WALTON – Spitfire Prelude and Fugue

Suite from Henry V

ELGAR – Serenade for String Orchestra

Variations on an Original Theme “Enigma”

Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Rachel Hyde, conductor

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

Sunday 28th March, 2010

The music-comedy team of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann (of the show At the Drop of a Hat fame) would invariably begin their live performances with a roistering number “A Transport of Delight” (happily preserved on recordings). This was, as Michael Flanders would explain, to help them “get the pitch of the hall”, a phrase which came immediately to my mind when Rachel Hyde and the Wellington Chamber Orchestra began the band’s first Sunday afternoon concert of the year. Although not as large an orchestra as, say, the Vector Wellington ensemble or the NZSO at average strength, the Wellington Chamber Orchestra is sizeable enough to make a pretty stirring noise at full throttle – one that always takes a bit of getting used to at the beginning of any concert in the confined spaces of St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace. Walton’s rousing “Spitfire” Prelude did the trick, the full-blooded sounds pinning our ears back, blowing away exterior and interior cobwebs, and probably temporarily flattening out our finer hearing sensibilities, thus enabling us to cope better with the rest of the programme! In such an immediate, even raw-sounding acoustic, it’s difficult for any orchestral group to produce a pleasing tone, not to mention surviving a fairly analytical spotlight; and the Chamber Orchestra emerged from this concert with considerable credit on both counts.

After the cinematoscopic strains of the “Prelude”, the orchestra launched into the splendidly-written fugue, negotiating its leaping energies steadily and giving the phrases plenty of “point” under Rachel Hyde’s direction. I enjoyed picking up the different changes of texture as different instrument groups threw their weight into the fray, the heavy brass sounding particularly exciting. The slower central section was sensitively handled, despite some string intonation diffculties; and apart from some slight out-of-sync problems between strings and wind when the fugue returned, momentum was excitingly restored, with the brass’s toccata-like statements at the end capping off a great finish to the work.

Elgar’s adorable Serenade for Strings was next; and to my delight it received a sensitive and glowing performance throughout – a lovely opening, the very first viola phrase’s leading note beautifully accented in a way that was echoed throughout the movement, imparting to the music a “charged” quality that gave the rhythms and phrasings a real lift, that characteristic Elgarian “stride” which informs much of his work. I thought the violins a bit reticent at first, but they leaned into that wonderful upwardly-leaping phrase so beautifully and with such heart, that the music readily took on the glow it needed to work its magic. The violas momentarily lost their poise at the reprise, but quickly recovered, supporting the violins with their last heartfelt utterance, before things were brought to a beautifully autumn-coloured close. Rachel Hyde encouraged some lovely phrases at the slow movement’s opening, the three-note figure like a sigh leading to and away from the middle note – most affecting. The strings sweetly understated the “big tune’s” first appearance, then radiantly resolved the minor key episode at the top of the phrase – very nice! Altogether, the ebb and flow of feeling in this movement was beautifully caught by all concerned, the violas at the end chiming in with a moment of smoky beauty – lovely. The wind-blown start to the finale generated deep-throated ascents from the lower strings and great strength of tone at the reprise of the tune – an untidy transition to the “striding” episode soon passed, allowing us to enjoy that lump-in-throat key-change to the full, capturing the music’s almost valedictory nostalgia at the end so tellingly.

Although Walton’s fashionable literary circle friends (notably the Sitwells) disliked Elgar’s music, Walton himself admired Elgar. There are touches of Elgarian colour and spectacle of the sort one encounters in Falstaff to be found also in Walton’s music for the wartime film Henry V, which famously starred Laurence Olivier. Walton’s score for the film has gone on to have a life of its own in the concert hall, and Rachel Hyde’s energetic leadership of her orchestral forces throughout did ample justice to the music’s pageantry and colour throughout, evident in the fully technicolour opening The Globe Playhouse. The two strings-only movements, The Death of Falstaff and Touch Her Soft Lips and Part brought lovely tones and sensitive voicings from the players, while the visceral Charge and Battle again brought the big guns into play to great effect, with terrific work from all sections of the orchestra, and an echo of the famous “Bailero” tune from Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne in the aftermath of the battle. The concluding Agincourt Song found the brasses again in fine form, with winds adding fine flourishes to the resplendent colours, and the strings determinedly keeping the triplet rhythms going steadily and strongly. Altogether  it was a great and fitting flourish of a finish.

At the second half’s beginning, Rachel Hyde spoke to the audience about the concert’s major item, Elgar’s famous “Enigma’ Variations, getting sections of the orchestra to play examples of the composer’s use of his theme throughout the work – a helpful and engaging thing to do, especially for younger listeners. She spoke also about Elgar’s original ending for the work, a more sombre and circumspect one that conductor Hans Richter persuaded the composer to change, hereby concluding with a great burst of positive energy, and sense of optimistic well-being instead!  The performance was loving, detailed and deeply committed throughout, technically fallible in a few places, but conveying a real sense of a creative artist’s genius in bringing so many different human personalities into view. Highlights were many, from the tenderly-phrased opening statement of the theme, with beautiful winds and lovely viola-and-‘cello counterpoint, through and into the first variation depicting the composer’s wife, Alice, the music’s grace and dignity giving rise to the utmost depth of feeling via a passionate climax, nicely poised and shaped by conductor and musicians. Some of the more tricky syncopated rhythms and dovetailings sorely tested the players, the strings in No.2 (H.D.S-P) never really settling, and the opening of No.4 (W.M.B.) shaky at the beginning – but No.7 (Troyte) was terrific, with strong timpani playing, and swirling strings that caught the mood, and delivered the requisite snap at the end, as did, incidentally, the playing in No.11 (G.R.S.), strings nimble, brass punchy, and winds and timpani emitting fine shrieks and thuds at the end. People who came to hear No.9 (Nimrod) first and foremost wouldn’t have been disappointed, either – the conductor kept things moving, nicely building the blocks of sound, and shaping episodes beautifully, such as the wind phrases in the central section, and the noble brass outpourings at the reprise of the famous tune. And framing Nimrod were No.8 (W.N.) and No.10 (Dorabella), each here appropriately charming and lyrically played.

The work’s grand finale, No.14 (E.D.U.) started with plenty of swagger from the players, and continued with great rhythmic elan through all the accelerandos towards those great colonnades of sound at the climaxes, building up the tension and excitement well. Just towards the end I sensed something of a “Starting to run on empty” feeling about the playing, as if, having given their all, the musicians were struggling to find enough energy for the final payoff. But even if that was the case, with everybody hanging in there for life itself’s sakes, the achievement was notable and memorable. Applause for conductor and orchestra was whole-hearted, the response auguring well for the rest of the season. Full credit to Rachel Hyde, as well as to the players – I would like to hear and see more of her as a conductor over the next while, as she got an excellent response from her musicians, and did interesting and thoughtful things with them to make it all come really alive.

ANTONIN DVORAK – Serenade for  Winds in D Minor Op.44

TABEA SQUIRE – The Suneater – for Recorders and Strings

HELMUT SADLER – Concertino for Recorders and Strings

JOSEF SUK – Symphony in E Major Op.14

Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Soloists: Members of the Recorders and Early Music Union

Conductor: Gregory Squire

St.Andrew’s on the Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 6th December, 2009

Family ties involving both composers and performers were brought into play through this concert – firstly, on the strictly compositional front, works by both Antonin Dvorak and his son-in-law Joseph Suk featured on the programme; while Wellingtonian composer Tabea Squire’s commissioned work “The Suneater – for Recorders and Strings” received skilled and committed advocacy from musicians whose ranks included both of her parents, conductor Gregory Squire and leader of the Recorders and Early Music Union, Katrin Eickhorst-Squire. I was interested in the conductor’s (and, presumably, the orchestra committee’s) decision to play Tabea Squire’s new work TWICE on the programme – while it seemed a laudable thing to do for a new piece, helping the audience to take in so much more of the work’s essence on a second hearing, one would hope that Greg Squire would want to extend such advocacy to all new music he conducts. His enthusiastic and engaging spoken introduction to the work emphasised the importance of repeated hearings to the understanding of any unfamiliar music – by way of example he amusingly quoted his first encounter as a student with Brahms’s First Symphony.

However, it was not Brahms, but his great contemporary, Dvorak, whose music opened the orchestra’s programme, the Serenade for Winds, Op.44. This was a work which obviously represented another formative musical experience for the conductor, who described the prospect of directing the piece as akin to a dream come true. Something about this piece truly engages people – the friend I happened to be sitting next to in the audience bent over and whispered to me “This is my funeral music” just as the piece was about to begin! It’s certainly a most lovable work, one which the Chamber Orchestra wind players (helped by a ‘cello and double-bass) relished with delight, digging into the dotted rhythms of the opening with great enthusiasm and managing some nice dynamic variation through the lead-back measures (lovely clarinets in thirds, nicely answered by horns) to the opening’s return. The second movement (a trifle fast for the players’ articulation at the outset) deftly pointed the contrast between the lyrical opening and the scherzo-like trio section scamperings, even if some of the instrumental solos had treacherous twists, and the tricky rhythmic dovetailings at the end of the scherzo-episode fully stretched the group’s capabilities as an ensemble.The players got a lovely colour at the slow movement’s beginning, horns, bassoons and strings laying down a rich carpet of sound on which the individual solos could be floated; and while there were smudged instrumental lines in places, ensemble was good and the overall feeling was right. A good, strong and forthright opening set the finale on its way confidently, and even if the ensemble subsequently lacked the sheer weight of tone to bring to bear to the growing excitement of the rhythms and exuberance of the fanfares at the end there were heartwarming moments, the most engaging being at the recapitulation of the work’s very opening, sturdily and strongly played.

Tabea Squire’s work for recorders and strings was inspired by Keri Hulme’s iconic novel “The Bone People”, in which story appears a “Suneater”, an idiosyncratic device made of wires, mirrors and crystal which spins when placed in the sun, and which is accidentally broken by its maker. Further inspiration for the composer came from various world mythologies that have developed “sun-eating” stories explaining the oscillations in nature between darkness and light. The music explored a range of colours and hypnotic rhythms which suggested these processes. Right from its eerie Aeolian-harp-like opening on strings, through exchanges both throaty and piping-like with various recorders, the piece unerringly evolved a strongly-wrought atmosphere, somewhat reminiscent of Holst’s “Neptune” in places. I liked the oscillations between rich strings and more astringent winds, which moved the sounds away from such remote “unknown region” ambiences and into more volatile and interactive realms. The intensely “breathy” effect of the recorders gave the last section an almost primitive feel, the instruments’ earthy,  “wrong-note” harmonies moving the sounds as a block out and away from the string ambiences, like a separation of disparate elements, each to their own realms. A second playing of the piece focused these thoughts concerning union and dissolution even more strongly, though I found it was interesting how uniquely “charged” the first performance felt, compared with the repeat, when things simply sounded “different” – everything with more focus a second time round, but less ethereal and magical in effect.

Helmut Sadler’s pleasant but largely unremarkable Concertino for Recorders and Strings filled in an entertaining quarter-hour’s listening, from the “Walk in the Black Forest” aspect of the opening movement, with its out-of-door, almost cinematographic ambiences, and rumbustious attention-seeking tones from the massed recorders, through some quasi-exotic harmonisings in attractively ritualised marches and processionals (some lovely, sensitive solo and ensemble work from the wind players) to a final agitato movement, whose slower middle section was marred by some poor wind tuning, but whose livelier sections were well-upholstered by the strings and deftly negotiated by the “group of soloists”.

The family circle aspect of the concert was completed by the orchestra’s performance of Josef Suk’s Symphony in E Major, an early work, in many ways indebted to the influence of Dvorak, who was Suk’s teacher as well as becoming his father-in-law, but with many original and beautiful touches. As this was the only full orchestral outing of the afternoon for the players they made the most of things, and gave the performance all they had. Before the performance Greg Squire spoke of the composer’s later, darker works, such as the Asrael Symphony, written in the wake of the deaths of both Suk’s father-in-law and his wife, and emphasised by comparison the relatively sunny nature of the earlier symphony. The playing was marked by some lovely solo work in places – a single horn at the start, the clarinet introducing the second subject – and Greg Squire asked for and got great rolling cascades of sound in places, strings capped by festive brass, triumphant and buoyant. Similarly, for the slow movement, my notes read “lovely solos from clarinet and oboe, rich string accompaniments, playing captures the music’s volatility – everything full-on…” The orchestra realised plenty of the scherzo’s dancing energy and spirit, with only the trio section sounding less happy due to some string-intonation lapses.  As for the finale, although too long (the composer’s exuberance getting the better of his judgement with too many episodes and climactic denouments) Greg Squire’s and his orchestra’s concentration never flagged, keeping the narrative well-paced and nicely detailed. There were some tricky exposed passages for strings that sounded uncomfortable for the players at one or two purple points, but more importantly, the epic sweep of the music was conveyed to us in as full-blooded a manner as was required.

BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No.5 in E-flat “Emperor”

ELLINGTON – Suite “The River”

RESPIGHI – The Pines of Rome

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Vector Welington Orchestra

– with players from:

RNZAF Central Band,

Pelorus Trust Wellington Brass Band,

Titan Hutt City Brass Band

Wellington Town Hall, Sunday 22nd November 2009

You’d be hard put to devise a more celebratory conclusion to a season of orchestral concerts than this one, with both Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and Respighi’s sonic blockbuster “The Pines of Rome” in the programme. Of course, Michael Houstoun’s performance of the Beethoven was the last in his presentation of the complete series of the piano concerti, giving the occasion a kind of “double-whammy” effect, and at the concert’s conclusion leaving us quite exhilarated with the energy and vitality of it all. I admit to enjoying the Duke Ellington work “The River”, even if it seemed to me to be a bit of “determined to be different” programming, interesting though the music was to hear – but perhaps I’m showing my prejudices regarding both the application of musical “novelties” to programmes and the parallel neglect of homegrown music. With only one New Zealand work (Jack Body’s “Pulse”) to its concert-programming credit throughout 2009, and one (admittedly a premiere by John Psathas) over four concerts next year, I’d be tempted to observe that the orchestra isn’t putting across much of an indication of compositional activity in this country to its concert-going public, given that scheduling one New Zealand work per season is better than having none at all.

Having gotten the gripe out of the way, I can more freely plunge into the business of reviewing Sunday’s concert, which was a great success – firstly, Michael Houstoun came, saw and conquered with his spirited rendition of Beethoven’s largest and grandest piano concerto, while the two second-half works by turns tantalised and thrilled us with their displays of different kinds of orchestral virtuosity, the sultry rhythms and colours of Duke Ellington’s dance-suite, and the full gamut of instrumental brilliance and power generated by Respighi’s Roman picture-postcards. The combination of exciting solo and orchestral playing and the inimitable Wellington Town Hall ambience made for plenty of thrills and, for me, after-glowings of satisfaction.

No-one ever plays the “Emperor” these days as I first heard it played, which was in the grandest possible manner on a recording made by Daniel Barenboim with the great Otto Klemperer at the orchestral helm – totally anachronistic, but still glorious and overwhelming! Vestiges of that formative magnificence, I confess, haunt my perceptions of other performances experienced since, and with which I constantly struggle, as with all first loves – Houstoun’s and Marc Taddei’s conception was a lean and fiery one throughout the first movement, the playing generating considerable orchestral excitement in the opening tutti, and providing an interesting foil for the soloist’s slightly more detached and Olympian manner. I liked the way Taddei encouraged the orchestra brasses, the horns occasionally rasping with scarcely-contained ebullience, and wonderfully contrasting their manner with the beautifully-phrased poetry of the wind playing. As for the strings, their warm tones and incisive playing was a joy – only in places such as immediately after the “battering exchange” between piano and orchestra mid-movement, where they share canonical phrases with the piano did I feel they lacked the numbers for their playing to “tell”. Houstoun’s playing encompassed all of these moods with both initiatives and responses that took us to the music’s four corners – incisive when needed, lucid and cogent in argument, and ruminative at certain cadence-points, he realised the composer’s “generosity of spirit” to which he made reference in a programme-note containing his own, thoughtfully-expressed views of the whole concerto series.

After the first movement I found parts of the remainder of the concerto a tad less engaging – the slow movement was very pure, with concentrated feeling and tightly-conceived lines, but for me the merest shade driven in places where I wanted the music to stand and catch its own stillness, and make listeners aware of their own breath-taking….I thought it lacked some of what the Germans call “innigkeit”, an inward intensity and concentration that banishes all other awarenesses of things.  A moment that did work beautifully was the hushed lead-in to the finale, the piano’s sudden surge of energy into the rondo-theme excitingly breaking the spell and causing exhalations of pleasure from some fellow-listeners in the hall. Houstoun had an uncharacteristic moment of lack of poise in one of the rondo episodes, but quickly recovered, enjoying the music’s exhilarations and contrasting episodes of playful teasing with the orchestra, even at one point anticipating and reaching a downbeat before Taddei and the orchestra could get there, to no great harm in the flow and ebb of it all. At the end, a well-deserved standing ovation seemed to abruptly and surprisingly come to an end, as if people were expecting something would be said from the platform by somebody, who never actually appeared. If there were flowers for Houstoun, one hopes he received them backstage, at least – his achievement in presenting the whole series of concertos with Taddei and the orchestra during the year deserved the warmest and most heartfelt acclaim.

After the interval, Marc Taddei spoke with the audience about the orchestra’s 2010 season, a schedule which I thought had been very nicely devised – a feature had been made of centenaries of pieces of music and their composers, with works connected with 1910, 1810 and 1710, as well as with the present (John Psathas’s commissioned work “Djinn”).  Of course, this configuration worked against including any New Zealand composition except a new one, which was the case with the above work (“Che sara, sara” as the song goes – but I shall return, teeth bared, snapping at the orchestra’s programming heels, in 2011!). In truth I thought the schedule showed rather more flair and imagination regarding repertoire than did the NZSO’s already-published 2010 prospectus, with mouth-watering things promised such as Elgar’s Violin Concerto played by award-winning violinist Feng Ning, and Saint-Saens’ wonderful “Organ Symphony”.

I had little idea what to expect of the Duke Ellington work “The River”, though it seemed on the face of things to resemble Smetana’s well-known “Vltava” from his “Ma Vlast”, the idea of tracing the course of a river from its source through different episodes to either a lake or a larger river or even the sea. One of the sections of the score was titled “Village Virgins”, causing some conjecture regarding how such beings could be rendered musically (Smetana’s “virginal” equivalent, not actually in “Vltava” of course, but elsewhere in “Ma Vlast”, was the war-maiden Sarka and her fellow-Amazons). In the event, the suite of seven movements featured plenty of recognisably “bluesy” rhythms and textures which could have hinted at the music’s origins, but also some full-blooded cinematoscopic orchestral all-togethers, expertly scored by “the Duke”. I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d got my sequences of what I was hearing in line with the programme’s titles, but the ballad-like opening “Spring” with its melismatic horn parts made a great impression, with lovely playing from all concerned. Another movement to impress was the “Giggling Rapids” episode, evoked by a piano solo and agile brass, with terrific percussion work from Jeremy Fitzsimmons. I also liked the section called “The Lake”, beginning with great stillness, and sensitive detailing from the winds over the top of a broadly flowing tune from the lower strings, which eventually became a kind of “Begin the Beguine” from the brass. Finally, just as the virgins were getting into the swing of things during their section, the lights began to dim, and, as the music finished everything in the hall dissolved into blackness, like the end of a scene from a movie – very atmospheric and nicely brought off. Joseph Haydn, of course, would have loved it!

The empty seats in both “organ galleries” had meanwhile been filled by bandsmen and women carrying various shining instruments, in preparation for Respighi’s work to follow – and what a performance it was! I thought the orchestra boxed, as the saying goes, pounds above its actual weight, capturing all the brilliance and  gaiety of the opening section at a scintillating tempo, but one which didn’t “flatten out” the rhythms at all, keeping everything nicely spiked and buoyant. The change to a deep, sonorous ambience for the second section was utterly compelling and dramatic, with Tom Moyer’s trumpet-playing true and sweet, if simply too close and unatmospheric (if he had been offstage it would have been a truly magical moment) and Taddei and his players building the great central archway to brilliant effect. The third section featured more beautiful solo work, this time from clarinettist Moira Hurst, summoning up the enchantment of a nightingale’s song, and setting the scene for the ghostly procession to follow, an eerie, plangently-voiced cor-anglais solo ((Madeleine Sakofsky) seeming to awaken the shades of returning armies marching upon the still-sleeping city. Taddei set a marvellously slow tempo, eschewing the virtuoso romp through this section that spoils many recorded performances by crack orchestras, and instead vividly capturing the sense of a human juggernaut inexorably approaching, and menacing in its power. By this time, the array of brass players on both sides were on their feet, ready to awaken the citizenry and salute the homecoming heroes. What sounds they were! – as the brass players from the Central RNZAF Band, the Pelorus Trust Wellington Brass Band and the Titan Hutt City Brass Band gave voice to their instruments, along with the deep tones of the Town Hall pipe organ, along with the orchestra playing at full stretch enriching the soundscape with the loudest tones I think I’ve heard in the Town Hall since a performance of the Berlioz Requiem I heard given thirty years ago. Simply overwhelming! Bravo!

SIBELIUS – Luonnotar, for soprano and orchestra

GRIEG – Songs

CHRIS CREE BROWN – Icescape

BRAHMS – Symphony No.4 in E Minor

Leif Segerstam (conductor)

Solveig Kringelborn (soprano)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Friday 13th November 2009

It was hard to know what to make of this programme as an assemblage of music – I thought of it as a concert of two diverse halves, the first an exploration of cool, bracing sounds and ambiences from both the planet’s hemispheres, and the second an exposition of one of the greatest of all romantic symphonies. I would have preferred to have heard Leif Segerstam conduct more Scandinavian or perhaps some Russian music, following his and the orchestra’s magically-wrought first-half evocations of music associated with Arctic and Antarctic regions. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in how he would approach a work from the standard Central European symphonic repertoire. But, interesting though the Brahms Fourth Symphony performance was, I would have thought a major symphonic work from Northern Europe (Nielsen comes immediately to mind, though there are any number of works by other fine symphonists from this part of the world) might have been considered a more appropriate companion for music by Sibelius and Grieg, along with Chris Cree Brown’s impressive tone-poem “Icescape”. I remembered the remark “Segerstam is a wild man!” made by Pietari Inkinen during a pre-concert discussion forum at the beginning of the NZSO’s Sibelius symphonies series, and wanted to hear him apply that wild spirit to more music that breathes the same fresh, tingling and rarified air.

Still, in an imperfect world I was content with hearing Luonnotar, Sibelius’s utterly magical evocation of the Finnish creation myth, made all the more mysterious and ritualistic by the use of the composer’s native language, here engagingly delivered by Norwegian soprano Solveig Kringelborn. Her clear, communicative tones and detailed diction helped bring a powerful sense of storytelling to the work (wrongly described as a “song-cycle” in the pre-concert publicity – Luonnotar is actually a fully-fledged stand-alone extended orchestral song). At the beginning, the singer survived a slight “tickle” on one of her opening notes, going on to capture all of the brooding, mystical power of both words and music. Segerstam and the orchestra, for their part, provided her with a stunning evocation of timeless creative impulse, a real sense of something being wrought from nothing – now still and brooding, now urgent and restless, now elemental and declamatory. It was a marvellous performance, and a perfect fillip to the earlier Sibelius festival series – would that we had more directed by Segerstam in this vein (the incidental music to “The Tempest”, for example…)

More did follow, but not from Sibelius – instead, Christchurch composer Chris Cree Brown’s “Icescape” tellingly kept our listening temperatures firmly in single figures with some gloriously rugged orchestral sounds – rasping string timbres and bird-like cries from winds, accompanied by primordial glissandi from the brass and crystalline touches from percussion. Elemental blocks of sound from different orchestral sections contrasted tellingly with both a volatile dancing element and episodes of great stillness, the sostenutos readily suggesting the icy wastes of the Antarctic continent. It was a work where timbral differentiation was as crucial to the argument as was rhythm and dynamics, with some amazing, ear-tingling sounds resounding in the memory at the music’s conclusion.

I wondered whether the bracket of Grieg songs coming after such austerities would merely serve to underline Debussy’s dismissive “pink bonbons stuffed with snow” remark regarding the Norwegian composer’s music. I needn’t have worried – Grieg’s uniquely piquant and richly unsentimental harmonic language (greatly admired by both Frederick Delius and Percy Grainger) is heard to its most telling advantage in his songs, striking even in oft-heard pieces like “Solveig’s Song” from Peer Gynt, and the well-known “Last Spring” (one of two songs that the composer arranged for string orchestra, but vastly preferable in its original form). Singer, conductor and players made this music their own, with many magical touches, the soprano’s affecting “world-weary” tones in Solveig’s Song, the orchestra’s heartfelt phrasing of the strings-only passages of “Last Spring”, and the astringency of the strings-and-wind textures in the Mahlerian “En Svane” (A Swan) which concluded the first half. Only in the more declamatory passages of “From Mount Pincio” did I feel that the singer lacked the tonal reserves to fully “command” the vocal line, though again she shone in the work’s more ruminative, sensitively-breathed passages, and generally won our hearts.

Segerstam propelled the Brahms symphony on its way with little fuss and no intrusive exaggerations – everything was sweet-toned and unhurried, rather small in scale, but with nothing pushed or “hefted up” unnaturally. My notes make ready references to gorgeous orchestral playing from all departments, the whole creating a lovely autumnal atmosphere, with one or two touches suggesting the occasional ‘edge of the abyss” realisation, without drawing undue attention from the shape of the whole. I thought the opening of the slow movement was beautifully done (though it’s music that always gives me goosebumps!), pizziccato strings and winds enjoying the music’s equivocations of regret and resignation that colours whole episodes of this movement. The NZSO strings didn’t disappoint at the reprise of the big, Brucknerian tune, here gloriously rich and deep-toned, while the horns made a suitably baleful impression just before the movement’s close. I enjoyed the timpani’s prominent voicings during the rumbustious scherzo, with the horns this time warm and sonorous in the middle trio section.

Throughout the symphony a section of the audience had been applauding at the conclusion of each movement (unusual for a Wellington audience), and matters came to a head when the applause after the Scherzo interrupted the conductor’s attempt at an “attacca” with the final movement – Segerstam turned to the audience and pointedly extended four fingers, one after the other, to the amusement (or bemusement) of all concerned. Despite the finale’s big-boned opening, which splendidly carried us through the first gaunt utterances of the Passacaglia theme, I didn’t feel that Segerstam consistently picked up the music’s underlying forward thrust after some of the more lyrical episodes – the result was that the tension sagged towards the end, and the last few pages for me didn’t have that “screwed-up-tightly” quality that surely the whole movement is inexorably moving towards. And the conductor’s agogic pause inserted before the final chord seemed more self-indulgent than logical and organic, in this, the most “connected” of all romantic symphonies.

For me, however, all of this was of little moment – the concert’s first part alone had reaped such ample rewards, I felt richly repaid, and grateful that I had been given the chance to experience Pietari Inkinen’s “wild man” at work with repertoire he knows and loves – even if it was only half-a-concert’s worth!

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam with Solveig Kringelborn (soprano).

Karelia Suite (Sibelius); Symphony No 191 (Segerstam); Prelude to Die Meistersinger (Wagner); Four Last Songs (Strauss) 

Michael Fowler Centre, Saturday 31 October 2009

It’s 20 years since I heard Leif Segerstam conducting the NZSO, and the memory is of a highly gifted musician blessed with an eccentric’s sense of humour, enlivened with an intelligence and vivacity that sets him apart in his profession. His notes to his 191st symphony also reveal a fascination with numerology which he applies playfully to several strands of his life. Not that a whimsical delight in numbers is altogether foreign to musicians: Bach was similarly absorbed, at least according a lot of his commentators, and so was Schoenberg.

Segerstam’s own notes about the symphony and certain other matters connected with family dates and word meanings, are both pertinent and impertinent, amusing to the like-minded, possibly irritating to more serious, literal souls. 

What to make of a composer who has already written 230 symphonies buy the age of 65? Why not? It’s only about four a year through his adult life.

His notes are probably intended to be more mocking of ordinary musical analysis than valuable in ‘understanding’ the piece. We must start with an understanding the Rosenkrantz form, recognising the ‘free-pulsative’ style with roots in ‘Wiener Schule [presumably he means the Second Viennese School] seasoned with Nordic nature visions’. He refers to his creation as ‘a gigantic chambermusical happening for large orchestra performing without a conductor’.

After the orchestra had rearranged after the Karelia Suite, percussion-dominated sounds suddenly arose though there was indeed no one on the podium. It took a little while to spot Segerstam at the piano, obscured for me under the balcony, stage left.

As for the music, there was plenty of noise, rhythm, jolly juxtapositions of percussion and strings or woodwinds, or the tuba; monotony was out of the question as was any real attempt to pursue lines of argument or the recognition of motifs, rhythms, colourings.

Musically it suggested Messiaen in the spirit of Satie.

You could tell when a section had ended as a group of players stood to cue the start of the next section: flute and piccolo, or the brass, or the Concertmaster alone; thereafter it was rather chacun à son goût, though the notes assured us that improvising was forbidden except when ‘playing in symbiosis with all others’.  

The common reaction at the interval was of amused bemusement. The word ‘boring’ was not in use though neither was the word ‘masterpiece’.

The concert had begun with a sonorous and slow performance of the Intermezzo from the Karelia Suite. The programme note had drawn attention to the original incidental music for a set of tableaux depicting aspects of Karelian life from which an overture (later to become Op 10) and the three movements of the familiar suite, Op 11, were later compiled. Strange that an era of frantic musical research into the origins of things hasn’t led an Osmo Vänskä or someone to unearth the original music for performance. There were some loving performances: the opening horns, open or muted, suggesting a cold dawn, Robert Orr’s oboe and later, Michael Austin’s cor anglais.

Segerstam is a large Brahms-like figure on the podium whose size seems to be totally absorbed into the music, its soulfulness or its grandeur. The Karelia Suite might have been rather a small ration of his great compatriot for some (me for example), but its quarter hour was worth three-quarters of many another piece of music.

The second half opened with the Prelude to Die Meistersinger, again filled, not with Beckmesserish self-importance but with Sachsish humanity, spaciousness of utterance, nobility. As befitted the conductor’ character, it was both loose-limbed, seeming unconcerned by attention to tight ensemble, but achieving something much more profoundly dramatic through that very unconcern. Segerstam’s success lay in the way he unobtrusively inspired the players (possibly without their even being aware) to discover their individual, and collective, feelings for the music’s great generosity of spirit. The thrilling peroration before curtain-rise created a great longing for just that; which is what our biennial Festival will of course give us once more.

The Four Last Songs may well have been the main attraction for many of the audience, and perhaps also, for those whose idea of a symphony concert rests on a starry pianist or violinist, a reason for all those empty seats. The orchestral element had all the nostalgia, languorousness, sense of the past, of the loss that Strauss felt at the destruction of his beloved Germany. But I was not convinced that Kringelborn was the born interpreter, in spite of the prominence of these songs in her performance record. Her lower register was certainly well based and attractive, but there was a slightly troublesome beat around the top of the stave and in pianissimo her top notes had an edginess rather than an ethereal quality. Nor did she produce an interesting, expressive variety of tone such as these beautiful songs lie open to and I found myself unmoved at the end.

However, her diction was clear, particularly in the third song, ‘Beim Schlafengehen’; clarity of diction is not a strength for many sopranos. But my misgivings about this performance holds no implications for other Strauss works; I suspect she would be a fine Marschallin, an Ariadne, a Dyer’s Wife. It was perhaps as well that the cycle ends with an extended postlude that allowed the orchestra to bring it to a close with a glorious, deeply felt, emotional litany.

In all, this concert’s slightly unorthodox programme, and a soloist not much known outside the opera house probably explained the rather thin audience. In spite of that, there was no missing the sustained, rapturous and emotional depth that Segerstam drew from the orchestra in all four works.

Festive Overture by Shostakovich; Cello Concerto No 1 in A minor by Saint-Saëns; Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen with Gautier Capuçon (cello)

Michael Fowler Centre, Saturday 26 September 2009

One could, for a start, have some small regret at the content of this programme. Capuçon is one of today’s most gifted young cellists and it might have been interesting to hear him in a more meaty work.

The repertoire of big popular cello concertos is sadly limited: Haydn, Dvorak, Elgar, Schumann, Shostakovich No 1… we all have our own rankings; and there are lots in the second division that are by no means contemptible; and some of them might be first division works for many people: Lalo, Kabalevsky, Barber, Britten, Finzi, Dutilleux, Hindemith, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, several others by English composers and many by Vivaldi and Boccherini, and several concerto-like pieces by Tchaikovsky, Bloch, Bruch, and the list goes on. If you’re curious, try Wikipedia – ‘List of compositions for cello and orchestra’; you’ll be surprised.

Saint-Saëns is certainly eminent among them in terms of the sheer attractiveness and popularity of his first concerto (his second lacks the invention and charm of the first), and I believe that he suffers, like many French composers whose names are not Debussy and Ravel, from the mistaken Germano-Austrian dominance of classical music.

Though Capuçon is still under 30, one is unlikely to hear a performance of greater refinement, tonal subtlety, than Saturday’s performance by Gautier Capuçon; one where there is almost an oversupply of nuance in every phrase, but in which many individual notes are multi-coloured, carrying their own miniature emotional landscape.

It is rare to hear such exquisite softness from a concerto instrument; for example, after the first big tutti of the first movement, and in the way he minimized his sound as the first movement subsided into stillness for the Allegretto to emerge. For one thing, it is to risk the cello being covered by the orchestra, but that risk did not exist with Inkinen’s singular care with the orchestra’s delicacy of sound and expression.

The two were of the same mind.

The audience was prepared for what was to be heard in the two major works, through the opening performance of Shostakovich’s brilliant Festive Overture; the opening brass fanfare stunned the auditorium with its sonic clarity and the consummate blend of instrumental timbres. The strings were no less arresting in their undulating rhythms and dynamics and their shimmering colours, as if gently buffeted by the emotions of the music.

Though it’s a bit of a show-piece, it proved a magnificent vehicle, capable of demonstrating both the music’s real merits and the orchestra’s prowess. While the external parts gleamed with polish and fastidiousness, the internal workings of the orchestra were those of a beautifully tuned engine.

Nothing could have better proven that excellence than Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned during World War II by Koussevitsky for his great virtuoso orchestra, the Boston Symphony.

Those qualities of individual instrumental brilliance that were audible in the earlier pieces, had their most conspicuous display here; almost every member of the woodwind and brass sections, along with timpanist and percussion, captured the limelight at some point in music that was exposed, daring, witty, sometimes simply beautiful. Bartók the orchestral virtuoso was stunningly on show here, unobscured by the theatrical setting that might allow you to overlook the orchestral genius of a work like the ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin.

Purely as music, I don’t think it’s in the top rank, but it has few peers as a demonstration of the way in which the 20th century symphony orchestra has become such a magnificent and sophisticated creation, perhaps one of the greatest cultural institutions that civilization has created.

I had the feeling here, along with the evidence from the Sibelius Festival, that Inkinen had hit his form, had finally confirmed his authority with the orchestra and his own impressive artistic coming of age; the result was a musical performance of real distinction.

GEORGE ENESCU – Roumanian Rhapsody No.1

GARY GOLDSCHNEIDER – Sinaia

BORIS PIGOVAT – In Argentinian Style

BELA BARTOK – Hungarian Peasant Songs

ALFRED HILL – Symphony in A Minor “The Carnival”

Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Donald Maurice, conductor

St.Andrew’s on the Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 20th September, 2009

Now here was an enterprising programme! – two of the composers whose music was featured I had never heard of; and no less than FOUR New Zealand premiere performances were given, the works by Gary Goldschneider, Boris Pigovat, Bela Bartok and Alfred Hill.  George Enescu’s colourful Roumanian Rhapsody No.1 was obviously the “taster” which began the concert, the music’s beguiling opening melodies and catchy rhythms providing exotic atmosphere aplenty, and setting the scene for further, more unfamiliar explorations to follow.

Conductor Donald Maurice encouraged a lovely improvisatory feeling with the winds’ phrasings at the Rhapsody’s opening, choosing tempi that set the rhythms of the dances nicely in motion, and characterising each differing section of the music with lovely colour and real feeling – a nice touch was getting the violist to stand for his brief gypsy-like solo! The more energetic sections went with real “schwung” in this performance, the woodwinds and horns covering themselves with glory, and the rest of the brass making the most of their more raucous moments. The players caught the “folksiness” of it all splendidly and put across episodes such as the lead-into the work’s “friss” section with infectious excitement and a great rush of adrenalin.

American composer Gary Goldschneider, who spent a short time in the 1980s teaching in both Nelson and Wellington, conceived his work Sinaia while on a trip to Roumania in 2001, after being carried away by the splendours of the historic Peles Castle, located in the town of Sinaia amid mountainous surroundings. Goldschneider based his work on Roumanian and other Eastern European folk-rhythms and melodies, using the device of a recurring motif representing Peles Castle to unify the different episodes of the piece. The work’s contrasting sections create evocative, even mystical ambiences from the outset, a strong, darkly-wrought opening throwing subsequent quixotic pizzicati and agitated, claustrophobic waltz-measures into relief, everything vividly and enjoyably characterised by the players. Another New Zealand connection came with the composer of the next item In The Argentinian Style, Boris Pigovat, through the advocacy by Donald Maurice of another of Pigovat’s works Holocaust Requiem. In gratitude to the New Zealander, Pigovat wrote In the Argentinian Style for Donald Maurice earlier this year, a “tempo di tango” piece that uses another South American dance style, the Milonga. The players delivered this with great verve, and real rhythmic bounce, Donald Maurice encouraging the violas in particular to make the most of their “moments”,  with warm and sonorous sounds.

Both works in the second half originally came into being for smaller forces than orchestra – Bartok’s Hungarian Peasant Songs were originally written for solo piano, but then orchestrated by the composer, while the Symphony by Alfred Hill began as String Quartet No.3, before being recrafted for orchestra 43 years later in 1955, but keeping the same nickname, “The Carnival”.  Throughout the Bartok, I thought the players’ instrumental detailing was exemplary, capturing the music’s wistful, melancholic aspect at the beginning, the winds in particular bringing a colourful “tang” to their exchanges with the brass in the “Peasant Songs” section; while horn and strings beautifully set the scene in the second part for the big processionals to follow – my notes read “majestic brass, imposing strings, winds add to the splendour with Kodaly-like shrieks” – the whole conjuring up the feeling of sounds springing from the very soil on which the dancers’ feet trod.

And so to the Symphony by Alfred Hill, whose string quartet version I had heard and enjoyed, but which equally captivated me in its orchestral guise, its rumbustious opening and attractive Italian-style rhythms moving with wonderful insouciance in this performance throughout the movement’s different episodes, towards a lovely, sospiro-like ending. The oboes relished their jaunty moments in the scherzo, strings digging lustily into their peasant-like drones, then relaxing into a brief but graceful contrasting episode – such skilfully crafted music, nicely realised.  I loved the strings’ command of the sinuous melodic lines in the slow movement, taken up by long-breathed winds, the expression reaching Elgarian depths of feeling in places.The finale, in a sense, returned us some of the way to the world of the Enescu Rhapsody which began the programme – a sultry, gypsy-like spirit galvanised Donald Maurice and the players, setting a sombre melancholy against a vigorous impetuosity, whose energies carried the day, and brought the concert to a suitably rousing conclusion.