Tag: orchestral

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.

 

Providence delivers the goods, courtesy of Houstoun, fireworks and Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
PROVIDENCE – Balakirev, Khachaturian,Tchaikovsky
(and, introducing the concert, the Arohanui Strings)

INTRODUCTION – The Arohanui Strings (Alison Eldridge, director)
(arrangements of Dvorak, Grieg and Beethoven)
BALAKIREV – Overture on Three Russian Themes
KHACHATURIAN – PIano Concerto (1936)
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.5 in E Minor Op.64

Michael Houstoun (piano)
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, November 7th, 2015

What with the Arohanui Strings delighting us at the concert’s beginning, and the city’s annual Guy Fawkes’ firework display illuminating the interval in a most spectacular way, this was an event which had plenty of what economists like to call “added value” – but it’s all part of what we’ve come to expect from an Orchestra Wellington occasion! In other words there’s nothing routine about what happens, even when there are no such extras or “frills”, but always a real and vibrant sense of a concert’s uniqueness and its attendant music-making joys.

Yes, there are people (and I’m usually one of them) for whom the idea of having a “presenter” who will introduce the concert and interview the conductor is something that potentially intrudes and trivializes the music-listening experience (“You can read a lot of that stuff in the programme” grumbled a friend to me at the interval) – though, despite myself, I found myself actually warming to the “host” Nigel Collins and his charming, somewhat wry and humourful delivery, squirm-making though I often find processes such as interviews and “potted musical histories” in these situations. A light touch seems to me to work best – and while I think a concert ought to be about music and music alone, I can enjoy something of a spoken nature that’s brief, witty and “of a piece” with what the evening is about.

But a truly heart-warming aspect of the evening was conveyed by the activities of the Sistema-inspired trainee group run by Orchestra Wellington violist Allison Eldredge, whose senior members sat with the orchestra to play their introductory programme items – arrangements of parts of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, and Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, enthusiastically delivered! Then it was the turn of the group’s younger members to join in (for a while, cuteness reigned!), playing an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” , also with great gusto and commitment. Marc Taddei rightly made a point of singling out Allison Eldredge to receive special audience acclaim for her work before she left the platform with her young charges.

So, the hall had been duly “warmed”, and our ears musically sensitized, by this time, and we were then able to plunge fully into Mily Balakirev’s absorbing take on three prominent Russian melodies, two of which I was able to recognize instantly, via Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. After a throat-clearing introduction, using a fragment of the second theme “The Silver Birch” (used by Tchaikovsky in the finale of his Fourth Symphony), the first, broadly lyrical theme was played on the winds, over an ambient string sostenuto, reminding me of the beginning of Borodin’s orchestral piece “In the Steppes of Central Asia”, the sounds romantic and truly gorgeous, especially with the horn and then the strings joining in with the melody.

The “Silver Birch” theme suddenly jumped into the picture, its snappy, three-beat rendition different to that of Tchaikovsky’s somewhat more conventional treatment, and its orchestrations enchanting in this performance. Balakirev then cleverly counterpointed the birch tree with his third theme, familiar from the Fourth Tableau of Stravinsky’s ballet “Petroushka”, a folk-song called “There was at the feast”. The two themes played with one another most inventively, the playing by turns affectionate and brilliant, until we were suddenly returned to the first theme’s long-breathed spaces, the sounds dying away into ambient distances.

The piano needed to be moved into place for the concerto, so while that was happening we got the interview, which both host and conductor did their best with – but it was then time for Michael Houstoun to make his appearance, presenting the last of the five Russian works he’d prepared for this series. This was the 1936 Khatchaturian Concerto, a work which (I was to discover) was definitely not everybody’s “glass of tea”. One reviewer of a recent London performance referred to the work as representing the composer at his “turgid worst”, as well as to the slow movement’s “boggy meanders” – which just  goes to show that it takes all sorts to make a world. At the interval my expressions of enthusiasm for the work and its performance were received with mixed reactions, including stony stares from a couple of people who obviously considered I had “lost it” as a music listener, let alone a music critic!

The early Soviet critics thought the work wonderful – “the epitome of modern lyricism…..inner harmony, vitality and folk character”….praising in particular “….the sweep and surge of the themes, and their thematic unity within the structure”. For a while (thanks also to those early recordings by Moura Lympany, who’d introduced the work to Britain in 1940 and William Kapell, who’d followed suit three years later in the United States) the work even began to rival THE Tchaikovsky concerto in popularity.

I had enjoyed what I’d heard of it on recordings, and was especially anxious to hear in concert the “flexatone”, an instrument often used by the film industry to create “spooky” ambiences and accompany supernatural happenings – Khachaturian scored it to “double” the strings in the slow movement of the concerto most affectingly, though at least one famous recording of the work (William Kapell’s) doesn’t use it. To my delight, there it was, or, to be more precise, there two of them were! – each was picked up and played in turn by one of the percussionists for the slow movement’s “big tune”, the change from one instrument to the other suggesting that one instrument was capable of higher (or lower) pitches than the other. Other people may have been slightly repelled by the eeriness of the timbre or its insistent throbbing quality, but I just loved it – and whoever the player was did a wonderful job.

First up, however, was the concerto’s opening movement, with an attention-grabbing orchestral opening seeming to prepare the way for the soloist! – Michael Houstoun managed, for me, to sufficiently command the opening without battering the recurring theme to death, bringing out its echt-Khachaturian quality (we could have equally been listening to tortured sequences of a similar ilk from “Spartacus”), music of a somewhat barbaric character, fiercely folkish, relying on ostinati for a kind of expressive and cumulative effect. The more rhapsodic passages, introduced by an oboe and carried on by a solo cello, gave the music more breathing-space, which the piano appropriately enjoyed in a rhapsodic, improvisatory way. We then enjoyed the cavortings of all kinds by both soloist and orchestra which followed, through wild, manic gallopings and an imposing return to the assertive opening theme.

But there was more – cascading tones and timbres gently tumbled us down with Ravel-like delicacy, Houstoun and Taddei taking as much care with these ambient balances as with the intersecting of the earlier, more feisty lines, until the bass clarinet nudged the piano towards centre-stage for its cadenza, a solo outpouring of comprehensive range and variety culminating in an exciting scampering passage and an upward flourish bridging in the whole orchestra for the movement’s grand summation. In complete contrast was the slow movement’s opening, strings and bass clarinet beginning a kind of slow waltz, which the piano turned to soulful purpose with its melancholy, folkish theme, one which both the strings and the eerie-sounding flexitone then took up and wrung what seemed like every possible drop of emotion from its stepwise progressions.

Khachaturian does perhaps gild the lily in places later in this movement, piling Pelion upon Ossa with a full-orchestra version of this theme, one introduced by an amazing descending chromatic passage from the pianist! The ensuing full-blooded treatment accorded the music either suggested heartfelt emotion or borderline vulgarity, depending upon the listener’s sympathies and/or antipathies. Whatever the case, it certainly wasn’t dull in this performnce, and left us wanting some resolution after having the emotions spread along a line like a number of exposed shooting-targets. And, right throughout, I found myself lost in admiration at both Michael Houstoun’s impressive command of the material throughout these “fraught’ passages, and the sustained intensity of the orchestral response under Marc Taddei.

The same went for the finale, the musicians throwing themselves at the pounding rhythms of the opening with great élan, Houstoun giving the Shostakovich-like writing of the solo part plenty of energy – here were “the athletic rhythms and luxurious orchestral textures” of the old Record Guide’s notorious 1951 put-down, which went on to sum up the composer’s overall achievement as having a “brash appeal” – rather, I liked a later critic’s description of the concerto as “a rhapsodic glitter of song and dance in kaleidoscopic confrontation”. William Kapell’s and Serge Koussevitsky’s historic 1951 recording (which I hadn’t heard) has long been considered the performance exemplar regarding this work, but on this occasion Houstoun’s and Taddei’s performance carried me along most satisfyingly throughout, right up to the conclusion’s grand apotheosis – I thought it a marvellous and resplendent way to conclude this Russian concerto series!

Then, of course, after the interval (and the fireworks!) we were plunged into the throes of a different, pre-Soviet Russian world with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Marc Taddei had promised us a “fresh listen” to this work, and certainly the first movement’s urgent, sprightly, forward-straining progress allowed no traces of the lugubrious quality that sometimes hangs about this music – I marvelled at the dexterity of the wind players whose accompanying scale passages in places had to be played as if sounding like rushing water, at this tempo! – but it was all very exciting! I did find the contrasting string melody a bit charmless, the line hustled along with unseemly haste – but it was certainly all of a piece, and there were no cobwebs left hanging about as the music’s coda strode proudly and haughtily away from us at the end.

I was enchanted with the playing of the slow movement, here, right from the beautifully-wrought depths of feeling at the opening, through to the final heart-stopping clarinet phrase at the end – and I’m willing to bet that Ed Allen’s horn solo was absolutely perfect at rehearsal, treacherous beast that the instrument can be in concert (it was just one note away from perfection, here!). The detailing was, in fact, superb from all instruments, as was the “singing” quality of the strings in places – and (small point) I was so pleased to hear the pizzicato sequence after the movement’s big central climax played “straight” instead of being pulled about unmercifully, as happens in so many performances!

More delight was to be had from the Waltz which followed, in which instruments like the bassoon took their opportunities most beguilingly as did the pair of clarinets sharing a “moment” at one point and a chuckle afterwards.  Of course, it was Tchaikovsky in a most balletic mood – and the scampering strings and winds caught the ambiences perfectly, with the brass magically chiming in at one or two points. Marc Taddei kept things simmering with an attacca into the final movement, the strings lean and focused, the brass noble and respondent, with trumpets gleaming. I was surprised, however, in the light of the first movement’s urgent treatment, to find the finale’s allegro section taken at a relatively relaxed tempo, though I noticed there were moments along the way when the music impulsively thrust forward, and kept its momentum.

The great climax of the allegro with resounding brass fanfares and roaring timpani set the scene for the music’s grand processional, the “fate” theme that had dogged the three previous movements singing gloriously out in a major key, the march swaggering and confident. And the coda here raced the music excitingly to its final, triumphal chords, delivered with all the panache and confidence that the sometimes vacillating and diffident composer would certainly have wanted, and, as we all did at the music’s conclusion, fully appreciated.

An experience to be savoured – Kari Kriikku with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
BOLD WORLDS

– with Kari Kriikku (clarinet)
and Miguel Harth-Bedoya (conductor)

JIMMY LOPEZ – Peru Negro
KIMMO HAKOLA – Clarinet Concerto
WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI – Concerto for Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday, 30th October, 2015

The concert certainly lived up to its title – this was no genteel, well-manicured, orderly assemblage of dulcet, well-rounded tones, but a feisty, attention-grabbing trio of pieces which, thanks to on-the-spot advocacy from concerto soloist, conductor and players, certainly made a lasting impact.

Because of the sheer physicality of each of the works, as well as the presence of a soloist in the second piece who wasn’t backward in coming forward in every sense, the concert couldn’t help but take on something of a music-theatre feel. It usually happens that, whenever an orchestra’s percussion section has a lot to do, a strong element of visceral excitement comes cross to the audience because of the to-ing and fro-ing and the palpable gesturings of the players with, in almost every instance, immediate and spectacular results!

However, it wasn’t only the percussion who were working hard – under Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s energetic and flamboyant direction, every section of the orchestra pulled its weight and more, the players seeming to engage with the business of making the sounds come alive and interact with one another, often to exhilarating effect. The concert’s first piece, Jimmy Lopez’s Perú Negro, was written as a kind of evocation of what’s known as Afro-Peruvian music (a genre developed in the composer’s native Peru in the days when Spanish landowners brought African slaves to South America, thus mingling the cultures and producing various unique creative results, particularly in music).

Peruvian Jimmy Lopez (born in 1978) is a long-time friend of Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and in fact  the work is not only dedicated to the conductor, but has specific motivic figures based upon Harth-Bedoya’s initials. Certainly, the music’s vitality and volatility reflects the latter’s own interpretative style – the dancing rhythms, the brilliant orchestrations and the range of contrasts of mood and colour were all brought out here by the conductor and players to stunning effect.

I thought the piece’s only drawback was that it seemed to drive through an exciting and all-embracing crescendo towards a thrilling climax which recapped the spirit of the opening fanfares, but then attempted to try and revisit those same energies which had been so splendidly expended,  losing some of its shape in the attenuated process. Others will have undoubtedly felt differently and responded more wholeheartedly to the excitement’s continuation – despite the musicians’ commitment and the playing’s brilliance I felt the music outstayed its welcome, indulging in some needless repetition towards the end.

Still, the piece certainly sharpened our excitement’s edges in anticipation of the arrival of Finnish clarinettist Kari Kriikku, scheduled to play a concerto by his countryman Kimmo Hakola. I had seen and heard Kriikku in concert before, as long ago as 2009, but vividly recollecting his skill as a player, as well as the showmanship that seemed to be part-and-parcel of his character as a performer in appropriate contexts. Reading the opening paragraph of the description of Hakola’s work as per the programme, I sensed that the music would be pretty-well tailor-made for Kriikku’s skills as a performer and for the theatrical character he seemed to invariably bring to his interpretations.

In fact, the piece was commissioned by Kriikku, and first performed by him in 2001, so it’s obviously a work he’s lived with for some time, reflected by the immense skill with which he negotiated his solo part with all its complexities. But not only did the music ask questions of the soloist, it also taxed the skills of both conductor and players to the utmost, requiring some incredibly “dovetailed” interactions between orchestra and soloist and within the sections of the ensemble itself. I couldn’t fault the orchestral playing at any point throughout the panoply of sounds conjured up for us by the composer, for our delight and (in places) stupefaction!

After the first movement’s “game of chase” between the protagonists, a series of interactions that left notes scattered in their wake across whole vistas of exploration, the slow movement’s ‘Hidden Songs” brought out cool, limpid textures providing some relief from the corruscations that had gone before. In the soloist’s wistful four-note theme and the orchestra’s ostinato accompaniment I sensed something of Stravinsky’s claustrophobic enervations from ‘Le Sacre du Printemps”, a mood broken into by rhapsodic interpolations from the orchestra. These eventually gave way to tocsin-soundings from the orchestral bells, the music’s movement ritualized, as both clarinet and different orchestral sections sang the last of their songs.

I enjoyed the Shostakovich-like aspect of the third movement’s grotesqueries, especially the tuba’s contributions to the fun in places, the soloist at another point “jamming it” with bongo drum and trombones – wonderful stuff! We were disconcerted when the soloist peremptorily walked off the performing platform, though the music kept going, the orchestra continuing to build the structure to the point where the players suddenly broke off and began animatedly talking with one another – obviously conveying  conjecture as to where their clarinetist had disappeared to!

After the timpanist had called his colleagues to order, the brass announced the soloist’s reappearance with stentorian voices. The last movement’s Wedding Dance” aspect expressed itself with contrasting moods, wild rhythmic excitement followed by louring trombones leading a mournful melody. As the soloist bent his line every which way, the orchestra whispered amongst itself, ruminating upon likely outcomes. A brief irruption of the running dance-music introduced the soloist’s cadenza, music filled with the most enchanting and angular birdsong, and choreographed by Kriikku most entertainingly – a gentleman sitting behind me nearly had apoplexy at one point, so delighted was he with the soloist’s antics! There came a brief dance-passage, the clarinetist treading a measure before preparing to deliver his final flourish – and the music was over!

Grimmer purposes hammered their messages out at the beginning of the concert’s second half, with the opening of Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra – I seriously parted company with the conductor at the beginning of the work, finding the opening far too timpani-dominated, and completely drowning out the lower strings’ announcement of the opening motif – force and emphasis was all very well, but this was, for me, too blatant – I heard the work “live” for the first time in the 1970s conducted by Vaclek Smetacek, who allowed the pounding rhythms sufficient force while bringing out the defiant syncopated angularities of the string utterances right from the beginning.

That grumble out of the way, I thought the rest of the work an absolutely thrilling experience as presented here – Harth-Bedoya encouraged his musicians to “play out” at almost all times, while preserving the clarity of the textures, as with the celeste’s unearthly echoing of the work’s opening pulsatings right at the movement’s end. Then, during the second movement, such magic was woven by the scampering strings and the spooky winds, whose beautifully-wrought exchanges were an absolute delight to the ear. The cunningly-wrought orchestral dovetailing reminded me throughout this movement of Holst’s “Mercury the Winged Messenger” from “The Planets” in a way that no other performance I’d heard seemed to have previously done.

With great portent and dark purpose the finale was launched, amid growlings from the piano and an almost primordial wail from the cor anglais, with other winds joining in. Strings built the sound-progressions and brass added their weight to the textures unerringly, as the passacaglia’s fifteen variations strode across the soundstage, each “fretting and strutting….before being heard no more”. The powerful outbursts from brass and percussion properly galvanized these scenarios, with various solos from the winds keeping the textural colours varied and volatile, and sometimes at exciting odds with one another! And the “exuberant twist” at the very end (nicely described as such in the programme notes) brought the work to an exciting and rousing conclusion.

Very great credit to the orchestra throughout all of these three works, most excitingly directed by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and in colourful collaboration with the characterful Kari Kriikku and his clarinet. Nobody should let the unfamiliarity of the composers’ names put them off going to this concert – from beginning to end, it’s a thrilling, no-holds-barred journey, well worth the experience!

Sistema Hutt Valley’s Arohanui Strings and related ensembles offer wonderful example

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Arohanui Strings – Sistema Hutt Valley

Music by Michael McLean, Mozart, Bartók, Joplin, Warlock, Moe Ruka, Beethoven and trad.

St. Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 28 October 2015, 12.15pm

To demonstrate the ethos and value of this programme for primary school children from Taita and Pomare, I quote in full the note on the printed programme from the concert:

“[This] is part of a visionary global movement transforming the lives of children through music.

“Right here in the Hutt Valley, we are building a youth orchestra in a neighborhood where children normally do not have access to private music lessons. Our goal is to help these children become engaged students and citizens, by being part of a music immersion experience (4-5 hours a week) where they learn discipline, leading and following, and peer teaching, in order to create something beautiful. It is our belief that music is a human right, and should be available for all who wish to learn.

“We are able to reach over a hundred children a week thanks to donations… and support from the Hutt City Council, Creative NZ, Infinity Foundation, and Orchestra Wellington…”

The concert began with a quartet of the teachers playing. Although eight names were listed, those in the quartet were not individually identified. Their leader, Alison Eldredge, played violin, and the others from the quartet conducted items later in the concert. A Tango by Michael McLean, an American composer whom Eldredge had met, was lively, with plenty of verve and passion.

The wooden ceiling, high but not too high, in St. Mark’s makes this a good place to hear string music.
Next came Mozart’s well-known ‘Ave Verum’. The introductory remarks did not mention that this was written for voices. Although the players made a beautiful sound, I found it a little too fast for a piece having words in the original. Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances are heard quite often on the radio, but it is years since I heard them performed live. Three were played by the quartet, and delightful they were. The first (‘Jocul cu bâtă’, i.e. ‘Stick Dance’) had Eldredge employing left-hand pizzicato, presumbly depicting the knocking of the sticks. After ‘Brâul’ (Sash Dance) came ‘Buciumeana’ (Dance from Bucsum); its wistful strains made for an enchanting listening experience.
The quartet finished their part of the programme with New Rag by Scott Joplin, a jolly piece by the black American composer, who died in 1917.

Then it was the turn of the Korimako Orchestra, comprising Arohanui’s more experienced players. It was interesting to see the ethnic mix, with Maori and Pacifica children dominating, but also the presence of several pakeha children, amongst others.

The orchestra performed an arrangement of Peter Warlock’s ‘Pavane’ from Capriol Suite. At times they were playing in a bunch of keys, but nevertheless it was a creditable performance from such a band, some of whose members looked to be about 7 years old. This was followed by Canon in D by Telemann – a good performance.

Before the Tui Orchestra, comprising younger, less experienced players joined the Korimakos, Christiaan van der Zee, one of the teachers, encouraged both children and audience to sing ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’, before the instruments played it. Other items followed, and then ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Wouldn’t Beethoven have been surprised! The instruments played the theme in unison, followed by a repetition in parts. This came over very well.

The work being done by teachers and volunteers for Arohanui Strings, supported by financial grants, is wonderful, and with the example of Gustavo Dudamel before them, we can be sure that musicians will emerge from this group – not only musicians, but human beings with enriched lives and greater skills in all phases of their existence.

 

 

Hamish McKeich’s final WYO concert a knockout

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
COMMEMORATIVE AND WARTIME CLASSICS

Music by BERNSTEIN, ELGAR, HOLST, LILBURN, SHOSTAKOVICH, and SPOHR

Patrick Hayes (clarinet)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

BERNSTEIN – Overture “Candide”
ELGAR – “Nimrod” (Variation IX) from the Enigma Variations
HOLST – “Mars and “Jupiter” from The Planets
LILBURN – Overture “Aotearoa”
SHOSTAKOVICH – Festive Overture
SPOHR – Clarinet Concerto No.4 in E Minor

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill St., Wellington

Monday 19th October 2015

This was a thoroughly enjoyable and enlivening programme, and as it turned out a  most appropriate way for the Wellington Youth Orchestra to (a) conclude a successful playing-year, and (b) farewell conductor Hamish McKeich, who’s been the orchestra’s inspirational music director for the past four years. Having heard nothing about Hamish’s departure beforehand, I was surprised when the concert’s master of ceremonies, Peter Dykes made the announcement at the evening’s beginning – and the news was confirmed by orchestra manager Tom Gott at the concert’s end, in a speech thanking Hamish for the sterling work he’d put into the orchestra over the time he’s worked with the players.

Nothing lasts forever, of course, even though with McKeich at the helm I’d gotten accustomed to looking forward greatly to each concert given by the orchestra of late. However, what he’s achieved with these musicians will undoubtedly linger and be shared with other, newer players, and add to a kind of on-going “tradition” of quality, such as that represented by this concert – a kind of showcase of the work done over the duration, and one that didn’t disappoint. With the help of a handful of NZSO players among the orchestral ranks, the playing had plenty of brilliance, enthusiasm, and sensitivity and depth of feeling as required, and put across a sense of knowing how to best present each piece instead of relying merely on a “one size fits all” approach.

The programme’s title “Commemorative and Wartime Classics” applied to some but not directly all of the items that were performed – though there’s a fair degree of warfare and carnage in Volatire’s story “Candide”, set to music by Leonard Bernstein, it’s a deeply satirical work whose purpose is to ridicule rather than commemorate. And Louis Spohr’s mellifluous Fourth Clarinet Concerto, though written for  a prominent virtuoso of the instrument, Johann Hermstedt, to play at an 1829 Music Festival, could neither be said to be either commemorative or associated with great conflict of any kind.

Described as “the perfect concert-opener”, Bernstein’s bright, racy Overture certainly filled the bill, both as a spectacular curtain-raiser on what was to come, and a real test for the youthful orchestra’s collective mettle. What was wanted was no-holds-barred playing, and the musicians engagingly tumbled over themselves in their eagerness to get the sounds up, running and together – while keeping the rhythms snappy, the conductor gave his players enough time to get their fingers around the notes and make the figurations coherent, relying on rhythmic point more than sheer speed to invigorate the music.

Being a “virtuoso” piece designed to put professional groups through their paces, the music here inevitably had moments where there were roughnesses in performance. It was more a problem with rhythms not quite dovetailing between sections than with notes being missed, as with the first appearance of the “Oh Happy We” tune, which went at several speeds on different instruments before the players got things together. Still, the music’s essential ingredients (a bubbly, raunchy, almost burlesque kind of feeling) were strongly in evidence, and McKeich and his players brought off both the excitement of the coda’s accelerando and the whiplash ending with great panache.

Next up was the concerto, one of no less than four written for the instrument by Louis Spohr, for his friend the virtuoso Johann Simon Hermstedt. The work’s dark, mysterious expression points directly towards the Romantic Movement that was to take hold of, and sweep through the nineteenth century. Though born fourteen years after Beethoven, Spohr wrote music which occupied a similarly pivotal position between classicism and romanticism, and his music was, for a time, just as highly regarded as Beethoven’s (like a number of his contemporaries, Spohr didn’t understand Beethoven’s late works, regarding them as “esthetic aberrations” and blaming the older composer’s deafness for their “faults”!).

Clarinettist Patrick Hayes, the winner of the Wellington Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition, showed us almost straightaway the skill of his playing and the extent of his musicianship, with beautifully withdrawn tones and lovely velvety runs throughout his opening utterances. As well, he dovetailed his lines beautifully with those of the orchestra’s at appropriate moments,  while making his instrument “speak out” when called upon to do so. He seemed more inclined to bring out the music’s mystery and depth of feeling rather than its brilliance and “show” – though not everything was note-perfect, he conveyed sufficient aplomb with the display aspect so as to make the more withdrawn moments “tell” at the appropriate times.

The slow movement of the work, a Larghetto, resembled a kind of poised, long-breathed dance with sinuous lines woven by the soloist over gently-pulsating accompaniments, a lovely contrast to the livelier Spanish rhythms of the finale, both soloist and orchestra relishing the rhythmic swirl of the triplet passages, and the sultry Preciosa-like jog-trot figurations accompanying the second theme. There was, too, ample display opportunities for the soloist, spectacular, firecracker-like ascents both with and without trills, and rapid, roller-coaster-ride figurations written for the player to proclaim his or her instrumental flair and command. In short, throughout the work we were treated to a real musician’s playing.

MC Peter Dykes raised a laugh when he described the Shostakovich Festival Overture which followed as, from an orchestral player’s point of view “a piece that teaches one the art of bluff”. I was reminded of a story I once heard about a wind player who was asked how he managed the more difficult parts of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe” ballet music, to which he replied, “You just waggle your fingers and hope for the best!”. To be honest, there didn’t seem very much “bluffing” on the part of these players when Shostakovich’s work started, so full-on was the orchestral sound in all departments! – having been suitably galvanized with the opening fanfares, we were plunged into a regular conflagration of instrumental excitement, with swirling winds and stuttering brass leading up to overwhelming percussive climaxes.

As well there was splendid solo work in places from the winds, the clarinet especially heroic, along with some lovely lyrical exchanges between lower and upper strings, singing out atop the driving rhythms! But conductor and players didn’t let up for the return of the opening fanfares and throughout the excitement of the coda that followed – a rip-roaring conclusion that left us all limp with excitement!

Douglas Lilburn’s 100th birth-anniversary year was acknowledged here with a bright and breezy performance of the “Aotearoa” Overture, from the outset lovely open-air playing which captured the spacious ambiences of the music, and the epic nature of the landscapes therein. I particularly enjoyed the string-playing in this performance – every chance these players got to sing full-throatedly they took, with rich and resonant results, leaving the winds to describe the movements of air and water and the brass and percussion to fashion the mountainscapes. Though the rather cramped acoustic of the Cathedral didn’t really allow the music to expand as it should at the end, the resonances still told splendidly, and brought the composer’s vision excitingly to life for our pleasure.

No greater contrast could have been wrought than was made next with Elgar’s famously elegiac “Nimrod” from the “Engima” Variations. Inspired by a mutual love of Beethoven’s slow movements on the part of the composer and his publisher and friend, August Jaeger, Elgar’s music raptly and intensely builds from near silence at its beginning to a magnificent outpouring of nobility. Difficult for any orchestra to sustain over long periods, this feeling was given to us in spadefuls by these young players, Hamish McKeich beautifully “terracing” the music’s course, and the players holding their lines tenaciously and full-throatedly, building towards the climax, then rapidly withdrawing and returning the sounds to whisperings – a terrific performance!

Finally came two movements from a work frequently associated, by dint of both subject-matter and time of composition, with war, Holst’s Symphonic Suite, “The Planets”. Most appropriately, we heard “Mars, the Bringer of War”, and its diametrically opposed “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”, the latter making a suitably riotous and good-humoured conclusion to the concert. What an impression the opening of “Mars” made on us all, with those dry, skeletal sounds of the players bouncing the wood of their bows on the instruments’ strings, an eerie, death-rattling kind of utterance accompanying the sense of rising panic, terror and alarm throughout the rest of the orchestra. At the other end of the sound-spectrum, the hammer-blows at the piece’s end were brutal and final in their impact – an extraordinary effect.

Thank goodness for Jupiter and the “laughter holding both its sides” aspect, which took us from tragedy to comedy, Holst’s extraordinary orchestral writing readily evoking a life-enhancing sense of well-being and elation, rebuilding confidences that that been shaken to their core by the onslaught of Mars at the opening. And what an extraordinary outpouring of pride and nobility of the spirit with the central trio’s “big tune”, here perhaps just a shade glutinous at its beginning, but gathering momentum and strength with every stride towards the powerfully-stated climax.

But just as impressive were the transitions from jollity to nobility and back again, in each case the winds playing a major part with tricky, syncopated figurations, firstly “shushing” the merriment, and then re-igniting the exuberance with a will, the brass and percussion in the latter case fetching up all the tethered energies and unleashing them once more. The loping stride of the laughing tune got a bit out of sync the second time round, due to the vagaries of the accelerando, but conductor McKeich quickly called the different voices to heel and steadied the course to the end – and what a wondrously vertiginous “swirling” aspect the players got before those last crashing hammer-blow chords put an end to the music! – as I said at this review’s beginning, thoroughly enjoyable!

So, salutations to Hamish McKeich and to his band of stalwart musicicans! – next year things will undoubtedly be different, but one feels certain that what has been achieved by conductor and players over the last few years won’t be easily forgotten.

Popular for the best reason – the NZSO’s Classical Hits Concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
CLASSICAL HITS

Music by ROSSINI, COPLAND, OFFENBACH, J.STRAUSS Jnr.
TCHAIKOVSKY, ELGAR and WAGNER

James Judd (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 19th September, 2015

Appropriately enough from my point of view, this concert began with the very same music that enthralled me almost fifty years ago, at the beginning of my very first concert-going experience in Palmerston North’s Opera House. I still recall, at the start of the “William Tell” Overture, the beauty of those two NZBC Symphony Orchestra solo ‘cellos (played by Wilf Simenauer and Farquhar Wilkinson), and the thrill of the orchestra “opening up” for the ensuing storm, before the cor anglais (I can’t remember the player’s name) and Richard Giese’s flute flooded us with sunlight and dried us out in time for the excitement of the concluding march. No better introduction to the capabilities of a symphony orchestra could have been devised by anybody, I thought, and especially when the conducting was to my youthful ears as exciting and volatile as was Piero Gamba’s on that occasion.

So, almost as much fond memory was activated as was “here-and-now” sensation and stimuli when Saturday evening’s “Classical Hits” concert got under way in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre with that very same overture, conducted on this occasion by James Judd – Andrew Joyce’s opening ‘cello solo and his duetting with section colleague Ken Ichinose did full justice to the example set by those aforementioned illustrious predecessors – and the rest of the overture literally went like a train, taking time out in between excitements for the pastoral pleasures of shepherd’s pipes and birdsong. Michael Austin and Kirstin Eade most beguilingly did the honours as shepherd and songbird respectively, causing me to fall in love with the music all over again. The rest (not forgetting the Lone Ranger!) is, as they say, history!

A pity that the opportunity wasn’t taken to insert a home-grown classical hit in such a programme – any of David Farquhar’s Ring Round the Moon dances surely qualify with flying colours by now – but at least European hegemony was challenged by Aaron Copland’s exuberant, so out-of-doors Rodeo (well, even rugby stadiums are practically indoors, now!), four foot-tapping “dance episodes” whose “Hoedown” concluding number brought forth at one stage a full blooded “YEE-HA!” from an audience member simply doing what his conductor had told him to do! Incidentally, I thought James Judd’s spoken comments welcoming us all to the concert and explaining aspects of each of the pieces throughout were just right – there was nothing patronizing nor over-modulated about what he said, but simply the conveyance of a message inviting us all to have lots of fun, with both listening and in one or two instances getting physically involved with the music-making!

In the light of such invitations from the conductor, I was half-expecting at least one or two adventurous souls to leap to their feet in the aisles during Offenbach’s famous “Can-can” from the Orpheus in the Underworld Overture – but perhaps Judd’s tempi were a shade too quick for comfort – a bit more weight and “point” to the rhythmic trajectories and textures might have otherwise tempted those who could have felt rushed off their feet at the music’s frenetic pace. However,  no-one could complain regarding the delicious rhythmic subtleties wrought by the conductor and players during Johann Strauss Jnr’s Blue Danube Waltz – right from the pianissimo magic of its opening on the strings, over which sounded those so-familiar horn calls, one was simply entranced – and each episode of the dance, here, had its own particular brand of beguilement, the music’s “character” allowed plenty of variety throughout.

Mirroring Copland’s “Rodeo” Dances before the interval, the second half also included a more extended work, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture. Beloved of concert audiences world-wide because of its instant appeal, the piece still doesn’t “play itself” – and James Judd certainly didn’t allow a single moment of anything but committed, characterful and sharply-focused music-making, right from the opening wind chords (so rich, grainy and redolent of “once upon a time in a place called Verona”) to the full-throated passion of the string-saturated utterances at the piece’s climax. Along the way, we heard the most beautifully-shaped phrasings from both strings and winds in the piece’s first section, and plenty of sound and fury from brass and percussion throughout the conflict sequences. And the voicing of the “big tune” by the violas in unison with the cor anglais produced a sound to die for, as did the answering phrases from the other strings, sounded here with such breath-bated tenderness.

I loved the idea of introducing the often-played “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations with the piece that precedes it in the complete work, the lovely “W.N.” (the initials of Winifred Norbury) – Elgar, though happily married, obviously enjoyed the company and friendship of  a number of women, some of whom are “enigmatically” represented in this set of variations. So we got the graceful G Major portrait of Winifred and her sister Florence in their beautiful eighteenth-century house, before the music magically modulated down into a rich and noble E-flat, the key of “Nimrod”, a word-play on the German surname of Elgar’s publisher and friend August Jaeger, and supposedly enshrining discussions between the composer and his friend on the slow movements of Beethoven. As in the complete work, the grace and charm of “W.N.” became the perfect foil for the profundity of the noble “Nimrod”.

After this Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries was a near-perfect choice, even if I always feel somewhat cheated in the concert-hall when the “Hoyotoho! Hoyotoho!” isn’t there, though for people not familiar with the music in an operatic context it obviously doesn’t matter. I did wonder whether there might have been a spontaneous irruption of Valkyrie-like shouts from some off-duty Valkyrie in the audience carried away by the excitement of the moment! Had I been the concert organizer I would have been tempted to try and “plant” a few such people (dramatic sopranos in mufti!) in antiphonal places in the gallery, just for the sheer fun of it! This was a swift and lightish performance throughout, James Judd keeping his forces “airborne” right to the end, unlike some of the weightier realizations of famous Wagnerians like Hans Knappertsbusch, whose concert performances on record of the last few bars of the work have to he heard to be believed!

And so we came to the orchestra’s final programmed offering, a spirited rendition of the younger Johann Strauss’s Polka “Thunder and Lightning”, Judd positively exhorting his audience to “make a noise”, which we did, albeit a little inhibitedly. It did the trick, however, as conductor and players rewarded our efforts with one of the classic encores from the famous Viennese “New Year’s Day” concerts, the elder Johann Strauss’s most famous work, the Radetsky March, during which, to everybody’s delight, the conductor “directed” the audience’s clapping, taking particular care to secure the correct dynamic levels for each sequence! The item brought a most successful concert to a bubbling and exuberant conclusion, an antidote for a blessed couple of hours to the dreadful weather which we encountered when making our way home. One wonders which of the tunes we heard during the evening would have made “top of the pops” amongst the satisfied patrons! Thank you, James Judd and the NZSO!

 

 

 

 

 

Memorable, glamorous, musically interesting evening with Renée Fleming and the NZSO

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Renée Fleming: A Gala Evening
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Judd

Ravel: La Valse
Shéhérazade: ‘Asie’; ‘La flute enchantée’; ‘L’indifférent’
           Pavane pour une infante défunte
Canteloube: Songs of the Auvergne: ‘Bailèro’; ‘Malurous qu’o uno fenno’
Gounod: Jewel Song, from Faust
Richard Strauss: Waltz sequence no.1 from Der Rosenkavalier
           ‘Morgen!’ Op.27, no.4; ‘Zueignung’ Op.10, no.1
Tosti: ‘Aprile’
Puccini: ‘O mio babbino caro’, from Gianni Schicchi

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 12 September 2015, 7.30pm

What a generous singer is Renée Fleming, performing so many items for us!  Yet she seemed as relaxed at the end as she was at the beginning, and in just as good voice. Although much of what she sang could be termed popular classical, it was all fine music.  It was good to see James Judd on the podium again, controlling the considerable forces.

Poised almost above the percussion, it was easy for me to look out on the Michael Fowler Centre gratifyingly almost full, and also to see the very large orchestra used for the first and many of the other items.  It was not an ideal position for reviewing, being parallel with the front of the platform, and therefore not receiving the full import of Fleming’s wonderful soprano voice.  However, thanks to others’ kindness, I was able to change at the interval to a rather better seat on the other side.

La Valse, as the excellent notes in the lavish programme explained, changed its character from when Ravel began its composition before the outbreak of World War I to what it became when he returned, a changed man, after service in the French Army throughout the hostilities.  I had not heard this considerable orchestral piece live for a very long time.  It contains some amazing effects – even though brass and percussion dominated where I was sitting.  In the case of the latter, that included seeing the tambourine player making a dash from one side of the back of the stage to the other, just in time to play that instrument towards the end of the work.  Typical of much French music was the use of the harp – in Saturday’s concert, two harps, used to magnificent effect.

Renée Fleming made her appearance wearing a beautiful gown with train and a cape – she looked stunning – to sing Shéhérazade.  This exotic work was not only demanding for her to sing, but demanding for the orchestra too.  Both emerged triumphant.  Sultry, brilliant, memorable are all appropriate descriptions of the performance. The soprano’s glorious opening low notes on the first words, ‘Asie, Asie, Asie’ (Asia) set the scene wonderfully, and she modulated her tone to great expressive effect. Fleming employed a certain amount of gesture – never overdone. The only detraction from the performance was that the lighting level was too low to enable one to read the full words and English translations of Tristan Klingsor’s fine poems the printed in the programme!   Intervention from Fleming over the interval (and from me, via an usher, too!) meant this situation changed for the second half.

The different mood of the second song allowed Renée Fleming’s voice to shine even more.  Here, Bridget Douglas’s flute playing was simply dazzling.  It was noticeable that after this song cycle and elsewhere in the concert Fleming was quick to applaud and bow to the orchestra – and in one of her little chats via microphone she commended the orchestra on its quality and flexibility, and remarked how proud we must be of it (applause).  She also commented that she liked singing in the MFC.

After the short third song in this evocative and dramatic cycle, came the interval.  Afterwards, the orchestra returned to play Ravel’s well-known Pavane.  According to the programme notes, Ravel disliked it being played slowly, like funeral music, saying ‘It was the princess who dies, not the pavane!’
Mellifluous horns against pizzicato strings was just one of the magical effects the smaller orchestra produced.

Again, outstanding flute playing featured.  However, I was moved to note ‘I prefer my music unpolluted by coughs’.  Nevertheless, the audience was mostly very attentive.

When the strings (muted) changed to bowing, a wonderful lush sound emerged, embellished by the harps.  The piece was like a scintillating example of French jewellery, although perhaps it was a little slow, bearing in mind Ravel’s remark.

Fleming returned, in a different gown, in pastel shades with a stole.  She spoke briefly about both the Canteloube and the Gounod items.  The former was notable for a lovely cor anglais solo, giving the music that rustic feel, and also for more flute from Bridget Douglas.  Of course the most popular song is ‘Bailèro’, and it received a well-justified rapturous reception from the orchestra and James Judd as well as from the audience.  Throughout her items, Fleming seemed relaxed, and to be enjoying herself.  The production of her attractive silvery tone appears effortless.

Gounod’s ‘Jewel Song’ is not an easy sing.  Fleming brought so much variety to this well-loved aria.  She had us bewitched, just as Marguerite was.  She turned to each side, and even to the orchestra when singing, so no-one could feel left out, and admired the rings she was wearing, in order to act out the aria’s words.

Her later enquiry to the audience discovered that there were many singers in the audience; they would have learned much. Renée Fleming employs portamento in her operatic arias, but it is never overdone or ugly; it embellishes and beautifies what she is singing.

I find the waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier somewhat hackneyed – thanks to Radio New Zealand Concert!  But through Strauss’s use of interesting harmonic intervals and marvellous instrumentation, plus the brilliant playing of the orchestra, I was seduced.  The five horns and three bassoons played faultlessly, and the great violin solo from Vesa-Matti Leppänen was a delight; James Judd almost danced to the music, and seemed delighted too.

Our soloist emerged again – in a third gown, of turquoise blue (later she told us it was the first time she had worn three gowns in one concert!)  She told us that she regarded herself as primarily a Strauss and Mozart singer; she made entertaining and humorous remarks too.

On to my favourites in the entire enticing programme: two of Richard Strauss’s most well-known songs.  These enchanting lieder are most often heard with piano; to hear them with orchestra was a real treat.  In Morgen! the introduction featured inspiring solo violin, with pizzicato violas, cellos, basses and harp. When the violins entered, their bowing produced a delicious pianissimo.  The singing was so
beautiful, yet simple and unaffected.

Fleming sings the words and music; she does not display herself and her skills.  Her use of the words is
extraordinarily intelligent and musical. Who could not be moved? Similarly with Zueignung.  It is a wonderfully uplifting and even jubilant song; quite sublime.  Yet people coughed even during these wondrous songs.

The name Tosti (Francesco Paolo) is associated with Dame Nellie Melba, and with rather sentimental Victorian parlour songs, written during the composer’s long residence in England.  But this song in Italian had charm, and a delicious orchestral accompaniment.  Next was ‘Top of the Pops’, Puccini’s soaring aria titled in the programme’s translation ‘Oh, dear daddy’.  Again, our superb singer took it simply, but beautifully, with well-judged portamenti. Her velvety tone did not prevent drama where appropriate.  Fleming must have sung this many times, but it sounded fresh, and it had the orchestra in splendid form, as throughout the concert, the latter receiving applause from Renée Fleming.

Not limiting herself to this ending to die for, Renée Fleming gave three encores: ‘Summertime’ from
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was first.  For this she changed the character of her voice; it became appropriately brassy.  Then came the audience participation – singing the chorus to her ‘I could have danced all night’ from My Fair Lady.  As a brilliant stroke to prevent the curtain calls and standing ovations from going on for hours, she finished with a much less familiar item: Marietta’s aria ‘Glück das mir verblieb’ from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.  Again, Fleming’s singing was deceptively simple-sounding, yet heartfelt and masterful, with wonderful dynamics.  The aria’s orchestration was splendid.

Negative points: the price of the programme was high, and there were too few sellers, resulting in long queues, which people had to abandon when the concert was about to begin.  These points meant that
many people did not have a programme.  A single sheet printed with the composers and titles of the works is common in European countries, and would have been helpful on this occasion.

All who attended were privileged to hear one of today’s great singers in top form, who had us eating out of her hand, while singing a generous and varied programme, with an orchestra in brilliant form, and a very experienced and enthusiastic conductor, who is an old friend of the orchestra, and of the audience.  A night to remember for a long time.  Thank you, all!