Tag: orchestral

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.

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko with Michael Houstoun (piano)

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 4 and Shostakovich: Symphony No 7 ‘Leningrad’

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 5 August, 6.30pm

There was a near-full house for this concert that featured a conductor who’s achieved much real distinction, a relatively unfamiliar concerto by a well-loved composer and a symphony that had won fame even before it was first performed.

Petrenko and the young conductors
Vasily Petrenko follows in the footsteps of several young conductors who have been given the direction of orchestras that were not at that point, particularly renowned. He took charge of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in 2007 aged 31, rather as Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1978, at 26, or Simon Rattle who took over the City of Birmingham Symphony in 1980 at 25.

Our own Pietari Inkinen took over the NZSO at the age of 27 in 2007, and he has made it a highly polished ensemble capable of responding to another young conductor like Petrenko, not only with finesse and refinement, but also with huge energy.

There is irony in the widespread feeling that not enough young people are coming to concerts, while orchestral players and soloists as well conductors seem to be getting ever younger. (*See below for more on young conductors)

It goes without saying that the demographic of pianists and violinists is, and always has been, very young, given the world’s propensity for wonder at spectacular performance by highly gifted Wunderkinder who have to make it by 20 if they are to make the grade at all.

That brings us to Michael Houstoun who was of course one of them, winning prizes in the Van Cliburn and Leeds competitions at about that age.

Rachmaninov’s Fourth
Rachmaninov’s last piano concerto is considered the hardest of the four to bring off, for the whole score presents problems on account of orchestral writing that is often rather dense, many-layered and so profoundly integrated with the piano.

Petrenko led the orchestra by encouraging the feverish series of rising brass-led chords, that promises both grandeur and emotional depths. Perhaps I was initially worried at Houstoun’s ability to assert the piano’s role in the face of the orchestra’s authority; but he quickly established and maintained a steady pace and authority of his own that was never splashy or egotistical and he quite matched the orchestra at telling moments with powerful and reciprocating statements and elaborations,

The common criticism of denseness really relates to very few moments, and they are no more conspicuous than in most concertos. More to the point was the poetry and glittering bursts of bravura scales and ornate arpeggios that Houstoun enriched his performance with: occasionally purely decorative, but generally with an eye steadily on the organic purpose.

The new element in Rachmaninov’s writing that everyone notes is his digestion of the influence of Gershwin and the jazz that he was hearing in America at the time, and its harmonies do at times suggest the indeterminate blues sounds that sometimes render big-band jazz sounds murky and rootless. These are only moments for Rachmaninov and he maintains attention through rising and falling dynamics and emotional intensity.

As for the riot of colour and speed of the piano, Houstoun’s playing, clean and finely focused, kept it taut and relevant.

The concerto’s problem, its lesser popularity, is due quite simply to the shortage of rapturous and memorable melody such as guarantees the hold of the second and third concertos; and that in spite of the pretty little tune in the slow movement that echoes a popular music-hall song published in the 1880s. ‘Two lovely black eyes’ which was a parody of ‘My Nellie’s blue eyes’. I have never read speculation as to how this came to be planted in Rachmaninov’s subconscious.

But perhaps it was this that prompted a contemporary critic, after the premiere in 1927, to write of the work: “…now weepily sentimental, now of an elfin prettiness, now swelling toward bombast in a fluent orotundity. It is neither futuristic music nor music of the future. Its past was a present in Continental capitals half a century ago. Taken by and large—and it is even longer than it is large—this work could fittingly be described as super-salon music. Mme Cécile Chaminade might safely have perpetrated it on her third glass of vodka.”

Whatever the connection of that tune, it does seem to be resistant to much interesting development; the music does rather fail to develop, apart from the unexpected, threatening episode about four minutes into it.

There are areas of the Michael Fowler Centre where the sound is not clearly represented or becomes muddied or unbalanced as between certain instrumental sections. I was in one of them, near centre stalls, and while my ears allowed me to hear the energy and the emotional force of the performance, the louder passages were too dense and sounded more muddied than I’m sure was experienced elsewhere. It left me, nevertheless,  in no doubt that the fourth is a much finer composition than its current popularity would suggest.

The truth about the Seventh
While the concerto was a big enough draw-card for a full house (which we had) the famous symphony was probably an even greater attraction. It is still rather belittled by the more severe critics and those who tend automatically to denigrate 20th century music with tunes, so running the risk of popularity. But now the seventh’s remarkable origins and its hundreds of performances during the war has been endorsed by the revival of interest in the past three decades (a seminal recording was Haitink’s with the LPO in 1980). Friday’s performance inspired me to dust off others on record, only to have the unsurprising result of persuading me that the years of ignore were driven not by sensitive musical ears but by dogma, pedantry and, especially among the musical critical fraternity, scorn for music containing tunes that made a big impact on thousands of people: that just had to be proof of vacuity and worthlessness.

Ian MacDonald (The New Shostakovich) puts the stimulus for its revival down to the publication of Volkov’s Testimony in 1979, where Shostakovich is quoted as saying the symphony was “not about Leningrad under siege; it’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and that Hitler merely finished off”. Such revelations were widely resisted when Testimony was first published and Volkov was dismissed as a plagiarist who’d made it all up. But later events conspired to validate Volkov’s memoir.

Volkov notes that the Seventh had been planned before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and could thus have nothing to do with the Nazi invasion; that the ‘Invasion’ theme had nothing to do with the attack; “it had to do with other enemies of humanity … not only German Fascism … Hitler is a criminal, that’s clear, but so is Stalin”, Volkov quotes Shostakovich saying.

It was this symphony in which Shostakovich found his true voice after the terrible years of repression in the late 30s. The war, engendering a sense of patriotism and shared perils, brought a halt to Stalin’s murders and removed the danger of writing music that came from the heart and allowed the composer to express something of the plight of the Soviet people faced with Stalinist terror, which could be now be disguised as something else.

That is the way the performance of the central part of the first movement unfolded, with its mighty outburst of determination to confront evil. Yet the ambiguity threads its way throughout the movement; nothing could be as heart-easing, superficially at least, as the peaceful tune towards the end, but it’s quietly overtaken by the recurrence of the ominous earlier tones; MacDonald describes “a strange glassy smile and the banality of the things it says”.

Nevertheless, the latter account leaves a question-mark over the significance of the trite little ‘Invasion theme’, echoing The Merry Widow aria, ‘Da geh ich zu Maxim’. MacDonald notes however that a version of the tune also existed in Russia, and was jokingly sung in the Shostakovich household to the composer’s son, whose name, of course, was Maxim.

The message?
This performance perhaps risked obscuring the overall message of submission and despair through the sudden shifts between varied moods and styles, the oppressive opening fanfares, the simple tunes, the ambiguities that make credible either its Soviet interpretation or the post-Volkov understanding.

Similar alternations of calm, perhaps self-deluding, and unease, fear, evil, permeate the other three movements and conductor and orchestra drove their way through its epic portrayals with tireless determination.

At the end, applause was prolonged and a (for Wellington) rare standing ovation revealed the extent of the work’s power to move a generation in which only the oldest (myself included) have clear memories of the course of the war, particularly on the eastern front, by far the most important in scale and in human and material destruction.

As an eight-year-old in the worst war years, I remember studying with intense interest the map of Europe on my grandfather’s wall, on which he shifted scores of pins day by day, following the progress of the allied armies that were closing in on Nazi Germany from all sides; his then commonly-held pro-communist feelings naturally left a deep impression on me, not really dispelled till the revelations after the death of Stalin in my first year at university. So this great performance did much more than tell the tale of a remote bit of history that I was, even at the time, very alert to: a great musical composition by a composer alert to international political realities, as virtually none had been before, had arrived. He was spurred by a regime that sought to control the political colour of its arts; ironically, the political awareness it stimulated was very different from what the Party intended.

This was a great concert that presented us with the most convincing performances of two masterpieces that have for different reasons been looked at askance by critics, or the public, or both, for many decades. Both works are surely fully rehabilitated now.

*Other conductors who made waves in their early years include Claudio Abbado at La Scala aged 35, Barenboim the Orchestre de Paris at 33, Seiji Ozawa at San Francisco aged 33, Bernstein debuted with the New York Philharmonic at 25 and became music director of the Toscanini-founded orchestra, the New York City Symphony aged 27, Gergiev was a mature 35 when he took over at the Maryinski Theatre in (then) Leningrad; the young Latvian Mariss Jansons began his triumphant years with the Oslo Philharmonic in 1979 aged 36; while his compatriot Andris Nelsons took over the Birmingham orchestra in 2008 when he was 29.

A recent issue of Gramophone celebrated 10 of a new generation of rising stars (not counting Dudamel who, at 30, is regarded as well-established now). One of them is Petrenko, while on the cover was Yannick Nézet-Séguin who conducted our National Youth Orchestra a few years ago. Interestingly, an accompanying article noted the continued absence of women conductors. It looks as if the advent of such fine conductors as Jane Glover, Simone Young, Marin Alsop, Julia Jones, Xian Zhang, JoAnn Falletta, Odaline de la Martinez (not forgetting Herbertina von Karajan or Georgina Solti) has not really created a well-marked career path for women.

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pinchas Steinberg and Simon Trpčeski (piano)

Night on Bald Mountain (Mussorgsky); Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 26 (Prokofiev); Symphony No 4 in F minor, Op 36 (Tchaikovsky)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 8 July, 6.30pm

I sat one seat away from a couple who, at the end of the symphony, sat stony-faced, and I mean with countenances sculpted from the finest granite: arms folded, so that any suggestion of an agreeable emotion, in sympathy with the storm of applause, and even a few shouts, was out of the question.

I suppose there are still a few people who came across some of the writers of the puritan school of severity and joylessness, and have themselves never listened with normal ears; people who dismissed Tchaikovsky as contemptible for having written music that is widely loved: the church of “if it’s popular, it can’t be good”.

If you detect a note of irritation in my reaction, you’d be right. For I happen to be one who thinks the two finest symphonists of the 19th century, after Beethoven, are Brahms and Tchaikovsky, closely followed by Schubert, Bruckner and Dvořák, and then Schumann, and you-add-the-rest. Anyway, this was a simply stunning performance.

Steinberg may not be a household name like Abbado or Barenboim, Gergiev, Rattle or Haitink, but he’s got a pretty respectable pedigree in opera and orchestral music with major orchestras and opera companies.

He conducted Tchaikovsky’s F minor symphony, without the score, with a searing conviction, whether through the most breathless pianissimo or the most ferocious and tempestuous climaxes. A powerful opening gambit was to be expected in the first movement, but it was followed by a thrillingly slowly paced waltz episode, where the orchestra was guided in serenely lyrical music that might have been misplaced from any other composer’s slow movement. Then it was the control of slow crescendos and slow accelerations (and their reverse) that contributed to the tension and the brilliance of the landscapes revealed from the mountain-tops.

If there were moments when I was slightly worried by the hush or the stillness of some passages, their importance was soon revealed through their contrast with the storming victories that followed. Steinberg’s secret was to invest familiar music with a revelatory freshness.

No conductor is needed to produce the many rapturous individual solo performances by oboe or clarinet, flute, horns or bassoons, or even perhaps by the beautiful playing of cellos at the beginning of the Andantino, but a Steinberg was definitely required to bring about the transitions and the evolutionary passages, and the whole structural grandeur and excitement that held the audience transfixed throughout (perhaps that was my neighbours’ problem).

Then there was that remarkable Scherzo: pizzicato strings, whose dynamics undulated voluptuously, and as phrases passed two or three notes at a time through all the five strings sections. The pizzicato parts were separated by a Trio of the most exquisitely refined woodwind and brass playing, finding colours and subtleties that were fascinating, hardly imagined.

It was the last movement where all Steinberg’s genius was consummated; the rhetorical eruptions, driven by the sweeping left arm, built through the energy that he inspired in the players to a coda of ferocious pace and white-hot emotion.

Mussorgsky

The concert had got off to a splendid start with a devilishly thrilling account of Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Mussorgsky’s witches’ Sabbath. It was polished, biting and for those predisposed towards the supernatural, exciting or terrifying. The sudden shifts, in the opening fanfares, from one orchestral chorus to another were at once vividly contrasted and seamlessly joined. The strings glowed with a dark velvet refulgence.

Nothing was as rapturous as the way the orchestra dimmed and quietly left the mountaintops at the end.

Macedonian pianist

Then the concerto, with Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski.

A local weekly described his country as being only 20 years old.

In case that evokes the image of a land rising from the ocean back in 1991, a word of encouragement: this was the Greek kingdom over which Alexander the Great ruled in the 4th century BC, when his conquests spread Greek influence as far east as India. Slavs settled in its northern region from about the 7th century and it was an independent Slav kingdom in the late 10th century AD. It was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1355, and when they were finally driven out in 1913 it was divided between Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. The Slav northern part became part of Yugoslavia from 1918 and it was a republic of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War.

It gained complete independence in 1991. There is inexplicable tension with Greece over the name since it is also the name of the Greek province immediately to the south with its capital Salonica.

Prokofiev’s Concerto No 3

The music. I was a bit disappointed that the most familiar of Prokofiev’s piano concertos was chosen for Trpčeski’s one concert (to be repeated in Napier, Hamilton and Auckland). He did write five of them, all worth hearing; what about a less-known Rachmaninov (1st or 4th), or the intriguing Scriabin concerto, and much other Russian piano music?

That said, the 3rd is highly entertaining: the first movement opens encouragingly, the orchestra playing a droll waiting game, for the piano’s entry which is without fuss, acting the part of an instrument of the orchestra rather than the flashy hero who holds himself apart. The remarkable thing was that, through Trpčeski’s modesty and refinement, the piano’s presence had a much greater impact, and actually charmed us through the constant varying weight of contrasting phrases; it all enraptured the audience from the start.

What surprised me however, half way through the opening Allegro, was a feeling of uninvolvement, that the tension, the temperature, had dropped below the level of full commitment. Yet Steinberg was undoubtedly creating a colourful canvas with finely wrought dynamics and rubato, even though some of it seemed to lie at the surface of musical experience.

The second movement kept me involved more steadily, with a piano part that took on more a life of its own; the sudden outbursts at speed, the hugely vigorous episode in triple time that just as suddenly subsides, with its several retreats to quiet lyrical passages. All the quirkiness of Prokofiev’s score, with shimmering lights, ever-changing rhythms, some motoric, some lyrical, were exposed. In the last climactic build-up there was a fleeting impression of faltering synchronism, but Beecham’s injunction was followed: all finished together.

Prokofiev seems to delight in throwing off balance an audience’s preconceptions of the character of the three movements of a concerto. The simplistic fast – slow – fast pattern has been long banished and myriad contrasts are found within each movement, by much more obtuse, unorthodox means. Nevertheless, pianist and conductor brought about a level of delight and musical fascination that was rare, again with its treading water episodes allowing time to reflect.

After his third return to the platform following great applause, the pianist took a page from a music stand near him and concert master Vesa-Matti Leppänen and principal cello Andrew Joyce brought their seats forward to surround the pianist who then told us that they were to play a trio arrangement of a Macedonian folk dance. They carried it off brilliantly, digging into the characteristic rhythms that one encounters in all the southern Slav countries. The audience was even more vociferous.

ROMEO AND JULIET – Music by Tchaikovsky, Berlioz and Prokofiev

Pietari Inkinen (conductor) / New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, June 25th, 2011

British comedians Michael Flanders and Donald Swann penned a number called “A Friendly Duet” for their successful 1960s revue At The Drop of Another Hat, a song containing references to various famous pairs of lovers in history and literature – including, of  course, Romeo and Juliet :

No romance, said Juliet,

I haven’t left school yet,

We’re friends – just friends!

Throughout much of the first half of the NZSO’s Romeo and Juliet concert, which featured the music of Tchaikovsky and Berlioz, I couldn’t help thinking of the Flanders-and-Swann song – the clean-cut, beautifully-modulated and expertly-delivered orchestral playing presided over by maestro Pietari Inkinen impressed on a great many counts, but seemed to me to keep at arm’s length what the publicity associated with the concert emphasized as its essential component – that sadly “done-to-death” concept, passion. True, the right instincts seemed to be closely associated with the venture – the programme notes for the concert spoke of “frenetic music” and “burning passion” (Tchaikovsky), and “unbridled energy” (Berlioz),  while Inkinen and the orchestra achieved in both pieces miracles of evocation and atmosphere with certain episodes, passages that took away one’s breath with the beauty and subtlety of the sounds. However, both Tchaikovsky’s and Berlioz’s music, for me, exemplify romantic expression in its totality, where beauty and subtlety vie with full-blooded extremes of feeling – and I didn’t feel those extremities were sufficiently explored. In quoting Flanders and Swann I’ve obviously exaggerated the touches of inhibition throughout the performances, but for whatever reason, the impression remains of emotion contained rather than given sufficient expressive rein.

I must say, at this point, that in the wake of the conductor’s and orchestra’s recent overwhelming performances of the Mahler Sixth Symphony, I was hoping for more along the same lines with Tchaikovsky et al., playing that expressed the music’s innate volatility and passion (that word, again!). Sadly, it didn’t fire on Saturday night in the way that the Mahler did for me – though I’ve been wondering whether Inkinen’s success with the latter work reflected more his (laudable) punctilious care regarding detail and his players’ strict observance of Mahler’s detailed directions in the score, and less any deep-seated emotional connection on his part with the music. If so, it suggests a cerebral approach to music-making – not a bad thing with music whose appeal stems mostly from its structure, logic and precise detailing, but more problematic with works that make their impact via emotional heft. That’s not to say that the thinking interpreter’s Tchaikovsky or Berlioz can’t work – but in place of the searing “muse of fire” there needs to be, in my opinion, equally razor-sharp focus of thought and action, however unromantic. That’s what I felt we got with Inkinen’s Mahler, but, sadly not sufficiently in evidence here.

What did work during the concert’s first half were a number of extremely focused moments – the fine gradations of tone and colour in the opening “Friar Laurence” section of the Tchaikovsky overture, the beautiful blend of strings and cor anglais (Michael Austin) for the first appearance of the famous “love-theme” (winds doing an equally heartfelt job of the tune’s songful repetition), and the strings” full-throated recapitulation of the theme just before the death-throes of the “star-crossed lovers”. But, expertly drilled though the fight music was, I didn’t think the orchestral flare-ups angry and incisive enough, so that the bitterness and hatred between the warring families didn’t sufficiently presage the tragedy. As for the Berlioz, I thought it odd that the selection of orchestral exerpts made here almost completely avoided the two salient themes of the story – the conflict between the families, and the lovers themselves. So instead of Berlioz’s furious and tumultuous introduction, we began with Romeo alone just before the Capulet’s Ball, and ended with one of Berlioz’s most amazing orchestral evocations, the Queen Mab Scherzo. This actually was the performance’s highlight for me, with Inkinen and his players weaving patterns of gossamer magic through which the most delicately-voiced rhythmic impulses darted this way and that, beguiling the senses with the elfin transparency of it all – a treasurable episode of pure orchestral alchemy. And what a telling evocation towards the end of the soldier’s dream of “drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes…” with deep, menacing sounds louring out of the dark! It was playing whose delight all but made amends for what I thought was a somewhat dull Capulet’s Ball, lacking that last ounce of sheer momentum, of youthful exuberance in the performance that would have readily conveyed that “unbridled energy” cited in the program notes.

In general, the Romeo and Juliet of Prokofiev fared better in Inkinen’s hands, even though the famous pungent crescendi and jagged chords introducing the Dance of the Capulet Knights were despatched quickly and sharply, the effect being taut and terse, or short-winded and literal, depending upon your point of view. I liked the savage tread of the Knights during their dance, however, magnificently underpinned by the heavy brass, and in particular the tuba (superbly played by Andrew Jarvis). The contrasting episode had little mystery and atmosphere, though – more a dancer’s than a listener’s performance. Happily, Young Juliet, which followed, was quite lovely, with solo playing to die for from clarinet (Phil Green), flute (Bridget Douglas) and ‘cello (Andrew Joyce). In fact the solo playing throughout the concert was near-impeccable – deft trumpet and oboe solos from Cheryl Hollinger and Robert Orr in the street scenes come readily to mind as do Nancy Luther’s silvery, nostalgic piccolo echoings at the very end. Again, it was the lighter, more graceful and lyrical aspects of the score that inkinen and his players more readily and successfully brought out, whereas The Death of Tybalt, though rumbustious and exciting at a certain level had no real cutting edge – more like children excitedly playing at war rather than the real, deadly thing. And what is the point of music such as this if it doesn’t convey “hurt” in the playing and listening?

Mention of the marvellous work done by the orchestra’s stellar line-up of soloists brings me to the sadness of acknowledging the last appearance on the NZSO platform of one of the greatest of them all – principal horn Ed Allen. He was appropriately farewelled by a speech from orchestral leader Vesa-Matti Leppänen which brought forth tumultuous audience applause accompanying a standing ovation for Allen, a kiss and a bouquet presented by his double-bass player partner Vicki Jones, and an affectionate hug from his conductor Pietari Inkinen. He will be greatly missed.

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen

Symphony No 6 in A minor by Gustav Mahler

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 10 June, 6 .30pm

The absence of a notable soloist usually leads to a less well populated auditorium, but clearly the name Mahler works like a famous composer and a star soloist rolled into one. There were a few gaps, to be sure, and I speculate that they would have been filled if the orchestra had not abandoned its ‘senior rush’, discounted late ticket selling policy.

Audience expectations were high, and they were not disappointed.

In brief, this was a magnificent, world-class performance that would have inspired a standing ovation in most of the great musical centres of the world. Wellington audiences are shy: fear of standing up, alone: but here a brave first one would have had the whole house up in a flash.

The orchestra had been augmented by additional players, some, I gathered, from Christchurch. About 116 in all; it is the biggest of all Mahler’s symphonies in terms of instrumental demands, not only in the range of instruments but also in player numbers: nine horns, six various trumpets, five flutes and piccolo, double timpani and harps; and I counted more in some strings sections than were listed in the programme. There were several less familiar items: celeste and tubular bells, a brace of cowbells that were carried through the aisles in stalls and gallery; Mahler’s use of percussion, though impressive in 1906, is hardly radical in comparison with their exploitation in recent times . The pièce de résistance was a specially acquired mighty hammer and solid wood drum that delivered the famous three strokes of fate in the last movement.

Such was the scene that greeted the audience – the entire stage and the raised levels behind the strings packed with players and equipment.

Apart from the scale of the piece, both in numbers of players and duration – almost and hour and a half – there are musicological matters. Mahler’s works were not subject to the numbers of published versions of his symphonies such as occupy the attention of Bruckner scholars studying the various published versions of many of his 11 symphonies, but Mahler’s Sixth had its birth difficulties.

In the course of rehearsals before the premiere at Essen in 1906, Mahler changed the order of the second and third movements, so the Andante came before the Scherzo. According to Wikipedia, he took that change so seriously that he had erratum slips inserted in the existing published score and ordered his Leipzig publisher to produce a revised edition to take account of the changed Andante – Scherzo order.

But the editor of the International Mahler Society’s edition of 1963 claimed that Mahler had again changed his mind, settling for the Scherzo – Andante sequence; and so there are two justifiable versions in use now. Michael Kennedy, in the booklet essay accompanying Simon Rattle’s 1990 account with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, says: “But no evidence to support this assertion has ever been presented”.

And it is interesting that the latest edition of New Grove Dictionary of Music simply states that the Andante was “originally presented as the third movement but subsequently relocated as the second”.

I have that Rattle recording in which the Andante is first, and have to confess that I find it more emotionally and structurally persuasive to hear the Andante straight after the first movement.

Wikipedia lists the performances by leading conductors using each edition. More have used the Scherzo-Andante version but many, including Abbado, Jansons, Ivan Fischer, Barenboim, Gergiev, Maazel and Slatkin have performed the Andante-Scherzo version. Inkinen is listed in the former camp (Wikipedia presumably listed him on the strength of the cancelled performance with the Japan Philharmonic earlier this year; this was Inkinen’s first performance of it). 

Kennedy also records the fact that Mahler had deleted the third of the three hammer-blows, at the end of the Finale: superstition that it might be prophetic – of his own death. But there is no musical reason for conductors to do likewise, and presumably few have.

Reviewers often allege that the Town Hall provides a more balanced and responsive acoustic for music of most kinds, and it’s possible that we might have had a more uniform sound picture there, but the general impact of this performance in the Michael Fowler Centre, no holds barred, left nothing to complain about. I can imagine no more arresting and full-throated opening: a complete vindication of the size and weight of the strings – well over the normal 60 – in which timpani, cellos and basses lent their vital power along with the lower brass and woodwinds. The onset of the throbbing rhythms of the opening march clearly presaged the irresistible energy that characterised the whole performance; nor were the beautiful lyrical passages less characteristic – the gentle portrait of Alma soon follows, after the strange subsidence from the sour brass chords.

There is no great contrast between the unrelenting Allegro energico, the first movement, and the opening of the second movement, Scherzo, which starts with a comparable heavy tread, now in triple time, soon plunges darkly into growling Fafner-like (Siegfried) bass sounds, but later offers brief oboe-led lyrical moments; though even these are punctuated by hard timpani. Here, with clarinets raised to cry to the farthest reaches of the hall, the orchestra caught marvelously the alternating gracefulness and ominous shadows which Alma took to represent the ‘unrhythmic games’ of their two little children (though the second, Anna, was born only in 1904). “Ominously,” she writes, “the childish voices became more and more tragic, and at the end died out in a whimper”.

In many ways, regardless of the underlying autobiographical nature of the narrative, the symphony is one of Mahler’s more formally traditional works, without voices and without an overt programme or philosophical subtext. But it is also a massive concerto for orchestra, and one could easily spend the hour and a half attending to nothing but the memorable and surprising flourishes and fanfares, defiant outbursts and agonized lyrical passages given to innumerable, arresting, individual and groups of instruments. No sooner is there a cry of alarm or some mark of the inevitability of fate than relief arrives from the flutes or celeste, or from an expression of nature in the shape of cowbells.

The scale of the music is so huge that when one first encounters it, and this was my early experience, it is easy to feel it as an incoherent series of motifs that seem to progress without much of a plan other than the composer’s momentary impulse.

Mahler wrote to a friend in 1904, as he was in the midst of composition: “My sixth will present riddles to the solution of which only a generation that has absorbed and digested my first five symphonies will dare apply itself”.

The Andante moderato needs no special insight perhaps, as it is much closer in spirit to the glorious slow movements of the fourth and fifth symphonies. Why, in spite of its pervasive melancholy, it has not been accorded the privileged position of the Adagietto of the Fifth mystifies me. The cowbells return; strings are at their most rich and opulent; Ed Allen plays rapturous horn solos, surrounded by magical flutes and oboes.

The last movement’s enigmatic opening, alternating calm beauty with flourishes by harps and the ominous murmurings by the tuba and low woodwinds set the scene. If I found the argument hard to follow at first hearing when I was young, there is now an inevitability that I find very clear, and the undulating dynamics and tempi of the shimmering orchestral colours as they were so vividly and excitingly laid out on Friday evening, had me spellbound for the full half hour.

Yet the score seems so full of graphic detail (Strauss suggested to Mahler that it might have been ‘over-scored’) that one must be forgiven for seeking the ‘meaning’ of many passages in this movement. The more clarity and energy that a conductor such as Inkinen brings to it, unusual sonorities from single harp strings, screaming trumpets, nasal oboes, the more likely are such questions to arise. This movement’s final peroration seems to start about seven or eight minutes from the actual end: it’s no mean feat for a conductor to convince his audience that every rise and fall in temperature, ever pseudo-climax, from which tactical retreat for regrouping is undertaken, all makes sense.

But it did.

And there was no avoiding the meaning of the three hammer blows, the last surrounded by the most real, despairing, defiant peroration of all.

How lucky we are to have an orchestra, built on over 60 years of commitment and experience, and well-enough endowed to permit the performance of such magnificent works that are so central to the understanding of civilization: not just of the west, but of all mankind.