Tag: orchestral

Further excellent exploratory concert into delightful quasi-juvenile symphonies

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Camerata – chamber orchestra led by Anna Loeser with soloists Michael Kirgan and Mark Carter (trumpets)

Mendelssohn: String Symphony No 10 in B minor
Vivaldi: Concerto for two trumpets in C, RV 537
Haydn: Symphony No 4 in D

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Friday 28 April, 6 pm

My colleagues, Rosemary Collier and Peter Mechen, have reviewed earlier concerts by Camerata – in May 2015 and November 2016. I’m sorry to have missed them. They included Haydn’s first and third symphonies; I wondered whether we’d missed a concert that had included the second symphony.

It also made me wonder, with considerable anticipation, whether they plan to survive long enough to get through all 104 (or is it 108?) of his symphonies. At the rate of, say, two or three concerts a year, I’ll need to live till at least 2050…

Mendelssohn
Youthful masterpieces were a feature of this concert, as this one began with one of Mendelssohn’s youthful string symphonies, written around the age of 12 to 14. It’s interesting that they remained unknown till the 1960s when they were first published. I remember the first book I encountered on Mendelssohn, by Stephen Stratton in the Master Musician series (I dated my purchase of it as 1954), which merely referred to these early works in about four words, suggesting that they were certainly not worth attention; but then, the author had probably not had access to the manuscripts.

This ironically had been the fate of some music by a comparably gifted composer – Schubert – whose ‘Great’ symphony was first performed by Mendelssohn 15 years or so after it was written.

The thirteen symphonies vary in length and number of movements. This, No 10, is in one movement, beginning with an Adagio introduction and moving to Allegro. (The first six and number 12, have three movements while the rest have either four or five, apart from this, the tenth, and number 13 which is also in a single movement – perhaps it was unfinished.)

I had not remembered the reviews by my colleagues as I began to listen to this concert, and thus had the delightful experience of being immediately and unexpectedly enchanted and filled with admiration for both the prodigious Mendelssohn and the performances as a whole under the enterprising Anna Loeser and her fellow musicians from the NZSO, Orchestra Wellington, other ensembles as well as students. One of the immediate impressions of this, one of the symphonies less familiar to me, was of music of singular accomplishment and maturity, interestingly chromatic in places and formally sophisticated. It was not just the liveliness and boldness of the playing that Loeser achieved, but the intrinsic strength of the music itself. The ear caught characterful emphasis on the first note of each short phrase, and the careful dynamic contrasts between phrases, as if there were shifts from minor to major tonality. In a small orchestra more of the character of individual instruments is audible (though there was no evident cost in that) and as well as the leading violins, I was particularly arrested by a long, rich phrase from the Victoria Jaenecke’s viola, and the featherweight quality of fleeting accelerations by the full string body as the end approached.

Vivaldi
The Vivaldi concerto played was one of the most familiar, and therefore strongest in melodic character. I wasn’t sure that the two solo instruments were not actually soprano trumpets as the pitch was unusually high, keen and penetrating. But I settled for the view that this was simply the impact of two fairly brilliant trumpeters, in a high register. Their duetting was impeccable, and their subtle alternating dynamics from phrase to phase a delight. Vivaldi still attracts a number of sceptics wedded to the notion (which also sustains elements of the contemporary avant-garde school of composers) that anyone who writes memorable tunes or immediately attractive music is either a charlatan or without talent, or both.

Both these outer movements are dominated by plain C major triads, in the finale, going alternately in both directions. Just plain fun. So this was a performance that was filled with rhythmic energy, of well-fitted ornamentation and adroit accompanying strings that simply supported the trumpets in the most buoyant and sympathetic manner.

Haydn
The fourth Haydn symphony is believed to have been written between 1757 and 1761; that is, before his appointment to the Esterhazy court, which was in 1761. How refreshing and bold to refrain from treading the too-frequented path of playing just the Morning Noon and Night Symphonies – Nos 6, 7 and 8.

Here pairs of oboes and horns joined the strings and the impact of the scoring made the piece sound much more accomplished and genuinely Haydnesque than one might believe as a result of the almost total neglect of most of the early symphonies. (In recent years of course, there have been many recordings of the complete Haydn symphonies).

At the beginning the handling of the strings together with the four wind instruments suggest a sort of concerto grosso, but eventually, all became a homogeneous unity. The orchestra’s comprehensive command allowed no sense that one was hearing any kind of journeyman exercise. The slow movement was characterised by a beguiling separation of strings: the violins weaving a beautiful limpid melody over ostinato figures from the cellos and basses. The third and last movement was a Minuet whose lively melody demonstrated Haydn’s already distinctive melodic and compositional gifts, plenty clear enough to commend him to Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy as his Vice-Kapellmeister (in a few years, full Kapellmeister).

It was really good to be able to share the experience and the opinion of the Prince whose decision to hire Haydn might well have been based on his hearing this and other very early, pre-Esterhaza symphonies.

Magisterial performances from Siyu Sun (piano) and the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
RACHMANINOV – Piano Concerto No.2 in C Minor Op.18
ELGAR – Symphony No.1 in E-flat Op.55

Siyu Sun (piano)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Rachel Hyde (conductor)

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

Sunday, 9th April, 2016

A great programme and an equally great occasion! Particularly in the case of the Rachmaninov Concerto, there was a commonality of sorts between the work itself and the circumstances surrounding this particular performance, in each instance a sense of “coming through” against the odds. It’s well-known that the composer wrote the music as a kind of “therapy” by way of recovering from the depression which overwhelmed him after the debacle of his First Symphony’s premiere; and in fact he dedicated the work to his therapist, Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a man otherwise practically unknown to history! Of course the concerto went on to become one of the most popular and enduring of Rachmaninov’s works.

In the case of today’s performance, the pianist, Siyu Sun, was asked to play at short notice due to the indisposition through illness of the scheduled soloist, Liam Wooding. Happily, the outcome’s success mirrored that of the Concerto’s, with difficulties overcome and the results bringing their own unique rewards. I had already seen and heard Liam Wooding play, and was most disappointed at the news of his cancellation – but I was surprised and, indeed, thrilled at the quality of Siyu Sun’s playing, in fact astonished that the services of such an outstanding player could be procured at all, let alone in what seemed like a moment’s notice!

The concert had another, more sobering circumstance to address, which was the recent death of one of its most prominent regular players, the flutist, Derek Holland. His services to the Wellington Chamber Orchestra as a player, section leader and committee member were com-memorated via an illustrated note in the written programme, as well as with a brief recording of his playing, introduced with a few words from conductor Rachel Hyde just prior to the Elgar Symphony which began the concert’s second half.

But to begin proceedings, it was the concerto – and we were pleased to welcome the soloist, Siyu Sun to the platform, along with her conductor, Rachel Hyde. Currently, a pupil of Rae de Lisle in Auckland, Siyu Sun earlier this year won the joint first prize in the National Concerto Competition in Christchurch, playing this same concerto with the NZSO and conductor Hamish McKeich. Later this year she will be performing with the Auckland Philharmonia as part of their Haydn Staples Piano Scholar programme for 2017. She’s also played the French Horn as a second instrument since the age of nine, and was actually a member in 2014 of the National Youth Orchestra.

Though Siyu Sun was in effect repeating her National Concerto Competition success with this same work, there was no hint of routine or sense of anything “second-hand” about her playing on this occasion. The work’s famous opening piano chords were finely gradated, Sun shaping the configurations with a slight “roll” (the notes are practically impossible for all but the largest hands to play without some degree of arpeggiation) and building towards a thunderous sonority prior to the strings’ trenchant entry. The violins dug in strongly, letting the theme soar over the piano’s agitations with full-throated fervour – an arresting beginning! – after which soloist and orchestra melted hearts with a tenderly-phrased second subject, aided and abetted by some sensitive oboe playing.

Siyu Sun demonstrated as much command of the quicksilver filigree passage work as she did the weightier, more assertive chordings during the movement’s agitated development sequences, while conductor Rachel Hyde finely-controlled the great orchestral surges leading up to the return of the opening theme in tandem with the soloist’s great and magisterial chordal passages – tremendous stuff! Only a slightly-too-early horn solo broke the spell momentarily – the player recovered some poise towards the end of the solo as the music moved through those sequences of peculiarly Rachmaninovian melancholy, piano and winds conversing with real sympathy. The movement’s coda was taken easily, establishing the rhythm clearly before excitingly building the crescendo to its no-nonsense conclusion.

How beautifully the orchestral strings caught the music’s “colour” at the slow movement’s beginning! With delicately-wrought support from the soloist, both flute and clarinet did beautiful things with the theme (derived most adroitly by the composer from those great piano chordal passages in the first first movement), before it was the piano’s turn, winds and strings murmuring their support. Sun varied her articulation of the theme in its more rapidly-moving guise so beautifully, ably supported by the orchestra, controlling the growing excitement before finally “going with” the crescendo and taking the ensemble with her (conductor and players sticking to their soloist resolutely!). The pianist’s scherzando figurations spread out naturally and easily, and with conductor and players, bringing off the sudden sforzando cadence with absolute unanimity. A big-boned cadenza-like piano passage later, the movement’s opening theme returned, this time with the strings wringing out the emotion, and the soloist matching gesture with gesture.

No time to relax! – an attacca, or as near as one could get to one, began the final movement, the scherzo-like rhythms a bit loose at first, but then strongly pulled together. What a fantastic entry from the pianist! – as commanding and surely-focused as her unashamedly rhetorical introduction to the entry of the famous tune! – here, oboe and strings delivered the goods ably supported by the horns and echoed beautifully by Sun’s glowing tones. Those “mysterious” passages came off well, with deft percussion touches adding to the ambience, which were thereupon tossed to one side by the piano in an irruption of great energy, though not taken in too helter-skelter a fashion! The orchestra stayed with its soloist throughout the fugal passages which followed, if not always with spick-and-span unanimity, though Rachel Hyde’s control of her forces kept everything in touch. I enjoyed the “ring” of the piano’s tones just after the chattering toccata-like passages with the brasses, and the confident elan of the players throughout their syncopated tutti statements, just before the second subject’s grand return.

The strings did well with the melody, allowing the piano plenty of space in reply, playing in big, deep-breathed paragraphs which expanded fully and naturally, contrasting markedly with the winds’ reiterations of the agitated theme – none too together the first time round, but tighter with their exchanges on repetition. The piano continued the agitations, triplet figurations helping to build towards that great entry-point of the tune’s final statement with crashing orchestral chords and a ringing, scintillating cadenza from the soloist. Then, it was such a great “all together”, the horns doing so well and everybody playing fully out! With Siyu Sun’s final spectacularly vertiginous sweepings up and down the keyboard, the final payoff was achieved by all in great style! – I think we in the audience were stunned by it all for a second or two, before recovering our senses and bursting out with our appreciation of what the musicians had achieved – most gratifying!

If further proof of Sun’s abilities were needed, it came with an encore, which she announced as the “Little Red Riding Hood” Etude by Rachmaninov – actually No.6 of the composer’s Etude-Tableaux Op.39. Normally reticent about his “sources”, Rachmaninov let it slip that this exciting and disturbing piece was inspired by the famous fairy-tale; and Sun’s scintillating, razor-edged playing certainly brought out the music’s dark predatory menace set against the victim’s tremuous vulnerability, with little doubt regarding the outcome – certainly more Brothers Grimm than Charles Perrault, I would think!

Then there was the Elgar Symphony! It had, from the moment I first saw the programme, seemed to me as if it would be a difficult assignment for the orchestra – but these players were, by this time, on a kind of “high”, and were more than ready for “the beast” by the time everybody had come back for the second half. Once the very moving tribute to flutist Derek Holland had been completed, the players began the symphony without further ado, giving the opening motto plenty of gravitas first time round, then upon repetition according it the full ceremonial treatment, a truly magnificent sound. Rachel Hyde than launched the allegro with plenty of “swagger”, encouraging the players to characterise that Elgarian “stride” which for me defines the great performances of this music, and which was here given enough space and weight to really tell.

Another defining character of Elgar’s music is its vulnerability (a quality that one of the finest of this music’s conductors, Barbirolli, used to call the “hurt”), one which manifests itself in the symphony’s more lyrical passages, no more so than in the winds’-and-strings’ repeated “sighing” motif, and which Hyde, bless her, gave her players plenty of elbow room to properly articulate and resound. Though there were moments of imprecise ensemble, it mattered far less than the engagement by conductor and players with the “character” of these qualities, the “grunty” aspect of the brass as telling as the “dying fall” of strings and winds in other places. A memorable moment was towards the movement’s end, when, after the triumphant re-statement of the motto theme, (wonderful harp flourishes, here!) the strings gently cascaded downwards over the stealthily tread in the bass and the woodwinds’ rounding-off mutterings, the players fully “at one” with the sequence’s different strands of expression.

The second movement’s dark, impulsive thrustings were here kept steady, the momentum unflagging and still dangerous-sounding, with the players’ concentration giving the sounds real “attitude”, the percussion giving extra “fizz ” at the top, and underlining the swagger of the march tune. How lovely, then, the change of character for the episode the composer called “something you would hear down by the river”, with its touches of Sibelius on the clarinets! After these energies began to wane, the transition to the slow movement was beautifully controlled by Hyde, aided by spot-on playing from the winds in their off-the-beat descents, allowing things to “wind down” and gently open up into the most gorgeous of Elgarian melodies on the strings, playing with real “innigkeit”, before blossing into a warm “nobilmente’ feeling. Throughout the rest of the movement the music seemed to capture a drifting, nostalgic quality, from shadow to sunlight and back to shadow, until the strings entered with the ‘new” tune, playing with even more tenderness, before rising to realms imbued with delight – a final statement from the strings, and a haunting reply from the brasses, the timpani, and finally the clarinet.

Mutterings and dark statements evolved a sinister bass tread at the finale’s beginning, as scraps of the motto theme and a nervously fluttering figure expressed the “agitation within” – the allegro let it loose, with the violins doing well to keep the uprushing opening together, and later, the rolling theme whose “three” against the accompaniment’s “two” (or so it seemed) was managed with aplomb! The sped-up version of the movement’s “sinister” opening then built towards a terrific tutti, before everything disintegrated – I mean the music, of course, not the playing! – and then (oh, the genius of the man!) morphed into a different treatment of the melody, noble and heartfelt, which spread through the entire orchestra! From here, I thought the last few minutes of the work featured conductor and orchestra lifted onto a kind of plane of involvement and execution which did full justice to the composer’s effusive and exuberant mood, delivering the final statement of the motto with terrific conviction and excitement. Everybody could, I thought, at the very end be justly proud of such a heart-warming afternoon’s music-making.

Adams and Mozart (and Martin Fröst) inspire de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN ADAMS – Shaker Loops
MOZART – Clarinet Concerto in A Major K.622
BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.6 in F Major Op.58 “Pastoral”
Martin Fröst (clarinet)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Edo de Waart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday 7th April, 2016

John Adams (b.1947) has for some time been popularly regarded as one of the “big three” of minimalist music composition, along with Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The term “minimalist” was used to describe a specific creative aesthetic involving the reduction to the bare essentials of whatever medium the creative artist worked with – in music this involved using repetition of melodic and rhythmic ideas to express minute gradations and subtle alterations of the original material, in order to “grow” something new.

Adams’ work “Shaker Loops”, first on the programme in tonight’s concert, was originally conceived as a string quartet, before the composer decided, after a less-than-satisfactory first performance, that he needed “a larger, thicker ensemble”, and so re-scored the piece for a string septet, completing the work in 1978. Whether it was through further dissatisfaction, or merely a desire to extend the performance possibilities of the piece, Adams then reworked the septet for string orchestra in 1982, in which form it has become one of the composer’s most well-known works.

The title of the piece draws from the name “Shakers” given to an American Puritan sect whose intense ecstasy of worship resulted in their physically “shaking” while at prayer – while the term “Loops” refers to the minimalist technique of splicing and repeating segments of pre-recorded tape, to give a sense of endless repetition. The composer described his intention as summoning up an “ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminates in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence”.

Edo de Waart has previously recorded Adams’ piece in its string orchestra version with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, one of a much-acclaimed series of recordings of the composer’s works by the conductor, made while Adams was composer-in-residence with the orchestra. Little wonder, then, that the performance by the NZSO strings in Wellington shimmered and crackled with a sure focus and intensity at the outset, a “knowing what was what”. De Waart’s leadership inspired a living, breathing realisation of the music’s closely-knit moods over four continuous movements, bringing out both continuums and contrasts, which led the ear on right to the work’s spacious, reflective conclusion.

That was the culmination of a journey which began with “classic” minimalist gesturings in the opening “Shaking and Trembling”, the patternings and texturings undergoing modifications of a sort that suggested different kinds of motoric response to traversals of varied terrain. As these scurrying notes gradually retreated and became the “ambient background” of the second movement’s “Hymning Slews”, some beautifully wind-blown Aeolian-like harmonies created an eerie, almost ritualistic atmosphere, with chord-clusters glowing through the textures like soft lights, certain figures lazily slurred, while others sounded harmonics which led to bewitching bird-song-like trills, the vistas thrown open and the silences enlivened, an almost Copland-esque feel imparted to the proceedings.

A stealthy, new harmony brought on an awakening of the lower strings, with Berlioz-like irruptions from the basses, and ascending ‘cello motifs, the playing “digging in”, bringing out a glowing intensity and enlivening energy, the “Loops and Verses” of the music’s third part, the ensemble patiently blowing smoke-rings around the persona of a great engine, whose powerhouse was driving its rods and pistons faster and faster, desirous of achieving a result. But almost as quickly, these motoric energies seemed to peak and flag, as if the impulses seemed to catch a whiff of something greater and more lasting overhead, pinpricks of distant light contrasting with the occasional rumbling of the basses – we were left at the end with the firmament overhead, and the earth below, in worshipful and luminous accord. As a realisation of a journey’s full circle, this seemed to me a great performance of a great work!

Following this was the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, which brought Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst before us, a musician acclaimed world-wide for his peerless instrumental skills and his thoughtful, soul-enriching interpretations. By way of welcoming their distinguished soloist, Edo de Waart and the orchestra began the concerto with a finely-wrought introduction, imbued with both strength and delicacy, one whose warmth and fullness of tone seemed happily removed from any didactic stylistic mode which might have proclaimed any kind of “authenticity” (oh, dear! – that just slipped out! – sorry!)….

Martin Fröst instantly took up and furthered these utterances with exquisitely-turned phrases expressed in tones that, true to the composer’s dictum, “flowed like oil”, but also seemed to value each and every note as something with its own distinction. At first I found his playing stance unduly distracting, with its somewhat “praying mantis-like” aspect (at times he appearing to be almost “stalking” his conductor as a likely victim!) – but once I’d gotten used to these quasi-choreographic poses, I began to relish the endless variety of his playing, suggesting a wealth of human experience and sensibility.

I read somewhere (not in the programme notes) that Fröst used for another concert performance of the work a modern replica of a “basset clarinet”, an instrument which was in vogue in Mozart’s time and which the work’s original dedicatee, Anton Stadler, probably used – the basset enables the player to use lower notes than are found on a conventional instrument. To me it sounded as if certain passages of Fröst’s playing were lower than usual, indicating that the basset replica was being used here. It extended the expressive range of the performance, having extra depths in the instrument’s lower register.

What a distillation of pure beauty was the opening of the slow movement! – the orchestral response matched the soloist’s rapt tones at the outset with a heartfeltness of its own. Fröst played some gorgeous flourishes at a couple of the cadences, moments which held fast for a few precious seconds the beauty of the discourse between clarinet and orchestra – a very slight earthquake during the latter stages of the movement failed to garner much attention, such was the spell cast by the performers with this music.

Mozart concerto finales often play “cat-and-mouse” between the soloist and the orchestra – this one, though more poised and genteel than in a lot of the piano concertos, still provides a sense of fun – the ensemble’s forthrightness contrasted beautifully with the clarinet’s moments of introspection, though the discourse wasn’t all one way, with the soloist’s lines occasionally rich and strong, and the orchestral phrases in more sober, supporting roles. While the applause at the end was primarily for Fröst, conductor and orchestra deserved much of the credit with their well-rounded and ever-alert contributions to the ebb and flow of one of the composer’s most sublime creations.

Predictably, the extended (and well-deserved) audience applause brought Fröst back out for an encore, though by no means a conventional or predictable one – this was a work called Klezmer Dance No.3, written by Goran Fröst (Martin Fröst’s brother) for clarinet and ensemble (the NZSO players were obviously well-prepared!). The music’s freewheeling energies were brilliantly delivered by all concerned, leaving the status quo of clarinettists being the most spectacular solo performers with the NZSO in recent times (Finnish virtuoso Kari Kriikku being another recent candidate for this award) undisturbed, even if last year’s star ‘cellist Johannes Moser ran these two close in his NZSO concert.

After this, further delight awaited, in the form of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony – but whether it was because the performance of the Mozart had left my sensibilities little room for additional wonderment and rapture, or because conductor and orchestra were at the end of “playing out” after an arduous tour (since March 30th, from Hamilton to Dunedin), I felt the performance didn’t quite “go on” from the first movement’s beautifully-sprung rhythms and lyrical outpourings. A pity – because De Waart and the players here caught the music’s many currents and eddies, finding, I thought, sufficient balance between incidental delight and on-going purpose to make Beethoven’s paean of praise work both as a kind of tone-poem and a symphonic journey – the conductor didn’t particularly “point” the minimalist-like repetitions of the first movement’s development, but they still made their impact, resonating all the more in the wake of the Adams work we’d heard earlier.

Though the orchestral playing, especially that of the winds, made for some beautiful sequences in the “Scene by the Brook” I missed here a sense of true rapture, of “giving over” to the music’s spell to the point where I felt uplifted and entranced by it all – I wanted to experience those murmuring water-currents, and to sing with the lullabic melody-lines, but it all somehow remained earthbound for me – and a momentary lapse of ensemble between strings and winds at one point didn’t help the music’s cause. Unlike with the first movement’s beauties, I coudn’t find a proper “way in” to the evocations, despite the sterling work done by the winds – and why the cuckoo-calls at the end of the movement were played in so perfunctory a manner to my ears, I couldn’t fathom (usually such a magical moment).

But again, the orchestral detailing in the third movement’s “Peasants’ Merrymaking” was superb, with horn-playing to die for, and droll interactions between oboe and bassoon which properly caught the music’s rusticity, though I felt the strings could have been encouraged to roughen up the textures just a little, during their “knees-up” sequence, which for me was a shade too “polished” in effect. As was the introduction to the storm, which (sensationalist that I am) I wanted to spit and rumble and moan more pointedly, just before the first great outburst – still, there were marvellous roarings from the timpani and, later, some anguished cries from the piccolo, answered with unequivocal elemental force from brass and timps in the time-honoured manner.

Re-reading my notes returns me more readily to the performance’s incidental beauties and delights, especially so with the finale – clarinet and horn exchanging calls so beautifully at the finale’s beginning, strings and brass building up the hymn-like song of thanksgiving to the point of fervour, and, after the nature-gods have received their dues, the sound of the horn solo at the very end, sealing up the music’s magic, and evoking Tennyson’s words, “answer, echoes, answer – dying, dying….” These were treasurable sequences, though I was still left at the end wondering why I didn’t feel (as I DID during the Mozart concerto performance in the first half), that continued presence of something “casting a glow over the proceedings”, which de Waart and the orchestra also achieved in their Mahler and Elgar performances last year. Modified rapture, then, but certainly enough to eagerly await what lies in store for us throughout the orchestral year’s remainder, here in Wellington.

Strauss’s final tone poem a mighty opening for the NZSO’s 2017 season

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart with Michelle DeYoung (mezzo soprano)

Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture
Elgar: Sea Pictures
Strauss: An Alpine Symphony

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 25 March, 7:30 pm

Here was a concert designed to attract various classes of music lovers: those attached to the classical heartland, discreetly coloured by a pictorial Romanticism; lovers of the voice in melodious, conventional guise with music composed at the turn of the 20th century; and finally, for those susceptible to musical expressionism on a vast scale, an evocation of vast natural phenomena and secular voluptuousness.

Though the orchestra had its first major appearance this year celebrating its 70th anniversary a couple of weeks ago, this was the first subscription concert. It drew a virtually full house.

There was a common theme: the depiction of various aspects of nature in music.

Hebrides
As the years pass I find myself more and more aware of my first hearings of music, and Mendelssohn’s Hebrides (or as I first knew it, ‘Fingal’s Cave’) goes back to the third form when the once-a-week, ‘core’ music class, was presented with it, on two sides of a 78 recording; and I just fell in love.  I’m sure it remains the ideal way in to classical music if teachers were prepared to defy their pupils’ compulsive attachment to fashion and junk.

I would like to think that the loving performance guided by Edo de Waart was a sign that it might have had a similar impact on him at a like age.

This was graced by both elegant. sumptuous strings and sequences of richly consonant playing by bassoons and limpid clarinets, of singular purity. The scoring might be conservative, but the orchestra, from very first, displayed an easy confidence painting the shimmering seas as well as the splendidly dramatised storm scene.

Sea Pictures
Elgar’s five Sea Pictures are set to poetry by five relatively obscure poets, including one by his wife (‘In Haven’). The best-known would be Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, to us, the Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, but Roden Noel and Richard Garnett would be unknown even to English literature honours graduates knowledgeable in nineteenth century poetry.

That is no handicap of course for a composer, most of whom have been on record somewhere saying that it’s poetry of the second class that tends to be the more rewarding to set; beautiful poetry cannot be improved by music.

The songs are amiable, but apart from the last, ‘The Swimmer’, have inspired music that is not particularly varied, and needs a naturally coloured voice to exploit the tepid emotions and situations of words and music. Furthermore, it’s strange that Elgar used the same or closely related keys throughout (G in the first and C in the next two), and common time, adding to a feeling of tonal monotony.

Michelle DeYoung has a rich, strong mezzo voice, that is on the alto side of the mezzo range. She had no difficulty projecting alongside, and at times over, the orchestra. What detracted rather was her pronounced vibrato that even tended to obscure the melodic character of the setting of the first, ‘Sea Slumber Song’, and though I’d hoped it might be under better control in the later songs, it really wasn’t. Until, that is, ‘The Swimmer’ where Elgar allowed himself to inject energy and DeYoung invested her voice with a touch of risk and excitement that Gordon’s rhythmically explicit lines express. So the short phrases of the last song gave the cycle a more spirited and satisfying conclusion.

I suspect that in the theatre her voice could make a more impressive impact – not least in Wagner.

An Alpine Symphony
Strauss’s Alpine Symphony was written in the same era as the Elgar songs, but the two could hardly be more different in intention, spirit, ambition and sheer musical magnificence. It was not finished till after the First World War had started, but nothing of that can be detected in it; Strauss allowed neither war to influence his music. He seemed able to ignore most of the horrors of the age he lived through, until that final elegiac utterance, Metamorphosen.

The orchestra’s last performance of An Alpine Symphony in Wellington was as recent as 2012, under David Zinman, which I heard but for some reason no review appears in Middle C.

In many ways, Strauss’s last symphonic poem can be seen as the summit of late romantic extravagance, for the scale and variety of its composition, the huge array of instruments employed (though the 20th century saw a greater flourishing of mainly percussion instruments and, of course, the questionable involvement of electronic devices). Strings were at full strength, 16 first violins (though Strauss stipulated 18 firsts and 16 seconds), and then 12 violas, with conventional decreasing numbers of others; quadruple woodwinds (and a heckelphone), nine horns, four of them doubling on Wagner tubas, the normal percussion with double timpani, plus glockenspiel, xylophone, wind and thunder machines, cowbells; two harps, piano, organ and celeste.

The noise was imposing, and the generally excellent precision and balance reminded those who needed it, that we were listening to one of the world’s best score or so of orchestras.

Behind the work’s conception, as the programme note made clear, quoting the same paragraph as appears in the Wikipedia entry, lay Strauss’s grief at the death of Mahler in 1911, linking with Nietsche’s pantheism/atheism which Strauss subscribed to. Those philosophical notions underlie, are more important than the overt characterisation of aspects of nature, and enable what might otherwise be a too-prolonged bit of landscape painting à la Caspar David Friedrich to engross the listener (this listener anyway) for nearly an hour.

The performance called on every section of the orchestra to excel itself, from the hushed expectancy of the opening led by basses, horns, then piccolos heralding the pre-dawn world. The programme listed the 22 ‘movements’, useful enough, but it can have the damaging effect of encouraging the literal listener to dwell pointlessly on these pictorial elements. That should be avoided of course, to allow the mere knowledge of the adventure, made vivid for example in off-stage phases (horns and other brass later), to be sufficient for one’s own imagination to conjure whatever images arise spontaneously.

What keeps the work afloat, one need hardly say, is the succession of contrasting, in themselves beguiling, evocative and richly melodic passages, that sound various but with which the composer, and the perceptive, energetic conductor never fails to bewitch the listener; an early, highly picturesque section ‘In den Wald’ – the woodland – ending with dappled sunlight from the full string body as the music transforms into the streamside – ‘neben den Bach’. (Yes, I confess I did pay attention to the ‘programme’ occasionally). On the mountain top comes the beautiful oboe solo from Robert Orr, and several other solos were of course arresting.

There is no need to attempt to follow all 22 linked ‘movements; it’s enough to say that such a flamboyant work calls for the resources and discipline of a first-rate orchestra; and Edo de Waart, a thoroughly engaged conductor, economical of gesture but able to persuade players and the audience that it’s a mighty work that far surpasses the beauties of its many entrancing individual sections.

 

The NZSO at seventy with an inspired programme for a full house

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich

Seventieth Anniversary Concert

Music by Dvořák, Prokofiev, Elgar, Gareth Farr, Stravinsky, Verdi, Sibelius, Ron Goodwin, Strauss

Michael Fowler Centre

Monday 6 March 2017, 7 pm

All three Middle C reviewers collaborated in reviewing this momentous concert. We paid attention in our first name alphabetic order. The first, fourth and seventh are Lindis’s, second, fifth and eighth, Peter’s, and the others, Rosemary’s.

Introduction (LT)

In keeping with the feisty critical tradition established by Beaglehole and Finlay at that first concert on 6 March 1947, let’s start with a little grizzle.

Wonderful for Wellington to be offered a free concert to mark the premiere of the then National Orchestra in the Wellington Town Hall (which, unlike the orchestra, has not been as determinedly looked after).

Wonderful to be offered free programmes.

And the MFC was booked out a week before.

But here was a chance to pull out all the stops.

For a wee bit more money the programme could have offered information about why each piece was chosen (that was, admittedly, covered by the introductions by orchestral members); but most importantly, to give a bit of the most interesting background to the founding of the orchestra and its fortunes in its first year. A great opportunity to educate the audience!

Go to the last section to read about the adventures of the orchestra’s establishment and first year or so

National Anthem and overture (LT)

First, one must acknowledge the resurrection of a disappeared tradition – the playing of the national anthem; here Oswald Cheesman’s arrangement of ‘God defend New Zealand’, instead of the British national anthem that was played in the 1940s and for many years after that too. It was, no doubt, to acknowledge the presence of the Governor General.  All stood and some even joined in singing in both languages.

The first work was the same as had opened the very first programme in 1947: Dvořák’s Carnival overture, and one tried to imagine what it might have sounded like then. This simply sounded like a performance by the best German and American orchestras combined: extraordinary subtlety and beauty from the full string body, elegant and throaty trombones, and exquisitely refined playing from oboes, bassoons, and all the woodwinds; it was a nice opportunity for the solo violin passage to be heard from Vesa-Matti Leppänen. The playing was all splendidly balanced, and it became, unostentatiously, an exhibition of orchestral fireworks that has ensured that it maintains its place among the showpiece works when an orchestra wants to display its virtuosity, power and refinement, all together.

At the end, violinist Greg Squire gave a general introduction to the concert, which set the pattern for spoken offerings before most of the pieces: no mayors, cabinet ministers, captains of industry or comedians; just those most intimately involved in making the music – the players themselves.

Prokofiev (PM)
Announcing the concert’s single soloist, Greg Squire made reference to the “special relationship” between the orchestra and Michael Houstoun, ever since the 1974 tour of Australia made by the orchestra with both the pianist and with Kiri te Kanawa, which was highly successful. Of course, of late Houstoun’s been more often associated with Orchestra Wellington, though one still remembers not-too-far-off occasions when the Houstoun/NZSO partnership  produced something vibrant and unique – a Rachmaninov Fourth Concerto with Vasily Petrenko conducting won’t be easily forgotten by those who heard it.

Houstoun has played and recorded the Prokofiev Third Concerto with James Judd conducting, for Trust Records, so there’s a certain “history” in this work with the pianist and the NZSO – Houstoun chose the slow movement of the work for the concert, a beautiful “Theme and-Variations” outpouring of bitter-sweet lyricism, punctuated by lively, spikier sequences. Here the opening “theme” was exquisitely coloured by the orchestra, and bluesily echoed by the piano, before a musical cat was, it seemed, set among the pigeons, creating flurries of motoric energy puctuated with cries of alarm and agitation, the piano suggesting changing to a jolly game of triplets for the third variation, which here came slightly adrift, the piano fractionally “out” with the orchestra until the fourth variation quietly and dreamily restored order.

Amends were made by all concerned with the fifth variation, energetic and constantly growing more and more insistent, until suddenly, amid the chatter of the figurations the original theme made a magical reappearance, the whole rounded off by a cadential passage which seemed to say, “And now you know the story of……….” before quietly and enigmatically disappearing into silence.

Elgar (RC)

The third work on the programme was Elgar’s Chanson de Nuit, Op.15 no.1, published in 1899, an orchestration of a work written about ten years earlier. In his introduction Donald Armstrong, long-serving Associate-Concertmaster of the orchestra, spoke of the various leaders/concertmasters (and some of their characteristics and wise-cracks), and of playing and recording Elgar works with Music Director Emeritus James Judd, in whose honour this piece was performed.

What was the delight of the audience to see former Concertmaster Wilma Smith step up from where she had been playing at fourth desk (after introducing the concert over the loudspeaker earlier) to lead the orchestra in this work, an orchestra much bigger at 100 players than the one that began things 70 years ago. This one included a number of ex-players like Wilma, and other extras.

The wistful, nostalgic character of this piece was beautifully rendered. It is a far cry from the imperial pomposity of Elgar’s marches. Not that the Chanson’s orchestration isn’t grand, but it has a catch in the throat and melodic phrases that express beauty and peace. It was superbly played.

The audience’s joy in having Wilma Smith lead it was demonstrated in tumultuous applause.

Gareth Farr – Great Sea Gongs (LT)

The choice of Gareth Farr’s From the Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs was pretty appropriate. Very much Hamish McKeich’s territory, as a former NZSO player, it has become a popular orchestral piece. But it was violinist Anna van der Zee who introduced it. At this hearing, I came to feel that, even though only the first section was played, the musical inspiration isn’t altogether sustained throughout its course. The scoring for percussion is dynamic, much of it with distinct Polynesian flavour, and it was splendidly played by four percussionists. Nevertheless, the strings were as richly employed too and contributed dramatically to the imagined deep sea evocation.

Percussion took the soloists’ role here. From the stalls only their heads were visible and it struck me that they should have been arrayed across the front, and the various instruments identified. They make a much more dramatic spectacle than many of the conventional solo instruments.

Speaking of that, it puzzles me that no effort is usually made in programme booklets to identify the various, hugely different percussion instruments; generally they are merely referred to as ‘percussion’: maracas, marimbas, crotales, claves, castanets, tam-tams, tom-toms, snare drum, side drum… How about stopping referring to oboes, flutes, bassoons, the bass clarinet, the cor anglais, the various saxophones by name? – let’s just call them all ‘woodwinds’.

Stravinsky – The Firebird – Lullaby and Finale (PM)

For myself, the Stravinsky item was the concert’s great centrebeam, to which everything was connected, as much to do with the momentous occasion in the orchestra’s history this music represented, as with the magnificence of the sounds themselves. Bridget Douglas introduced this part of the programme, beginning by making a wish that she had been thirty years older and thus playing in the orchestra at the time when the composer himself visited this country (1961) and conducted the NZSO in this same music! She then recounted the story of another visiting conductor programming this same music in a subsequent concert with the orchestra and objecting to a change of phrasing that wasn’t marked in his score, asking the orchestra with some irritation who had gotten them to make that change – to which one of the double bass players supposedly replied, “It was a little bald-headed bloke called Igor!” But the occasion was undoubtedly a formative experience for the players of the time and one whose resonances have endured and gone into legend. John Hopkins, the orchestra’s then Resident Conductor of the day attested to Stravinsky’s “extraordinary magnetism” as a musician, and his ability to get musicians to “play above” themselves.

Perhaps mindful of the significance of that occasion, tonight’s players seemed also to “play above” themselves, Hamish McKeich encouraging the orchestra to beautifully “grow” the finale from the somewhat stricken Lullaby (Berceuse) which depicted the ravages of the evil enchanter Koschei, allowing the first glimmerings of hope to spread through the orchestral textures from the ravishingly-played horn solo, and bring about the radiance of the Firebird’s Apotheosis in resplendent style. I’m sure  that “the little bald-headed bloke” would have been thrilled with the performance.

The Force of Destiny  (RC)

In his introduction to the following Sibelius item, Vesa-Matti Leppänen, spoke of this item too, and how Juan Matteucci, conductor in the 1960s, introduced more operatic repertoire to the orchestra. He mentioned also Pietari Inkinen and the orchestra’s successful European tour.. He spoke warmly of the work of the orchestral management and staff, and finished by remarking on New Zealand’s affinity with Sibelius’s music.

There can surely be no overture more filled with the dramatic music, filled with dread omens, than this one.  The opera premiered in 1862, and has remained in the operatic repertoire. Like all of the composer’s operas, this one is filled with remarkable melodies, which were given their due by the musicians. There was wonderful woodwind, and heart-plucking harp. The piece gives opportunity for every orchestral section to shine, and the tutti passages were superb.

The playing was precise, spiky and portentous, though slower than I have sometimes heard it played. The solo passages from various members of the orchestra were exquisitely played, and the whole was a sumptuous performance, its drama fully revealed.

Karelia Suite (LT)

Sibelius’s Karelia Suite has a long history with the orchestra. Appropriately, it was introduced by Concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppänen who recalled (not personally of course, it was before his time), New Zealand’s most famous connection with the music, in the company of which we flew ecstatically over the Southern Alps in the National Film Unit’s film for the Osaka Expo in 1970; many of us were moved to tears from the sheer emotion of the conjunction of mountains and music in that film.

The hushed strings were again a breath-taking element at the start, slowly rising from basses through cellos to violins; four immaculate horns, and other winds, contributed to the subdued but powerful spirituality of the music.

But hands up all those who longed for the following Ballade to arise from the ashes of the mere four minutes of the Intermezzo!

633 Squadron  (PM)

Timpanist Laurence Reese paid a special tribute to one of the “greats” of film and “light” music, British conductor Ron Goodwin. Larry remembered that, as a newly-appointed NZSO player, he “caught” the last of Goodwin’s country-wide tours with the NZSO, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Goodwin had been coming to New Zealand for a number of years, and, according to Larry’s reckoning,  had by that time clocked up over a hundred-and-fifty concerts with the orchestra. Goodwin’s Overture 633 Squadron readily evoked war-torn skies over Britain with British Spitfires and Hurricanes vying for dogfighting supremacy with German Messerschmitts, with the orchestra and conductor throwing themselves into the fray, and producing sounds of the utmost brilliance and excitement.

Strauss: Rosenkavalier  (RC)

The programme ended with Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite, arranged by the conductor Artur Rodzinski from music in Strauss’s opera, some 30-plus years after the work’s premiere. It is lush music, calling for a large orchestra, including two harps.

Appropriately for this supreme composer for the French horn (he was the son of a leading horn player), Heather Thompson, a long-serving horn player in the orchestra, introduced the item. She spoke of former chief conductor Franz Paul Decker and his introduction of the music of Mahler, Bruckner and Strauss, and of the orchestra’s playing this work at the Expo in Seville in 1992 to a huge ovation.  She also mentioned the International Arts Festival production of the opera in Wellington in 2002.

There was wonderful horn playing in this work – as indeed throughout the concert. Strauss’s writing for the orchestra contrasts drama and subtlety; exclamation and intimacy; these themes and the thrill and varied moods in the opera were well conveyed through the beautiful scoring. There were minutes – maybe five or so – when nearly all the lights in the auditorium went down; I did wonder how the percussionists at the back of the stage managed to see their scores; the playing continued uninterrupted.

The combination in the Suite of brilliant waltz, almost bombastic brass and nostalgic elements seemed appropriate for a night of memories of the varied life of an orchestra, and a fitting conclusion to the concert, making at the same time a great start to the 2017 orchestral season. This was all very fine playing, but notably from the bassoon and the horns.

A standing ovation greeted the end of the work, and streamers rained down on the orchestra. The band played Brahms’s rousing Hungarian Dance no.5 as an encore with great panache. – something they had played as an encore at the Musikverein in Vienna seven years ago, Hamish McKeich told the audience.

The concert was interesting in containing no works by the ‘Great Masters’ of the symphonic repertoire – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich, but for the amount of 20th century or near-twentieth century works, and their geographic spread: one New Zealand work, two English, one Czech, two Russian, one Finnish, one Italian and one German.

The history of the orchestra’s conception and birth (LT)

The usually much more elaborate and expensive programmes for regular concerts are probably bought by not much more than half the audience. Many of those who might just become a bit better informed remain in ignorance about what they’re hearing; they turn away when the programme seller mentions the price.

It was an occasion to honour the vision and determination of prime minister Peter Fraser and James Shelley, head of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, who drove the orchestra’s founding, along with sympathetic allies including the legendary Joseph Heenan, permanent head of Internal Affairs.

There was the bitchiness, in certain circles, about conductor Anderson Tyrer, but he contributed enthusiasm and in his book about the orchestra’s first twenty years, Owen Jensen gives him generous credit. Other conductors were invited: distinguished New Zealand opera conductor Warwick Braithwaite, Eugene Goosens.

But the orchestra’s beginning was not merely a Wellington affair.

At once, its role was as the ‘National’ orchestra, and as well as preparing the Wellington programme, they prepared enough music for four different concerts, all of which would be broadcast from the local national radio station: four symphonies, four overtures and twelve miscellaneous pieces, to be played in the other three main cities..

The Wellington programme was:
Dvořák: Carnival Overture
Brahms: Symphony No 2
Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad
Enescu: Romanian Rhapsody No 1
Wagner: Prelude and Love-death from Tristan and Isolde
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel

In addition, as recorded in Joy Tonks’s history of the orchestra, The First Forty Years, the orchestra played Johann Strauss’s Moto Perpetuo as an encore to ‘restore quiet’ after the Enescu and then at the end they played Grainger’s Handel in the Strand and the polka from Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper (which used to be a familiar dinner music piece on 2YC, but which I haven’t heard broadcast for years).

Within the month other concerts took place, including, remarkably two schools concerts one of which the National Film Unit filmed. (At one of those, probably in the fourth form, 1949, I had my first thrilling orchestral experience: I’m sure Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien was the highlight). The first tour, to the South Island took place in April. And in June they ventured north, to console Auckland in the days when Auckland was only 50 percent bigger than Wellington.

In the following year the National Broadcasting Service (NBS) decided that the orchestra should undertake a nationally toured production of Carmen (in English), which was only possible with orchestral participation. It was inspired by the centenary of Otago province, to be celebrated by a music festival. Tyrer conducted and it had 33 performances in the four main centres; it was a popular success but it met criticism from those more familiar with opera. It showed that New Zealand resources were capable of undertaking serious large-scale musical productions, a step towards national artistic self-confidence.

An Italian opera company toured Australia in 1949 and Peter Fraser made a New Zealand tour feasible by offering the orchestra to the company. That tour comprised eleven operas; there were 61 performances and audiences totalled 120,000.

The orchestra’s first performance of New Zealand music was under Warwick Braithwaite in the August of 1947: Lilburn’s Song of the Antipodes. (renamed now A Song of Islands).

By the way, the visiting Boyd Neel String Orchestra played Lilburn’s Diversions for String Orchestra on their 1947 tour: not clear whether before or after the Song of Islands performance. .

There are three seminal books detailing the history of the orchestra:

Owen Jensen: NZBC Symphony Orchestra, Reed, 1966
Joy Tonks: The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The First Forty Years, Reed Methuen, 1986
Joy Tonks: Bravo! The NZSO at 50, Exile Publishing, 1996

Perhaps the orchestra’s 75th anniversary should prompt a further history.

St Andrew’s opens 2017 lunchtime concerts with enjoyable baroque concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Graupner & Vivaldi: concerti for viola d’amore, guitar and viola

Donald Maurice (viola d’amore), Jane Curry (guitar), Sophia Acheson (viola) and string ensemble of five players

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 8 February 2017, 12.15 pm

The concert was in part the Wellington launch of a new CD of the music of these two composers performed by Maurice, Curry, and Polish and Hungarian musicians.  An opening speech was delivered by the Polish Ambassador to New Zealand, H.E. Zbigniew Gniatkowski.  After the concert enjoyable refreshments were available.  The concert, the first in the 2017 St. Andrew’s series, was very well attended.

The programme began with Christoph Graupner’s concerto in D for viola d’amore and viola.  The printed programme supplied no notes on this composer, but Wikipedia informs me that he was German, and lived from 1683 to 1760, thus spanning the life of J.S. Bach.  Grove remarks that he represents the Vivaldian rather than the Corellian tradition in his 44 concertos.  Of these, the two played today are the only two noted by Grove as being for viola and viola d’amore.

The ensemble, who stood to play (except the cello, of course) were under the direction of Donald Maurice, but gestures were only required at the beginning of each work; the ensemble’s rapport and experience, plus their frequent eye contact, kept everything together splendidly.

Immediately the viola d’amore enters, one is struck by its mellow tone – as I was when reviewing a concert by much the same ensemble at St. Andrew’s last May.  On that occasion, three Vivaldi concertos were played, including the guitar one in D that we heard today.

The Graupner had a grave e marcato first movement – and exceedingly grave it was, followed by vivace, then grave again, but this time not as solemn as the first one; in fact it was enchanting.  The final movement was marked allegro; the rich, dark tones of the viola d’amore were so resonant compared with the other instruments.

The Vivaldi guitar concerto is a well-known one, in three movements. Its largo middle movement is languid and winsome.  The piece was played with subtlety and plenty of variation of tone and dynamics.

Another concerto for violas d’amore and viola by Graupner ended the programme, this one in A. Like the earlier one, it was graceful and attractive, if not as characterful as the Vivaldi.  The opening andante was suave and gentle, while the allegro fourth movement was interestingly intricate.

All made up to a very enjoyable concert.

Next week’s scheduled euphonium concert has had to be cancelled.  Note; NO St. Andrew’s lunchtime concert on Wednesday 15 February.

 

 

 

 

Shaken but not stirred – Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s “Peter and the Wolf” and other delights

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
GIOVANNI GABRIELI: Canzon per sonar septimi toni a 8 Ch.171
Sonata Octavi Toni a 12, Ch.184
CPE BACH: ‘Cello Concerto in A, Wq.172 (H.439)
TCHAIKOVSKY –  The Nutcracker Suite (three movements)
PROKOFIEV – Peter and the Wolf

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Andrew Joyce (soloist and conductor)
Garry Smith (narrator)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace

Sunday 4 December 2016, 2:30pm

This concert was very well attended, the audience including many children, despite its not being advertised on RNZ Concert’s “Live Diary”, or the fact that the NZSO performed one of the works the previous afternoon at a free concert at Te Papa.

The Gabrieli works featured brass instruments only. The nature of the work and the instruments employed were described by Andrew Joyce, and the instruments were demonstrated by their players. The antiphonal nature of the music, written for St.Mark’s Venice, was very effective (though the intontion was a little wayward at times, early on), the two brass choirs facing each other across the platform.

Amazing to think that, in Gabrieli’s time, these instruments had no valves…..

Next the strings came to the fore, with more explanations; and Andrew Joyce played the solo part in the CPE Bach concerto, one of the first ‘cello concertos ever composed. I found that, in this item, as compared with those later in the programme, most of the children were not attentive. Obviously the melody and characterisation of the other pieces appealed much more.

A very fast, busy Allegro was tossed off with apparent ease. The Largo produced some beautiful melodies and lovely long lines from the soloist – when I could hear him above the children’s chatter! – the latter varied hugely in how “good” they were. They were all given a page with illustrations for them to draw and enlarge on.

The allegro assai finale contained an energetic solo that nevertheless had variety and subtlety. Andrew Joyce’s playing was very accomplished. Throughout the orchestra’s playing was fine, even if it seemed to be lost on most of the children.

The first half concluded with three movements from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite: the “Chinese Dance”, “Dance of the Mirlitons”, and “Waltz of the Flowers”. Now there was demonstration and explanation of the woodwind instruments, part of the much bigger orchestra for this work. The children were much quieter in this: it was more appropriate music for them to enjoy, and was played with verve and expression, though I found the flute’s intonation suspect in the first one.

Peter and the Wobble…er…Wolf, comprised the second half. I thought the programme over-long for children. With the encore it made up over two hours – though there was a generous interval. Some of the audience left after the first half. The reason for the amended “title” was the earthquake that occurred at 16 minutes past 4, one that turned out to be 5.5 in scale. So inured are we to these events now that nothing stopped, no-one dropped, covered and held, and apart from glances with raised eyebrows between adults, there was no reaction.

While I felt the introduction to the work contained too many unnecessary words, I found Garry Smith’s narration of the story excellent. He didn’t miss a beat when the church shook. I have been unable to find out who was responsible for the delightful English translation of the words: the original of the story was written by Prokofiev himself.

The orchestra’s playing of this magnificent music gave us a wonderful performance. It beautifully demonstrated the woodwind instruments particularly. It was good to hear the detail so much more clearly in this venue compared with a large concert hall. The composer’s delightful and decorous music,  and the words in Garry Smith’s characterisations, easily brought to life Peter, Grandfather, and the cat, bird, and duck – and the wolf!

The encore was the “Sleigh Ride” from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite.

Edo de Waart and Ronald Brautigam confirm stature: symphonic conductor and Mozartian pianist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart with Ronald Brautigam (piano)

Mozart: Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor, K 491
Elgar: Symphony No 1 in A flat, Op 55

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 29 October, 7:30 pm

Ronald Brautigam’s is not exactly a household name and his performance history is impressively confined largely to Mozart and Beethoven, though not always in performances with high profile conductors or orchestras. Most of his playing is on the fortepiano of the age of Mozart and early Beethoven.

While that partly explains his relative obscurity to the popular audience, it doesn’t detract from his high reputation among those who take their classical music seriously and comprehensively. In fact, last December, in Sydney, I heard Brautigam and De Waart with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in this very programme, plus, I should add, an engaging, round eight-minute performance of White Ghost Dancing by Ross Edwards, perhaps the most widely popular of Australia’s contemporary composers.

In Wellington, we heard only the two big works, though the concert reached the normal two hours with a little ceremony marking the retirement of two very long-standing players, violist Brian Shillito and violinist Sharyn Evans.

The C Minor Piano Concerto
For the Mozart, the orchestra was reduced to the likely size of a Viennese orchestra of the late 18th century – around 30 strings, flute and pairs of horns and woodwinds including, unusually, both clarinets and oboes, and authentic timpani. Though such perceptions can be unreliable, I had the impression of a more 18th century sound than I heard in Sydney; that could be auto-suggestion or the effect of the size and shape of the Concert Hall in the Sydney Opera House. It was clean and elegant, with a beautiful balance emerging in the sombre, two-minute-long opening passage; no affectations or excesses.

No period fortepiano was needed to produce a warm and persuasively Mozartian performance, as Brautigam’s revealed himself as a pianist of great skill, refinement and intelligence. There are several passages for solo piano throughout the work and here he refrained from drawing attention to himself or his exemplary and brilliant playing. In one of Mozart’s only two piano concertos in a minor key (and one of the very greatest), there was often a distinctly plaintive feeling in which oboes and the lower instruments – cellos and bassoons – were particularly effective.

This was a spirit that Mozart elaborated in the last movement with its contrapuntal writing that was, nevertheless light in spirit and unfailing elegance.

Above all, there seemed to be a singular rapport between conductor and soloist revealing an unerring unity of approach and a common perception of Mozart’s style and melodic and instrumental character.

Elgar No 1
I have been known to utter remarks about Elgar’s symphonies that are a reaction to what can be heard as either grandeur or pomposity, and the outer movements do offer much opportunity for these feeling to be confirmed.

I exempt the very opening Andante from these feelings as, in spite of the plain and singular grandeur of the big tune (after all, it IS entitled ‘Nobilmente’), it establishes a meditative spirit that needs to be carefully maintained and was indeed carefully enunciated under De Waart. And again, after the Allegro proper begins, there are a page or two of gentle, rather beguiling music before a growing attack of grandeur emerges.

Part of the problem for me is the sheer unsubtlety of some of the big tunes that have undoubtedly been important in the music’s remaining very popular. There are those brass-band inspired, mini fanfares for trombones and tuba; but then one has to set them aside as they are followed by passages of interesting lyrical writing that is delicate and suggest that Elgar had paid attention to the French composers who were his contemporaries, not that I would include Debussy among his influences. It is after all, more common to link Elgar with his German predecessors – Brahms and perhaps lesser figures like Bruch. The tunes might sound ordinary but it is what he does with them that establishes him as a major composer. So the first movement actually ends in a sound world that is restrained, imaginative and quite moving.

The second movement again is driven by a tune that’s a bit obvious, but is it essentially different from the folk-inspired tunes Mahler used? The tunes are used in a splendidly expansive and energetic way and De Waart drew fine playing from the orchestra, though moments of brass exposure might have been a little more subtle.

One of the symphony’s characteristics that I delight in is the way each movement draws to its end in meditative calm; in the case of the end of the second movement you can be forgiven for wondering whether the next movement has arrived unannounced. And the rapturous Adagio hardly changes in mood as the Lento opening of the last movement begins.

All this adds up to confessing that the slow third movement is my favourite: endlessly gorgeous, allowing one to savour Elgar’s refined use of the orchestra, taking more care than some late Romantic composers to assure the distinctness and clarity of each instrument. In spite of the large, almost Straussian orchestra, the Adagio in particular is not the product of an empty jingoist, but that of a remarkably refined and intelligent composer.

I sometimes recall the music master at Wellington College, in the once-a-week ‘core’ music class, remarking as he played us 78s of the Enigma Variations, that Elgar was one of the greatest orchestrators, and thinking, for many years, that was an odd and extravagant claim. (How many students at ordinary state schools today get that sort of life-enhancing exposure to great music?) But listening to his music with open ears many decades later, I think he was right. This was a performance that fulfilled all the expectations one can have of the composer Elgar; some twelve minutes of some of his tranquil, happiest and most inward invention, in these warm, reflective landscapes.

Even in the sometimes blustery last movement there’s that long episode about five minutes before the end, of peaceful meditative music that paints an unimaginable picture of the world just five years before the 1914 catastrophe.

It was good therefore to see a pretty full house for this splendid concert that reaffirmed the taste and interpretative talents of Edo de Waart.

Orchestra Wellington’s fifth concert excels with last works of Berlioz, Bartok and Tchaikovsky (almost)

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei and Vincent Hardaker, with Michael Houstoun at the piano
Arohanui Strings – Sistema Hutt Valley, conducted by Vincent Hardaker

Arohanui Strings: arrangements of music by Purcell, Tchaikovsky (Serenade for Strings and the waltz from Sleeping Beauty)

Orchestra Wellington:
Overture to Béatrice et Bénédict (Berlioz)
Bartok: Piano Concerto No 3
Tchaikvosky: Nutcracker – Act II

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 15 October, 7:30 pm

This was the once-a-year event for the young musicians involved with the Hutt Valley Arohanui Strings, the project inspired by the famous Venezuelan institution, El Sistema. They filed in after some of Orchestra Wellington’s players had taken their seats: the more advanced ones taking seats alongside a professional player as mentor; the beginners spread across the front of the stage – some of them looked aged about four. They were conducted by the orchestra’s assistant conductor Vincent Hardaker, with assistance from the side by Alison Eldrigde, encouraging the littlies at the front.

Playing some simplified, though genuine classical pieces: Purcell, Tchaikovsky, Scottish dances, they charmed the audience.

Hardaker stayed to conduct the orchestra itself in the Béatrice et Bénédict overture, Berlioz’s last opera and though about six years before his death, really his last work. It’s based on Shakespeare’s Much ado about Nothing, written on commission from the Baden Baden Opera. Though it hasn’t taken root in the regular repertoire, I saw it staged by the Australian Opera in 1998; there’s some fine music, several quotes of which appear in the overture, which has always held its place in the orchestral repertoire. Its brightness and wit were splendidly captured by Hardaker and the players, with secretive little passages from clarinets, edgy brass and dancing violins.

Bartok’s last piano concerto, left a few bars short of completion when he died in New York in 1945, as WW2, too, was ending. I recalled with bemusement how barbaric it sounded when I first heard it in my late teens, which was, after all, only about 10 years after its composition.

Musicologists enjoy themselves identifyjng its odd modal tonalities; all quite beside the point. Any audience can assess its blending of Balkan folk music with ancient modes and contemporary musical obsessions, all overlaid by sheer musical inspiration. Houstoun approached the first movement with a sense of determination and energy, though its generally lyrical character emerged clearly, allowing melodic figures to take root; lovely flute notes at its end. It confirmed the admirable collaboration between Houstoun and conductor Taddei.

The second movement on the other hand can be heard simply as a rather beautiful piece of music, even though analysis shows characteristics uncommon in western classical music. But ‘beautiful’ hardly touches the enigmatic, spiritual, orphic quality of this singular movement. The orchestra alone and many individual players proved their capacity for exquisite, contemplative playing at the start and throughout there are some breathlessly calm, slow passages for the piano alone, Bach-like figurations, in which Houstoun captured a metaphysical spirit, perhaps the composer meditating on his imminent death – it’s entitled Adagio religioso. But then there’s an upbeat interlude, curiously alive with bird-calls in the middle, ending with skittering keyboard.

The third movement returns to an energetic, folk-dance-inspired Allegro vivace, where there’s still more opportunities for individual instruments to shine, like horns and the piano to indulge in fast fugal passages that come to envelope the whole orchestra.

In all, a splendid show-case for the orchestra and pianist, in one of the 20th century’s real masterpieces.

The opportunity to hear a whole of Act II of Nutcracker played without the distraction of dancers proved hugely rewarding, as the score is endlessly inventive and memorable as pure music, quite apart from its qualities of marvellous danceabilty with which choreographers and dancers have been able to create indelible productions.  While I have grown very tired of performances of the Suite that compacts the character dances, in their setting, as little orchestral pieces played by a live orchestra in the concert hall, they sit perfectly in context; their genius, their instrumental brilliance, and the way they flow the one into the next is simply a delight. The programme note records that Nureyev said that it was Tchaikovsky who encouraged serious composers to engage with choreographers, making possible masterpieces like the Stravinsky ballets, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë, Prokofiev, as well as dozens of wonderful scores by other great 20th century composers.

Nutcracker engages with an orchestra, inspiring spirited and moving playing from almost every section and including a few instruments like the celesta which Tchaikovsky was the first to use symphonically (though Chausson had actually beaten him by a few years with incidental music for a French version of The Tempest). It’s the great Pas de deux that follows the Waltz of the Flowers that especially enchants me, and it was wonderful to hear this played so well by a ‘live’ orchestra.

Nutcracker mightn’t have fitted perfectly with the ‘Last Words’ theme of this year’s concerts, for the Sixth Symphony, and some piano pieces and songs followed it. But it served a higher purpose: to elevate the genre of great ballet music to the concert hall, and with this performance Marc Taddei proved the case most convincingly.

Taddei gave the first clues to the 2017 programme, which will follow the same most successful pattern as this year, disclosing the general theme of the music, associated with the great impresario Diaghilev, and at least two of his greatest collaborators: Stravinsky and Ravel. If you buy before the next and last of this year’s concerts, the sub is only $120.

 

America: NZSO performances of brilliant new violin concerto plus Dvořák in New York and Reich in minimalist heaven

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fawzi Haimor with Anne Akiko Meyers (violin)

Steve Reich: Three Movements
Mason Bates: Violin Concerto
Dvořák: Symphony No 9 in E minor, Op 95 (‘From the New World’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 8 October, 7:30 pm

Once upon a time to have scheduled the New World Symphony would have guaranteed a pretty full house in spite of its being accompanied by unfamiliar music. But sometimes I think that as the years pass, the general public is becoming, not more open and adventurous, and simply ‘well-informed’ in the arts, and music too, but less in all those spheres.

And there are various reasons: slavery to the flat black screen, perhaps the cost of tickets, disagreeable weather outside, but most importantly, the lack of exposure on all popular radio and television channels, to anything but the most vacuous noises and sights of the tawdry, commercialised world of entertainment; and a school curriculum that avoids much real exposure to worthwhile music, or the other arts, including literature.

So there were too many empty seats for what turned out to be a splendid, enjoyable concert and the ‘happy few’ – I mean, really ‘quite a large number’ went pretty wild after each piece.

Steve Reich’s earlier New Zealand appearance
The first piece was a chance to recall the great days of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts (as it was then), in 1990, the first of the two under the direction of Chris Doig. One of the many exciting international visitors was Steve Reich and the Musicians, who played inter alia, Reich’s famous, holocaust-related Different Trains.

Perhaps trains have a special place in Reich’s life, for the piece played on Saturday, Three Movements, has inspired a performance on You Tube, played by the LSO under Michael Tilson Thomas, accompanied entirely by a film by Alessandro Manfredi featuring trains in Switzerland, some speeded up to accompany the outer fast  movements, some slowed for the middle movement. It’s a riveting, infectious experience, for a lover of both trains and music.

Three Movements for Orchestra
So was the NZSO’s performance. Coincidentally or calculatedly, the performance celebrated Reich’s 80th birthday, on 3 October.

The centre stage was occupied by two marimbas, two vibraphones and two pianos, which squeezed the strings to the sides; they were divided into two distinct string orchestras. It starts with marimbas and piano in fast alternating beats, with excitement created by shifting tonalities (accompanied in the You Tube clip as white and red, high-speed Swiss and occasional Deutsche Bahn passenger trains flash through, intensifying the excitement of the music). While the pulse remains steady, the rhythm changes to become more and more difficult to identify as sections of the orchestra handle overlapping harmonies and rhythms.

The middle movement runs at half the speed of the outer movements with vibraphones taking over the main rhythmic work and woodwinds, notably clarinets and oboes (winds are limited to pairs of each, but four horns and triple trumpets and trombones) dominate the colouring. The third movement resumes the speed of the first, but intensifies the experience as both marimbas and vibes and the pianos increase the density, loudness and rhythmic complexity. Reich draws attention to his penchant for rhythmic ambiguity and coins the term ‘canonic mensuration’ to describe the way his motifs appear simultaneously in two or more speeds. Even though it’s not easy to keep track of the pulses, they are undeniably fascinating and compelling.

American conductor Fawzi Haimor electrified the orchestra with gestures that were vivid and lucid; it was an occasion when the orchestra’s international quality and acumen were both in high demand and met the competition with formidable success.

Bates: Violin Concerto
Similar strengths were demanded by the next work by 39 year old Mason Bates who has made an impact in the United States. It was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin in 2012. Bates is composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, having just completed five years in a similar role with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He followed the violin concerto with one for the cello; his first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, will premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017.

It looks as if its performances in New Zealand are among the few so far outside the United States, if my Internet browsing reflects the situation. The violin concerto has been recorded by the London Symphony under Slatkin with Anne Akiko Meyers, the soloist in Wellington; and the European premiere was by the Orchestre national de Lyon last year. In the United States it’s been played by orchestras in Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and others no doubt that don’t appear on my computer screen.

And incidentally, Bates’s website and others highlight the three-city tour by the NZSO.

Bates is travelling the road that was paved by the minimalists, Glass, Reich and Riley, but his palette is rather more eclectic, not adhering to the habits of repetitiveness felt in the early minimalists. Like most younger composers who are more interested in giving audiences a good time than impressing musicologists, he avoids serialist dogma and complex, tuneless music such as his compatriots Morton Feldman or Elliott Carter produced.

I found an interesting observation in an American review of Bates’s music, touching the direction of classical music today:
“… classical music and its audiences love young dynamos who satisfy the urge for innovation while continuing the traditions of the classical canon. Bates presents cutting-edge concerts and writes big pieces for orchestra that are essentially 21st-century tone poems, or musical narratives.”
It’s not irrelevant that he moonlights as a DJ, is deep into electronica, and the sophisticated areas of pop music.

So what does the violin concerto sound like? What are its influences?
Though I didn’t find many distinct echoes of earlier composers, there were glimpses of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, inter alia, certain of the pulsating passages of his violin concerto; and you can hear sounds that, in a couple of decades from now, will define the time and place of this music. Thinking about violin concerto models, the fast movements of John Corigliano’s ‘Red Violin’ Concerto is not far away.

The piece doesn’t demand a Straussian or Mahlerian sized orchestra: strings numbered 14 first violins down to six basses; there’s a piano and some interesting percussion that I could hear but not see.

Bates and the primitive birds
Then there’s the illustrative aspect. Bates’s own notes describe how he fastened on depicting a chase between two mesozoic animals, of the Jurassic age (around 150 million years ago): the bird-like Archaeopteryx lithographica chasing a compsognathid (Compsognathus longipes) at night. Though I’m really not interested in dinosaurs, it was not hard to be fascinated by the music itself, listening to the contest between the two creatures, through frantic, pulsating, skittering sounds alternating with the violin’s rather gorgeously lyrical, soaring music.

There was, naturally, a very special feel in the violin’s part, since we were privileged to have the commissioner/dedicatee/performer of the premiere playing with the NZSO; they were indeed driven by the combination of Meyers’s intensity and soulfulness, and the elegant, energetic conducting of Haimor. While the orchestral part of the work is full of entertainment and uncluttered virtuosity, the violin was so constantly the centre of attention that it was too easy to miss the delights conspicuous in the orchestra.

The second movement, called ‘Lakebed Memories’, took us from the actual Jurassic age to viewing a mesozoic lakebed, perhaps from the present day, in a series of slow, falling phrases from the violin and semi-glissandi pizzicato from cellos and some curious sounds from percussion, e.g. crotales(?) and glockenspiel(?).

In the middle of the third movement the orchestra gave way entirely to the violinist who raced away with endless oscillating figures representing ‘The Rise of the Birds’, another opportunity for flight, breathless ascents, or peaceful gliding on up-draughts, as the by-now-familiar, beautiful soaring motif comes to dominate until the relatively matter-of-fact ending.

I doubt that the orchestral performance was any less brilliant and convincing that those by the premiering orchestra, Pittsburgh, and others that have played it. It was one of the most attractive and engaging pieces of contemporary music I’ve come across for a while.

The New World Symphony
After the interval, the ‘New World’ Symphony did not feel like a retreat to old-fashioned music, something one knew too well, that had become hackneyed. Though other composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, of the period when Dvořák wrote it (the 1890s) have now come to dominate, to hear such a vibrant and vivid performance was to be reminded that it was no disgrace to have become more immediately popular than the other composers I mentioned.

The opening, extremely calm with strings and a telling clarinet note, and then a surprising, extra-fortissimo call to attention from Lenny Sakofsky’s hard-sticked timpani and Greg Hill’s horn. To watch conductor Haimor again, in main-stream repertoire (and here, no score), bending to the same emphases and gestures, the balletic movements that galvanised the auditorium in the first half in music of our day, made clear the essentially contemporary nature of the symphony. Every section of the orchestra, now at full strength – 16 first violins down to 8 basses – seemed to be electrified by the call to deliver a message of this kind: breathy, slow and quiet flute, velvety horns, and in the famous Largo tune, cor anglais and then bassoons, in playing that quite eliminated any sense of its being over-familiar.

And the Scherzo movement was alive with variety and subtlety, with scrupulous articulation everywhere. The Finale – con fuoco – further upped the emotional temperature where sudden switches of tempo, dynamics, discretion and brashness, brilliant orchestration and, as the programme note remarks, Dvořák’s unending melodic invention, create one of the most colourful and arousing of orchestral finales. An early experience of the symphony came to mind, hearing, in the late 1950s the opening of the Finale used as a sensational promotional tool in a sampler LP of the ‘new stereophonic recording technique’ , when the breathtaking opening assaulted the ears seemingly from every direction.

Not much has changed.
This concert will go down as one of the real highlights of musical 2016.