Tag: orchestral

Wellington Youth Orchestra’s final, tumultuous concert for 2014

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.7
WAGNER – Overture “Die Meistersinger”
J.STRAUSS Jnr. – On the Beautiful Blue Danube

Wellington Youth Orchestra

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

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

Tuesday 21st October 2014

Richard Wagner described Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as “the Apotheosis of the Dance”, referring to the dominance of rhythm over melody throughout much of the symphony’s duration. Yes, the tunes are there, but, apart from some lyrical sequences in the work’s introduction, and throughout the trio of the third-movement Scherzo, the melodies are constantly dancing, stamping or galloping about!

If ever a work by Beethoven demonstrated the composer’s own euphoric description of his art – “I am the Bacchus who presses out this wine which makes men spiritually drunk!” – it’s this uninhibited riot of a Symphony – though not as epic as the Third or Ninth Symphonies, nor as heaven-storming as the Fifth, the Seventh Symphony gives an elemental display of god-like exuberance that leaves its listeners exhilarated and its performers spent through giving their all.

It had an enthusiastic contemporary reception, even though most of the acclaim that followed the very first concert in 1813 went to the composer’s gimmicky “Wellington’s Victory”, with which it shared the program. But once the novelty of the “battle piece” had worn off, the symphony began to assert its well-nigh irresistible appeal, with the second, Allegretto movement in particular capturing its listeners’ imaginations – this movement was in fact played alone for a time more often than was the complete work.

Beethoven’s efforts did not, however, find favour with some commentators, whose sensibilities were obviously affronted by such unseemly demonstrations of raw energy! Friedrich Wieck, father of Clara (Schumann), was present at some of the rehearsals and observed that the composer of such music must have been in a “drunken state” when writing the work. And Beethoven’s great contemporary, Carl Maria von Weber, thought that parts of the first movement alone qualified the composer as “fit for the madhouse”. Even a decade later, a London critic wrote of the work, “Often as we have heard it performed, we cannot yet discover any design in it, neither can we trace any connection in its parts.”

Posterity has reversed these opinions, though a dissident echo was provided by the legendary conductor of more recent times, Sir Thomas Beecham (no great lover of Beethoven’s music, even though he recorded several of the symphonies) – after giving a typically riotous performance of the Seventh, Beecham drolly commented, “Well, what can you do with it? – it’s like a lot of yaks jumping about!”

Such criticisms and comments missed the point of the “excessive” nature of the work’s rhythmic character, one which Beethoven had touched on more generally with his “I am the Bacchus” comment, and which the work brought to a kind of apogée in terms of constant energy and momentum. And these qualities were at the heart of what Hamish McKeich and the Wellington Youth Orchestra players were able to achieve in their recent performance.

The players clearly felt the import of the symphony’s “introduction” here – no mere symphonic throat-clearing, or “getting the pitch of the hall”, but a statement of intent containing the seeds of what was to follow – thus the tensions were built up via the strings’ dovetailing of the scales, the lower echelons “digging in” with point and focus on each occasion, the winds and brass intensifying the harmonic ambiences, then nicely terracing the tensions, keeping us in a suspended state for what was to break forth. Something much more than Viennese “gemütlich” was obviously on the agenda.

The allegro was taken at an urgent clip – the flute led the way magnificently, well-supported by the strings, while the first big tutti was a riot of energy and colour, the brass a bit approximate in their note-pitching, but the impulses were right where they ought to have been. Early on, a feature of the playing (as it needed to be in this symphony) was the work of the orchestra’s timpanist, whose command of both propulsion and dynamics right throughout was, I thought, exemplary. But everybody hove to – the winds were sonorous, the brass exciting, even when fallible, and the strings kept the rhythms a-tingling.

The beginning of the development brought some anxious ensemble moments with those treacherous dotted rhythms, the winds further unnerving things by being temporarily awry with an entry. But they made amends by steadying the rhythm leading up to that wonderful, exhilarating reprise, together with the brass getting those shouted dotted interjections bang-on! By this time the interactive support between the sections was kicking in nicely, so much so that there was a wonderfully delighted squawk from a young child in the audience during one of the pauses before the coda!

What followed was like an encounter with the elements – the lower strings caught the “vortex” aspect of those incredible “churnings”, from which the rest of the orchestra, by a sheer act of will gradually pulled us upwards from and into the light – though the horns struggled a bit with their triumphant “whoopings” the rhythms had oceans of momentum, and caught the exhilaration at the movement’s end.

I thought the second movement arresting at the outset, the lower strings purposeful, the violins sharing theme and counter-theme, stoically supported by the winds, brass and timpani. The trio, too, was nicely focused, the theme by turns tender and expressive, with lovely clarinet work. A somewhat weedy start to the pp string fugato broke the spell momentarily – the strings seemed happier when playing with fuller tones. But apart from the surprise of the clarinets seeming not to enter with one of their phrases right at the end, the movement’s gravitas was strongly maintained.

Which was the last thing that sprang to mind with the explosive beginning of the scherzo! – instead, boisterous fun was the order of going, the music’s triplet rhythms a whirl, and the winds and strings managing their “giggles” at the end of each of the sections. By contrast the trio’s solemn lay rang out lyrically (winds) and then majestically (strings and brass), with the timpani again a tower of strength in conjunction with the latter.

I confess that I momentarily gaped at the hectic pace the conductor adopted following the finale’s two opening flourishes – this was a REAL allegro con brio and the young players certainly bent their backs to the task, whether exuberantly stamping the rhythms out or whirling through the figurations. Conductor and players kept the momentum going splendidly through the lighter passages, and made a great fist of things like the leaping string unison exchanges and the whooping brass calls – hair-raisingly exciting in places, as were the timpani’s splendidly focused and detailed energies.

And so it continued, through the powerful thrustings of the last big orchestral build-up before the coda, and into the furious vortex of scarily shifting, droning harmonies from winds and lower strings, leading up to what Sir Donald Tovey called the “Bacchic fury” of the work’s coda. Perhaps the winds might have lost their footing momentarily with their tricky angular entries and syncopated harmonic shifts amidst the maelstrom of sound and fury that the composer was building up, here – but somehow, it added to the effect of this elemental, inchoate material being imbued with energy and propulsion as to burst out with unparalleled power and splendour, everybody pulling together to bring off those final, whiplash chords in properly thrilling and conclusive fashion.

We needed an interval after that! – so, having enjoyed a breather, everybody was back for the second half’s intriguing mix of Wagner and Johann Strauss. FIrst up was Wagner’s Overture “Die Meistersinger”, an item I was looking forward to immensely, because I had played the cymbals in a performance during another life, many years ago!  Here, the brass rang out the first four notes gloriously, setting the scene for a carnival atmosphere of polyphonic largesse, the same players getting slightly ahead of the rest of the orchestra in one place in their eagerness to impress. Hamish McKeich favoured fairly brisk tempi, even through the transitions containing fragments of the opera’s more lyrical moments, which made for a breathless effect, as we were quickly plunged into the “entry-music” for the Mastersingers from Act Three, which, incidentally, went with proper pomp and ceremony.

I thought McKeich could have relaxed a little with the central section’s lyrical sequences – the playing wasn’t allowed to expand vocally, in the way that the tunes do in the opera itself, though perhaps the conductor wanted to keep the ensemble “tight”! However, the winds trotted in merrily during the “apprentices” section, managing a cheeky trill at the end of their sequence, as did the strings in places, the odd precarious-ensemble-moment smartly manoeuvered back into place within a few measures!

As for the famous “trio of themes” at the end – well it was a joy! The tuba sounded terrific, especially his concluding trill, while the brass gave warning of their “en masse” arrival in sonorous fashion, helped by the timpani the second time around. It all came across as properly festive, even if I felt the cymbal player was a little overawed by the occasion and didn’t “sound” his instruments as resplendently as they could have been.

After such rumbustiousness, the Johann Strauss piece was lovely! – it was really the waltz “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”, but played in a way as to imitate a loosely-strung set of waltzes – I suspected it was also to enable the players to turn their pages comfortably!  A gorgeously-played horn at the beginning presided over magical ambiences, passed adroitly by some moments of hesitant ensemble, and, gathering in a solo ‘cello, led us into the dance. To my delight the players made a great fist of the Viennese “lilt”, obviously well-schooled by their conductor, the ensemble sounding in places for all the world like a well-drilled Viennese dance-band! Another surprise for me was the repeat of the opening “waltz-sequence”, which I’d never heard done before. Right up to the nostalgic coda, with its trumpet solo and trilling flute, the players caught the idiom of the piece with great style, readily communicating to us their pleasure of performance.

But there was more! – in fact the final item set the seal on the afternoon’s music-making brilliantly, via a tremendously exciting performance of the “Waltz King’s” well-known “Thunder and Lightning Polka”. It was put across with such panache, such energy and exuberance, with the percussion having the proverbial field day! At one point in the work’s middle section I wanted (once again!) the cymbal player to bash his instruments more vigorously, but it must be said the player made up for his reticence in the closing measures of the work. I would have loved to have taken part in such a performance myself – what a blast it seemed to be for all concerned!

Very great credit to the inspirational Hamish McKeich, and to his hard-working, talented instrumentalists. To my mind conductor and players can look back on some singular achievements this year, their successes auguring well for seasons yet to come. On their showings throughout 2014 it’s my opinion that they’re becoming an orchestral force to be reckoned with, a stimulating and valuable contributor to the capital’s enviable array of orchestral concerts.

 

 

Orchestral spectaculars from the NZSO – and a 2015 sneak-preview

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:

JANÁČEK – Sinfonietta
BRETT DEAN – Trumpet Concerto
MUSORGSKY (orch. Ravel) – Pictures at an Exhibition

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)
Dima Slobodeniouk (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Wellington

Friday 10th October, 2014

I thought it happy and appropriate that the second half of the NZSO “Bold Worlds” Wellington concert on Friday of last week was prefaced by several of the principal players telling us something about the 2015 orchestral season (details of which had just been released), and specifically what each of them was particularly looking forward to taking part in.

So we were able to hear concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppänen telling us about the various 2015 concerts involving violinists, including reappearances by Hilary Hahn, Baiba Skride and Anthony Marwood, plus a concert featuring the first appearance of Janine Jansen with the orchestra. Vesa-Matti also talked about Sibelius’s Four Legends, conducted, naturally, by Pietari Inkinen – and mentioned that he would also, at some stage, be revisiting Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”.

Principal flute Bridget Douglas then took over, expressing her delight at having played all the Beethoven Symphonies, and at the prospect of taking part, with pianist Freddy Kempf, in performances of all five piano concertos next year. She told us about us about her scheduled performance of the Ibert Flute Concerto with the 2015 National Youth Orchestra, along with a new work by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Salina Fisher. She also mentioned the return of Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, with the Mahler Fifth Symphony, as another highlight.

Then it was the turn of Principal Trombone Dave Bremner to wax enthusiastic about his favourites from the coming season, naturally enough focusing upon his eagerly-awaited partnership with the world-famous trombone virtuoso Christian Lindberg, the latter conducting Jan Sandström’s Double Trombone Concerto “Echoes of Eternity”, Bremner citing the exercise as “proof that men CAN multi-task”, then afterwards drawing our attention to the orchestra’s centenary tribute to the work of Douglas Lilburn, via his Second Symphony.

Having suitably whetted our appetites for the coming season the players returned to their places to await the arrival of guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk. How fitting it was that, having told us about some of the orchestral highlights of the coming year, the players then pulled out all of the orchestral stops in giving us terrific performances of two favourite orchestral showpieces and a spectacular new concerto for trumpet and orchestra, the latter with one of the world’s great soloists, Håkan Hardenberger!

First on the  evening’s program was Leos Janáček’s grandly festive and excitingly virtuosic Sinfonietta, a work that’s as exciting to watch being performed as to hear, thanks to the writing for brass choir which begins and ends the music, and which is often delivered by players placed either antiphonally or (as here) in a group separated from the remainder of the orchestra. Janáček began writing music for a gymnastics festival at Brno, in his native Moravia, intending to compose a number of fanfares to mark the occasion – but his imagination gradually took charge of the original idea, and he found himself overwhelmed by a mixture of patriotic fervour (the work was dedicated to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces) and parochial feelings (apart from the opening fanfares, each section of the work celebrates a landmark in the town of Brno).

Also informing the music is the composer’s incredible native exuberance, additionally fuelled by his late-in-life infatuation with a married woman, Kamila Stosslova, almost 30 years his junior – many of his important works come from the period of his “idealized” relationship with Kamilla, who was obviously a kind of “Beatrice” to the composer’s “Dante”, an archetypal Muse.

All of this would have gone for very little had the performance by the orchestra, directed by their striking current guest conductor, Dima Slobodeniouk (a name which led me to make wild and inaccurate first-guesses as to his nationality, which was Russian!) faltered or hung fire in any way. Placed in the gallery at the rear of the main orchestra, the brass consort began the work, pinning back our ears with some fantastic playing, bringing out that hint of barbaric splendour which, alas, is sometimes smoothed over in performance. This all took place in tandem with Larry Reese’s thrilling, on-the-spot timpani contributions, the sounds ringing around the proverbial rafters most excitingly and satisfyingly.

The rest of the work brought in the main body of the orchestra, each movement vividly characterized by instrumentation which, in Janáček’s characteristic way, often exploited the extremities of tonal and timbal characteristics of the groups – thus the treble instruments of the orchestra often shrieked and squealed most excitingly, while the lower reaches menacingly loured and rumbled. Performances which don’t bring out this sense of striving to push of the sounds in certain places simply don’t do the composer or his music justice – and thankfully, Dima Slobodeniouk seemed to understand and readily engage Janáček’s particular demons in that respect.

So, in the second movement (The Castle at Brno), the strings joyously chirruped their vigorous figurations over brasses that muttered and rumbled, in between sequences of great lyrical beauty. Similarly demonstrative was the fourth movement (appropriately titled “The Street”) with its festive trumpet-calls, invoking all kinds of responses from the rest of the orchestra, involving gruff, big-boned bass strings dancing heavy-footedly and orchestral bells ringing out almost in alarm at the summons. I liked, too, the boyish “tumble-down” orchestral phrases, winds squawking in roguish pleasure at the unseemliness of it all, energy and laughter paramount.

These two movements were such a marked contrast to the third, middle movement (evocatively called “The Queen’s Monastery”). At the beginning all was melancholy, the tuba mournfully intoning a pedal-note over which the strings and then the winds sang what seemed like a lament, broken only by extraordinary flourishes from the winds in a handful of places – when questioned about these by a worried flute-player, the composer apparently emphasized that the irruptions need to sound “like the wind”. But the most marked contrast came with the music’s middle sequence, the pent-up energies firstly hinted at by the brass, and then, after a brief restatement of the opening by the strings, suddenly unleashed, to the alarm of the strings and the orchestral bells – what larks were here! – riotous goings-on amongst the brasses, with whooping horns, bumptious heavy brass and scintillating trumpets making the most of their “moments”, despite the frightened squawks of the winds!

A gentler, more folksy beginning to the final movement from winds and strings gradually built in strength and tension towards the great moment when the brass at the rear, summonsed by a clarion call and a cymbal crash, rejoined the orchestra with the work’s opening fanfares, this time underpinned by whole-orchestral counterpoints. I confess that I did want the conductor to broaden the music slightly as it drove towards its resplendent final chords, but he chose, just as excitingly, to maintain the momentum until the very final peroration – what a noise, and what an overwhelming effect! Even the somewhat ungrateful acoustic of the MFC was activated, shaken and stirred by all of this, with the players’ efforts and their conductor’s magisterial direction receiving justly-deserved acclaim.

Straight after Janáček’s far-flung ambiences, our ears were freshly-syringed by the opening of Brett Dean’s Trumpet Concerto, an evocation, it seemed, of huge machinery being activated piece-by-piece, begun by woodblocks and metallic scintillations, and building through an enormous crescendo, a cavernous bass line underneath the more superficial figurations suggesting some kind of gigantic ship being launched. Having activated his orchestral forces, the composer introduced the trumpet, played here by Håkan Hardenberger, by repute one of the world’s best on the instrument. He was the “superhero” of the composer’s conception, his music brooking no interference, and very much “in charge” of things until his downfall, delineated by the dying flight aspect of the lines at the movement’s end.

The second movement, given the title “Soliloquy”, presented a more meditative mood, the “draining away” of energy and colour reminding me of some of Salvador Dali’s paintings of melting objects. The trumpet played long lines trying to stem the downward flow, but was itself caught in the torpor of it all – all seemed decay and disillusionment. The trumpeter’s attempts to energize his world – last-ditch attempts at rallying fanfares – seemed to fall on deaf ears, as the orchestral basses take up the chromatic downward figurations. All the soloist seemed to be able to do was salute the passing of things, and wait for some kind of redemptive force to appear.

It came with a muted trumpet call which seemed to awaken a distant response in kind from within the orchestra, one which grew in detail and resonance – rather like the opening of Respighi’s “Appian Way” sequence from “The Pines of Rome” the voices were distant and representing mere possibility at first, remaining muted and disembodied, but with impulse and ambience beginning to mushroom into something. As the interactive dialogue between trumpet and orchestra began to flourish and establish itself, a distant march-like rhythm suddenly began, beautifully “placed” by the composer from with the existing textures. This quickly took on a course of its own, set in opposition to the trumpet and orchestral discourses, the music building up to an incredible climax, most theatrically brought to an unexpected close by a stratospheric note from the trumpet and a dismissive whip-lash phrase played by the solo violin – what an ending!

We need an interval to doubly realign our ears after those two works! – In that respect the “sneak preview” of the 2015 season was doubly welcome, as it helped “close off” what had been before, in preparation for Ravel’s take on Musorgsky’s tribute to the work of one of his dearest friends. It’s a work that’s too well-known to have to comment on each section, here, but the “pictures” and their interspersed “promenades” were again notable for their sharply-etched characterizations, the conductor seeming to me to pay particular attention to the nuancing of the string lines in places, to the point where the textures exhibited all kinds of characterful fibres, enough to remind one of human speech – one of the composer’s obsessions, of course.

My only criticism of the conductor was that he seemed to elongate many of the pauses between the pictures, breaking the continuum of the voyage. Yes, the pictures are self-contained – but Musorgsky himself abruptly “butted-together” pairs of them, sometimes incongruously, as one would experience when disparate pictures in galleries are hung next to one another. The composer also “filled in” some of the pauses between the pictures by the use of “promenades” music derived from the work’s very opening, a melody that changes in mood and feeling in relation to different parts of the gallery. Elsewhere, pictures aren’t linked by anything except silence – and I found the silences in some cases stretched by the conductor so far as to take us away from the experience. A pity, because I found myself having to re-establish myself in the gallery a number of times instead of simply being taken from picture to picture, in what should have been a sequence of unbroken enchantment.

But as for the orchestral playing – well, it was of a vividness and impact that meant that one was very quickly returned and imbued with the pictorial and emotive force of whatever music was being performed – it was the best possible advertisement the orchestra could have devised for its up-and-coming programme next year. And I do hope to encounter both conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger again in concert, before too long. It was wonderful to experience an evening of music-making so distinctive and engaging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orchestra Wellington confirms its vital role in city’s musical life with wonderful Haydn and Mahler

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with Kieran Rayner (baritone)

Haydn: Symphonies No 85 in B flat and 86 in D
Mahler: Songs of a Wayfarer (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) arr. Schoenberg
Schnittke: Moz-Art à la Haydn

Opera House, Wellington

Sunday 7 September, 4 pm

In the lobby before the concert a friend asked whether I’d been to Marc Taddei’s pre-concert talk and I confessed I had not. She, with a wide knowledge of music, though from another artistic perspective, had been delighted with it, had gained rewarding insights in what was about to be played.

Some pre-concert talks are more fascinating than others; Taddei’s are among the best: he has a gift that reaches both young people and those who might think they know it all, and serious assistants (in the French sense; to avoid the obnoxious word attendees) should make time for them.

Haydn’s Paris Symphonies
One of the topics he would have covered would have been the Paris symphonies of Haydn which have provided the backbone of all the orchestra’s subscription concerts this year. This concert was special, with one each at the beginning and the end.

They are probably among the symphonies that even the moderately well-versed might recognise but be unable to ascribe a number to. That is certainly my case. Though the symphonies were commissioned by a Paris orchestra, Haydn did not conduct them in Paris, as Mozart had his a few years earlier.

No 85
No 85, reputedly a favourite of Queen Marie-Antoinette, opens with stately, perhaps ponderous Adagio, rather un-Haydn-like, with a deceptive dotted rhythm; its move into the substantive first movement, is as serious as the opening of an early Beethoven symphony, and seemed indeed to call for a bigger orchestra than we had. Though the programme notes recorded how Haydn had taken advantage of what he knew to be the great size of the Paris orchestra, we were limited to the scale of an Esterhazy ensemble. There were six each of both violin sections, down to just one double bass.

However, Taddei, through his brisk triple-time speeds and a sense of resolve, soon succeeded in creating the impression of a big band, acknowledging a work of major significance, as Haydn displays his assurance in adroit modulations and his unfailing wit in the varied treatment of his themes. The second movement, scarcely a ‘slow’ movement, either as written or as played, with its solid emphasis on every other crotchet, in common time, handles a French folk tune said to have been one the Queen played in her prison cell a few years later awaiting her 1793 fate under the guillotine. Indeed, memorable, with its charming flute obbligato weaving through it.

The Minuet and Trio had an unusual quality, with its asides and solo excursions for violin and woodwinds; but notably the little diversions and the discursiveness, especially in the shy Trio, almost a Schubertian Laendler, a sort-of mirror image of the Minuet itself, which avoided any risk of the predictable, all of which were charmingly captured. The finale had a more orthodox feel: brisk and bright, though there’s the characteristic Haydn diminuendo and the music’s near disappearance before the recapitulation. All performed with a splendid feeling of affection and an authentic feel for the gallant/classical period.

No 86
I might as well mention here the other symphony – No 86 in D major – played at the concert’s end. Though played with the same forces, and even though I had found No 85 thoroughly delightful, this was even more imposing right from the more than a minute-long introduction – Adagio, with an illusion of greater weight, such as Haydn would have imagined in the orchestra for which he was writing. And perhaps, though I don’t have perfect pitch, a reflection of the way composers felt about the D major key.

After that fine rhetorical Adagio, the Allegro spiritoso came like a moment of sheer delight, and it brought me to what I’m sure has driven Taddei to programme all six of these works this year – the realisation that, given Haydn’s remarkable sense of the differences in culture and style between London and Paris (then and now), these symphonies are every bit the masterpieces that the dozen London Symphonies are.

Compared with No 85, the slow movement here really is that, though oddly labelled ‘Capriccio largo’.
Though the programme note observed that the melody was not especially memorable, in fact the whole movement IS memorable, for the spirit of poignant seriousness, of profondeur and throughtfulness
that invested its performance.

The Minuet and Trio were no less engaging, with the Trio again offering charming episodes for solo violin against, woodwind solos, its tune undecorated in comparison to the Minuet itself in which almost every note is embellished. And it ends with an imposing, finale, quite the equal in grandeur and zest of any Salomon-symphony: timpani, brass and all. Which was a splendidly-judged ending to a splendid concert.

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen by Mahler
But the second work in the concert was Mahler’s Wayfarer songs sung by young Wellington baritone Kieran Rayner. I’ve been hearing him over many years since he was getting parts as an undergraduate in the School of Music operas and other performances; and since then in the wonderful Candide, done by the Orpheus Choir and Days Bay’s Così, Alcina and Viaggio a Reims.

This youthful cycle (Mahler was about 25) is a fine exercise for a singer at Rayner’s stage, and accepting the very occasional technical blemishes, he invested each song with its individual character and emotion: full of opportunity for rich and extreme late Romantic passion and grief. His discreet hand gestures and facial expressions were all that was needed to support the words, which emerged clearly.

The orchestra may have felt that the Schoenberg arrangement of the score better suited the small orchestra that had been decided on for the Haydn. Many would have found the score perfectly satisfactory, but with Mahler’s own orchestral sounds in my head, the orchestra’s size: small string bodies and the limited range of wind instruments, seemed a little dry.

Others have found in Schoenberg’s arrangements their own intensity and colour, which is felt to match what Mahler himself set on paper. Rayner captured the moving expression of pain in ‘Die zwei blauen Augen…’, though I found something inauthentic in the sound of strings against single clarinet and flute: ‘Quelque chose manquait’. Yet there were many aspects that I enjoyed, the contributions of both piano and the digital (I suppose) harmonium, in ‘Ging heut’ Morgen…’ and the agitated feel of ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’, for example. And above all the final words, ‘Unter dem Lindenbaum … War alles, alles wieder gut/Alles! Alles, Lieb und Leid/Und Welt und Traum!’: defeated and lost, accompanied by small, thin flute and clarinet notes.

Ideally, one would have liked both German and English texts to have been offered in the programme; after the synopsis of each song, the English translation of each was a bit redundant: better to have printed the German.

Schnittke
Finally, and to my mind a bit oddly, Schnittke’s manipulation of his notion of the style and sense of Haydn and Mozart.

When we returned after the interval, the stage was in darkness; slowly, figures could be discerned entering, a violin began to play a jaunty, fractured tune, then another violin and eventually the stage lit up to reveal the full orchestra and conductor, standing. The music, in detached scraps, came from unfamiliar music Mozart wrote for a commedia dell’ arte; they had no impact of themselves, and it was hard (for me) to derive much entertainment or enlightenment from Schnittke’s efforts.  After a few minutes, the stage started to dim and players left one by one, as in the Farewell Symphony, and it ended with the double bass playing alone with Taddei tapping his baton on the music stand. I was left wondering what it was that I’d missed, that had gained it the sort of standing it has in avant-garde circles. (Does Schnittke actually love Haydn and Mozart? Does he love music? For all his difficult life and the sadness of his last years, I have never warmed to his music).

However, the Haydn and Mahler were the real thing, deeply touching both the mind and the emotions, and the orchestra’s performances offered another demonstration of the value of a city based orchestra which tackles music that is less played by the NZSO, but which is revealed as of major importance.

 

Searing contribution from the WYO to “Recovering Forbidden Voices”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.8 in C MInor Op.65
BEETHOVEN – Two Romances for Violin and Orchestra Opp. 40 and 50

Malavika Gopal (violin)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Monday, 25th August, 2014

This concert was associated with a series of performances, presentations and discussions entitled “Recovering Forbidden Voices” –  programmes organised by Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music and the History and German Programmes of Victoria University of Wellington, and held over the previous few days (22nd-25th August) in the capital. The “Forbidden Voices” referred to music and composers who fell foul of the Nazis in Europe, resulting in many works, particularly by Jewish composers, being suppressed or banned over the period associated with the rise of Hitler to power in Germany.

The music of Shostakovich came under fire in his native Russia at the same time for different reasons – the composer had, during the 1930s, famously fallen foul of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” but had rehabilitated himself somewhat as a “people’s artist” with his Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the latter work celebrating the siege of Leningrad and the heroism of the Russian people. What the composer privately thought of the war, its effects upon his homeland and the events surrounding the conflict was more realistically delineated in his Eighth Symphony.

The work wasn’t received with any great acclaim, reviews being tinged with disappointment and bewilderment at the music’s bleak, pessimistic tone – “significantly tougher and more astringent that either the Fifth or Seventh…..unlikely to prove popular…” commented a colleague of the composer. These were prophetic words, as in 1948 the infamous “Zhdanov decree” issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party attacked the composer and his work, accusing him of “formalist perversions”. As a result, the Eighth Symphony wasn’t performed again until 1956.

The Russian view of the symphony that has endured was expressed a number of years later later by the great pianist and associate of the composer, Sviatoslav Richter, who called it “the decisive  work in Shostakovich’s output”. While perhaps not as popular in the West as the aforementioned Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the C Minor work’s greatness and incredible  depth of tragic expression has come to be acknowledged everywhere.

While the symphony’s performance readily associated the occasion with the “Recovering Forbidden Voices” theme, the concert’s first half presented a dramatic and perhaps a welcome contrast in anticipation to Shostakovich’s conflict-torn work. This was supplied by both of Beethoven’s Romances for violin and orchestra, performed by soloist Malavika Gopal, currently a player with the NZSO, and back home in Wellington after a period of study and performing experience overseas (including a stint with the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra).  However, before the concert proper began we were properly welcomed by three speakers, firstly Professor Donald Maurice representing the School of Music, and then by the Mayor of Wellington, Celia Wade-Brown, and the Government Minister for the Arts, Chris Finlayson, all of whom talked about the “Forbidden Music” venture.

Once the music got under way, Malavika Gopal’s quality as a violinist was instantly apparent, the opening solo of the first of Beethoven’s Romances as sweet-toned as one could wish for, and the contrasting middle section properly gutsier and grainier, as befitted the music. Naturally all the attention seemed to be on her, except that if Hamish McKeich and the orchestra’s accompaniments had faltered in any way we would surely have noticed!

I have a slight preference for the less ritualistic, more rhapsodic No.2 of the pair of Romances, and Malavika Gopal didn’t disappoint with this one either, if anything sounding even sweeter-toned in the music’s freer, more soaring lines.Though reluctant to pass judgement to any great extent on her musicianship after such brief encounters with her playing, I would nevertheless be anxious to hear her tackle some more extended solo repertoire, which her return to take up a place with the NZSO “firsts” will hopefully enable her to do here in Wellington.

An interval decently distanced the two very different listening experiences for us, after which it was “all posts manned (sic)” for the Shostakovich. Though feeling hopeful as regarding the capabilities of these young players (thanks in part to my hearing a wonderful recent performance by the School of Music Orchestra of Vaughan Williams’ difficult “Pastoral” Symphony) I did have reservations regarding their abilities in sustaining Shostakovich’s vast and bleak vistas of pessimism and deep sorrow, punctuated by frighteningly intense outbursts of fear and anger. And I wondered how on earth this group of young players was going to be able to generate sufficient tones to fill the spaces of the Michael Fowler Centre. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

Right from the beginning, the playing seemed galvanised by a kind of spirit akin to grim determination, Hamish McKeich getting the lower strings to dig furiously into the textures, and, together with the chilling entries of the winds and the brasses, catch the “edge” of the music. Each section of the orchestra seemed to “speak its name” and assert its character in full measure, the treble voices across the sound-spectrum by turns plaintive and shrill, the middle voices properly insistent, and the basses both brooding and massively weighty as required.

Though the upper strings occasionally had problems with their intonation when essaying those great contrapuntal passages, the players kept the intensities to the fore, keeping the argument strongly and inexorably ploughing forwards, the winds and brasses rising spectrally from growing disquiet mid-movement and brutalising both the themes and their interaction, with incredibly powerful onslaughts of sound, leaving the cor anglais and the clarinets to try and pick up the pieces. Despite the strings’ on-going struggle to hold those long mezzo-forte lines together, and the trumpet with its sudden declamatory phrase having a bad moment (probably after the player had delivered the passage  perfectly at rehearsal umpteen times!) the music’s purposeful strength was tenaciously held to the movement’s end.

What amazing, garish, full-on sonorities were hurled at us over the course of the two following scherzo-like movements! Such tremendous, playing-right-out work from the winds – and to such ghastly, ghoulish effect – in the first scherzo, Allegretto, piccolo, bassoon, clarinet, and then piccolo again, were all superb! Here, the strings occasionally had that nightmarish “wartime air-siren” aspect, which galvanised the brass and percussion into brutal sequences, harrowing ostinati torn by savage climaxes – however, Hamish McKeich took care to preserve the music’s shape with his players, maintaining a sense of ebb-and-flow, which held things in check, albeit temporarily, the contra-bassoon having a few droll soundings of its own, helping to ease the tensions.

All, it seemed, to little avail, as the savage, relentless viola ostinati which began the third movement allegro lashed out and flailed away at our sensibilities. My favourite part of the symphony (sensation-monger that I secretly am), I’ve always found the Russian recorded performances of this movement in particular streets ahead of those made in the West, with conductors like Kondrashin and Mravinsky requiring of their players such raw, unbridled attack and relentless, unequivocal savagery when addressing the music’s machine-like rhythms. I had been told by McKeich that he had studied the work with Valery Gergiev in Europe, and that he was fully aware of the special “Russian” performance characteristics, which for him informed the playing of that repertoire. In this movement, as with the rest of the symphony, his direction was as good as his word.

It actually sounded for much of the time as if a Russian orchestra was playing, so determined and up-front were the efforts of the players to give what their conductor was asking for – and for me it put some of the professionally-polished, but much-too-genteel efforts of some crack ensembles I’d heard on record in the shade. Full marks in particular to the trumpeter and side-drummer in the crude, ironic trio section – the strings couldn’t quite match the “bite” of the solo instruments here, but they made up for it when the opening returned. And the brass and percussion at the climax overwhelmed, as they ought to have done, the timpanist lashing out mercilessly, underlining the brutality of the composer’s nightmarish depiction.

So it was we were plunged into the great Passacaglia of the fourth movement, brass announcing the crack of doom and the string lines utterly despairing, the winds adding to the desolation with their helplessly-lost utterances, piccolo, bass clarinet and tongued flutes expressing the “fumbling in the despairing dark” referred to by one commentator – here it all sounded exactly like that, the impulses and gestures well-and-truly “gutted”.

Which is why the transition to the finale effected by the bassoon solo was such balm to the senses, even though the resolutions which followed remained properly haunted and bruised to the end. When questioned, the composer told a friend that the C Major transition to the concluding Allegretto had cost him “so much blood”, but that the end of the symphony was optimistic, despite the reiterate of moments of anxiety – though nothing further from the tub-thumping of the Fifth Symphony’s finale could be imagined than this work’s closing pages.

What these young musicians and their conductor gave us was a deeply-felt, incredibly-committed and stunningly-delivered emotional journey, thrills and spills all part of the human experience. It deserves to be remembered as a landmark performance by any standards, but certainly as a glowing achievement on the part of Hamish McKeich and the orchestra, and a cause for warm appreciation on the part of those fortunate enough to be present.

 

 

Imaginative programme of too rarely played masterpieces from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by admin

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

Haydn: Symphony No. 83 in G minor, The Hen
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G
Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Golden Cockerel

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 9 August 2014, 7:30 pm

This imaginative programme by Orchestra Wellington was an opportunity to enjoy a selection of colourful works heard all too infrequently on concert stages here. Haydn’s The Hen Symphony was performed with appropriately modest orchestral forces for which Orchestra Wellington is admirably suited. The opening Allegro Spiritoso sparkled with clean vigorous playing of exemplary precision that allowed inner voices to speak through beautifully clearly. The contrasting central episode was beautifully judged by Taddei, as were the dynamic contrasts and pauses of the following Andante, where his tempo shaped and enhanced the transparent artistry of the melodic lines.

The Minuet was undertaken at a tempo that would have been well beyond even the sprightliest pupils of any Baroque dancing master, but it bounced along with appealing grace providing one ignored its origins in the dance (a somewhat questionable approach in my view). The Finale bears the designation Vivace which is best interpreted as lively or sprightly, but the hectic tempo imposed by Taddei was such that the wonderful, brisk triplet rhythms simply could not be enunciated cleanly and effectively. It was disappointing to have such an invigorating reading of this symphony somewhat clouded in this way.

Soloist Jian Liu gave a riveting performance of Ravel’s delightful Piano Concerto in G major, and he was supported by some spectacular playing from the orchestra. In the opening movement Ravel has crafted some exquisitely balanced conversations between the pianist and various instrumentalists. The Allegramente designation means simply cheerfully, merrily, but hectic tempi in the fast sections often obscured Ravel’s remarkable skill and artistry as an orchestrator. By contrast, those episodes that call up the world of Louisiana blues were wonderfully languid and seductive, particularly in the hands of the brass and woodwind (with imaginative use of the French bassoon by Preman Tilsen.)

The soulful simplicity of the opening piano melody in the following Adagio was beautifully expressed by Liu, and was deliciously savoured by the winds as they picked it up one by one. Full breadth of tempo allowed the wandering tonalities and modal overtones of the orchestration to be genuinely explored. But sadly the signature cor anglais melody of this movement sounded strangled by nerves, whereas it deserves to ooze out with rich seductive warmth over the lacework of the piano part.

The Finale is certainly marked Presto, but as in the first movement, Taddei’s frenetic tempo unjustly obscured Ravel’s spectacular mastery of complex orchestral resources. However, no player appeared to flinch at Taddei’s demands, and Liu’s technical mastery was quite spectacular, with mind-blowing solo work from first bassoon Tilsen deserving particular mention. But in fact Ravel’s extraordinary skills were robbed of their true exposure by such a tempo, whereas he, and the audience, most surely deserved better.

Stravinsky’s symphonic poem Song of the Nightingale is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s oriental fairytale of the same name. Right from the first notes of the spectacular opening outburst the players were clearly revelling in the extraordinary colour and complexity of the writing. But the initial tempo was just too hectic to allow Stravinsky’s amazingly intricate colour palette to be properly appreciated, degenerating rather into a frantic muddied melange .

Things improved markedly in the following episodes where Taddei gave the instrumentalists a chance to show off both the vigorous and poetic qualities of the work. The somnolent and subdued sections were sensitively crafted to create a  truly evocative air of mystery and oriental fantasy, and the final retreat of Death’s threatening presence from the striken Emperor’s bed chamber left a breathless hush over the hall.

Six months before he died in 1908, Rimsky-Korsakov completed his opera score for Golden Cockerel based on Pushkin’s 1834 fairytale. It was immediately banned by the Tsar’s political censors for its satirical political overtones, and this orchestral suite was only later was compiled from his work by Glazunov and Steinberg (the composer’s son-in-law). It is an outstanding showcase for the amazing skill, colour and complexity of orchestration that Rimsky-Korsakov had exactingly honed over his lifetime.

The opening scene depicts Tsar Dodon at home in his opulent palace, followed next by his unsuccessful venture onto eastern battlefields to defeat imagined threats from a neighbouring potentate. These two movements were given a most evocative reading that did full justice to the rich colours lavished on the orchestral canvas. The potentate was in fact the Tsaritsa Shemakhan, whose seductive powers overcame Tsar Dodon in the third movement, where dancing melodic lines were artfully shaped in contrast to the energetic central section. The brass had a marvellous field day with all the pomp and ceremony of the ensuing wedding ceremonies which they tackled with great drama and intensity. And the orchestra readily transformed  the mood into the dark, sombre foreboding that presaged the Tsar’s  unfortunate demise at the hands of the triumphant magical cockerel.

The whole work gave a wonderful opportunity to appreciate not only Rimsky-Korsakov’s extraordinary powers, but the technical mastery and musicianship of Orchestra Wellington’s musicians. Full marks too to conductor and management for offering a most imaginative programme of lesser known works. Those Wellington concert goers who opted for a cosy evening at home on an inhospitable winter’s night missed out on a  real treat.

 

Masters of whole worlds: Mozart and Mahler with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Violin Concerto No.4 in D Major K.218
MAHLER – Symphony No.9 in D Major

Simone Lamsma (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 8th August, 2014

What to play at a concert along with a Mahler Symphony? It’s a question that has diverted promoters, critics and musicians themselves over the years, and the various possible solutions seem often to complicate further rather than clarify matters.

It isn’t so much the actual music that’s the problem – it’s the awkward length of Mahler’s symphonic conceptions that makes programming with other pieces something of a challenge. At least the composer’s First and Fourth Symphonies aren’t so problematical due to their shorter durations – each can easily accommodate a “normal” first half of, say, an overture followed by a concerto, within a concert.

Not so the other Mahler symphonies, all of which are that bit too lengthy to allow anything pre-interval along the lines of the above, though, apart from the longest of them, the Third Symphony, not quite of the length that normally takes up a whole concert. Having said that, two of the works – the “Resurrection” (No.2) and the “Symphony of a Thousand”(No.8) are such spectacles in themselves that on that count they’re often played “alone” – in each case the sheer “size” of the experience comes from other considerations beside the music’s time-span.

The work featured in tonight’s concert, the Ninth Symphony, though perhaps less viscerally spectacular than either of the above, has the kind of gravitas that can make it a stand-alone piece as well. The conductor of tonight’s performance, Edo de Waart, said in an interview a day or so before the concert that he usually performed the Ninth on its own, as he felt it would overshadow anything else that’s played. If something else was chosen to be performed at the same concert it would have to be “strong”.

Perhaps Mahler himself gave a kind of “guide-line” with a remark he reportedly made to Sibelius when discussing the nature of symphonic form – in response to Sibelius’s professed attraction to the form’s “severity and logic”, Mahler exclaimed that “symphony is like the world – it should embrace everything!”.  I certainly thought that on this occasion the choice of the Mozart Violin Concerto (K.218 in D Major) presented by Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma was appropriate – it seemed to me to fulfill at once that “all-embracing” aspiration valued by the composer, while presenting two uniquely characterful works with their own clearly-defined boundaries.

As it turned out, the Mozart concerto was given a delightful performance by Simone Lamsma, her bright, silvery entry banishing for the remainder of the performance a slightly wiry-sounding beginning to the work from the NZSO strings, and her energy and élan nicely countering an initial impression of petiteness. I thought her passagework most characterful, her accented notes given plenty of emphasis, bringing out a “layered” quality to the music.

The cadenza developed these perspectives further, getting very physical and gutsy playing, the sequence sounding more like Beethoven’s voice in places than Mozart’s! We then got a heavenly “andante cantabile” at the slow movement’s beginning, the soloist’s floated notes exquisite-sounding, her silvery discourse sensitively accompanied by the ensemble, and, in conclusion, capped off by a cadenza for the violin which occasionally broke into what sounded like birdsong.

Not to be outdone in effect, the finale took us through poised, gavotte-like steps by way of introduction, and then whirled us into an allegro, the exchanges between the two sequences continuing throughout the movement. And such an exuberant cadenza! – demonstrating to us the soloist’s brilliant fingerwork, and leavened in places by pure, elevated tones. After this came a lovely, “dying fall” kind of finish to the work of the “that’s all, folks!” variety, not unlike what the composer had also done in his previous violin concerto – all very piquant and charming.

And so to the Mahler – it was true, as Edo de Waart had pointed out, that this work was perfectly capable of standing alone in concert – but having the Mozart concerto first up we felt more “tuned in”, at one by this stage with the ambience of the listening-spaces, and with the throes of our day-to-day existence put well aside, ready to face Mahler’s symphonic retelling of his life’s most profound “dark night of the soul”.

The conductor had said when interviewed that “one needs a top orchestra” for this work, so I think he would have been thrilled with the NZSO’s response to his direction throughout the symphony – certainly his demeanour at the end and his ready acknowledgement of the players indicated his wholehearted appreciation of their efforts. Each of the movements here had a surety of impulse, touch and expression, the structures clearly outlined, the emotions unlocked and ready for we listeners to square up to.

Those enormously cataclysmic first-movement climaxes which characterise the composer’s despair in the face of his all-too-pressing mortal sickness and imminent destruction were here delivered directly and swiftly, growing from the musical textures rather than over-laden, or imposed from outside – obviously the “line”, the shape and coherence of the music was important to de Waart, something not achieved lightly, but integral to the flow. I felt it was more “musical” than “psychological” in the conductor’s hands, concerned less with emotional extremes and more with soundscapes, making the throes of despair more of a human than a personal problem, with its own set of resonances.

In this the conductor was supported by a plethora of superbly-wrought orchestral detail, the occasional brass “blip” like “spots on the sun” (as someone said once about the great pianist Alfred Cortot’s wrong notes!), playing whose richness and variation of colour and texture fully realised Mahler’s love for the world and his agony at the thought of having to relinquish life so peremptorily. The word “leb’wohl” (farewell) readily came to mind in tandem with the two-note theme that dominated the music.

Both middle movements were strong on “attitude”, the Landler/Waltz by turns good-naturedly bucolic and sentimental at the beginning, with the quicker waltz-music taking on an almost manic aspect in places, before everything ground almost to a halt, leaving the rustic tune to run its course, here nicely tossed about the orchestra before cheekily ending with a piccolo phrase.

Set against this drollery was the harsh Rondo-Burleske, here a tightly-coiled set of poses and  rapier-like thrusts, purposeful and almost business-like in its insistence and cruelty. Whatever savage humour could have been lurking around corners and in alcoves, de Waart’s splendidly-maintained focus gave it no chance, though the claustrophobic mood was relieved by a trio-like section featuring a nostalgic, splendidly-played trumpet solo.

The frenetic, abyss-bound final pages of the Rondo, brilliantly delivered, were succeeded by sounds which seemed wrung from tissues of pure emotion by the strings, playing at first in octaves and then generously flooding the textures with warmly-impassioned harmonies – conductor and players here made this moment work as profoundly as I’ve ever heard it presented. But even more impressive were the work’s final few minutes, here played with such rapt beauty and concentration as I’ve rarely experienced anywhere in a concert hall – string phrases and sound-impulses that suggested all too palpably a farewell to life, a leave-taking whose silences continued to sound for what seemed like ages afterwards – for all of us present, very much the stuff of legends.

This performance’s dedication, announced before the concert, to the recently-deceased Franz-Paul Decker, for many years the NZSO’s Music Director, had no more appropriate voice than that final movement of a work that had been one of Decker’s greatest interpretative achievements. The old maestro’s shade would have sighed contentedly in tandem with those beautifully-realised, seemingly-endless silences to which we were all so very privileged to be able to lend our  presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anniversaries, celebrations and NZ premieres – NZSM Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PASTORAL ELEGY
Music by Gade, Villa-Lobos, Vaughan Williams

NIELS GADE – Overture “Hamlet”
(Vincent Hardaker – conductor)
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS – ‘Cello Concerto No.2
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Symphony No.3 “Pastoral”
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Alicia Cardwgan (soprano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
NZ School of Music Orchestra

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

Wednesday, 6th August, 2014

I thought this an exceptional concert in every way! – innovative repertoire choices were thrillingly and memorably supported by skilled and strongly-focused, committed playing from all concerned.

Each piece as presented had its own world and voiced its own particular character – partly the result of stylistic and contextual differences, but also  indicative of the extent to which these musicians were determined to get to grips with things, and put across the music’s differing flavours, colours and feelings.

I’d never before encountered either the Niels Gade overture or the Villa-Lobos concerto (the performance of the latter by ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo was, in fact, the New Zealand premiere). Gade may have been thought conservative in musical outlook by his contemporaries and by subsequent posterity, but I thought his “Hamlet” Overture fully worthy of Shakespeare, as regards the music’s beauty, dignity, energy and theatricality.

Conductor Vincent Hardaker and his players deftly nailed the “cat-like tread” mood of the opening, preparing the ambiences for the intense, dramatic urgencies that grew, spectre-like, out of the textures. Though not strictly following the play’s action, the music portrayed a good deal of the drama’s significant moods and character interactions.

A telling example of this came with the strings’ very Lisztian melody depicting the beautiful but ill-fated Ophelia’s love for the Prince, and the music’s gradual disintegration as the girl’s madness and death drew near, lyricism undermined and eventually overlaid by repeated turbulence and purposeful strength. A final ‘cello solo then sounded over rich brass chordings, suggesting some kind of valediction being played out, the tragedy grimly resolved. I enjoyed it all, music and playing, immensely.

After this things were somewhat re-aligned – from Shakespearean tragedy the focus morphed into Latin American intensity and exuberance. This was accompanied by a change of conductor and the introduction of a soloist to perform Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Second ‘Cello Concerto. It was Kenneth Young who took the podium, and we also welcomed Inbal Megiddo, Head of ‘Cello Studies at the School of Music, as the concerto player.

To hear Megiddo perform this work was to experience the next best thing to a direct link with its composer, as she had studied the concerto with its first performer, Aldo Parisot, for whom Villa-Lobos actually wrote the work. Megiddo described that experience for her as “exhilarating”, and expressed the hope that she might be able to convey something of that same feeling in her performance for us, by way of dedicating her efforts to her “teacher, mentor, collleague and friend”. I can only report that she certainly made good her intention in spadefuls!

From the work’s first chord, with the music’s upper registers straightaway reaching for the stars, we in the audience were galvanised anew, as much by the playing as by the music itself – the writing seemed to possess a kind of “top echelon” quality, something of an edge which constantly tingled and thrilled. We heard marvellous exchanges between soloist and orchestra, with the former’s rhythmic verve readily communicating itself to the young orchestral players, encouraging them to take up the spirit of the music’s frequent syncopated figures and impulses dancing along the ‘cello-strings.

The folky-sounding second-movement Modinha, a Brazilian love-song genre, featured a beautiful ‘cello melody, with an intensely-laden heart-on-sleeve dance-like accompaniment. Still, the music seemed always to have a slight “edge”, an astringency which put paid to any feeling of its emotion cloying, Hollywood-style. A Scherzo, dance-like and mixing the exotic with the “folky” brought forth more exciting playing – in places intense and gutteral, at other times airborne and melismatic – from Megiddo, with conductor and orchestra splendidly responding to her energies with sharply-syncopated tutti sequences.

What the cellist herself described in the notes as a “virtuosic cadenza” was here excitingly and full-bloodedly played, with wonderful near-the-bridge timbres, triple-stopping and resonant open strings, some spectacular glissandi launching us into the world of the work’s finale. Here, ‘cellist and orchestra had a terrific time with a four-note theme that was tossed about like a straw man in a blanket to exhilarating effect, right up to the sheer abandonment of the coda, complete with its breath-snatchingly abrupt ending!

After the Villa-Lobos work’s ferment of whirlwind energies and arresting sonorities it seemed on paper entirely appropriate for the concert to feature by way of contrast a piece entitled “A Pastoral Symphony”, moreover one written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer of that quintessential English-landscape piece “The Lark Ascending”. Thinking about the juxtaposition of the two pieces made me recall a conversation some years ago with a friend who had visited London for the first time – he told me that after encountering the overwhelming grandeur and magnificence of St.Paul’s Cathedral he simply had to go back to his lodgings and lie down for a while.

True, the Villa-Lobos concerto, for all its engagingly vigorous and heartfelt qualities, wasn’t exactly grand, stupendous and cathedral-like! – but neither was the Vaughan Williams Symphony a mere exercise in English pastoral evocation (as a fellow-composer of Vaughan Williams’ dismissively remarked, concerning the work – “like a cow looking over a gate”!)  Whatever restorative qualities the symphony possessed applied to its own set of tensions and tragedies embedded within its contexts, those of its composer’s wartime service with the Medical Corps in France, a scenario fraught with death and loss. The composer, in fact referred to the work as a “War Requiem”, the Mahlerian second movement of the work with its bugle calls (played on a natural E-flat trumpet, and echoed by a natural horn) and anguished strings particularly underlining this idea.

Elsewhere, the music sang, danced and echoed with evocations of landscapes and people’s lives darkened by war and stained with blood – each movement wrought its own kind of ravaged beauty, the language and atmosphere one of lament rather than conflict and carnage. Ken Young kept the music’s pulse flowing throughout, to the work’s great advantage in this case, as tensions were made palpable by the playing’s urgency and tightly-wrought figurations. In the first movement, for example, the flowing themes were never allowed to settle, the music’s aspect having an almost haunted air, with memories of what had gone before “charging” the textures with tragedy.

The orchestral playing was, I thought, impressively focused, poised and suitably alert at all times, the textures and colours having the right mix of beauty and astringency. The winds at the beginning had tuning problems most obviously in their ensemble passages, but their individual work was outstanding throughout, with many a beautiful solo turned as the work proceeded. The brass chimed in with rich resonances when required, their ensemble capping the climaxes beautifully in places. And the work of the strings was a joy to experience, from the players’ most sensitive nuances to the most earnest and full-blooded climaxes. Conductor and players caught the ebb and flow of it all, the beauties and the sorrows.

The second movement’s nostalgic brass calls (the trumpet offstage, as indicated) came off splendidly, ably supported by contributions from the solo viola,’cello, and clarinet – but the work from the strings was again wondrous, phrases so sensitively and unerringly delivered, the players obviously right into the music’s world. Young aimed for and got a telling contrast of mood with the swiftly-delivered third movement, the tempi quicker than I’d ever heard previously – but it worked brilliantly, completely avoiding the somewhat heavy-footed quality sometimes encountered in performances of this movement. It also had the effect of sharpening the players’ responses to the movement’s elfin-textured coda, impulses striving for the greatest possible contrast with what had gone before in the bucolic scherzo.

Another off-stage “effect” in this work came with the final movement, the voice of a soprano at the very beginning and at the end. The singer’s disembodied tones have an ethereal effect, her wordless line a part-lament, part-incantation, which the strings repeat fervently at the movement’s climax – a stunning, breath-catching moment, as on this occasion. Soprano Alicia Cadwgan’s voice was ideally placed, not quite pure-toned enough at the outset of the first solo, and rushing a phrase mid-way through – but sounding far more at ease with her return at the end, floating her last few notes beautifully and hauntingly. As far as “capturing” the particular character of the movement mattered, Young’s direction and the orchestral playing was I thought, beyond reproach.

In the silence that followed we sat and allowed the resonances to fade as the tones had done, and pondered the music’s effect. I couldn’t help at that moment recalling various descriptions of the work which I’d read via my first, youthful hearings of recordings, comments which, even at that latter stage seemed to concentrate more upon the composer’s depictions of the “Corot-like landscapes” in France, and scarcely remark upon the music’s darker context of war’s grim realities. Perhaps a certain distancing wrought by time was necessary for people to re-examine the work’s and its composer’s circumstances – appropriately so, of course, as the anniversaries of that particular conflict presently loom disturbingly from out of time’s mists, carrying their warnings!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unexciting, lowpowered NZSO programme under Alexander Shelley yields riches after all

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Shelley

Shakespeare in Music

Korngold: Suite from incidental music for Much Ado and Nothing
Mendelssohn: Three pieces from the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Walton: Henry V suite (arranged by Muir Matheson)
Strauss: Symphonic Poem Macbeth

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 2 August 7:30 pm

The one programme in the NZSO’s 2014 season that looked problematic when I first scanned the offerings last year was this one. No soloist, no well-known conductor, no crowd-pulling music centre-piece.

So I was not surprised to see one of the smallest audiences for the NZSO that I can remember.

However. The music, all of it, was enjoyable and Alexander Shelley proved, as he had with the National Youth Orchestra last month, an engaging and energetic conductor. I’d heard him interviewed by Eva Radich on Upbeat during the week and was interested in his enthusiasm and ideas for engaging younger people in the enjoyment of classical music.

He spoke about each of the works on the programme, pertinently, with a wit and charm that could hardly have bothered anyone (though I often hear what I consider churlish complaints about musicians who presume to tell the audience things that they think they already know or, if they don’t know, don’t want to).

Korngold’s incidental music for Much Ado was for a Max Reinhardt production of the play in Vienna when the composer was 21, about the same time that he wrote Die tote Stadt. The claim in the programme that Korngold had won the admiration of Mahler struck me as unlikely, though I was aware of comments on the prodigy’s genius from others. After all Mahler died in 1911 when Korngold was only 13.  But the truth is more amazing, as the boy had been introduced to and played for Mahler in 1906, aged about 9!

The five pieces (out of a total of 14) gave immediate evidence of the composer’s theatrical flair and his predisposition for a Hollywood career which came in the 1930s. They were colourful, charmingly orchestrated, opening with a big chirpy tune, depicting the spunky Beatrice, and then a romantic tune more suitable to Hero and Claudio (according to the programme note). The next piece depicted the Bridal Morning, gentle and delightful with prominent flute and cello. And so it continued, each piece strongly characterised, and immediately engaging. The suite is scored for small orchestra: no basses, with single woodwinds, trumpet and trombone and just two horns, harp, piano and percussion.

The last section is Masquerade, a hornpipe, which is familiar – not what is heard in the British Sea Songs, the BBC Proms fixture on the Last Night, nor one of the Hornpipes in the Water Music. But a great little number, splendidly played. The music was a hit in post-ww1 Vienna and deserves to be heard occasionally today: in RNZ Concert’s Cadenza or their early morning programme, for example; and they now have an excellent recording thereof.

The orchestra played the Overture, the Scherzo and the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music. I’d wondered whether the normal principals – Leppänen, and the two Joyces – viola and cello, who were absent for the Korngold would reappear for the rest of the concert, but the sub-principals remained, including Donald Armstrong as Concertmaster.

The Overture danced with sparkling clarity and brilliance through the elfin-like opening bars, and the following tutti was especially enlivened by bell-like flutes, in fact the woodwinds were having a particularly fine evening, specially evident in the Scherzo; and throaty trombones restored the Wedding March from its manifold mutilations to its proper splendid celebratory character.

Though I do not usually warm to the bombast, heroics and bluster of Walton, and not Belshazzar’s Feast  either, it was either the fine orchestral playing or a sudden awakening on my part to the composer’s gifts that made me enjoy, even admire, the music he wrote for the war-time film of Henry V. The Passacaglia was especially attractive, with remote touches of Tudor music, of Gluck, of Grieg… I couldn’t really nail it. The battle scene was obviously a brilliant accompaniment to bowmen’s battles and cavalry charges. It struck me that there must have been something in the water between 1897 and 1902 (when Korngold and Walton were born) that led to such instinctive film music composers.

Finally, the least known of Strauss’s tone poems, Macbeth: I’d long thought it must have been his first as it has seemed less memorable, burdened with too much thick orchestration, and a biggish melody that tries to emerge on the strings failed to take root. In fact, both Aus Italien and Don Juan preceded it and Tod und Verklärung was written at the same time. So there’s no reason in terms of composing maturity for me to find Macbeth less arresting and interesting. But I do. It uses a normally large orchestra, with triple winds and five horns, and though this was a thoroughly lively and resonant performance it was only in the closing phase that the music showed signs of cohering and evolving in a promising and interesting way.

The concert as a whole was most enjoyable however; as I wrote above, however, there was no ‘must see/hear’ about the programme. For me, several other Shakespeare-inspired works would have suggested themselves, such as Berlioz Symphonie-dramatique, Roméo et Juliette from which around 40 minutes of beautiful excerpts could have been played. Or the Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev music for the same play might have had more pull than any one of the pieces programmed.

 

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2014 tackles showpieces with a will

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
NZSO NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA 2014

Conductor: Alexander Shelley
Assistant Conductor: Gemma New
NYO Composer-In-Residence 2014: Sarah Ballard

RICHARD STRAUSS – Don Juan Op.20
SARAH BALLARD – Synergos (World Premiere)
RICHARD STRAUSS – Also Sprach Zarathustra Op.30

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, Friday 18th July

ASB Theatre, Auckland, Saturday 19th July

This year the NZSO National Youth Orchestra is fifty-five years young – it’s a Gilbertian kind of paradox that the orchestra seems, with each passing season, just as youthful, energetic, enthusiastic and capable as ever!  Here on Friday evening last week were some of New Zealand’s finest young musicians brought together in the time-honoured manner for a short rehearsal period, before shaping up for their first concert in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre. With two famously brilliant late-romantic orchestral showpieces on the programme plus a newly-conmmissioned work by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence Sarah Ballard, the concert was set to be something of a blockbuster.

Things couldn’t have gotten away to a more thrilling beginning with the opening of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Juan, the first of the two pieces commemorating the composer’s two-hundredth birthday this year. British conductor Alexander Shelley didn’t “spare the horses”, getting from the young players oceans of vigour, colour and red-blooded commitment in realising the music’s infectious excitement and sheer bravado – impressive stuff from a twenty-four year-old composer! Romantic feeling there was a-plenty as well, with several superb solos delivered from within the opulent orchestra textures, solo violin and winds covering themselves with glory.

I wasn’t altogether surprised by the playing’s brilliant and whole-hearted qualities, having attended a number of concerts from recent years given by the orchestra, and invariably being knocked sideways on these occasions by the sheer impact of the music-making’s elan and range of expression. The 2009 performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, for example, remains for me an unforgettable occasion, the performance as thrilling as I’d ever previously encountered of that work, either “live” or on disc, one most fittingly marking the orchestra’s fiftieth birthday.

But this concert seemed to me to present just as challenging a prospect in a different way – from a listener’s point of view these two Strauss works appear to demand just as much brilliance and energy as does any Mahler Symphony, or orchestral work by Bartok or Debussy, but along with an additional degree of tonal weight and depth that “goes with the territory”. More so than with the other composers mentioned, Strauss’s works are, perhaps along with Scriabin’s, the most sumptuously-orchestrated of his era, requiring players to generously pour forth their tonal resources, and frequently occasioning the command “all you have!” from conductors.

I wasn’t worried by a couple of momentary ensemble spills that accompanied the thrills throughout the concert – but I was concerned that these youthful players would be able to summon up enough breadth and depth of sound to put across the sheer physical impact of this music. It wasn’t so crucial during Don Juan, whose music has for much of the time a volatile, quicksilver urgency that relies on brilliance as much as, if not more than, weight. As I’ve said, these players, guided by Alexander Shelley, threw themselves into the fray and realized all the music’s glittering energy with great elan.

Among those who acquitted themselves splendidly were clarinettist David McGregor and oboist Thomas Hutchinson – the latter in particular made a beautiful thing of his famous solo in Don Juan depicting ‘the red-headed woman, Donna Elvira”, an embodiment of the “Ideal Feminine”, making the Don’s frenetic drive towards a kind of fulfillment seem even more precipitous and his decline and death more shocking – here properly and chillingly realized!

A different kettle of fish was Also Sprach Zarathustra (“Thus spake Zarathustra”), Strauss’s response in orchestral terms to the thoughts and philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche. A more epic, and longer-breathed work, its textures every now and then pointed to the orchestra’s relative lack of both size and tonal resource. Perhaps the long string-melody soon after the very beginning of the work most obviously illustrated this shortcoming – the first few measures were beautifully negotiated by the solo strings, but the relative smallness of the sound of the full section thereafter stressed a need for more tonal weight and vibrancy.

Happily, these few moments were outweighed by the impact of the playing of the more vigorous passages in the score. The famous opening came off splendidly – despite there being no pipe organ at hand  in the MFC (whomever it may concern, please note the “veiled” reference here to the need for restoring the Wellington Town Hall to circulation as quickly as possible!) Conductor Alexander Shelley kept things moving, allowing timpanist Sam Rich his wonderful moment of glory, while not pressing too hard on trumpeter Matthew Stein and the other brass players, who helped bring off a magnificent musical sunrise. Another heartening and joyous sequence was that of the Dance Song, solo violinist Jonathan Tanner leading the dance with easeful charm (some particularly lovely individual notes from his instrument!) and infectious gaiety.

So, the Strauss works can be said to justly represent another musical landmark in the orchestra’s distinguished history. But what of the concert’s new work, the “world premiere” of Synergos, written by the orchestra’s 2014 composer-in-residence, Sarah Ballard? The short response is that I and my various cohorts at the concert thought the work a brilliant display of descriptive orchestral writing, employing instrumental timbres and colourings to stunning effect. One friend (an experienced concert-goer) went so far as to admit to me that he was prepared to patiently “sit through” the work as a way of getting back to the “real” music afterwards – but to his surprise he enjoyed Sarah Ballard’s finely-crafted collection of orchestral “noises” much more than he thought he would.

This twelve-minute work achieved a great deal in a short time, being a kind of three-part exploration of instrumental timbres and tonal hues associated with each of two colours, red and gold, and of their eventual “synergos” or coming together. I thought the opening of the work extremely kinetic, and very “edgy” as regards the instrumental extremes of timbre and tone being employed. The opening sequences were arresting – scintillations of percussion, strings playing right at the “edge” of their tone, heavy brass growling, winds in a ferment, cackling like witches – a bedlam-like orchestral canvas! Being not particularly colour-oriented in my own thinking, I found myself inclined to characterize what I heard so far as being of a vibrant, active quality – by instinct seeking and forming a “behavioural” more than an “appearance” description.

By contrast I thought the second part of the work had a more open, broader-browed manner, the string-tones seeming to resonate or widen to reveal spacious aspects, the wind notes burning like stars in the ambient firmament, the harp-notes sprinkling showers of gently-scintillated warmth. The figurations sounded at ease with themselves, ready to cohere with whatever timbres or colours might be thus activated – the effect wasn’t unlike the ambience surrounding one of those huge, slowly-revolving reflector-spheres which collect and configure as much as reflect and scintillate.

So the opening scenario drew from the composer’s set of responses to red, or, as she called it “Alizarin”, while this latter sequence explored the contrasting effects of considering gold, or “Aurum”. My younger companion at the concert was delighted at being able to recognize the contrasting features of the two “colours” (she afterwards admitted to being attuned to colour in music, and was thus receptive to what Sarah Ballard’s work was exploring). What I found fascinating was what then followed – the amalgamation of the two parts, the synergos of the piece’s title.

Individual lines, figurations, punctuations and impulses began to push their way through, up and out of the textures, the breathy, toneless brasses awakening the winds, and finding their own voices, the two different ”waves” of occupancy eyeing, shouldering and pushing one another around a bit at first, displaying the prerequisite “attitude” as part of the synergistic process, before finding their places in the new order of things. I was left with a feeling of awe at the work’s conclusion, as if I’d been of some kind of journey which defined the nature of my own temporality in the face of the timelessness evoked by the tinkling glockenspiel at the piece’s end.

Very great credit to composer and conductor and musicians for a remarkable quarter-hour’s music, one which added to the overall enjoyment and fascination of 2014’s distinctive NZSO NYO occasion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wellington Chamber Orchestra – nostalgia, high spirits and adventure

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

LILBURN – Aotearoa Overture
HAYDN – Symphony No.99 in E-flat
SIBELIUS – Symphony No 1 in E Minor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Vincent Hardaker (conductor)

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

Sunday, 6th July 2014

Perhaps it’s awfully “New Age” of me – but I do like to make up some kind of all-purpose phrase to use as a heading, when writing a review of any concert. It actually provides a framework upon which one can hang aspects of an overall purpose for the music-making, even if it’s largely in the ear of this particular listener as it were. Of course, this “ear of the listener” is the true reality of any concert – we listen to and respond individually, not collectively, to music, however much we might like to compare notes (whoops!) afterwards.

This concert resisted my first attempts at finding a phrase that would adequately sum up the music played – I finally hit upon the idea that the ostensible “odd composer out” of the trio, Josef Haydn, could, in fact, be equated with his two youthful companions, Sibelius and Lilburn, on the score of being similarly “young at heart”. There’s certainly nothing in this particular Haydn Symphony to suggest anything other than youthful spirits and unflagging energy, qualities in abundant supply, of course, in each of the other works on the program.

So, on that score I’ve been able to link, however tenuously, both music and composers for this Chamber Orchestra presentation. Douglas Lilburn’s well-known Overture “Aotearoa”, which opened the concert, was written specifically for a “New Zealand Centenary Matinee” in London in April 1940 – the orchestra’s own programme note was, I thought, somewhat misleading in using the word “sadly”, when referring to the Overture being performed in London first of all, as it was that particular centenary soiree which specifically prompted the work’s creation and gave the young composer the opportunity of it being actually performed. It was, incidentally, Lilburn’s final compositional act of his student years in London, as he left shortly after the concert for New Zealand.

But to the present performance!  – and here I have to take my metaphorical hat off to conductor Vincent Hardaker and the orchestra players for a splendid performance of the work. Right from the first pizzicato-and-woodwind chord, it seemed to me that a certain quality was “there”, that the sounds made by the players brought to mind that unique character remarked upon by New Zealanders who heard that first London performance – “It’s Cape Reinga!”, one ex-pat Kiwi listener was heard apparently whispering to the other, during the work’s introduction!

What impressed was the evocation of the music’s character throughout – tones and textures by turns shimmered, sparkled and roared, as the interaction of sunlight, water and wind with rugged coastlines and towering mountains was brought to the mind’s view. True, there was a lack of really soft playing from the strings in certain places, and some of the composer’s characteristic whiplash rhythmic figurations occasionally lacked the last word in precision – but the spirit was at all times palpable, which, for me was more important than soulless accuracy.

I also liked Vincent Hardaker’s actual “shaping” of the music, particularly the way he allowed the central section of the work a little more time and space in which the sounds could expand and create a contrasting mood with the predominant allegro. It actually made the work “bigger” than I’d ever heard it played before, opening up the music’s realms during that particular sequence, and making the reprise of the allegro even more spine-tingling than usual. I’ll risk bias by particularly praising the winds for their characterful playing throughout, even if all sections of the ensemble had their moments of glory.

After this, the first movement of the Haydn Symphony (No.99 in E-flat) just didn’t seem to ignite, even in the wake of an introduction which showed some promise – the allegro which followed pushed the ensemble beyond the players’ manipulative capabilities, even if the music’s spirit sounded right in certain places. Better presented was the slow movement, written by the composer as a heartfelt tribute to a deceased friend. The strings prepared the way for some lovely work by the winds, the music then leading the players through some darker, tenser moments and as suddenly back into the sunlight once again. Notable, too, was the quasi-military sequence with properly stuttering brass and complaining winds, towards the end.

Anyone brought up on an “older school” of Haydn-playing (Beecham, Klemperer, Walter) would gasp and stretch their ears at what seem like the breathless “authentic” tempi at which today’s ensembles take some of this music. Hardaker’s tempo for the Minuet practically turned the music into a Beethovenian scherzo, most of which the players coped with, apart from some blurred figurations. A good thing the conductor relaxed the tempo a little for the Trio, though things were still pretty edge-of-the-seat lively for the players.

Fortunately, the finale was played largely for its wit and drollery, the conductor encouraging his musicians to enjoy their interactions, and letting individual voices “speak” (such as the oboe’s crescendo on the held note shortly after its entrance). We enjoyed the composer’s seemingly endless inventions as one orchestral group followed the other in a kind of tag-music game, demonstrating some adroit ensemble playing in the process.

Things moved up a few notches for the Sibelius Symphony after the interval – and the work got away to the best possible start with a stunningly-played clarinet solo from Robert Ewens, followed by passionate, soulful string-playing. Wind and brass gave stern responses, resulting in a mighty climax (the timpani slightly ahead of the beat, but the spirit certainly present!). There being no harp for whatever reason, a piano was used (the player nervous-sounding at first and misreading the opening rhythm – but things soon settled down), the winds setting to and “carrying” the atmosphere, one or two sluggish entries brought up to speed by the others.

The movement’s evocations of Nordic landscape and weather were conjured up with a will, strings digging into the reprise of their gloriously juicy lines, winds enjoying their icy-fingered chromatic descents, the brasses covering themselves in glory in places, and the percussion putting the final dusting of snow on the peaks! – though I did find in places the timpani too loud – I couldn’t hear the final string pizzicati at all, beneath the rattle of those skins, exciting though the noises were.

Such a gorgeous slow movement! – the lullabic character of the music was nicely caught by strings and winds over murmuring brass, though the harp was sorely missed in places. Occasionally I thought the winds TOO forthright, though the plangent tones weren’t out of place, even if the nicely-played solo ‘cello was somewhat overpowered in such company. The beginning of the allegro was well-managed, the rhythms dancing, the lower brass snapping at the dancers’ heels, amid great shouts and cymbal crashes, the strings maintaining the “howling wind” aspect well – the calm returned suddenly and effectively, the conductor taking all the time in the world with the music, giving room for his players to express the utmost tenderness and serenity – well done!

The timpanist made the most of his big moments in the scherzo, leading the way with those treacherous off-beat entries which everybody seemed to manage, along with the fugue-like passages for winds and strings, though I could swear the brass missed an entry at one point. Fortunately they were all there for the Trio, the horns in particular making lovely sounds, inspiring the winds to reply in kind, even if the oboes sounded a bit overbearing. The scherzo’s reprise culminated with an excitingly well-managed accelerando at the end, which all concerned must have enjoyed!

And so to the finale of this epic work! Singing strings and snarling brass with winds close at hand, at the start, made a good beginning. More lovely work by the strings with their recitatives and with the winds at the start of the allegro – conductor Hardaker steadily and surely building the galloping excitement with his players. I was surprised by how quickly he moved the second “big tune” along, giving the pianist little chance to make an impression with his “harp” entries. The lower strings shone with some agile “scurrying” work at the allegro’s return, then helped the rest of the strings to push the rhythms along, the brasses flailing the textures, heightening the energies and stirring the blood! At conductor Hardaker’s speeds, the aforementioned “big tune” had more urgency than majesty, and the brass seemed to run out of puff trying to keep up, though they rallied for the final few shouts of defiant triumph.

In all it was a performance that, for all its orchestral fallibilities, gave us the work’s essences – and parts, such as the work’s opening and the last few pages of the slow movement, were most satisfyingly and memorably realized. Together with the Lilburn those were the concert’s highlights for this listener – places where the music wasn’t overly “pushed” but allowed to articulate its character and truly engage the skills and sensibilities of the musicians. On this showing, I look forward to hearing more of Vincent Hardaker’s work with this orchestra.