Tag: orchestral

Wonderland in name and deed – Made In New Zealand

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WONDERLAND – MADE IN NEW ZEALAND 2012

CREE BROWN – Celestial Bodies

CRESSWELL – Concerto for Orchestra and String Quartet

WHITEHEAD – Alice

New Zealand String Quartet

Helen Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Wellington Town Hall

Friday 25th May 2012

This was a “Made In New Zealand” concert which packed a real wallop, featuring three substantial pieces of music by different New Zealand composers – all of whom, incidentally, were present.  While none of the performances on this occasion were premieres, each one seemed to me to freshly unwrap the music, and square up whole-heartedly to the technical and emotional challenges of each of the pieces’ different physical and spiritual worlds.

It seems to me to be important that any orchestra can play and sound as if it “owns” music written by composers who live in the same geographical space, however “global” or “multi-national” an outlook certain forces of darkness seek constantly to try and impose on our lives. And, as Douglas Lilburn was fond of pointing out, there are aspects of the New Zealand experience which even Mozart, for all his music’s greatness and universality, couldn’t express – and an orchestra such as the NZSO which both encourages and can brilliantly play music by local composers that CAN express these things, is, purely and simply, above rubies. At least, in the expert hands of conductor Hamish McKeich, this was certainly the case throughout Friday evening’s concert.

While I’m still convinced of the need for integrating New Zealand music into “normal” concert programs and schedules, rather than treating it as a kind of separate species  confined to its own enclosure (open to the public only at certain times throughout the year!) I’m certain that having a “Made In New Zealand” concert gives additional opportunities for the NZSO to (as orchestra CEO Chris Blake puts it) “support and stimulate the creation and development of a New Zealand symphonic repertoire”.  And it’s fortunate we have conductors such as Hamish McKeich and Kenneth Young who can, when given opportunities to do so, make good that statement of intent with fully-committed advocacy.

Without wanting to “limpet-mine” this review with any suggestion of a subaqueous agenda, I feel nevertheless compelled to mention, quite offhandedly, that one of the greatest (in my opinion) of New Zealand symphonies – David Farquhar’s first, performed in concert in 1960, a year after it was written –  still awaits its SECOND public performance. Ironically, the work has enjoyed two recordings throughout the interim, and thus can’t claim to be completely neglected – but how else would one characterize something that’s had a single public airing in fifty-two years? To my ears the work urgently has a part to play in any such “development of a New Zealand symphonic repertoire”.

Back with the business in hand, I was interested to read that the first work on the evening’s program, Chris Cree Brown’s Celestial Bodies, was first presented in 2005 in Christchurch as an audio-visual collaboration with the artist Julia Morison. It would have been interesting to have experienced something of the composer’s original conception for this work, though previous “Made In New Zealand” concerts which used visual elements encountered a good deal of criticism from concertgoers, myself included, which might have been off-putting for the organizers. However, it must be said that the criticism was directed almost exclusively at instances where visual elements were imposed on existing music, not where it was part of the composer’s own initial scheme.

This accounted for those parts of the work so readily and cheerfully dispensing entirely with the “live” orchestra (the whole of the fourth section “Dark Matter” for example.) Having visual imagery interacting with the taped material would at this point have, I feel sure, removed some of the incongruity for me of having to watch an entire orchestra sitting on a concert platform listening to prerecorded sounds. For the rest I enjoyed the players’ skilful acoustic dovetailing with some of the sounds on the tape throughout (a sign of the times being a reference to an “electroacoustic CD” instead!).

Celestial Bodies is a work in ten sections, the parts named for various phenomena found throughout space, the composer describing them as “overwhelming in their size, awe-inspiring in their diversity and breathtaking in their beauty”. New Zealand composers have written outer space-inspired music before, an example being Edwin Carr’s ‘The Twelve Signs”, though Cree Brown’s work avoided any astrological reference-points. Instead, his pieces unfolded for us, one by one, aspects of the cosmos with titles such as Galaxy, Globular Cluster, Pulsar, Nebula and Supernova, as well as those with a more sinister ambience like Dark Matter and Black Hole.

These were brilliantly crafted sounds, atmospheric and pictorial, with plenty of variation, and readily suggesting their subject matter in practically every case. They were not for everybody, as I discovered when talking with people, some of whom said they struggled to feel any connection with the music, while admiring the composer’s craft and skill. I felt involved in almost every episode, and particularly enjoyed the orchestra’s interactions with the pre-recorded sounds, a process which I thought set up interesting performance tensions in places and pushed my listening boundaries outwards, towards places that felt quite eerie – the second piece, Globular Cluster, worked on my imagination readily in that respect.

I also enjoyed the pieces’ contrasts, for example, when going to the following piece, Pulsar, and encountering those strongly-etched rhythms pulsating through spaces that had seemed up to this point pleasantly nebulous. Black Hole was another piece whose elemental irruptions gave a real sense of menacing power, thrillingly at odds with one’s accustomed sense of vast stillness when looking at the night sky, the orchestra’s heavy batteries making splendidly frightening noises, complete with a startlingly anarchic chord at the end.

Where I didn’t especially “connect” with Cree Brown’s music was, as I’ve said, with any “pre-recorded only” episodes of any length – the fourth piece, Dark Matter, the most ready example. I’m certain that, had we seen Julia Morison’s images, the sequence would have told more readily and maintained enough interactive tension – perhaps a soloist or group of soloists from the orchestra needed to play ad lib with the pre-record, in the absence of any visuals, to keep the impulses alive and flowing.

Interactive tension was the name of the game with Lyell Cresswell’s Concerto for Orchestra and String Quartet. In one continuous movement, the work spun its listeners excitingly through what seemed like an endless variety of episodes involving interchange between the performers – in this case the New Zealand String Quartet and the orchestra. Although this concerto wasn’t written for the NZSQ, (it was premiered in Scotland by the Yggdrasil Quartet and the Scottish National Orchestra in 1997), Cresswell has written other works specifically for the group, a piano quintet And Every Sparkle Shivering, first given here in 2000 with Michael Houstoun, and a string quartet, Kotetetete, which the NZSQ performed last year in the City of London Festival. Cresswell has described the NZSQ as “a quartet that can play anything”, and felt that whatever demands he made of the players in writing the Quartet, they would relish the challenges.

The group has played the Quartet Concerto before, the first time in 2001 with the BBC Scottish Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young. From the start, Cresswell wanted to write a piece that was a genuine partnership between quartet and orchestra, and not merely with the latter group providing some sort of “accompaniment”. And neither did he want the piece to be a kind of Concerto for orchestra, with string quartet. On the “genuine partnership” count alone, the work seemed to me a truly egalitarian tour de force – one noted a constant flow of creative happenings between solo instruments, small groups and larger forces, a kind of all-encompassing concerto grosso, with all the attendant tensions and resolutions which one might expect would throw up between such elements.

Cheryl Hollinger’s magically-phrased trumpet-playing, introduced by scintillations of percussion and airborne, ethereal orchestral strings, got the work way to a suitably “storyteller-like” beginning, the theme hinting at a kind of unfolding aspect, as in the best tales. And though the quartet’s viola-led instrument-by-instrument configurings, supported by the orchestra strings and commented upon abruptly by brass punctuations, were carefully terraced by the composer, the effect seemed always natural and organic, never forced or contrived. As with genuine human interaction, the exchanges occasionally flared up excitingly, the music expressing its fair share of marked contrast and volatility, but was then balanced by slower, more reflective and meditative episodes midway through the work. Here, I loved the heartfelt duo lines between various pairings of solo strings from the quartet, seeming to me expressing great beauty against what felt in places like a backdrop of ambient desolation.

There were places throughout the final section during which I wondered whether the writing fell back on itself every now and then, and could have benefitted from some  “tightening” by the composer – but always a succeeding episode would scoop up and whisk away my misgivings, generating so intense an excitement of quicksilver exchanges of texture, colour and rhythmic patterning between quartet and orchestra. Cresswell’s orchestral writing in particular I thought so very virtuosic in places, the music’s occasionally vertiginous momentum creating exhilaration aplenty. The quartet players, as always, gave their all, and each section of the orchestra, directed and balanced with admirable skill by conductor Hamish McKeich, seemed switched-on to razor-sharp mode with the timing and focus of their rapid exchanges.

After the interval came intensities of another, more directly human kind, Gillian Whitehead’s setting of poet Fleur Adcock’s retelling in verse of an ancestor’s emigration from Britain to begin a new life in New Zealand in 1909. Twenty-three year-old Alice Adcock, showing symptoms of tuberculosis, and hoping that a change of climate would help effect some kind of cure came to this country from Manchester, to the consternation of her family. She lived for a further fifty years, during which time she lost her husband and was then rejected and dispossessed by his family, having to relocate with her children to another part of New Zealand and start a new life.

Fleur Adcock felt Alice’s story was, in a sense, that of all those who came across the seas to establish a new life, the commonalities having, in her words, “the resonances of a universal myth, known to all of us who live here”. Making the most of the deceptively simple poetry, singing with great power and beauty, and relishing occasional forays into a kind of sprechtgesang, Helen Medlyn here became the heroine, Alice, body and soul, pretty much as she would have done when she “created” the role in 2003 at the premiere performance. She brought out all the different elements of the text – its humor (much talk of lice, using terms like “gentle creepers” and “big crawlers”), positive energy (revelling in the clean air of a new country), unflagging optimism (happiness at finding a man to marry who will take and accept her child) and a sense of loss and grief over deaths of loved ones (father and husband) – but also gave the sung lines plenty of theatrical (even operatic) presence and vibrancy.

No praise is too high for orchestra and conductor, Hamish McKeich, living the different scenarios with Medlyn every inch of the way throughout the story-line, and continuing to deliver, right through the unfortunate contretemps which quietly erupted in the gallery, where an audience member suddenly took seriously ill ten or so minutes before the end of the piece. This, of course, occasioned a flurry of piteous activity (those on the ground floor, along with many of the musicians, largely oblivious to what was going on) – but evidently the revival efforts of those brought to help were successful.

A stimulating and colorful “Made In New Zealand” concert then, with three substantial works whose effect will have won for the orchestra, its conductor, and the special solo performers many plaudits from a delighted audience and from three grateful composers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hutt Valley Orchestra – “What did you say they were playing?….!”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concerto No.3 in D Minor

MASCAGNI – Cavalleria Rusticana (Concert Performance)

Melanie Lina (piano)

Hutt Valley Orchestra

Brett Stewart (conductor)

(Cast of Cavalleria Rusticana: Ruth Armishaw (Turidda) / Sharon Yearsley (Santuzza)

Kieran Rayner (Alfio) / Jody Orgias (Mama Lucia) / Alison Hodge (Lola) / Chorus)

Expressions Art and Entertainment Centre

Upper Hutt

Saturday 5th May 2012

I must confess to surprise upon hearing about the Hutt Valley Orchestra’s proposed Sounds Expressions concert – the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto? And Cavalleria Rusticana? – the whole of it? Perhaps my response was due in part to my experiences as a player in an amateur orchestra in Palmerston North during the 1990s, though I must say we also attempted things of reasonable difficulty, like the Borodin Second Symphony and the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, and had a lot of fun, and made splendidly outlandish and occasionally reasonably musical noises.

I had heard pianist Melanie Lina being interviewed on RNZ Concert, and liked what she had said about performing the Rachmaninov Concerto, and was impressed by the quiet confidence she exuded about it all. So I was intrigued, but thought that, however good the soloist might be, the work would still be quite a challenge for the orchestra, in fact, any orchestra. Again, I was basing these reactions upon what I knew of amateur orchestral playing, and wondered whether the Hutt Orchestra (whose work I didn’t know at all – in fact, I didn’t even know they existed!) was going to be up to the task – and then, after the Rachmaninov, there was Mascagni’s “Cav”, for goodness’ sakes!

It turned out to be an evening of surprises, involving a full gamut of reactions, a process whose exact order had considerable bearing on my own responses to the evening’s music-making. It was very much a concert of two halves – first up was the Rachmaninov Concerto, one which soloist Melanie Lina began confidently and nearly always securely, with steady, if rather muted support from the orchestra. I noticed from the outset that the orchestral winds seemed to find it difficult to actually “sound” their notes, though the violins were a little better – though somewhat “seedy” the first orchestral tutti had recognizable shape and form. And conductor Brent Stewart seemed to make all the right gestures and work collaboratively with his soloist throughout.

The only problem was that Stewart seemed to have considerable difficulty getting any actual tone from many of the players, who appeared for long stretches as if they were “cowed” by the music. It was left to Melanie Lima to make her own performance of the work for much of the time, because despite the conductor’s best endeavors, she got precious little help from the orchestra, save for one or two details, such as a sensitive horn solo answering one of the piano’s phrases in the second subject group. The horns actually seemed in places reasonably onto things, because I picked up some nicely etched-in muted notes from them just after the pianist’s reprise of the opening theme.

During the piano-and-orchestra exchanges that followed the players kept things rhythmically together,  though the lack of any impactful tone from the orchestra made the episode a one-sided affair, the brass hardly registering at all. I found it difficult to understand why the players didn’t seem to want to “play out” more – as I said earlier, my own orchestral experiences involved at least making with my colleagues plenty of noise, quite a lot of which was musical. I wanted these players to similarly hurl themselves into the fray, take more risks, and in the right places, roar, blare, rasp and bray, but at least give the soloist something reasonably substantial in places to actually play along with or against (this is a romantic concerto, after all!). Perhaps Brent Stewart had been reading Richard Strauss’s tongue-in-cheek essay “Advice to conductors”, containing statements such as “Never look at the brass – it only encourages them”!

The soloist made a good fist of her “dying fall” music just before the cadenza – she played the shorter of the two written by the composer (though probably the more difficult, less chordal and more quicksilver an affair),achieving real grandeur at the climax.Though entering late the flute sounded its solo evocatively, as did all the winds and the horn. In fact the horns again stood out, making the beautiful “sounds of evening across the meadow” sequence (my favourite bit in the first movement) just before the final reprise of the opening, really tell, with secure chording and nicely-floated tones.

I hoped that, with more room to breathe, away from the strictures of the first movement’s driving rhythms, the orchestral tones would sound more fully during the slow movement – but apart from a nice-phrased oboe solo, the rest of the orchestra, alas, sounded fairly inert and hardly preparing of the way for the piano’s tragic downward entry, here beautifully sounded by the soloist, moving from anguish to warmth as the music proceeded. What passionate writing here! – and how involved Lina sounded! To my delight she and conductor Brent Stewart kept intact the vertiginous passage that’s often cut, the sequence thus able to fully express the music’s somewhat Bronte-ish wildness and gradual descent into loneliness. I thought Lina everywhere had the full measure of the work’s emotional contourings, setting romantic sweep next to poetic expansiveness, but always with the music’s overall shape kept in hand.

Occasionally the winds would nose their way up and out of the misted orchestral textures and make a phrase “tell”, both clarinet and oboe managing to sound some of their counter-theme against the pianist’s skittery central-section waltz-like rhythms. And the strings did conjure up enough tone to recognizably sound the final tragic outburst of the movement, just before the soloist’s dangerous-sounding flourishes heralded the finale.

The “galloping horse” motive rang out splendidly from Melanie Lina’s piano throughout the finale’s opening, the violins actually managing to sound their counter-melody against the pianist’s forthright second-subject measures. Then, in the haunting nocturnal episode that followed the orchestral tones filled out and the players made something of the music’s dark pulsings underneath the piano’s quixotic chirruping. Another section sometimes cut in performance was here restored, with swirling figurations from the piano supported by strings, and with the flutes sounding their repetitions of the piano’s nocturnal birdsong.

A pity the violas and cellos couldn’t muster up enough tonal weight to help usher in the beautiful return of the first movement’s second subject – like an old friend returning after a long absence! Happily flute and horn amply supported the piano here, just like during the “old times”. For the rest of the work, the piano took charge, driving the music towards the “big tune” at the end, Lina phrasing her lines expansively and romantically, pulling the orchestra along with her, and achieving real grandeur to finish.

The pianist was accorded a great ovation, and, I thought, deservedly so. I wondered in fact whether it was I who was at fault here, underestimating the demands made of the players by the sophisticated nature of the work’s sinuous, often somewhat elusive orchestral quality. Still, even so, I found it hard to understand the lack of sheer orchestral NOISE in places where surely the musicians would have “felt” the need to fill out tones and expand phrases naturally.

Judge of my surprise after the interval, when, right from the beginning of Mascagni’s score, the orchestra came alive! The strings dug into the melody and actually made it sing, while the winds and harp made a lovely impression, leading up to the first singer’s entry. This was Turidda (not Mascagni’s original “Turiddu”), sung by Ruth Armishaw, the character’s sex-change presumably the company’s response to the lack of an available tenor for the part. At least one hoped so, because despite one’s most liberated and politically-correct instincts, the scenario was always going to flounder spectacularly with the so-called “duel to the death” between the wronged husband and his wife’s lesbian lover at the story’s denouement – even in an age ridden with wholesale scuppering of traditional operatic presentations, this seemed a more than particularly perverse way of rearranging things.

Though obviously a concert performance, surely it would have been better to present the character as a “trouser role” in this case, a la Baroque opera, or one of the Richard Strauss stage works such as “Rosenkavalier”? Still, all credit to Ruth Armishaw, whose stylish singing certainly didn’t lack ardour – whether or not it was latent homophobia on my part, or merely my inability to make the “leap of imagination” required, I must confess I found myself ignoring her feminine attire, and responded to the strength of her commitment to the role as if she was a “Turiddu”.

Once again, the “second-half” orchestra amazed me with its energy and fullness of tone after the bells sounded, and the waltz tune took up its insinuating gait – the Italianate winds did exceedingly well, especially the piccolo. The chorus, seriously lacking weight of numbers, made up for a lack of tonal splendour with energetic and accurate singing. The brass seemed to have found their voices, and with the timpani, made telling contributions to the cadence-points. Everything had the kind of “schwung” (yes, I know, this isn’t German opera!) that one imagines one would find in the average Italian provincial opera house in this repertoire.

Sharon Yearsley (as Santuzza, the would-be lover of Turidda) and Jody Orgias (as Lucia, Turidda’s mother) made the most of their exchanges in their somewhat fraught opening scene – both alive to their characters’ dramatic possibilities and using their voices accordingly, Yearsley’s particularly heartfelt. Also right into his part, as with almost everything I’ve seen him do, was baritone Kieran Rayner as Alfio, the village carrier, his voice bristling with energy and rustic directness, unaware at this stage of his wife Lola’s affair with Turidda, and single-mindedly intent about his business.

The whole Easter Hymn sequence that followed swept us up satisfyingly and carried us along – it’s music that almost blackmails the listener emotionally, so direct is its lyrical and cumulative appeal. Everybody on the performance platform seemed totally committed and involved, at one with conductor Brent Stewart’s impressive control of the buildup to the soprano’s’ thrilling climactic note at the chorus’s end.

Wholly admirable was Sharon Yearsley’s pacing of her role, outlining the complex history of the knot of relationships between the main players in the story to Jody Orgias’s patient and responsive Mama Lucia, then pulling out the stops with Turidda’s entry. With two women singing the impassioned encounter between them that followed, the scenario seemed almost to transcend time and place and take on the power of an opera seria scene from a work by Handel – great singing from both Armishaw and Yearsley, nicely interrupted by the flirtatious Lola (Alison Hodge oozing charm and insouciance with her Waltz-Song), but rising again to a furious climax as Turidda rejects Santuzza and follows Lola, voices and orchestra again delivering plenty of raw power.

More goings-on bubbled up with Alfio’s arrival, Yearsley and Kieran Rayner making the most of their dramatic exchange, as the hapless Alfio was told by Santuzza of his wife Lola’s renewed involvement with Turidda. Not surprisingly, at one point Yearsley almost faltered, but rallied splendidly – throughout, the orchestra surpassed itself. with splendidly baleful tones. What an emotional contrast provided by the famous Intermezzo! – the violins struggled a little at first, but were more securely-toned when doubled by the lower strings for the “big” melody – the whole nicely shaped by Brent Stewart, and marked by some sensitive harp playing.

The few bars of waltz music that follows always makes the hairs at the back of my neck stand up, for some reason, and this performance made no exception – Ruth Armishaw, chorus and orchestra tore into the Drinking Song with gusto, despite a few scratchy ensemble moments, and caught the excitement of the last few bars with a will. The baleful brass accompanying Alfio’s entry, and the subsequent viola solo  (so darkly poised) helped create real menace, even if the ‘cellos couldn’t advance the feeling with the same surety.

Plenty of support was forthcoming from the strings for Turidda in her impassioned “farewell” aria, and the orchestral energies continued right to the end – here was the “noise” that was wanted so badly earlier in the concert. Throughout the fateful offstage cries announcing Turidda’s murder and the subsequent whiplash chords, the sounds struck home splendidly.

So, very much a “tale of two halves” here, I felt, as far as the orchestra was concerned. Perhaps most of the rehearsal time was taken up with the opera (in which case it certainly showed) – but there again, perhaps it was the music. Mascagni would have had a fair idea of what the average Italian opera orchestra could play and tellingly deliver – raw emotion taking precedence over subtlety and shades of expression – and so his music would have probably been an easier proposition, especially for non-professionals, than that of Rachmaninov’s. Whatever the case, all credit to pianist Melanie Lina for her marvellous exposition of a redoubtably difficult work, both technically and interpretatively – I hope we see her back in the Wellington region before too long – and to the concert’s second-half singers, players and conductor for a thoroughly invigorating “slice of Italian verismo life” (with intriguing variations) – hugely enjoyable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSO’s welcome exposé of Schumann symphony and Elgar’s cello concerto

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Grams with Lynn Harrell (cello)

Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Op 26; Elgar: Cello Concerto in E minor; Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, Op 120

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 4 May, 6.30pm

Lynn Harrell and the Elgar Cello Concerto brought about a full house, not as common an event for the NZSO as it once was.

The concerto certainly worked its spell and the audience was satisfied, but it was Schumann’s symphony that would surely have been the revelation. Half a century ago Schumann was probably among the top ten composers while, in New Zealand at least, Berlioz, Liszt, Mahler and Bruckner, Strauss and Sibelius would have been somewhat more marginal.

Now Schumann is seen primarily as a composer of piano music and songs, plus a few chamber works. But the fierce commitment to this symphony that Andrew Grams managed to communicate to the orchestra, and so to us, changed all that. The slow (Ziemlich langsam), atmospheric introduction with its arresting cello and bass underlining offered the hope of a thoroughly convincing performance, as Grams’s clear, incisive body language seemed to convey a spirit that energised the playing.  Nevertheless, one could be excused for feeling now and then that, in spite of the careful dynamic and tempo shaping that characterised his clear-sighted interpretation, certain musical gestures were repeated too often.

The very short slow movement, marked Romance, which follows the first movement without a pause, received a sensitive performance with attractive oboe and violin solos. I never expect its unheralded end and the following Scherzo is unexpected; it might be one of Schumann’s less subtle, less happy conceptions with its pauses that seem merely mechanical, but the performance offered a charming balance between resolute outer section and the twice-over trio.

A slow, imposing introduction created an air of expectant mystery, as with the first movement; again precedes the last movement which Grams attacked with visual flamboyance and energy that the orchestra responded to energetically. One is grateful, however for the arrival of the lyrical second theme to temper the somehow forced feeling of the main theme and its working out. There was no doubt that the conductor believes in Schumann’s orchestral works, and let us remember that this was the second he wrote immediately after his outpouring of song, and just after his rapturous Spring Symphony; not in his last troubled years when his inspiration became more fitful; Grams’s enthusiasm generated an ardent conclusion that touched both players and audience.

The concert had started with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, one of those pieces very familiar to my generation – I remember it from 78 rpm recordings that we heard in music classes at college – but rarely played today. It is of course a small masterpiece. Its performance was atmospheric, the timpani and strings held in careful check till the moment when sunlight bursts forth. A fine clarinet solo lit the middle section and it subsided with a careful diminuendo.

The Elgar, which for some of the audience was the only reason to be there (several seats fell empty after the interval – poor misguided souls!), was a rendering that might have divided those of the audience who have allowed themselves to become devoted to particular performances. It is not necessary to hear Jacqueline du Pré’s as the only possible interpretation, especially in a work where the composer’s emotions are so close to the surface and so invite cellists (and orchestras) to explore those emotions, inevitably through their own instincts.

Obviously Lynn Harrell comes from a different social and musical background from some of the famous interpreters, and one might have expected a somewhat less emotionally wrought performance than what we had. But in fact I felt his playing pushed occasionally towards sentimentality, elongating phrases, indulging rubato generously, yet he was also sparing with vibrato and he always judged his balance with the orchestra astutely (and the orchestra with him). In the more overtly virtuosic passages his playing was fluent and agile, musical above all. The concerto is nevertheless given to certain rhetorical touches that are a bit wearying – those big chords that punctuate the lines of the last movement, rather like those in the first movement of the Lalo concerto.

The audience responded with great enthusiasm and he rewarded them with an arrangement of Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat (Op 9 No 2), overacted somewhat, but an attractive, well-received encore.

The concert was at least as important for its orchestral contribution under this youngish American whose extrovert and clearly delineated command brought energy and varied colour to the entire concert.

NZSO and Pietari Inkinen all at sea

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SIBELIUS – The Oceanides / BRITTEN – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”

CHAUSSON – Poème de l’amour et de la mer / DEBUSSY – La Mer

Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano)

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 20th April 2012

Having rather too cleverly used the expression “all at sea”  in this review’s heading, I needs must hasten to add that the words weren’t meant in a pejorative sense – but rather as a compliment to conductor and orchestra regarding their powers of evocation!

Compiling a complete list of musical works inspired by the sea would, I think, result in several closely-worked pages being filled. Of the pieces for orchestra, Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO surely gave us four of the greatest, with the help of mezzo Sasha Cook, who followed her heartfelt performance of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer of a week ago with a mellifluous rendering of Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer. 

I thought three of the pieces received splendidly characterful performances, the one disappointment for me being the opening item on the program, Sibelius’s The Oceanides. As a friend said to me during the interval, it wasn’t very Mediterranean – we missed the glint of sunlight on the water and the play of light on the waves, a scenario which would have rendered the “big wave” when it came, an even more impressive demonstration of nature’s power. Here, it instead seemed all very Baltic, and somewhat more subaqueous than Sibelius might have intended – a point of view, but one that played down the Homeric inspiration commented on by the composer: – “It (the Oceanides) derives from the mythology of Homer and not from the Kalevala.”

I wondered whether the good ole’ MFC acoustic played its part in swallowing up some of the music’s airiness – in particular the winds seemed scarcely to speak throughout to my ears in the place where I was sitting, though I suspect it was more the conductor’s “through a glass darkly” way with the music. The passage for glockenspiel, harp and clarinet containing the hitherto “embedded” string theme hardly at all registered, and there were similar places whose evocations of air and light (ironically the program note spoke of the music’s “bright warmth”) were made subservient to the string-dominated soundscapes depicting the ebb and flow of watery expanses. Perhaps in venues like the Auckland Town Hall, the winds will get more of a chance to establish a better sense of the play of sun and wind upon the waves.

Having in previous articles commented upon Pietari Inkinen’s seeming reluctance to explore and bring out the “darker” sides of Sibelius’s music, I now may justly be accused of inconsistency at complaining when he does so! Still, Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes” responded marvellously to the same kind of trenchant treatment, though here I thought all sections of the orchestra were encouraged to “speak” and convey their distinctive colours and accents. The playing of the opening Dawn allowed us to sense the vast and lonely beauty of the sea itself, as well as conveying its darker, more threatening power. This was in complete contrast to the gaiety and human bustle of Sunday Morning with its insistent backdrop of church bells – how wonderfully “precarious” those syncopated cross-rhythms of strings and winds always sound, played here as well as any other performance I’ve heard!

More sharply-etched contrasts came with Moonlight, here dark and dour, unresonant and unromantic and filled with foreboding, followed immediately by the physical assault of Storm with Inkinen really encouraging his players to rattle, roar and rend the air with tumultuous sounds. It was all very exciting, with particularly wonderful brass-playing (the tuba roaring like a kraken from the baleful deep), the performance capturing the “frightened shadows” aspect at the end, with properly spectral strings and winds, before the final free-falling orchestral tumult resounded into the silences.

After the interval, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke added her lovely voice to some gorgeously-wrought orchestral textures throughout the opening pages of Chausson’s seductive Poème de l’amour et de la mer. One of a number of stunningly beautiful works for female voice and orchestra written at about this time (such as Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Ravel’s Scheherazade), Chausson’s “endless melody” style of writing enabled the singer to demonstrate her finely-tuned dramatic instincts, in the first part, The Flower of the Waters (La Fleur des eaux) now hushed and expectant at “O ciel qui de sees jeux dois porter la couleur”, now radiant-toned (at “Faites-moi voir ma bien aimee”, and then later at “Et du ciel extrovert pleuvaient sur nous des roses”), the music evoking roses raining from the sky.

Here, and throughout both interlude and the second vocal episode, The Death of Love (La Mort de l’Amour) conductor and players supported and matched their soloist’s outpourings with a range of tones, by turns refulgent, flowing, spectral and halting. How the music darkens at the words “Le vent roulait des feuille mortes”! – with Chausson’s debt to Wagner, and in particular “Parsifal” evident in those sombre harmonic progressions for orchestra alone, and underpinning the despair of the words “Comme des fronts de morts”.

As for the most quintessential sea-piece of them all, Debussy’s La Mer, Inkinen and the orchestra brought out plenty of crisp detail and strongly-contoured lines – this was no impressionist wallow, but a beautifully-judged delineation of detail whose impulses activated a bigger picture with a widely-flung spectrum of variation. While here I didn’t feel quite as consistently the elemental undercurrents that made Inkinen’s reading of The Firebird of the previous week such a powerful listening experience, Debussy’s seascapes were allowed sufficient power in places to “tell”, again with instruments like the timpani encouraged to sound out (a couple of pistol-shot thwacks in the finale from Laurence Reese certainly added to the excitement!), and the lower strings and brass bringing appropriate weight and darkness to some of that same movement’s climaxes. While we’re on this movement, full marks to the trumpet-player (whom I couldn’t see properly – was it Michael Kirgan?) whose brief but cruelly-exposed solo shone out truly amid the darkness.

In all, an exciting, and richly-varied concert, each of these last two orchestral outings making a refreshing change from the usual “overture-concerto-symphony” format, with, for me, equally satisfying results. Maybe there’s hope for things such as Janacek’s Taras Bulba and Elgar’s In The South yet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Triumphant NZSO concert by Inkinen in Mahler, Stravinsky and Lilburn

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen

Symphony No 3 (Lilburn); Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Mahler); The Firbird ballet music (Stravinsky)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 14 April, 8pm

Lilburn’s Third Symphony is certainly the least heard of his three, written after he had begun experimenting with serialism and had virtually abandoned himself to electronic music.

If its first performances was predictably labelled gritty or avant-garde – in its pejorative sense, or harsh (in the composer’s words), the years have softened its impact on ears attuned to modernism that previously went only as far as Stravinsky or Britten. The echoes of Sibelius or Vaughan Williams heard in the first two symphonies have now been replaced by echoes of, in some opinions, late Copland and Stravinsky.

No doubt as a result of its inclusion on one CD with Lilburn’s other two symphonies, it has gained familiarity, as listeners allow the CD to come to its end with the quarter-hour Third Symphony.

The recordings seem to be favourites of those putting together the midnight-to-dawn music on Radio New Zealand concert.

Lilburn’s technical skills as orchestrator and in all aspects of large-scale orchestral composition have always been conspicuous, but what struck me about this performance was the confidence in handling of the musical ideas, and especially, the way in which Inkinen maintained the pulse, exposed the essential lyrical and eventful features of the score and highlighted individual instrumental motifs, which seemed sensitively directed to giving rewarding moments for a great many players, particularly winds.

The piece is famously built on modified serial principles, but we have become so used to atonal music – music without constant, implicit reference to a home key – that tonal ambiguity does not sound as tuneless or alien as it did when one first encountered it. Certainly there are no lively melodic episodes such as the Second Symphony’s Scherzo, but there is no need to dwell on its serial elements. The actual tone row doesn’t appear for some time and only through reading the score would the average listener recognise it, or even come to hear the way these scraps slowly coalesce into the row proper. They are the atoms that come together eventually as molecules – tunes – and after a few hearings the evolution of the flow and generally light-textured composition starts to reveal its absorbing beauties.

On the other hand, Lilburn’s signature whole-tone oscillations are there from time to time and certain rhythmic and intervallic habits appear. Its five sections are not distinguished by pauses, only by changes of tempo and mood, but once identified, they help the listener to grasp the argument, and the luminous, animated and well-thought-out performance did the rest.

Mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke had replaced soprano Measha Brueggergosman to sing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Sasha made a mark as Kitty Oppenheimer in Adam’s recent opera Doctor Atomic at the Met; she has sung a lot of choral and symphonic repertoire that calls for solo voices, like Mahler’s Second and Beethoven’s Ninth, and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, which she sings at the next NZSO concert. Her opera repertoire is interesting, ranging from Strauss’s Composer, Mozart’s Dorabella, Massenet’s Charlotte.

Hers was a strong and characterful voice, warm and communicative in the middle and low ranges, and capable of comfortable excursions high into soprano territory and of captivating pianissimos. So she explored the four songs that Mahler set to his own words, bringing out their sharply contrasted moods with vivid individuality. Her transformation from the sunny optimism of ‘Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld’ to the panicky grief of ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’ was quite astonishing, the repeated cry, ‘O weh!’ filling the air with palpable alarm.

And Inkinen guided the orchestra’s accompaniment, so discreetly written as to avoid burdening the first words of each phrase, with scrupulous care; not that her voice would have failed to penetrate a more rowdy orchestra.

The major work, if that is a fair description after the two beautiful/interesting pieces in the first half of the programme, was Stravinsky’s first ballet for Diaghilev, which suddenly made him famous. It was appropriate to recall in the programme notes Stravinsky’s conducting of the conclusion of the ballet in his 1961 concert with the orchestra, which I was at.

From the very first moment I knew I was in for a radiant, exalted experience, with the almost soundless murmuring of basses slowly emerging, rather like the opening of Das Rheingold. But if hints of Wagner can be heard (as they can in almost everything written in the half century after The Ring, it is Russian rhythms and melodic shapes that soon dominate. The air of foreboding through magic sounds that suggested Liadov’s Enchanted Lake both made me long for an evocative production of the ballet in Bakst’s designs, but also persuaded me that the music, so beautifully played, was more evocative on its own than any staging might be.

Moving and arresting solos came from various players – Julia Joyce’s viola,  and the rapturous horn playing of new principal Samuel Jacobs; sinuous flutes, and major bassoon contributions and the subtly varied strokes of the timpani.

And the orchestra lifted the dark veil of evil as Kaschei dies and  a new sunny mood emerged in playing that expressed the renewal of the lives of the Prince and the captive princesses.

The splendour of this, and indeed, all three works at this triumphant concert confirmed Inkinen’s unobtrusive mastery of the podium, and I find it disturbing that a cabal still exists that seeks out the odd adverse reviews that inevitably appears in overseas media, mostly in unmoderated blogs. Reliable critics wherever he has worked have found his leadership and interpretive talents convincing, clear and imaginative.

Highly enterprising concert from School of Music Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young

Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat by Beethoven (with Diedre Irons – piano); The Walk to the Paradise Garden from Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet; Symphony in Three Movements by Stravinsky

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Tuesday 3 April, 7.30pm

The church of St Andrew’s (on the Terrace) was pretty full for this first concert of the year by the orchestra of the New Zealand School of Music. Loyalty by many fellow students and families of the players explained a good many of the audience, but the attractions of the programme would have accounted for a good many too.

The concerto came first. And I steeled myself in preparation for the big and often unruly sound I expected to encounter, in the light of previous experiences of orchestras performing in this acoustic.

The concerto opened, as it should, with the mighty rhetorical exclamations from piano and orchestra. No problem: everything was in its place, no undue burden of bass instruments, with Diedre taking command resolutely, boldly, yet with nicely judged rubato, little accelerations on the rising flourishes and careful dynamic undulations, with timpani making its discreet impact (it was tucked against the wall on the right, behind the chamber organ).

The strings were both numerous enough to balance the winds – 36 were listed in the programme – and produced a quality of sound, both dense enough and sufficiently satiny, to deal with Diedre’s muscular and energetic piano; and the winds, now adorned with a couple of oboes which the school has lacked in recent years (though one of the two listed was replaced by NZSO principal oboe Robert Orr), and at least one very good player in each section. The principal flute in the concerto (JeeWon Um I think) produced a particularly beautiful tone and clarinets played with distinction.

But more important than individual detail was the effect of Kenneth Young’s discipline and his sensitivity to the dramatic pacing and expressivity that this remarkable piece calls for. It is all too easy to allow this testament to Beethoven’s self-confidence and optimism for mankind to be overstated in performance, but here, and naturally in the slow movement, there was plenty of room for hesitancy and pause, and Diedre’s ability to refine her manner to find interesting nuances in repetitive motifs kept the performance delightfully alive. The final breathless phrases between piano and controlled timpani (Reuben Jelleyman) exemplified the refinement of the entire performance.

After the interval there were two hugely different 20th century works. Delius, as well as Debussy, celebrates his 150th birthday this year, and the familiar Walk to the Paradise Garden from his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet revealed the players’ widespread talents and Young’s grasp of Delius elusive idiom (the opera has no more to do with Shakespeare than has Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth; it’s based on a German novelle of 1856 by Swiss writer Gottfried Keller. Incidentally, you’ll catch a production of the opera if you’re in Ireland later this year: the Wexford Opera Festival is staging it).

It is probably the ideal introduction to Delius, particularly for those who, like me, have found his music too discursive or formless, for it’s both beautifully written, using a large orchestra with great subtlety and charm, and is furnished with beguiling lyricism and musical ideas that are interestingly developed.

It could have been chosen to allow the strengths of the wind sections to be heard, for that is where much of its beauty lies. Robert Orr’s oboe took the rapturous early solo, but the baton soon passed to clarinets and flutes and the two harps; and the climax is reached with the involvement of two trumpets and three trombones, four horns and the entire woodwind section. The playing was near immaculate, and the performance persuasively confirmed Delius as the great composer that many major conductors and critics from Thomas Beecham on have claimed.

Stravinsky’s so-called symphonies are, apart from the youthful one in E flat, somewhat unorthodox and individually very different from one another. There are three ‘symphonies’ and a couple of other works that use the word symphony in their titles: the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the Symphony of Psalms. The Symphony in Three Movements was compiled from bits of music discarded from abortive film scores towards the end of World War II and its opening is loud and bellicose, in goose-stepping 4/4 time. No chamber symphony this one, it employs large numbers of brass including four horns, the two harps plus piano (splendidly played by Ben Booker), a piccolo, a bass clarinet and contrabassoon (played by guests, respectively, Hayden Sinclair and Hayley Roud); in addition to timpani, now played by Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa, a bass drum thudded behind the trombones and trumpets at the back of the sanctuary.

Stravinsky’s fingerprints are all over the work, from The Rite of Spring to the Symphonies for Wind Instruments and the Dumbarton Oakes Concerto.  It might have been thought a tough assignment for a student orchestra, even though its language is diatonic, but perhaps because of the scene-painting and the unmissable references to war and to Nazism in particular, the performance flourished through the kind of energy that students can bring to it as they come to know a piece for the first time.

 

NZSO Soloists and a kaleidoscopic “Carmen”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

KENNETH YOUNG – Portrait / TORU TAKEMITSU – Rain Tree / ARVO PÄRT – Fratres

GEORGES BIZET / RODION SHCHEDRIN – Carmen Suite for Strings and Percussion

NZSO Soloists

Vesa-Matti Leppänen (director)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 24th March

Strings and percussion put side-by-side make an intriguing ensemble combination – perhaps they’re not natural musical bedfellows to the extent that are winds and percussion or brass and percussion. But their coming-together makes, I think, for unique results, such as their capacity for generating enormous contrasts of timbre and colour. This was evident throughout the NZSO Soloists’ “Carmen Suite” concert, given that the music presented during the first half was perhaps more subtle and subdued than one might have expected from such forces.

It struck me throughout the evening that, because of the difference in sound-worlds, there was a certain tension generated by the combination, a tension of awkwardness, of having to marry these very different worlds together. Perhaps it was as much audience- as composer-generated, but I thought the chalk-and-cheese juxtapositions of “non-percussive” and “extremely percussive” created a mixture of expectation and conjecture as to how it was all going to turn out. Of course there is percussion and percussion, and in at least one of the works programmed in the concert, Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree, one could almost predict that the sounds would hardly sound “percussive” at all!

As I’ve already indicated, the three works in the first half took a gentler, more reflective stance towards the percussion section, as if, along with the strings, traditional adversaries were being brought together for some kind of truce and told to be on their best behaviour! Then in the second half, more overtly “percussive” qualities were given their head in places – though I must say that this music, Rodion Shchedrin’s reworking of themes from Bizet’s opera Carmen into a ballet suite, wasn’t as “noisy” as I had been previously led to believe. More through circumstance than by deliberate avoidance, I had never heard the work before. (Right! – I shall try to no longer use the words “percussion” and “percussive” in this review – if I can!)

The concert opened with a new work, one written especially for the NZSO Soloists and commissioned by the NZSO Friends of the Orchestra. This was Portrait, a work by Ken Young – and from the title, one might have expected the piece to be a self-portrait, or a portrait of some specific person or object. Instead, the composer told us in a program note that the work was one which merely “reflects various moods and sensations”. We were as well invited to make any associations we ourselves wished to make with the music.

It was all my fault – I was expecting the composer of his first two symphonies and that wonderfully exhilarating work Dance to give us something more along those lines. So, I spent much of the listening-time waiting for the piece to do something other than what it was doing! Still, the music I found extremely attractive, written in a late-Romantic idiom, and making striking use of the solo violin – Young employed a kind of descending motif at the opening, one whose harmonies he occasionally “bent” chromatically, in a haunting, atmospheric manner.

I was struck by the beauty of the music for the strings and harp throughout this opening section, with the solo violin like a single wanderer in a beautiful, unfamiliar sonic landscape. The music did gather up its energies during a middle episode, where the writing reminded me a bit of Bartok’s in his Concerto for Orchestra, the motifs sounding folkish and very singable. But whatever more strongly rhythmic episodes there were seemed all too ready to put aside their energies and return to more reflective modes of expression. And because I was waiting for the composer to bring more muscle and thrust into the proceedings, it took a while for me to rid myself of the disappointment that the piece never seemed really to “take off”, beautiful though many of the episodes were.

Upon reflection, and rehearing a section on the work on the radio, I’m inclined towards thinking that the music worked well despite my expectations of the time not being fulfilled. But as regards the next item on the program, Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree, I did expect a completely different kind of sound-experience – in a sense this was the case, though again I had some difficulty focusing on the music, albeit for somewhat different reasons. As I imagined it would be, Takemitsu’s piece was largely meditative, gentle and inward, with occasional irruptions of light (more of this in a moment) and scintillations of impulse. Energy in Takemitsu’s music is, of course, largely of the mind and the imagination, rather than of the blood and sinew. Three percussionists were involved, playing marimba, vibraphone and crotales (antique cymbals) respectively.

What became the performance’s dominant feature (causing much discussion afterwards) was the lighting used throughout the piece. The instrumentalists were individually lit, and the illumination was alternated between the players, according to which instrument was being used – an interesting idea in theory, but in practice one I found fatally distracting. It all seemed too insistent and crude, at odds with the overall gentleness and subtlety of the piece, and an enormous distraction for this listener, at any rate – in fact I found myself absorbed in predicting when each lighting-change was going to happen and to which instrument it would be applied, instead of listening to the music!

Again, the problem is probably mine to an extent, but I would think this also a generational issue. I can imagine audience members younger than myself not batting an eyelid at what I would consider distractions, as they would have probably experienced many musical events with constant variation of lighting and other effects “augmenting” the music. Of course, Takemitsu himself was a noted “cinephile” with a number of beautifully-wrought film-scores to his credit, so his music does have a strong and established association with visual imagery. But I found the lighting changes “noisy “and “clattery” in this instance – visually more like lightning, or dramatic denouement, or explosive flashes one might associate with warfare. I might well have been prepared to accept more delicately-modulated ambient changes, of the kind suggested by the music. But, unfortunately, I still labour under the delusion that a concert is where someone goes to “listen”, and found this all too much to take, something of an impediment.

So, a somewhat muted, circumspect first half was completed by a classic Arvo Pärt work, Fratres, which was written in 1977. This began life as a work for strings and winds, but the composer subsequently arranged the music for a number of combinations of instruments. Probably the most popular version is for solo violin, strings and percussion,as was performed here, though it also makes occasional appearances as a work for violin and piano.

I thought the string-playing during this work was simply a joy to listen to. It all began with the solo violin sounding modulating arpeggiations which grew in intensification as the deep percussion sounds opened up the ground beneath one’s feet, suggesting something monumental and unearthly. The accompanying string chords had an eerie, haunting Aeolian, or wind-blown quality, with the double basses holding on to this deep-seated sound. I like the way the hymn-like music for strings seemed to address the heavenly spaces, with the solo violin also playing music of the air, while the percussion and lower strings kept the foundation sounds well grounded.

One would have thought, after all of this, that the second half of the program, featuring Russian composer Rodian Shchedrin’s Carmen Ballet  (music largely drawn from George’s Bizet’s eponymous opera), would straightway electrify our sensibilities with masses of sound – my somewhat randomly-formed impression of what we were going to hear was that it was going to be “extremely noisy”! In fact, what we got at the start was the gentlest and most evocative kind of “wake-up call” – Rodian Shchedrin begins his Suite with what sound like distant, early-morning sounds, bells sounding the famous “Habanera” theme as a gently nostalgic echo, perhaps for some people a sleepy remembrance of what they were doing the night before! But soon, the music got going in earnest, with the first Dance, an evocation of the bull-ring, flailing castanets prominent.

I thought two differences between Shchedrin and the original Bizet work gradually emerged. Firstly, it became clear that Shchedrin had his own order of events for the action of his ballet – it wasn’t a carbon copy of Bizet’s Carmen story, by any means. And so the tunes we all knew came in a somewhat unexpected order in places. What I didn’t know was that Shchedrin had interpolated a couple of numbers from Bizet’s incidental music for L’Arlesienne into his score and from another opera, The Fair Maid of Perth, along with a bit of Jules Massenet’s ballet music for Le Cid. So these things came as a surprise as well.

Secondly, Shchedrin’s strings and percussion scheme rather unexpectedly drew my attention to the enormous importance Bizet gave to the wind instruments in his opera – without them, as here, the differences were profound. So, in that sense, the strings had a great deal to make up for; and what they lacked in timbral and textural variation, they compensated for by fervently singing – they could, of course, convey all the romance and anguish of Bizet’s themes, even if those accustomed colours and “dialects” associated with some tunes, were no longer there. The NZSO strings were, I’m happy to report, well up to the task.

It was interesting, and perhaps predictable, that the official Soviet reaction (in 1969 the cultural scene in Russia still dominated by “The Party”) was extremely hostile. Shchedrin’s “tweaking” of the story for the Ballet caused outrage in some quarters – Soviet Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furseva exclaimed that the work was “insulting” and that “Carmen, the hero of the Spanish people, has been made into a whore”. It was only after the intervention of Shostakovich that a ban that had been placed on the music’s performance was lifted. Shchedrin’s story-line has Carmen in a kind of “menage a trois” with both Don Jose and Escamillo the Toreador. At the end, Carmen dances with each of her lovers in turn until Don Jose stabs her in a fit of jealousy. Presumably it was Carmen’s apparent “free-range” sexual activities which raised the ire of the Soviet Thought-Police.

Given these scenarios, I was surprised and delighted at the extent to which the music had moments of real fun, of a somewhat irreverent feeling, a “tongue-in-cheek” aspect that peeked out occasionally from between the score’s pages. For example, Shchedrin gets the players to hum the Toreador’s Song at one point, and subsequently asks the percussionists to play kazoos, to everybody’s delight at the concert. Touches like this leavened the intensity of the mix, to the enterprise’s advantage.

So, it was all very entertaining, superbly delivered, exciting and with lots of diverting touches. Perhaps Shchedrin’s work is too quirky in itself to be an enduring masterpiece – but it’s certainly a work that, ultimately, reminds one of what a great piece the original Carmen continues to be!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Splendid concert from the summer sessions of the National Youth Orchestra

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra National Youth Orchestra

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Op.61
Shostakovich: Cello Concerto no.1 in E flat, Op.107 (allegretto, moderato, cadenza, allegro con moto)
Gluck: Iphigénie en Aulide Overture
Stravinsky: Suite from Pulcinella

NZSO National Youth Orchestra (concertmaster, Hilary Hayes), conducted by Tecwyn Evans, with Santiago Cañón Valencia (cello)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 17 February 2012, 6.30pm

Friday night’s splendid concert began with a work by a suitably youthful composer; Mendelssohn was 17 years old when he wrote the well-known music for Shakespeare’s play (well beloved of Radio New Zealand Concert).   It was good, too, to have youthful New Zealand-born conductor at the helm – even if sartorially, he did not match the orchestra members.

This was a new venture, to bring together the Youth Orchestra in the summer, in addition to their usual early spring session.   However, it was not the full orchestra, but consisted of 52 players.  The small orchestra, as a friend pointed out, doesn’t give the same breadth and depth of sound as we are used to from the National Youth Orchestra.  That said, it was appropriate to have a smaller orchestra for the Stravinsky and Shostakovich works.

Mendelssohn’s music is wonderfully ethereal.  In 2002 I attended a ballet in Budapest that was a dance version of the Shakespeare play; the music was Mendelssohn’s, including his Italian symphony, which is very much in a similar mood to the Midsummer Night’s Dream music.  The dance really gave the work life – since we never hear it performed with the play.

The woodwind sections came through well in this performance, while the brass were excellent.  There was good variation of dynamics, but not quite that smooth, satin sound one hopes for from the strings; they played well, nevertheless.  In the passages that seem to evoke the fairies, the playing was appropriately unearthly in effect.  Those for violins alone were well unified, while the timpani provided strong support.

This was a generally fine performance.

Shostakovich’s music dwells in a completely different sound world, and inhabits a much darker, more sombre  milieu.  It was quite amazing to find a 16-year-old playing such music, without the score, and with complete accuracy and complete confidence.  It was scored for chamber orchestra, as was the later Stravinsky work; there would not be too many other 20th century works so scored.

Young Colombian cellist Santiago Cañón Valencia is studying at the University of Waikato, because his mother learned cello from James Tennant who now teaches there.

Shostakovich opens with the cello alone intoning a theme the composer uses elsewhere in his œvre: the notes B-A-C-H (in German notation; in ours, B flat, A, C, B), doubtless proclaiming his admiration for that composer.  I find the repetition of this motif too incessant for my taste.  The cello is soon joined by the winds; especially prominent are bassoons and oboes, all playing impeccably.

To regain the upper hand, the solo part soon goes to the upper register,  way down on the finger-board.  The sole horn enters with the Bach theme; later, he has important interplay with the cellist, which young player Sung Soo Hong managed pretty well, despite one or two fluffs. The cello soloist has little respite from constant playing in this spiky first movement, referred to in the programme notes as ‘especially sardonic’.

A great contrast comes with the smooth opening of the slow movement.  The horn got briefly getting out of kilter, but his very exposed part was played splendidly on the whole, and he showed great control of dynamics.

The soloist introduced a beautiful, rather sad theme with minimum accompaniment – violas, and pizzicato on cellos and basses.  A marvellous clarinet solo entered, counterpointing the cello part.  Muted strings arrived, giving the soloist a rest as they played a sombre variation on his theme.

Then the solo cello entered again with a high, mellifluous melody, which Valencia played quite beautifully.  Another solo was accompanied by clarinet and bassoons.  At all times Valencia appeared the consummate artist – accuracy, dynamics, expression were all of a high order, belying his youth.

Here was fine horn playing, and delicate phrases on the celeste advancing the sudden ethereal quality of the soloist playing harmonics, while the violins wander quietly in Never-Never Land, until the movement tailed off to nothing.

Almost without a break, a protracted grave melody from the soloist introduced the third movement ‘Cadenza’, which was entirely cello solo.  Valencia employed left-hand pizzicato and simultaneous two-strings pizzicato.  Bravura playing emerged: up and down the finger-board, before the orchestra came in with some trenchant chords then the woodwinds had their moments of acrobatic glory, all heralding the allegro final movement.  The soloist gave us a sort of perpetuum mobile while the other sounds cascaded around him.

The playing was electric, but always with gorgeous tone.  Back to Bach, with the familiar motif, played on winds as well as on the cello, with the accompaniment as at the opening of the work.

This was a splendid performance, and after enthusiastic recognition by the audience, Valencia played as an encore a slow movement from Bach’s sixth cello suite, very skilfully and soulfully.

Following the interval, we went back in time to an operatic overture by Gluck (with an ending arranged by Wagner).  The slow opening befitted the serious, classical subject.  Throughout the work there are lovely contrasts between the concerted passages and the delicate filigree on the strings.

There was a clear, fine sound from the strings; they were absolutely together and accurate.   The overture  was very attractively played.  I couldn’t pick the Wagner ending particularly, although the sound was certainly bigger at the end than it had been at the beginning.

Stravinsky’s attractive and highly entertaining Pulcinella suite was the last item on the programme.  Delightful, charming and colourful are all appropriate descriptions of this suite of eight pieces from the ballet music the composer wrote for Diaghilev, based on music of the early eighteenth-century composer, Pergolesi.  The orchestra was slightly reduced for this work.

The opening Sinfonia set the mood of the neo-classical style, with some wonderfully grunty sounds from the violins and winds, and solo work for the concertmaster, extremely well executed.  The Serenata that followed featured excellent oboe playing with splendid tone, from Hazel Nissen.  After the third movement (Scherzino – Allegro – Andantino) came the rapid, animated Tarantella, which featured more solo playing from the concertmaster, Hilary Hayes, with bassoon accompaniment.

‘Toccata’ gave opportunity for the brass and woodwind sections to show their skills, the piccolo being a particular feature, while the Gavotta that followed used all the orchestral colours, the second variation being for woodwind entirely.  The Vivo movement was fun to hear – and probably also to play, requiring lots of energy.  It was a good movement for the double basses to demonstrate their skills.

The Minuetto – Finale began languidly, then the string quartet of the section leaders with winds played elegantly with winds.  A great trombone solo followed, the finale bringing the work to an exciting conclusion.

The performance was greeted with enthusiastic applause from the audience, and the conductor ensured that every section had its turn in the limelight of applause, but there was special attention for the leaders of sections, and especially the superb trombonist, Joseph Thomas.

It is marvellous to witness the highly skilled, confident playing of the young people; it augurs well for the future of orchestral music in this country, as well developing audiences.  Not only were the ‘regulars’ at symphony concerts there (on a free ticket if they were NZSO subscribers), but also the families and friends of the performers, who may not be regulars.

Tecwyn Evans appeared to guide everything carefully, ensuring entries were signalled, but in an undemonstrative style.  He can feel as pleased as the audience was with the outcome of his efforts.

I feel compelled to say something about the printed programme.  Surely print designers must say to themselves “Who is going to read this, and in what circumstances?”  Given that the majority of the audience would have been over the age of 55, this was not a user-friendly piece of printing, with design appearing to take precedence over practicality.

Why did some composers’ photos need to have half their faces rendered green?   Why was the typeface of some pages (not all) so peculiar – a font I have never seen before, that appeared unevenly inked.   The notes for the Stravinsky work (or Stravinky, as it appeared in one paragraph) seemed less well proof-read than the others and were very difficult to read, even in broad daylight the next day, let alone in the dim light of the concert hall.  The inking of the minims (upright strokes) was less than for the round letters, giving a most peculiar appearance. The lower case ‘g’ seemed to stand out everywhere on the pages with this font, as though it were more inked than other letters – which it was, being composed of two circles.  In the semi-dark of the concert hall, these pages looked as though they were printed in Hebrew!  Punctuation marks were practically invisible.

Other pages were printed in a slightly more readable sans-serif font.  Tests have shown that such fonts are not as readable as fonts with serifs, since the latter help to carry the eye forward.  In the United Kingdom, the Arts Council has for years required promoters of concerts receiving funding from it, to provide large-type programmes for sight-impaired people.  I am not sight-impaired, but would be relieved to have programmes that can be more easily read.  In addition, there were places where white print was over a light background, or a photograph, where it became virtually unreadable.  My colleague says he wishes ‘they would stop overlaying letterpress on pictures and design features. The two elements should be kept apart.  It’s a tiresome fashion that a respectable organisation should be able to resist’.

 

 

A few hours of sun as the annual concert at Government House garden returns

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Vector Wellingon Orchestra Summer Concert in the Government House Garden

Conductor: Marc Taddei; soloists: Julia Booth (soprano), Helen Medlyn (mezzo soprano), Benjamin Makisi (tenor).
The Footnote Dance Company

Government House Garden

Saturday 11 February, 2pm

There was more than the usual amount of nervousness about the weather which has disrupted things at least once before, but by dawn, no doubt after a sleepless night by the management and performers, the matter seemed to be under control, and the afternoon turned into the very special Wellington musical adventure that it has become over the past decade. This was the first concert in the grounds since the house was closed for refurbishment.

I was relieved to find it hard to find a good spot to sit on the slopes when I arrived at about a quarter to one: big adverts on the day were clearly not needed and perhaps suggested over-exuberance on the part of the sponsors, The Dominion Post.

Appropriately, Ian Fraser (replacing Kate Mead who’d been host in previous years) referred to the death two days before of notable Wellingtonian, Lloyd Morrison, who supported the arts, especially music, through recordings of much New Zealand music on his label, Trust Records; as well he demonstrated a rare determination to retain business in Wellington against pressures to relocate to the north, a loyalty few others in business bother to display.

The concert was dedicated to Lloyd Morrison

Ian Fraser’s style was different.  His carefully dissembled erudition might not have had Kate’s smile-inducing recklessness, but we learned a few relevant facts and a few opinions.

One of his better quips came as he introduced the first piece, Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien (that odd mix of Italian and French). He noted that so many composers and others (Tchaikovsky was one of many) from the cold north of Europe yearned for the warmth of southern Europe; ‘rather like’, said Fraser, ‘Wellingtonians who in mid-summer, yearn for sultry climes’.

But Marc and the orchestra had decided that the gods should not be provoked by playing that was too lively and sun-drenched. As always with music that I heard when young and have retained a perhaps undue love of; so a far more exuberant performance raced ahead of what I was hearing (my landmark first performance was at a school concert by the then National Orchestra in the Town Hall, probably about 1950. By the way, how many times a year does the NZSO or the Wellington Orchestra these days fill the Town Hall or MFC with secondary school pupils?).

A Frenchman’s impression of Spain – Chabrier’s España – was livelier but, even though one doesn’t get an honest sound picture through heavy amplification in the open air, it sounded a little ragged.

It should have been enlivened by the dancing of six members of the Footnote Dance Company. They danced in front of the stage, in dark costumes and in the shade so that their efforts were largely lost, I imagine, to a great part of the audience. It was the same with their accompanying Strauss’s Pizzicato Polka and the 1812 Overture.

Earlier concerts had focussed on the music of particular countries; this time the orchestral pieces were simply from the more exotic parts of Europe. Well: Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 4 is exotic for an Iranian; the overture to The Bartered Bride served as a great introduction to NBR New Zealand Opera’s second production in its 2012 season.

The solo orchestral offerings, indeed, were not the principal ornaments and opera arias (and duets and a trio) filled the rest of the programme. All three singers were in top form. The first bracket showcased each with a solo aria: Julia Booth opened with a lovely, unhurried and carefully enunciated Song to the Moon (in Czech) from Dvořák’s Rusalka. Ben Makisi, his voice quite without signs of strain that have sometimes been there in the past, seemed perfectly poised in the Flower Song from Carmen, urgent, lyrical. And Helen Medlyn, who was the first (and only) performer to wear colour – a beautiful, ground-trailing turquoise dress – could hardly have chosen better than Rosina’s confident ‘Una voce poco fa’ from The Barber of Seville. She leapt dangerously but successfully across wide intervals to the remote top notes.

Ben Makisi next sang ‘Where’er you walk’ from Handel’s only English opera, Semele, again with simple rhetorical sincerity. Later, with Julia, he sang the love duet from Madama Butterfly; though the blend was not perfect as each voice seemed to inhabit a separate space, they evoked the contrast between her naïve faith and his cynical sexual wants.

In the second half Makisi made a splendid impact in his singing of the favourite of every tenor, Granada; and in complete contrast, the aria from The Magic Flute in which Tamino looks on the tiny portrait of Pamina, ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön’, in ringing, fairy-tale, love-at-first-sight style.

Julia’s other solo aria was from Manon – ‘Adieu, notre petite table’ – in which the coquettish, fickle Manon says goodbye to the little table which represents what she and her now-to-be-abandoned lover had for a while. This year is the centenary of Massenet’s death, a matter being commemorated in more musical-aware parts of the world. (Fraser remarked that while successful, Manon was never accepted as family entertainment in Paris. That may have been some parents’ inclination, but the Opéra-Comique where it had its first triumphant run, was essentially a family theatre. It premiered only nine years after the slightly controversial opening season at the Opéra-Comique of Carmen). Julia sang it with warm feeling, again displaying a voice of charm and beauty.

Julia also sang in duet with Helen Medlyn, the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann, in which initially there seemed a slight imbalance between the two voices, as Helen’s voice emerged with a little more fullness than Julia’s.

Helen’s other solo aria was from little-known French composer Ambroise Thomas whose bicentenary (his birth) was marked in many quarters last year. Like Gounod, his two most famous operas were drawn respectively from Shakespeare and Goethe: Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet and Faust; Thomas’s Hamlet and Mignon (a small part of Goethe’s sprawling Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). Here was one of the couple of well-known pieces from the latter: ‘Connais-tu le pays’, one of the poems Goethe embellished his novel with, much set by many composers (the other once-popular piece is the Gavotte). Helen’s rendering was a little more worldly than one might expect from the simple Mignon, but full of character.

Finally, the sparkling (of course) Champagne chorus from Die Fledermaus was sung by all three, vividly, with plenty of gusto, with Helen taking something of a lead in pushing the tempo to its brilliant finish.

Perhaps a repeat of that might have done instead of the statutory 1812 (nothing was made of this year being the bicentenary of Napoleon’s terrible campaign) which ended the afternoon with alarming cannons that had us blocking our ears as the earth shook, making us fear that Christchurch had suddenly arrived under us.

 

 

Perry So and John Chen illuminate NZSO’s Chinese New Year

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Floating Bride, the Crimson Village (Ross Harris); Yellow River Piano Concerto (Xian Xinghai and arranged by others); Symphony No 6 ‘Pastoral’ (Beethoven)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Perry So; with John Chen (piano)

Michael Fowler Centre

Wednesday 1 February, 7.30pm

I missed the equivalent concert last year, marking the Chinese New Year, but heard it broadcast a couple of weeks ago by RNZ Concert (on Monday 23 January). The splendid performances obtained by conductor Perry So persuaded me that I should go to this year’s concert that he was also to conduct. While last year’s concert included, as Chinese content, the suite by Bright Sheng, Postcards, and arias from Jack Body’s opera Alley performed at the 1998 New Zealand International Arts Festival, this year it was the problematic Yellow River Concerto.

It had a curious provenance, starting in 1939 as a cantata by Xian Xinghai (old orthography: Hsien Hsing-hai) based on a Chinese poem urging the people to defend the country against the Japanese invasion. Though it was at first championed by the Communists, it was banned in the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) along with all Western culture. (You will find excerpts of a performance of the Cantata on You-Tube, which strike me as suggesting something rather more authentic, with greater integrity than the concerto concoction; there is also an interesting performance by young Chinese pianist Harvest Zhang of part of his solo piano version).

Xian died in 1945; but Chinese musicians were anxious to preserve Xian’s work as well as to legitimize the piano as an acceptable instrument in the face of the mindless rejection of all things from the West. Six musicians, including the pianist Yin Chengzong, worked on an arrangement of the cantata as a piano concerto and it was premiered in 1970 (the Cultural Revolution encouraged collective artistic endeavour as opposed to focus on the individual). The concerto was immediately popular, but it again fell foul of political correctness for a decade after Mao’s death in 1976.

Even though China had acquired significant familiarity with Western music before the Communists gained power in 1949, and that continued, though with its main influence through the Soviet Union from then on, the traditions were ruthlessly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

Xian had studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Dukas and D’Indy and his cantata had clear Western fingerprints; but following the Cultural Revolution, China’s view of the West remained clouded for a considerable time and this collective transformation of the piece in 1968 produced music that had the superficial technical, virtuosic aspects of some Western music pasted on to pseudo-traditional Chinese music that sounds simply trite and purposeless, failing to generate any sense of evolution or continuity.

So the success of the performance rested entirely on the splendid vigour of Perry So’s leadership and the whole-hearted and brilliant advocacy of John Chen’s playing: not only the dazzling speed and accuracy, but his irresistible gift of persuading us that perhaps it was better music than all the other evidence suggested. So it was understandable that an unsophisticated audience, uncultivated in the aesthetics and patterns of Western classical music (in China in the 70s, and perhaps here?), would have been moved by its sentimentality, its triumphalism, its naïve gaiety, by the sort of compulsory celebration demanded at the fulfilment of the goals of a five year plan. I suspect that Xian might have found rather embarrassing what his posthumous colleagues had done to the bones of his music.

The rest of the concert was non-Chinese.

It had begun with another performance of Ross Harris’s dazzling settings of Chagall-inspired poems by Vincent O’Sullivan, The Floating Bride, the Crimson Village. Perhaps it was not such an inappropriate offering if one sees oriental qualities in Chagall and thus in the exquisite realisations by Harris.

I heard the first performance of them at the 2009 Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson where they were accompanied by Piers Lane at the piano. Harris then provided orchestral settings for them which I heard in the NZSO’s May 2010 New Zealand music concert. Here they were given the clothing that they cried out for: orchestrations that were extraordinarily subtle and imaginative, and which I am sure gave soprano Jenny Wollerman a support and comfort that seemed from the beginning to be implicit in the compositions. Harris’s scoring (the brass limited to two horns, a trumpet and a trombone) is beautifully adapted to the sense and sounds of the poems and evoke with remarkable vividness the colours and fancies of the many Chagall paintings that are familiar. The orchestral writing is also so discreet, and the playing was so sensitive, that Wollerman’s voice was never troubled by undue weight or density. One tries to be aware of influences in new compositions, and of course they can be heard, ranging from Berg in ‘Tu es ma belle’ or Ligeti, Shostakovich, Stravinsky perhaps in ‘The Rabbi’ or Poulenc in ‘Give me a green horse’.

If O’Sullivan has created these poems almost, one felt, in a state of dream-induced, spiritual rapture, Harris’s music gave them a substance that seemed to takes us back to Chagall’s world in which the insubstantial becomes tangible in sound as well as in images.

The second half of the concert was devoted to the Pastoral Symphony; even though from a different era, and working in quite a different aesthetic, it seemed a far better companion for the songs than the Yellow River Concerto.  One often approaches such a well-known work as if another hearing is superfluous, it’s so completely in your head that you can hardly imagine being awakened to anything new or unexpected.

But Perry So’s performance had an immediacy and a sense of being heard totally afresh that I found it both illuminating and inspiring. Without indulging in excessive dynamic oscillation or rhythmic elasticity, he brought a sense of delight to the performance that is rare.

The first movement arrested with its finely judged dynamics and rallentandi, speed that never seemed hurried. Perry So lit each of the distinct motifs of the second movement with clarity while creating a sense of continuity and architectural integrity: again I was enchanted by the way he so visibly sculpted each phrase and used the dynamic palette so enchantingly. The speeds were brisk without sacrificing definition, individual instruments had their moments of stardom – oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and the dancing third movement, the storm, the gaiety, the pensive moments, created an ecstatic expression of fulfilment.

If I had wondered whether I would be much delighted by this concert, right at the start and certainly in the second half, I found myself in a state of high contentment and serenity. And so I look forward to another year of great music from this splendid orchestra.