Tag: orchestral

The Orpheus Choir and Orchestra Wellington at Sea with Brent Stewart

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents:
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – A Sea Symphony

also – MENDELSSOHN – Overture “The Hebrides”
BRITTEN – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”

Lisa Harper-Brown (soprano)
James Clayton (baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th May, 2016

Avast, me hearties!  Time to batten down the ‘atches and splice yer mainbraces, ready to lend an ear to these ‘ere tales o’ the Seven Seas, as retold by the Cap’n ‘n crew of the good ship Orchestra Wellington, with sister-vessel Orpheus ready to heave-to for the grand sail-past!…….well, that’s probably enough nautical language to give readers an idea regarding this concert (in fact I was starting to get worried as to where my next seafaring expression was coming from, so I’m happy to return to “landlubber mode” for the remainder of this review!

From the moment the orchestra launched into the opening of Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture, we were all truly at sea, our sensibilities registering the ebb and flow of the oceanic swells, the tang of the salt spray and the sense of wide open spaces created by both wind and brass, bird calls and ship signals pushing out the vistas towards distant islands and horizons.

The whole piece is a truly remarkable recreation of a maritime scenario, one which many New Zealanders will readily identify with as a result of living so close to the sea – in fact conductor Brent Stewart expressed in a program note his own affinities with the ocean as a result of various childhood experiences. As the overture proceeded one sensed his direction of the music becoming freer and increasingly “taken up” by the music’s evocations along the way, especially with those moments of deep repose in between the watery undulations, and with the contrasting excitement of his “whipping up” the canonic strings-and-winds exchanges midway through.

Things were very beautifully rounded off by the duetting clarinets (one instrument most beguilingly becoming two) towards the end, leading to a final frenzy of waves breaking over a rugged coastline, the conductor again pushing the tempo and encouraging from his players a vigorous and exciting ferment of activity, which abruptly died away, leaving the opening theme as a single distant, haunting bird-call – here, only the final note seemed to me a shade too abruptly curtailed for its distance to properly register.

More oceanic splendours were to be had with Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from the opera “Peter Grimes”.  I enjoyed the fresh, bracing tang of “Dawn” with its opening bird-cries, and was gripped by the incredible depth and dark-browed spaciousness of the lower instruments with their portentous replying crescendi. The tolling bells of “Sunday Morning” burst forth without ceremony, a true “attacca” and at a terrific pace, the counterpointing winds throaty and characterful, squawking with what seemed like native dialects!  After an angular exchange between strings and winds, the bells returned with terrific impact, even though a couple of the decrescendo-strokes didn’t through some kind of attrition quite “ring true”.

The third Interlude “Moonlight” sounded to my ears more pointillistic than atmospheric, the brass, winds and percussion notes brought out, and given a spiky-sounding character, not merely in the manner of a pretty nocturnal picture – even so, the biting incisiveness of the final “Storm” took one’s breath away with its fury and frenetic pace. The players dealt with their conductor’s pacing brilliantly, throwing fingerfuls of detail about in what seemed like an uncalculated and spontaneous-sounding way, which worked spectacularly well. A shadowy and goblin-like sequence featured spiked winds and moaning strings which were taken up by the baleful brasses and hurled down the cliff-edge onto the rocks below – shattering!

The Orpheus Choir, along with soprano Lisa Harper-Brown and baritone James Clayton, took the stage with the orchestra after the interval for the evening’s REAL business in hand – Ralph Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony. Written between 1903 and 1909, the piece was its composer’s first full-scale symphonic work, and at once placed him not only within the British choral tradition, but in the ranks of the symphonists following Parry, Sullivan, Stanford, German and, most importantly, Elgar. The work also reflected a current vogue among British composers (Holst and Delius as well) for settings of the poetry of American Walt Whitman.

During the time Vaughan Williams took to complete this symphony he spent three months studying with French composer Maurice Ravel. While the finished symphony shows certain stylistic and harmonic influences stemming from Ravel (and French music in general) the composer of the Pavane pour une Infanta defunte and Rapsodie Espagnole paid tribute to his pupil by exclaiming at one stage that Vaughan Williams was “the only one of my students that does not write my music”.

As might have been expected with a first symphony from a young composer the work has an arresting opening, attention-grabbing brass chords and a full-throated choral declamation, hurling forth the words “Behold! – the sea itself!”  Here, the choir’s voices galvanized our sensibilities right from the beginning, though for whatever reason the brasses’ attack on the initial notes was curiously soft-grained, lacking for me a certain scalp-prickling quality, both here and at the fanfare’s reprise after the first sequence concluding with “the long pennants of smoke”. Elsewhere, the playing was very much “on-the-spot” from all departments, and all sections of the choir sounded glorious from where I was sitting.

I was eagerly awaiting the contributions from the soloists, both of whose work I had previously encountered. Starting almost conversationally, with his “Today, a brief, rude recitative…”, baritone James Clayton steadily built up the energies and intensities towards “and the winds piping and blowing”, before giving us a sonorous “And out of these”, and then relishing his full-blooded exchanges with the choir at “untamed as thee!”. Soprano Lisa Harper-Brown threw herself splendidly into the swim of things with a commanding “Flaunt out, O Sea!…”, her voice strong and steady there and later with her “Token of all brave captains…..”, and riding excitingly over the massed textures just before the movement’s rapt “All seas, all ships” concluding phrases.

At the beginning of the slow movement, conductor and players caught the dark depths and charged stillnesses of the orchestral writing. I wanted at first a slightly stronger line from the baritone, whose words didn’t quite carry to me through the accompanying textures, though once the horns began their processional at “A vast similitude interlocks all” the singer’s energies found a new gear and conveyed more tonal presence and clarity. After the choir had regaled us with its sonorous “This vast similitude”, it was left to the soloist and orchestra to return us to the hushed sonorities of the opening, conductor and orchestra once again evoking the dark sounds of the “old mother….singing her husky song”.

The scherzo, subtitled “The Waves”, for chorus and orchestra, was delivered with terrific élan throughout, amid traditional sea-shanties and wind-borne spray singing and dancing above the “myriad, myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks….”. The Orpheus’ voices relished their interaction with the swirling textures of the orchestral writing, with the different instrumental groups on top form and in perfect accord. Vaughan Williams’ use of chromatic and whole-tone scales to depict the action of the waves and the spray-laden ambiences contrasted stirringly with the nobilmente striding theme depicting “the great vessel sailing”, the choir left at the end to exultantly pin back our ears with their final, unaccompanied “following!” – a great moment!

Traditionally composers have a lot of trouble with the final movements of their symphonies – but Vaughan Williams seemed here in his fourth and last movement “The Explorers” to produce his best music of the work. Conductor Brent Stewart allowed his forces plenty of space and time at the outset, floating the chorus’s brooding “O vast rondure, swimming in space” steadily, almost ritualistically, against a beautiful orchestral tapestry characterizing the “processions of suns, moons and countless stars above”. Moving to describe the “myriad progeny” of Adam and Eve as “baffled, formless, feverish, with never happy hearts”, the composer set disembodied offstage voices in a manner not unlike in Wagner’s “Parsifal” intoning the words “Wherefore unsatisfied soul?” and “Whither, O mocking life?”, here magically realized by some of the Orpheus’s female voices.

Again, each of the soloists performed wonders, from their fresh and eager interchanges at “O, we can wait no longer”, and throughout the rapt beauties of “O Soul, thou pleasest me!”, rising to an ecstatic climax at “O, thou transcendent” – the solo violin needed in places more ethereal as well as occasionally surer tones, but otherwise reliably supported the voices in tandem with the winds. Then at the chorus’s “Greater than stars or sun”, the soloists enjoined us amid a volley of nautical terms, to “shake out every sail”, without delay – “Away, O Soul – hoist instantly the anchor”, to the accompaniment of hornpipes and jigs punctuated by enthusiastic percussion crashes and cries from the chorus to “Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only” – truly stirring stuff!

After chorus and orchestra exhausted themselves declaring that they “will risk the ship, ourselves and all”, amid frenetic energies and terrific upheavals of energy, soprano and baritone brought the work to an ecstatic conclusion, equating these, the Soul’s oceanic journeyings with life and its challenges and fulfilments, and sharing with the chorus and orchestra a richly-wrought sense of continuing exploration, with all voices murmuring “O farther, farther sail”, as the music gradually disappeared. Thanks to an inspired performance from Brent Stewart and his forces, we were given, by the end, a real sense of the vastness of the composer’s vision and his determination to realise his view of things in his big-boned, full-blooded music.

NZSO ‘wastes its sweetness upon the desert air’ with some splendid, approachable, 21st century music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Aotearoa Plus
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bramwell Tovey with Stephen de Pledge (piano)

Bramwell Tovey: Time Tracks
Magnus Lindberg: Piano concerto No 2
Christopher Blake: Voices (premiere)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 6 May, 6:30 pm

Above all, this concert again raised for me the old controversy about the handling of new music. Whether it is best to ghettoize music that is unlikely to find a large audience, or to place these pieces carefully in concerts that include an irresistibly popular masterpiece.

If the intention is to persuade the timid to expose their minds to something unfamiliar, the size of Friday’s audience showed again that approach No 1 does not work, for very few of the ‘conservatives’ would have been there, and so the hope of getting the reluctant to open their ears, failed.

It’s not as if much music being composed today uses the kinds of artificial notions of what the basic patterns of melodic structure should be, so widespread at mid-century. Though polytonality is often used and conventional melody often seems avoided in case it suggests that a ‘serious’ piece of music is really lightweight, much music, including what our own composers produce can actually be enjoyed by simply opening the ears, without prejudice.

Tovey’s opera suite from The Inventor
This first visit to New Zealand by English-born, Canadian conductor, pianist and composer, Bramwell Tovey, revealed an accomplished, versatile musician who has conducted a number of distinguished orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Montreal and Melbourne Symphony, and the Philadelphia orchestras. He has been conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra since 2000. His compositions range across many genres, including the 2011 work for Calgary Opera, The Inventor, which was well received there. This concert began with the premiere of an orchestral suite, Time Tracks, the second suite that Tovey has drawn from his opera. The opera tells the true story of a charismatic con-man with a variety of versatile criminal talents than culminated in an unintended climax on the Bremerhaven docks: an insurance swindle goes wrong with an explosion that kills about eighty people.

Tovey introduced his piece entertainingly, useful for those who had not bought a programme. I’m not sure that the music was much more enlivened by accounts of the opera’s subject, as it stood on its own feet as an obviously dramatic sequence, opening with bold and colourful statements. It revealed a facility in handling narrative and situational elements through the use of a wide variety of tuned percussion, as well as tam-tams and hand bells and the usual range of drums, occasional solos and episodes from orchestral sections that were attractive or arresting in their own right. A couple of times, Tovey stepped off the podium to play a honky-tonk piano to his left, a sort of bluesy lament and later evoking a dreamy quality, no doubt reflecting the opera’s depiction of the flawed character’s insight into his own weaknesses. Among the many evocative phases in the score are touches of big-band jazz and motifs and harmonies that hint at the influence of John Adams. A particularly vivid moment is the depiction of a train gathering speed.

Piano Concerto No 2 by Lindberg
Lindberg’s second piano concerto was written with the character of its soloist (Yefim Bronfman, who has played with the NZSO), with the New York Philharmonic, very much in mind. In the words of the programme note, it was a response to Bronfman’s “muscular performances of Bartok and Prokofiev”. The sound and energy of those two composers were certainly audible in the music, but at the beginning, also Ravel (though not, as the programme note suggested, Debussy); Lindberg himself has mentioned Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand as inspiring the music. Inevitably, one can also be persuaded of the influence of other 20th century composers, even Rachmaninov in the last movement, perhaps Szymanowski too.

A throbbing motif imposes itself early on, but soon the piano attempts to impose itself. For much of the time, it failed, not because De Pledge lacked the ability to bring the right amount of energy and incisiveness to the performance, but because a great deal of the time, Lindberg cannot resist imposing a massive accompaniment that smothers the piano. I came to feel that this was perhaps more the result of a failure to impose restraint on and require greater discretion and subtlety from the orchestra; it was after all, a larger than normal orchestra with extra brass instruments and pains were needed to find whatever chamber-music-like qualities existed in the scoring.

The piano had its moments nevertheless, such as the start of the second movement, and between what one felt were obligatory hair-raising, bravura passages, there was sufficient evidence of the presence of a real instinct for the great piano concerto tradition as it has evolved in the past century. There was a passage of attractively warm playing from cellos; horns contributed with finesse, and there was no question that the score lay well within the orchestra’s interpretive abilities.

Christopher Blake’s second symphony
Finally, the second half, was Christopher Blake’s second symphony, entitled Voices, based in sometimes quite literal ways on Eliot’s The Waste Land. A daunting task, one might think, to find musical intimations or coherence in that still-disturbing poem, laden with abstruse classical and modern literary and musical references. Blake doesn’t employ the titles Eliot gave to the five cantos of the poem, but focuses on the people who populate each part.

Here, in contrast to the music in the first half however, was a piece that employs as large an orchestra with wonderful discretion, only rarely allowing full tuttis to emphasise aspects. Blake’s notes draw attention to the way his symphony has cross references between the movements and, though reassuring us that the music does stand alone, without reference to the poem itself, that “it is amplified and harnesses other worlds of meaning when viewed through the lens of Eliot’s poem”. So I look forward to the performance being released by the NZSO and Radio New Zealand Concert, accompanied by a gloss with annotations to help the listener elucidate more of the music’s secrets and its connections to the poem.

Its character was announced right at the start with a prolonged, unison horn evocation, followed by a startling attack from wood blocks; then mysterious string murmurings. It’s in the first part that Eliot quotes four lines of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, “Frisch weht der Wind…”, with electrifying musical impact, and the music is there. The second part, ‘Albert and Lil’, (A Game of Chess in Eliot), is coloured with gently sleazy blues sounds, involving various instruments, including an alto saxophone, played seductively.

Perhaps the fifth section was the most intriguing and enigmatic, starting with a shocking attack from tuned percussion, and soon one of the few passages for the full orchestra with propulsive, racing strings, with its references to things not in the actual poem, but in Eliot’s notes, like the journey to Emmaus and Shackleton, a fine oboe solo, and a great variety of brilliant, cleanly-used, individual instruments, raising in one’s mind more questions than answers, especially in one’s effort to recall the poem.

Each section bears its own tone and significance, as does the poem itself, and I remained, quite simply, thoroughly engaged by the sound world that was created as well as by an admiration for the composer’s evident intention to employ the orchestra to display so well the strengths of its soloists and of each section. A very nice way for a chief executive to compliment his employees for their skill and dedication, not simply in his own composition but for the huge contribution that the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra makes in the protection, against the sort of decaying and decadent cultural forces described by Eliot in 1922, of some civilized standards in this country.

 

 

NZSO and Madeleine Pierard with Ross Harris’s anguished Second Symphony to mark ANZAC Day

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
‘Spirit of ANZAC’

Frederick Septimus Kelly: In Memoriam Rupert Brooke
George Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad, Rhapsody for Orchestra
Ross Harris: Symphony No 2

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 21 April, 6:30 pm

I have been heard to utter unpatriotic feelings about the seeming endless attention paid in New Zealand to war and in particular the First World War and Gallipoli, which took place around 100 years ago. I have no problem with the stimulus the centenary has given to serious re-examination of the political background to the war, its pursuit and the catastrophic results of the Treaty of Versailles that sought to fix the world afterwards. But I wish more attention was given to those other aspects, involving other parts of Europe and the Middle East, for it is the outcome of the war in those spheres, and the self-seeking, diplomatic manoeuvering, the persistent imperial ambitions of all the main players that have created today’s ever-more insoluble crises, particularly in the Middle East. We are still led to believe, at least in much of the English-speaking world, that the war was all about Gallipoli and parts of the Western Front.

However, this evening’s music was concerned mainly with the war’s impact on individual people – soldiers and their families.  Not just with an amorphous ‘loss of life’ and ‘national tragedy’.

In Memoriam Rupert Brooke
It began with a string composition by one Frederick Septimus Kelly, an Australian, who was with his friend Rupert Brooke when he died and was buried on the Greek Island of Skyros. It was rather a moving piece, echoing some of the music of the early 20th century, Vaughan Williams, perhaps Elgar: pastoral, warm and reflective. An elegiac viola melody in the middle lent it a certain strength. It achieved its purpose very well, as McKeich led the orchestra through a sympathetic, unaffected though expressive performance.

Butterworth
George Butterworth, who was killed, with Kelly, at the Somme in 1916, has become a more famous name and his better-known A Shropshire Lad, for full orchestra, demonstrated a gift that might have had him rated with Bantock, Ireland, Moeran or York Bowen, perhaps even in the class of Holst, Howells or Vaughan Williams if he’d lived.

It begins in the character of Butterworth’s lovely The Banks of Green Willow, with strings and solo entries from clarinet, bassoon and cor anglais and follows an emotional path that reflects much of the pervasive emotion of Housman’s poems. In the middle section it expands notably with heavier brass and its pastoral charm is lost. This rather vivid section might have felt a little at odds with the character of many of the poems, though, admittedly, many in the big collection extend far beyond nostalgia and the English countryside, and are primarily reflections on mortality, on the loss of young lives in war (though of course they were published 20 years before the First World War): nevertheless, the rather extravert brass felt a shade too literal and specific.

Harris: Second Symphony
The major work was Ross Harris’s 2nd symphony. Like all his symphonies, this was commissioned and premiered by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, in 2006. It has rather surprised me that neither Wellington-based orchestra has commissioned a symphony from this major Wellington composer, as one after another has been written for Auckland; this one has even had a second playing in Auckland. (His sixth is scheduled for APO performance later this year). And I don’t think any have even been performed here; if so, this was a momentous occasion – the first Harris symphony to be played in Wellington.

This was one of the earlier collaborations between poet Vincent O’Sullivan and Ross Harris. Though cast in four movements, and obviously with an important orchestral element, it could as well be described as a song-cycle, as a symphony. There are eight stanzas, distributed through the four movements.

It tells a story, based on a newspaper report, of a young soldier in France, falling in love with a local girl, deserting, having a brief love, and coming to a sad, predictable end. I suppose it’s superfluous to say it reminds me of M K Joseph’s poignant novel, A Soldier’s Tale.

On stage was a large orchestra including large percussion, with tubular bells, though just double winds, under conductor Hamish McKeich who confirmed quickly his commanding grasp of the score and delivered a taut, dramatic and very moving performance.

Also on stage is Madeleine Pierard who sings the poetry through all the movements, taking first the soldier’s, then the French girl’s roles. It’s vividly descriptive music, starting in hushed strings, cor anglais, interrupted shockingly with mighty bass drum, violent brass, with military sounds, ironic marches; while the poem speaks soon of dreamy advances through poppy fields, with flashes of soldiers’ graves and snow and the sudden awakenings to reality. Pierard’s earthy, penetrating soprano kept the story anchored to real people and their emotional crisis, and even to their brief ecstasy.

The second movement deals with the love story, and the music opens in spell-binding unreality, in dread presentiment of its brief span, employing a limited tonal range, a momentary, almost subliminal echo of one of the Sings Harry songs. There were moments when the music seemed to strive too hard to reflect the words, though it was still the music that made the deepest impact, sometimes heart-stoppingly awful; so it was in the third movement where the violence of the soldier’s capture and killing are dealt with swiftly, violently, and the orchestral tumult is all that’s needed to understand.

In the fourth movement, poem 7, tubular bells, clarinet, strings, express the tragedy and the girl’s grief, perhaps better than the clarity of words can ever do. Though the last stanza, “Who, who is this young man…” with a cello solo accompanying the girl’s stricken loss, and her slow walking from the stage, to the fading music, was inevitably the most affecting part of the composition. The last lines are sung from back stage, as if from the grave.

Predictably, there were many empty seats, though the audience responded enthusiastically to soprano, conductor and orchestra, as well as to poet and composer who filed onto the stage.

 

Full house for Edo de Waart and the NZSO in magnificent Eroica and an epic Double Concerto by Brahms

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Edo de Waart’s Masterworks: Brahms & Beethoven

Lilburn: Festival Overture
Brahms: Concerto for violin and cello in A minor, Op.102 (Double Concerto)
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E flat, Op.55 (‘Eroica’)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Edo de Waart (conductor), Nicola Benedetti (violin) and Leonard Elschenbroich (cello)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 16 April 2016, 7.30pm

In a review of the NZSO just over a year ago, I said “You can’t beat Beethoven on a good day – and this was a very good day”. That was one hundred percent true of this concert, with new Music Director Edo de Waart. I thought it was brilliant planning to get an audience in to hear a programme that was at least in part familiar. They would then be so delighted with what they heard that they would want to hear de Waart’s other programmes through the year (he returns in August and October). It was gratifying to see the Michael Fowler Centre completely sold out.

Lilburn’s overture is one of his most appealing orchestral compositions. After a splendid attack, a cello theme introduces an exchange of ideas, with delightful interplay between sections of the large orchestra, though in themselves the various themes are quite spare. Already in this early work (1939, while he was still a student in London), Lilburn’s characteristic dotted rhythm motif appears. The piece is bombastic and contemplative by turns, the big brass line-up contributing to the former characteristic. It was a good opener for a concert of grand music.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti is on her second visit to New Zealand; it is a first for her partner, Leonard Elschenbroich. The violinist wore a bright red-orange fitting dress; the cellist did not wear a tail-coat, but a simple jacket. Neither was de Waart in tails – is it time the NZSO itself phased out this anachronistic dress?

The Brahms required a slightly smaller orchestra: there were no trombones, and some sections were down-sized; the cellos were brought forward nearer to the centre of the stage, with violas behind them.

The work opened in typical Brahms style with a brief tutti, then immediately the cellist gave passionate utterance in a solo passage. What marvellous tone he produced! Then the woodwind gave us a lovely pastoral section before the violin entry.

Playing from music scores, the soloists were in absolute unanimity. It was very lyrical playing from Benedetti, but from my seat, her sound was not particularly strong. As a colleague pointed out, we do get used to hearing recorded music, where the technician or producer can twiddle the knobs to bring the solos out more. Later, the violin sound penetrated more, when the orchestra was not so full or loud.

Elschenbroich produced subtly gorgeous nuances. Of course, the cello is in touch with the floor of the platform, and so can gain more resonance than the violin is able to. His playing reminded me of a singer who reported that his teacher said “Do something with every note.” I could not help thinking that it would be great to hear this work in the acoustic of the Wellington Town Hall – bring it on! All the elements made up to an epic first movement. The horns were very important, and their parts were beautifully played.

The slow movement featured a warm string melody with many mellow asides for winds, and an exquisite ending for soloists and orchestra alike. The third movement began bouncily for the soloists, cello first. Elschenbroich was the more flamboyant of the two performers (some would say this is a characteristic of the players of that instrument), but not to an excessive degree. There was precision and attention to detail from both – and indeed from the orchestra also. The work demonstrated the power and the pathos of Brahms. Technique was always subservient to the music as art for these two outstanding soloists.

The large audience was very attentive, and besides lengthy, enthusiastic applause from the audience to the soloists there was applause also from orchestra members. A nice feature was that the two soloists played in the orchestra for the Beethoven symphony that followed the interval.

The Eroica symphony is familiar, but like all great works of art, one can always find new insights, new elements, in every good performance. And this was a very good performance indeed. The orchestra was reduced again from that used for the Brahms work, and the playing, particularly in the first movement, was more detached and precise than is often heard in Beethoven. The delicate passages were delicious. Despite the symphony being so well-known, the playing had a spontaneous feel, brisk and energetic.

The sombre theme of the funeral march of the second movement was a contrast after the cheerful first movement. Its piquancy was brought out in the minor key version of the initial theme. Oboe and bassoon underlined the mood. How astonishing this symphony, the longest so far written, must have sounded to audiences accustomed to Haydn, Mozart and their contemporaries! The theme passed magisterially from section to section of the orchestra. Basses had a wonderful statement all their own.

The scherzo third movement was exciting; how amazing it is that one who was already considerably affected by deafness (in 1803, the year of the Eroica’s composition) could write such music, with all its subtleties and variety. The tricky horn calls in this movement came off perfectly.

The finale is notable for the extensive use of syncopation. These passages and the clarion call responses are such unexpected features of a classical symphony. If we were not so familiar with it, we might find these quite comical. They are certainly warm-hearted and entertaining, as are the dance-like passages that follow. But Beethoven never lets us wallow for long. Soon, more aggressive themes interrupt, and the dance passages change their modality to the minor. The development of the themes is quite astonishing. More off-beat music from oboe followed, the orchestra taking up the theme in a heavy, almost parody fashion. After lots of magic of all kinds, the triumphant conclusion arrived, again syncopated.

Edo de Waart and the orchestra gave us a magnificent rendition of this ground-breaking symphony. Not only did the audience afford the conductor prolonged and enthusiastic applause, orchestra members did the same.

 

 

 

 

After fifty-seven years of public neglect – Farquhar’s First Symphony from the NZSM and Ken Young

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
RARITIES AND ROMANCE

Martin Riseley (violin)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

MOZART – Overture “The Magic Flute”
BEETHOVEN – Romance for Violin and Orchestra in G Major
FAURE – Masques et Bergamasques
YOUNG – In Memoriam David Farquhar
FARQUHAR – Symphony No.1

Basilica of the Sacred Heart
Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 14th April 2016

At last! – the drought has been broken! – the well has been newly dug! – and the field has been freshly ploughed! So, just what, you’re bemusedly thinking, am I on about this time round? I’ll tell you! – David Farquhar’s First Symphony, performed only once previously in concert in 1959, has finally received its SECOND public performance! – that makes, by my reckoning, fifty-seven years of shameful, and never-to-be-restored neglect! Well, there’s always a “better-late-than-never” component to this sort of thing, provided that whatever it is that’s been neglected actually delivers the goods when given the chance.

That chance was given the work in truly resplendent fashion by maestro Ken Young and his redoubtable band of heroes in the NZ School of Music Orchestra at Wellington’s Sacred Heart Basilica in Hill St, last Thursday evening. Farquhar’s Symphony shared the programme with several other items, in the first half an overture (Mozart’s Magic Flute), a miniature concertante work (Beethoven’s Second Romance for Violin and Orchestra) and a suite of incidental pieces by Gabriel Faure (Masques et Bergamasques). Then, after the interval the symphony was appropriately prefaced by a work for brass ensemble titled In Memoriam David Farquhar, one written by Ken Young in 2007 shortly after the composer’s death.

The effect of all of this was to judiciously “prepare the way” for the symphony – first came the overture whose mix of gravitas, festivity and fun shook and stirred all of the venue’s ambiences to perfection, followed by the violin-and-orchestra piece which delightfully brought out solo and ripieno textures to maximum effect. Though I confess to finding Faure’s Masques et Bergamasques of lesser interest than I did its first-half companions, I was still grateful for the opportunity of hearing something not often performed in the concert-hall. The most startling precursor to the symphony was, however, the In Memoriam David Farquhar piece, one which made a splendidly sombre and valedictory impression. So, when the time came to begin the symphony, our ears were nicely primed for what was to follow.

A few comments regarding the performances – I enjoyed the rhythmic “snap” of the chording at the very opening of the Mozart Overture, and the beautiful hues of both the wind and brass amid the string figurations, leading to the allegro – the conductor’s luftpause caught some of the players on the hop at the start, but things soon settled down, with crisp ensemble and plenty of ear-catching dynamic variation from the players. The voices tumbled over one another nicely throughout the “second-half” exchanges, and the trombones and timpani made the most of their moments towards the end – lovely playing.

Violinist Martin Riseley seemed to my ears a shade tense at the very beginning of the Beethoven Romance, his phrasing a little too tightly-wound for comfort – his second entry seemed to unwind the double-stopping rather more warmly and relaxedly, and the orchestra replied beautifully, the horns sounding particularly mellifluous. I enjoyed the capriciousness of the alternating “gypsy” episode, the violin-playing sweetly leading things back to the reprise of the opening, the music none the worse for its little romantic “adventure”.

Faure’s divertissement Masques et Bergamasques (“Maskers and Revellers”) originally included a piece that became one of his most well-known works, the Pavane, but it was published separately – the suite from the original 1919 stage work consists of just four movements, three of which come from a long-abandoned (1869) symphony, and one, the Pastorale, newly composed. We heard a bright, perky Overture, a limpid, atmospheric Minuet, with a grandly ceremonial Trio, a vigorous, high-stepping Gavotte also sporting a Trio, one with a beautiful melody, and finally a Pastorale, the only newly-composed piece, a flowing tune on strings nicely augmented by winds, followed by piquant phrases suggesting touches of melancholy. I thought it all pleasant enough without being greatly memorable.

Not so Ken Young’s In Memoriam David Farquhar, a piece for brass ensemble which immediately struck a deep and richly resonant vein of serious intent, while avoiding sentimentality. Trumpets took the themes to begin with then allowed the trombones some glory, the music featuring some well-rounded solos from both instruments. Composer Ken Young sought our pardon at presenting a piece of his own music at the concert, though he was forgiven readily under the circumstances. He also introduced the Symphony, making no secret of his admiration for and belief in the work as one of the most significant pieces of orchestral music to come out of this country.

Right from the opening bars of the work one sensed the purpose and focus of the sounds coming from the players, who were obviously inspired by the occasion – the opening phrase’s wonderfully angular and whimsical falling fifth/rising seventh combination here immediately opened up the music’s vistas to a range of possibilities, such as a delicious brass fanfare which the strings took over and tossed around. Then the orchestra suddenly lurched into a syncopated, upwardly progressive theme which galvanizes the music’s trajectories, the brass taking their cue, and excitedly giving the theme a Holst-like welcome.

Ken Young imbued each of these ideas with plenty of thrust and accent, the angularities building up the music to its last great climax, and to a kind of breakthrough into a strange and resonant ambient realm – a magical moment, as if one had suddenly looked up from some all-engrossing preoccupation and discovered that it was already evening. The players, after piling on their energies in layers, beautifully enabled a kind of glowing, almost crepuscular atmosphere, a territory to where the music was obviously headed, the opening angular theme now sounding like a bugle call heralding a fulfilled purpose.

To the second movement, now, and a world of magical and disconcerting transformations – ghostly shivers, mutterings and dry-as-dust timpani at the outset suddenly were swept up by toccata-like chattering fanfares which disconcertingly broke into dance mode a la commedia dell’arte, the dancers laughingly and mockingly circumventing the phantom figures of the opening, who eventually banded together and hoarsely cried “Enough!”

Here, Young and his musicians found exactly the right blend of mystery and sharp-edged attack which this music required to “speak” and work its enchantment. They brought off episode after episode with great aplomb, especially the sequence involving the Wagner-like brasses and chattering winds which conjured up Battle-of-Britain-like scenes, Spitfires and Hurricanes bursting though the clouds like avenging Valkyries. Again the commedia dell’arte dancers appeared, with their ironic laughter echoing down the music’s passageways, putting the portentous brasses to flight with a final flourish – a sequence of delicious ironies and enigmas, the orchestral writing masterly in every way.

Equally heroic was the orchestra’s full-blooded response to the finale’s tremendous “land uplifted high” gestures and textures, right from the moment the trumpet sounded the “call” to action. No more epic and heroic orchestral writing can be found in a home-grown orchestral work than in this movement, and after a trenchant ascent with the struggle made manifest every step of the way we were taken to the heights, and left there in wonderment at the place we’d reached and the wide-reaching range and scope of the journey.

I felt at the piece’s conclusion (a deeply-felt silence grew most movingly out of the final bars) that no more thrilling and satisfying realization of this long-neglected and deservedly relished work could have been achieved than here. Very great honour to Ken Young and to the musicians of the NZSM Orchestra, who enabled this music to come to life once more with the kind of commitment and sense of adventure and occasion that would have gladdened the composer’s heart.

Committed and successful concert of Russian classics from Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Rachel Hyde with Helene Pohl (violin)

Khachaturian: Adagio from the ballet, Spartacus
Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No 2 in G minor, Opus 63
Borodin: Symphony No 2 in B minor

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 10 April, 2:30 pm

I was prevented from getting to the first half of this concert, which, with the tough though splendid Prokofiev concerto with Helene Pohl, would obviously have been the highlight.

But Borodin is no stroll through the birch forest either.

The Prokofiev concerto had an interesting provenance, as the composer later recounted: “The number of places in which I wrote the concerto shows the kind of nomadic concert-tour life I led then. The main theme of the 1st movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the 2nd movement at Voronezh, the orchestration was finished in Baku and the premiere was given in Madrid.”

The second concerto is more attractive and lyrical than the first but there is much that is complex and difficult and it is brave and ambitious for an amateur orchestra to tackle; and no easy matter even for a soloist such as Helene Pohl, one of New Zealand’s most polished and cultivated violinists. It’s a fine, strong work, calling for a fastidious and brilliant violinist and I very much regret having missed it, especially in what I gather was such an emotionally committed performance.

Spies told me that, although there were inevitable glitches in the concerto – in the orchestral playing, it was considered a great success, very well received by the audience and certainly an achievement and rewarding experience for orchestra and conductor.

The concert had opened with the famous (‘Onedin Line’) Adagio from Khachaturian’s Spartacus which was well within the capacities of the orchestra; as someone said, it just played itself.

I was impressed at once by the richness of the string ensemble that opens Borodin’s best-known symphony; quickly followed by carefully articulated horns – four, as scored, and then more general wind entries. I gather that the four horn players are using new instruments, and their work, for an amateur orchestra, was surprisingly accomplished.

Rachel Hyde achieved a really characteristic Russian sound that lay somewhere between Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov; perhaps it occasionally lost its grip after the development phase got under way, but there was a clear feeling for the music’s shape. The second movement is a Scherzo of intriguing irregularity with a strikingly different Allegretto in the middle, and that was exploited satisfyingly.

The orchestra stopped to retune between second and third movements, breaking the flow a bit; but the reward was an Andante movement of considerable charm, opening with nice playing by clarinet and harp and soon a fine horn solo; and other wind players also had rewarding solo opportunities. The strings led the long, warm melody that rather dominates the movement which, at the end, merges curiously into the last movement without a break. The Allegro finale had striking energy, characterized by repeated short motifs of a pentatonic character that chased each other from one section to another.

Although Borodin thinned out the brass parts when he revised the symphony two years after its 1877 premiere, a performance like this in a limited acoustic, does not produce sounds from brass and percussion that are exactly refined or subtle. Nevertheless, listening between the notes, so to speak, the playing emerged as well-rehearsed, committed and energetic.

Though I had not heard what I guess was really the most interesting, even exciting, music in the concert, what I heard was admirable, and what I heard about, even more so.

A view of the world – Edo de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MAHLER – Symphony No.3 in D Minor

Charlotte Hellekant (mezzo-soprano)
NZSO Chorale / Wellington Young Voices
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Edo de Waart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 2nd April 2016

Gustav Mahler’s famous assertion to his fellow-composer Jean Sibelius, that “symphony is like the world – it should contain everything” is nowhere better demonstrated than in the former’s Third Symphony, significantly the longest of the composer’s essays in this form. The music seeks to acknowledge every natural creative force in the universe throughout its six movements – in fact, Mahler originally intended to go further and include a childlike vision of afterlife based on a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn called “Das Himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), but eventually thought better of the scheme, saving his setting of the poem for the Fourth Symphony instead.

To go with this symphony’s vast duration, the composer called upon a large orchestra, joined by a mezzo-soprano soloist, womens’ voices and a childrens’ choir. With such forces expounding along such lengths, one couldn’t help but feel awed by the range and scope of the experience in listening to the work – and especially when, as with the performance we witnessed on Satruday evening in Wellington, the response from orchestra players, voices and conductor thrillingly matched the composer’s vision in intensity, brilliance and depth of feeling.

I thought the key to this occasion’s success lay with conductor Edo de Waart, who, making his Wellington debut with the orchestra as its Music Director, enabled orchestral playing which brought out the work’s sheer range of expression, from rapt stillnesses and breathtaking beauties to rumbustious energies and, in places, disturbingly raw, almost panic-stricken upheavals – indeed, a performance in which, to quote the composer’s own words once again, “the whole of nature finds a voice”.

Right from the start the playing gave notice that the performance meant business, with horns vigorously awakening at first the percussive instrumental textures, and then the deep, black-browed heavy brass, their grim mutterings punctuated by upward-rushing fissures of agitated string-tone and sombre calls from the watchful trumpets, alert to all dangers. From these seismic upheavals grew the subterranean seeds of a march-rhythm, at first held in check by a superbly-voiced trombone solo (stunningly delivered by David Bremner), but then eventually bursting forth and dominating the whole movement.

My overriding impression of the opening was of elemental forces being unleashed, a process which seemed to gather focus and intensity as the music proceeded – however rapt and hushed the ambience in certain places, the weight and energy of that which had gone before was picked up in a trice, with no signs of exhaustion over an enormous time-span. Though occasionally interrupted by violent outbursts and episodes of brooding calm, the music’s course was not to be denied, with conductor and players bringing things to a kind of fever-pitch of ecstatic joy by the movement’s end.

Then came a complete change of mood for the second movement, originally titled “What the Flowers tell Me” – where there had been granite-like strength and exuberant energy, there was now tenderness and delicacy, the wind-playing properly “pastoral” (NZSO principals Robert Orr, Bridget Douglas and Patrick Barry readily evoking the composer’s beloved meadows and wildflowers), spiced with occasional details from elsewhere suggesting occasional thistles and stinging nettles, with insect life and sudden wind-flurries giving an extra edge to the pleasures in places. After some scherzando-like interactions,  everything was rounded off most romantically by the strings, with Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s violin having the last word.

Over pizzicato strings the winds again dominated the opening measures of the “Forest Creatures” movement, the clarinet perkily sounding the octave-leap call whose resonances came to haunt every far-flung corner of this sound-world. For the moment there were rumbustious triplet-rhythmed sequences jauntily bounced along by the strings and percussion and answered by shouts of glee from the brass. The transition from these good-humoured high-jinks to a state of almost “charged”, breath-held expectancy was beautifully managed by conductor de Waart, the strings beautifully preparing the way for the off-stage flugelhorn, sounded as if from the realms of enchantment by Michael Kirgan with superbly-controlled playing (from where I was sitting I thought the sounds just a tad TOO distant – but better that, I think, than their being too close!). Whatever the case, the playing and the atmosphere created was, purely and simply, to die for.

As happens at the conclusion of the scherzo movement in the composer’s previous  “Resurrection” Symphony, there’s in THIS scherzo a similarly rapid gathering-together of forces resembling an oncoming hurricane or tidal-wave, one which here broke across the orchestral soundscape, scattering all idyllic imageries and feelings, and alerting us to nature’s power and grandeur – as one commentator puts it, the presence of the great god Pan is here made manifest, and so it seemed on this occasion,  though without reaching QUITE the extremes of  elemental force that my mind’s ear could have imagined. No matter, for it was sufficiently forceful and disturbing to banish the day and evoke the deepest and darkest part of the night – the composer’s setting of the “Midnight Song” from Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”.

This was as great a contrast with what went before as was the second movement of the symphony to the first – we were plunged by the “Midnight Song” into the deepest recesses of our consciousness – and if the depths of those silences carried some resonances from the frenetic pop-music activities taking place adjacent to the concert hall along the waterfront, the wonder of it was (we afterwards marvelled) that  these thudding pulsations had such minimal impact upon our Mahlerian sound-world. I caught myself throwing occasional glances at the percussion to see whether the bass drummer was making a pianissimo roll of which I was unaware – but that was the only distraction, thanks in part to the compelling intensities of what OUR musicians were doing throughout.

Mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, brought an appropriate deep-voiced dignity to her tones, ably supported by the NZSO horns, the ambience suitably dark and subterranean, the sounds from the world’s depths – “Die Welt is tief und tiefer, als der Tag gedcht!” (The world is deeper than the day can tell). If some of her softer singing was difficult to “catch”, the sound still conveyed much of her words’ meaning – and she delivered a heartwarming surge of emotion together with the strings at “Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit” (For Joy wants all Eternity, deep and profound”), which beautifully subsided into the silence as the “Bimm-bamm” of the childrens’ choir began.

The singing from both the NZSO Chorale and the Wellington Young Voices was exemplary – I’ve previously heard no finer performance of this, either live or on record. The timbres of each choir at once blended and contrasted with those of the other so very deliciously, alternating beautifully with the mezzo’s tones; and the brighter flecks of texture and colour provided by winds, brass and percussion, including the orchestral bells, raised high above the orchestra, completed the celestial effect. All credit to the choir trainers, to Mark Dorrell with the NZSO Chorale, and to Christine Argyle and Anya Nazaruk with the Wellington Young Voices, for their performances.

To my initial alarm, Maestro de Waart kept  the choirs standing for the first few minutes of the orchestral finale – but then, having preserved the rapt mood of the whispered strings-only opening to the finale, did what I hoped he would eventually do, which was to motion them to sit at the beginning of a new orchestral “episode”.** Only Mahler could get away with a finale such as this, but the conductor’s ability to sustain the line of the music certainly helped with generating a sense of its unity and eloquence – we were aware of de Waart’s grip of the piece’s architecture throughout, and of how each section grew out of the one before it, so that there was an inevitability about the coda’s arrival which felt like a proper “homecoming”. This having been done most resplendently, the reception accorded the Maestro at the end was heartwarming – flowers, coloured streamers and a general sense of festivity and true significance helped make the occasion a festive and memorable one, and, of course, whetted the appetite most positively for the music-making yet to come.

**I mention this because I’ve never forgotten the first performance of this symphony “live” that I ever heard, given by Franz-Paul Decker with the NZSO, during the course of which he refused to allow his choir to sit down throughout the WHOLE of the finale –  instead, leaving them standing there for we in the audience to sympathize with to the point of distraction regarding the music, and thus completely negating the purpose of the exercise!

A few days in Sydney for opera and symphony

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Pinchgut Opera: L’amant jaloux by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry
Musical director: Erin Helyard; stage director: Chas Rader-Shieber
City Recital Hall, Sydney
Thursday 3 December 2015

Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edo de Waart  – two concerts
Preludes to acts I and III of Lohengrin; Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra by Joseph Jongen; Also sprach Zarathustra (Strauss)

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
Friday 27 November, 8pm

Edwards: The White Ghost; Mozart: Piano Concerto  No 24 in C minor, K 491; Elgar: Symphony No 1 in A flat, Op 55

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House

Friday 4 December, 8pm

Readers with sharp eyes will have noticed my absence from the pages of Middle C over the past month. It is partly to be explained by my little trip to Sydney to fulfil a long-standing ambition to see the work of a small Sydney opera company, Pinchgut Opera, which specializes in early opera, of the 17th and 18th centuries. When I edited New Zealand Opera News (till 2006), I conscientiously announced their forthcoming productions, and hoped to get myself there. But their once-a-year projects were typically in the first week of December and there were still too many musical and other distractions in Wellington.

The company’s name, by the way, derives from an island of that name in Sydney Harbour, which was used as a prison in the early years, and the prodigality of the rations led to the name which has persisted.

The timing of this year’s second production was especially tempting as it coincided with a couple of concerts by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Edo de Waart.

André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry
The opera was L’amant Jaloux by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry who lived from 1741 to 1813. He was born in Liège and studied in Rome but settled in Paris to become a successful composer of mainly comic opera. He helps to breathe life into seeming opera drought between the death of Rameau till the emergence of the post-Napoleonic composers like Auber, Boieldieu, Hérold, Adam and of course Berlioz (though one should not ignore foreigners like Gluck, Cherubini, Piccinni, Spontini and Rossini).

There is a ballet suite drawn by Thomas Beecham from Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-Lion that gets an occasional airing on radio. When I was in Liège many years ago to catch a performance of Rossini’s William Tell, I was surprised to find in front of the Opera, a statue, not of César Franck who was also born in Liège, but of Grétry. In fact I could find no memorial, plaque on a birthplace or a street named for Franck!

L’amant Jaloux
L’amant Jaloux, ou les fausses apparences which premiered in 1778, is based on a very popular 18th century English play, The Wonder: a Woman keeps her Secret by Susannah Centlivre.

An entry on it is to be found in the Penguin Opera Guide, even if not in many other opera dictionaries. The Penguin remarks that “Beaumarchais-Da Ponte-Mozart” borrowed from it (possible as The Marriage of Figaro was composed in 1784).

In an admirable programme essay, musical director Erin Helyard (who till recently was well-known here as lecturer in historical performance practice at the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University) wrote that “it was Grétry who, more than any other operatic composer, really managed to unite Italianate vocality with French word-smithery”, which was the result of the impact of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona which had finally reached France in the early 1750s, instigating what was called the Querelle des bouffons, the battle between French and Italian operatic styles which soon became politicized in France as between conservatives and liberals.

This piece shows Grétry as having succeeded in merging the French and Italian styles, resulting in sounds that come close to Mozart and the story not too remote from Figaro and Così fan tutte.

The story: Spanish merchant Don Lopez, for financial reasons, needs to stop his widowed daughter Léonore (only 20 years old) from remarrying. The object of her affections is the ridiculously jealous Don Alonze; his first suspect turns out to be his own sister Isabelle, a friend of Léonore, who is protecting her from her guardian who want to marry her by force. There’s a dashing French officer and a clever maid who confuses the names of the two young women which reignites Alonze’s jealousy as he hears the French officer serenading the wrong girl. In the nick of time Alonze comes into a big inheritance thus removing Lopez’s objections to his daughter’s marriage, and the identities of the young ladies are clarified, leaving no impediments to the two couples marrying.

Never mind: it’s fast-moving; the acting was very animated and, as far as possible in a farce, the piece expresses a basic sincerity and humanity that emerged clearly enough through the surface nonsense. The spoken dialogue was in pretty clear English, sung parts in French with witty surtitles;

The staging was droll and clever with simple sets, dominated by a long diagonal wall studded with trapdoors that supply bizarre exits and entrances for those being hidden or making untoward entrances.

The singers
The six principals were splendidly voiced, mostly Australian singers with respectable international careers: David Greco, eight years with important ensembles in Europe, made an immediate impact as the domineering father, Don Lopez, an imposing voice and presence; Jacinte the Maid was sung by Jessica Aszodi, a perfect fit in the soubrette mould, shrewd, quick-witted. The main female role of Léonore was sung by Celeste Lazarenko who’s amassed an impressive range of roles in Britain and France as well as Australia: a vivid presence with a brilliant soprano voice. Ed Lyon (Don Alonze) has sung extensively with William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants as well as interesting roles at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden and with several Continental companies. Alonze’s sister and Léonore’s friend Isabelle was sung by Alexandra Oomens whose career has so far been limited to Australia, though her performance was hardly less striking than her more experienced colleagues: the three women, as a trio, offered some of the most delightful episodes of the evening. Andrew Goodwin was well cast as Florival, who is the imagined rival of Alonze, but eventually gets the right girl (Alonze’s sister); his career has ranged from Madrid to Moscow, including The Rake’s Progress with the Auckland Philharmonia.

Music director Erin Helyard was focus of all eyes (and known to a Wellingtonian as lecturer till recently in historical performance practice at the New Zealand School of Music), a small, vital, energetic man who stood at a harpsichord and hammered away at the ‘continuo’ part supporting the Orchestra of the Antipodes which contributed equally to the production’s success, with beautiful authentic instruments (the programme book drew attention to their using baroque pitch, A=430kh). The orchestra’s sound, at close quarters (in the front row) was splendid and the ensemble of voices wonderfully integrated.

I just loved every minute.

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
While I might be tempted to say this opera production eclipsed the two Sydney Symphony Orchestra concerts I heard, that wouldn’t be true. An opera performance is usually more engrossing than a normal concert by an orchestra or chamber group, if only because it involves more senses, but these two concerts, conducted by Edo de Waart, were splendid; anyway: a different orchestra and different town.

I had missed a solo recital in the Concert Hall by organist Olivier Latry the day before my first symphony concert, but he played the organ part Jongen’s Sinfonia Concertante as well as in Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. It allowed me to reflect with some bitterness, about the feeble, irresolute behavior of the Wellington City Council which has removed the great organ from the Town Hall and is incapable of resolving to carry out the necessary strengthening of the building so that Wellington is able to hear a concert organ, important in many orchestral and choral works, not to mention concerts in one of the world’s finest traditional concert halls.

One of the curiosities of my trip was to encounter two rather obscure composers both of whom were born in Liège: Grétry, above, and now the composer of the big organ work played by the SSO and organist Olivier Latry, Joseph Jongen.

It’s curious that a piece that is probably not typical of most of Joseph Jongen’s output has probably become his best known work. It was commissioned to inaugurate the restoration of the huge organ in the Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia in 1928. This was a performance that showed vividly how important the existence of a real pipe organ of concert dimensions and capacities is for a city with any pretentions to being of musical consequence. The space afforded the music a fullness, clarity and excitement that cannot be expected in many churches, even one with as fine and versatile an organ as that in the Anglican cathedral in Wellington.

In the second half, Edo de Waart demonstrated his special affinity with the Strauss tone poem, thrillingly expansive in the famous opening, as well as, in turns, warmly human and ethereally mystical elsewhere in the great work.

The concert was curiously designed, starting with the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin and ending with the Prelude to Act III. Their sharply contrasting characters fitted their roles most effectively; that they hardly raised any expectations of the music drama that follows each prelude was probably just as well; both work perfectly well as stand-alone concert pieces.

Edwards, Elgar and Mozart
The second concert, a week later, was for me rather less rewarding, dominated as it was by Elgar’s First Symphony. Though De Waart achieved a warm and beautiful performance, the cloying, grandiose, imperialist atmosphere that lies behind at least its first and last movements, I find hard to stomach. Happily, the conductor’s Dutch pianist colleague Ronald Brautigam occupied most of the first half with Mozart’s piano concert No 24 in C Minor. Both conductor and pianist approached it in a calm, rapturous spirit which I found deeply satisfying.

The concert had opened with an Australian piece I didn’t know by a composer with whom I was quite familiar – one of the country’s best-known and most popular contemporary composers, Ross Edwards. I came across his violin concerto, entitled Maninya, many years ago. It is actually one of five pieces written in what Edwards calls his ‘maninya’ style: the word means ‘dance’ or ‘chant’, and the work played here was White Ghost Dancing. The aboriginal people described the early European settlers as ‘white ghosts’ and Edwards wrote that “the concept of a white ghost came to symbolize non-indigenous Australia’s innate aboriginality – its capacity to transform and heal itself through spiritual connectedness with the earth”.

His music is immediately engaging, both through its infectious rhythmic character and tunefulness and a certain instrumental colour that recurs from time to time like a friendly gesture.

I was interested to hear Eva Radich’s interview with De Waart after I got home, in which he commented on his programming device of placing any ‘difficult’ work in the first half and the popular symphony or concerto in the second, to prevent those afraid of the unfamiliar from leaving at the interval.

De Waart has been a major presence in the orchestral world for a long time, with a large and impressive discography. I look forward to his tenure with the NZSO.

Rites of Spring – from the sublime to “cor blimey” in all respects

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Rite of Spring

Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending
Walton: Cello Concerto
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jaime Martín, with Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin) and Jakob Koranyi (cello)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 20 November 2015, 6.30pm

 

Spring was celebrated before a nearly full Michael Fowler Centre on Friday.  Though the very popular Vaughan Williams work and the famous Stravinsky ballet score were composed within a short space of time of each other, their musical languages were vastly different, yet they both in their own ways celebrated spring, one in the English countryside, the other in a primitive Russian past.  Thus the programme was rather a case of the sublime to the cor-blimey – not that I am complaining.

 

It was good to have the orchestra’s concertmaster as soloist.  Many of us recall his predecessor in that position, Wilma Smith, playing the Vaughan Williams work.  Naturally, this performance differed from hers.  Leppänen began very softly, with the medium-sized string orchestra plus a few woodwind instruments and two horns making up the accompanying ensemble.

 

Apparently it is not only in New Zealand that this work is an immense favourite with audiences.  Here, it nearly always rates at or near the top of the annual end-of-year ‘Settling the score’ programme on Radio New Zealand Concert, in which listeners’ selections are ranked in order of  popularity.

 

This was very fine violin playing, if not having quite the warmth of tone that I anticipated, though it did warm up over time.  The orchestra’s contribution was always in keeping with the mood; the horns’ subtle interjections were splendid, as were the flourishes for triangle near the end.  The violin’s solo finishing section was gloriously delicate in its lilting tunefulness, and was greeted with tumultuous applause.

 

Walton’s cello concerto was not a work that I knew.  It was appropriate to have another English work after something so English as the Vaughan Williams.  It required a normal full orchestra – though it still appeared comparatively small, set among all the places required for the Stravinsky.

 

A gorgeous quiet opening from the cello immediately concentrated attention on the soloist (dressed quite informally compared with the orchestra members in their tails and white bow ties, who again were contrasted with the conductor in a business suit and tie).  The first movement, unusually, was the slowest (moderato), and conveyed a dreamy and meditative mood; the mute was employed for much of the movement, giving the music a restrained character.

 

The second movement, allegro appassionata, was faster and more dynamic.  Quite a lot of athleticism was required of the soloist, expressing the tempo marking.  Brass, timpani and percussion contributed largely to the driving mood.  There was pizzicato from the cellist, then a very animated bowed passage.  Koranyi (from Sweden) expressed the varying moods elegantly and with panache, though he did not have the big sound to be heard from some cellists.  However, he met Walton’s considerable demands with style and skill.  According to the programme note, ample as were those for the other works, this movement demonstrated Walton’s enjoyment of shifting accents and changing his metres ‘giving the movement an engaging vivacity and unpredictability’.

 

The third movement (tema ed improvvisazioni) opened soulfully, the soloist accompanied by pizzicato cellos only.  Many of the solo passages were in the high register.  Ravishing woodwind came on the scene; the following solo section had the cellist drawing on a variety of technical skills in short order.  After this sections contemplative close, we were woken by drum rolls and loud brass flourishes.  Another extended solo section called for more double-stopping and great dynamic variation; all this was accompanied by multiple-toned coughs from the audience!  Deep notes from the soloist, along with chanting flutes, were quite thrilling.  Cellos and basses joined in with their own low notes, while the harp contributed delicious timbres, along with those of the xylophone, to end.

 

A very full orchestra, of over 90 players, was required for Stravinsky’s tremendous work.  The brass section included 9 horns (two of the players sometimes playing Wagner tubas) and two full-sized tubas, the woodwind four flutes plus piccolo (sometimes 3+2), four oboes plus four bassoons and contra-bassoon; four clarinets and a bass-clarinet.

 

A century after its composition, the opening of this music (and indeed much else in it) is still startling, and must have been extraordinary at its first performance – and indeed (to impresario Diaghilev’s delight) there was famously a riot.  This music was something the like of which the audience would never have heard before.  I admire the French for their boldness and expressive trait in showing their displeasure, and on the other side, their admiration for the work.  How often today do we get any demonstration of dislike of music?  We’re far too self-conscious and timid!    Not only the dancers must have been very fit for such energetic rhythms, the string players especially needed to be fit to play their fast figures leaping from string to string.

 

This was the most dynamic, exciting performance of the work that I have heard, and the players were absolutely on top of their game.  This is a work that you experience rather than simply enjoy.  It has probably not been surpassed in the annals of Western music for energy, dynamism and sheer exuberance.  No wonder so many sound shields were in use behind members of the brass and woodwind sections of the orchestra!   There was so much remarkable playing from them, and the thrust and vigour are unlike anything else in music.  The score is crammed full of contrasts.   A section of off-stage brass was very effective in the second part of the work.   Insistent rhythms are a major feature of the work, and come up in various of its 15 sections.

 

Compared with other of Stravinsky’s works for ballet, there is little melody in Rite of Spring.  The interest lies elsewhere.  Despite the huge demands, and the large number of players, the orchestra played as one.  The performance received a rapturous reception, not least from conductor Martín, who selected individual players for a handshake before standing sections of the orchestra one by one.  Of the strings, he singled out the violas.  But there was no mistaking that the principal bassoon, who introduces the whole work with plangent notes in a high register, won his especial favour.

 

 

Wonderful NZSO programme of masterpieces from the heartland of classical music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jaime Martín with Garrick Ohlsson – piano

Beethoven: Leonore Overture No 3, Op 72b
Mozart: Symphony No 35 in D, K 385 (Haffner)
Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor, Op 15

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 13 November 6:30 pm

I had the feeling that both conductor and pianist had, contrary to the indications in the programme, been to New Zealand before. It looks as if I was wrong about Jaime Martín (I wonder if I’m confused by J Laredo of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio), but I can clearly recall Ohlsson’s visit though I haven’t found evidence in my large file of programmes.

This however, was a monumental concert, given totally to three unassailable masterpieces; it’s the sort of programme that one imagines all music lovers wish was much more common than it is.

The third Leonore Overture was a splendid choice with which to open. It’s the most dramatic of the four that Beethoven wrote for Fidelio over the space of a decade, though Leonore No 2 is the same length and uses most of the same material and deserves to be aired, along with the No 1 and the last one, actually called Fidelio, that Beethoven wrote for the final, successful version of his opera in 1814. It opened with a fine emphatic chord subsiding to beautiful flute- and oboe-led phrases from Bridget Douglas and Robert Orr that use the melody of Florestan’s first aria.

One’s attention was quickly drawn to Martín’s rearrangement of the orchestra, basses on the left and given licence for supercharged command, the distinctive classical timpani, at the level of the strings, demanding attention; second violins front right with violas behind them. Donald Armstrong was in the Concertmaster’s seat

The overture’s depiction of elements of the opera was more than usually vivid, with the string body at its most opulent, horns and trumpets, the only brass in the score, supplying more than enough martial character. The two forays from the off-stage trumpet seemed to come from slightly different quarters, a nice theatrical touch, if my ears were telling me the truth. And the triumphant Coda was more exciting than I felt it reasonable to expect.

It’s a long time since I heard the Haffner live, a favourite from the days when as a student I used to pay nine pence for an hour to explore music in the old Central Library’s record room at the east end of the main upstairs reference room.

Though string numbers were reduced – 12 first violins and normal decreases from that – there were no real concessions to ‘authenticity’ and I enjoyed the greater opulence of the orchestra, which echoed the sort of full-blooded performance we’d heard in the Beethoven. Even so, the idyllically charming Andante was played with singular delicacy, the long piano passages by violins laid out with particular beauty. The whole movement seems to embody the quintessential Mozart: civilized, melodically rapturous, offering room for subtle and delicate gestures at many places.

Such unobtrusive gestures added interest in the Menuetto too, again a movement (anthologized in piano albums) that seems to speak in unmistakably graceful, Mozartian accents, particularly in the Trio. In the last movement, the smaller classical timpani that the orchestra obtained some years ago were delightfully conspicuous, trumpets high and bright, with a feeling that both horns and trumpets were travelling a little to the side of the rest of the orchestra – meaning to suggest that they lent an extra note of enchantment.

Hearing this again confirmed my particular affection for this symphony and made me wish our orchestras programmed the dozen or so best Mozart symphonies routinely.

Brahms’s first piano concerto occupied the entire second half. Modern timpani replaced the classical ones now; as you might infer from references to their contributions in the earlier works, Larry Reese took his role seriously; here in the Brahms, though they are clearly scored to be heard prominently, too seriously? It suited my personal taste, but I’m conscious of harbouring an excessive pleasure in loud low sounds not perhaps shared by everyone.

After the mighty orchestral opening, the piano enters with singular modesty, and Ohlssen did it right, somewhat matter-of-factly, nothing flashy. Soon Brahms was supplying Ohlsson with material for more weighty pianism which he dealt with in a characteristically muscular manner, soon in the company of thrilling, throaty horns. The piano was always admirably in balance with the orchestra and it was reassuring to sense a fine meeting of minds over tempi, expressive gestures, dynamics, the orchestra seeming to rejoice in whatever spectacle or meditative moments the pianist took slight liberties with.

The Adagio is a gorgeous movement, offering the rhapsodic Brahms rich opportunities which Ohlsson handled with gentleness and restraint; again horns often provided important counterweight to the piano and other winds. Pairs of clarinets or oboes accompany and precede some of the most rapturous piano passages that lead to the broad fortissimo in the latter part of the movement. The last couple of minutes of ecstatically prolonged meditation were spell-binding.

The boisterous Finale is then emotionally welcome; though it’s about 12 minutes long, it’s one of those episodes that one longs to go on forever, and the performance by orchestra and pianist never had me in doubt that I was lucky to have been born in a time a place where it could be so splendidly played: in a city with a great symphony orchestra, and in a post-Brahms era, and before the end of civilization as we know it.

Applause was long and impassioned and Ohlsson chose to play an encore that could not have been in greater contrast: Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor: restrained, poetic, perfect.