Tag: orchestral

Some great hits from NZSO’s popular classics concert; a win by a big margin

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Andrew Joyce (cello)

Schubert: Symphony No 8 in B minor ‘Unfinished’ 
Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme
Gillian whitehead: Turanga-nui (premiere)
Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 15 September, 7:30 pm

I don’t know what sort of audiences have been showing up at the other ten performances of this concert between Invercargill and Kerikeri, but the thin population in the MFC was a bit of a surprise. There was certainly competition from the rugby on Saturday evening; but there was probably also a more insidious factor: no glamorous overseas soloist; no internationally recognised conductor.

Other inhibitors: a deterrent for the serious musical aficionado was the presence of music likely to be enjoyed by the masses; and at the other extreme, for those with only superficial interest there wasn’t much they might have encountered in film or TV.

The Unfinished
But it was a good try. Schubert symphonies are not much played, compared with Beethoven, Brahms or Mahler; and they should be (a Schubert series from Orchestra Wellington is worth thinking about). McKeich moved elegantly and sensitively through the Eighth, the pianissimi rather exquisite, the interrupting fortissimo interjections a bit too emphatic, but with absorbing attention to its unique spirit. But the end of the first movement arrived too soon; I’m sure Schubert called for a repeat of the exposition.

The second movement hung together very well, with a chance to admire the composer’s orchestral subtleties, especially the winds that now included trombones, with Beethoven’s innovation in his Fifth Symphony 15 years earlier. In all, this was a beautifully evoked account.

The Rococo Variations had a troubled birth, having been subjected to arrogant revision by Tchaikovsky’s professorial colleague at the Moscow Conservatorium, cellist Fitzenhagen.  I didn’t see the relevance of the programme note’s remarks about an arrangement for piano and cello for that was not publicly performed. Furthermore, the notes left it to be assumed that the orchestra used Fitzenhagen’s controversial revised version which has been more played, since its seven sections were named. Andrew Joyce confirmed to me that it was Tchaikovsky’s original, eight-variation version. Among many minor changes, including the deletion of one variation, the main alteration was the Andante sostenuto which Fitzenhagen had moved from its affecting penultimate place to become the third variation in his version.

In fact, reading accounts of its composition and Tchaikovsky’s strenuous objection to the quite major alterations in Fitzenhagen’s unauthorised interference, it is surprising that it took so long for Tchaikovsky’s own version to be first performed, in Moscow in 1941.

The Rococo Variations were inspired by Tchaikovsky’s love of Mozart, and scoring is more limited than the normal scale in the 1870s: just pairs of winds; no trumpets or trombones, no timpani. While the orchestra played with discretion, even distinction, the aural focus was predominantly on cellist Andrew Joyce, who has to be recognised as a cellist of international standing, such was his splendid bravura as well as the extraordinary beauty of tone that he produced. There were moments of dazzling virtuosity, often climbing to the top of the fingerboard, using thumb position and perfect, false harmonics.

The beauty of the orchestral parts were a fine match with the cellist’s playing, and there were no balance problems. It’s fashionable to denigrate the piece as a concerto-manqué, but Tchaikovsky composed exactly what wanted, a homage to Mozart (who never wrote either concerto or sonata for cello), and you can think of it as a half-breed if you like, but it stands convincingly just as Tchaikovsky composed it and I was utterly delighted by the performance.

Joyce’s encore was a tune from the British Sea Songs of the Last night of the Proms. Wasn’t sure I heard correctly: Tom Bowling?

Gillian Whitehead Turanga-nui 
After the interval came Gillian Whitehead’s Turanga-nui which, though the fact was ignored in the programme note, is the third of a ‘Landfall’ commissions by the NZSO that marks Cook’s 1769 arrival (we’re a little previous, obviously, for the 250th anniversary) at Poverty Bay (Turanga-nui-a-kiwa), though oddly, the programme note didn’t mention that. This piece dwelt initially on the arrival half a millennium earlier of another group of strangers.

Much contemporary orchestral music employs a good deal of percussion and this certainly used percussion, but it was never gratuitous, integrated sensitively with conventional stringed and wind instruments. To some extent it was a depiction of landfall, of encounter that turned ugly between human beings with almost no common context, and conflict. Timpani and ethereal strings set the scene but were followed by shrill wind-led agitation; bird-song, flutterings, the dance of the wind. It often astonishes me that the sounds arising in the composer’s head can be translated into actual orchestral sounds, at all. But the feeling created here was of that magic occurring, and that the offerings from marimba and xylophone, trombones and tuba, discreet Maori instruments, flutes and strings, and a particularly evocative bassoon solo, existed just as precisely on paper as in they had in Whitehead’s mind.

The music and its instrumentation quite enchanted me, and I think it enchanted the audience generally. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many a sceptic in the audience didn’t came away with a much greater respect for and pleasure in contemporary New Zealand music than they might have had earlier.

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune 
The Debussy; it’s the centenary of his death this year, so he’s being played plenty around the world. In fact, a couple of weeks ago a surprisingly effective version of the Le Faune for flute and piano was played by Diedre Irons and Rebecca Steele at a lunchtime concert, and the day after the present concert, NZSO principal flutist, Bridget Douglas, played his famous little solo flute piece, Syrinx at a Wellington Chamber Music concert. This was a good performance, with much careful and evocative playing by woodwinds and harps. It doesn’t play itself by any means, and there were moments when some of Debussy’s still elusive, mythologizing creation slightly missed its potential.

But the last work, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet symphonic poem, to use the appropriate descriptive term, was a splendid, emotion-laden, orchestrally exciting performance. Curiously, even though there was a full complement of winds, the strings were fewer than is typical in late 19th century orchestral music; it made no perceptible difference. There are things about its orchestration, its near-dissonant harmonies, its structure, not to mention its powerfully emotional, musical inspiration that anticipates the future directions of music as did Debussy’s Faun (only 15 years later). And the tragic passion of its last pages, declining to the subtlest gestures from oboes, clarinets and bassoons, proved a wonderful climax and catharsis.

The programme’s construction might have been a bit unusual, but it worked very well in the end and certainly deserved a much bigger crowd.

Rachmaninov and Stravinsky – not such strange bedfellows, courtesy of de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STRAVINSKY – Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920 rev.1947)
Symphony in Three Movements (1945)
RACHMANINOV – Symphony No. 2 in E Minor Op. 27

Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, August 24th, 2018

What a pleasure it was to be able to read in the programme NZSO Music Director Edo de Waart’s comments about each of the pieces due to be conducted by him in this evening’s concert with the orchestra. His words resonated on a number of fronts, one of them historical as he touched on the NZSO’s special relationship with Igor Stravinsky, who, in 1961 visited New Zealand at the age of 79 as a renowned “guest conductor” of the orchestra. On that occasion the conducting was shared between the composer and his assistant, Robert Craft, the latter directing the orchestra in one of this evening’s works, the Symphony in Three Movements, and Stravinsky himself taking the baton for Apollon Musagete, followed by the Lullaby and Finale of The Firebird.

Equally fascinating (as well as speaking volumes regarding his versatility as a musician and conductor) was de Waart’s recounting of his own history with some of the music, notably the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which he had previously performed many times as oboist/director of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. To then read of his enthusiasm for Rachmaninov’s music via his comments on the Second Symphony (he conducted all the symphonies on record with the Rotterdam Philharmonic) suggests a sensibility on the conductor’s part which inclines towards the inclusive rather than the drawing of demarcation lines between composers based on judgements wrought from fashion or intellectual snobbery.  In their very different ways both Rachmaninov’s and Stravinsky’s works have undergone such travails over the years courtesy of self-styled “high priests” of opinion regarding artistic merit – one turns with some reassurance to Sibelius’s observation on behalf of his vocation in general, that “no-one ever erected a statue to a critic”, even if there exist a handful of exceptions to that dictum.

In fact, Rachmaninov’s and Stravinsky’s differences as creative artists were never the cause for the degree of disjunction between them promoted in certain circles of musical academia, people who regarded their own judgements as something akin to “holy writ”, and dissenters as somewhat lacking in “proper” faculties (Theodor Adorno, for one, regarded Rachmaninov’s music and people’s enjoyment of the same as “regressive” and in one famous instance even “infantile”!). The composers themselves were surprisingly accepting of one another’s music, Rachmaninov speaking of Firebird and Petrushka as “masterpieces”, and regarding even Le Sacre du Printemps as having “solid musical merits in the form of imaginative harmonies and energetic rhythms” (one can, I think, hear Rachmaninov’s debt to Stravinsky in the pounding rhythms of the first of the former’s Symphonic Dances of 1940).

If Stravinsky’s opinion of Rachmaninov’s music was expressed somewhat more equivocally, it was without rancour or condescension – he spoke in later years of the latter’s earlier pieces as “watercolours”, adding that he then “turned to oils and became a very “old” composer”, but qualifying his judgement with the words “….do not expect me to denigrate him for that.” – an attitude in marked contrast to that of many of Stravinsky’s devotees who saw it as their “duty” to summarily disparage Rachmaninov’s music. The two composers famously became neighbours in Beverley Hills towards the end of Rachmaninov’s life, their social interactions apparently marked not by discussions about music but about agents, managers, copyrights and royalties! (For a more detailed account of this interaction between the two composers, click on the link below, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Public Relations Office, to an article by commentator Michael Steinberg.)

https://www.sfsymphony.org/Watch-Listen-Learn/Read-Program-Notes/Articles-Interviews/Rachmaninoff-Feature-Oct-2014.aspx

Stravinsky used the title of his work for wind instruments to refer to the original meaning of the word “Symphony”, a “sounding together” – the music derived from a chorale Stravinsky wrote in honour of Debussy, who died in 1918, which gradually developed into what the composer called “a grand chant” using the “objective” tones of wind instruments, as opposed to the “warm, human tone” of strings.  He himself claimed the work lacked any general appeal, containing nothing that resembled his earlier, more popular compositions. Even so, the music at the outset contrasted strident, attention-grabbing wind chords with passages for mellow brass, everything spacious and beautifully al fresco. The mood throughout resembled an enactment of some kind of ritual, not unlike the iconic Le Sacre du Printemps in the intensities generated by the different sections, though with a somewhat loftier, more austere overall effect. At all times, Edo de Waart got playing from his instrumentalists which could only be described as sublime, the ensemble by turns sharply-focused and richly-rounded, the sonorities replete with varied interest and engagement.

The later Symphony in Three Movements seemed to more readily evoke the composer’s past, in the outer sections recalling (once again) the muscularities and acerbities of the aforementioned Le Sacre, as well as using a piano obbligato reminiscent of another of his ballets, Petrushka. The work’s opening sequences resembled in places a circus band that had gone off the rails, with the percussion having great fun! Throughout the movement there seemed an almost “Concerto for Orchestra” aspect, the composer’s writing skilfully interactive while keeping an openness of texture. The piano was given a lot to do, almost like a mediator between sparring elements, each determined to “be themselves”, come what may!  I loved the strings’ articulation of the gentle jog-trot rhythms at the second movement’s beginning, with the harp taking on the obbligato role here, while the winds coloured their sounds for de Waart most exquisitely, relishing their ad lib-like contributions, and creating some magical ambiences together with the strings. The music led the ear innocently enough to the finale’s beginning, at which point what sounded like a jingoistic kind of anarchy unfurled its flag to the strains of pompous fanfares, the composer flying in the face of his own pronouncements regarding music, here (“…music is powerless to express anything except itself…” for example – Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography 1935) by admitting that he was inspired by World War II newsreels of goose-stepping German soldiers, and that the build-up towards the music’s triumphal ending marked the war’s turning-point in favour of the Allied forces. The debate regarding the composer‘s words in relation to his own music continues, meantime……but for now, I’m happy to report that de Waart and the players gave a performance of the whole that bore out the conductor’s description of the music as a ‘glorious work”.

So we came to the concert’s second half, featuring music by a different composer, one whose attitudes and intentions regarding his work (and music in general) are on record as diametrically removed from any Stravinsky-like ideas of music’s “powerless” objectivity as could be. Edo de Waart unequivocally described Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony as “a haunting and deeply moving work”, thereby cutting the Gordion Knot of binding judgement regarding musical styles by treating all of the concert’s individual works entirely on their own merits. It was ironic, therefore, that, his conducting of the Symphony to my ears didn’t seek to invest the work with any particular nationalistic or geographical character of sound other than a kind of echt-European mellowness of utterance – in other words, his was an objective, well-rounded and beautifully-proportioned reading, one which allowed “the notes”, as written by the composer, to speak for themselves.

Which is another way of my saying that the music here wasn’t made to sound any more “Russian” than what the composer had written into the score. While my preference, when listening to this music, is for rather more “temperament” expressed in occasional volatilities and explorations of near-extremities of tone and timbre, I relished de Waart’s obvious love and respect for the music and its composer, and the orchestra’s sensitive, well-rounded and at times brilliant playing.

We heard a beautifully long-breathed opening pair of exhalations which set the work in motion, before a light, lithe allegro moderato swung into action, its phrases beautifully weighted and nuanced. Throughout each succeeding episode de Waart and his players similarly wove layer upon layer of lyrical utterance, both strings and winds shaping their expression next to great rolling crescendi from the brass, capped by scintillating percussion, until the dancing exuberance of the movement’s coda was done.

More excitement was to be had from the scherzo, incisive strings and ringing horns leading the way, de Waart keeping the exuberance seemly, as well as curbing any overt sentimentality in the phrasing of the second theme, apart from a touch of portamento in one of the upward string figures. The brasses got their galloping syncopations excitingly right, the strings reducing things to a whisper before the whiplash entry of the Trio – here, clear and incisive rather than weighty, though the brass resonances rang deeply and richly soon afterwards. What I always think of as the “Rimsky-Korsakov” sequences – those lovely prancing, wind-decorated martial figures! – had plenty of exotic glitter before things accelerated excitingly towards the reprise of the opening, the movement then racing to its suddenly sombre conclusion, its spectral brasses and ghostly whisperings vanishing into the night.

Again, the famous opening of the slow movement, with its “continuous melody” wrought by strings and clarinet, was simply and directly expressed, with exquisitely-judged playing from clarinettist Patrick Barry, matched later by the NZSO strings, and supported by the other wind-players. Nothing was over-wrought, de Waart keeping the heart-on-sleeve emotion of it all within the realms of natural utterance, while encouraging an interactive sound-picture, the wind counterpoints and brass-and timpani climaxes all part of the greater flow. This served to highlight the finale’s joyous release of energies, even if I thought the horns could have been allowed a more exuberant voice in places – still those echoes of the previous movements made their mark amid the festivities, as did the hushed build-up of the ‘bells” sequence towards a sonorous, scalp-tingling panoply of ringing sounds whose effect was all the greater in the context of the conductor’s restraint elsewhere. And though I occasionally craved more raw excitement in places, I relished de Waart’s insistence on clarity of detail at all times, my ears in a constant state of titillation through registering so much that’s normally masked or underplayed.

A thoroughly-deserved burst of acclamation from an appreciative audience greeted conductor and players as the music’s final hammered-out chords flung their energies out to the four corners of the hall – splendid stuff!

 

 

 

 

 

 

East and West mingle at Wellington Youth Orchestra Concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
LOVE AND FREEDOM

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Leonore Overture No.2 Op.72a / Symphony No. 7 in A Major Op. 92
MICHAEL VINTEN – Six Korean Love Poems (arr. Anne French)

Sarah Court  (mezzo-soprano)
Wellington Youth Orchestra
Michael Vinten (conductor)

St.James’ Church, Woburn Road, Lower Hutt

Sunday, 19th August, 2018

A most striking frontispiece on the programme cover (uncredited) for this enterprising concert seemed to alert us to the presence of something out-of-the-ordinary – an illustration something along the lines of those disconcerting front-and-profile images of one and the same person. It wasn’t exactly that, in this case, but the effect certainly caused a double-take on my part, which I presume was the idea! – here, a youthful portrait of Beethoven was set literally cheek-by jowl with a young woman’s image similarly iconic (if somewhat Westernised) in exotic effect.

All that it was signifying was the programme’s setting of a pair of “classic” orchestral pieces next to an almost brand-new New Zealand work, a premiere of sorts, in fact – more about this circumstance below. The venue wasn’t the orchestra’s usual performing-place, with Wellington’s still-recent spate of earthquake activity continuing to exert its toll by putting pressure on performing groups seeking appropriate spaces in which to do their thing, as various buildings normally used for this purpose get ear-marked for “strengthening”, a process which takes time and considerable expense.

Here, it was St.James’ Church in Woburn which served the purpose, a place in which I’d previously heard vocal ensemble music, but not an orchestra. I thought the sound lively (too much so, it seemed to me, in the case of the timpani), and with an audience present to soak up some of the reverberation, allowing plenty of detail to register. Best of all sound-wise was the set of songs, with the singer’s forward placement enabling her superb diction to give the words that inner life which concert situations so often blur or impede in an unhelpful acoustic. The orchestral detail, too, bloomed in those spaces, the sounds working beautifully with the singer to convey the composer’s desired effect.

First up, though, and very properly, was an overture (I invariably think, at a concert’s beginning, of Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame in partnership with Donald Swann, telling his audience that they always considered their opening song important, because, as he remarked, “it helps us to get the pitch of the hall”) – and so it was, here, with the very opening chord of Beethoven’s Leonore No.2 Overture (written for the composer’s one and only opera) generating a sound which, thanks to conductor Michael Vinten’s expert direction and the players’ sharpness of response, nicely “defined” the spaces, and set the ambient tone for what was to follow.

The winds had a lovely colour throughout the work’s opening, with supportive work by the horns creating a sense of expectancy, and leading to some strong and sure chording whose aftermath gave rise to the work’s principal melody, the radiance eventually breaking through the darkness – the strings managed their tricky syncopations throughout, while the winds brought forth a lovely “glow” with Leonore’s lover Florestan’s lyrical theme, the exchanges allowed time and elbow-space to phrase their figurations. The ‘cellos enjoyed their playing of the main allegro theme, counterpointed by the winds and leading up to the stormy sequences which preceded the famous trumpet fanfare – here played with breathtaking skill on both occasions by the orchestra’s principal player Vincent Brzozowski. More expert playing from the winds brought back the music’s lyricism and expectancy of light triumphing over darkness, the strings playing the notes with a kind of breathless caution at first before gaining in confidence and activating themselves and one another to cascade outwards in all directions, excitingly sounding the theme in a kind of gabble, and bringing forth the brasses in glorious C Major with an energised, victorious version of Florestan’s “Leonore” tune. Vinten got his players to work up a “real” presto-like tumult here, skin and hair flying and no prisoners taken, a truly joyous conclusion to a well-fought musical campaign.

I was curious enough originally at Michael Vinten’s choice of Korean texts for his song-cycle “Six Korean Love-Poems”, but things became “curiouser and curiouser” when I discovered that the English words from the poems were in fact “transliterations” by the New Zealand poet Anne French – the programme note elaborates further by saying, re the original texts, “Anne has taken their ideas and images and refashioned them, whilst retaining a flavour of the originals”. Any disquiet I might have had regarding such a practice was effectively quashed when remembering that Gustav Mahler’s purportedly translated Chinese texts in his song-cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” were similarly “adapted” by Hans Bethge from material which itself had been in places “expanded” by earlier European sinologists. In fact Mahler himself in places revised Bethge’s wording to fit his musical lines, further distancing his work from the original “letter”, even if retaining the “spirit”. Well, I reasoned, if it was good enough for Gustav Mahler……….

Vinten set French’s versions of these poems during 2015/16 for voice and piano, and they were premiered in Brisbane in 2016 by today’s singer, Sarah Court, and pianist Therese Milanovic. Today’s performance was thus the world premiere of the songs’ orchestral version, and the first time they had been performed in New Zealand in any form. I’m not sure whether the composer’s original intention was to eventually orchestrate them, or whether it became obvious over time that they cried out for orchestral colour and variation – but whatever the case, and, of course, not having heard the voice-and-piano version of the songs, I thought the realisations remarkably “at one” with the texts.

Anne French used verses by poets writing as early as 1560 (Hwang  Chin-i, a sixteenth-century gisaeng, or courtesan, famous for her beauty and intellect), and more recently, Kim So-wol (1903-1934, considered the “founder” of modern Korean poetry, despite his tragically short life) and Han Yong-Un (1879-1944, a Buddhist monk, reformer and poet). Each of the poems in the collection had a different kind of intensity of shade, texture, or colour of utterance, which I thought Vinten’s writing reflected in each case. Thus, the music of the first poem connected with the words’ evocations of natural phenomena, the leaves falling, the scent of flowers, the babble of a stream, all of which were heard in both figurations and their accompanying stillnesses, the vocal line mirroring the “natural dance” of these things. The second song seemed like a series of sighs, with long singing lines and warm, luscious textures, delineating a period of waiting for the arrival of a lover. By contrast, the third poem was a tightly-woven mind-game interaction, quixotic and angular in effect with exotic tinges coloured by percussion in places, and yielding at the end in accordance with the words “softened just a little by love”.

How different the evocations for the following “The sweet briar rose”, diaphanous textures and repeated patternings creating an ethereal effect over which the vocal line rhapsodised, while a flute solo joined in with an exquisite effect of tremulous wonderment – the voice soared, swayed, teased, enticed and reflected, before resigning to waiting, with a brief orchestral postlude for company. The fifth poem was a soliloquy on deprivation following the loved one’s departure, the opening agitated figures supporting the singer’s description of the “treading red and gold leaves under his feet”, almost like a running commentary, with strings and timpani pushing the music forwards. With a memory of a first meeting the music became rhapsodical, and then as the singer voiced a strategy “let my grief kindle my hope”, the sounds threw open the picture, suggesting distance and emptiness spanned by the vocal line’s confident tones. In stark contrast, the final song generated no such comfort or confidence, the piccolo and other winds evoking loneliness and abandonment, the vocal line angry – “Let that name be broken into pieces”, anguished – “Let that name be scattered on the air”, and despairing – “There is no answer to it yet”. The instrumental writing adroitly suggested full, rich textures yet remained curiously open, almost feeling cut adrift, as the sounds evoked that “great space between earth and sky” and generated brief moments of grandeur before dissolving, leaving behind the desolation of a solo violin and dark percussion sounds underpinned by low piano notes as the singer intoned “I call your name in sadness”. A brief frisson of energy accompanied the words “I shall be calling your name all my life”, before a final plaintive statement from the piccolo signalled the end of the piece.

An interval allowed time and space for what we’d heard to settle and take hold within, though the performance had from the outset already begun to carve a niche of enduring memory, thanks to Sarah Court’s rich and varied mezzo tones and her heartfelt rendering of the texts, augmented by an incredibly inventive panoply of orchestral sounds gotten from the players by the composer himself on the podium. I found myself marvelling at the human empathies of those words, poet Anne French triumphantly forging a link here with expressions of feeling one might consider on the face of things intractably rooted to far-removed worlds, mere curiosities from an alien culture – what came through, of course, was a shared and binding humanity, though I wouldn’t have been surprised had the “thought-police” of cultural appropriation gotten wind of the occasion and chimed in at some stage, PC spurs and medallions jangling!

Refreshed, we settled back to listen to what would be made of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the work famously styled by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” (in contrast with the view of one of Beethoven’s contemporaries, Carl Maria von Weber, who remarked on hearing the work that its composer was ‘fit for the madhouse!”).  Michael Vinten seemed to take Wagner at his word regarding his approach to Beethoven’s music, which was athletic and sprightly rather than grand and monumental. The opening chord, though slightly fallible, had considerable “punch”, and though the scales were played tentatively at first, the strings got more of a “swing” as the music went along. Both winds and timpani kept the rhythms sprightly, the timpanist (whose work I always admire) playing a shade too emphatically for me occasionally in this context, though always exciting and reliable (a moment of concerted confusion apart, later in the movement). The allegro stumbled a bit at its outset, but was finally launched, Vinten driving the dotted rhythms at a great rate, the effect somewhat raucous, but also very “Beethoven”, vibrant and unbuttoned!

It was this energy of Beethoven’s writing that was consistently conveyed by the performance, and which I relished, despite the occasional hit-and-miss element with the notes. It’s always seemed to me more important for players in youth and amateur ensembles to be encouraged to “get the rhythms right”, and, past a certain point, let the notes take care of themselves – if the rhythms are strong and confident, then the music will sound right despite any mis-hits, but if the rhythms are untidy, then no amount of correctly-sounded notes are going to be of much use! With brisk speeds and strongly-wrought rhythmic direction,  Vinten seemed to me to be achieving plenty of coherent excitement with these players. There was the occasional mixup, most notably near the first movement’s end with the music emerging from the grinding bass vortices, and some voices coming in a measure too early; but in general, the dance and its irrepressible rhythms triumphed!

The symphony’s most renowned for its “slow” movement, and here, the processional-like figures received well-wrought and full-throated treatment from all concerned, the lower strings especially good at the outset, the cellos eloquent and soulful. The contrasting major sequences  sounded properly easeful, with nicely-articulated canonic work between winds and horn, and the great cascading return to the processional rhythm was impressively managed. The strings held their rhythmic patternings beautifully throughout the fugato, and integrated superbly with the rest of the orchestra at the grand, ceremonial refrain of the hymn-tune – a great moment!

What an orchestral difficulty the scherzo must be to launch! Untidy at the very beginning, the ensemble rallied itself, once again finding the rhythm’s “swing” and managing the whiplash szforzandi with great elan! Vinten kept the Trio moving, encouraging the players to plunge into the full tutti, boots and all – very exciting! – and afterwards, perhaps emboldened by what they’d just achieved, the reprise of the scherzo’s opening was much tidier.

Despite my “connecting” with Vinten’s way of keeping the ensemble rhythmically tight, I still wasn’t prepared for the “Vienna Philharmonic” speed with which the finale began, here! – though occasionally starved of tonal weight, the sounds leapt forwards with each accented downstroke, the players keeping things together as if their lives depended on the outcome! I occasionally thought more weight could have been applied to some phrases, such as the lower strings’ reply to the oft-repeated dotted figure hurled at them by the upper strings – but this was a small point compared with the energy generated by the whole. At the end we certainly felt as though we had been immersed in a kind of maelstrom, the conductor and players sharing with us an accompanying sense of satisfaction at re-emerging with exhaustion and invigoration triumphantly hand-in-hand!

 

 

NZSO triumphs with brilliant Beethoven and Brahms masterpieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart, with violinist Augustin Hadelich

Beethoven: Violin concerto in D, Op 61
Brahms: Symphony No 2 in D, Op 73

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 18 August, 7:30 pm

Though this was a very traditional, heart-of-the-classical-world concert which one might have thought would excite neither the aficionados nor the young and innocent in terms of classical music awareness, it was a very near full house – not an every-day experience for the NZSO.

But the fact is that I cannot remember a live performance in Wellington of the Beethoven violin concerto: certainly, a search of Middle C’s archive brings up none. And I had to go back to the NZSO’s Brahms festival in October 2011 to find the last performance of his No 2.

Beethoven Violin Concerto
Though one doesn’t expect a performance of such a familiar concerto to spark excitement, even the orchestral introduction, which was cautious, expectant and dignified, presaged something splendid. It took hold of the audience almost at once, as if the orchestra, as well as audience, knew that they, the orchestra, were harbingers of something special. So the violin’s entry seemed to still the audience immediately, generating the feeling that a definitive, exultant performance was at hand. There is a special kind of silence that takes possession of an audience when faced with something remarkable.

Augustin Hadelich is of German descent, but born in 1984 to a vintner family established in Tuscany. Aged 15, and already a prodigy on both piano and violin, his career was nearly ended in a fire on the family farm. But five years later he had gained entry to the Juilliard School in New York, and won the Indianapolis international Violin Competition.

Hadelich’s playing was marked by calmness, a sense of determination, clear-sightedness. It produced, at the same time, flawless articulation and perfect intonation that almost seemed inconsistent with emotional warmth, and sheer beauty of tone. One expects to enjoy dynamic variety, but what he produced was a sort of flexibility distilled by taste and delicacy, leaving not a hint of indulgence or excess.

One mark of that was in the studied approach with which the cadenza at the end of the first movement began; its emphasis was on the music and its beauties rather than astonishing with tonal brilliance and virtuosity and it cast almost a sense of religious rapture, that was compelling and utterly stilled the audience. Its perfection was almost machine-like if it hadn’t been for the sheer musicality and essential humanity of its expression.

At the movement’s end there was what sounded like some utterly irresistible clapping.

The Larghetto second movement opened in the same spirit of sobriety, stillness that brought the audience once more to a kind of silence that seemed unreal among two thousand people. And the link-passage to the Finale was stripped of the sort of histrionics that its foretelling often brings about in other performances. It was a warning about the astonishing speed and musical force that Hadelich created in this brilliant movement. Its pace scarcely left room to breathe and its remarkable technical demands brought no slackening of pace till the moment when preparation for the Coda arrived, and it led the music through striking modulations, eventually ending, not in any sort of Tchaikovskyan frenzy, but loosening new and sublimely original ideas. And unlike many, he resisted the temptation to bring the spotlight back to himself in the final bars.

It was a performance the like of which I don’t expect to experience, live, ever again.

Paganini’s 24th Caprice was his way of thanking the audience for their immediate, standing ovation (unusual for the reticent Wellington audience), and its incendiary flamboyance and amazing technical embellishments were spell-binding (extraordinarily elaborate left-hand plus right hand pizzicato).

Brahms Second Symphony
Though the first half had created an experience that might have made another major work even after the interval, seem anti-climactic, Brahms second symphony, again in the key of D, survived extremely well. The orchestra expanded from its Beethovenian-numbers to full size, with 16, 14 violins, etc, five horns, but just double woodwinds. If the limelight had not shone much on De Waart in the concerto (and it truly deserved admiration), in the Brahms his unassuming, discreet yet strong and clear presence on the podium inspired the orchestra.

Brahms claimed somewhere that “I have never written anything so sad”; but elsewhere, Brahms is quoted saying it’s “light and carefree, as though written for a young married couple”. Take your pick; I don’t hear anything sad, and suspect that it was Brahmsian irony – opposite to what he felt about it; nor did De Waart seem to feel that way. And one would hardly choose D major to express grief or even melancholy (nor did Beethoven).

Brahms plunges us straight into the music, with no ritual introduction or conspicuous attention to classical forms, though his argument with the Liszts and Wagners was over his belief in the importance of the traditional structures. The performance seemed to draw attention to the endless compounding and modifying of themes, of scraps of themes, with every detail of Brahms’s rich orchestration resulting in a reading that was sympathetic and deeply satisfying.

Though the first movement is Allegro non troppo, there was hardly a strong feeling of speed or liveliness for quite a while. Some of the most beautiful episodes came from horns, sometimes just the principal, Samuel Jacobs; horns in particular seem to define Brahms’s orchestral palette. And there was lovely playing by other winds. The momentum evolved slowly, almost imperceptibly, as the varying facets of its themes and gestures developed organically and a strong feeling of integrity took hold.

The second movement Adagio non troppo (the ‘non troppo’ characterises Brahms’s devotion to the sanguine temperament, the happy medium, rather than emotional extremes) was pensive, expressive, is rarely jocular, and never suggestive of a suppressed Rossini or Offenbach. Yet it became the sort of spirited music that had emerged in the first movement. Both movements seem essential Brahms and one sensed in De Waart a deep sympathy with what Brahms was talking about and feeling.

The movement that might otherwise be the Scherzo, started in a gentle triple time, but very soon a lively 4/8 time, Presto non assai, took over for a short time before a triplet-quaver rhythm brought yet another change of tempo, though not really of mood and musical sense.  The movement’s variety that De Waart handled so deftly was a delight as were interludes by oboes and flutes.

The utter silence before the start of the last movement spoke volumes about the impact this wonderful performance was having on the audience. So as the Allegro con spirito gathered energy, high spirits, and joie de vivre, the full force of the big orchestra seemed to be employed in a spirit of an almost incandescent joy. Beethoven’s Freude in the Ninth Symphony might have found an even truer domicile here at the end of Brahms 2, than in its original incarnation.

This too got an enthusiastic reception from the very large audience.

 

 

 

Third fine Orchestra Wellington concert, unthemed but with Dvořák 7, a great success

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with Michael Houstoun (piano)

Mozart: Piano Concerto No 14 in E flat, K 449
Gao Ping: Wild Cherry Tree
Dvořák: Symphony No 7 in D minor, Op 70

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 11 August 7:30 pm

The third of Orchestra Wellington’s 2018 subscription concerts offered an unusual mix of music: nothing unusual about the theme symphony-Composer, Dvořák, and an unfamiliar Mozart piano concerto, but the premiere of a commissioned piece by a Chinese composer with New Zealand associations, no doubt raised a certain curiosity … or misgivings: that may have explained the slightly less-than-sold-out audience – a rarity for this orchestra these days.

Mozart K 449
The Piano Concerto No 14 is the first of the second set of three (K 449, 450, 451) that Mozart wrote after coming to Vienna in 1782; they are regarded as the beginning of Mozart’s period of greatest creativity. No 14 was the first to be recorded in Mozart’s own notebook listing his compositions, from 9 February 1784.  It is common to marvel at Mozart’s output of masterpieces from that time, especially the piano concertos (but of course much else, including the great operas) in the dozen years from 1784.

I was actually surprised to find that I didn’t know this piece very well and that the one I had expected and knew well, was No 12, one of the earlier group of three written in Vienna. So this proved a delightful re-awakening to a serious, confident, at the same time, very sanguine work, from the hands of just that kind of pianist, with conductor and orchestra who could do it splendid, totally sympathetic justice.

My initial feeling was the orchestra was perhaps a little too stripped back to ‘classical’ dimensions, though the numbers (12, 10, 8, 6, 3 as far as I could see) seemed fine; but it seemed to invite a warmer, richer sound. So the back and forth motifs between piano and orchestra in the first movement and the sonorities generally might have been a little more robust and fully-fleshed. But the orchestra once more revealed its responsiveness to this engrossing music; and I loved Houstoun’s elegant little ornaments, and the overall joyousness that he managed to draw from its E flat tonality.

The Andantino movement has a somewhat reticent air and to keep audience attention might not have been easy, but it happened, with Mozart exploiting his skills at embellishing and varying working its magic, with Houstoun’s lyrically detailed fingering. I loved the way they handled its final, reticent notes and the non-emphatic opening of the Finale, where a typical, characterful melody takes hold, beguilingly, stretching it till the time for the Coda, triplets, brought it quickly to an end.

Wild Cherry Tree
The main piece in the first half was a premiere commissioned by Prof. Jack Richards from Gao Ping, for some years lecturer in music at Canterbury University. Wild Cherry Tree is based on folk tales and impressions from the region where he was born – Sichuan, the province in south-central China, east of Tibet. The vocal parts, presumably in Mandarin, or the Sichuan dialect of Mandarin, were sung by counter-tenor Xiao Ma and bass Roger Wilson. The first thing to record was the size of the orchestra, normal late-Romantic – four horns, though just double woodwinds and trumpets. But the back row could have marked it as a post-serialist juggernaut, with several keyed percussion instruments, a variety of drums, a set of three tuned gongs, claves and certain items whose names escape me. Their noise, dominated initially by timpani and bass drum, was impressive, but it was often refined by sensitively blended woodwinds, as well as the many more subtle percussion items.

The first of the four ‘movements’ was sung by Wilson whose pronunciation was a matter of admiration, though there remained a European timbre that no amount of linguistic virtuosity, with which he is generously equipped, can disguise. Without recourse to the programme notes, I might have been hard-pressed to attribute the sounds to ‘Snow-capped mountains’. But then, scenic or narrative associations of music often escape me and rarely seem relevant in my appreciation of music, particularly of Asian music which seems to be much devoted to landscape and other visual sources. So I found the orchestral episodes elucidated the vocal parts, and as the music passed, its meaning and emotional qualities and made increasing musical sense.

The second part, ‘Scarlet Horse’, seemed to have set itself challenging subject matter: ‘overlapping romantic relationship between past and present, fantasy and reality, with contrasting visual images… roaming the world on a scarlet horse’. If the theme seemed to be a matter of some obscurity, galloping rhythms enlivened it, and the actual sung episodes delivered by Xiao Ma’s counter-tenor offered a musical experience that felt perfectly matched and coherent. The timbre of his voice, of rare purity and beauty worked persuasively to suggest what we have come to associate with Chinese music even though the pentatonic scale did not dominate the soundscape. Later, the two voices duetted, sometimes in passages that were colourful and animated, sometimes in what I took to be wordless episodes.

The counter-tenor alone sang through the third part, ‘Little Flower’, accompanied by percussion, including the small gongs, marimba and high, delicate woodwinds. flutes. Both voices shared the fourth movement, ‘Under the Wild Cherry Tree’, with the two alternating in a sort of dialogue, charmingly, with delicate string playing, alongside tuned percussion.

This was a challenging score in every way, though not in the avant-garde, contemporary western music sense; there was no doubt that the orchestra’s success with it flowed from some serious rehearsal under conductor Taddei along with the orchestra’s high level of musical skill that can easily be unremarked.

Dvořák’s Seventh
It was Dvořák’s 7th symphony from which the concert’s name ‘London’ derived (though oddly, that was mentioned neither in the season brochure nor in the evening’s programme book; however, it had been mentioned in much earlier publicity). It was first performed in London in 1885 (he made nine visits to England between 1884 and 1896). The composer himself regarded it very highly.

With their decision to feature five Dvořák symphonies this year, Taddei and the orchestra have already shown their flair and affection for his music; I hope that audiences have understood how his earlier symphonies, and not just those numbered 1 to 4 which had earlier been excluded from the canon altogether, have been seriously under-exposed as a result of what I feel is the blind popularity of the Ninth. The Fifth and especially the Sixth have been revealed as very fine works, but the last three are more or less on a par, i.e. to be compared with Schumann’s and Brahms’s, and some scholars rate the Seventh as the best; I’m so inclined as well.

This was a beautiful, sensitive performance that explored all the delicate and meditative aspects of this D minor work, a key that for some reason most composers have used to convey sadness, grief, sometimes anger, certainly, seriousness of purpose. (Mozart’s piano concerto no 20 and Brahms’s first piano concerto, the Choral Symphony, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet, Mozart’s Requiem, Franck’s symphony, Bruckner’s ninth, Sibelius’s sixth, Shostakovich’s fifth symphonies…. )

Those characteristics were evident right from the beginning: sombre, with restless, uneasy melodies, but before long these same ideas acquire a feeling of contentment, with passages that are optimistic and almost joyous, and it slowly subsides to end peacefully. The orchestra captured the greatness of the second movement, with its beautiful, near flawless horn passages, and descending themes that expressed a meditative spirit, a mood that for all the composer’s joyful, Slavonic flavoured music, harbours very a deep pensiveness, and the playing here was both meticulous and moving.

There is also a very special character about the Scherzo which, miraculously, combines the jocular, a feeling of contentment with looming sadness. There is a remarkable persistence of mood and musical spirit throughout the work, with a feeling of inevitability as movement follows movement. That seemed especially strong at the end of the vigorous Scherzo and opening of the very deliberate, serious-minded Finale: the two movements, superficially in tempo, far apart but their moods are so satisfyingly complementary.

I think I have recently lamented the way musical taste gets dominated by a single ‘great’ work by a composer, in each genre, and that’s true for Dvořák; for me this fine performance of the Seventh, emphatically put the New World in its place: not above, but simply in the same class of musical inspiration and integrity as the 7th (and the 8th, which we come to in October; not to mention last month’s 6th which used for a long time to be a cherished cassette tape companion in the car).

The programme might have looked a bit lacking a common theme, with a big, pageant-like Chinese work between a Mozart concerto and the Dvořák; but it proved a wonderfully enjoyable evening.

 

Trpčeski’s emphatic restoration of Grieg concerto and a blazing Shostakovich Tenth from Martín and NZSO

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jaime Martín with Simon Trpčeski – piano

Shostakovich: Festive Overture and Symphony No 10 in E minor
Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op 16

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 13 July, 6:30 pm

Last Friday Jaime Martín conducted the National Youth Orchestra in a stunning concert, drawing from young players performances that were both accurate and full of energy. He has shown the same gifts with the parent orchestra.

Shostakovich’s Festive Overture was written just shortly after the death of Stalin and the composition of the 10th symphony; it can more easily be read as music that complies superficially with the expectations of the regime, than the symphony does. If you listen, seeking clues to his real feelings about Stalin’s tyranny, they can be found, right from the ritual brass fanfares and, a minute in, the urgent squeal of the solo clarinet; but one soon falls under the influence of the warm, happy melody from horns as Shostakovich writes the music that fits the occasion. And Martín drove it with an almost reckless flawlessness, instruments tumbling over each other. Just as we’d got used to the huge energy that Martín extracted from the Youth Orchestra, similar electrifying expressiveness worked with the professionals of the NZSO too.

Grieg
The last local performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto seems to have been in September last year from Orchestra Wellington with Jian Liu. My records show the last performances by the NZSO, however, were in 2005, by Pascal Rogé. From the NZSO’s earliest years, the Grieg was played very often: nearly 100 performances, including a dozen in Wellington, up to 2005. But it has long been regarded by the musical elite as too ‘popular’ to have a place in the Pantheon of great piano concertos.

This performance, if Jian Liu’s last year hadn’t awakened audiences to the truth, put it squarely in the class of great piano concertos. Written aged 24, and certainly strongly influenced by Schumann’s concerto in the same key, it rather refutes the view that Grieg could not handle traditional large-scale forms, even though its rich melodic character has probably not won it friends among those for whom ‘tune’ is a dirty word. The piano leads from the front, not merely with its big chordal pronouncement but with the feeling of melodic integrity and the handling of its evolution. Simon Trpčeski left no doubt that the opening pages came from real musical inspiration, with no sense that Grieg was simply filling his pages with passagework; the dramatic episodes made organic sense and the cadenza, opening thoughtfully, avoided the sort of vacuous flashiness that had come to characterise many of the piano concertos of the post-Beethoven-Chopin-Schumann-Mendelssohn era.

Trpčeski
Although I tend to deplore the boringly formulaic style and content of musician biographies as printed in programmes (and I know, they are dictated by the respective artist managements), Trpčeski’s catalogue of orchestras, conductors, venues, festivals and recordings is unusually remarkable. But the notes have scarcely anything about his Macedonian background. I have a particular interest in the Balkans; I first saw the ruined Skopje a few months after the terrible 1963 earthquake, and have travelled through several times, including a visit to the beautiful Lake Ochrid, lying between Greece, Albania and Macedonia; and I hope that both Greece and Macedonia can build on the recent accord over the name, as I have affection for both parts of Alexander the Great’s former homeland.

The piano part felt part of the orchestral fabric rather than as the orchestra’s rival for attention, suggesting that its role was to explain, to enlarge ideas intelligently, to explain a slightly different point of view. One could notice Trpčeski’s close rapport with the orchestra and with the conductor: at the start of the second movement he nodded subtly, approvingly, at what he was surrounded by, and such gestures were repeated. It’s not a long movement, but engaging enough, straight away, often taking pains to duet with solo instruments – flute, horn – in a genuine partnership. And the third movement, Allegro moderato molto, was fleet, light in spirit, leaving what weightiness existed to the orchestra.

For his encore, Trpčeski drew attention away from himself, by inviting Concertmaster Leppänen to join him in the second movement of Grieg’s Third Violin Sonata which served to remind the audience that even though Grieg didn’t persevere with large-scale orchestral works (he did write a youthful symphony but acute self-criticism set it aside; in truth, the symphony often sounds meandering and lacking momentum), he wrote several fine sonatas.  This sonata is a major work and should be played more: in fact it was given an excellent performance by Jian Liu and Martin Riseley at Paekakariki earlier this year. And this excerpt was a splendid demonstration of its quality.

Shostakovich’s Tenth
The second half of the concert offered an exciting performance of one of Shostakovich’s finest symphonies. It was the first written after Stalin’s death, and unlike the Festive Overture, a subtle examination of the nature of the era that had just ended and of what might lie ahead.  I haven’t heard a live performance since the NZSO’s in 2009.

It opens with sombre accents that might not be immediately identifiable as Shostakovich, though not for long, as horns and other brass soon made clear, then clarinet and flute, distinctive though quiet. It’s a very long movement – about 20 minutes – and explores almost all the territory (though not the actual notes) that is explored more particularly in the other three movements.

The second movement began with the powerful aural as well as visual impact of the entire, near-60-strong string body bowing fiercely in perfect accord, biting hard along with side drum, with ferocious intensity and producing an overwhelming feeling of energy and determination: there are indeed moments (for me, most moments!) when the experience of live performance exceeds anything you can even dream of from a recording or a broadcast. Then there’s the strange, rather unexpected fade-out, though it employs the same material; then rising again to end abruptly. These unusual phenomena in a symphony one knows fairly well, never cease to surprise.

The third movement opens mysteriously, with an uneasy five-note theme, mainly strings, an utter contrast with the second movement. But soon, a solo horn toys with a pregnant idea, alternating with bassoon; gradually they come to another brass-heavy tutti passage comparable with the threatening sounds of the second movement. But soon it fades, uneasily, like the cessation of a violent rail storm.

In its opening minutes there’s no hint of a conventional last movement: dramatic, often optimistic, creating a world in which crises have been overcome. Instead, it’s uneasy until a hesitant solo clarinet leads to sudden gaiety – and Shostakovich’s gaiety is usually embellished with sarcasm or mockery and the listener (and the Soviet Composers Union) are left with the disturbing feeling that sounds from hard brass and side drums don’t perhaps mean what they say. Conductor and orchestra handled these murky, obscure feelings brilliantly, eventually seeming to draw from the score a genuine sense of hope, even perhaps, optimism, saying that the future might be better than the immediate past had been, with a climax that blazed with excitement.

It was an astonishingly powerful and committed performance in which this newly emerged conductor, who’d spent most of his career as an orchestral player, showed how he could inspire and energise an orchestra in a quite thrilling manner.

Orchestra Wellington’s “The Prophecy” a remarkable musical journey

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
The Prophecy – Music by JANÁČEK, BRITTEN and DVORAK

JANÁČEK– Taras Bulba (Rhapsody for Orchestra)
BRITTEN – Piano Concerto Op.13
DVORAK – Symphony No. 6 in D Major Op.60 B.112

Jian Liu (piano)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th July 2018

Due to a printer’s mix-up, there were no printed programmes to be had for this concert, conductor Marc Taddei assuring us at the concert’s outset that he would be our guide throughout the evening’s music-making. As it turned out, the only regret at such a state of things one came away with from the concert at the end was having no tangible printed record of or piece of memorabilia belonging to a truly great musical occasion!

None of the three works presented here could be said to be tried-and-true crowd-pleasers or popular box-office drawcards – and yet, here was Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre humming with great excitement and expectation at the evening’s beginning, the venue admittedly not filled to bursting, but with an attendance that must have gladdened the hearts of the organisers at its obvious signs of public interest in the orchestra and its presentations.

On paper, the concert’s musical offerings would have caused the average event promotor in most parts of the world serious misgivings as to their box-office viability – Janacek’s Taras Bulba, Britten’s Piano Concerto and a lesser-known symphony by Dvorak – but those surviving concertgoers with longer memories than others may well have hearkened back to the heady days of John Hopkins at the helm of the NZBC Symphony (as the NZSO was called during the 1960s), when there was a similar excitement and sense of exploration of unfamiliar and untried musical worlds of delight and daring in an established orchestra’s programming.

Oh, well, those of us who value as keepsakes such things as programmes will have to be content with our memories on this auspicious occasion – “and gentlemen of England now a-bed/ shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here” would be an appropriate thought-reminder to conjure up, in years to come. I shall be accused of somewhat gilding the lily with these wafflings, but I can’t help thinking, by way of registering my delight in enjoyment of concerts such as these, how fortunate we in Wellington are at having two accomplished orchestras regularly performing for our pleasure. Though obviously not London, the situation here per capita is very likely comparable!

What, you will be asking by now, was the propellant for such an outpouring of enthusiasm – a single performance or item? –  the whole concert? – or the existence of an orchestra and conductor who are prepared to challenge and enliven and stimulate and even risk alienating their audiences?  The answer is that it’s probably all three of those things, coming together in an upward burst of well-being on my part, and a desire to tell other people all about it. Happily, my anticipation at the prospect of what the concert promised was matched by the performances, wholly predictable but with many fascinating and unexpected detailings.

Once opening formalities were over, the concert began with one of the few orchestral pieces composed by Leoš Janáček, excepting a number of opera overtures. This was “Taras Bulba”, a work which Janáček based on a novel by Nikolai Gogol, set in 16th Century Ukraine, a tale of a Cossack warrior and his two sons. The composer, though a native Moravian, was an ardent Russophile, and asserted that he wrote “Taras Bulba” because (he would echo Gogol’s own lines, here) “in the whole world there are not fires or tortures strong enough to destroy the vitality of the Russian nation”.

Janáček was, of course expressing a kind of Pan-Slavic kinship with the predominant Slavic power, as his own homeland had long been under the dominance of the Austrians, and, like many Czechs, looked to the east for support. He studied the Russian language, belonged to a Russian society in his home town of Brno, and, in addition to Gogol’s work drew inspiration for some of his other compositions from Russian writers like Tolstoy (the “Kreutzer Sonata” String Quartet), Ostrovsky (the opera “Káta Kabanová”), and Dostoyevsky (the opera “From the House of the Dead”).

Cast in the form of a three-movement “Rhapsody for Orchestra”, the music for “Taras Bulba” tells the grim story of the single-minded Cossack leader’s loss of both of his sons during the bitter conflict with the Poles, followed by his own capture and execution – the first movement concerns one of the sons, Andriy, who had the misfortune to fall in love with a Polish girl, and thus changed his allegiances, for which treacherous act he was killed by his father on the battlefield. The middle movement depicts the torture and execution by the Poles of the second son, Ostap, witnessed by Taras Bulba himself, disguised and in the assembled crowd. The final movement tells the story of the Cossacks’ subsequent attack on the Polish forces, and of Taras Bulba’s capture and death by execution, but not before the dying leader utters his prophecy (which gives the movement its name), predicting an eventual victory for the Cossacks in the struggle.

Janáček’s approach to this seemingly unpromising subject consisted of devising brief but telling motifs used in association with themes and characters in the story, and using them both pithily and with great variety. We heard plaintive cor anglais and oboe statements at the first movement’s outset, sharply interrupted by orchestral crescendi, startlingly capped by tubular bells, but then with the emotion reinstated by tender organ phrases. Conductor and players skilfully dovetailed these expressions of romantic feeling (cor anglais, oboe, organ, solo strings) cheek-by jowl with great tensions and savage interjections (crescendi, and brass shouts). Amidst these angular contrasts the playing brought out, by turns, the figures of Taras Bulba (anger, tenderness, implaccable resolve) and his son Andriy (remorse, resignation) which interact with characteristic abruptness, the whole having a kind of brutal, impulsive realism.

Both of the succeeding movements were equally well-characterised, in “The Death of Ostap”, the opposing impulses of triumph and bloodthirsty recompense expressed by the victors’ wild dance of triumph set against the pain and anguish of both Taras Bulba and his doomed son Ostap, as the latter is tortured and then executed. And in the concluding “Prophecy and Death of Taras Bulba”, repeated agitations across the orchestra took us into the midst of a battle’s confusions, uncertainties and elations, with triumph and disaster hand in hand – fanfares announced the Cossack leader’s defeat and capture by the Poles, but then the orchestra took up a groundswell of triumphal gesturings as Taras Bulba defied his enemies and predicted a great victory for his people – here, the bells and the tones of the organ joined with the orchestra to make a conclusion all the more jubilant and resounding for being so hard-won!

A much-needed respite from these intensities was provided by the need to bring out the piano and put it in place, after which we greeted the appearance of Jian Liu, the evening’s concerto soloist. Based in Wellington, and working as the Head of Piano Studies at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music, Liu occasionally appears as a soloist or chamber-music partner at local concerts, one of the most notable of recent occasions being as a member of Te Koki Trio in a performance with the School of Music Orchestra of Beethoven’s delectable Triple Concert – see the Middle C review https://middle-c.org/2018/04/nzsm-orchestras-triple-celebration-with-the-te-koki-trio/  However, as opposed to realising the tailor-made aristocratic elegance of Beethoven’s piano part for this work, Liu’s assignment for this Orchestra Wellington concert was of an entirely different order, that of bringing off Benjamin Britten’s virtuosic writing for the solo part of his 1938 Piano Concerto, the work, partly because of its technical difficulties, still something of a concert rarity.

No such impediments seemed to stay the order of the music’s going on this occasion, with everybody, soloist, conductor and players hitting their straps immediately with the opening Toccata – the result was a dazzling “tour de force” of concertante writing, the composer seemingly unafraid to push the brilliance of the writing to its limits (Britten himself gave the 1938 premiere). As for Jian Liu’s realisation  of the solo part, the playing was masterly in its virtuosity, from incisive through to elfin in quality. The players brought off the accelerando leading up to the cadenza with a spectacular concluding crash, leaving Liu to delight and bewitch us with his fantastic command of sonority and dazzling keyboard execution, before the coda gathered up the threads and ended the movement with a flurry of finality!

After this the second movement Waltz seemed here to float in from a dream-world, everything sultry and suggestive, following on from the solo viola’s beautiful melody. The piano elaborated on the material before the pace quickened, the rhythms taking on a spiky, almost grotesque character, Liu’s octave scamperings bringing a Shostakovich-like profile to the music before the orchestra re-entered with a gorgeously over-bright version of the opening theme, as if parodying the original mood!

Britten’s original third movement was called Recitative and Aria, one which he replaced with a piece called Impromptu in 1945.  A Satie-like melody from the solo piano conjured up spacious vistas, holding us in thrall until a cadenza-like flourish introduced a blowsy version of the tune by the orchestra, with arpeggiated piano accompaniment. By that time the piece’s passacaglia character was well-established, with subsequent variations of the theme involving elephantine lower-strings, whose ploddings were magically transformed by Liu, Taddei and the players into elegant waltz-steps, the characterisations coherent and vivid, before subsiding into rapt silences at the end.

Again Shostakovich’s influence seemed to haunt the music when the finale began without a break from the previous movement, the march seeming to grow out of the earth upon which the music moved. It was as if the sounds were a kind of rallying-call, further energised by militaristic skirlings from the winds, the piano’s revelry-like sounds echoing those of the brass and adding to the swaggering mood. Suddenly it was as if the tongue-in-cheek mood had awakened deeper feelings, strings, winds and stuttering brass moving the music on from vainglorious attitudes into and through more confrontational realms, the winds in particular voicing their concerns in no uncertain manner, and the piano screwing up the tensions with increasingly insistent and vigorous hammerings.

And then , as if the sounds had literally exhausted themselves and needed to refresh and regroup, the music all but melted down for a few moments, before Liu’s piano took the lead and re-established the march, underpinned by the percussion, giving the brass their chance of undying glory, with the piano’s help rallying the troops and encouraging the strings and winds to “skirl” for all they were worth! As for the soloist, such scintillating glissandi, and “devil-take-the-hindmost” repeated notes did Liu “throw into” the mix at the concerto’s end! We were stunned, enthralled and finally galvanised by it all – what a player! And, as well, what a performance by conductor and orchestra! What else could the pianist do at the very end but, after acknowledging the applause, point to the keyboard and sit down, and then, amid the sudden hushed silences, bring into being the simplest and most touching of pieces from Robert Schumann’s “Kinderscenen” (Scenes from Childhood), the lovely “Traumerei” (Dreaming)? – a “did we dream you or did you dream us?” moment, wrought of magic.

A blessed interval gave us the space our sensibilities needed to digest these wonders and their brilliant execution, and clear our receptive channels in readiness for Marc Taddei’s and the players’ unfolding of Antonin Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony in D Major. In the wake of the joyful rendering of the Fifth Symphony at Orchestra Wellington’s first 2018 concert, we were eager for more, this time with a work that promised to show an even greater array of fruits from the composer’s patient symphonic apprenticeship.

For myself, I was warmed through and through by both music and performance – the bright, eagerly-syncopated rhythms of the opening woke the music perfectly, the playing straightaway catching that ever-present rustic element in Dvorak’s music in the spacious balances, the characterful voicings of the wind instruments and the “snap” of the often-syncopated rhythms. Marc Taddei allowed his players to subtly “lean into” each of the new sequences, enough to impart a warmth and flexibility to the utterances without loosening the structures, and generally inspiring brightly-toned and affectionate playing. We didn’t get the first-movement repeat, but were amply compensated by Taddei’s and the players’ mellifluous shaping and balancing of the music.

Eloquent winds and silken strings opened the slow movement, answered by an atmospheric horn solo, the music’s flow long-breathed but maintaining the pulse. The minor-key outburst was almost Mahlerian in impact, though the angst was short-lived, the lyrical sweetness returning with a heart-warming reprise of the opening melody by the first violins playing high up, after which the ‘cellos also were given a “moment” with the theme. In complete contrast was the driving Scherzo, a “Furiant” with ear-catching syncopations in its main section (astonishing timpani!), and a winsome Trio, whose exquisite touches were shared by strings and winds (the piccolo particularly charming!).

Though reminiscent of Brahms’ Second Symphony’s finale at the very beginning (the older composer gave Dvorak a great deal of encouragement, with Dvorak’s gratitude to Brahms appropriately and amply expressed here), the younger man was no slavish imitator, as the latter stages of the work made clear. Taddei played the opening in an extremely relaxed manner before launching into an exciting accelerando throughout the transition passage  leading to a restatement of the opening theme, and its broadening once again. There followed an exciting and absorbing symphonic adventure, with conductor and players alive to all of the music’s possibilities and accomplishments, the drama of the material’s “working out” culminating in a sensational burst of joyous energy at the coda, the players  responding to their conductor’s challenging tempi with fire and brilliance! It was heady stuff, and made for an exhilarating finish to a remarkable concert.

Jaime Martín and National Youth Orchestra on full throttle as percussion and brass deliver excitement and panache

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

NZSO National Youth Orchestra, Jaime Martín (conductor); Todd Gibson-Cornish (bassoon))

Falla: Suites ! & 2 from The Three-cornered Hat
André Jolivet: Bassoon Concerto
Josiah Carr: redwood
Stravinsky: Suite from The Firebird (1945 version)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 6 July 2018, 6.30pm

It was a joy to see young people making fine music so well, and enjoying it, and to observe, too, the number of young people in the audience responding most enthusiastically – but a pity to note many empty seats.  However, let us hope that the younger members of the audience will, as a result of this experience, attend concerts by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, especially as they qualify for cheaper seats, under the ‘Pay your Age’ scheme.

Spanish conductor Jaime Martín exuded enjoyment of both the music and the orchestra.  Under his direction, and with the skills of the young players, everything possible was extracted from the music, including detail I have not noticed in previous hearings of some of the works.  The playing throughout was proficient and confident.  Great percussion playing, and plenty of demand for it was a feature of the concert.  Notable was Martín’s conducting style, which was expressive yet very precisely pointed in his use of the baton – it was not merely an extension of his arm and hand, as is the manner with too many conductors.  It was a pleasure to watch his stick having an elegant life of its own.

It was appropriate for him to conduct music of his countryman, Manuel de Falla.  These Suites are colourful and varied.  It was fitting, too, that in a concert featuring a bassoon soloist that the Falla Suites have passages in which the orchestra’s excellent bassoonists take prominence.

The first Suite is made up of 5 movements, the second of 3.  The movements alternate between rowdy dances and somnolent, restful moments.   For example, after the sleepy movement on what must have been a hot ‘Afternoon’, comes the ‘Fandango’, which is the Dance of the Miller’s Wife.  Here, there were excellent wind solos, with superb dynamics, including marvellous crescendo and decrescendo passages.

Next came the bombastic Magistrate, portrayed by magnificent bassoon playing, followed by a sonorous oboe, for the Miller’s Wife.  Trombones and cymbals add excitement to the score.  The percussion section adds greatly to the whirling character of the dances, especially with castanets and glockenspiel.  An outstanding horn section of the orchestra had plenty of opportunity to shine, too.

The audience’s enthusiasm the end of the Suites was amply justified.  The conductor got each section to take a bow – especially the horns, the percussion, and the trombones.

The otherwise excellent programme notes by Sarah Chesney gave me a little amusement when it came to the biography of French composer André Jolivet.  His dates were given as 1905-1947.  The text notes that the society ‘La Jeune France’ that he was part of, had wanted to ‘create modern music that embodied both spiritualism and humanism…’  It appears he was successful in the quest for spiritualism, since it allowed him to continue composing music until well after 1947!   (The digits were reversed: he died in 1974.  And I think spirituality was meant, rather than spiritualism!)

I heard a radio interview with Gibson-Cornish the other day, in which he said that the concerto was very difficult, and he had not performed it before.  He hails from Christchurch, and is currently principal bassoonist in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, to which role he was appointed at the age of 21, in 2016  He is a former member of the National Youth Orchestra.  The concerto is relatively short, having two movements, but each was made up of a slow section followed by a fast one.  The orchestra was vastly reduced, comprising strings, including two harps (who also played in the other works) and piano.  The strings produced a lush sound.

The bassoon solo part was quite high-pitched much of the time, but used the entire gamut of the instrument’s range.  The piano uttered some ungrateful chords, as well as jazzy rhythms.  The bassoon soloist played from memory.  The conductor did not use a baton, conducting this smaller ensemble.

The beginning of the second movement (largo cantabile – fugato) had the bassoon making sweetly sonorous sounds against gently lilting strings which became sultry.  The piano’s passages were always interesting, and often quirky, as were the soloist’s; he played with splendid tone and great panache.  It is rare to hear the bassoon as a solo instrument; to hear it played in such a refined and musical manner was a pleasure.

Amid tumultuous applause from orchestra and audience, Gibson-Cornish handed his large bouquet to the orchestra’s Concertmaster, Wellingtonian Claudia Tarrant-Matthews.

After the interval came the premiere of redwood by Josiah Carr, the NYO’s Composer-in Residence, 2018.  It was of approximately 8 minutes duration.  The orchestra was back to its full strength of 80 players.  Here again, the percussion were prominent; there were notable passages for a single cymbal and for gong, drums, strings playing pizzicato, brass, and flute employing flutter–tongue technique.

The opening music was of a weird, ominous effect – as though it were the background music for a spooky film.  The piccolo and gong added to this effect as did Claudia Tarrant-Matthews, playing solo at the highest extent of her violin’s fingerboard.  The orchestra joined in a general cacophony.  It seemed that the Rotorua redwood forest gave the composer overwhelming feelings rather than uplifting ones.

Dark expressions were interspersed with delightful ones, such as lovely harp notes.  However, the piece did tend to reinforce my feeling that numbers of New Zealand composers write in a dark vein.  While researching Jolivet,  I came across the following in Grove (entry for Jolivet by Arthur Hoérée): ‘… they [La Jeune France] were opposed to certain sterile experiments undertaken by mid-European composers … and they sought to ‘rehumanize’ an art that had often become too drily abstract.’  It seems to me that the tendencies they observed are occurring again.

Stravinsky’s music for the ballet, from which he extracted a Suite, revised in 1945, is one of the most vibrant, exciting, joyous musical works of the twentieth century.  It is a marvellous Suite for giving all parts of the orchestra opportunity to shine – which they did.  They made a great start to the performance, with the double-basses murmuring, followed by cellos, violas and brass.  Glissando violins and delightful piano interjections all helped to give a feeling of anticipation.

The Suite comprises twelve episodes; the character of each was well contrasted.  The second episode, ‘Prelude and Dance of the Firebird’ featured brilliant horn playing and a lovely oboe solo.

The strings’ soporific effect was rudely shattered by the colossal loud banging chords of the ‘Infernal Dance’, followed agitated music.  The glockenspiel came into its own again. ‘Lullaby’ was the next episode – a thoroughly sleep-inducing one.  All sections of the orchestra were very busy throughout the work, including the harps.

We were back to slow and subtle, with pianissimo strings.  Then there were grand closing gestures from all the instruments, with brass to the fore.  Amidst the thunderous applause, Martín selected groups of players for their own share of the ovation, and shook hands with a number of individual players. He did this before taking a bow himself.   Numerous returns to the stage were required of the conductor; one was demanded by the orchestral players stamping their feet.

Bravo, NYO!  You were superb, as were conductor and soloist.  There were to be no fireworks the next night (thank you, Matariki whale, for predicting the weather), but on Friday, The Firebird concert gave us works and playing full of fire.

Dvořák with Rolf Gjelsten wins all hearts at Wellington Chamber Orchestra concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
DVOŘÁK – ‘Cello Concerto in B Minor Op. 104
BRAHMS – Symphony No.2 in D Major Op.73

Rolf Gjelsten – solo ‘cello
Rachel Hyde – conductor
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday 24th June 2018

As part of the “run-up” to this particular Wellington Chamber Orchestra concert, its second of the current year, the Orchestra circulated on-line a truly inspiring issue of its occasional newsletter, Notes, one which I was delighted to get, in view of what was “coming”.  It featured a heartwarming contribution from the concert’s soloist, Rolf Gjelsten, who’s of course the ‘cellist of the much-acclaimed New Zealand String Quartet. His love for and anticipation of playing the Dvořák concerto came across strongly, as did his delight at the prospect of working with the orchestra once again (a previous collaboration involved the Brahms Double Concerto), due to the inspiration he readily derived from working with amateur musicians, who play “for love” (as the word “amateur) suggests.

Regarded generally as the greatest of ‘Cello Concertos, Dvořák’s work dates from his years in the United States, and was written over the period 1894-95. The work was supposed to be given its premiere by its dedicatee, Hanuš Wihan, but several disagreements between composer and dedicatee resulted in an impasse which delayed the work’s public appearance. By the time things were sorted out, Wihan was unavailable, and the concerto was eventually given its first performance by another ‘cellist, Leo Stern, in 1896, in London, with Dvořák conducting.

The work enshrines something of a personal tragedy for the composer as well, in the form of an excerpt from one of his own songs quoted in the work’s slow movement, “Kez duch muj san” (“Leave me alone”), the first of a set composed in 1887-88, and a favourite of Dvořák’s sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová. Dvořák had fallen in love with Josefina some years before, but his affections were not returned, and he eventually married Josefina’s younger sister Anna.

However, his feelings for his sister-in-law remained, as when news came to Dvořák, while still in the United States, of Josefina’s illness, prompting his inclusion of a quote from the song in the work as a tribute to her. Shortly after the composer and his family returned to Bohemia, Josefina died, and the sorrowful Dvořák rewrote the coda of the concerto to briefly include a further reminiscence of the song, in the composer’s own words, “like a sigh”, before the whole concludes “in a stormy mood”!

Great was the sense of expectancy in St.Andrew’s prior to the appearance of soloist and conductor for the concert’s first half, akin to what I had felt in this same venue a couple of months previously at an event featuring the NZ School of Music Orchestra and the musicians of Te Kōkī Trio playing Beethoven’s grand and celebratory Triple Concerto. This time there was a single ‘cellist, albeit a resplendent-looking figure in his purple shirt, the New Zealand String Quartet’s Rolf Gjelsten, acknowledging the enthusiastic applause and settling himself and his instrument ready to play.

Despite a touch of nervousness at the beginning, with the clarinets a tad ahead of the beat, and the winds playing a swift, featureless legato, without really “phrasing” their lines, the music settled down at the first tutti, conductor Rachel Hyde holding her forces together splendidly, and continuing the flow right up to the entry of the horn with the beautiful second subject. Here it was most winningly played and phrased, and answered as warmly by clarinet and oboe, with the strings then chiming in, bringing a great surge of emotion to the proceedings.

From the moment of Rolf Gjelsten’s first entry, “owning” the concerto’s opening theme without resorting to over-emphasis, I was aware of the prominence given the wind instruments here, a balance which, to my great delight, continued throughout the work. In a live performance of this work one realises by comparison the extent to which soloists on recordings are “over-miked”, creating a sound-picture which distorts the reality of scale between solo instrument and orchestra. Here Gjelsten instead seemed as concerned with allowing other players to “speak” as realising his own tones and phrases, often playing as if accompanying and letting through other solo or ensembled lines. It all conjured up a fresh, out-of-doors feeling, the music-making characterised by a delight of different timbres in places and some hushed, very “aware” accompaniments, with nice work in places from solos such as from the flute.

The great moment of the soloist’s spectacular upward glissando and the following, suitably grand welcoming orchestral tutti was brought off with tremendous elan, the transitions from these to more poetic realisations bringing forth miracles of sensitive playing from all concerned before the eventual triumph of the brass. The conclusion was a bit raucous-sounding, but I think it goes with the territory in the venue’s relatively confined spaces (surely making the restoration of the Town Hall a matter for ever-burgeoning urgency).

By this time in the performance we were confidently awaiting (and got!) a lovely rustic wind-blend of sounds at the slow movement’s beginning, the ‘cello joining in as if breaking into spontaneous song! The clarinets sounded especially mellifluous, supported solidly by the lower brass. The soloist played and phrased with compelling candour, as if confiding in us the music’s private thoughts, a heartfelt episode which culminated in a passionate orchestral outburst of great weight, strings unified in emotion and winds subsequently realising all kinds of detailed responses (including the quotation from Josefina’s “song”), with flute and bassoon strong and steady, and the horns so eloquent, almost Wagnerian in places! All credit was due, I thought, to conductor and players for their concentration and involvement throughout this section, which produced a kind of frisson, a glow of music-making at once intimate and far-reaching, the composer’s thoughts of his lost love poignantly evoked amid light and shade. Towards the end a shadow briefly cast its effect on the music before fading away amid dulcet wind tones.

A quick march jolted us out of our reverie at the finale’s appearance, with great urgency and excitement impulsively generated, even the soloist racing momentarily ahead with his double-stopped melody, though he was soon gathered in!  To my ears it all sounded slightly hectoring at this pace, especially so in the wake of the previous movement’s easeful  flow – however, relief was at hand with the lullabic episode that followed, Gjelsten’s eloquent tones matched by the clarinet with other winds and the strings eventually floating in their strands of airborne fancy. What then really uplifted the spirits was the appearance of a new episode involving the soloist’s unashamedly yearning treatment given a new melody, which was then repeated as a duet between the ‘cello and the concertmaster’s solo violin. It wasn’t a quote from “the song” itself, this time, but surely indicative (in fact, candidly so) of a kind of longed-for partnership of hearts and souls. A great moment came when the orchestra triumphantly asserted the tune’s suggestion of a consummation of sorts (Gjelsten’s playing fiery and intense, here!), with the brass suddenly announcing a kind of “Promised Land” to view, everything strangely reminiscent of “Parsifal”, an impression to do with perhaps a similar kind of longing……

What followed was given to us with remarkable power and poignancy from all concerned, a kind of thoughtful summation of the concerto’s emotional territory, the ‘cellist musing, winds characteristic-sounding in thirds, and distant trumpets calling the heart home, with solo violin again joining the cello in a brief moment of rapture, one leading to a stab of pain from the winds and a cry of sorrow from the ‘cello – vast expanses of a life, its joys and vicissitudes, all regarded in mere seconds before the ‘cello acknowledged the inevitable and surrendered to the orchestra for the last word.

It was perhaps unfortunate that anything had to follow such a “complete in itself” experience!  Ironic, too, that it was the music of Brahms, one of Dvořák’s staunchest supporters, with which the orchestra had, on one level sensibly, opted to continue the concert, but which exerted an entirely different set of demands. The performance of this, the composer’s Second Symphony, had many good moments, the conductor and players having plenty of success with the long, sinuous lines of the music, with some of the instrumental solos falling most gratefully on the ear throughout. It seemed the chief difficulty experienced by the players came with the tricky rhythmic dovetailings the composer delighted in, resulting in sections every now and then getting “out of sync” with one another, and sometimes in places that one wouldn’t expect to be problematical.

The first movement was nicely shaped by conductor Rachel Hyde, encouraging those long, lyrical lines and dovetailed exchanges between strings and wind which give the music a certain pastoral quality. I thought a certain “robust” rhythmic quality wasn’t pronounced strongly enough in places, with the players allowing the figurations to “hurry” at moments where they should have remained steady and “pointed” – difficult to achieve in music as deceptively benign as this! The movement’s central section caught the growing excitement of the composer’s writing, with great growls from the brasses at appropriate moments, while the concluding section featured a nicely-detailed horn solo, rich string sounds and perky oboe-playing.

The second movement’s declamatory opening from the strings received steady support from winds and brass, the ‘cellos and violas rich and warm in the big, almost Elgarian second-subject melody before handing over to the violins. Here, again, a stormy middle section cast shadows mid-movement, with timpani and brass underpinning the powerful statements, the conductor securely holding the last and most powerful utterances together, and allowing the winds space to solemnly announce the portentous timpani-reinforced coda.

After this we needed some light and warmth, and the perky and playful oboe, supported by flute and clarinet lines, lifted our spirits, as did the strings also, at first, with their skipping figures, the ensemble coming unstuck only at the sequence’s end, when the winds, with their Mendelssohn-like interjections brought order and security once again. The strings managed the “darkening” of the music beautifully, though the energies of the vivace section meant trouble in the playground for a few moments! The oboe called order for the last time, supported by the winds and strings, including the horn, and quiet and calm was restored.

After the expectant opening chord, lots of bustle and sotto voce business began the finale, the strings slightly “jumping the starter’s gun” but the race then finding its own joyous striding momentum, the clarinets and supporting splendidly giving notice of some oncoming crossroads, characterised by some shapely and sonorous playing from the lower strings with their contrasting melody. Again the winds steadied and focused the ensemble, their teamwork and detailing a delight, enough for the players to rally towards the end and, encouraged by Rachel Hyde, “let it rip” throughout the coda to exciting and satisfying effect.

In retrospect, whatever the orchestra performed throughout the concert’s second half would have, I think, seemed relatively effortful and hard-won, following such an inspired and beautifully-wrought first-half performance. Incidentally Rolf Gjelsten unobtrusively took his place at the back of the ‘cellos throughout the second half, bringing an appropriate kind of “oneness” to the afternoon’s events, an occasion of whose achievement the orchestra itself could be justly proud.

 

 

NZSO in splendid form under Harth-Bedoya with Brahms and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, with Stefan Jackiw (violin)

Brahms & Tchaikovsky
Farr: He iwi tahi tātou
Brahms: Violin Concerto in D, Op.77
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no.4 in F minor, Op.36

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 23 June 2018, 7.30pm

It is always a case of pleasant anticipation when a new Gareth Farr work is to be performed, and this was the case again.  Farr’s piece was commissioned by the NZSO to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s first landing in this country, which occurs next year (he departed from Britain in 1768).

The title comes from Governor William Hobson’s greeting to Maori chiefs as they came forward to sign the Treaty of Waitangi.  In English it is ‘We are all one people’.  Farr stated in the programme note for this short work ‘It is about the unique cultural diversity and energy that makes this country what it is’.

The piece began with a bouncy, rhythmic background to a cor anglais melody.  Percussion and pizzicato strings sustained the rhythm, then strings switched to bowing followed by a cello quartet.  More volume was created by the brass joining in, and tubular bells.  Drummers had perhaps the most exciting role, and we had some native bird calls from a flute.

There came sounds of military confrontation, doubtless the New Zealand Wars, with gong, side-drum and tuba.  These sounds gradually faded, and the tubular bells returned.  The music ended with a huge blast of sound, perhaps denoting a positive future.

Through many nuances this music spoke, and was splendidly performed by the orchestra.

Brahms
The Violin Concerto is one of the tops in the repertoire.  I know it well through recordings and radio, but have not so often heard it performed live.  Here it was played by young American Stefan Jackiw, of Korean and German heritage.  It was quickly apparent that he is a violinist of great skill and talent.  The music was always beautifully rendered, with attention to detail, beauty of sound, and impeccable tuning and rhythm.  He was deft, and thoroughly on top of the music.  Occasionally, early on, he was overpowered by the orchestra.

He captured beautifully the rather plaintive quality of the solo part in the first movement (allegro ma non troppo).  The large body of orchestral strings were solid and unified, delivering an excellent structure above which the soloist performed brilliantly.  His demanding solo part in this movement was executed with skill and musicality.  The cadenza was thoughtful and subtle, even tender, as well as revealing technical wizardry.  Some of Brahms’s most graceful and memorable music is to be found in this concerto.

Prominent for me in this concerto, despite the magnificent orchestra and violin work, is Brahms’s wonderful writing for woodwind.  This was evident right at the beginning of the first movement.  The second movement (adagio) opened with the wonderful oboe solo, accompanied by the deeper woodwinds and horns.  The violinist takes up the theme and varies it, against a background of quiet strings and haunting woodwind interjections.

The movement develops with increasing brilliance, but that beautiful, nostalgic theme on the oboe returns, with its bassoon accompaniment.  Then the violin rose to an emotional climax and subsided to an exquisite ending.

The mood changes completely in the finale (allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace – poco più presto), and we are whirled into a lively Hungarian dance.  The soloist decorates the theme spectacularly.  The dance becomes fast and furious before the end.

Jackiw generously applauded the orchestra, as its members did him, very warmly, while the audience applauded and cheered him heartily.  He played an encore, Largo from a violin sonata by Johann Sebastian Bach.  It was played with beautiful tone and sensitivity; it included some very quiet passages.

Tchaikovsky
The final work was Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, a work full of fire and passion.  The portentous ‘fate’ motif from the brass at the opening – first trombones and then trumpets play andante sostenuto, but the tempos changes to moderato then later andante again, and finally allegro vivo.  It is a long movement.  The juxtaposition of a wind melody against stuttering strings is a striking touch.  The tuba made itself felt; the whole orchestra blazed forth in a grand manner.

Quiet soon came, with lovely woodwind solo passages that seem to be out of another world from what preceded them.  Strings follow in kind, but the woodwinds have the foreground.  Then it was back to bombast and big themes and gestures for the whole orchestra, and a return of the fateful brass theme.  The full-bodied music returned again.  There were more delicious woodwind and horn solos and ensembles.  A rousing windup ended this monumental movement.  Tchaikovsky was certainly a great orchestrator.

The second movement (andantino in modo canzona) begins with an oboe solo against pizzicato strings.  Cellos then take up this very romantic theme.  Changes of key add to its somewhat mysterious quality.  There are many variations, and as the theme is passed around the orchestra, another theme arises, more playful than the first.  With the addition of brass, it too becomes grand.  The clarinet features, followed by bassoon.

The third movement opens with a long section of magical pizzicato from all the strings, which is interrupted by the woodwinds with a jolly theme, and their echoing the strings’ pizzicato theme.  Finally, it’s the brass’s turn, and the strings pluck again.  The whole is imaginative and effective, with much variation of dynamics.

All join in for the rambunctious finale (allegro con fuoco).  There is a quiet section, and a return of the ‘fate’ theme.  Cymbal claps are part of the dramatic effects that follow, with repetitions of earlier music.  This was an aural spectacle!

Features of the orchestra playing under Harth-Bedoya were delightful pianissimo passages, and plenty of bite and alacrity in the strings.  The orchestra was in splendid form. A shame that there were quite a lot of empty seats downstairs for this concert.