Tag: orchestral

Rachmaninov – jubilation and bitterness, but sheer poetry from Joyce Yang

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
RACHMANINOV
Vocalise Op.34 No.14 (transcribed by the composer)
Piano Concerto No.3 in D Minor Op. 30
Symphonic Dances Op.45

Joyce Yang (piano)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 27th October, 2017

A beautifully put-together programme, this, devoted to the music of Rachmaninov, and in almost every way, superbly delivered! There could be no doubt, however as to who the “star of the show” was – Korean-born American pianist Joyce Yang gave what seemed to me a performance in a thousand of the composer’s fearsome D Minor Concerto, regarded by many as one of the most technically difficult works for piano and orchestra ever written. Earlier, the NZSO and conductor Edo de Waart had breathed into life a deliciously-poised orchestra-only version of the wordless song, Vocalise, in an arrangement devised by the composer. Then, following the concerto, came a performance of Rachmaninov’s very last work, his “Symphonic Dances” , written in 1940, three years before his death. The first two of the dances came off best, here, particularly the first, with its beautifully-played saxophone solo – I confess to being a tad disappointed with the final dance’s performance, feeling that it was wanting in “bite”, and needing more wildness and desperation in its execution.

The Vocalise, which began the programme is one of those pieces which has been arranged or transcribed for a variety of instruments – it began life as a wordless song which concluded the composer’s Op.34 collection, entitled “14 Romances for high voice and piano”, and was written specifically for the voice of the great Russian soprano Antonia Nezhdanova, Rachmaninov wishing to give the singer a vehicle for displaying the beauty of her voice without recourse to words. The composer was to subsequently arrange the work both for voice and orchestra accompaniment, and for orchestra alone, although more recent sources suggest that Rachmaninov originally wrote the work for Nezhdanova to perform with orchestra AFTER the rest of the songs were already written for voice and piano, the Vocalise being subsequently added to the “Romances” collection. Among the various arrangements, the most unusual is probably that for theremin and piano, arranged by Clara Rockmore (nee Reisenberg), who was the electronic instrument’s most well-known exponent during the twentieth century.

This was a gorgeously-played performance (the conductor’s very first of this work, as he tells us in the programme’s introductory note), enabling the NZSO strings to really show their mettle, and delivering all those qualities which bring out the work’s inherent tenderness, lyricism, depth of feeling and range of intensity. The strings at first had the lion’s share of the playing, but they were gradually joined by the winds, firstly seeming to merely echo-phrase-ends, but then to increasingly augment the harmonies of the textures, as well as contributing counterpointing lines. Towards the end the music becomes strongly reminiscent of the slow movement of the composer’s Second Symphony, by dint of a clarinet solo which takes over the theme for a few measures before surrendering it again to the ascending strings.

Though in some ways moving from the Vocalise to the D MInor Piano Concerto seemed like something of a “quantum leap”, the links between the two works were here more than usually stressed by the character of the concerto performance, soloist Joyce Yang giving one of the most poetic and sheerly beautiful realizations of this work I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing!  She and Edo de Waart had played the piece together at least twice before with different orchestras, so the interpretation was “of a piece”, with the give-and take between soloist and orchestra replete with understanding and fluency.

Among what marked out her performance for me from so many others was her conveyance of involvement with every note of the music she played – nothing sounded mechanical or “less important” (as either “fillip” or transitional” sequences), but all had its place in a kind of organically-conceived whole. Another thing was, as I’ve said, her remarkable poeticizing of so much of what she played – never did she seem interested in virtuosity for its own sake. Whatever “display element” was in the solo part was there because of the music, and nothing more.

In addition, neither have I heard another pianist bring out to the same extent the music’s impish, quixotic aspect – she found a spikiness in some of the figurations that I thought equated with Rachmaninov’s contemporaries such as Prokofiev,Ravel and Bartok, and even in places, Gershwin. Humour isn’t often a quality one associates with Rachmaninov’s music, but the way Yang articulated some of the filigree passage-work in places made me smile at the playing’s sheer character – this was no faceless perfection, seamless articulation, bland liquidity or pure decoration on show – every note, as I’ve said, had its own raison d’etre, in this performance.

I confess I had to go back all the way to 1993, and Peter Donohoe’s performance of this work with the NZSO under Nicholas Braithwaite, to recall the same wonderment and pleasure at hearing this work “live” – an example of such shared alchemy of interpretation was during that brief, but telling sequence just before the final first-movement reprise of the work’s opening, when the piano gently drifts a repeated bell-like sequence of notes across an ambient crepuscular soundscape enriched by soft horn-chordings – like Donohoe did, Yang drew out this passage exquisitely, once again allowing the notes to speak their character and make an indelible impression upon the listener, however brief and fleeting…..

As for the notorious “virtuoso” elements of this concerto, Yang showed us that she could certainly “finger it” with the greats, as well as match the orchestra in tonal depth when she needed to, putting all of her physical weight into the playing of the heavier chords, such as in the massive first-movement cadenza, and again during the build-up to the final peroration at the work’s very end, and letting her fingers and wrists do the work in the more scintillating passages. People expecting virtuoso thrills got an amazingly musical version of the same from their soloist, one which realized all of the work’s necessary excitement and exhilaration.

No greater contrast with the concerto could have been given to us than what Yang played as an encore – an enchanting performance of one of the most beautiful of Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces”, his “Nocturne” from the “Lyric Suite”. Though it seems heretical to say so, I could have gone home happily after hearing this, feeling as if I had heard a piano articulate all the intrinsic beauty that it was possible for the instrument to express. Of course, I stayed! – lamenting the degradations that have resulted over the last generation of years in visiting artists such as Joyce Yang NOT giving solo recitals in tandem with NZSO appearances, as used to invariably happen in the (good) old days! A modestly-resourced Music Society such as that in Waikanae, which hosts world-class artists such as Alexander Gavrylyuk consistently and successfully organizes piano recitals – why can’t the NZSO do the same with their visiting artists, any more?

Though the first half was a hard act to follow, the orchestra and Edo de Waart did their best with the composer’s compositional swan-song, the “Symphonic Dances”, which appeared in 1940, three years before Rachmaninov’s death. The composer wryly remarked, “I don’t know how it happened – it must have been my last spark!” – but upon closer analysis of the music itself one can hear alongside all the echoes of the past and allusions to previous works, a spirit determined to raise its voice not only in protest at and defiance of the critics who reviled his works, but in bitterness and anger at having lost his homeland and his sources of inspiration. Had Rachmaninov lived for another ten years and been able to work further through these feelings, who knows what else he might have achieved?

The work itself was received with some negativity on all sides – with bewilderment by some of the composer’s “fans”, who were expecting more lyricism and lush orchestrations along the lines of the Third Symphony and the Paganini Rhapsody, and with a good deal of both half-hearted enthusiasm and outright derision by the critics, some of whom by this stage had made Rachmaninov-denigration a kind of “sport” (readers should look up the critical warblings of one Pitts Sanborn for a particularly vicious example of this, in relation to the composer’s Fourth Piano Concerto).

Rachmaninov described himself to an interviewer as “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien”, not being able to either “cast out the old way of writing” or able to “acquire the new”. Despite this assertion, the Dances’ relative toughness, leanness of orchestration and rhythmic asymmetries are nowadays regarded as evidence of the composer’s very apparent awareness of what was happening all around him. This is opposed to the more institutionalized view of Rachmaninov as some sort of nineteenth-century compositional throwback almost right to the end. As Brahms would have said, “any jackass” could hear elements of the old Rachmaninov in places throughout the music, the aching, yearning lyricism, the exciting rhythmic snap of certain figurations, and the oft-quoted “Dies Irae” theme which haunted his work from his First Symphony onwards.

The first two dances were beautifully done, the highlight being the saxophone playing of Simon Brew in the first dance, Rachmaninov writing one of his most beautiful melodies for the instrument, before allowing the strings to take over and repeat the melody, to lump-in-the-throat effect. The whole was framed in sharply-accented, no-nonsense rhythmic fashion by de Waart and his players, who took just as readily to the spooky waltz-rhythms of the second movement, a kind of Russian “Valse Triste”, and gave its melodies a proper “yearning” quality most characteristic of the composer.

Where I craved some more “bite”, a tougher, harsher, more urgent response to the music was in the third dance, whose Stravinsky-like rhythms for me “sat” too heavily – de Waart’s steady-as-she-goes way with the music I thought produced more a feeling of petulance and bad-temper rather than galvanizing, sharply-etched bitterness. With the “Dies Irae” and exerpts from the Russian Orthodox liturgical Chant “Blessed is the Lord” literally “fighting it out” in the music, I wanted more sparks flying, more combustion, more sense of triumph over bitter adversity at the end. Perhaps while on tour with this piece de Waart and the orchestra will push this piece further and further to its limits, and achieve a harder-won but ultimately more cathartic and appropriately triumphal conclusion to an already momentous concert.

Outstanding concert to mark disasters at Aberfan and the Pike River: music by Schubert and Karl Jenkins

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Youth Orchestra conducted by Simon Brew and Jonathan Griffith

Massed adult choir, children’s choir and screen projections
Solo voices: Jenny Wollerman (soprano) and James Clayton (baritone)
Solo instrumentalists: Ingrid Bauer (harp), Monique Lapins (violin), Buzz Newton (euphonium), Lavinnia Rae (cello)

Schubert: Symphony No 8 in B minor, ‘Unfinished’
Karl Jenkins: the Benedictus from The Armed Man and Cantata Memoria for the children of Aberfan

Michael Fowler Centre

Monday (Labour Day) 23 October. 2 pm

Concerts by the Wellington Youth Orchestra in the past, in my experience, have been poorly promoted and have played to an audience numbering just a few score.

This one was very different. Hand-bills had been thrust into the hand at most concerts in the previous fortnight and there were interviews on radio and in the press drawing attention to the tragedies that the orchestra had decided to commemorate.

The concert came about through the conjunction of separate elements. Last year a concert in New York had performed a cantata by Karl Jenkins commissioned by, among others, a Welsh Television channel, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster.

The result was Jenkins’s Cantata Memoria: for the children of Aberfan. It was performed by United States conductor Jonathan Griffith, the conductor of Distinguished Concerts International New York. Among the performers there was Wellington resident Wim Oosterhoff who conceived the idea of bringing the work to New Zealand. The project was a formidable one; Oosterhoff persuaded Griffith to come to Wellington to conduct the Wellington Youth Orchestra and a 300-strong choir that included 60 children, arrayed behind the orchestra.

It was to combine the work in memory of Aberfan, Cantata Memoria, with music to mark the Pike River disaster seven years ago: a movement, the Benedictus, from Jenkins’s choral work, The Armed Man, a mass for Peace (which had been written to mark the advent of the new millennium in 2000).

The Unfinished Symphony
The concert began however, with Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, chosen no doubt because of its focus on a work that the composer left incomplete; a composer whose life too was incomplete: it is hard to think of a composer, even among the many who have died young, of such genius that he would probably have produced the greatest music written since Beethoven, having already come close to that point when he died.

The symphony was conducted by the orchestra’s permanent conductor Simon Brew who had also rehearsed the Aberfan oratorio and the piece from The Armed Man.  It was a fine performance of the Schubert, one that could well have come from a totally professional orchestra, such was the remarkable elegance and pathos of the conception. And there was strikingly beautiful playing by violins, then cellos, horns, choruses of majestic trombones and each woodwind section in turn. The contrast in spirit between the sombre opening and the more sanguine Andante con moto second movement, marked a performance of real sophistication.

Benedictus for Pike River
Jonathan Griffith took over after the interval with the Benedictus from The Armed Man, employed sympathetically to commemorate the Pike River disaster. It is dominated by one of Jenkins’s most gorgeous creations, the solo cello episode which was played exquisitely by Lavinnia Rae; lovely children’s voices. The massive attack by brass and percussion towards the end had the required shock impact.

Curiously, unlike a reference in the Aberfan work later, no context was found to refer to the culpability of the Pike River mine owners whose guilt and prosecution seems quietly to have been forgotten.

The Cantata Memoria for Aberfan 
The Cantata Memoria was strikingly accompanied by images projected on a large screen behind the performers, and they were successfully related to the subject of the relevant passages. Rain rippled down a window to the delicate accompaniment of Ingrid Bauer’s harp; there were landscape scenes from the air which seemed to be a mixture of New Zealand and Wales.

The two soloists, James Clayton and Jenny Wollerman delivered important and moving passages; after the baritone’s grief-laden lament, the children’s choir (impressively, they sang their parts without the score) turned to face a photo of Aberfan engulfed by the collapsed mountain of mine tailings.

As choir members chanted the names of the victims of the catastrophe which were also projected on the screen one by one, with a pointed reference to a culpable National Coal Board (what about the private owners of the coal mines?). Later the euphonium, played by Buzz Newton, accompanied Clayton, in a telling sonic association, and the euphonium had several significant later episodes. Elsewhere, Monique Lapins’ violin led the emotional journey, along with the children’s choirs repeating the Agnus Dei, with Wollerman and Clayton repeating some of the most powerful words from the Latin Mass, ‘qui tollis peccata mundi’.

Then the Lacrymosa from the Requiem Mass, was accompanied alternately and impressively by euphonium and James Clayton’s voice, though the impact to my ears was not especially grief-laden.

Jenny Wollerman’s major part in the performance arrived with the bright, consoling words, ‘Did I hear a bird?’, the orchestra accompanying onomatopoeically as swans flew across the screen and that spirit was sustained as the two solo singers shared the singing of a Welsh folk song in a calm, reflective manner.

In a school playground, as children played hot-scotch and other games, harpist Ingrid Bauer accompanied, tapping the wood sounding board of her harp.

The concert attracted a good-sized audience, probably among the biggest I can recall for a WYO concert, and a standing ovation greeted the highly impressive performances by adult and children’s choirs, the Wellington Youth Orchestra, special involvement by singers Jenny Wollerman and James Clayton and by instrumentalists Ingrid Bauer, Monique Lapins, Buzz Newton and Lavinnia Rae; plus the thorough preparation and leadership by Simon Brew and Jonathan Griffith.

 

Excellent NZSO concert – Berlioz, Elgar and Tchaikovsky – draws disappointing audience

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Travels in Italy

Berlioz: Harold in Italy
Elgar: In the South (‘Alassio’)
Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini (Symphonic fantasia after Dante)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Judd, with Antoine Tamestit (viola)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 6 October 2017, 6.30pm

Here was a stirring programme, the items linked by their composers’ inspirations from Italy.  It happens that these three were all superb orchestrators; the works all exploited the orchestra fully.

We have had both Berlioz and Elgar already this year in NZSO programmes; no shame in that.  James Judd was noted for his Elgar performances when he was Music Director of the NZSO – one of the eminent composers of his homeland, just as after him, Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen programmed much music of his homeland’s most famous composer, Sibelius.

Berlioz treats the theme of Harold (aka Childe Harold in Byron’s long narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) in four different scenes, or movements, and so our eminent viola soloist also travelled, performing from different parts of the stage, not only from the front, which added interest.  Some commentators have seen the work as semi-autobiographical.  It is neither symphony nor concerto, but has elements of both.  Berlioz had recent experience of living in Italy, as winner of the Prix de Rome.

The opening of the work is quite spooky, a portentous wind solo playing against repetitive strings in a minor key, then the soloist played the main theme, standing behind the second violins.  During the movement he began his travels by moving forward to the usual position, on the conductor’s left  It was inspiring to hear the lovely tone of Tamestit’s viola, a Stradivarius from 1672.  One of the movement’s highlights was hearing the harp passages beautifully played, as a counterpoint to the brilliance of the viola solo.  The latter played variations on the main theme, all performed with flair and gesture, but without any element of technical display for its own sake.

The movement, titled “Adagio: Harold in the mountains.  Scenes of melancholy, happiness and joy”, built up feverishly and dramatically, reminding one that it was Paganini who requested Berlioz to write a work, that turned out be this one.  Snatches of brief phrases were tossed around the woodwinds, then things went almost berserk at the end of this movement, and the soloist retreated to the rear of the second violins.

The second movement is marked “Allegretto: March of the pilgrims singing the evening prayer”.  The whole orchestra plays the main theme; this is repeated with muted upper strings, while the cellos and basses play pizzicato and the woodwinds intone a single note.  There is an atmosphere of timorous expectation (rather spoilt by the amount of audience coughing).  A bell tolls as the procession fades away.

“Allegro assai: Serenade of an Abruzzi mountain dweller to his mistress” is the description of the third movement.  There is a splendid cor anglais solo.  Horns rumble away on the main theme; a dance tune is played by the woodwinds, accompanied by violas.  The soloist plays throughout, weaving in and out of the orchestral textures.  All is understated, and muted in the last phrases.

The solo viola has less to play in the final movement, which is “Allegro Frenetico: Orgy of brigands.  Memories of scenes past.”  Tamestit strode to the rear of the basses and played from there.  We heard rambunctious chords from the orchestra, with plenty of brass and percussion interjections.  The master orchestrator maintained the work’s interest throughout.  Violins were frenetic.  After some more quiet playing from the soloist, then Wham! Bang!  The end.

In response to prolonged enthusiastic applause, Tamestit returned to the platform and played an encore by Hindemith: a movement from one of his viola sonatas – a phenomenally fast and furious little piece of perpetuum mobile.

The remaining two works were each half as long as the Berlioz one, which had acted as both symphony and concerto.  In the South is one of Elgar’s inspired shorter orchestral works.  It, too, involves a solo viola, but in this case it was not the distinguished soloist from the Berlioz who performed, but an unfamiliar face, who took over the principal’s chair from Julia Joyce for this item.  A knowledgeable young violist sitting near me informed us that the principal was soon to take maternity leave, so we assumed that the excellent unknown violist was to fill in for her.  He gave a a fine and beautiful performance of the folk-song solo – slow and dreamy.  Perhaps this could be the southern Italy siesta?

The very spirited opening section soon led to quiet playing, the strings using mutes, and the woodwinds playing meditative music.  Some of the Elgar pomposity appears here and there, but this is a characterful work, partly gentle in character, though in the middle of the work there is a grand slow march; as the programme note said “… the texture of the music rapidly transforms between  expressive grandeur and secretive meditations.” Then brass and percussion come to the fore.  There was much light and shade in the music, and a great build-up to the climax.

Tchaikovsky’s theme was much more sombre, inspired by the tragic story of Francesca di Rimini from Dante’s Inferno.  Here was another portentous opening, cellos vying with woodwind for the honours in presenting the dramatic themes.  The violins then took over issuing the challenges.  When the brass broke in, we had the full drama.  The storm raged, to be followed by a sublime clarinet solo.  Muted strings featured in this work too, with a large, sweeping unison melody.  Flutes came to the fore, sounding like a flight of birds.

The work continued with many and varied orchestral colours and dynamics.  Oboe and flute had a conversation; the horn joined in, followed by the big unison theme again.  As the programme note said: “…Tchaikovsky at his most romantically lyrical.”  It was so dramatic one could almost see the stage or screen action – stirring stuff indeed, and all extremely well performed.

It was disappointing to see many empty seats in the Michael Fowler Centre, given it was such an interesting programme.  Perhaps for many people 6.30pm is not a favoured hour for a concert.  Nevertheless for those present, it was an early evening of outstanding music, stunningly well played.

 

Entertaining concert, mixing symphony with jazz and a witty film score from Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Justin Pearce

Mozart: Symphony No 25 in G minor, K 183
Mussorgsky: Songs from The Nursery ( with soloists; Janey MacKenzie and Luka Venter
Jazz standards: Chatanooga Choo-choo and Nature Boy, sung by Cole Hampton
Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kije Suite

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 24 September, 2:30 pm

One might have considered this an unorthodox programme, starting with a well-known Mozart symphony, ending with Prokofiev’s delightful Lieutenent Kije Suite and in between, songs by Mussorgsky and two jazz standards.

The Mozart symphony is known as the ‘Little G minor’ Symphony to distinguish it from the big one, No 40. But it became easier to distinguish after its arresting opening was used as the introduction to the fictitious, misleading film on Mozart and Salieri, Amadeus (based on Shaffer’s play). It’s unusual in being scored for four horns, as well as the usual strings and pairs of oboes and bassoons. The four horns proved something of a burden, as I had to assume, charitably, that there’d been inadequate time to rehearse. I even came to think that it might have been better to strip the horns back to two or to replace them with clarinets, or other instruments. However, some of the problem could well have been the unforgiving St Andrew’s acoustics.

Their fanfare-type opening was not a happy affair, and the accompanying strings were asked to play with excessive force, no doubt to balance the horns. Most of the later passages for horns were somewhat more restrained, but still problematic. Those elements apart, subsequent playing by strings and woodwinds was very nice and in all other respects the orchestra handled the score with considerable finesse; the subsequent movements, especially the Andante second movement, were very well played, with a charming, placid feeling.

Chattanooga Choo Choo
A set of songs followed, all arranged by conductor Justin Pearce: Chattanooga Choo Choo, made famous by the Glen Miller Band during the Second World War. Then five of Mussorgsky’s songs from The Nursery and finally a song new to me, Nature Boy which has a rather curious provenance.

The railway theme remains significant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a half million population city on the Georgia border. In keeping with the fame that the city derives from the song, there’s the fine Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum and a well preserved Terminal Station, now a hotel, though like most of the United States, there are no trains either in the city or intercity connections – how miserable for the visitor – even worse than New Zealand!

A big band was assembled for the occasion, the winds somewhat reflecting Glen Miller, though with only one saxophone. But we had strings, as well as trumpets, trombones, the four horns (now happy enough), plus a tuba. The amplified singer, Cole Hampton, was somewhat outclassed by the band, though I doubt whether it would have helped simply to turn up the volume. So the words, charming to any train buff, narrated a young man’s journey from Philadelphia through Baltimore and (North) Carolina, to meet his life’s partner at Chattanooga (at which one of the city’s several terminals?), were rather lost.  Pressed all my buttons: I enjoyed it.

The Mussorgsky of Boris Godunov doesn’t at once prompt thoughts of nursery songs, but these are a delightful, beguiling set that evokes childhood, demonstrating the composer’s multi-facetted genius. They were shared between soprano Janey MacKenzie and tenor Luka Venter; at once they created an intimate, slightly droll atmosphere, viewed through the eyes and ears of particular children. For some of the songs the orchestra proved rather too weighty though it might have been justified in the encounter with the beetle. Both singers involved themselves happily in the little tales.

The last song, again from the jazz world, was unfamiliar to me. Nature Boy was composed by one George McGrew who adopted the name eden ahbez, all lower case, e e cummings-style. Nat King Cole made it famous in 1948. I felt that, again, the orchestration was out of keeping with the subtle and atmospheric character of the song and my impression was rather supported when I read, in the usual source of information, that the arranger for Nat King Cole’s recording for Capital Records used flute and strings. In the context of jazz or pop music of the time it was unusual and an interesting discovery, for me.

Lieutenant Kije
To perform Prokofiev’s delightful Lieutenant Kije suite (drawn from the music for the eponymous 1934 Soviet film) was great idea. I doubt that I’ve heard it performed live before. My first hearing was as background music to a 1958 film, The Horse’s Mouth, based on the Joyce Cary novel, directed by Ronald Neame and featuring Alec Guinness. I’d have seen it shortly after its release and it immediately grabbed me of course, both on account of that characteristic British post-war, comedy film era, as well as its subject – a zany story of an eccentric artist; and the music.

I can’t help reproducing a quote from a website that I found, seeking to check my memory.

It’s by Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College: “… [The Horse’s Mouth] sparkles with conviction and eccentricity—at least that’s how it struck this avid young provincial filmgoer, who had never been inside a pub, let alone heard any of Prokofiev’s music, in 1959. It stayed in my memory, but only later did I come to realize why the qualities that distinguish it are the very reasons that the film remains neglected by British film historians.” And later in the essay he describes the film : “…as part of an English tradition of revolt against cozy middle-class philistinism.”

Lieutenant Kije has, of course, also been used in many later films, but one’s first experience is usually the most memorable. By the way, its spelling doesn’t comply with normal transliteration from the Russian, Киже which would be ‘Kizhe’ – sounding as in ‘measure’; The ‘j’ is the letter used in French transliteration of the sound, as it had been first published in France.

The performance was surprisingly polished and re-created the character of the delicious music much more successfully than I’d thought likely from an essentially amateur orchestra. Right from the start, with a solo trumpet (Neil Dodgson I suppose) sounding from behind the scenes, I was aware of something special. The very particular orchestration was captured, and I have to express delight at the horn playing: it was as if the music’s eccentricity had inspired skills and a singular affinity. Double basses held the limelight for a few bars; the tenor sax struck the right tone and there were nifty remarks from the xylophone. Most striking of course is the sleigh ride – Troika – a term sadly, forever blackened by the harshness of the intransigent trio of torturers working their financial austerity, from the IMF, ECB and EU Commission of recent years. But the real thing transcends that unfortunate borrowing.

The performance was a small triumph for the orchestra and conductor, and a delight for the audience.

 

Orchestra Wellington with scintillating programme: Grieg piano concerto midst spectacular orchestral waltzes

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei
Pianist: Jian Liu

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales
Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor
Weber: Invitation to the Dance (orchestrated by Berlioz)
Ravel: La valse

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 9 September, 7:30 pm

Orchestra Wellington’s 2017 series has followed the theme of music inspired or commissioned by the great impresario Serge Diaghilev. The two pieces with Diaghilev connections at this concert were Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and Ravel’s La valse, though there was also a ballet connection with the first Ravel music in the programme which was originally a set of waltzes for piano which Ravel orchestrated at the request, not of Diaghilev, but of ballerina Natasha Trouhanova.

Ravel based his set of eight waltzes on the many that Schubert had written for the piano: a set of 34 dances entitled Valses sentimentales, in 1823 and a set of 12 entitled Valses nobles, in 1826. Ravel originally called his orchestrated waltzes Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs.

A programme note by pianist Richard Dowling describes the original ballet performance: “It was orchestrated in two weeks in March 1912 and the ballet was performed in April 22, 1912 at the Théatre du Chatelet with Ravel conducting the Lamoreux Orchestra. Mme. Trouhanova danced the part of Adelaide. The premiere was an outstanding event, as four ballets were conducted by their respective composers, Vincent d’Indy, Florent Schmitt, Paul Dukas, and Ravel.”

Ravel composed, not just a set of individual dances, but a sensitively composed, unified work. That’s not to say it has a formal structure like a sonata movement, but a sequence that finds unity in melodic, rhythmic, emotional contrast in a way similar to the pattern of a suite or set of character pieces such as Schumann composed for the piano. The variety ensures that the listener is constantly stimulated by something fresh, but a creatively composed suite also creates a coherent, integrated group, each supporting or offering a connection with the next.

The problem with music that has been first conceived for a certain instrument or instruments, and later arranged for others, is the feeling, hard to dislodge, that the second version is something of a compromise or trade-off with the original. Here the big orchestra dramatized the waltzes, perhaps burdening the piano score with unnecessary colour and tonal variety; Taddei was careful to invest them with appropriate charm, energy, calm, delicacy, a touch of mystery or melancholy, the unexpected or enigmatic.

Grieg’s piano concerto is allegedly one of the most popular, but I’m mystified as to how it gains familiarity these days when there are so few live performances (that I have recent memory of); nor does it get played by RNZ Concert (which is surprising in light of their obsession with certain categories of the very popular classics). So what emerged as a lovely performance of a, to me, thoroughly familiar and well-loved concerto might not have been that for many of the audience. In addition, it used commonly to be belittled as a youthful, immature work, and evidence that Grieg was merely a miniaturist and couldn’t handle big forms. I’ve never agreed at all.

I used to love the Schumann concerto (which we heard played by Stephen de Pledge a month ago) more than Grieg’s, but the effect of this performance re-awoke my affection for Grieg, with Jian Liu’s luminous, calm, deeply felt performance and demeanour, and with very similar characteristics emerging from the orchestra.

New-comers to it could scarcely have had a more persuasive introduction. All its important features were in place: the big opening timpani statement preceding the arresting piano double octaves that at once subsides as the orchestra quietly runs through the opening themes long before the piano re-enters to elaborate on what we’ve heard. Jian Liu at once established his tone of poetic graciousness that really characterised the whole piece, even in the more flamboyant parts of the last movement, though I note that it’s marked ‘Allegro moderato molto e marcato’ rather that ‘molto vivace’ or ‘presto’, or ‘con fuoco’, etc. Though the long cadenza is a poetic rather than a virtuoso exercise, which Liu made no attempt to impose, all the brilliance necessary was there, and he seemed always driven by the view of the cadenza as an integral part of movement. Each phrase was given charming breathing space, and such things as slightly prolonged gaps between certain big chords at its climax were beautifully judged.

The second movement expresses a gentle calm that Liu approached almost diffidently, though the deft keyboard flutterings, at one point duetting with Ed Allen’s perfectly sympathetic solo horn and with Mark Cookson’s clarinet also distinctive. But the charms of the slow-movement don’t end, as the last movement too, passes through contrasting meditative and calm episodes between its excitable and challenging bravura passages.

Weber’s Invitation
I was ready to consider the Grieg the concert’s highlight (and really, it was), but to get a rare live hearing of Berlioz’s sensitive and felicitous orchestration of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance was a treat, and attention was rightly focused on Brenton Veitch’s beautiful cello ‘invitation’ and courteous ‘escorting of his partner back to her seat’ after the waltz ends. Marc Taddei’s own introduction, discreetly reminding those unfamiliar with it not to clap at the end of the waltz itself, did the trick. It was a lovely way to awaken those who had not already discovered it, to Berlioz’s genius in finding extraordinarily sensitive orchestral interpretations of tales, moods and visual scenes.

La valse
If I’d felt that the Ravellian orchestra weighed a bit heavily on the Valses nobles…,  La valse itself was rather different, conceived and designed by Ravel as an orchestral tour-de-force. This performance, employing very large wind and percussion sections, and two harps, emphasised the traditional character of ‘the waltz’ and for about two-thirds of its length it may have been formally modelled on the concert waltzes of Johann or Richard Strauss. But it becomes increasingly clear that the composer wanted to dramatise the potentially frenzied and chaotic characteristics that he felt impacted 19th century society, and the orchestra successfully navigated its path to the almost stupefying climax with increasing intensity, yet there was little loss of detail in the performance that was truly a credit to Taddei and the orchestra.

 

“The Three Altos” – scenes of glory and achievement for the viola here in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Three Altos – a Viola Spectacular with the NZSO
The 44th International Viola Congress, Wellington, NZ

ROBERT SCHUMANN (arr. Mclean – Marchenbilder Op.113 (world premiere)
Roger Myers (viola)
ROBERTO MOLINELLI – Lady Walton’s Garden (world premiere)
Anna Serova (viola)
BORIS PIGOVAT – Poem of Dawn (New Zealand premiere)
Anna Serova (viola)
WILLIAM WALTON – Concerto for Viola and Orchestra
Roger Benedict (viola)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Monday, 4th September, 2017

This concert marked the conclusion of the 44th International Viola Congress, one which brought aficionados from everywhere in the world to Wellington for no less than five days of intense viola interaction. Co-hosts for the event were Professor Donald Maurice, and NZSQ violist Gillian Ansell, both distinguished teachers of the viola at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington. It was no wonder that, with fifty-plus events scheduled for the five days, the prospect of the Congress was, for Gillian Ansell, “nothing short of viola heaven!”

The concert, featuring three internationally-acclaimed viola soloists performing individually with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, made a fitting conclusion to this five-day whirlwind of meetings, seminars, workshops and chamber concerts. Two of the presentations were world premiere performances – Michael McLean’s orchestral arrangement of Schumann’s Märchenbilder Op.113, and Roberto Molinelli’s Lady Walton’s Garden, a three-movement work whose individual sections are named after plants and flowers from Lady Susana Walton’s garden, La Mortella, on the island of Ishia, near Naples; while a third, Israeli composer Boris Pigovat’s 2013 work Poem of Dawn, here received its New Zealand premiere. Not unfittingly, the fourth work was a viola classic – Sir William Walton’s much acclaimed 1929 Viola Concerto.

We were fronted up to by a couple of speakers before the music got under way, the first being the Hon. Chris Finlayson, who, in introducing himself as a representative of the Government, told us quite categorically (besides welcoming us to the concert and paying tribute to those here in Wellington who had organised the Viola Congress) that one could still be a classical music-lover despite being the Attorney-General! We then were addressed briefly by the newly-appointed Director of the NZSM, Professor Sally Jane Norman, who similarly paid tribute to the organisers of the Congress and the evening’s concert, describing the event as “a strong cultural resonator for Wellington”, and causing wry amusement with her description of the city as “a world famous wind instrument” – a nice touch!

These pleasantries having been deftly expressed and duly registered, we settled down to the evening’s music, beginning with the first of the evening’s “premieres”, Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder Op.113, arranged for viola and orchestra, with soloist Roger Myers, and with Hamish McKeich conducting the NZSO. No composer of my listening experience proclaims his character more readily in his music than does Schumann, the opening Nicht schnell expressing that curiously unique melancholic lyricism so characteristic of the composer which at once gives and conceals, emotes and holds in check, a scenario of unquiet impulses and counter-impulses which, allowed to get the upper hand, as in Schumann’s unfortunate case, can lead to undermining disturbance. Scored for an orchestra these impulses seemed rather less obsessive, if more discursive – but the general effect was attractive, more “comfortable” than the chamber version.

The vigour of the Lebhaft’s march was transformed midway into a skitterish galop, a twisting phrase thrown this way and that by soloist and orchestra, the music’s angularities given plenty of swagger by the players. Then, it was the turn of the following Rasch, which music expended comparable energies, Roger Myers’ finger-fleetness given a workout by the driving triplet rhythms set against a striding orchestral accompaniment.

After these vigorous expenditures, the benediction of the finale cast a dream-like spell over the hall, with Schumann come into his element here as a composer of “the soft note for he who listens secretly” – a quote normally associated with the Op.17 Fantasia for solo piano, but just as applicable to the hushed, inward musings of the viola and the accompanying strands and counterpoints – as if the music’s questing spirit has found its resting-place. In some moods the sounds might be thought of as religious, while in others the music’s lullabic trajectories might evoke deep nostalgia. Roger Myers’ playing and the orchestral support under Hamish McKeich winningly encompassed both possibilities.

In view of the ostensible subject-matter, I was expecting something far more Delian from Roberto Molinelli’s “Lady Walton’s Garden”, but was obviously out-of-synch with both the times and the context – this was no languid, heavily-scented “In a Summer Garden”-like evocation, but a lively, infectiously physical delineation of joyous energies, especially so during the work’s first movement, subtitled gincko biloba (the first of three such names). The new soloist was Anna Serova, and her poised, finely-crafted viola-playing here, suggested, perhaps, an agent provocateur, the conduit through which the garden and its verdant energies were expressed.

The second movement, Victoria Amazonica (the largest of the water-lilies) appropriately conjured up liquid, dreamy harp-coloured textures at the outset, but graduallly burgeoned into a full-blooded exploration, by turns romantic and acerbic, with passing gypsy caravans and angular, 7/4 dance rhythms, the soloist all the while registering and commenting on the order and passing of things. Breaking this exotic spell was the final movemento, a tango, subtitled palo borracho (‘drunken tree”), music with “driven” rhythms suggesting an exotically-set drama, with the soloist a kind of domesticated gypsy fiddler, or even a cafe violinist. Matters came to a head when Serova suddenly set down her violin and whirled into the arms of a tango-dancing partner who, it seemed, had appeared from nowhere! The only problem, review-wise, for me with the violinist exchanging her role of musician for that of dancer, was the ensuing unexpected distraction of having to surrender one’s attention to the sight of a beautiful woman dancing a tango – the music from that point on, was……er – well, it seemed OK!

After the interval had realigned the balance of my critical sensibilities, I was ready to re-encounter Anna Serova as a viola soloist once more, in this instance giving us the New Zealand premiere of a work by Boris Pigovat Poem of Dawn, a work dedicated to the violist. Already known to New Zealand audiences through his searing, no-holds-barred Requiem, performed in Wellington by Donald Maurice and the Vector Wellington Orchestra in 2008, here Russian-born Pigovat, to my surprise, gave us a glimpse of another, less confrontational side to his creative personality, in this radiantly-scored, rhapsodic work, the opening gathering up and engaging our sensibilities as it meant to go on, with raptly meditative solo instrumental lines, supported by touches of ambient magic in the orchestra all of which seemed to constantly evolve, moving us from realm to evocative realm, a tour de force of post-modern romantic orchestral writing! To my unprepared ears the music in places bordered on the schmaltzy in its directly emotional gesturings, albeit extremely high-class schmaltz! I’m certain that my reaction to the piece at the time was coloured by my having a different kind of expectation of what a previously unheard work from its composer would sound like!

I had no such problem with the Walton Viola Concerto that concluded the formal part of the concert. In this work, solo instrument and music deliver a near-perfect match of sound and emotion, the opening movement achieving miracles of a “gradual awakening” of things and their exploration, with both feeling and intellect brought into play. Roger Benedict’s performance with Hamish McKeich caught this tantalising interaction with plenty of whimsy allied to executive brilliance, even if some of the soloist’s energetic double-stopping came slighty adrift intonation-wise amidst the cut-and-thrust exchanges with the orchestra. But how beautifully the players ‘floated’ and then energised the movement’s lyrical main theme, song mingled with dance, as it were, the music leading one’s interest on while keeping up enigmatic appearances. Whether the middle-movement scherzo reveals or further conceals through diversion or entertainment depends on how one views its rumbustious character, as a Janus-faced mask or an ecstasy of brief abandonment! Whatever the case, the music was here given for all its character was worth, the soloist’s material jaunty and insoucient, and the orchestra’s brassily rumbustious episodes joyous and life-enhancing!

But it’s the finale which truly proclaims this music’s greatness, as it did, here – the opening bassoon’s jauntiness was carried along by the other winds and the soloist, the viola alternating rhapsodic inclination (as “English” as the work gets!) with an undertow of restlessness driven by the strings and augmented by the winds. Soloist and orchestra continued this volatile alternation between the two states, Roger Benedict’s viola here delving into the depths with long-breathed lines as readily as charging impulsively forward towards a kind of running skirmish with the orchestra, the music spectacularly expending its energies with a passionately-declaimed phrase capped off by a solo trumpet – splendid stuff! The soloist’s subsequent re-entry, with its gradual upward progression towards “the inverted bowl we call the sky” was lump-in-the-throat stuff, as was the return of the work’s very opening theme, with viola and orchestra each claiming the other as “belonging”, in a deeply satisfying, but still mysterious kind of fusion – we all sat spellbound at the end, in the embrace of the music’s enigmatic concluding silence. I’d always wanted to hear this work “live” and wasn’t disappointed!

Afterwards, the NZSO’s Principal Viola Julia Joyce joined the evening’s three soloists in an arrangement of a Piazzolla Tango, which, as the saying goes, brought the house down, thus, in a suitably festive manner, concluding a similarly festive occasion!

NZSO and Edo de Waart’s outstanding performance of Damnation of Faust

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edo de Waart
Soloists: Alisa Kolosova (mezzo-soprano; Marguérite), Andrew Staples (tenor; Faust), Eric Owens (bass; Méphistophélès), James Clayton (baritone; Brander),
Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus, Wellington (Michael Vinten, Chorus Director)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 25 August 2017, 6.30pm

Berlioz was a non-conformist, musically.  In an ironic twist, the otherwise excellent programme notes said he ‘flaunted rules and regulations’ whereas in fact he flouted them, falling out with audience and critics in the process.  The work that was the entire programme of this NZSO concert demonstrated to the full the composer’s very different  music from that composed by his contemporaries and recent predecessors.

The work required a large orchestra; there were numbers of additional players, and a large chorus, consisting of 28 women and 43 men – when have we ever heard a Wellington choir with so many men in it?  I was surprised and delighted to see that the orchestra appeared to include an ophicleide, the instrument specified by the composer next to the tuba, not merely a second tuba (the listing in the programme did not give this instrument).

I last heard this work live back in the 1970s, in the marvellous Dunedin Town Hall, with Kiri te Kanawa as Marguerite and Simon Estes (American bass) as Méphistophélès.  The other two singers were David Parker as Faust and Maurice Taylor as Brander.

It was innovative and useful to have surtitles projected in the Michael Fowler Centre, as for a conventional opera (which of course this work is not), so that the audience could follow what was being sung.  The French we heard sounded impeccable, particularly from Eric Owens.

The first character we met was Faust, sung by British tenor Andrew Staples.  He has a very pleasing voice.  At first I thought he was not always strong enough against the orchestra, but soon this opinion changed, as he warmed to the task, and adjusted to the venue being full (well, not completely, which was disappointing) after presumably rehearsing with it virtually empty.

Berlioz’s enchanting music constantly painted pictures.  Following Faust’s first solo there was pungent woodwind, including no fewer than four bassoons, and numerous rhapsodic utterances from the orchestra as a whole.  The chorus’s first entry, as peasants dancing and singing, was clear and immediate.  The singing was precise, with full-bodied tone.

Then came the Hungarian March, featuring fine flute playing especially, with other winds in strong support.  Rousing military bravado was almost palpable.

Next was a complete contrast, as Faust leaves the countryside and returns to his study, in Part II.  The pensive mood is portrayed in the music’s lambent tones.  Then an Easter chorus is sung by the choir and there is a great build-up of volume, as the orchestra becomes more agitated and Méphistophélès appears.  American Owens has a magnificent voice, full of expression and tonal colour, but perhaps his interpretation of the role of Méphistophélès could have been more dramatic, vocally; there was a certain uninvolved quality about his performance.

He takes Faust to a pub, where the chorus of drinkers becomes raucous, and an amazing story about a rat is told in ironic, fugal music, followed by Méphistophélès’s story about a flea. The male chorus was in fine fettle singing the chorale for the rat.  Strong music conveyed the irony of the flea song.  James Clayton, in the part of the drunken Brander, used gesture and movement more than the other singers.

Faust and Méphistophélès retreat from the vulgar scene and the latter sings a lullaby, encouraging rest to come to Faust, amid flowers.  Here, his large, rich voice was imposing, and expressive of the words.  Trombones’ fine playing accompanied him.  The mixed chorus was most effective in invoking the beauty of nature.  The strings lead a quiet dance, as Faust falls into slumber.

The male chorus, now students, are joined by the soloists in singing that was robust and characterful, with full brass, as the two protagonists enter the town where lives Marguérite, whom Faust has seen in visions as he slept.

As they make their way to her room, yet more varied, imaginative music sounds from the orchestra, with a march consisting of trumpets and timpani (6 of them!), plus echo horns and trumpets off stage.  Faust contemplates the air of the countryside, and thinks of Marguérite.  Andrew Staples produced some gorgeous high notes; here there was no problem of balance against the orchestra.

At the opening of Part III, dazzling flutes introduce Marguérite, who sings one of the work’s well-known arias, about the king of Thule.  This aria drew beautiful vocal expression from Alisa Kolosova; she also used more facial expression than the other two principal soloists.  The aria was accompanied by Julia Joyce on viola, a marvellous obbligato played with clarity and broad strokes bringing out the full tone of the instrument.  It was a pity that so much coughing, absent in the first half, was apparent during this aria.

On Méphistophélès’s return he is accompanied by fanciful piccolo pirouettes.  Bass clarinet, too has quite a large part to play; another manifestation of Berlioz’s imaginative orchestration, evoking the dramatic moods and changes, reflecting the detail of Goethe’s great dramatic poem based on the medieval legend of a man who sold his soul to the Devil.
At the moment at which Marguérite and Faust must part, since they are imminently to be discovered together in the bedroom, the full chorus joined in.

Part IV reveals brilliant singing from Alisa Kolosova in the wonderful aria “D’amour l’ardente flamme”.  It was exquisite singing, but even more exquisite was the playing of the orchestra’s cor anglais player, Michael Austin, performing the obbligato.  I cannot recall hearing cor anglais playing more wonderful and dynamically varied than this.  It made the aria exotic and erotic; alternately electrifying and hypnotic.

The soldiers interrupt the mood, but the cor anglais gets a last opportunity to produce the mellifluous, enchanting, expressive melody.  Whereas at times Marguérite seemed to lack the power to project sufficiently.

Faust is heard again, invoking the forces of nature.  The drama builds, the female chorus rises. Méphistophélès brings his rushing horses, portrayed by a combination of pizzicato and bowed strings; they underpin the screams and unearthly songs.  Brass then woodwind add to the horrific scenario of the rush to hell that has full sway in Berlioz’s (and Goethe’s) imagination.  Faust staggers as the men’s chorus and Méphistophélès carry forward the ghastly drama with various names of the Devil, and singing in a ‘devilish tongue’. Méphistophélès wanders off and the women join the chorus.

It was a shattering experience to hear the chorus sing the heavenly ‘Praise’, with the two harps and a solo soprano from the chorus, after what preceded it.  Their tone was gorgeous in this heavenly ending.  The interpretation by the writer of the programme notes was that the horses carry Marguérite to hell as well as Faust, whereas Larry Pruden’s notes to the 1972 performance have her saved by God; hence the heavenly chorus.

This was an outstanding performance .  At the end, the applause was loud, long and accompanied by cheers for all the performers.  Andrew Staples nobly gave his bouquet to Julia Joyce, who had played the viola obbligato so beautifully.  Then, to my delight, Edo de Waart wended his way through the orchestra to present his flowers to Michael Austin.

Descriptions heard from members of the audience afterwards included ‘amazing’, ‘tremendous’, ‘emotional’.  In addition to the privilege of hearing a superb band of soloists, a splendid and well-trained chorus this concert demonstrated again what a fine orchestra we have, under its superb conductor, Edo de Waart.  Above all, however, it revealed the astonishing innovation, inventiveness impetuosity and imagination of Berlioz.

 

Bruch’s violin concerto and Beethoven’s Seventh survive another (splendid) exposure as great works

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Edo de Waart with Karen Gomyo – violin

John Adams: Short Ride on a Fast Machine
Bruch: Violin Concerto No 1 in G minor
Beethoven: Symphony No 7 in A

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 12 August, 7:30 pm

It’s unusual for the NZSO to stage two concerts on consecutive evenings in the same town, though often enough they travel to different towns for concerts on consecutive nights. This time it was presumably to make full use of Karen Gomyo’s short visit to New Zealand with concerts only in Wellington and Auckland.

In the past I have remarked on the boring CVs about guest soloists that get printed in the NZSO’s, and other concert promoters’ programmes. Their unvarying pattern, moving through lists of festivals, orchestras, conductors, glamorous venues, highlights of the current year, and major premieres. Almost never mention of early years, education, musical studies. Very rarely do they mention earlier visits to New Zealand, unless the NZSO happens to be accorded distinguished orchestra ranking in the artist agent’s hand-out.

In this case, there is no mention in the programme of Gomyo’s earlier visit to New Zealand, in June 2015, to replace Hilary Hahn at the farewell concert for Pietari Inkinen, playing the Beethoven violin concerto. Though the press publicity beforehand mentioned it.

Here, with Bruch’s first violin concerto, her characteristic playing that impressed two years ago, her scrupulous and refined bowing, and dynamic subtlety, found fertile ground and had more scope in the Romantic heartland in which Bruch lived. Beginning with slow, secretive strokes on timpani, that expressed tension as much as magic; the flutes, clarinets and prominent bassoons made way gently for her entry: an auspicious beginning that seemed never to falter thereafter. Her playing seems characteristically quiet and it can lead one to feel that the orchestra is sometimes too loud; I heard one or two comments about her quiet playing, suggesting that she allowed herself to be covered by the orchestra, but the work is pretty carefully written so that the orchestra and soloist are rarely competing for space; the relationship between orchestra and soloist seemed meticulously judged. The violin doesn’t have to be dominant throughout and the pleasure lay then in the music’s sustained melodic beauty, and Gomyo’s delicacy and unostentatious approach didn’t fundamentally change as the movement’s more dramatic phase took hold.

Her brief cadenza towards the end of the first movement was fervent rather than showily spectacular and the rest of the movement is simply a fading away to the start of the Adagio, which though in a gentle triple time sustains much the same mood. It is of course a ravishingly beautiful movement (making you astonished, and sad, every time, that Bruch didn’t find comparable ideas to weave into more of his music).

The Finale is in the conventional pattern and has further memorable melodies that those of us who don’t allow conventional prejudices to colour our views of Bruch, hardly tire of. Her sound was simply discreet and gorgeous, overflowing with soulfulness, even when some fairly spectacular playing was taking place.

The concert had opened with John Adams’s perhaps most famous piece, Short Ride on a Fast Machine. It’s certainly a winner with audiences and De Waart employed no undue restraint in driving as if on a Grand Prix track, maintaining a thrilling pulse for its five minutes. Incidentally, poking about the Internet I came across a book by Magnus McGrandle with the same title and the blurb characterises it: ‘Short Ride on A Fast Machine is a quirky and engaging caper, the story of a young cycle courier from London who goes on an improbable journey to Norway, to pick up a stuffed owl for a mysterious client.’ Reportedly just published; is he paying Adams royalties?

The second half was Beethoven’s equivalent of the Fast Ride, the seventh symphony which, mythically, inspired Weber to write that it was ‘evidence that its composer had lost his mind’, and, Friedrich Wieck (father of Clara Schumann) maintained that ‘the music could only have been written by someone who was seriously intoxicated’. But see below…

The orchestra is taking its period authenticity commitments seriously: here with 18th century style timpani, or kettledrums as they used to be called; a bit sharper in impact and not as opulent. Otherwise normal, double winds, though four horns, two trumpets and no trombones.

The orchestra size and De Waart’s speed intensified rather than reduced its keen-edged impact, that heightens the sense of being slightly unhinged; perhaps Weber could be forgiven if he’d heard a really fast driven performance. I imagine that we don’t know details of the speeds at which Salieri took its first performance in December 1813.

There are many quotable comments on this symphony, perhaps the most famous, Wagner’s who called it ‘the apotheosis of the dance’. But there were a few deaf critics; it was of the first movement that Weber is alleged to have written. But the authority Wikipedia dismisses it. It’s worth quoting:

‘The oft-repeated claim that Weber considered the chromatic bass line in the coda of the first movement evidence that Beethoven was “ripe for the madhouse”, seems to have been the invention of Beethoven’s first biographer, Anton Schindler. His possessive adulation of Beethoven is well-known, and he was criticised by his contemporaries for his obsessive attacks on Weber. According to John Warrack, Weber’s biographer, Schindler was characteristically evasive when defending Beethoven, and there is “no shred of concrete evidence” that Weber ever made the remark.’

It was in the second movement , a mere Allegretto, where there was a pause to catch breath. It was somewhat secretive, emerging into the light of day slowly. The third movement is not actually named Scherzo: merely Presto, with sharply contrasted moods in not closely related keys between the Scherzo A section, and Trio, B section; and there’s the quirky, teasing feeling in the unusual second and almost a third reappearance of the Trio. It came off brilliantly.

As did the last movement, with its sense of cosmic power and urgency, of ‘Bacchic fury’ (Donald Tovey), with its reputation as one of the most extraordinary compositions of all time. De Waart’s dynamic gestures were not the least exaggerated, the fierce down-beats, the writhing basses and cellos and the steadily rising crescendo as it wound its way through a seeming (but not actual, I’m sure) accelerando, to a finish that generated shouts and prolonged clapping.

One often wonders, presented with another performance of a Beethoven symphony, whether over-exposure will diminish its impact at one’s 37th hearing. But it didn’t this time, at least.

Mahler, Berg – and Salina Fisher, from the NZSO – music of innocence and experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SALINA FISHER – Rainphase
BERG – Violin Concerto “To the memory of an Angel”
MAHLER – Symphony No.1 in D Major “Titan”

Karen Gomyo (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 11th August, 2017

Spectres, once they’re established, can haunt the world of music for decades, for oceans of time, during which certain attitudes and values can be gradually eroded, or else further entrenched. The fact that each of this concert’s three items might well have reawakened specific “ghosts” lurking among the sensibilities of the NZSO’s many loyal supporters might well have accounted for the relative paucity of attendance (by my reckoning the hall was no more than two-thirds full).

In fact, two of these so-called “spectres” probably contributed far less to the numbers or empty seats than the one which I’ll come to in a moment. Time was when programming a piece of New Zealand music at a concert would ensure that a certain number of music-lovers stayed away. Nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that home-grown music, partly by dint of sheer persistence (thanks to various staunch advocacy from certain musicians and listeners) and partly due to its intrinsic attractiveness no longer “scares off” people to the extent that it used to do.

As for the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer was famously quoted at some point as saying in response to shafts of critical disapproval “My time will come”, a prediction which appears to have come true wherever Western symphonic music is regularly performed. It did take more than a decade after the then National Orchestra of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service was founded in 1946 for the ensemble to tackle a Mahler Symphony (the Fourth with conductor John Hopkins in 1958), though since then all the others, including the unfinished fragment of the Tenth, have been more-or-less regularly performed.

It’s interesting that Hopkins, according to Joy Tonks’ 1986 history, “The NZSO – the first Forty Years” – Reed Methuen), had to fight the Assistant Director-General of the then NZBC, John Schroder, to programme what the latter called “this long and boring music”…! – an indication of the extent at that time of the composer‘s “spectral” aspect in people’s minds. Now, it seems, concert audiences can’t get enough of Mahler, even though the presence of the First Symphony on the occasion of this concert didn’t help to make up for what appeared to be more potent misgivings on the part of a goodly number of patrons.

So maybe it was the presence of music by Alban Berg which could have been the crucial factor – though Berg was in many ways the least “hard-core-radical” of the famous Schoenberg/Berg/Webern trio whose work popularly defined the “Second Viennese School” of composition, his music is still regarded as “difficult” by association with his two contemporaries, enough, perhaps, to put off people of a less adventurous inclination from attending the concert. One woman sitting just down from me lasted ten minutes into the Berg Violin Concerto before she was gathering her things and was off – but at least she was prepared to give the music a try!

But what riches there were for those of us who stayed, firstly to marvel at the finely-wrought and freshly-contrived super-detailings of instrumental textures, timbres and tones of Salina Fisher’s miraculous new work Rainphase, and then to luxuriate in the miraculous contrivance of acerbic twelve-tone structurings interlaced with russet-coloured afterglowings throughout Alban Berg’s last completed work, his Violin Concerto. Both works required active listening of a kind which occasionally confronted rather than soothed the ear – and perhaps the Concerto might have attracted more people had there been a pre-concert talk of some kind, helping to shed some light in advance on some of the music’s ebb and flow. It was certainly a work which richly illustrated Berg’s teacher, Schoenberg’s dictum about there being “no such things as dissonances – merely more remote consonances!”

Beginning with Salina Fisher’s work, the first sounds were Keatsian in their “Fled is that music? – Do I wake or sleep?” quality, harmonic-like tones so ethereal and other-worldly – in point of fact, not unlike those at the very opening of the Mahler Symphony we were to hear later in the concert. The tones then multiplied and harmonically “clustered”, and seemed to initiate the process of a giant organism gently breathing, with still more textures and timbres joining in with the wonderment, and with percussion gradually becoming more prominent. The lower instruments provided a foundation while the lighter-toned sounds clustered, glowed and scintillated before receding into an almost transcendental world of gestural sonorities, for all the world becoming “naturalistic” in their textural and timbral explorations, sonorities best described by the words “swishing” and “murmuring” and “breathing” and “rippling” – all water-words describing both activity and aftermath.

Gentle string pizzicati turned the processses into a kind of promenade or dance – a “gavotte of the stormwater pipes”, or some such activity – with as much happening on the ground as there was in the air. Winds found their characteristic voices and intoned a kind of nature’s hymn, individual lines finding one another and growing in intensity, reaching what felt like a kind of fruition of a natural process, most satisfying to experience. Fisher’s assured instrumentation throughout these sequences made for breath-catching results in places, no more evocative than during the piece’s long drawn-out diminuendo, flecked with motifs of valediction. As strings and winds found a commonality and the textures dried slowly out, the piece magically returned to its origins, the ending surviving even the oddest irruption of vocalised noise from (one presumed) some audience member somewhere, made for whatever reason, accidental or intentional…….

Last year I had the good fortune to both hear and review a performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto here in Wellington played by Wilma Smith, well-remembered in Wellington as a former leader of the New Zealand String Quartet, as well as an ex-concertmaster of the NZSO, before her relocating to Australia in 2003. On that occasion Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington were the musical collaborators, so this time it was the NZSO’s and Edo de Waart’s turn, with the superb violinist Karen Gomyo, whom I’d previously heard playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the NZSO and Pietari Inkinen in June 2015. On that occasion Gomyo was a substitute for the newly-pregnant Hilary Hahn, and captured my interest with a reading of the great work which provided a distinctive and memorable experience.

Throughout the work’s opening Andante movement one would think that there was little the average concertgoer would find troublesome or unpalatable. It wasn’t music which “played itself”, and did require some concentration – but the rewards for listeners were considerable. Berg began the work with a series of open fifths alternated between the solo violin and various orchestral instruments such as the harp and the clarinet, Gomyo keeping her higher tones exquisitely pure, while squeezing more emotion from on the lower notes. After musing on the opening in exchange with muted brass, the soloist connected with the orchestral winds, taking part in both gentle, bitter-sweet exchanges, and a couple of trenchantly-delivered arched lines, throbbing with feeling.

Out of this the clarinets began the dance that ushered in the second movement. A somewhat angular figuration in places built up to some vigorous to-ings and fro-ings, with the peasant-like dance-steps tossed about, and the violin taking charge of the rhythm for a “this is how it goes” sequence. As if it had been playing quietly for a while and nobody had noticed, the solo horn suddenly introduced an affecting counter-melody which the muted trumpets then picked up – like a memory of long ago suddenly coming into focus! The composer when young had had an affair with a peasant girl, which produced a child and it was believed that this tune was a reference to that particular memory.

As well, Berg had already begun the concerto when he heard of the death from infantile paralysis of Manon Gropius, the daughter from a second marriage of Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, a girl he knew as Mutzi. The violin’s quixotic dancings in this movement seemed like the composer’s attempt at capturing for all time a young girl’s vivacity and sweetness, the music lightly evoking fond remembrance and nostalgic sadness, and watched over by guardians such as the stern tuba and a wraith-like pair of Sibelius-like clarinets. As the trumpet hauntingly sounded the folk-tune once again the soloist suddenly danced away, as if wanting to preserve the impulses of memory which brought happiness and escape from what was to follow.

Whereas the music had thus far been vivacious and volatile on the one hand, and thoughtful and nostalgic on the other, the third movement’s opening produced a shock with its harsh ferocity – the stuff of nightmares come into the midst of contentment. Gomyo’s playing bit deeply into the music’s textures like a wounded animal, then withdrew into hiding, accompanied by spectral tones from the oboe and flute, the music feeling “cornered” and subdued, the textures slightly “ghoulish” , the lines from the soloist suspended in space. With another irruption welling up from below, the music appeared in utter turmoil, the solo violin screaming in agony and despair, and the brass in ghoulish-march mode. The soloist’s tones were overwhelmed by the orchestra’s sheer weight and harshness – such horrible, merciless music!

Out of the vistas laid waste by the turmoil Gomyo’s violin sang resolutely to herself a strongly sustaining ascending line, one which the clarinets then took up and played with such beauty and poignancy – this was the chorale used by JS Bach in his Chorale “Es ist genug”, one which soloist and orchestra here made their own, playing it warmly and tenderly, resisting attempts by the individual instruments to drag the melody back to earth. As the strings sang the last vestiges of life, the soloist beautifully ascended the melody, to a point after which the winds and brass broke into radiant support of “the angel” of the music’s title, the silences at the work’s end carrying with them only her memory.

After these somewhat overwrought utterances, the opening of the Mahler Symphony which followed the interval seemed to take us back to the world of childhood, of first impressions of consciousness and the wonderment induced by nature and creation. De Waart and his players gave the music an almost timeless quality, the sounds here seemingly conjured out of the earth’s elements.The work’s many moments of reflective beauty brough out this performance’s most distinctive quality, an incrediby rapt, breath-holding sense of listening to the silences and the soft sounds in between. Writing this now, it all comes back to me so vividly – playing and conducting of the utmost concentration and refinement.

The work’s more bucolic passages were also rendered with an ease of utterance (more elegant than earthy, I felt, probably because the MFC isn’t renowned for its warmth and richness of sound). Apart from a brief (and uncharacteristic) first-movement woodwind slip, the orchestral playing was simply to die for, so much of the detailing heavenly in effect (the off-stage trumpets, for instance)! Had it all taken place in the Town Hall I’m sure this performance would also have heaved, grunted and roared all the more readily. As it was, the exquisite refinement of those soft passages (onstage brass performing miracles of quiet, withdrawn playing) gave the first movement’s peformance a distinctiveness of its own that won’t easily be forgotten.

De Waart’s second-movement country dancers moved briskly and easily, encouraged by the winds lifting the bells of their instruments as directed by the composer, and by the string players bouncing their bows on the instruments’ strings, adding to the rustic effect. A solo horn most elegantly called the dancers indoors for a more genteel waltz, the playing rich and velvety in effect, and the string-wind counterpoints to the dance a delight. The return of the countryfied Landler brought forth, among other things a splendid cymbal crash and, to the heads of all the dancers, a fine rush of blood at the end.

Timpani strokes, both eerie and purposeful, ushered in the third movement, a double-bass solo voicing the instrument’s spectral tones throughout a minor-key version of the folk-song Frere Jacques (apparently always sung that way in rural parts of Austria), counterpointed by a piquant oboe line, before giving way to the strains of a small klezmer band, almost offstage and passing by, in effect. Again, conductor and players achieved wonders with the quieter sections of the score, most notably the rapt, break-of-day beginning of the trio section of the movement with its near-heartbreaking quotation of the song “Die zwei blauen Augen” from the composer’s own Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – here, the play of different emotion, the surge of hope and the minor-key pang of anguish from the original song was as affecting as with the original.

Out of the movement’s deathly hush at the end came a blaze of ferocity from the brass and a crash from the percussion that made everybody jump, launching the finale in no uncertain terms! Though the hall doesn’t give much back, the percussion section did a great job, Lenny Sakofsky punishing the cymbals for all they were worth and both Larry Reese and Thomas Guldborg fetching up great roaring avalanches of tone from each of the two sets of timpani. The movement’s ebb and flow was strongly characterised – the tumultuous flare-ups of excitement and agitation were tellingly counterweighted by the more inward, lyrical sequences, each mood in a sense “overtaken” by another in what seemed like an inevitable and organic progression of things. As for the final all-together, it most spectacularly featured the horn sectio “standing and delivering” as the music roared forth, driven by the timpani and upholstered by every orchestral section singing and playing its heart out.

As I’ve said, in the Town Hall we would have been overwhelmed by these sounds, perhaps even too much so for some people – but not for this writer. Conductor Edo de Waart made an interesting gesture with his actions immediately after taking his bows in front of an enthusiastic audience, by giving his bouquet of flowers to the double-bass player, Joan Perarnau Garriga, in acknowledgement of his restrained but telling contribution to the performance – maybe for de Waart those rapt, inward-looking sounds were the ones that enshrined the true soul of this remarkable music.

Astonishing performance of complete Daphnis et Chloé ballet music, plus a Schumann allusion

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir conducted by Marc Taddei with Stephen de Pledge (piano)

Schumann: Carnaval (four scenes arranged by Ravel)
Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor Op 54
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé – complete ballet score

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 5 August, 7:30 pm

Orchestra Wellington continued its 2017 series theme that focuses on the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the genius behind the Ballets Russes which changed the face of ballet before the First World War, and also impacted on most of the other arts. For he employed the most gifted choreographers, composers, dancers and designers, of the age, and inspired them to produce work that would radically enrich and rejuvenate, even revolutionise the arts generally. One of the greatest ballets inspired by Diaghilev was Daphnis et Chloé; and the orchestra must have faced the necessity of performing it with trepidation.

But we began with an arrangement of Schumann’s Carnaval. What’s the link with Diaghilev?

Carnaval is a bit of an oddity, for it was first used, at Fokine’s initiative, in a collaborative orchestration by Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky, Lyadov, and Tcherepnin for the Ballets Russes in 1910. So it is curious that in 1914 Nijinsky asked Ravel to do another arrangement of Carnaval, this time for a London season; a Ravel arrangement was inspired no doubt by the success of Daphnis et Chloé in 1912, the year before Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps.  Most of Ravel’s score is lost and only four parts are extant: Preamble – German waltz – Paganini – March of the ‘Davidsbündler’ against the Philistines. So it was a minor work in the Ballets Russes story, but it acted as a sort of overture to this concert.

It is hard for me to adopt an objective feeling towards an orchestration of music that seems so utterly, quintessentially for the piano and which I’ve loved in that form for hundreds of years. Clearly, the orchestra decided to include it, as Marc Taddei explained, because Schumann’s piano concerto was scheduled in the first half, and the idea of some kind of link was attractive.

So, it’s essentially a scrap, a remnant in which there is not enough time to become much engaged by the sort of delightful, eccentric magic that a performance of the entire 20 pieces of the original creates, making emotional and artistic sense of the complete score.

I couldn’t avoid the feeling that it presented the orchestra with an insuperable task, to ingest the music, firstly to overcome resistance to sounds not from a piano, and to be persuaded that Ravel himself was convinced by it. Though whimsy, children’s make-believe, a chimerical world, the exotic, are common to both Schumann and Ravel, I have the feeling that they imagined them in quite different ways.

So I was not surprised to find in the scoring little that I’d have ascribed to Ravel in a blind-fold test.

Schumann Piano Concerto
The Piano Concerto was an entirely different matter: it was among my first LP purchases as a Schumann-enraptured teenager; but it’s a long time since I’ve heard a live performance. Adding the visual element to the music, I found myself noting aspects of the score that spoke of a composer not as much at ease with an orchestra as with his piano (a very familiar view which I decided was unhelpful). My attention nevertheless, was largely on the beautifully lyrical piano writing and the sympathetic, unostentatious playing by Stephen de Pledge which (in spite of blemishes here and there) soon took my attention away from the rather traditional orchestral score. Though very different in character, the reputation of Schumann’s concerto a little like that of Chopin’s two concertos: one disparages the orchestration. However, De Pledge’s playing, and particularly his cadenza that was musical rather than flashy, were enough to draw applause at the end of the first movement; that might also have indicated large numbers of the audience fairly new to classical music – one of the positive achievements of Orchestra Wellington’s policies.

The little encore was, appropriately, from Carnaval – Chiarina, a portrait of Schumann’s fiancée and future wife, Clara Wieck.

Daphnis et Chloé
The main purpose of the evening was the rare performance of, not the more familiar suites that Ravel himself took from the work, but the whole nearly hour-long ballet, Daphnis et Chloé, complete with chorus.

The huge array of instrumentalists (over 80) and the 100-strong Orpheus Choir could not been a more striking contrast to the music before the interval. These 70 years had led to music that was as different as Matisse and Braque are from Ingres and Delacroix.

Though it is in three parts or Tableaux – not, formally speaking or conspicuously in ‘Acts’, one does not notice the sort of contrasted movements that characterise traditional classical music.  The overwhelming impression is of organic growth, through a series of evolutionary mood changes and a story that moves to and fro, in and out of focus. Thus there is no point in trying to point to particular episodes as ‘effective’ or ‘unfocused’ or ‘particularly arresting’, in the way a critic often feels obliged to do. What do tend to stand out, to sound familiar, are naturally enough the parts that form the two suites that Ravel compiled, which include the Nocturne, Interlude and Danse-guerrière; and Lever de jour, Pantomime, and Danse générale, mostly from Tableau III.

Even though the impact on the listener is so overwhelming that there’s little chance to attend to details of thematic evolution, of the use and significance of contrasting keys, one has to take as read the fact that its success in maintaining rapt attention, and perhaps a longing for it to continue for another half hour, is due to those inconspicuous compositional secrets.

Though there’s no question about the singular brilliance and emotional power of the ballet, as music, there is an old-fashioned idea that the best test of the real depth of music’s originality and genius, lies in its likely impact if it could be heard without the trappings, regalia, colours and jewellery that adorns it. Would the music, stripped of its gaudy, overwhelming orchestration, reveal weakness in invention, in structure, in the unfolding of a musical narrative; would it remain engrossing if reduced to a piano score? Might it emerge featureless and drab? Who knows?

Of course, that’s as nonsensical as looking at a Turner or a Monet and asking that it be judged in a black and white reproduction. So the flamboyant and luxurious orchestration was an essential element, a major attraction, achieved through an orchestra of Mahlerian or Straussian size, and a great choir. And to think that a merely part-time orchestra, though overflowing with experienced professional musicians, both permanent and as frequent guests, had the temerity to take on one of the most famous, most challenging, sometimes acknowledged as the greatest, orchestral masterpieces of the 20th century. Not only were the wind sections enhanced with relatively infrequent instruments like bass clarinet, E flat clarinet, alto flute, but there were two harps and nine players lined up behind timpani and percussion, more than I can recall at any previous concert. Just for the record, percussion (taken from details in Wikipedia) were snare drum, bass drum, field drum, tambourine, castanets, crotales, cymbals, celesta, glockenspiel, xylophone, wind machine, tam-tam and triangle.

Then there’s the wordless choral element, present throughout most of its length: music that to some extent, is rather like what I described above: dense in complex harmony but sonically uniform. Learning the choral parts was probably more challenging than it would have been with conventional word setting where memory of words and music are inter-dependent and mutually supportive; and the choir’s performance sounded as near faultless as I imagine it gets (particularly conspicuous in the impressive passage without accompaniment). If diction was never an issue, the sheer energy and incisiveness of the singing, and the incessant demands on singers spoke of thorough rehearsal and dedication under their conductor, Brent Stewart (who was not named in the programme but singled out at the end).

This was the most courageous and momentous enterprise of Orchestra Wellington’s entire 2017 season, and perhaps one of the orchestra’s all time finest hours; it was mainly a tribute to conductor Marc Taddei, for its conception, inspiration and leadership that carried it through to a performance of astonishing dramatic and musical subtlety, insight and sheer splendour.