Tag: orchestral

NZSO concludes its Sibelius Symphony cycle on Naxos

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SIBELIUS – Symphonies: No.6 in D Minor Op.104 / No.7 in C Major Op.105

Tone Poem: Finlandia Op.26

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Naxos 8.572705

Sometimes, when listening to performances of music one knows and loves, one has to try to come to terms with interpretations markedly different to one’s own ideas. Common sense suggests that this is a healthy process to take part in – and, after all, to expect uniformity or even conformity of music-making or listening across different performances would be unrealistic, let alone undesirable. And music-making which goes against the grain of one’s expectations or particular tastes surely adds to the fascination of the whole business. 

So, am I writing a music review, here,  or some kind of philosophical rant? It’s just that, in as many instances as there are recordings, I’ve recently worked my way as a listener through performances of all of the Sibelius symphonies from Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO which have, by turns, delighted and frustrated me. Therefore, before inflicting yet another maddeningly ambivalent set of opinions upon Middle C’s readership, I think it’s about time I addressed the issue of the reviewer’s sensibilities before dealing with the intrinsic qualities of the music-making.

My own formative experiences with music criticism were with 1960s issues of the magazine Gramophone; and once I’d gotten over my period of unquestioning and unshakable faith in the opinions expressed throughout those erstwhile columns, I began to develop some independence as a reader and consumer of these opinions. There were some reviewers whose judgements I invariably trusted, finding instances where my experiences with recordings they reviewed seemed to me in accord with what they’d written. But I soon began to feel (youthful arrogance?) I could think critically for myself; and even reached the stage where, with two or three of the  reviewing “regulars”, I would unhesitatingly investigate the things they didn’t like and studiously avoid those they heaped praise on. In other words my sensibilities seemed attuned to some opinions, and in conflict with others.

But, like Pontius Pilate in the Gospel stories, who declared to Jesus Christ at one point, “What is Truth?”, I’m now inclined to shy away from absolutes – any comment I might dare to make as a critic is assigned no more status than that of “opinion” regarding music performances – and so it is with my remarks concerning these Inkinen/NZSO Naxos recordings of Sibelius. As for the particular disc under review, containing the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies of the Finnish Master, as well as his considerably earlier work Finlandia (Naxos 8.572705), I find myself, as with the others in this series, liking most things about the performances, but having to scratch my head and ponder the reasons for the music being expressed in certain ways at particular points.

By way of making further confessional gesturings, I ought to declare that I’ve been violently in love with the Sibelius Sixth Symphony even since encountering, more than forty years ago, Anthony Collins’s 1950s Decca recording (in glorious mono) with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Seventh Symphony I intensely admire, but don’t love as passionately, except when listening to Colin Davis’s amazing Boston Symphony performance; but I admit I never tire of hearing rattlingly good performances of Finlandia (my benchmark being the flamboyance of Sir John Barbirolli and a fired-up Halle Orchestra). So – in vying with these noble resonances, how do the new performances sound? And could I imagine them working equally well on their own terms?

The opening of the Sixth Symphony on the new disc sounds to my ears as if the instruments were recorded a shade too closely, the textures distractingly “edgy”, with insufficient space around and about the different strands – it makes for a slightly claustrophobic effect, one also very brightly-lit. I did get used to the sound, partly because there was so much else to enjoy – the tempi are beautifully paced by Inkinen, nicely-breathed throughout the opening, and infectiously propelled with the arrival of the allegro (the “molto moderato” allows the music time to speak with sufficient resonance). The various “pedal-notes” from winds and brass accompanying the strings’ “endless figurations” throughout the movement make for wonderful ambient colour-changes as the music surges forwards, towards a darkening of the textures as the lower strings dig into what seems like the very ground underfoot. I was hoping Pietari Inkinen would get his brass at the end to gradually intensify their ascending phrase-notes to imitate a crescendo, which, however, they don’t do – but the sounds are nevertheless nobly wrought.

At Inkinen’s beautifully-measured tempo the slow movement is for once just that (often there’s confusion over metronome markings, here), gradually unfolding with beautiful dignity and gradually-burgeoning textures, as things turn from air into water and finally into solid earth at the climax (the brass allowed some welcome “attitude” here which they’re unfortunately denied in other places in the symphony) – but this is a beautifully-realised performance. So, too, at the beginning, is the bucolic scherzo, even though I thought its dotted rhythms a bit too tightly-clamped in places – and, those delicious interactions between strings and wind need, alas, sterner interjections from the brass, I feel, than those we get here – Sibelius did talk abut the work’s “rage and passion”, which Inkinen, it seems, will have little truck with, both here and at the very end of the movement, where I feel the brass ought to be able to properly snarl, giving warning of what’s still to come (Collins’ LSO brasses from the 1950s are wonderfully goosebump-forthright, here!).

Again, Inkinen finds the “tempo giusto” at the finale’s beginning, at first a wonderful feeling of some kind of ritual unfolding, followed by a hitching up of garments and dancing at the allegro molto, Inkinen managing the music’s occasional swirling crescendi beautifully, though for my taste not allowing timpani and brass enough scope for expressing the exuberance and energy that the cadence-points cry out for – even that final vortex-like dissolution of energy and impulse could have done with a bit more snarling force (the composer’s “rage and passion” again needing a proper voice). But Inkinen makes eloquent amends with his players throughout the movement’s epilogue – the lines sing, the rhythmic patterns dance and the textures glow, with the final string phrases almost sacramental in their expressive beauty and purity.

A longer pause between the two symphonies on the disc would have been welcomed – however, in just a few seconds, the Seventh Symphony’s opening timpani-strokes (prefiguring the opening of the later tone-poem Tapiola) sound, followed by those giant’s upward steps into the “different realms” of a world-weary composer’s imagination. A wide-ranging work, despite its single movement and relatively compact structure, it contains music of both sunlight and shadow; and Pietari Inkinen’s patiently unfolding way with the first episode balances the pastoral with the epic,allowing the hymn-like themes to sing as if from the mountain-tops. Then comes the first of three majestic trombone statements (a commentator called them “peaks along a mountain range”), and though beautifully voiced, I thought the player’s sound not sufficiently “epic” – too smooth, too “civilized” to conjure up vast spaces, real or imagined. But Inkinen’s grip on things doesn’t falter, moving with impressive surety from the bleak despair of the trombone tune’s aftermath to the playfulness of the scherzo-like scamperings which follow.

The second trombone statement suggests something more baleful and threatening, introduced by swirling strings and supported by forthright echoing brasses and winds. There’s an almost heroic restraint about the playing at first which holds the listener back from being plunged immediately into a maelstrom of doubt and darkness – but there’s a powerful cumulative effect at work, so that by the time horns and timpani voice their defiance the threat of chaos is met head-on and for the moment, overcome. It’s almost Ein Heldenleben country we now find ourselves in, strings and horns echoing heroic-like motifs that speak of valorous deeds and triumphal homecomings, of romance and rest for the weary (all in a bracing Nordic C Major, of course, instead of a glowing Straussian E-flat!). But triumphs are short-lived for this Sibelian hero – Inkinen and his players vividly plot the ever-increasing urgencies and agitations (marvellous playing from both strings and winds, here – although I did wish for stronger timpani at one point), taking us to the huge crescendo that ushers in the final trombone solo, again nobly played, but I thought still needing just a touch of “bite” in the phrasing, to truly ring out. However, orchestral support burgeons promisingly, the textures both jagged and epic, building to what ought to be the composer’s most intense cry of pain in all of his music – ah! – not quite, as it turns out, here…..still, the anguish is sufficient to strongly register and release waves of resonant poignance to the resignation of the coda.

Right at the end Sibelius recovers his strength and resolve sufficiently to voice a final gesture of defiance – a kind of “Finnish Amen”, darkly launched and heroically wrought. Inkinen and his musicians give it heaps of dignity and nobility, making a sonorous conclusion to a finely-conceived performance.

I would have put Finlandia elsewhere on the disc, preferring to sit in silence at the symphony’s end. But there it is, waiting, ready to cheer us all up once again, we who’ve been immersed as listeners in oceans of Sibelian reverie, angst and stoic resignation. The performance takes its time to do so, Inkinen possibly hearkening back to the work’s original title “Finland awakes”, by way of demonstrating a kind of “sleeping giant” at the beginning (compare the startling opening attack of, for one, Barbirolli’s Halle Orchestra brasses, on a famous 1960s recording). Timpani and snarling lower brass help matters, and the strings dig into their first phrases with a will.  Matters energize once the stuttering trumpets galvanize the work’s introduction into action (I liked Inkinen’s  bringing out of the lower strings’ “seething” textures shortly afterwards), and strings and timpani give plenty of initial impetus to the music’s driving force.

This reviewer’s niggardly opinion apart, people will perhaps enjoy being “cleansed” at the disc’s end by such a life-affirming expression of joy and energy. And this Naxos recording, the last of Pietari Inkinen’s and the NZSO’s Sibelius cycle, needs, I believe, to be investigated – though the expression “Vive la difference” isn’t Scandinavian, it’s entirely apposite. For these are performances that may not completely satisfy all listening sensibilities, but they will certainly fascinate and engage, and might even (as in my case) win you over.

Dream team together on record – Trpčeski, Petrenko and Rachmaninov

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concertos 1-4 / Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini

Simon Trpčeski (piano)

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Avie Records

AV2191 (Concertos 1, 4 / Paganini Rhapsody)

AV2192 (Concertos 2, 3)

Avie Records and its NZ distributor Ode Records will have pleased Wellington concertgoers enormously with a recent pair of CD recordings (available separately) featuring pianist Simon Trpčeski and conductor Vasily Petrenko in the music of Rachmaninov – all four Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on Theme of Paganini. Of course, both Simon Trpčeski and Vasily Petrenko have been recent guest artists with the NZSO, though not performing together – Trpčeski gave us Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, and Petrenko conducted the orchestra in a recent concert featuring Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Michael Houstoun as soloist. So the CDs represent a “coming-together” of different strands of impulse from these concerts, pianist, conductor and composer. While the absolute stand-out performance of the set is that of the Fourth Concerto, these musicians bring plenty of feeling and enviable skills to each of the works on the two discs, if not quite emulating the performance-intensity levels which I enjoyed at each of the concerts I attended.

Trpčeski and Petrenko approach the First Concerto as though they’re making no allowances for its status as a relatively youthful work (Rachmaninov was 18 when the concerto was completed, in 1892, though he revised the work extensively in 1917, expressing some latter-day astonishment at the Concerto’s “youthful pretensions”). In fact Rachmaninov soon realized he couldn’t remain in Russia with the Communists in control, and therefore had to face the prospect of earning a living in exile as a virtuoso pianist – so reworking his concerto’s “youthful pretensions” gave him an extra piece to add to his projected concert repertoire.

Right from the start, Trpčeski and Petrenko stress the work’s big-boned contrasts – those boldly stated flourishes from orchestra and soloist at the beginning have real “bite”, throwing into bold relief both the liquid flow of the opening theme, and the rapid scherzando-like passages which follow. Trpčeski‘s playing has plenty of flint-like brilliance, if not as volatile and alchemic as the composer’s on his recording (but nobody else’s is!), and Petrenko conjures from his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic players gloriously Russian-sounding tones, rich and resplendent in one episode, elfin and volatile in the next, heart-rending and melancholic in a third. One senses, too, a piano-and-orchestra partnership of equals, with all of the creative interactions and tensions that such a relationship implies.

I liked Trpčeski‘s Scriabin-like fantasizing on the slow movement’s first page, the playing creating sounds borne upon the air, with Petrenko encouraging his players to evolve the sounds almost by osmosis, allowing the soloist to climb through the textures with his figurations. And scenes of Imperial Russia come to mind as the music’s rhythmic trajectories kick in with the clipped horses’ hooves, the jingling harnesses on the sleigh and the wind-flurried snow-flakes skirling as the string sing a soulful melody. Only in the finale did I feel Trpčeski‘s playing a trifle under-voltaged in places, lacking some of the electricity of Stephen Hough’s blistering fingerwork on a rival Hyperion set of the concertos (Hyperion CDA 67501/2). Petrenko’s is a darker orchestral sound for Trpčeski than Andrew Litton’s is for Hough, though the romance of the second subject group is beautifully realized on the newer recording, the canonic dialoging between instruments as tenderly lyrical as any. Finally, some whiplash-like irruptions of energy from the orchestra galvanize the soloist as the music races to its brilliant conclusion.

After the resplendent performance I heard Petrenko conduct of the Fourth Concerto with Michael Houstoun and the NZSO, I was surprised and fascinated to encounter a somewhat leaner orchestral sound from the Liverpool Orchestra as recorded by Avie – what remnants of romantic sweep Rachmaninov allowed to remain in his composer-armoury by this stage of his creative career were certainly brought out full-bloodedly in Wellington, but seem less in evidence on record. Instead, Petrenko keeps things lean and tightly-focused in Liverpool, details very much to the fore, the result being a steady steam of interactive dialoguing between orchestra and soloist, the attention on the musical thoughts and ideas rather than any guide’s exposition of it. It did make the big moments in which the soloist did dominate more telling, such as the archway of the big central climax, with its gorgeously bluesy Gershwin-like tune on the strings, though the subsequent mocking laughter of the brasses resonated all the more in such a climate of restraint. Trpčeski‘s playing throughout is of a piece with the orchestra’s, focused and flexible, taking a partnership role as often as seeking to dominate. The result is a strongly-balanced exposition of the music, the sensitivity of Trpčeski‘s dialoging with the winds in the melancholic epilogue to that big middle section a clue to the stature of this performance as a powerfully expressive partnership of equals.

Pianist, conductor and orchestra build the haunting, melancholic tread of the slow movement towards a climax whose pain and sorrow, though momentary, pierce the heart of the listener, as much for the heartbreak of the subsequent bars as for the shock of the sudden onslaught. As for the finale, again Trpčeski‘s playing may yield points to Stephen Hough’s performance in sheer vertiginous brilliance, but here it’s the interplay with Petrenko’s ever-responsive Liverpool players that catches the ear again and again. Critics who damned this music at its premiere on the grounds of Rachmaninov’s “old-fashioned” style must have made up their minds about the work before they even heard a note – for this is a composer who, despite his own distaste for the avant-garde and his omni-present inner resonances of Imperial Russia, was certainly listening to what was happening around him. Bartok, Stravinsky, Gershwin and Ravel are all there at the finale’s feast, even if the fare remains bitter to the taste, flavoured to the end with the composer’s own anguish in exile from his beloved native land. Rachmaninov’s trauma at the work’s reception by the critics was such that he cut the Concerto heavily, rewriting some passages and (ironically) lessening the work’s “new look” aspect – it’s worth tracking down either Alexander Ghindin’s or Yevgeny Sudbin’s recordings of the Concerto’s original version (respectively, on the Ondine and BIS labels) to experience the extent of the composer’s thwarted achievement.

By the time he came to write the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for piano and orchestra, Rachmaninov had, I feel, come to terms some of the way with his situation. His frequently-expressed grief at his refugee status had become less overt in his music than, perhaps by way of compensation, a delight in brilliantly sardonic, in places almost diabolical accents,  though he would still produce incomparable episodes of melancholic lyricism (his Third Symphony, completed two years after the Rhapsody, is a kind of emotional counterweight in this regard). The Rhapsody was the first work he wrote in a new home, the villa called “Senar”, on the shores of Lake Lucerne. As befits its virtuoso leanings it uses a similar theme to that used by Brahms in HIS “Paganini” Variations, albeit for solo piano. Unlike the hapless Fourth Concerto, the work was an instant success with the public, the composer’s pleasure at this tempered with the worry of having to perform it. Oddly enough, there’s a tenuous New Zealand connection with this work through the famous choreographer Michel Fokine, who wrote to the composer from Auckland in 1939 (Fokine was touring the country with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet at the time) asking permission from Rachmaninov to adapt the work for a ballet to be called “Paganini” – the composer subsequently agreed, and “Paganini” received its first performance at Covent Garden that same year.

Trpčeski and Petrenko play the score, it seems to me, with ears for its structural qualities, rather than its surface brilliances and coruscations. Up to the first appearance of the “Dies Irae” theme (Variation 7 – Meno mosso,a tempo moderato) the music treads steadily, the orchestral colours dark and weighty, the piano having more “glint” than out-and-out brilliance – something of a contrast with Stephen Hough’s more elfin volatilities, matched with a brighter, more effervescent orchestral presence from Andrew Litton and his Dallas Symphony players. Trpčeski is chunkier and earthier, and his accompanying orchestral colours to my ears more Shostakovich-like (a nicely guttural clarinet in Variation 12, having more time, at Petrenko’s tempo, to “colour” its melody). One could hazard the comment that Trpčeski and Petrenko give the music a more Russian-sounding outlook, very like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan music in the splendidly swaggering Variation 14, though Stephen Hough again finds extra sparkle in the succeeding piano-only Allegro. I like the homage Rachmaninov pays to Prokofiev in Variation 16’s Allegretto (straight out of the latter’s ballet Romeo and Juliet), Andrew Litton encouraging particularly spectral shudders from his strings, while Petrenko’s Liverpudlians are robuster, fuller-bodied phantoms. In the lead-up to the famous Eighteenth Variation, I found myself preferring Hough’s and Litton’s rather more atmospheric Allegretto, more spacious and Gothic, the sostenuto winds almost ghoul-like, not unlike Respighi’s Catacomb phantoms in his Pines of Rome, though honours are pretty even when the big tune comes around (the “Paganini” theme simply inverted and slowed down, can you believe it?).

And so it goes on – Hough and Litton bring out the glitter and volatility of the concluding sequences with more quicksilver than Trpčeski and Petrenko, whose energies have a darker, more elemental quality. But both rides to the finish are madcap ones, risk-taking ventures, with alarming accents and angularities aplenty, as well as passages whose harmonic explorations leave those of the worlds of the Second and Third Concertos far behind. At the beginning of the last variation of all, Trpčeski and Petrenko out-point their rivals in deliciousness, but as the patternings intensify, it’s simply neck-and neck at the finish. Trpčeski throws away the last phrase deadpan, like a good poker-player, while Hough etches it in with just a hint of a raised eyebrow.

Turning to the second of the Avie discs, containing the aforementioned remaining concertos, the listener enters a world filled with multitudes of ghosts of past performances, whose resonances are liable to rise up and haunt and even overwhelm all but the most intrepid and determined new interpreters. Happily Trpčeski and Petrenko are adventurers of that cut and cloth, and the opening paragraph of the C Minor Concerto (No.2) is a strongly-wrought statement of intent, couched in deep, rich tones, and propelled with striding energy. Vasily Petrenko loses no chance to support his pianist with emphatic touches from his players that stress the depth of feeling and purpose of it all – his lower strings, for instance, sing a rich counter-line to Trpčeski‘s simply-voiced second subject melody, echoed beautifully by the oboe shortly afterwards. The musicians tend to make the music’s transitions flow, rather than go for high-contrast changes of tempo and mood  – but the excitement nevertheless builds up impressively towards the movement’s “great moment”, the return of the opening theme on sweeping orchestral strings, the soloist reinforcing the music’s trajectories with a triumphal counter-melody.

The second movement opens enchantingly, strings, Trpčeski‘s piano and the winds taking turns to weave undulating patterns of finely-spun emotion, the music’s ebb and flow and brief irruption of energy easily and naturally brought into being.  After Petrenko’s terse opening to the finale the music expands with explosive energies towards climaxes, furious piano playing initiating steadily growing momentums which the strings-and-piano fugato gathers up and races towards the release of the big tune’s reappearance.The scherzando passage is galvanized by Trpčeski each time he joins the fray, culminating in a spectacular keyboard flourish and a grand and forthright final statement of the tune – glorious!

And so we come to what many people regard as the greatest of all Romantic piano concertos, the “knuckle-breaker”, as pianist Gary Graffmann used to describe it – otherwise known in the business as “Rack 3”. For a time the territory of only the boldest and most fearless of pianists (the likes of Horowitz, Janis, Gilels, Malcuzynski, Lympany and Van Cliburn, as well as New Zealand’s Richard Farrell – but, unaccountably, NOT Sviatoslav Richter), the general rise in technical piano-playing standards (though not in actual musicianship) has seen many more pianists than one could have ever imagined taking the piece on, with, alas, generally unmemorable results – given that the work still remains an enormous challenge, so that anybody who actually attempts the piece really deserves Brownie points for trying.

At first, Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s way with the music seems small-scale, their delivery of the opening episode emphasizing the first theme’s beauty while playing down its rhythmic undercurrents.  However, it’s part of the longer view – when the lower strings take up the tune, Trpčeski‘s increasingly insistent accompanying figurations awaken the music’s urgencies. And what a glorious sound Petrenko encourages from his strings, and how subtly both musicians build the music through the first appearance of the concerto’s most memorable melody, shared by the piano and the orchestra, in turn, to the grand, romantic sweep of the moment’s climax.

The central episode again relaxes the tension surrounding the opening tune’s reprise – those underlying energies are kept down by Petrenko, allowing chattering winds to interact with the pianist’s nervous utterances, and only encouraging the music’s pulses to beat with any edge and force when rising out of the ambient detail to match and contour the piano’s combatative intentions – impressive control, but lacking, I thought, that suggestion of abandonment which would have brought out the encounter’s sense of the participants risking all and plunging into the fray. Trpčeski chooses the heavier, more chordal of the two cadenzas Rachmaninov left, and builds up a splendidly majestic weight of tone and fury of purpose. Beautiful wind-playing answers the soloist’s near-exhausted ruminations, and my only real disappointment is that pianist and conductor don’t make something more “charged” of the “bells across the meadow” episode before the opening tune’s final reprise brings the movement to its expectant close.

At the slow movement’s beginning, I’m always reminded of my first recording of this concerto, Byron Janis’s with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony – still memorable for Janis’s coruscating pianism and for Munch’s fervent encouragement of his strings at this point in the work. Petrenko’s players sound just as committed, the dying fall as the strings awaken the piano one of the work’s most expressively full-blooded moments. Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s account of the dark waltz-like episode is poised and veiled, as though concealing feelings too candid to fully display, though the strings subsequently stress the underlying heartache just before the finale’s electrifying opening flourishes. Trpčeski is suitably volatile and impulsive, here, and the steady-ish pace adopted for the “galloping horse” motif allows the orchestral tutti more weight and cumulative force. I’ve heard the scherzando episode played more delicately and impishly by other pianists, but Trpčeski brings out its nocturnal aspect nicely, and the lead-in to the great moment of the first movement’s memorable second subject is as charged with emotion by the players as one would want – for me, a definite performance highlight.

Apart from what I thought sounded like a strangely “clipped” reprise of the orchestra’s “galloping horse” motive, the remainder of the concerto gets the utmost romantic treatment, with all the proverbial stops pulled out – Trpčeski‘s pianism has all the weight and brilliance required, and Petrenko draws from his players the full panoply of orchestral splendor, the sounds making handsome amends for those momentary “lean-and-hungry” equestrian impressions. In sum, though I didn’t find the music-making throughout these discs as consistently “electric” as I did in the concert-hall from this pianist and conductor, that’s as much a commentary on the nature of the “live-versus-recorded” music-listening experience. It’s one I’m glad to have had both ways with these truly splendid artists, here together playing such marvellous music.

A new element in the ‘Live in Cinemas’ phenomenon – orchestral concerts

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The following note has just been posted in the first part of our Coming Events schedule.

Both the BBC Proms and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra have this year entered the ‘Live in Cinemas’ market.

In New Zealand we got three of the Proms concert – the first and last nights, plus one from the middle of the season that featured Emanuel Ax playing Brahms’s Second Piano Concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitink – they also played Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

The Last Night of the Proms will screen from 6 October. Lang Lang will play the piano and Susan Bullock will sing; Edward Gardner conducts.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s series was of four concerts: the first, their ritual Europa Concert marking the orchestra’s founding in 1882. That took place this year in the Teatro Real (Royal Theatre) in Madrid, and included Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. The second, taken from the orchestra’s home in the Phiharmonie in Berlin, consisted of one work – Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde: with Anne Sophie von Otter and Jonas Kaufmann, conducted by Claudio Abbado.

The third to be screened, like the others, at the Penthouse in Brooklyn, on 17, 18 and 21 September, will be at the Waldbühne, the famous open air arena in forest 10 km or so west of the city. There Riccardo Chailly will conduct a lightish programme including Nino Rota’s film score, La Strada, and music by Respighi and Shostakovich.

The fourth concert will be under Japanese cnductor Yutaka Sado and includes performances of Takemitsu and of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony.

Over 60 cinemas across Europe are part of this historic live cinema event, courtesy of Rising Alternative.

Here is an excerpt from Musicweb International’s article about the Berlin Philharmonic’s venture in live transmissions in cinemas, and emergence of a phenomenon that could make a difference to the appreciation of classical music everywhere.

“…Digital cinema and satellite technology is providing cinema owners, distributors and the entertainment industry at large with new programming opportunities – the ability to show alternative content (non-movie entertainment). Cinemas are becoming vibrant entertainment centres, as well as movie houses.

“The technology is operated by Rising Alternative, a leading international distributor of special event entertainment into cinemas. Rising Alternative, based in New York, is a leading distributor/agent of special event entertainment (alternative content) for cinemas. Rising Alternative acquires, distributes and markets world-class live and pre-recorded cultural content, including opera, ballet and concerts to cinemas worldwide. The upcoming slate of events includes highly anticipated performances from La Scala, Milan; Berliner Philharmoniker; Wiener Philharmoniker, Vienna; the Salzburg Festival;  the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona;  Teatro Real, Madrid;  San Francisco Opera and the Munich Opera Festival. The company was created by Giovanni Cozzi, a co-founder of Emerging Pictures, the U.S. digital art house cinema network.”


Boris Pigovat’s Requiem – a stunning CD presentation

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REQUIEM

Works by BORIS PIGOVAT

– Requiem “The Holocaust” / Prayer for Violin and Piano / Silent Music for viola and harp / Nigun for String Quartet

Donald Maurice (viola)

Vector Wellington Orchestra / Marc Taddei

also with Richard Mapp (piano) / Carolyn Mills (harp) / Dominion String Quartet

Atoll ACD 114

This recording commemorates the first performance outside the Ukraine of Boris Pigovat’s Requiem, given by violist Donald Maurice, with the Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, on November 9th, 2008 at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington. The composer, whose grandparents and aunt were victims of the Babiy Yar tragedy in 1941, when thousands of German Jews were massacred in cold blood by the Nazis, had wanted for a number of years to write a work dedicated to the Holocaust, thinking originally of the standard Requiem format, with soloists, choir and orchestra. Then Yuri Gandelsman, the then principal violist of the Israel Philharmonic asked Pigovat to write a work for him, and the composer decided he would tackle a piece for viola and orchestra, writing in the style of a Requiem. He completed the work in 1995, but it wasn’t premiered until 2001, as Gandelsman, who intended to give the first performance, was prevented by circumstances from doing so. However, the situation was eventually resolved, most appropriately, by a concert planned in Kiev commemorating the Babiy Yar tragedy, to which Pigovat successfully offered his score for performance.

The composer regarded the cancellation of the original performances in Israel as “the will of Providence”, as it meant the work would be performed for the first time in Kiev, near the tomb of his family members who were killed at BabiyYar. Added poignancy was generated by the co-operation between the Israeli Cultural Attache in Kiev and the city’s Goethe Institute which resulted in the famous German violist, Rainer Moog, being asked to play the solo viola part. This concert took place in October 2001. Eight years later, the work was performed here in New Zealand at a “Concert of Remembrance” (commemorating the 70th anniversary of “Kristallnacht” – The Night of Broken Glass – a pogrom carried out against German and Austrian Jews in retaliation for the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young German/Polish Jew in November 1938). The concert featured, along with Pigovat’s work, a performance of Brahm’s German Requiem, and was sponsored by a number of groups, among which were the respective Embassies of the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel. As well, Boris Pigovat himself was able to attend the concert, thanks to the support of the Israeli Embassy.

Now, there’s a further chapter in what has become an ongoing story – this features the recent invitation made to violist Donald Maurice to give the work’s first-ever performance in Germany, on October 15th at the final gala concert of the International Viola Congress in Wuerzburg. The performance commemorates, in turn, the 70th anniversary of the Babiy Yar massacre, and will be given by Maurice with an orchestra from Duesseldorf.

However, before making this journey, Maurice will again perform the work on the actual day of the tragedy, September 29th, in the Wellington Town Hall with Kenneth Young and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra.  Also performing will be Israeli ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo, playing Bloch’s Schelomo. As well, John Psathas’s Luminous and Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka will give a New Zealand flavour to this commemorative program. I believe the concert is included under the umbrella of a “Rugby World Cup Event” – if so, one salutes the organizers’ enterprise!

Atoll Records deserves the heartfelt thanks of people like myself who weren’t able to attend that Wellington performance of the Requiem in 2008 for making the recording commercially available. It was at the time splendidly captured by Radio New Zealand’s David McCaw and his engineer Graham Kennedy – as one might expect, the music generated plenty of visceral impact, all of which comes across with startling force in Wayne Laird’s transfer to CD. It presents soloist Donald Maurice, with conductor Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra  working at what can only be described as white heat – the coruscations of parts of the Dies Irae movement are searing, to say the least – and the effects upon listeners in the hall must have been profoundly disturbing in their impact.

The Requiem has four movements, each of them given Latin subtitles, a ready context, despite their non-Jewish origins, for listeners accustomed to pieces which use similar kinds of headings for individual movements (works by Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and Faure for example) – the four movements are Requiem Aeternam, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa and Lux Eterna. Pigovat considered these parts the most suitable for his overall purpose in writing what he called “a tragic orchestral piece”. Despite his work being completely instrumental, some of the composer’s motifs and themes in the work are derived directly from the words of texts – for example, the first theme of the Dies Irae on trombones fits with the words of the first verse of this famous thirteenth-century Latin poem; while the Jewish Prayer, Shma Israel, Adonoi Elokeinu, Adonoi Ehad inspired a recurring theme in the work, first appearing in the epilogue of the Dies Irae, and in subsequent places, such as in the viola solo at the very end of the work.

The opening measures of Requiem Aeternam bring about vistas of space and eons of time, into the centre of which swirls an irruption of dark, threatening unease. But the solo viola takes up the chant-like line, by turns declamatory and meditative, its discourse supported by various orchestral motifs and atmospheric textures. Donald Maurice’s solo playing vividly captures the music’s gamut of supplicatory emotion, while Marc Taddei and the orchestra provide an accompaniment richly-mixed with ambiences of faith and trust, doubt and fear. From Ligeti-like string-clusters come sudden intrusions of light and energy, menacing, gutteral-throated strings and ghoulish figures on what sounds like a bass clarinet. Deep, seismic percussion ignites an outburst that galvanizes the whole orchestra, and brings the solo viola into conflict with forces of darkness. A portentous, doom-laden motif rises in the orchestra, challenged further by the viola, which is soon overwhelmed by a rising tide of pitiless-sounding, all-enveloping brutality, reinforced by crushing hammer-blows. Stoically, the viola remains steadfast, giving vent to its anguish, but still raising its voice to heaven at the close.

There are some famously apocalyptic settings by composers of the “Dies Irae” poem, and Pigovat, though not employing the actual words, certainly aligns himself with the movers and shakers of heaven and earth, such as Berlioz and Verdi. Slashing string lines introduce the “Dies Irae” movement, leading to orchestral outpourings whose force and vehemence will, later in the movement, readily suggest the imagery suggested by the term “holocaust”. After the initial maelstrom abates, the solo viola attempts to plead with the forces of darkness, but is repeatedly beaten down, its desperate energies to no avail. Pigovat was strongly influenced by a novel Life and Destiny by the Russian-Jewish writer Vasiliy Grossman, containing passages describing Jews’ last train journey from imprisonment to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Some of Shostakovich’s more harrowing motoric orchestral sequences come to mind in places, over the top of which the brass shout cruel repetitive utterances. Out of a searing, incandescent chord-cluster thrusts a beating rhythm, the composer suggesting the pulsing of a great number of human hearts, a rhythm which loses strength and dies.

Harsh, strident bells sound the beginning of Lacrimosa, the viola sharing in the pain and horror of what has just been experienced. The composer notes, most appositely, that “It is possible to shout with strong anger, or to groan powerlessly, or to go mad, and only then appear tears……” and Maurice’s virtuosic playing at this point conveys all of these feelings and more besides. A timpani-led processional begins the process of ritualizing the grief, somewhat, but underlines the bleak nihilism of the scenario, reinforced by a doom-laden tam-tam stroke. Then the orchestral strings offer consolation amid the despair, horns as well paying tribute to those destroyed as well as acknowledging those left behind. As the music slips without a break into the Lux Eterna, lights softly begin to glow amid the sound-textures, and there’s an almost lullabyic feel to the music’s trajectories.The viola speaks again, its voice dark-toned and grief-tainted, but calling for a renewal of faith in the human spirit, and a rekindling of hope for the future. The instrument re-establishes connections and interactions with various orchestral voices, their tones no longer expressing fear, hate, and cruelty, but intertwining with the soloist’s voice in search of a better, more understanding place for everybody in the world (the final exchanges between viola and dark-browed brass and percussion speak volumes, as the work closes).

The three pieces accompanying the Requiem on this disc all have connections or commonalities of some kind with the major work. The first, Prayer, for viola and piano, probably has the closest relationship with Requiem, as it was written when the composer had finished the latter’s Lacrimosa and was preparing materials for the fourth part, Lux Eterna. The music thus breathes much the same air as does the Requiem, with one of its themes actually used in the Shma Israel section of Lux Eterna. Donald Maurice again plays the viola, and, together with pianist Richard Mapp, gives an extraordinarily intense reading of the work. Its opening measures are meditative and hypnotic, the piano resembling a tolling bell at the outset, beneath the viola’s quiet song of lament. From the darkest depths of their interaction spring impulses of lyrical flow, gentle and undulating at first, then more impassioned, Maurice’s bow biting into his strings and Mapp’s monumental chords imparting an epic quality to the mood of grief and suffering. The undulations return, their tones gradually dissolving into mists of quiet resignation and fortitude – altogether, a beautiful and moving work.

Silent Music is scored for viola and harp, a felicitous combination of complementary tones and timbres, one I’d never before imagined. Written in 1997, after the Requiem, the piece commemorates the practice in Israel of people lighting candles for burning at places where there have been fatal terrorist attacks, one such occasioning this piece. The music’s beauty almost belies the composer’s sombre intent, though towards the end of the piece some repeated agglomerations of notes on Carolyn Mills’s harp grow through a disturbing crescendo towards a moment of intense pain, whose feeling resonates throughout the concluding silences.

Intensities of a different order are unashamedly displayed throughout the final work on the CD, Nigun, for String Quartet, though the piece finished far more quickly than I expected, due presumably to an error of timing recorded with the track listings (instead of a nine-minute work, the music came to an end, a tad abruptly, at 5’00”.  Boris Pigovat originally wrote this work for string orchestra, the string quartet version appearing for the first time on this CD. The composer’s intention was “to give expression to the tragic spirit which I feel in traditional Jewish music”. It’s certainly not a happy work, being, in psychological terms, assailed by anxieties at an early stage in its progress, the composer using the quartet’s antiphonal voicings to create a kind of overlying effect, as textures pile on top of, or slide beneath, other textures. Figurations and tempi intensify as the piece proceeds, the Dominion Quartet’s players “blocking” their sounds together for some marvellously massive-sounding chords, before continuing what feels like a fraught interaction, mercifully worked-out in the time-honored manner, but leaving one or two sostenuto voices to gradually expel their last reserves of breath and melt their tones into the stillness of the ending.

Not only does this recording deserve to be heard and savored, but the oncoming Town Hall concert (September 29th – see above) featuring the Requiem, should be an entry on everybody’s calendar. If something of the spirit of this recording can be replicated (albeit with a different orchestra and conductor) the occasion will be stunning, unmissably spectacular.

On The Transmigration Of Souls – 9/11 Commemoration by John Adams presented by the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Vector Wellington Orchestra’s John Adams 9/11 Commemoration

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.5 in C Minor

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.25 in C Major

ADAMS – On the Transmigration of Souls

Orpheus Choir, Wellington / Choristers of the Cathedral of St.Paul, Wellington / Wellington Girls’ College Teal Voices

Diedre Irons (piano)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday September 11th, 2011

Review adapted – not a transcript – from a radio review for Radio New Zealand Concert’s”Upbeat”, with Eva Radich)

It was unusual for the Wellington Orchestra to be performing  on a Sunday afternoon.

The 9/11 date gives a clue – and in fact it’s ten years to this very day since New York’s World Trade Centre was attacked and destroyed by two hi-jacked terrorist-controlled aircraft. American composer John Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write a piece to be performed on the first anniversary of the attack, in 2002. This performance was the New Zealand premiere of this work, which won for its composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003, and for the premiere recording in 2005 various Grammy Awards.

The orchestra usually performs in the Town Hall – but here they were in the Michael Fowler Centre on this occasion.

Acoustically, the Town Hall would have been great for the John Adams work – the music was gradually built up with many different textural strands that would have responded even more powerfully to a full, immediate and  reverberant ambience, the kind of things that performers have to work harder to get in the MFC. But there were advantages gained from performing in the bigger venue, most obviously a bigger audience, and more space in which to place the various choirs that the work requires. Having said this in comparing the two venues, I have to say that I thought the sounds were beautifully managed all the way through – the taped sounds of city activity and the various voices reading the names of people who died in the attack and written tributes to them that were displayed in various places afterwards all came across with plenty of clarity and atmosphere, as did the heartfelt efforts of the different choirs and the power and beauty of the orchestral playing.

It must have been a pretty daunting commission for any composer, to commemorate such an earth-shattering event.

John Adams himself admitted to feeling, at first, a bit overawed by the range and scope of it all – he was quoted as saying “I had great difficulty imagining anything commemorating 9/11 that would not be an embarrassment” –  but then he reckoned that any composer that was worth his salt wouldn’t shrink away from confronting something “profoundly intense” and conveying its essence by whatever means. Adams felt that this event had been so well documented and its images spread so widely, that his job as a composer wasn’t what he called “an exposition of the material” – he had no desire whatever to create any kind of narrative or description. Instead his intention was to create in sound a kind of “memory space” for human reflection, absolutely free from any statement about religion, patriotism or politics. Adams likened to the concept the feeling one gets when one visits an enormous cathedral – he cited the experience of going to Chartres Cathedral in France, saying that “you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot.”

So, how did he do it? – how did the piece begin and develop and make its impact?

Adams decided he would dispense with the usual texts composers used for commemorative works, poetry, liturgy or Scripture. Instead he decided to use words that had been scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by people searching for their missing loved ones. In this way the focus would be on the people who were left behind, on their expressions of hope mixed with gradual acceptance of the reality of loss. He began the piece with prerecorded tape sounds of a city, of people going about their everyday business, pedestrians and traffic noises. Then a voice begins repeating the word “missing” over and over, followed by the introduction of names of the dead. The choirs begin to sing, like angels singing halos of tones, the orchestra strings play soft tremolandos, the percussion begins to softly scintillate, the choirs repeat words with growing intensity, like a great tower or archway gradually lighting up all over. A solo trumpet (very American) reminiscent of Charles Ives and of Gershwin, paying homage to a kind of cultural history, suggests an on-going presence of the spirit, as the choirs continue their chanting (Orpheus Choir) and sustained tones (Choristers’ Choir) accompanied by woodwinds playing Straussian Rosenkavalier-like chords. The music grows and changes textures by osmosis, as different instruments add their timbres and colours, brasses introducing a deep,sombre aspect, the overall sounds gathering girth and variety. The heavy brasses, trombone and tubas, play the most sepulchral notes imaginable and the tape voice repeats the word “missing”, everything growing in intensity and focus until the orchestra, like some leviathan awakening, opens up its heavy batteries with brazen bell sounds, expressing anger, war, disaster and danger, before subsiding into an uneasy calm, with only the children’s voices repeating the messages of grief at first, then gradually joined by the adult choir, the voices like waves of sound, reinforced by the orchestra, canonic flurries from the strings, irruptions from brass and percussion expending tremendous energy. The choir repeats the word “Light” as the taped voices return repeating more names of the dead and the phrase “I see water and buildings” (which were the last words spoken by a flight attendant on her cell-phone) repeated, as the intensities narrow down to a few simple phrases, repeated by the taped voices, such as “my brother’, “my son” and “I love you”. And with these sounds the music gradually fades and dies.

What was the reaction of the audience at the end?

Certainly very respectful, enthusiastic, but at the same time, thoughtful, applause – obviously the “Mr Bravos” of the concert-going world weren’t going to have the chance to exercise their lungs at the end of this piece. I think the audience’s reaction was tempered by the solemnity of it all, and rightly so.

What was the effect of the piece on you? How much power did the piece have to move your emotions?

For me, the most moving section of the work was the last, reflective episode following the final altogether irruptions of sound and energy, impressive though the impact of these was. I found that, in a sense, the composer was requiring of me to “accumulate” emotion over the course of the piece, so that I felt the lump in my throat coming up when I heard the words at the end “My brother”, “my son”, and “I love you”. It’s interesting that, when I was listening to the first five minutes of the work on you-tube on the computer earlier in the day, I felt the emotion well up then, very palpably – but I think that was because the video clip I was watching contained images of the events of the tragedy, the buildings on fire, the rescue workers standing amid the rubble, the onlookers distraught, the people jumping to their deaths, the simply-written poster-messages – somehow the visual imagery worked with the music to activate my emotions far more overtly, which I didn’t experience during the actual performance in any way until those last few minutes.  And I think, as I said, that this accumulated effect was what the composer had planned, that in the end it was the simplicity of utterance of these ordinary people who had been bereaved that was so extraordinarily moving.

This work was placed last on the program – did you think that was a good idea?

Yes, I think one was able to carry out of the concert hall an abiding impression of the commemoration of the day, because of hearing the Adams work last. Of course, to then have played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wouldn’t have actually “spoiled” the Adams piece – but it would’ve lessened its raw impact on the audience, going into the aftermath of the concert. It was a contemplative, rather than an earth-shattering piece, the realization of which the composer made quite clear was his intention all along.

Perhaps it would have upstaged anything that followed it?

Actually, no – I don’t think so – and again, I think the composer intended it to be that way. Hearing the piece was for me like connecting with some kind of collective human energy for a short while, and feeling a commonality of spirit and of impulse that was comforting in its way. I think it was a boldly-conceived and sensitively-constructed work. I wondered whether some simple visual production techniques, such as appropriately ambient lighting, might have enhanced the work’s overall impact.In one or two places I did imagine that something visual could have been brought into play with no violence done to the composer’s intentions. But there again, it was obvious Adams intended nothing more than a sound-picture, and for those sounds alone to have a cumulative effect upon his audiences.

So, what about the other two items? – were they put in the shade by the Adams work?

For me, not at all – and partly because it was very much a concert of two halves, with each creating its own unique world of feeling. The first half was absolutely splendid in a completely different way, featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (arguably the most famous of all symphonies in the classical literature) and a lesser-known, but still imposing work, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25, with Diedre Irons as the soloist. I was speaking with one of the ushers whom I know, during the interval, and who told me that the first concertgoer who came out of the auditorium a few minutes before had said to her, “World class – absolutely world class!” So, people were obviously impressed by what they were hearing.

Do you think it would be difficult for any conductor and orchestra to tackle something as well-known as Beethoven’s Fifth, something that almost everybody would have heard, and with so many great performances available on recordings? I would think it would be quite daunting a prospect.

I think you’re right about that – and in the face of such circumstances, the only way to tackle such a work is to do exactly what Marc Taddei and the orchestra did – which was to play the music almost as though they’d never heard anybody else’s performance, and instead make it their own. Interestingly, I reckoned it was only the second performance of the work I’d ever heard “live” – of course I’ve heard countless versions on record – but in the concert-hall the music’s still a relatively new experience for me, so I was really looking forward to hearing the work. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Under Marc Taddei’s direction the orchestral sounds blazed forth, all departments covering themselves with glory. One of the things that thrilled me was, despite this being the Michael Fowler Centre, and not the Wellington Orchestra’s usual home, the Town Hall, the playing had enough energy and tonal weight to fill the auditorium’s spaces and get across the music’s heroic qualities with plenty of gusto. Particularly successful in this respect was the first movement – great attack, right from the outset, with urgent, rather than monumental tempi, but with the rhythms given plenty of chunky, energetic emphasis. The strings were excellent, but the support from the brass and winds and timpani was also spot-on. Other highlights – one of them in this performance for me was the way Marc Taddei challenged his string players in the scherzo to keep the tempo steady for the rushing string figurations – you remember the lower strings come in first, followed gradually by other, higher voices. The skin and hair was flying as these players bent their backs to the task and kept the momentum of the music going – absolutely thrilling! Another great moment was in the finale when Taddei brought the players in for the repeat, at which point the playing seemed to leap forward all the more eagerly and propulsively.

I did think, in one or two places that the famous “motto” theme needed a touch more rhetoric, a bit more underlining, such as for its very last, grand, first movement statement – after all, it is an intensely dramatic as well as a structural motif. More serious, for me, was the nonappearance of the goblins in the third movement, where Taddei got his strings to play so quietly their pizzicati could hardly be heard against the winds – in fact at one point I thought they’d lost their way and stopped playing, so hushed were their sounds.

And who are these goblins, you might well ask? – Well, in Chapter Five of E.M.Forster’s novel Howard’s End there’s a wonderful description of the Symphony’s third movement, made by Helen, one of the novel’s characters – “….the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures – it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world…..Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push and they began to walk in a major key instead of a minor – and then he blew with his mouth and they were scattered……..The goblins really had been there. They might return–and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things….” Alas, the pizzicati were so quiet, and the tempi so swift, we couldn’t really register the goblins’ footfalls and their uncanny progress, or feel their ominous presence. And when Beethoven briefly returned to the scherzo just before the reprise of the finale’s triumphal theme, Taddei’s tempi were so quick there was no time for goblins and their ominous footfalls whatsoever!

If you hadn’t read “Howard’s End”, what would you have thought of the performance overall?

Oh, absolutely splendid (though with a touch more drama and rhetoric required for the “Fate” theme) – but you’ll appreciate that there are some episodes in one’s favorite music that have got to be done “just so”, otherwise they don’t work as well as they ought to. This is all terribly subjective, I’m sure you must be thinking!

Tell me about the Mozart concerto with Diedre Irons.

This,alas,was the last in the series of Mozart concertos played by Diedre Irons with the orchestra – such a pity that we’re not going to go as far as the last one of all, which I would love to hear her play. Still, this one, No.25 in C major, was suitably grand and ceremonial, as befits its key, and also a counterweight to the C Minor of the Beethoven Symphony that we heard. This is a big-boned concerto, with occasional touches of the exotic – trumpets and drums speaking with what I thought was a Turkish accent during the second subject group.

After these very grand, ritualistic beginnings the soloist’s first entry is, by contrast, somewhat rhapsodic, making us “stop and listen” – Diedre Irons’s playing has such character, such purpose, so that with each phrase we experience delight in the moment and satisfaction with the whole. I liked her piano sound – it seemed to my ears a more characterful, brighter and more sharply-focused sound she was getting, compared with the instrument in the Town Hall, enabling her to do more with the music.

Has it been a good combination, Diedre Irons with Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra?

I thought this concerto in particular interestingly set the music-making styles of two different musicians together in a very interesting and creative partnership – Diedre Irons’s playing detailed and momentous, able to expand the phrases for expressive effect while maintaining the music’s larger momentum, compared with Marc Taddei’s energetic, somewhat “driven” style, given to tauter inclinations, marshalling his rhythms and driving the lyrical lines. Here, those differences worked well upon one another, and helped to bring out the concerto’s variety of mood and colour, to the extent that, if one didn’t know the music well, one wasn’t sure what was going to happen next (Mozart at his most inventive).

I believe that the first movement cadenza was the work of none other than Kenneth Young, which I didn’t know until after the performance, thinking at the time that it was a wonderful window into a composer’s soul, exploring the music’s fundamental materials in different lights and from varied angles (no cadenzas by Mozart for this work have survived). The slow movement was one of Mozart’s “operatic” realizations – it seemed that the winds’ tender descending phrase had taken us to the world of “Le Nozze di Figaro”, to the Count’s garden in the fourth act, with beautiful al fresco horns alerting us to the wonders of the evening air. Despite a few momentary spills – one or two horn blurps, and, elsewhere, some pianistic sunspots (in somewhat ruminative passages) – Irons and the orchestral winds enjoyed some delicious dialogues throughout, particularly lovely in effect towards the movement’s end. The finale’s chirpy, but somewhat plain-sounding theme, gets a good going-over when triplets turn the tune into exciting rhythmic swirling and tumblings, and later there a lovely dovetailing of pianistic triplets against long string lines as part of the rich variation Mozart brings to the music – undoubtedly some of his most inventive and colourful for piano and orchestra. Soloist, conductor and players despatched it all with the utmost élan and enjoyment, for our enormous pleasure.

NZSO NYO 2011 – “Tomorrow’s Sounds” already heart-warming strains

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2011

James Judd (conductor)

with Cameron Carpenter (organ)

ALEXANDRA HAY – An Atlas of Unfixed Stars

SAMUEL BARBER – Toccata Festiva Op.3

SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Symphony No.2 in E Minor Op.27

Wellington Town Hall Friday  August 2nd

Auckland Town Hall Saturday August 3rd

Watching those beautiful, youthful faces totally engrossed in and engaged by the music-making throughout the 2011 NZSO National Youth Orchestra’s Wellington concert on Friday evening, I found myself briefly imagining I had become a camera, and was able to capture for posterity those precious images of  “golden lads and girls” revelling in an evening’s unique moment in time. I suspect that it was all enhanced by the venue – Wellington’s Town Hall has for orchestral concerts a natural immediacy of interaction between the players and their audience, but on this occasion the lines of communication between the groups hummed and buzzed to saturation-point excitement! However inspirational I’ve found previous National Youth Orchestra concerts held in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre to have been, I don’t recall a more thrilling, involving and interactive bevy of performances than those we were given by these almost scarily talented youngsters under the direction of their inspirational maestro James Judd.

The concert as a whole was, I thought, a somewhat quirky affair in places, with the showcasing of the youthful orchestra’s corporate and individual talents unaccountably diluted by the antics of the guest soloist, virtuoso American organist Cameron Carpenter. True, his playing of the solo organ part in Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva was jaw-dropping in its virtuosity, especially the pedal-only cadenza towards the end of the work. But (perhaps curmudgeonly) I felt other aspects of his contribution to the concert were too self-vehicular in this context – they took the focus away from what I was given to understand the concert was supposed to be celebrating, the coming-together of the country’s finest young musicians to demonstrate THEIR performance skills. To be fair to Carpenter, an impressive performer as such, this may well have been what the people who decide these things at the NZSO wanted – post-Jeremy Wells and his unfortunate TV doco, it seems the attraction of flash over substance is still hanging around and about the orchestral management’s door.

It was the encore item that for me was the rub – to have Carpenter and his colourfully entertaining irruption of performer-pizzaz in the context of a larger group’s activities was one thing, but to then allow him a substantial encore slot which seemed merely to draw attention to the player and his instrument seemed somewhat off-centre. What I would have enjoyed was for Carpenter to have prepared something that had involved the orchestra or a group of players – but, unaccountably, his solo performance meant that the focus was on him and his instrument to the exclusion of the young musicians. Yes, he did acknowledge (in a brief but eloquent post-performance speech) that his work with the group for the concert had been a real “buzz” for him – and maybe, unlike myself and one or two people I spoke with at the interval, the young musicians felt no such qualms over his activities in the concert.

I found it ironic, therefore, that the encore itself was such a hit-and-miss realization of the music. This seemed a pity, in light of Carpenter’s avowed respect for Franz Liszt as a composer,  which his spoken introduction to the work made clear. His transcription for the organ of the work in question, Funerailles, from the set of “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for solo piano, did the music few favours, the instrument simply unable to command the coloristic resonances that give the original composition its striking power in both the opening slow and rapid concluding march sections. Carpenter’s realization did bring out the lyricism of the piece’s central section, especially the consoling major-key episode – even if, in places, the chirpy staccato tones reminded me of Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” – but with the onset of the bigger, more resonant chordings an unfortunate stuttering staccato was the result, with the lack of pianistic nuance and colour giving the themes a blatancy avoided by the original. More weight in the bass did help the player bring off the last couple of pages with a real hiss and a roar, again courting vulgarity (a common criticism of the composer’s music per se, but in this case, I feel, quite undeserved).

But back to the concert proper (protesteth this reviewer too much?) – which began with a work by the orchestra’s 2011 composer-in-residence, Alexandra Hay. With a biographical note about the composer in the program came the following sentence: “Her work often explores processes of gradual transformation: the unfolding of figures, timbres and resonances that converge and disperse.” And thus it was with Hay’s work, here – An Atlas of Unfixed Stars. Pointillistic notes, near-notes and sounds began for us what seemed like a journey through realms of ever-growing awareness, the notes becoming oscillations, the near-notes forming clusters and the sounds ringing the changes through breathings, scrapings and fidgettings. And so the aural detail continued its agglomerations, catching all of us up in spaces beneath “that inverted bowl we call the sky” watching with our ears the stars and their adjoining empty vistas, and gradually “discerning” the celestial details and their different characteristics more clearly – their oscillations, their intensities, and in a few cases their actual movements. The music intensified the hues, textures and incidences, so that we listeners/watchers were increasingly caught up in the display, our involvement adding an extra dimension to the spatial elements of the sounds, the immediacy for us of some figures and resonances set against the relative distancing of others. I found myself a captive listener/spectator at an early stage of the piece, admiring the composer’s adroit handling of detail within an extended structure, and the youthful players’ confident-sounding realization of it all.

Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva was new to me, but readily made an impact with rousing orchestral textures and energetic rhythms, the players revelling in the instrumental writing – in fact I thought the marvellously virile opening had more than a touch of the cinema about it, as if it were the on-screen prelude to a filmed Greek or Roman tragedy. In almost no time at all the organ trumpeted spectacularly in soon afterwards, anxious not to be overshadowed, the playing almost maniacally virtuosic. A long, lyrical theme, divided up by the soloist as well as sections of the orchestra added to the music’s variety, which incorporated a kind of struggle for dominance between the different characters, resolved by the organ’s amazing pedals-only cadenza (the soloist hanging onto the organ stool with both hands for dear life while pumping his legs like a stage-winner in the Tour de France, creating an overwhelming sonic effect). The cynic might well quote Shakespeare’s “full of sound and fury – signifying nothing” in response to the work, but I enjoyed its spectacular peregrinations enormously.

An interval’s grace allowed us to catch our collective breath in preparation for hearing one of Rachmaninov’s biggest and grandest works, the Second Symphony in E Minor. Over the years belittled by “fashion-conscious” detractors of the music, and until comparatively recently performed with grievous cuts sanctioned by the chronically self-critical composer, the work’s stature was here suitably and convincingly vindicated, given complete and with the utmost conviction and intensity by conductor and players.

Had Rachmaninov’s First Symphony not been so systematically savaged by its critics at the work’s premiere, the composer’s subsequent works may well have explored even more adventurous and individual pathways – hypotheses such as this are, of course, the absorbing and unanswered might-have-beens of musical history. Though he destroyed the earlier score (it was eventually retrieved via a set of the orchestral parts, after the composer’s death), Rachmaninov (perhaps subconsciously) acknowledged and ratified the youthful work by calling the new symphony his “No.2”. It has all the recognized Rachmaninovian hallmarks – lyricism, melancholy, ceremony, brilliance and drama – and the restoration of all the cuts gives the work an epic feeling, in places ritualistic, in others intensely ruminative. Schumann’s description of Schubert’s “heavenly length” in the latter’s “Great” C Major Symphony for me applies as well here to Rachmaninov’s work of seemingly endless melody.

The young players gave the work exactly what it needed to succeed, truckloads of energy and passionate commitment, put across with astonishing executant skills. No quarter was given, no allowance made for the group’s relative inexperience or brevity of rehearsal time – James Judd directed his young charges with intensity and drive that surprised and delighted me, as I’d occasionally found his conducting too “fussy” and lightweight during his tenure with the NZSO. Naturally, there were places where ensemble didn’t quite come together; and I thought the players distinctly ran out of a bit of “puff” in the finale until their second wind kicked in towards the end. But there was no doubting the musicians’ commitment to the task, both individually and corporately – and as a result, the music’s full stature was triumphantly realized.

In particular, the string playing – crucial to this work’s success – was the stuff of dreams, by turns richly-wrought and finely nuanced, with the occasional stylish portamento giving the heartstrings an extra tug. In circumstances such as these, the different strands weren’t over-moulded, to the music’s advantage, I thought, the characteristic instrumental timbres allowed their particular accents and colours, which brought out the earthy Russian-ness of the sound more markedly. The winds had much the same attractive individual piquancies, with the clarinettist a confident and sensitive soloist in the third movement (an elongated beat at one point scarcely interrupting the flow). The brasses had tricky syncopations to content with in places, but they registered many more thrills than spills, and were there in glorious array for the big moments, as were the percussion, enjoying their more delicate scintillations and ripping into the big moments with gusto (I noticed a nearby audience member, startled by the timpanist’s precipitate entry at one point, was ready for the next onslaught when it came – no circumspection or half-measures here, but instead, a very exciting and appropriately full-blooded sound.

It adds up to yet another successful and heart-warming occasion generated by efforts of the NZSO in helping to proclaim the skills of our young musicians – and (briefly returning to my opening theme) how wonderful it would be to have some of that youthful beauty of concentration, engagement and sheer joy in music-making caught on film – the “golden lads and girls” of our own musical world, indeed!

Wellington Orchestra’s funding secure through 2013

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

On 15 December 2010 we published an article about the Arts Council of New Zealand (Creative New Zealand)’s proposals to introduce changes to the criteria and the pattern of ‘multi-year’ funding provided to arts organizations.

On 1 September the council announced the results of its review and the consequent funding decisions.

For Wellington, the most critical matter was how the Vector Wellington Orchestra fared.

Happily, through what we gather were some pretty intense negotiating sessions, the orchestra’s funding has been left untouched for 2012 and 2013, at $365.000 per annum, the same as at present. The council has also agreed to a review of the entire orchestral sector to be carried out by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, perhaps with the involvement of an overseas expert.

Here is the introductory part of the Council’s press release:

Creative New Zealand has committed funding through two new complementary programmes as it implements a major overhaul of its multi-year funding for the arts.

The funding was made by the Arts Board and Te Waka Toi as the new programmes replace the previous Recurrent Funding, Arts Investment, and Sector Investment programmes.

Over the next three years more than $50 million will be invested in 72 arts organisations, ranging from the Auckland Theatre Company to Dunedin’s Blue Oyster Gallery.  In 2012, overall investment in the same organisations will increase by approximately $2 million to $22 million, up from $19.7 million in 2011.

“The majority of funding will be delivered through long term contracts that will give arts organisations security to plan for the future.  These forward looking investments give confidence that pivotal art organisations are well placed to respond to contemporary New Zealand,” said Creative New Zealand Chief Executive Stephen Wainwright.

“Investment in Māori and Pacific arts organisations has increased by 20 percent.  This will enable organisations like Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, Tawata Productions and Toi Māori Aotearoa to delight growing audiences for Māori and Pacific work.”

Creative New Zealand is also broadening access to the arts with funding for Arts Access Aotearoa which works to improve access to arts for all New Zealanders, including people with disabilities.  For the first time multi-year funding is also being provided to Touch Compass, a contemporary dance company that combines dancers with and without disabilities; and Massive Theatre Company which produces work from the stories of Aucklanders in their teens and early twenties.

“We’re also pleased to support the new New Zealand Dance Advancement Trust which is being funded over two years to deliver a programme of contemporary dance so New Zealanders can see work by some of the country’s best dancers and choreographers.

“In addition to supporting new and emerging arts organisations, Creative New Zealand is also funding those which have a strong record of arts delivery and are key to the arts in this country.  The majority of our investment continues to be in the critical network of theatres, contemporary art galleries, orchestras, service organisations, festivals, publishers and chamber music organisations throughout the country,” he said.

Creative New Zealand is offering $500,000 a year in incentive funding for initiatives where organisations are working together, for example to develop and present new New Zealand work or to provide internships for emerging artists and arts practitioners.

The schedule of grants

(the amounts are totals over, variously, one, two or three years and must thus be adjusted to see the annual figures)

Dance and performing arts

Toi Tōtara Haemata: All funding is for 2012-2014, unless noted otherwise.
Black Grace, $1.62 million;
DANZ Dance Aotearoa New Zealand, $973,500;
Touch Compass, $666,000, 2012-2013

Toi Uru Kahikatea: All funding is for 2012-2013, unless noted otherwise

Atamira Dance Collective Charitable Trust, $665,000;
Footnote Dance Company, $740,000;
Kahurangi New Zealand Māori Dance Trust, $599,280;
New Zealand Dance Advancement Trust $1 million;
Okareka Dance Company Limited, $200,000, 2012;
Pacific Dance New Zealand, $100,000, 2012;
Touch Compass, $25,000 (bridging until end of 2011)

Literature

Toi Tōtara Haemata:
New Zealand Book Council, $512,000, 2012-2013

Toi Uru Kahikatea: All funding is for 2012, unless noted otherwise
Auckland University Press, $47,000;
Auckland Writers and Readers Festival Charitable Trust,$88,339;
Bridget Williams Books Ltd, 23,000;
Michael King Writers Studio Trust, $69,000;
New Zealand Society of Authors, $66,385;
Penguin Group NZ, $17,500;
Random House NZ Limited, $36,000;
University of Otago College of Education, $18,428, 2013;
Victoria University Press, $26,000

Multi-artform

All funding is for 2012-2013, unless noted otherwise

Toi Tōtara Haemata: Arts Access Aotearoa, $558,000;
Auckland Festival Trust, $700,000;
New Zealand International Arts Festival, $1.551 million, 2012-2014;
Toi Māori Aotearoa, $1.5525 million

Toi Uru Kahikatea: All funding is for 2012-2013, unless noted otherwise
Arts on Tour NZ Trust, $434,000;
Dunedin Fringe Arts Trust, $25,000, 2012;
Otago Festival of the Arts, $90,000;
Southern Lakes Arts Festival Trust, $96,000

Music

Toi Tōtara Haemata: All funding is for 2012-2014, unless noted otherwise.
Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, $4.2 million, 2012-2013;
Chamber Music New Zealand, $2.304 million;
NBR New Zealand Opera,  $7.425 million;
New Zealand String Quartet,  $780,000

Toi Uru Kahikatea: All funding is for 2012-2013, unless noted otherwise
Audio Foundation, $ 103,600, 2012;
Centre for New Zealand Music (SOUNZ), $172,500, 2012;
Choirs Aotearoa New Zealand, $520,000;
Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, $1.5 million;
New Zealand Choral Federation, $300,000;
New Zealand Trio Foundation, $280,000;
Southern Sinfonia, $630,000;
Strike Percussion, $89,500, 2012;
Vector Wellington Orchestra, $730,000

Theatre

Toi Tōtara Haemata: All funding is for 2012-2014, unless noted otherwise
Auckland Theatre Company, $2.79 million;
BATS Theatre, $885,000;
Capital E, $810,000, 2012-2013;
Centrepoint Theatre, $1.37 million;
Massive Company, $410,000, 2012-2013;
Playmarket, $996,000;
Taki Rua Productions, $1.26 million;
The Court Theatre, $1.784 million, 2012-2013

Toi Uru Kahikatea: All funding is for the period 2012-2013, unless noted otherwise
Circa + TACT, $1.186 million;
Downstage Theatre Trust, $650,000;
Fortune Theatre, $900,000;
Indian Ink Theatre Company, $206,992, 2012;
PROMPT Incorporated, $67,494;
Red Leap Charitable Trust, $178,927, 2012;
Silo Theatre Trust, 320,000, 2012;
Tawata Productions, $386,280;
The Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ, $100,000;
Young and Hungry Arts Trust, $172,500

Wider Visual Arts including craft/object, media arts and Inter-arts

Toi Tōtara Haemata: All funding is for 2012-2014, unless noted otherwise.
Artspace Aotearoa, $918,000;
Objectspace, $801,000;
Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, $574,000, 2012-2013;
The Physics Room, $750,000

Toi Uru Kahikatea: All funding is for 2012-2013, unless noted otherwise
Art and Industry Biennial Trust, $217,990;
Artists Alliance, $89,920, 2012;
Asia New Zealand Foundation, $32,250;
Blue Oyster Arts Trust, $95,855, 2012;
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, $164,615;
Enjoy Public Art Gallery, $86,990, 2012;
eyeCONTACT, $50,000, 2012;
Intercreate Trust, $50,000, 2012;
McCahon House Trust, $54,000;
The Big Idea – Te Aria Nui Charitable Trust, $60,000

Comments by Wellington grant recipients

Wellington Orchestra

Vector Wellington Orchestra has escaped a threatened funding cut that would have trimmed more than $200,000 from its annual budget and reduced it to community orchestra status.

Creative New Zealand announced yesterday that the orchestra would continue to receive its current level of funding for the next two years.

The decision comes at the end of a review of arts sector funding initiated by Creative New Zealand in 2010.

The VWO raised questions about the review process amid concern that its major funding body was aiming for a predetermined result.

“If the cut had gone ahead there would have been devastating effects on the Wellington arts sector, and the orchestral sector in New Zealand”, said VWO General Manager Diana Marsh. “Besides presenting our own concerts, other Wellington arts bodies rely on us to provide a professional orchestra for opera, ballet and choir performances in Wellington,” Marsh says.

“This is a great win. Wellington got in behind the orchestra in a big way, and we are now in a stronger position for the future.”

There will be a review of the entire orchestral sector next year, but it will be carried out by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

VWO board chair, Alick Shaw said “We proposed this review to CNZ in our first meeting after they announced the new funding arrangements. It took far too long for them to accept that this type of investigation was needed and we all endured a year of needless conflict and compromised relationships within the sector. That should never have happened.

“This review is the critical element of our agreement with CNZ, not just for the VWO but for all of the regional orchestras as it secured our funding in the interim. Most importantly we will all be consulted in developing terms of reference and membership of the panel. This will ensure an open process and an informed outcome.

“Everyone should understand that our board and management did not over-react. The fight back was crucial in securing our future. Our continued funding has resulted from an agreement between the VWO and CNZ, not just a change of heart. We are grateful to all our members and friends for their support”.


Downstage acknowledges the result

Downstage Theatre Trust is pleased to have been offered on-going funding by Creative New Zealand (CNZ) as part of CNZ’s Arts Development Investment (Toi Uru Kahikatea) Programme.

CNZ is offering an increase in our funding and a return to a multi-year commitment. This is an endorsement of the significant operational changes we have undertaken since 2008, and the commitment shown by our core supporters. In that time Downstage has moved from a traditional producing company to a collaborative presenting partner, working with New Zealand’s talented independent theatre sector to bring high-quality New Zealand theatre to Wellington and national audiences. We aim to support the professional growth of local theatre practitioners through a commitment to providing paid employment, supporting audience development, and underwriting the financial risk involved in presenting New Zealand theatre works.

A specific allocation of funding for audience development initiatives will help Downstage to achieve our vision of building an appreciation and following for distinctive New Zealand work.

The funding offered does not enable Downstage to fulfil all our ambitions at present, however, we are actively seeking additional sponsors for our innovative programmes. We are also building support from regular donations; there’s more about our BackDownstage programme on our websitewww.downstage.co.nz

The offer of Toi Uru Kahikatea funding is a positive step in Downstage’s development as a 21st century arts organisation, as we move towards our 50th anniversary.

Spain and Aranjuez celebrated by the NZSO and guitar

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Rimksy-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol, Op 34; Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez; Debussy: Ibéria; De Falla: Three dances from The Three-Cornered Hat

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph König with Xuefei Yang (guitar)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 26 August, 6.30pm

Though the programme booklet doesn’t enlighten us, I am not aware that König has conducted in New Zealand before. He is typical of the young conductors of today in having amassed a CV of breathtaking scope and variety – geographically and artistically. Born and educated in Germany, his permanent posts have been in the Ruhr, in Malmö (Sweden), Oporto (Portugal), Gran Canaria and Luxembourg; and he has made numerous distinguished guest appearances throughout Europe and the United States. He generated a high level of energy and finesse in this concert, well equipped through his work in both Spain and Portugal.

Concerts of national music often include music by foreign composers and it’s hard to avoid the colourful works that Spain has inspired from non-Spanish composers.

This one brought out pieces that most people may not have heard live for many years, if ever. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol used to be pretty familiar, and it would have been to the first generation of NZSO audiences for it was in their earliest programmes. For me it’s still represented by a pair of 78s, bought aged 16 – Liverpool Philharmonic: Malcolm Sargent.  It should be part of the repertoire that is presented to audiences that are new to or remain shy of classical music.

Though it’s a splendidly written, highly-coloured rhapsodic composition, it’s also very much a show-piece for concertmaster Donald Armstrong’s violin solos as well as for various solo wind instruments including brilliant flute cadenza by Kirstin Eade (this is a correction: my original review had assumed the player to be Birgit Schwab from Hanover, who was said in the programme to have ‘switched seats’ with principal flute Bridget Douglas). Conductor König made sure all were vividly exposed; and he created exciting climaxes as well as sustaining stretches that were delicate and transparent.

Rodrigo wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez as the catastrophic Spanish civil war was ending and one might look there for the origin of its elegiac mood, but there is no mention of that or evidence in the music.  As is normal for the guitar in a big space, it was amplified, but very carefully; and the orchestral strings were reduced; I couldn’t see the back of the violins, but I’d guess 10, 8, 6, 4, 3. It’s beautifully scored so that the guitar is never covered by the orchestra and there are charming, delicate gestures by solo cello and woodwinds, pizzicato strings, and in the Adagio, the famous cor anglais melody, beautifully played by Michael Austin. Nevertheless, from where I was, well back, left of the gallery, the guitar in the first movement sometimes seemed indistinct in relation to the orchestral sound.

Xuefei Yang’s artistry and virtuosity emerged in the slow movement, in her dynamic and rhythmic flexibility, in overall tempi that were leisurely and expressed an air of mystery that was evoked by discreet means. Individually, the guitar and sections of the orchestra explored the lovely folk melody most imaginatively. It might not be the most profound music, but its reputation, and the affection in which it is held, are well based. It must be the envy of every composer who aspires to provide music for the guitar.

I was delighted to hear her playing of Tarrega’s enchanting, evergreen Recollections of the Alhambra as an encore.

The orchestra was at full strength again for the second part of Debussy’s Images for Orchestra – Ibéria. (All three of Debussy’s big orchestral works, Nocturnes, Images and La mer, are in three sections and one of the three in Images, Ibéria, is itself in three parts). It’s one of the most multifaceted pieces of music that pushes existing forms to the limits; it uses the late romantic symphony orchestra, at times with fiery energy, at times with extreme restraint and delicacy. It’s a fabric of individual instrumental colours, excellent percussion playing, at other times producing great orchestral climaxes. What this performance was not – quite, was to be driven, in the first section, ‘Par les rues et par les chemins’, by a rhythmic energy of really high tension: the wonderfully disparate parts did not completely coalesce. The second part, ‘Les parfums de la nuit’ captured more mystery, and it was the place to hear a beguiling oboe, remote tubular bells as morning breaks and trumpet sounds of a military band announce the approach of the fair day. König held the orchestra back slightly to experience the slowly gathering energy of the festival, building to brass-led climax, in full sun and human exuberance.

Touching on Debussy’s tenuous experience with Spain, the otherwise admirable programme notes made the curious remark that he had been no further in Spain than the ‘village of San Sebastian, a few hours from the French border’. The village has a population today of around 200,000, perhaps 40,000 when Ibéria was written, and you’d get there, even in Debussy’s day, on the main Paris to Madrid railway in half an hour, about 40 km  from the frontier.

Finally, De Falla’s three dances from his ballet The Three-cornered Hat (El sombrero de tres picos) of 1919 (did you know that Wolf’s only opera, Der Corregidor, is based on the same Spanish play of 1874?). Sometimes the Dance of the Miller’s Wife begins a selection from the ballet, but here we had only the Neighbours’, the Miller’s and the Final dances. They were splendid, lively performances, rightly delivering rather more gusto and unrestrained energy that had Ibéria. It was not only boisterous, it was played with great delicacy too, properly letting the audience hear what a great composer and orchestrator De Falla was. There were forays of distinction by flute, horns, bassoon, cor anglais, The Miller’s Dance began deliberately holding back to create an air of suspense rather effectively towards the heavy-footed climax. The orchestra played the Final Dance with great theatricality, emphatic bass instruments lending a peasant quality to the denouement that thoroughly humiliates the Corregidor – the lascivious magistrate.

The sort of thing that would have brought an old-fashioned promenade concert, such as seduced the young to the love of classical music in Town Halls around the country in the 1950s (speaking personally again), to a thrilling conclusion, and it did just that for those at the Michael Fowler Centre.

A composer’s credentials – a clarification

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Re Grayson Gilmour:
Refer to the review of the New Zealand School of Music orchestra concert on Friday 12 August.

My review expressed a note of puzzlement that the one piece in the programme by a New Zealand composer seemed to be by a composer, Grayson Gilmour, with no connection with the school and, indeed, nothing indicated any connection with tertiary music education at all.

I have been enlightened.
Grayson Gilmour is a current student of the NZSM. He is enrolled in a Bachelor of  Music with Honours, studying with John Psathas and Dugal McKinnon. His work, Existence – Aether, was commissioned by the NZSM as a recipient of the Jenny McLeod prize (an annual commission for orchestra awarded by the school). Grayson completed his undergraduate degree at the NZSM, majoring in composition, about 3 years ago, before returning for postgraduate study.

Showcase for winner of NZSM concerto contest

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young

Bruckner: two motets arranged for trombones: ‘Locus Iste’ and ‘Vexilla regis’
Grayson Gilmour: Existence – Aether !
Milhaud: Saudades do Brasil
Pierre Max Dubois: Concerto for Alto Saxophone and orchestra (soloist Reuben Chin)
Beethoven: Symphony No 2 in D

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Friday 12 August, 6.30pm

This outing by the orchestra of the New Zealand School of Music (NZSM) was the opportunity to celebrate the winner of the school’s annual concerto competition. Curiously, nowhere in the programme was that fact recorded, even in the short biographical note about the saxophonist. The final round of the competition took place in the Adam Concert Room on 25 May when the four finalists played with piano accompaniment (see Middle C review of that date).

The timing of the present concert was perhaps a little unfortunate as half the school’s instrumentalists were involved in the orchestra that accompanied the NZSM’s production of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the beginning of the month. I assume most of the best players had been employed there; while there were times when that might have been evident, that fact that two very accomplished orchestras could be put together also served to demonstrate the depth of talent available. *(see below)

I must here make a disclosure. I had mistaken the starting time of the concert and missed the first 40 minutes; happily Radio New Zealand Concert recorded the concert and I am grateful for their supplying me with a recording of the performances.

It opened with a most attractive arrangement (unnamed) for trombones of two motets by Bruckner. Whether that was inspired simply by the presence of five excellent trombonists or by some other reason, it was a very engaging way to open things. Perhaps no instruments are better adapted to suggest the warmth and organic richness of the human voice; the sounds supplied a deeply meditative quality to these beautiful pieces, leaving me with not a scrap of dissatisfaction at the absence of voices. Articulation and ensemble were admirable.

It was followed by a piece by 25 year old Grayson Gilmour. I hadn’t heard of him and so enlightened myself in the way of the 21st century, to be somewhat engaged by his zippy, zany website with a range of video and audio clips; pop style sounds, images and vocabulary, with drollerie and a heart. Though he allowed himself to write a rather pretentious programme note invoking musical exoterica (Dérive – viz. Boulez). Gilmour’s piece, Existence – Aether 1 (are there other parts?), is remote from the precise, hard-edged sound world of Boulez however, and he employs the word not in the French – Boulez – sense of ‘deriving from’, for example, earlier pieces of music, but to mean exploring, discovering, drifting. The latter word certainly characterizes the actual music, a post-modern, dreamy character that makes an immediate appeal through slowly evolving sequences, carefully orchestrated over long-held flute or string notes. Nothing in the website references discloses any tertiary music study, or mentions pieces such as this. Is he perhaps an interesting example of the irrelevance, up to a point, of academic study in the evolution of a real composer?

Interesting, if this is the case, that the School of Music’s orchestra should choose it in favour of a piece by one of their many student composers.*

The orchestra’s qualities were more tested in the nine pieces from Milhaud’s Saudades do Brasil (there are twelve altogether). Milhaud is famous among other things, for his ’polytonal’ phase and these pieces represent that, following his years at the French Embassy in Rio de Janeiro. They are polytonal in a cheerful manner, but here was the rub. If one is to avoid the impression of reckless and joyous dissonance, rather more precision and tonal finesse is probably needed; the more brassy moments were a bit blousy, while the calm pieces were successful. It might have been auto-suggestion, but the orchestra seemed to gain in idiomatic confidence as it went along and by the second-to-last piece, Laranjeiras, there was a real confidence which engaged most sections of the orchestra, I recalled, apart from the May concert where Ruben Chin won the school competition, that the name Dubois as composer had featured in a students’ concert at St Andrew’s in 2010: I looked it up and found it was his À l’Espagnole. (Searching on the  internet, you also find another: Théodore Dubois, well known to organists).

A contemporary of Boulez perhaps, but Pierre Max Dubois’s inclination and that of many others who did not fall in with the alienating rites of Darmstadt, led him to writing music that was accessible to the generality of music lovers. Its accents were still contemporary but they had not been cut so totally adrift from tradition. This concerto, for saxophone and strings, is a delightful example of good music of the mid 20th century.

The concerto is colourful and varied, its three movements used in the way the three movements had been used for three centuries; and the playing was filled with energy and dance and subtlety; though the outer movements have jazz accents, it is by no means a jazz-inspired work. Its ancestry is distinctly that of Ibert, Milhaud and further back perhaps to Chabrier; thus the saxophone’s sound removes it entirely from the jazz world.

The second half was devoted to Beethoven’s second symphony. While St Andrew’s is a good venue for smaller ensembles and had been a good space for the saxophone concerto, full orchestras don’t sit well there (part of the reason for problems with the Milhaud). More experienced players would have found ways to refine their sounds which were often uncomfortably loud and confused. Nevertheless, much of the playing was marked by careful dynamic control – the second movement was sensitively played; what one had to concentrate on was the energy the orchestra brought to the performance and the generally accurate playing. I was particularly interested, being able to listen later to the recording, how much of the acoustic failings of the live hearing had disappeared on the recording and I could hear more clearly the careful detailing of much of the playing, especially of the strings and, in the boisterous last movement, even in the brass. Sure, the absence of a spacious acoustic was still obvious, but the quality of the playing was much more evident.

*  We were later offered an explanation:
Grayson Gilmour is a current student of the NZSM. He completed his undergraduate degree at the NZSM, majoring in composition, about 3 years ago, and is now studying for a Bachelor of Music with Honours, studying with John Psathas and Dugal McKinnon. His work, Existence – Aether, was commissioned by the NZSM as a recipient of the Jenny McLeod prize (an annual commission for orchestra awarded by the school).