Tag: orchestral

Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Shostakovich: Symphony no.9 in E flat, Op.70 / Poulenc: 8 Chansons Gaillardes on anonymous 17^th century texts

Beethoven: Overture ‘Egmont’, Op.84 / de Falla: El amor brujo

Linden Loader (mezzo soprano) and Roger Wilson (baritone)

Justin Pearce (conductor)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 27 June 2010

A well-filled church enjoyed an adventurous programme from this amateur orchestra.  It would be unusual for an amateur orchestra to play an almost entirely twentieth century programme.

The Shostakovich was a difficult and challenging work with which to open the concert.  It is not one of his longest compositions, and makes good use of the orchestra – there is plenty of exciting playing for the winds to do, and the description in the programme note ‘A short witty work full of light and bite’ is apt.  There are hints of Prokofiev-like wit here and there.

The orchestra mostly made a good sound, but uniformity of rhythm and even intonation were uneven at times.  Precise rhythm is especially required for pizzicato playing.  Perhaps this work was a mite too difficult for the orchestra. However, after a slightly shaky start, the players settled.

The second movement, Moderato, featured dramatic and forceful playing from the woodwind band.  Most noticeable throughout, but especially in her extended solo, was the excellent bassoon playing of Kylie Nesbit.  She had lots to do, and always her playing was sonorous and beautiful.  In fact, her playing was a recommendation for the value of this instrument.

While the programme notes were very good, they were somewhat doctrinaire, and some phrases did not make comprehensible English, while some of  the statements did not really apply in 1943-1945, when the symphony was written.  It was good to hear this work played.

Poulenc’s songs to words of both dubious provenance and dubious morals were sung well by Roger Wilson, who was in fine voice and produced the words with clarity.  However, the orchestra did not always display good ensemble, and Justin Pearce, resplendent in red shirt and a silver-backed waistcoat kept everything going.  But frequently the winds were too loud for the voice, the vocal lines in some of the songs (e.g. ‘Chanson à boire’) being in the lower register of the singer’s voice.

The conductor cannot always go by the composer’s markings; balance depends on the size of the auditorium, its acoustic qualities, the size of the orchestra and as well, the size of the audience.  Therefore to achieve it, sometimes the orchestra needs to play more quietly than the composer directs, especially when he calls for full orchestra, or considerable use of brass.

The balance was better in the fourth song, ‘Invocation aux parques’.  It was a succinct song of typical French brevity.  In the following song, ‘Couplets bachiques’, there were again threats of swallowing up the singer.  Poulenc’s typical wit and insouciance were evident.  Next was ‘Loffrande’.  This setting was without brass, so it was possible to hear the words.  It featured another humorous, piquant ending.

‘La belle jeunesse’ achieved a better balance, mainly because most of the phrases were in the higher register.  Here, there was some great brass playing.

The final song, ‘Sérénade’ was the most lyrical of the songs, in a traditional sense.  It was enchanting.  Robyn Jaquiery provided a vital part of the texture, with her inconspicuous piano.

The brass problem affected the Beethoven overture also, at least where I was sitting, in the gallery.  With four horns and two trumpets, the brass accompanying notes were too loud to enable the melodies in the strings and woodwind to be heard clearly.   When the brass was not playing, the balance was good.  It was a stirring performance (apart from a few renegade notes) of the finest of Beethoven’s overtures.

El amor brujo must be one of the favourite works of Spanish composer Manuel de Falla.   Soloist Linden Loader looked the part of a Carmen-like gypsy for this gypsy music, in a red dress and black shawl, matching the red hangings in the church and Justin Pearce’s red shirt.

In the first movement the orchestra generally, and especially the brass, were too loud for the singer, but the second and third movements’ muted string tone with piano was most attractive.  Here, the trumpets too were muted, and made a wonderful sound, particularly in the trumpet solo.  The oboe solo was also excellent.

Unfortunately the programme notes titled only the movements with voice, and not the orchestral ones in between.  The second song, ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’ had better balance, but I felt  that Linden Loader was not singing as well as usual.

In the dreamy movement that followed the strings evoked the mood superbly.  The final song ‘Dance of the game of love’ featured more tone from the soloist, and the lilting and mellow quality we know and love in her singing.  The joyful and cheerful ending of this song brought the concert to a fine close.

DVORAK – The Noonday Witch Op.108

TCHAIKOVSKY – Piano Concerto No.1 in B-flat Minor Op.23

PROKOFIEV – Symphony No.7 in C-sharp Minor Op.131

Freddy Kempf (piano)

Alexander Lazarev (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 25th June 2010

Each of conductor Alexander Lazarev’s two recent concerts with the NZSO has featured repertoire which, although not obscure, doesn’t often appear in our orchestral programmes. Both Glazunov’s ballet The Seasons and Dvorak’s spooky tone-poem The Noon-Day Witch are in what I would call the “somewhat neglected” category of orchestral works – I was therefore interested to read NZSO CEO Peter Walls’ description in the programme’s welcoming foreword of the Dvorak tone-poem as “ever-popular”. I would have thought that, for most people, it simply wouldn’t rate in the popularity stakes next to works like the Carnival Overture and the Scherzo Capriccioso. And as for calling the concert series “Russian” – well, I feel the good Antonin would have had something to say about that, Slav or no Slav.

Nonetheless, the second of the “Russian Romantics” presentations by the NZSO was as resounding a success as the first (Glinka, Rachmaninov, Glazunov) with all credit due to the musicians involved. I compared the NZSO’s performance of the Dvorak piece with a recording I own featuring the redoubtable Czech Philharmonic under the directorship of the worthy but relatively lack-lustre maestro Vaclav Neumann. Even allowing for the extra frisson generated by a live performance, conductor Alexander Lazarev and the NZSO’s players brought to the music whole oceans more colour, atmosphere and energy, so that the macabre story of the disobedient child whose life is taken by the pitiless witch at the unthinking invitation of the child’s mother really came to life. Every phrase counted as part of either atmosphere or narrative, the story’s unfolding episodes so very vividly characterised – the opening’s rustic folk-dance, the oboe’s depiction of the disobedient child, and the mother’s anger and frustration leading to her unwitting invocation of the witch were all brought unerringly into focus in varying ways. What incredibly sinister pianissimi Lazarev conjured out of his string players, for example (the conductor involuntarily shooting an accusing glance out into the auditorium at a hapless cougher, at one point), by way of depicting the arrival of the witch and the fear and horror of the mother at her impulsive threat’s nightmarish realisation. Then, how baleful the brass, how wonderfully angular the string-playing, and how brutal and whip-lash the final orchestral payoff!  Despite such full-blooded advocacy, I still didn’t feel as though the work hung terribly well together – it somehow lacked the surety and focus of some of the composer’s other shorter orchestral pieces, such as the two mentioned earlier.

Concertgoers who had heard pianist Freddy Kempf’s poetic Rachmaninov Third a fortnight ago in Wellington would have revelled in the chance to hear him tackle another of the most famous concert war-horses of all time, the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. I may sound perverse, but after having remarked in a review of the previous concert that the pianist seemed never to completely COMMAND the Rachmaninov Concerto despite the moments of great poetry and depth of feeling, I thought on this later occasion that it was the orchestra which in places wasn’t quite (literally) up to speed in relation to the playing of its star soloist. Conductor Lazarev adopted an expansive approach to the famous opening tune, one which I thought didn’t quite “knit” with the more forthright playing of the pianist. Kempf in fact seemed determined to prove that he could make the most of the biggest virtuoso moments, though to be fair, his playing of the more lyrical and limpid passages as well never missed the chance to generate washes of poetic feeling. But two of the most exciting pieces of interplay between orchestra and soloist in the first movement didn’t quite come off for me because of the conductor’s reluctance to match the pianist’s terrific head of steam, resulting each time in a kind of sudden upward gear-change as the music spurted forward in the soloist’s hands – I was surprised, considering what I’d witnessed of Lazarev’s energy and volatility on the podium and the exciting results he got from his players elsewhere.

What did emerge (as it did during the Rachmaninov concerto performance a fortnight previously) was the music’s narrative aspect – one felt that a story was being told, both by the orchestra (a gritty, dogged build-up to a flailing piano entry reminiscent of similar orchestral textures in the same composer’s Fourth Symphony) and the pianist (a lovely dialogue between the hands, the same phrase tossed back and forward with different emphases and textural qualities, before dialoguing (so operatic at this point) similarly with the orchestra. The cadenza was played with a volatile mixture of poetry and bravura, even if the pianist seemed to momentarily tire towards the movement’s end. Somebody’s rogue hearing-aid interrupted the beginning of the slow movement, which, when conductor and pianist agreed that they would press on anyway, featured the most delicately-voiced string-playing I’ve heard for a long time, allowing Kirstin Eade’s flute to shine through untramelled. Freddy Kempf’s elfin playing suited the central section’s scamperings to perfection, though in the finale (played “attacca”) I felt he could have “roughed up” the music’s textures a bit more, in keeping with the roisterous energies of the orchestral tutti. Still, his scherzando-like playing wove wonderful arabesques of energy, and he certainly unleashed a jaw-dropping torrent of octaves by way of announcing the final “all-together” statement of the finale’s big tune – thunderbolts and whirlwinds indeed! – earning him a momentous ovation at the end. Some people I spoke to thought the encore (Vladimir Horowitz’s amazing transcription of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever March) inappropriate after the concerto, but I didn’t think so – I loved its outrageous excess, and thought Kempf’s performance was positively Horowitz-like in its power and brilliance (I’m SURE I counted only two hands at that keyboard!).

Before the second half began, an endearingly human touch to the proceedings came with Associate Concertmaster Donald Armstrong’s warmly-expressed farewell to one of the orchestra’s longest-serving violinists, Jane Freed, playing in her last concert. Then it was the Prokofiev Symphony’s turn (the composer’s seventh and last) beginning with an unusually forthright piano note, its resonances colouring the string-playing that followed with whole skyfuls of nostalgic feeling, floating like terraced banks of clouds. Alexander Lazarev was in his element with this work, encouraging great surges of string-sound within expansive orchestral paragraphings, but then keeping the percussion-led “other voices” dance-like reply strictly in tempo, ensuring a seamless flow of engagement from all concerned. He brought out the accompanying piano figurations to the big tune’s reprise at the movement’s end in a way that opened our vistas even further and dug more deeply into the terrain’s soil. In the second movement, begun gracefully, but then gathering momentum and pointed articulation, Lazarev galvanised his forces during the motoric percussive episode, cranking up the tempo most excitingly, then slowing again for the strings’ return. Throughout, the players’ instrumental detailing was a delight – I couldn’t see the trumpeter from where I was sitting, but his (her?) waltz-tune was played with just the right amount of delicious vulgarity, for example.

Conductor and players caught the crepuscular, lump-in-throat expanses of the third movement’s opening with great sensitivity – those tunes sung over the music’s dark abysses (Robert Orr’s oboe-playing a constant delight) engendered such a flavour, a bitter-sweet sense of remembrance and loss and resignation throughout. Of course, Lazarev is an “attacca” musician with a vengeance, and the symphony’s finale was no exception, its first note here searing through the ambiences of the previous music’s dying fall and creating a great stirring of blood and breath, ready for the propulsive urgencies that followed. The orchestra equally delighted in the fairy-tale gallop episodes and the gawky gavotte sequences, nicely playing up the music’s contrasts and angularities, the brass players covering themselves with glory along the way, especially during the lead-up to the reintroduction of the first movement’s “big tune”. Lazarev seemed occasionally to want to bring the audience in as an optional chorus during this section, turning his body towards the auditorium with some of his sweeping arm-gesturings, as though the entire space within the MFC had been given over to conductable music-making. I had thought that we were going to get both endings of the symphony, as written by the composer (the authorities objected to Prokofiev’s original elegiac ending to the work, requesting that he write an alternative coda with a happy, boisterous ending!) – but instead of setting this “clip-on” piece in motion at the end, the conductor brought the symphony to its conclusion with a single pizzicato chord as per the original. And that, as they say in the classics, was that! Rapturous responses from all sides at the end, with appreciative plaudits for Alexander Lazarev and more salutes to Jane Freed, bringing a memorable concert to a satisfying conclusion.

SCHUMANN – Piano Concerto in A Minor

SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.11 “The Year 1905”

Diedre Irons (piano)

Kenneth Young (conductor)

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

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

Wednesday 12^th May 2010

This concert reinforced my feeling that there is a pressing need in Wellington for an alternative mid-sized venue for concerts. Ensembles such as amateur and student orchestras, whose following wouldn’t perhaps stretch to filling with audience an auditorium such as the Town Hall, nevertheless deserve to play somewhere that’s more acoustically grateful to orchestral sound than is St. Andrew’s on-the-Terrace Church. Throughout both of the orchestral concerts I’ve attended at the church this year, I found myself thinking how much more musical both bands would sound if playing in an acoustic less bright, analytical and constricted than what they and their audiences have had to cope with.

I’ve no wish to denigrate such a wonderful church as a concert venue for solo recitals, chamber groups and smaller vocal and instrumental ensembles, and have enjoyed many concerts there given by those kinds of forces. Like many churches, the intrinsically theatrical layout and performance ambience of St.Andrew’s makes it an ideal place to listen to and enjoy an enormous range of music performances, as the recent series of March Concerts which ran parallel to the International Arts Festival richly demonstrated. But try to jam a sizeable orchestra or the forces required for a major choral work into the performing space and then listen to them perform – the resulting sound reflects all-too-obviously a lack of ample space for effective large-scale music-making.

As an ex-player in an amateur orchestra I often used to reflect on the phenomenon of the performances I took part in sounding considerably more mellifluous when our group performed in public, compared to the sounds we made at our rehearsals, the difference being largely a warmer and better-balanced acoustic at our regular concert venue than what we had to endure in our cramped practice rooms. A pity that both the Wellington Chamber Orchestra and the NZ School of Music Orchestra don’t have the luxury of a similar sound-metamorphosis. One could reflect by way of compensation that we live in a troubled, less-than-ideal world, and making and listening to music in a less-than-ideal acoustic environment could perhaps be regarded as a metaphor for our troubled times.

The music featured on the programme for this concert mirrors some of the issues associated with “troubled times” – the Schumann concerto is a romantic, almost escapist evocation of a world removed from irreconcilable conflict and darkness; while its pairing with the Shostakovich symphony in the concert could epitomize the chasm between an ideal and the reality of life. The latter work all too graphically depicts the constraints placed upon individual activity and happiness by a regime prepared to brutally sacrifice human life to maintain the status quo. Certainly the contrast between the two halves of the concert couldn’t help but make upon listeners an enormous impression of distance traversed, and of experience both enjoyed and resolutely confronted.

The orchestra had the inestimable benefit of pianist Diedre Irons as soloist for the Schumann concerto, a work with whose performance she’s been identified over the years. She certainly commanded the keyboard to thrilling effect in places, such as in the first-movement cadenza, and during those joyously abandoned moments in the work’s finale, when piano and orchestra match momentums stride-for-stride. Perhaps the immediacy of the acoustic had something to do with it, but I was surprised her playing seemed very insistently-projected in places where I was expecting more light-and-shade, more limpid and withdrawn tones, as with the first movement’s main theme (I did write in my notes at that point, “piano very full-toned – but we are all very close, and this IS a full-blooded romantic piano concerto!”). Having said this, I thought the slow movement beautifully phrased throughout by piano and orchestra alike, a highlight being the gorgeous tones of the ‘cellos in their “big tune” mid-way through the movement, which the rest of the strings joined in with and shared. The winds, while not always DEAD in tune throughout, negotiated some lovely exchanges with the piano at the very end of this movement. And all credit to both oboe and clarinet, in the first movement voicing their respective first-and second-subject themes clearly and gracefully, and to the horns for their great calls at the reprise of the finale’s main, leaping theme.

In general, I thought the musicians captured the joy of the music, if not all the poetic nuances of the writing – I was able to witness a huge wink from conductor Ken Young to his soloist after she had completed a surging flourish leading into one of those full-blooded orchestral tutti in the finale, an exchange which nicely summed up the collaborative spirit of the performance. No such joy and tumbling warmth was in evidence during the concert’s second half, featuring Shostakovich’s mighty Eleventh Symphony – whatever collaborative spirit celebrated by the music was indeed a grim, resolute affair, the symphony’s subtitle “The Year 1905” providing a clue as to the work’s intent and physical and emotional terrain. Having heard Ken Young expertly conduct a similarly harsh and confrontational work last year, the Sixth Symphony of Vaughan Williams, I was prepared to have my sensibilities similarly laid bare by the Russian composer’s all-too-palpable depictions of violent oppression and untoward human suffering.

The symphony is one of a number of Shostakovich’s works which has acquired over the years a certain negative reputation for politically-motivated bombast. True, in certain hands, these works can sound empty and over-inflated, but rarely when interpreted by Russian conductors like Mravinsky and Kondrashin, who get their players to cut through the hollow-sounding rhetoric to the nub of the matter. In a sense, everything is already in the music (as with Michelangelo’s “releasing the angel from the stone”) and the musicians simply work to set it all free. For me, this is just what Ken Young’s conducting and the playing of the student musicians (helped by a handful of NZSO players) managed to do throughout the work. The Symphony emerged as the searing, universal testament of human suffering and fortitude that its composer would have wanted it to be.

Each movement’s prevailing character was sharply etched – the hushed opening, with its ghostly brass fanfares (both trumpet and horn by turns capturing that paradoxical sense of enormity of distance in time and space, and oppressive, impending menace, the occasional split note mattering little in such an atmosphere), the flute duo’s melancholy song, and the constant suggestions from orchestral groupings of underlying suffering, despair and menace, set the scene for the nightmarish coruscations to follow. Young beautifully controlled the second movement’s swirling foretaste of the ensuing tragedy, and got the utmost out of all sections during the pitiless fugal passages and the savage three-against-two brass-and-percussion onslaught, everybody, the audience included, collapsing with exhaustion at the end, the trumpet calls having a proper “angel-of-death” ambience, with strings and winds offering little consolation.

Over portentous pizzicati the violas beautifully sang their third-movement lament, joined by violins (playing lower!) to great effect, the ensuing quasi-Wagnerian textures (shades of Siegfried and Fafner!) dissipated by conciliatory strings, Young building the intensities with his players to almost-unbearable thresholds of pain and angst, before the short-lived respite offered by the return of the viola theme. Still, nothing in the performance surpassed the players’ commitment to the “Tocsin” finale (my notes feature scribbled exclamations such as “wonderful punch and spike”, “like a series of hammer-blows”, “slashing violin lines”, “roaring, stuttering brass”, and “shattering climax”, one’s critical senses obviously too dumbstruck by the onslaught to resort at the time to anything more than cliches!). It didn’t matter that, in the final uproar, I couldn’t hear the climactic tubular bells being rung at all – there was simply no room in the crowded soundscape – it was that feeling of having witnessed musicians at full stretch playing music which activated one’s capacities for total involvement which was lastingly treasurable and made the most impression.

Polish Pride

SZYMANOWSKI – Concert Overture

CHOPIN – Piano Concerto No.2

CHOPIN (arr.Stravinsky) – Nocturne

LUTOSLAWSKI – Symphony No.4

Diedre Irons (piano)

Jacek Kaspszyk (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 29th April 2010

Polish hearts beat staunchly both at the beginning of and throughout this special concert in the Michael Fowler Centre, as Beata Stocyńska, the Polish Ambassador to New Zealand, addressed those present in the Michael Fowler Centre at the invitation of Peter Walls the orchestra’s CEO.  Mrs Stocyńska spoke of her countrymen’s and women’s pride in their culture and the achievements of their creative artists, such as Fryderyk Chopin, whose 200th birthday was marked by the proclamation of a “Year of Fryderyck Chopin” by the Polish Government. There was tragedy, too, at the mention by the ambassador of the recent air-crash in Russia that claimed the lives of the Polish President and a number of government officials, an event that gave this concert and its music all the more poignancy for those present. Adding his dignified gravitas to the occasion was the Governor-General of New Zealand, the Honourable Sir Anand Satyanand, speaking on behalf of all of the non-Polish people present, and eloquently but simply conveying a nation’s sympathy for another’s anguish and grief.

The tributes concluded, it was then over to the musicians, who moved the proceedings forward spectacularly with Karol Szymanowski’s Concert Overture. Anybody unfamiliar with Szymanowski’s music would have presumed that the overture was by Richard Strauss, so unerringly does the younger man imitate the latter, at the time the most famous composer in Europe. In fact Szymanowski almost out-Strausses Strauss, if not to the music’s advantage – though exciting and forceful, the work is simply too heavily scored, and risks tiring the listener’s ear before the end. Conductor Jacek Kaspszky controlled the profusion of youthful orchestral exuberance as best he could, although one was still left with a “less-is-more” feeling after the tumultuous waves of instrumental tone had ceased once and for all.

If the excitement and energy was all too palpable during the Szymanowski Overture, similar qualities were in short supply during much of the performance of the Chopin piano concerto which followed, at least in the orchestral playing. Though numbered as the second, the F Minor Concerto was actually composed earlier than the E Minor No.1, and, despite the young composer’s love for Mozart’s music, shows little of the latter’s aptitude for using the orchestra as an effective protagonist, especially in the outer movements. It’s music that doesn’t ”play itself”, requiring instead plenty of positive and energetic advocacy, which conductor and orchestra seemed strangely reluctant to fetch up, with the result that, when pianist Diedre Irons wasn’t playing, the music seemed to amble inconsequentially along. Right at the outset there was genuine poetic feeling from the strings, and some nice work by oboist Robert Orr, but thereafter things were oddly lacklustre – some nicely shaped bassoon-and piano exchanges later in the movement raised hopes, but the duetting if anything seemed to further inhibit rather than stimulate any contrasting vigour and muscle in the tuttis.

It’s interesting, and fortunate, that the slow movement of the concerto is an absolute gem – inspired by the young composer’s passion for a singer, Constantia Gladowska, the music conjures up a kind of breath-stopping enchantment throughout, underpinned by a richly-woven carpet of sensitively-sustained orchestral tones. Diedre Irons wove one magical arabesque after another in this movement with finely-spun feeling and delicacy, nicely supported by the orchestra at every turn. But as for the rest, there was little to enthuse about – no strong impulse or spark that would have energised those admittedly dull orchestral textures and given the interchanges between piano and orchestra some interest. The pianist was doing her utmost (and how good to have her perform with the NZSO once again), but the orchestral response to her elaborate solo paragraphings and spirited lead-ins during the outer movements suggested that hearts and minds were largely elsewhere.

Igor Stravinsky’s piquant orchestration of Chopin’s A-flat Nocturne Op.32 No.2 served to demonstrate the well-known balletic inclinations of one of the twentieth-century’s greatest composers. Written in 1909 for the impresario Diaghilev, to extend an existing ballet using Chopin’s music for the famed Ballets Russes, Stravinsky produced a delightful neo-Tchaikovsky-like realisation which brought out all the sentiment of the original (a lovely “stopped” horn at the cadence-points of the opening section) and gave bright Russian colours to the more vigorous episodes in the middle part of the work. A lovely, diaphanous ambience gave the conclusion a sombre beauty, Kaspszyk and the players nicely realising the setting’s mixture of delicacy and turbulence.

Both delicacy and turbulence were writ large in the evening’s final work from Poland, the Fourth Symphony of Lutoslawski. Overshadowed at first by the incredible popularity of his Third Symphony, with its engaging tunefulness and high drama, Lutoslawski’s Fourth is a much tougher proposition, shorter, more introverted and darker, in places elegiac. The work has a two-movement layout, each part relating to the other in a way that creates a kind of arched structure, the first movement making its listeners, in the composer’s words, “hungry, and finally even impatient” for the fulfilment of the second part. So we heard the clarinet’s gentle, lyrical theme at the start against a murmuring accompaniment, extended later by both flute and clarinet,and interspersed by episodes of faster, more mercurial and less predictable music – these are marked in the score “ad libitum” and the performers asked to improvise, to shape the gestures according to their own impulses.

The players were transformed, engaged, focused and totally committed to making these sounds – my notes refer to things like “impassioned tolling-bell figures – great swinging strides from basses, snappish brass clusters splash colour and tighten tension, strings soar and sear…”  and later “claustrophobic ostinati from strings with brass and percussion bouncing backwards and forwards off walls…” the impression thus given of sometimes elemental, sometimes feverish activity. Against this were the moments of stasis, in line with Lutoslawski’s avowed intention of delaying the listener’s desire for continuity and resolution through unexpected contrast and variety. I noted “pointillistic shimmerings from strings, iridescences from everywhere, like fireflies at dusk” and “great spaces, deep loneliness, railway lights humming along lines in the middle of nowhere – a sense of impulses coursing over vast spaces, subdued but purposeful…”. One’s gradual awareness of the process of resolution of these disparate elements became a profound listening experience – throughout the performance the focus of the playing and conducting was palpable, spell-binding in its intensity and brilliance, and unerring in its control and direction, for which the musicians received their just dues from the audience at the end.

Smetana: Sarka from Ma Vlast; Sibelius: Violin Concerto; Tchaikosky: Symphony No 6 ‘Pathétique’

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen with Hilary Hahn (violin)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 23 April, 6.30pm

I have the feeling that while the Wellington audience realizes that Hilary Hahn is quite a good violinist, many do not quite know the extent of her international renown. One doesn’t become a Gramophone magazine Artist of the Year on account of being simply competent – and that was 18 months ago. The NZSO programme booklet, at least, marked the orchestra’s awareness of her pre-eminence with an unusual double-spread biographical essay. There was a full house and I understand some were turned away: a contrast with the situation at the fine Bruckner/Strauss concert a fortnight earlier which, of course, had deserved a similar audience.

Hahn’s vehicle was the Sibelius concerto, oddly, only seven months after the orchestra’s performance of it in the Sibelius Festival with its concertmaster as soloist. That was a fine performance, but this one was superb. Not only did Hahn demonstrate every kind of spiritual energy, from dynamic power to breathless, poetic finesse in her role, but her very presence, petite and all as she is, seemed to inspire in the orchestra a boundless intensity in the tutti, and especially in the cellos and basses (both sections seem remarkably inspired by the leadership of bassist Hiroshi Ikematsu), low brass and bassoons, but also their obverse: misty, shimmering pianissimi in the opening pages and the several magical diminishings of sheer physical power, such as in the slow movement.

Even if her scarlet dress didn’t altogether endorse the emotion of the tremulous, sub-audible dawning passage at the opening, it came to represent the character of her ful-blooded playing soon enough, helped by the commanding projection of sound from her fine instrument.

She played an encore, to cleanse he palette, as it were – the Allegro assai (I think) from Bach’s 3rd solo violin sonata.

What most characterizes her playing is not just the flawless intonation, beauty of tone and the detailed nuances that colour and embroider every phrase, but the celebration of the human spirit, generosity and optimism, belief in the importance of human creativity (if such purple extravagances be allowed). Those are the spiritual messages of all great art, regardless of the specific emotions and images with which they engage.

Those thoughts recurred listening to Tchaikovsky’s last symphony, with its assumed text of despair, a reading that is hard to avoid as one leaves with the last movement in the ears. Yet that is hardly the overwhelming message of the earlier movements, though in a performance such as this where I felt both second and third movements to be in the nature of forced rejoicing, unvarying in their tempo and without much dynamic variety.

It struck me that Inkinen’s immediate start of the last movement was as much to deny any temptation to hear the March-like 3rd movement as an affirmation of over-confidence, to reject it at once as empty bombast, as it was to stop the inevitable, unwanted applause that makes such a juxtaposition hard to bring about.

While the middle two movements are interesting, the Pathétique’s heart, unlike with many great symphonies, seems to lie in the first and last movements which seem far more complex, obscure, ambiguous and plain beautiful than the two middle movements. Their orchestration, their ebb and flow of speed and dynamics, exert a much stronger attraction to the emotions and to tantalize the intellect.

Played at the beginning, and completing this programme devoted to the music of the Slav, and near-Slav world, was the long overdue playing of one of Smetana’s symphonic poems: an imaginative stroke. It puzzles me that so many of the pieces of music that feature in writings about music and that furnish the minds of at least older audience members, from their childhood, are ignored by concert arrangers: the more popular of the Ma Vlast cycle for example, Vltava and From Bohemia’s Woods and Meadows.  Sarka is a particularly dramatic piece, perhaps not entirely successful in its shape, but susceptible, as shown here, to brilliant and arresting performance; the clarinet solos were most eloquent and there were fine passages from other players such as trombones and tuba.

Lovers of the tone poems lament that a composer of such orchestral flair didn’t attempt the symphony, or more large-scale orchestral music.

In all, this was a brilliant concert fully justifying the big audience, and the presence of this remarkable violinist.

Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei

Stravinsky: Danses concertantes (1942); Psathas: Djinn (with Pedro Carneiro – marimba); Beethoven: Symphony No 3 in E flat ‘Eroica’

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 17 April 2010

The Wellington Orchestra’s 2010 season does not have such a conspicuous theme as the two previous seasons have had. This year the anniversaries are being celebrated: while I am personally affected by such curiosity, not everyone is urged to place everything in a historical continuum. So the first concert was about this year, and marks it with a piece by a New Zealand composer first performed at this concert which is, oddly enough, 2010. Following concerts feature music first performed in 1810, 1910 and 1710 respectively.

Marc Taddei told us that the choice of the programme pivoted on Psathas’s new work, which he wanted to set between important music from the greatest composers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

At certain points in the 20th century there may have been little argument about Stravinsky’s pre-eminence; it might not be so obvious now. Just one, and clearly idiosyncratic, measure: in my own collection of LPs and CDs, six other composers born after 1875 rate higher – Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Ravel, Bartok, Vaughan Williams, with Poulenc hard on Stravinsky’s heels! 

Nor would everyone think the Danses concertantes stand alongside Beethoven’s Eroica. Stravinsky envisaged it as music for dance but few ballet companies have taken it on, and it certainly doesn’t rank with the three great ballets, or even later ones such as Apollon Musagète, Le baiser de la fée or Agon. Yet it sounds very danceable, even though it is all written in varieties of common time, two of the five sections being marches, of unmistakable Stravinsky character. The melodies and the orchestration are also unmistakeable, notwithstanding possible influence of a composer like Poulenc (though that might that have worked the other way?).

The orchestra handled the vivid dynamic and tempo changes, and balances between winds and strings, with dramatic awareness; if polish was uneven there were plenty of moments where the sonorities and the instrumental textures delighted: the familiar horn fanfares were just one. Conductor and orchestra showed a singular instinct for the score.

What the performance did was to remind me of the large number of Stravinsky’s orchestral works, quite apart from the three great ballets) that we should hear more often – the three symphonies, the Divertimento, the concertos, as well as the later ballets such as Pulcinella, Jeu de cartes and those mentioned above.  If he is the greatest composer of last century, why does he feature so rarely in the concert hall and, relative to others such as those I named, on recordings?

The main course was the premiere of John Psathas’s new orchestral score, entitled Djinn. César Franck’s symphonic poem of the same name, inspired by Victor Hugo’s poem, was, naturally, of no help in preparing one’s receptors for it.

It is a concerto for marimba and orchestra, predominantly ebullient, riotous, though often with an implicit calm, suggestions of raga, of Latin sentiment, all the while employing the orchestra, especially percussion and winds, with enormous virtuosity. Not overlooking the palette of effects from strings that created the element of mysticism that lies in the Indian supernatural being which Psathas blends, at least in his evocative note, with Greek mythology and philosophy: for two of the three movements have Greek references (Pandora, Labyrinth and Out-dreaming the Genie).

One could imagine that the Djinn, depicted by the marimba, played with almost unbelievable wizardry by Portuguese percussionist Pedro Carneiro, was floating above or was inseminated into the entire fabric of the piece.  Not a conventional concerto by any means, not even with the ebb-tide, look-alike cadenza that ended the Labyrinth movement.  A secondary soloist in Jeremy Fitzsimons’s side drum, placed in front of the conductor; whose role hardly seemed to justify the limelight.

Without having seen the score, I can only imagine the near dismay that might have faced Marc Taddei when he first opened it, and even more, as rehearsals began. Not only the task of realizing the sounds and their relative weight and meaning, but the complex rhythms.  The outcome was a highly impressive premiere which I’m sure will tempt other orchestras.

Nevertheless, I found myself more than a little bemused and battered at the end of this phantasmagoria of riotous sound; increasingly a lover of the sublime, of sustained lyricism and spirituality: speed and massive orchestral forces have decreasing appeal for me, even when huge skill, undeniable musical impulse, an underlying scheme and a spiritual message are present. As the Emperor said (foolishly, and probably apocryphally) about Die Entführung aus dem Serail: ‘Too many notes my dear Mozart’. But I wouldn’t dare.

Just as it has become risky for a 90-piece symphony orchestra today to tackle pre-1800 music, because the ‘historically-informed’ police frown, so it might be risky for a small orchestra to tackle orchestral music from the Eroica onwards. (Not that today we are short of lighter, tighter, more transparent accounts of the Romantic masterpieces from the likes of Gardiner and Harnoncourt). The immediate impression was of less than ideal weight and bass-driven sonority; and faster speeds than of old. But such impressions are often fleeting, and when within a few minutes the impact of a genuine musical instinct in a conductor becomes evident, all is well.

That was not quite what happened, as opportunities, in the first movement and again in the Finale, for the dramatic pause, the slight rallentando before a fresh declamation, were not always grasped; though the latter had started with a fine sense of foreboding, a slightly uneasy anticipation.

In the first movement, the orchestra, which played throughout with uncommon verve and commitment, was sometimes discomforted by the speed; the slightly brisker andante of the Funeral March made sense, while the Scherzo was surprisingly effective, perhaps benefiting from the leaner body of strings.

Nevertheless, the conductor and orchestra continue to attract big – almost sell-out – audiences, which makes one wonder at the signs of reduced activity this season.

R.STRAUSS – Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings

BRUCKNER –  Symphony No.7 in E Major

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 10th April 2010

At the beginning of the concert the NZSO’s Chief Executive, Peter Walls, brought the Chilean Ambassador Luis Lillo onto the platform to speak to the audience. The Ambassador talked about the devastation in Chile in the wake of February’s major earthquake, and thanked the orchestra and the concertgoers present for their support of the Chilean Earthquake Humanitarian Relief Fund. The NZSO has announced that all proceeds from programme sales at this and the Auckland concert on Saturday 17th April will go to the Fund. What a pity, therefore, that the attendance for this concert was noticeably less than usual, despite Peter Walls’ hope expressed in the programme foreword, that because of the music offered the concert would be well patronised. A possible explanation is that a proportion of orchestral patrons continue to take fright at the appearance of the name “Bruckner”, while another is that the combination with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen seemed to some people as if it would be too much like hard listening work!

Certainly the pairing of two largely elegiac and valedictory scores gave the concert a very specific flavour, exploring a particular ambience in depth as it were, from two different viewpoints. Of course, there are as many responses to great music as there are people, and for some, the prospect of having to square up to any composer’s (let alone TWO composers’) outpourings of grief and mourning can be too sobering, even disturbing an experience, rather too far outside the parameters of “comfortable listening”. It’s precisely because of this that others, like myself, would have revelled in the experience of being taken so profoundly into those darkly despairing realms, far removed from normal experience. In fact I thought that, musically, it was great and imaginative programming.

Strauss’s Metamorphosen, scored for for 23 solo strings, was written by the composer as a lament for the physical destruction suffered by German cities during the Second World War – though the larger view of the composer’s intent would probably include the havoc wrought by the Nazis and the war in general upon German art and culture. The music’s intensity was highlighted in this performance by the musicians, with the exception of the ‘cellos, standing up to play, giving the music-making an extra “gestural” quality, quite choreographic in effect, and fascinating to watch. For me, it added to the performance’s intensity and sense of player-involvement – incidentally, qualities which I’m pleased to observe, seemed to carry over into the second-half performance of the Bruckner as well, even though most of the orchestra members had for the symphony resumed their seats.

Conductor Pietari Inkinen encouraged a deeply-voiced, extremely hushed beginning to the Strauss, the sounds seeming to grow from out of the ground the players stood upon as the violas brought in the first hint of the quotation from the “Eroica” Symphony’s Marche Funebre, one which transfixes this work. The upper strings brought cool and clear light and space to the textures, with intensities hinted at all kinds of different levels, both dynamic and timbral, and everything beautifully controlled and shaped. The work unfolded in great paragraphs, giving we listeners a sense of form and perspective with succeeding episodes, the transitions bringing out remembrances of light and warmth set against darker utterances, the solo violin a plaintive voice amid the ebb and flow of levels of feeling. Conductor and players brought the music up to an incredible fever pitch at the agitato climax, the lower instruments then digging in with a will, bringing out the full emotional force of the tragedy of man’s descent into inhumanity, and properly overwhelming the textures of the music with gloom and despair. It was black and trenchant stuff, taking us right to the abyss’s edge, before enveloping us within the deepest tones of dignified mourning at the close – impressive and deeply moving.

Of all the Bruckner Symphonies, the Seventh (although some would nominate the Fourth, instead) is possibly the most approachable for the uninitiated. It’s a most attractive work, filled with gorgeous melody, rich and varied colourings and a well-balanced amalgam of pastoral gentleness, playful impulse and epic power. The orchestra and Pietari Inkinen gave what I thought was a splendidly uninhibited performance of the work, bringing out and revelling in those marvellously juicy lyrical lines throughout the first two movements, and setting the music’s more ethereal other-worldly episodes against a gloriously epic soundscape of rugged and far-flung proportions.

One of the Symphony’s most distinctive features was a highlight of the performance and a resounding success – the use of those special instruments known as “Wagner tubas” in the work’s slow movement, the music paying homage to the composer that Bruckner admired almost unreservedly. The latter was at work on the slow movement when news of the death of “the Master” reached him, and he used the quartet of these eponymous instruments to express his grief. This was the passage immediately following the music’s biggest and most resplendent climax, when the instruments begin a dignified and sombre lament, which becomes a threnody of deeply-felt emotion – here it was all quite superbly played and beautifully controlled by the musicians.

With the other movements equally as characterful and focused, this was a performance to remember and savour – a soulfully-realised first movement with wonderfully-arched lyrical lines,a vigorous and charmingly bucolic Scherzo, and a Finale whose performance here knitted the music’s somewhat stop-start character together with rare cohesiveness, and brought about a resplendent finish. Pietri Inkinen and his players delivered the last pages of the work with a breadth and grandeur that evoked an image of the world viewed by the composer from what seemed like mountain-tops akin to the portals of Heaven.

All in all, I thought the concert a most promising start by the orchestra and its conductor to the 2010 season.