaine Tailleferre, a beautifully luminous and engaging piece whose relative neglect until recent times I find difficult to fathom on the strength of pianist Somi Kim’s sonorous, attractive playing and Orchestra Wellington’s gorgeously sinuous accompaniments. Also, framing this work were two far better-known but still ineffably fascinating pieces by Prokofiev and Beethoven whose “add water” appeal would have nicely eased audiences into Tailleferre’s relatively unchartered territories.

Before the concert began, maestro extraordinaire Marc Taddei took the liberty of using the occasion to promote an important new recording project involving the orchestra and himself, one paying tribute to the music of a composer whose work Taddei and the Orchestra have valiantly supported over the years, New-Zealand-Greek composer John Psathas, (born in Wellington, in 1966, to Greek parents). This is a recently-recorded two-disc (both vinyl and CD) set on the Atoll label titled “Leviathan” containing four concerti, three for percussion and one for tenor sax. (“Leviathan” is, of course the title of one of the percussion concertos). With the help of concertmaster Amalia Hall, Taddei displayed the LP set with its stunningly-contrasted coloured vinyl (one disc white and the other blue), all with the kind of “fatal attraction” allure that a vinyl-collector like myself would find impossible to resist – as with the orchestra’s previous unmissable recording project involving two Beethoven symphonies to which, of course , I readily succumbed! If this paragraph sounds like an advertisement, it’s because I simply can’t help myself at this point! – so, back to the concert! (see the conclusion of this review for details regarding the recording’s availability)….

Where was I? – Oh, yes! – one finds it difficult to think of a better choice to begin such an evening as we had scheduled than with Prokofiev’s self-proclaiming “Classical” Symphony, and in a performance which, for three of the four movements seemed to me to attain an “ideal” regarding the ever-tantalising balance in performance between surface execution and feeling.  The opening movement properly launched itself upwards with great gusto, but with enough ‘wriggle-room” for the momentums to generate the piece’s infectious eagerness while allowing a flexibility of movement between the different themes.

The adorable slow movement was by turns tender, limpid, forthright and glowing – I particularly enjoyed the enticing “lift” to the triplet rhythms that accompanying a later reprise of the principal theme, and the quiet dignity with which it all ended. The Minuet I also found utterly charming, Marc Taddei allowing his players enough “expression” in their exchanges to reinforce the idea that these were real dancers, rather than simply marionettes going through the motions. After these delights I thought the finale a tad too hasty, to my mind exchanging some of the music’s deliciousness for the sake of sheer brilliance (though the orchestra certainly rose to the occasion, the wind players in particular performing miracles of fingering and tongueing in keeping up the tempo!).

French composer Germaine Tailleferre has until relatively recently been known by the musical world at large merely for her membership of the French group of composers named “Les Six”, and for little else, a similar fate to two other group members, Louis Durey and Georges Auric. Tailleferre, who had distinguished herself as a pupil at the Paris Conservatoire, and who received further encouragement from both Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel, became a member of “Les Six” in 1920. She composed a great deal during the 1920s and 30s, much of which was lost during World War Two after she had fled France for the United States – her creative output continued after her return to France up until her death in 1983, by which time she had produced almost two hundred finished works. Her 1924 Piano Concerto survived the war, becoming one of several concertante works she completed, including a Second Piano Concerto, a Violin Concerto, a Double Piano Concerto and a Double Guitar Concerto!

Somi Kim, piano, plays Germaine Tailleferre’s 1924  Piano Concerto with Orchestra Wellington – photo credit: Latitude Creative

Though not a long work the Piano Concerto features the piano playing practically without a break, a task which the soloist Somi Kim undertook sporting a sparklingly eye-catching dress which seemed to visually echo the music’s constantly effervescing glitter throughout the three movements, and especially in the outer ones, with coruscations continually flying off in all directions!

The first movement, in lively, quick-march tempo, straightaway engendered a sense of a festive occasion, with music that seemed to be purposefully “on the move” somewhere, the playing beautifully gradated by both pianist and orchestra to a similar objective, whatever the orchestrations and however discursive the key-changes. Throughout, I was put in mind of JS Bach’s First and Third Brandenburg Concerti with their constant sprinklings of instrumentation channelled towards both the act of interchange and the establishment of a kind of overall “understanding” between the participants as a desirable and complementary process, rather than any kind of duel or contest.

The slow movement seemed the emotional “heart” of the work, with Somi Kim’s piano solo seamlessly enhanced by the winds, and Marc Taddei enjoining the strings to make the most of an ongoing sinuousness melody. The ensuing tutti took it up, buttressed by rich chordings from the piano and further warmed by a sappy trumpet solo – so much achieved, I thought, with relatively simple means! A warm-hearted oboe solo then gave way to a “worrisome” flute, bringing a forlorn note to the proceedings before the movement’ concluding surprise – a remarkably haunting and certainly unexpected modulation to distant realms right at the end!

I enjoyed the ambivalence of the finale’s opening rhythm, my ear jumping to and from different numbers of beats to the bar as the music’s trajectories evolved, keeping me guessing in delicious-sounding ways. Again, It’s all more of a concertante work than a concerto, really, a true partnership in the baroque/classical manner, rather than any kind of contest between soloist and orchestra – Kim and Taddei dovetailed their piano and orchestral parts splendidly throughout, and the solo cadenza near the end gave the pianist the chance to “sound out” a couple of beautiful church-bell-like cascades before the solo trumpet invited the rest of the orchestra back into the discourse for the work’s coda, one not unlike a gentler, more urbane version of the final bars of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, with its prominent solo trumpet part! Certainly, I felt,  a work to get to know better.

Somi Kim responded to the warm audience applause at the end with a lithe, nimble-fingered encore rendition of the well-known Rondo a la Turca from Mozart’s Piano Sonata K.311. I would have enjoyed as much her playing something by Poulenc or Satie or even Ravel, if only to keep up Gallic appearances, but the audience obviously loved it – so c’est bon!

After the interval, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony might have seemed “le deluge”-like at such a concert – it was, after all, the nineteenth’s century’s most influential symphony with even its “number” becoming an insuperable burden for at least seven subsequent symphonists I know of who ventured into those same numerical realms and faltered – Schubert, Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold and Roger Sessions. Marc Taddei further stressed the significance of Beethoven’s work by talking about the composer’s simultaneous adherence to tradition (four contrasting movements, including a sonata-form opening movement, a scherzo and a slow movement) AND to the work’s ground-breaking aspects (the work’s epic length, and with a symphonic finale like no other with vocal soloists and choir!) So the work epitomised a composer’s knowledge, experience, use and further develop of this creative ethos called “The Classical Style” like no other had done up to this time.

As I’d found with his conducting of the “classics” occasionally in the past I found Marc Taddei’s very direct and at times to my ears more-than-usually brusque approach to Beethoven’s opening movement of the Ninth Symphony hard to get in accord with at first – I’d always thought of Beethoven’s opening movement as having a rugged epic grandeur which explodes in places with excitement – but Taddei’s “never-let-up” tempo made the whole movement seethe with barely-contained energy, exciting in its way, but hardly with a “epic” quality.  I thought the famously seismic “middle section” of the movement, for instance, didn’t have the sheer impact I was accustomed to feeling because much of the rest of the movement had already been given so agitated a character. It certainly made me rethink what Beethoven himself might have been after – something less monumental and more kinetic and volatile, which Taddei and his players certainly put across with few holds barred and with such elan and brilliance! I did come to the end of the movement thinking “Golly! It’s over, already!” having lived for so long with more colossal-sounding traversals. This one was, for me, quite a wake-up call, and certainly an ear-opening experience!

I could far more readily equate with Taddei’s treatment of the Scherzo, the opening biting and incisive, the timpani blows galvanising and the rhythms spot-on throughout – the movement’s  compelling amalgam of high spirits and restlessness was put across with incredible panache, both in an ensemble and individual sense – the timpani’s almost visceral attack was exhilarating, and the wind-and brass playing throughout the Trio sections were a joy to listen to! And I did appreciate the repeats, enabling us to enjoy that feeling of physical excitement and exhilaration for much of the piece all over again!

As with the first movement I took a bit of getting used to the quicker pulsings of the slow movement, again wanting a longer-breathed, more “epic” quality to prevail, something which, as my own rhythms “caught up” with the conductor’s, I increasingly enjoyed as the movement progressed, Taddei actually allowing the strings enough space for their phrases to bloom,  and the lines to sing. The sequence with the winds and the solo horn took on a lovely glow in places (the latter player’s brief solo flourish was gorgeous!). And though I again felt the triplet variation section was overly pushed along, it was given a charm of its own by the superb playing. I didn’t like the excessively staccato treatment of the great fanfares, wanting them to have more of a “resounding” character in those celestial spaces hovering around and about the notes. In all, the movement certainly sounded beautiful playing-wise, even if I felt my listener’s usual “transfigured”  sense of feeling  in this music thwarted by its quicker-than usual pace…..

Soloists Emma Pearson (soprano), Margaret Medlyn, (mezzo-soprano), Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono (tenor) and Robert Tucker (baritone), with the Orpheus Choir of Wellington, Orchestra Wellington, and Music Director Marc Taddei –  Photo credit: Latitude Creative

And so to the finale! – what a magnificent “horror chord” opening utterance we got, straightaway! The recitatives then jumped out of their blocks quickly, perhaps with not enough weight to convey firstly their disapproval (instrumental versions of “O Freunde. nicht diese töne!” – O friends, not these sounds!) and then their exultation when the “Ode to Joy” melody finally appears (“O Freunde, freuden vollere!” – O friends, more joyful ones!). The orchestral basses were INCREDIBLY quiet at the beginning of their “Ode to Joy” theme, while the strings and winds partnered really well for their verses, and the brasses were simply magnificent in their utterances!

A second “horror” chord introduced the soloists – and Robert Tucker made a tremendous initial impression with his recitative, though less so with his verse, the line being low for his voice – I suddenly felt that the soloists perhaps ought to have been at the front with the conductor, and not behind the orchestra – surely Beethoven wanted them to be heard, and not just as solo choral voices! I was surprised when I realised that Margaret Medlyn was singing the alto part, and not Melissa Crennan, as per programme (I was told later that the latter had fallen ill). Generally the soloists were audible, though soprano Emma Pearson’s clear, bell-like tones stood out from the rest. The Orpheus Choir were the real heroes – great shouts of “Vor Gott” (Before God) ushered in the tenor solo, (Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono), though he was hampered by the trajectories disappointingly sped up and the rhythms flattened out, leaving him almost no swagger in his step, and little room for any real heroic timbre in his voice!

I wondered why the horns sounded here as if they were “joining” their pairs of repeated notes in the brief introduction to the choir’s reprise of “Freunde, schöner Gotterfunken” (they WERE playing very softly)…..the latter was splendidly done, as was the whole “Seid umschunglen, Millionem” (Oh, you millions, I embrace you!), during which sequence I at last got a real “cosmic” sense from the music, thanks to the “space” accorded the singers by the conductor, expressing the moment’s mystical and epic gravity. Perhaps the Orpheus’s most splendid moment was the great Choral Fugue “Seid umschunglen, Millionem” which then followed, the voices and orchestral brass achieving real grandeur together!

The solo quartet’s “moment of truth” came at the end of the sequence with the choir at “Freude, Tochter aus Elysium”  (Joy, Daughter from Elysium), and the “Alle menschen werde Bruder” (All men shall be Brothers) sequence, where the soloists individually rhapsodised over the words, raptly concluding with a high B-flat from soprano Emma Pearson – nicely, if a wee bit circumspectly rounded off! Then it was the famous final presto sequence, choir and soloists intoxicated with joyful feeling and racing to the work’s conclusion, with the orchestra having the final riotous say!

Away with the perfidy of critics! – all were heroes, singers, choristers, players, conductor! – and all were enthusiastically and resoundingly applauded, and the magnitude of their achievements, singly and corporately,  given their just dues. I babbled about the performance highlights afterwards to anybody nearby who would listen, and gleaned from the exchanges that those present absolutely revelled in what they’d just heard, drunk with those copious dollops of “Freude, schöner Gotterfunken”, given to humankind as a gift for the ages.

Wellington City Orchestra sounds a classy farewell to conductor Rachel Hyde

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Anna Gawn performs Ross Harris’s Klezmer Suite with Rachel Hyde conducting the Wellington  City Orchestra

Wellington City Orchestra presents:
Music by BERLIOZ, ROSS HARRIS, TCHAIKOVSKY

HECTOR BERLIOZ – Marche Hongroise (Hungarian March) from ”La Damnation de Faust” Op.24
ROSS HARRIS – Klezmer Suite (2023)
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No. 6 in B Minor Op 74 (“Pathetique”)

Anna Gawn (mezzo-soprano)
Rachel Hyde (conductor)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 29th June 2024

This was a triumphant concert tinged with sadness for all associated with the Wellington City Orchestra, being the last occasion for some time on which Rachel Hyde will appear as the band’s conductor, as she’s planning to spend the next couple of years in Europe.  Her long-time association with the orchestra has featured her as a regular guest conductor for a number of consecutive years.

The rapport with the orchestra players that Rachel has built up over this period obviously paid dividends in many instances today, resulting in a concert that provided plenty of thrills both of a novel and well-honed nature – a “call-to-arms” work by Berlioz to stir the blood which opened proceedings, followed by a colourfully exuberant, quixotic, whimsical and heartfelt collection of klezmer-inspired pieces by Ross Harris, and concluding with a cornerstone work of the romantic orchestral repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the  “Pathetique”. I thought that, as a collection the pieces both drew from and played off one another in a satisfying archway of presentation, incident and reaction for all concerned.

The last time I heard the Berlioz work in concert was, I think, as part of an NZSO presentation of the complete “La Damnation de Faust” under conductor Edo de Waart as long ago as 2017 – whether as part of a dramatic scenario or as a concert item, the March, whose origin was a song recalling the deeds of a legendary eighteenth-century Hungarian patriot, Francis II Rákóczi, which Berlioz adapted for his “dramatic legend”, never fails to generate palpable audience enthusiasm, as it did here. If things got off to a somewhat muffled opening fanfare-beginning from the brass (who redeemed themselves handsomely in due course), the piece’s rhythmic gait was most adroitly picked up by the perkiness of the wind-playing and their full-blooded exchanges with the strings. The brass, too, soon seemed to have cleared their throats, with some properly portentous responses to the heroic major-key exhortations of winds and strings in the music’s middle section.

Hyde kept the tempo rock-steady throughout the piece’s martial exchanges, allowing the tensions to build surely and excitingly, and encouraging the percussion to “let-er-rip” along with the brass, before swinging magnificently into the march theme’s final full-throated glory, carrying us all along with the music’s brazen trajectories – and the conductor’s superb control of the famous final chord, with its crescendo-decrescendo flourishings made for a breathtaking end-moment of which the players could all be proud!

It must have been like greeting an old friend for Rachel Hyde to programme Ross Harris’s Klezmer Suite, the next item on the agenda – she and the Kapiti Chamber Orchestra had commissioned and premiered this work the previous year. I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from it all, but I needn’t have worried as to the efficacy of such a delightful amalgam of ritualised song and dance as was given here. In fact, though written in a similarly worlds-apart style, Ross Harris’s work somewhat unexpectedly reminded  me in places of David Farquhar’s Dance-Suite Ring Round the Moon in terms of its transposition from a language and culture equally as removed from Aotearoa New Zealand but having an ease and universality of expression and feeling which allowed the listener to readily enter and enjoy its distinctive world.

Harris took a number of dance-like movements from the repertoire of his Klezmer Band “The Kugels” and orchestrated them, interspersing these different “moods” with several Yiddish songs, written for the soloist Anna Gawn (the soloist for last year’s premiere performance), settings of verses by various Yiddish poets, The opening dance-like “Shteti Tanz” (Simple Dance) set the atmosphere for the suite, lively, edgy, almost neo-Bartokian in flavour, and contrasting strongly in mood with the following “Dos lid fun a meydi” (The Song of a girl), a beautiful performance by singer Anna Gawn, her hands as expressive as her voice, and with flavoursome support from strings, clarinet and horn.

The orchestra-only pieces contrasted moods such as the brooding, meditative darkness of “Trit bay trit” (Step by Step) whose lower strings and brass darkly supported a plaintive, emotion-filled violin melody, and the two more energetic pieces, firstly “Hanoi” (To have fun) – an almost nihilistic “eat, drink and be merry” general dance – and “Narish” (Silly) which seemed to characterise a burlesque mood with clowns or knockabout comics doing their thing! The final piece, a song “Shtil iomir ale farshvindn” (Softly, let us all vanish) re-established the heartfelt mood, voice and oboe together generating a lamenting, almost “lost” quality, with every note, song or played, made to “speak” simply and sincerely.

Complementing the “Suite” generously was an encore, again performed by the singer, but this time accompanied by Ross Harris himself on the accordion and a fellow-member of “The Kugels, violinist Robin Perks. The song was one of those “Impossible task” folk-tales involving lovers trying to “prove” their feelings for one another via deeds of wishful veracity (a kind of Yiddish “Scarborough Fair”, perhaps?), here with a spacious, atmospheric introduction from the solo violin and with  orchestral violins supporting the singer’s expressive tones, the words of the song augmented by what seemed like brief but telling vocal melismas, all very moving and heartfelt.

After this, and an interval allowing us to put something of an aura all about what we had heard, the players filed back onto the platform for the concert’s concluding business, the great “Pathetique” Symphony by Tchaikovsky one of romantic music’s most durable utterances judging by its seemingly limitless popularity. Having heard the work on countless occasions I had found myself wishing beforehand that Rachel Hyde had chosen something less frequently performed – but as soon as the lower strings had ushered in the bassoon solo that began the work I found myself drawn into it all over again! – what made it special on this occasion was that I was sitting right in the front row of the audience, and thus almost “with” the violinists, and able to observe their fingerings, bowings and vibrato-ed phrasings almost like a voyeur!

What I gained from this experience was an awareness of the richness and subtlety of the composer’s writing for the strings all though the players’ opening exchanges and interactions with the winds – I’d never realised quite to the same extent how “Mozartean” Tchaikovsky’s writing was here, how he would “share” his themes among the instruments, and sometimes in unexpected ways with the lower strings, making them play higher and lighter in places than one might expect. I thought Rachel pushed the players along to their utmost capabilities in places, so that sometimes the exchanges didn’t quite dovetail as precisely as they might – but they always “found” each other again. The strings ascended to the beginning of the “famous” melody beautifully, and with support from brass that seemed happier than in places near the beginning of the work, the tune was given a pliable, breathing shape, nicely contrasted by the winds’ ascending melody, with flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon each playing their part. The return of the string melody at a higher voltage, with the brass in sharp attendance was heartwarming, the emotion palpable and pulsating!

The thunderclap of the succeeding allegro was terrific! – conductor and players put across the agitations with trenchant energy,  growing the sounds towards the first climax with thrilling intensity and with the brass holding their lines through the “Russian Requiem” theme. Just as pungent were the exchanges between strings and winds that followed, capped by piercing piccolo shrieks and swept along by stuttering brass towards the second, all-out climax, all sections giving their all!  After these detonations were done, the basses heaved themselves upwards once again and beckoned everybody back to life once more, timpani and clarinet surviving a moment of realignment before pouring oil on the troubled waters, leaving the coda’s brasses creditably holding their notes and restoring peace.

The 5/4 movement that followed was given a swift, evanescent reading, the players on their toes at their conductor’s urgings, though with the detailings still sounding a little rushed and the dovetailings the first time round stretching to properly “connect” –  the music’s flow settled as the movement went on, though some details, such as the strings’ pizzicato notes didn’t quite have the space to “sound” with sufficient clarity.  The players sounded more at ease in the “Trio”, the ebb and flow of emotion filling out more spaciously and focusedly.

No such reservations about the third and fourth movements! I felt, right from the scherzo’s beginning, that Rachel had hit the “tempo giusto”, the players filling out their spaces with confidence and verve (I loved the piccolo playing, which always had such a “presence”!).   The famous “march tune” announced itself with a crash and swung into view with a vengeance, mid-movement – a great moment, and with the string triplets wonderfully incisive! And what excitement conductor and musicians built up as the crescendo’s sounds rose up to greet us, with the percussionists having the proverbial field day at the back as the whole orchestra magnificently roller-coasted its way to the end – never mind about the slight hit-and-miss payoff!!

A great and noble account of the last movement followed (again, the string writing from where I was sitting sounded amazingly “layered” and detailed!) Rachel and her players encompassed all the sadness, despair and fatalistic gloom implied by Tchaikovsky’s writing, by turns full-blooded and sensitive. Apart from an initial brass burble and a slightly premature string entry, the major-key section of this movement was most affectingly grown, the strings singing crazily and the winds and brass joining in for all they were worth, making the movement’s subsequent death-throes all the more appalling, with the positively ghoulish muted brass particularly cruel and mocking, as was the single gong-note and fate-laden brass afterwards – all that was left was for the orchestra to weep amidst growing silence.

I would imagine that Rachel herself, her players and the orchestral staff were thrilled with the results of their efforts in every way, and not the least with the audience reaction to it all – there was cheering and foot-stamping at the end and a genuine feeling afoot that we had all been witness to something exceptional, besides the realisation that this was an occasion that won’t be repeated for a while to come, with Rachel’s departure pending. However, legends are made of this kind of stuff, and everybody would have been left with his or her own sense of what made this occasion special, not the least of which was the chance to express thanks, gratitude and best wishes to Rachel Hyde for some memorable music making and many happy and fruitful times to come.

 

 

Conductor Han-Na-Chang’s NZSO debut in music by Leonie Holmes, Richard Strauss and Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Conductor Han-Na Chang scores with her NZSO debut in music by Leonie Holmes, Richard Strauss and Pyotr Tchaikovsky

LEONIE HOLMES – I watched a shadow*
RICHARD STRAUSS – Don Quixote
(with Andrew Joyce, ‘cello, and Julia Joyce, viola)
PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No. 5 in E Minor Op.64

Han-Na Chang (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
(Vesa-Matti Leppanen, concertmaster)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 18th May, 2024

I’m probably risking accusations of inverted sexism in drawing special attention in this review to the gender of the conductor on the occasion of this concert! – I solemnly do promise never to underline any such point again, but, after living through the tail-end of the age which regarded the role of orchestra conductor as a male bastion, and not ever having actually used the words “end of an era” to underline what has obviously been a change of things, I feel like “coming out” and hailing as such the appearance of South Korean Han-Na Chang on the NZSO’s podium as a guest conductor as signifying, in a local context, a real milestone.

I say these things having watched a number of women over the years mount the podium to direct the orchestra – conductors from overseas such as Dalia Atlas, Jane Glover, Odaline de la Martinez, Simone Young and Suzanna Malkki, and more recently, homegrown talents such as Holly Mathieson, Tianyi Lu and Gemma New, the latter having been appointed the orchestra’s Principal Conductor in 2022.  So, if women are of late no strangers to the conductor’s role here in New Zealand with the country’s leading orchestra, what was it about Han-Na Chang’s appearance that constituted something special?

The difference for me was that, unlike with the names mentioned above, Han-Na Chang’s was one completely unknown to me, as have been the names of many of the NZSO’s guest conductors of recent times. She is a fully-qualitied representative of a wider world of music-making which we in this country can only guess at regarding its range and scope , but can experience through the tried-and-true “guest conductor” system, one in which gender seems no longer an issue!

As with any unknown podium guest, the question “What will she be like?” was on the lips of anybody “not in the know”, as the diminutive Han-Na Chang made her entry and mounted the podium. First up in the programme was a local work by the highly-respected Auckland composer Leonie Holmes, one which had received its world premiere the night before in Auckland and was now making its Wellington debut. For a guest conductor to make her NZSO debut with a premiere of a work by a local composer seemed like a boldly positive and forthright gesture, and certainly one which gave Leonie Holmes’s composition I watched a shadow plenty of added interest.

The programme note for this new work contained the words of the poem by Wellingtonian Anne Powell which inspired Holmes’s music, a meditation on the world of nature’s ebb and flow encapsulated in a single crepuscular-like event, a hill embraced by its own shadow. The sounds took the form of an orchestral rhapsody, beginning with a percussive splash and slowly building an austere soundscape, grounded in string-texturings but with waves of contrastingly-flavoured disturbances, like a kind of gradual oceanic movement enlivened by wind-and-brass irruptions.

The work’s central part animated the discourse with pizzicato strings, wind roulades and atmospheric brass touches, expressing something of the variety of nature-impulse described by the poet’s words as “the hum of the universe”, but with bell-sounds, “knell-like” warnings growing a heavy, ominous tread. Though this trenchant mood was relieved, the sounds reformed with fresh impulse, building excitingly towards a great climax with surges of percussion, leaving us wondering at the ambivalence of what we’d heard. Rather like some of Sibelius’s music, Holmes’ work here seemed relatively unpeopled, our own existence’s fate of little account to these dispassionate comings-and-goings. Whatever the case, all was rendered here as committedly by conductor and players as one might imagine posssible.

From natural attrition we proceeded to a world of fantasy, foolishness and nobility, in the form of Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Don Quixote, a musical realisation of aspects of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic 17th-century novel. Strauss cast his deluded picaresque hero, the Don, as a solo ‘cello, and his down-to-earth squire, Sancho Panza by a solo viola, the ensuing dialogues and soliloquies an absolute delight for the listener, as were the colourful orchestral depictions of some of the Don’s adventures. Strauss here flew in the critical face of those conservative commentators of the time who derided what they called “programme music” by elevating the genre at its best to heights of expression and technique surpassed by no-one before or since, with Don Quixote having long been considered the greatest of his works of this kind.

As the two main protagonists, the husband-and-wife team of cellist Andrew Joyce and violist Julia Joyce gave what I thought were vivid portrayals of their respective characters, the former capturing all the would-be knight’s delusional expressions of chivalrous glory as well as his touching final realisations of mortality, and the latter steadfastedly affirming the squire’s support for his master with wryly matter-of-fact observances. Conductor Han-Na Chung’s control of the orchestra throughout the work was masterly, the detailing richly-informed and the overall sweep of certain moments no less than breathtaking! I shall particularly cherish the image of the wind-machine player “giving his all” at the rear of the orchestra during the work’s notorious “flying horse” sequence!

And so to what seemed like the concert’s readily-publicised “raison d’etre”, the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, a work not lacking in performance history in this part of the world, but despite such popularity, one with the kind of resilience that instantly responds to a “fresh-as-paint” approach from its interpreters. Which is just what Han-Na-Chang conveyed, right from the opening Andante’s portentous clarinet phrases and ever-resonating string accompaniments (I couldn’t see the player from where I was sitting but I presumed the clarinettist was the ever-reliable Patrick Barry!)

What I particularly enjoyed was Chang’s direct and unsentimental approach throughout the work, never pulling about or unduly elongating lines or phrase-ends in search of “expression” when the composer had already ensured sufficient feeling would be generated by playing what was marked – so there was no “swooning” in the strings when the second subject of the opening movement’s allegro arrived, and no accelerando extremities needed to get back up to speed for the movement’s basic tempo, Chang keeping the music’s blood-pulses from ever becalming and losing their trajectories.

The slow movement, one of Tchaikovsky’s greatest symphonic achievements, here also benefited from Chang’s steadiness, particularly with the pizzicato notes that followed the appearance of the motto theme mid-movement – the octave-pizzicato was “in tempo” from its first entrance, rather than being vulgarly “sped up’ and then awkwardly slowed once more, evidence of our conductor’s “tidy mind” and care for musical structure. Oh, and Sam Jacobs’ magical horn solo in this movement deservedly earned him an ovation of his own at the symphony’s end.

The ever-enchanting Waltz with its gorgeous balletic scherzando character throughout the middle section led straight into the Finale, a fulsome major-key motto-theme at the start, and properly “warning” tones from the brasses, just before the great timpani roll that ignited the strings’ allegro vivace entry. I wondered whether there was a brief rhythmic hiccup between strings , brass and timpani during the maelstrom-like passage that preceded the entry of the winds with their long-held-note melody, but perhaps I was mistaken amidst the super-saturations of sound at that point  – and in the comparable passage later in the movement, I heard no hint of misalignment! What was thrilling was the almost visceral stamping rhythm of the strings throughout these “Russian dance” episodes and the rapidity of the brasses’ stuttering notes pushing the music’s trajectories along so (literally!) breathlessly, in places! The swaggering motto-march-theme at the end seemed to gather up all that had gone before and fill the hall’s overhead spaces with exuberances, capped only by the frenetic energies of the coda, and its march-like codicil at the very end!

Very great credit to all concerned, and especially to conductor Han-Na Chang for an auspicious debut, one which was instsntly and generously acknowledged at the concert’s end by a delighted, near-capacity Michael Fowler Centre audience.

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “The Grand Gesture” presentation casts its spell

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
THE GRAND GESTURE – a reflection of music and art of the Baroque era

IGOR STRAVINSKY – Suite from the Ballet “Pulcinella”
JOHANN SEBASTIEN BACH – Concerto for two Violins and Orchestra in D Minor BWV 1043
GEORGE FRIDERICH HANDEL – Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.12 in B Minor
LUKAS FOSS – Baroque Variations (1967)

Amalia Hall (violin)
Monique Lapins (violin)
Jonathan Berkahn (harpsichord)
Orchestra Wellington (Concertmaster – Justine Cormack)
Marc Taddei – Conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 4th May, 2024

On this occasion I couldn’t get to the usual pre-concert presentation which can so rewardingly illuminate what’s about to be presented in the concert – I arrived to catch only the final stages, and caught some musical excerpts from the oncoming concert played in the foyer by members of The Queen’s Closet for the audience’s pleasure and delight. It was obviously enough to whet appetites of even those like myself who were standing at the back, probably feeling a bit like those “Gentlemen of England now abed (who) shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here!”

A few empty seats on the fringes of the downstairs auditorium apart, the concert appeared well-attended, and the mood expectant – as is the usual wont with any Orchestra Wellington concert these days, thanks to the sterling efforts of the players and maestro Marc Taddei in obviously putting body and soul into their presentations, and bringing to life even what might seem at times like somewhat intractable material!

Tonight’s presentation title “The Grand Gesture” set out to demonstrate some of the continuing resonances of the work of composers from the Baroque era – if not for our present specific time, certainly of living memory for some in the case of the work of German-born American composer and conductor Lucas Foss, and delightfully so regarding a neo-classical response from twentieth-century giant Igor Stravinsky to the music supposedly the work of a contemporary of Bach, Handel and Scarlatti, one Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-36), more of which circumstance below.

A good deal of thought had obviously gone into the concert’s structure (a valued characteristic of this Orchestra’s work), including what were some unscheduled appearances of musicians playing what appeared to be on “first take” simply further examples of memorable and enduring Baroque music – thus to begin the concert we were treated to a dream-like vignette of violinist Amalia Hall spotlit amid the darkness and high up on the stage platform giving us a stellar performance of the Prelude to JS Bach’s Violin Partita in E Major that transported all of us to our own “other” places for its duration, and for some time afterwards.

Then came the Stravinsky all splendidly articulated, robustly trajectoried and beautifully-voiced throughout. The original “Pulcinella” ballet had its genesis in an idea by the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who wanted a work based on the long-established Italian theatre tradition of “commedia dell’arte”, one that used age-old characters wearing masks, “types” such as foolish old men, wanton courtesans, devious servants, and jesters or clowns – a well-known type of the latter was Harlequin, who became the “Pulcinella” of Diaghilev’s scheme.

At that time, the music Diaghilev gave to Stravinsky was believed to have been by Pergolesi (Stravinsky regarded his contact with this music as “a love affair” with the older composer), but much of it has subsequently proved to have been the work of others. In Stravinsky’s original ballet, the vocal sections of the score were based on songs genuinely by Pergolesi which Diaghilev had found, but the purely orchestral music used by Stravinsky from the suite we heard tonight was all adapted from the works of different composers, names otherwise unknown to history – Gallo, van Wassenaer, Monza and Parisotti.

Such an “inconvenient truth” hasn’t been allowed to get in the way of anybody’s enjoyment of what Stravinsky did with this music, who added to the original themes his own twentieth-century harmonies, cadences and rhythms, producing a suitably light-textured and nimble-footed score which served Diaghilev’s purposes admirably. The suite which the composer extracted from the ballet was written in 1922, two years after the ballet’s first performance, and uses eight of the latter’s original twenty movements.

Though Stravinsky took pains to reproduce in Pulcinella something of the reduced orchestral forces of earlier times, there were certain touches that “advanced” the musical language beyond the scope of eighteenth-century practice, mainly found in the “Vivo” movement towards the Suite’s end, such as the use of the solo trombone and double-bass with their “glissando” passages. I’ve always loved this Suite, and Marc Taddei’s and Orchestra Wellington’s performance was, I thought, musically engaging, stylistically evocative and technically outstanding!

Next came what for many would have been the “jewel” of the evening’s presentations, the adorable D Minor Double Violin Concerto of JS Bach, and with two soloists whose performances I wouldn’t imagine being bettered anywhere – Amalia Hall, the usual concertmaster of Orchestra Wellington, but a frequent concerto soloist with the orchestra itself to impressive effect was here joined by Monique Lapins, the sadly-about-to-depart second violinist of the illustrious New Zealand String Quartet, leaving for pastures afresh after eight years with the Quartet. Together with the orchestra they wove a diaphanous continuum of textured interaction that allowed the music to express whatever range of emotions and awareness of structural potentialities this performance couldn’t help but inspire among its listeners.

By inclination I tend to go for warmer, fuller performances than what I sometimes hear from so-called ”authentic” ones – but this performance seemed to tread securely between heart and mind, warmth and clarity, breathing-space and momentum, and deliver spades of intent and realisation from both worlds. And though ideally matched, the pair were not carbon copies of one another’s sound – I imagined a tad rounder, and more sensuous tone from Monique Lapins’ playing compared with Amalia Hall’s marginally brighter and shinier sound, as if what was passing between them was a REAL conversation. But, ah! – that slow movement! – why does it ALWAYS seem as though it’s over too quickly, no matter who the performers are?…….

As with the concert’s opening, the second half began with another performer “spotlit” up behind the orchestral platform in almost “deus ex machina” fashion! This time it was Jonathan Berkahn at the harpsichord performing a relaxed, even somewhat “other-worldly” rendition of one of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas, the well-known E Major (K.380/L.23). As with the violinist’s rendition of the Bach Partita’s Prelude at the concert’s beginning, the episode had the air of some kind of “visitation” from distant realms – both beautifully-wrought moments.

In more “down-to-earth” mode then came the Handel Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.12, the last of the set of concertos inspired by Handel’s great Italian contemporary, Archangelo Corelli. I was hoping we might get my favourite of the Op. 6 set, No. 9 (with its wonderful borrowings from the composer’s famous Organ Concerto “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale”). But this work, which I didn’t know as well, was itself, in the words of the vernacular, a “real doozy”, with plenty to do for soloists Amalia Hall and Monique Lapins once again, in the form of some enchanting moments along the way. There was appropriately ”grand gesturing” at the beginning, with the two violins sharing solo passages with a solo ‘cello, both in reply to and augmenting the orchestra. And what a delicious allegro to follow! – with some enchanting dovetailing of parts, and the silvery tones of the violin soloists inspiring some similarly feathery playing from the orchestra strings. A lovely and graceful Larghetto was followed by an even more enchanting Largo section, the soloists (both, I think) playing with mutes and producing, along with the solo ‘cello, some breathtakingly unworldly textures – brief but memorable moments in time to be savoured long afterwards. A sprightly dotted-rhythmed fugal Allegro brought us home with a no-nonsense, but still ceremonial finish.

Conductor Marc Taddei then issued for us something in the nature of the old-fashioned “Government Health Warning” regarding the programme’s final item, Lucas Foss’s “Baroque Variations”. He spoke of the piece being very much of the “psychedelic era” of the 1960s during which the work was composed, with numerous allusions to sounds associated with various electronic gadgetry of that time, but with its composer bent also upon reaching back to resonances as far distant as the music from the Baroque era which we had heard earlier in the concert, including the two pieces which our celestial-like “visitors” had performed in those uplifted and spotlit places!

The first of the three movements “On a Handel Larghetto” quietly and almost spectrally elaborated on fragments of the corresponding sequence in Handel’s Op 6 No.12 Concerto, the sounds seeming to do little more than resonate each other’s muted repetitions between strings and brass, lines occasionally drifting away from one another and exploring dream-like imaginings as more instruments joined in with the reminiscings, gathering tonal weight as notes were sustained for longer periods and percussive irruptions became more frequent.

A second movement also began mysteriously, its diaphanously filmic texture of sound featuring floating droplets of notes and occasional percussive thuds, into which sounded the strains of fragments of the Scarlatti sonata we had heard in full on the harpsichord. Here its themes and rhythms seemed as if they were being disconcertingly dismembered for us, as if the music was “a patient etherised upon a table” and referred to in fragmented and mesmerizingly repetitive terms.

After two somewhat restrained movements, the third “On a Bach Prelude (Phorion)” opened up the air-waves somewhat, beginning with the reappearance of the “phantom” Bach Partita violinist, whose playing was this time “echoed” in a fragmented way by the orchestra concertmaster and the other orchestral strings, as well as being “pecked at” by the orchestral winds and “wailed over” by the brass. This process became rather Charles Ives-like as the violas and the brasses played echoing notes and phrases against skittering winds and violins “chasing down” the lines, until the orchestra seemed to lose its patience with its wayward children and exploded a volley of indiscriminate sounds that added to the “things running wild” atmosphere, awakening an electric organ’s more seismic qualities. The “Phorion” part of the movement’s title was a reference to a Greek word meaning “stolen goods”, perhaps indicating how Bach’s violin prelude music was being chaotically rent via a plethora of sounds indicating an exhilarating (and liberating?) loss of control.

Afterwards I found myself talking with others of our different impressions of the work, the opinions ranging from “genius” to “madness” in general terms, but concurring regarding the hugely fascinating range and scope of the programming and the dedication and skill with which conductor and orchestra carried out its philosophy and execution – above all else, with a whole-heartedness whose qualities we’ve come to expect and hope to continue to enjoy.

Haydn and Mozart Camerata’s perfect fellow-churchgoers at Wellington’s St.Peter’s-0n-Willis

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Camerata presents: HAYDN IN THE CHURCH 2023

Josef HAYDN – Symphony No. 17 in F Major Hob.1.17
Wolfgang MOZART – Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat K.364

Anne Loeser (violin) / Victoria Jaenecke (viola)
Camerata Ensemble

St.Peter’s Church-on-Willis, Wellington

Friday, October 20th, 2023

Sometimes one goes to a concert which by dint of the music and the playing seems  not a moment too short or too long – this evening, with merely two works on the programme (one of which took  less than two thirds of the time of the other), it felt as though we were transported from one to the other by a kind of osmosis, as there was no “proper” interval between the two, merely what felt like a “luftpause” to allow the slightly different arrangement of the two works to be set up.

The programme opened with a Haydn symphony (No.17 in F Major), part of a series that has been a feature of the ensemble’s presentations of late. This was an early work of the composer’s , and not unlike some kind of extended three-part operatic overture in effect – certainly a grand and varied beginning to one’s listening for the evening.

Straightaway I was transported by the openness of the sound during the work’s first few bars, with the horn timbres taking the music al fresco, and the joyfulness of the dancing rhythms doing the rest  As in some of the earlier Mozart symphonies, the winds also frequently coloured the texture with long but supple lines –  so although the strings had the bulk of the melodic material, the winds  (including the horns) frequently “coloured’ the ambiences, which in this symphony were lively and not a little exploratory, developing both the theme’s upward-rushing muscularity and making use of numerous “offshoots” of impulse in unexpected ways.

The slow movement was graciousness itself at the beginning, its sequences seeming to weave an endless continuation of variants of the opening – I became lost in its enchantment and its apparent inexhaustibility – no contrivance or striving for effect, but simply creativity being given quiet but purposeful energy. As with the previous two movements, the finale finds ways of making the expected unexpected – the triple-time Allegro turns, twists, runs and jumps, and generally led our ears a merry dance! Again, the horns open up the spaces suggested by the music’s energies, and the winds’ rustic colourings delight the sensibilities. Despite the movement’s brevity, Haydn’s seemingly boundless invention seemed to once more carry our interest along with the sounds’ continued delight in discovery.

Nothing could have better prepared us for the delights that were to follow, with Camerata leader Anne Loeser and violist Victoria Jaenecke entering to play for us Mozart’s adorable K.364, the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for violin and viola. From the beginning the sound was lovely, with especially telling dynamic variation from winds and horns and lower strings – the violins themselves seemed a trifle overwhelmed by their colleagues’ characterful strains at first, though the wonderful “Mannheim crescendo” that Mozart gives us in this first tutti here really made an exciting impact. Both soloists with their first notes were silver-toned and ethereal, each more so than I expected they would be, even though their passage-work was exemplary. Anne Loeser led the way into the beautiful minor-key development, each soloist making the most of the music’s pathos, and supported by the orchestra players so well. And their teamwork during the cadenza was exemplary, playing into each others’ music with real aplomb, though both gave me a start by plunging back into the allegro more quickly with their concluding trills than those on my favourite recording (the Oistrakhs pere and fils).

I couldn’t imagine the slow movement being better done than here, with each of the soloists seeming to “play out” more than in the first movement, while integrating their tones clearly and sensitively in the exchanges, the cadenza passage a highlight of the performance with its heart-stopping sense of time almost standing still. And the finale reinforced this “playing as one” kind of Elysium-like culmination of energies and purposes throughout the work – we all  enjoyed the  tidal ebbing and flowing between violin and viola, and also soloists and orchestra, as the work arched upwards towards its culmination in a final grand accord.

Anton Webern steals the show! – Orchestra Wellington and Marc Taddei with “Pharaoh”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON presents “PHARAOH”
GEMMA PEACOCKE – Manta
(with Arohanui Strings)
ANTON WEBERN – Passacaglia Op.1
JOHN PSATHAS – Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra  “Pharaoh”
(with Tomoni Nozaki – timpani)
BRIAR PRASTINI (vocalist) – White, Red, Black
WOLFGANG MOZART – Incidental Music to “Thamos , King of Egypt”
(with the Orpheus Choir of Wellington – Brent Stewart, Director)

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 7th October, 2023

Programme-holding audience members at Orchestra Wellington’s Saturday evening concert “Pharaoh” at the Michael Fowler Centre might have been a little confused upon turning to the opening page of a publication to find the heading “Prophecy” at the top of the page containing the evening’s listed items – hang on! – wasn’t “Prophecy” the title of the previous concert? There was also some disagreement in print regarding John Psathas’s scheduled Timpani Concerto – was it called “Planet Damnation” as on that introductory page with the programme listing? Or was the work’s name actually “Pharaoh”, which stood at the top of the section in the booklet devoted to each individual item, and which gave “Planet Damnation” as the name of the concerto’s third movement?

These things were, of course, minor hiccups which distracted little from the concert’s overall impact, which was considerable, and, thanks to Music Director Marc Taddei’s extraordinary empathy with young musicians demonstrated a heart-warming variety of delights throughout the presentation’s opening segment of music-making. Wellington’s long-established youth programme for aspiring string players, Arohanui Strings, were there in force, from tiny tots to teens, and obviously bursting to play their part in the concert’s opening item, Kiwi composer Gemma Peacocke’s beautiful, multi-stranded instrumental response to the subaqueous world of manta rays who populate the waters of the Outer Hauraki Gulf Tikapa Moana, as characterised in a story by Wiremu Grace, called Whaitere, the Enchanted Stingray.

Peacocke’s piece seemed wrought from sounds at once pulsating with movement and endlessly regenerating, beginning with attention-grabbing soaring and descending lines, a seascape with something of the quality of Sibelius in “The Oceanides”. The supporting winds and brasses sounded repeated figures and long-held pedal notes, with the youthful string-players steadfastedly holding their own lines as the creatures of the deep in the music reaffirmed possession of their world. A solo violin characterised for a moment something of a single creature’s adventure and undertaking, as the oceanic frisson with which the piece began rose and fell impressively once more before the waters resumed their preordained rituals of ceaseless movement.

Marc Taddei then took the opportunity to allow the youngsters their moment of glory, encouraging them to join in with a simplified version of Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”. After starting them all off, the conductor stood motionless, leaving them to it,  exclaiming to us “Don’t they all sound better when I stop conducting them?” to great amusement all round! Then it was the “Tiny Tots” turn to impress (with even more than their obvious cuteness!), coming on stage with their tiny instruments and playing a folk-tune, then playing it again much faster, to breathless effect! After a lullaby restored composure, Taddei proceeded to give all of us a hint regarding one of the pieces of music scheduled for the as yet unannounced 2024 programme for Orchestra Wellington, telling us the Arohanui Strings will play a tune that “will give the show away!: – which it certainly did! And with that the youthful players took their leave……

What then was wondrous was how such heartwarming vignettes of youthful musicians playing what might in some cases have been their first-ever concert notes then “morphed” into the spectacle of the full Orchestra Wellington on the platform with their conductor tackling a score which truly represented a kind of acme of orchestral execution and epoch-making-and-breaking composition – this was the 1908 Op. 1 Passacaglia of Anton Webern, the composer’s simultaneous tribute and farewell to Romanticism in music, his only composition to be performed in public that was written under the tutelage of his teacher at that time, Arnold Schoenberg.

The 20-plus variations of this work (a Passacaglia traditionally consists of a short theme in the bass which becomes a foundation for a set of variations on that theme) use a brilliantly-worked array of sounds, often lush in the manner of Mahler but at times hushed and sparse, with brilliantly inventive combinations of instruments – Webern organises his variations into an almost symphony-like plan of movements, with a central slow section and contrasting scherzo-like textures, all concluding with a ghostly epilogue. Listening to the players negotiating this tightly-worked scheme with what seemed like absolute confidence and conviction, I found myself simply taking off my mythical hat to both conductor and players – I knew the work reasonably well, but couldn’t remember hearing on record or seeing on film a more exciting and involving performance!

I must confess to finding John Psathas’s Timpani Concerto which followed a bit perplexing in contrast to what I’d just heard – and unfortunately my seat was in a place where my view of the timpanist was obscured by the conductor, so I missed some of the visual excitement of the soloist’s obviously virtuosic command of the instruments. As it wasn’t a work I’d heard before I figured earlier I might find a You-Tube performance with which to familiarise myself regarding the piece – and I found a clip which bore the title “Planet Damnation”, featuring a most exciting performance by Larry Reese, the NZSO timpanist. I didn’t know I was hearing and getting to know only the final movement at that stage, so the onset of the first movement nonplussed me for a while, as did what seemed like an over-insistence of the percussionist playing the woodblocks! The slow movement, when it came, was something of a blessed relief.

Though it was just as unfamiliar, I really enjoyed the slow movement, as it gave the timpanist, Tomoni Nozaki, a beautiful young Japanese woman, a chance to demonstrate the skill and variety of her touch and her ear for all kinds of sonority, instead of her being often drowned out by the rest of the orchestra (I found the woodblock part for one far too insistent!). Then came the movement I’d already heard, and I was able to better relate to the plethora of percussive irruption that the first movement had seemed to unfetter upon our sensibilities. I don’t think it’s a work I shall ever love, but the skills on display by the soloist were sufficiently interesting to make the piece work throughout those two latter movements.

We had a different running-order to that of the printed programme, so we got Briar Prastiti’s “White, Red, Black” after the interval. I liked this work a lot, admiring the composer’s orchestrations of her material, the wind-blown ambiences of the opening carrying my sensibilities along with the music’s trajectories, sharpening my interest more with bird-song-like figurations suggesting in places things coming into focus. What I found slightly disappointing was not being able to hear a single word of the vocalist’s line (despite a microphone being used) from where I was sitting (and my companion similarly reported that he could not hear the singer, and nor could somebody else I spoke to afterwards)….the accompaniment was invariably beautiful, but whenever the song’s intensities sharpened or  grew in body, so did the accompaniments! For this reason, the most telling vocal moments for me were towards the end, when the voice became as an orchestral instrument, the wordless vocalising as haunting as any other of the sounds we were hearing.

Before the final item of the evening, Marc Taddei announced certain salient details of the Orchestra’s 2024 programme, certainly whetting our appetites with some of the detailings – it seems to be a kind of survey of masterpieces representing different eras of artistic creativity, beginning (if I remember correctly) with the Baroque era, and finishing with a contemporary work (I didn’t write all the “clues” down, but Taddei assured us that full details would be released at the Orchestra[‘s final programme for the year, “Red Moon”, on November 11th.

And so to the evening’s final item, which, though splendidly performed and presented, with resplendent singing from Brent Stewart’s Orpheus Choir, and, by turns, stirring and meltingly beautiful orchestral playing, either in support or leading the way, I thought it all essentially lacked the last modicum of focus and interest to be truly engaging. Perhaps if we had had the words, the extra focus would have enlivened the undoubtedly “Game of Thrones” like scenario for which Mozart produced this music. Or, perhaps we needed a narrator with a suitably theatrical “presence” to knit the scenario together more readily –  In reality, everybody – choir and orchestra – did their best with the material, but for me it never really caught fire! I found myself wishing at times that the orchestra was instead giving us the G Minor Symphony K.183, which was what the music occasionally sounded a bit like. And, as I walked to my car after the concert, the thing I found myself wanting to do the most was to get home and play that sensational Webern work again! It was , for me, the evening’s indisputable highlight, and I remain grateful to Marc Taddei and his players for THAT most of all – a truly remarkable experience!

 

 

Evocations of Spain, from Ewan Clark and the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra presents:
CHABRIER – Espana
TURINA – Danzas Fantasticas
BIZET – Carmen Suite No. 1
RODRIGO – Concierto de Aranjuez
(Owen Moriarty – guitar)
BIZET – Carmen Suite No. 2

Wellington City Orchestra
Conductor – Ewan Clark

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

Saturday, 16th September 2023

There were probably quite a number of people attending this concert who were in exactly my situation regarding our relationship with the music we were about to be served – the Chabrier, Bizet and Rodrigo Items I had heard many times before and knew reasonably well, but the Turina work,  Danzas Fantasticas, never.

Audiences are more often than not disparate and largely unconnected fraternities, but here from the outset one sensed a kind of “anticipatory listening camaraderie” hovering about St.Andrew’s Church  in view of the afternoon’s programme. I liked imagining that it promised both the pleasure of hearing so many well-known items, and the thrill of discovering and getting to know at least one work of Turina’s – whose title alone promised more of the same qualities as its companions in the programme.

Well, I can’t speak for my companions in the church this afternoon, but by the time the Danzas Fantasticas had strutted its stuff, I was flabbergasted! I kept on thinking, listening to conductor Ewan Clark’s expert “putting the players through their paces” reading of the work, why have I never before investigated this music ? What a peach of a work! I had actually heard of it (probably the only Turina work I could name if pressed to do so), but it didn’t for me provoke anything like the “instant recognition” that any of the other pieces on this afternoon’s listening menu did. It would therefore be fair to say than Joaquin Turina isn’t as yet a “single-work composer” in the popular regard of things, as one could say about Chabrier with his Espana” or Rodrigo with his “Concierto  de Aranjuez” – and, in many people’s minds, perhaps even Bizet with his “Carmen”.

However, it wasn’t for me the only reason that this Wellington City Orchestra concert gave such particular pleasure on this occasion – though not yet entirely consistent in its responses to the demands of the music, I felt that the band under conductor Ewan Clark had captured the character of every piece we heard, from the vibrancy of rhythm and colour evident in Chabrier’s Espana” to the sheer variety of emotion and situation portrayed for us in Bizet’s music for his opera “Carmen”. A friend afterwards remarked upon the vividness of the playing’s recreation of the opera’s powerful atmosphere and intensely dramatic situations. And besides the vividness of Turina’s picture-postcard evocations of Spanish life, the playing of guitarist Owen Moriarty brought home to us the intensely-wrought emotion embedded in the famous “Aranjuez” Guitar Concerto, the orchestral response to the soloist’s and his heartfelt ruminations impressively of a piece with the music’s character and depth of feeling.

A few remarks regarding what I heard here and there in the music and its playing – at the very beginning of “Espana” there were a few tentative moments with the difficult syncopations between strings and wind (I played in this work once in my halcyon days as a percussionist, and remember never feeling entirely sure of what I was doing in relation to my fellow-musicians, including the conductor! – AND I also remember not being able to get Perry Como’s famous “Hot Diggety Dog” song out of my head for some time so I could properly concentrate on Chabrier!). Here, the introduction came together beautifully as the players overcame these uncertainties and started to develop the music’s engaging feeling of “schwung”, the piece’s occasional “rolling crescendi” also carrying us along with great exhilaration! Ewen Clark got a treasurable moment from the strings with a “comma” inserted at one point just before the players’ big-hearted taking-up of the juicy lyrical theme! – and I also liked the elan with which the brasses made their alternating calls just before the coda.

Next up was the Turina work, about which I must report that my anticipation was all the more whetted by the appearance on the platform at that point of a contrabassoon that seemed twice the size of the player who was carrying it! Despite my slight bewilderment at the programme note not being entirely “on the button” with its descriptions of the openings of each of the first two movements, I still thoroughly enjoyed the sounds that I heard! The first opened with mysterious string chordings, followed by a sudden irruption, stimulating rhythmic sequences of sounds by turns lively and sultry, with a lovely, romantic melody dug into by the strings varied by some beautiful lines from a cor anglais  – then the strings returned with their mysterious opening chords before bidding us a kind of sweet and nostalgia-ridden series of “adios”. A bracing call to attention began the second movement, which then morphed into a more relaxed and somewhat angular 5/4 rhythm with beautiful writing for both strings and winds. Yes, the finale was indeed of a “lively and rhythmic character” – very Spanish, with the themes contrastingly sultry and charming, with an exciting coda, a brief cello solo, and a coruscating orchestral pay-off!

We then got the first of the two Carmen Suites from the opera, beginning most appropriately with the baleful “Fate” theme (which I recall never before hearing until I encounted the opera proper!) – great brass and lower strings here! The Aragonaise theme came next, delivered with great brilliance and atmosphere – it was followed by the beautiful “Intermezzo” a moment of flute-and-harp calm in the opera amidst a sea of troubles! Carmen’s tempting invitation to Don Jose, the Seguedille followed – after a slightly shaky start, oboe and strings nailed it! Les Dragons  d’Aicala, Don Jose’s marching tune, featured both bassoon and clarinet in fine fettle, while the suite’s most popular number Les Toreadors made an excellent first-half concluding piece, not too rushed, but delivered with real swagger!

After the interval Owen Moriarty took the platform with his guitar, to perform the much-played but ever-enchanting “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Joaquin Rodrigo – this occasion was no exception, as the soloist despatched his part with a remarkable amalgam of spontaneity and fluency throughout – did the wind players occasionally get slightly ahead of the soloist at times when he seemed to “give space” in  the turning of a phrase-end? – even if such was the case, no violence to any particular bar or phrase that I could pinpoint was enacted by any of the players in the making of this music! A deservedly-mentioned highlight of the performance was the playing by Rodney Ford of the cor anglais solo in the second movement, for which the latter received acknowledgement at the work’s end – the playing had a plangency I couldn’t remember being bettered in any previous performance I’d heard. In fact the “live” occasion gave the music an extra level of intensity throughout that made a huge difference to how one responded to the work as a whole, the occasion thus more deeply “touching” my sensibilities than has been usually the case with the music.

Nothing could have “rounded off” the concert better after this than the second of Bizet’s “Carmen” Suites – though Owen Moriarty did his best to help us return to our lives with an encore by a Serbian composer Miroslav Tadic – a most entertaining and vigorous piece called “Walk Dance”, which certainly “cleared the air” of any Iberian excess that may have hung around after the concerto’s final notes had died away. Then it was all orchestral hands on deck again for the Bizet, beginning this time with a more-than-usually circumspect piece for this opera, the Marche des Contrebandiers  (Smugglers’ March), but whose relative unfamiliarity was made up for in spadefuls by the deservedly famous Habanera. Afterwards came some of the most beautiful music from the opera, that given to Micaela, Don Jose’s would-be sweetheart, in the throes of searching desperately for him in the mountains – lovely horn-playing, at first, followed by the solo violin with the melody, the Concertmaster Paula Carryer here doing an excellent job!

More familiar to those who hadn’t yet seen the opera would have been the following Chanson du Toreador (Song of the Toreador) expressing the necessary courage and bravado of Escamilo, the bullfighter, with solo trumpeter Neil Dodgson making a brilliant job of it, as do the brass in general in the following La Garde Montante (The Changing of the Guard) together with the winds, giving the scene plenty of ceremonial elan! Finally, we heard one of Bizet’s most exciting creations, the Danse Boheme, sung in the opera by Carmen and two of her gypsy cohorts in a vivid description of a wild and abandoned gypsy dance, Ewan Clark and the orchestra responding by pulling out all the stops, as they say in the classics, and bringing the concert to a suitably brilliant conclusion. We clapped and shouted our approval of it all, a great and deserved success for all concerned – well done on all counts to guitarist Owen Moriarty, to conductor Ewan Clark and to the stalwart players of the Wellington CIty Orchestra.