Tag: orchestral

Music of magical flight – Palmer, Mozart and Stravinsky from the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents
FIREBIRD

Juliet Palmer – Buzzard
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Piano Concerto No. 23 in A K.488
Igor Stravinsky (ed. Jonathan McPhee) – The Firebird Ballet

Diedre Irons (piano)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 8th April, 2021

Throughout the first half of Canadian-based New Zealand-born composer Juliet Palmer’s work Buzzard, I was enraptured,  totally enthralled by Palmer’s self-proclaimed “digestion” of Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird. I was bowled over as much by the former’s mastery of orchestral techniques we all readily ascribe to the latter’s music, the brilliance of the orchestrations, the motoric rhythms, and, by turns, the fluency and the angularity of the changing time-signatures, as by the curious phenomenon of the music having been “masticated” by Palmer into resembling in many places something more like Petrouchka! I confess that for some time I couldn’t extricate myself from imagining fairground ambiences, even complete with a slow-motion thematic “quote” at one point in the music! Still, the essence of Stravinsky was all there, the rumbustious rhythmic trajectories, the dynamic punctuations, the angularity of the different cheek-by-jowl time signatures, and the ear-catching variety of orchestral texture, feathery and diaphanous soundscapes co-existing with explosive irruptions and roistering rhythms.

This was “transmorgrified” Stravinsky, wondrous and strange in its “familiar-but-new” guise, and even possibly emerging (as the composer put it) somewhat “damaged” and “disfigured” as a by-product of the process. Gradually, it seemed to me that the ambience of the piece was shifting to something more sombre, though Palmer chose to indulge mid-way in some Ibert-like sequences involving sounds evoking whistles, shouts and extraneous noises, before introducing an almost “worry to death” motif, one which created what sounded almost like an impasse in the work’s unfolding. An oboe-led sequence which finally suggested something of the atmospheres of Palmer’s “other” subject for “dismemberment”, one relating to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, with its mystery of Odette and her enchanted cygnets under the sway of an enchanter, was given but a brief moment to develop, before being overtaken by a skitterish section of sounds that for me reflected only the helplessness and vacuity of the swan’s and her cygnets’ peregrinations, with few “echoings” of the would-be-lovers’ predicament – in general, on one hearing I felt a far more resounding sense of identification with Stravinsky’s work than of Tchaikovsky’s, on Palmer’s part when the piece had finished. (I note that microphones were present, suggesting the concert was recorded, and presenting the possibility of my hearing the work again)….

Moving on to the concert’s second item, Mozart’s adorable A Major Piano Concerto K.488, I instantly warmed to the work’s opening, played here by the orchestra with what sounded like a certain expectation, something of a “wait and see” exposition. Hamish McKeich and players gave the full tutti in the opening its due, but elsewhere brought out a dynamic differentiation that nicely suggested things held in reserve. Diedre Irons, whose playing I’ve always greatly admired, appeared also to hold the music “up for inspection” at first, her passagework having a delicacy that seemed to me to resemble a flower about to open, but with a certain tremulousness, bent on a kind of journey which I felt began to “flow” more freely as the first-movement cadenza approached – the orchestra then proclaimed and the pianist responded, the display exhibiting a marvellous gathering of flowering energy, the confident flourishes conveying to us that the Mozartean “oil” had begun to flow.  In the slow movement which followed, every piano note resounded and shone, with both clarinet and then flute in response to the piano so eloquent, and the bassoon so steadfast in support. The playing’s rapt togetherness created an intensity from which the winds gave us some relief, some gorgeous quintessential Le Nozze di Figaro-like moments enabling us to breathe more freely before immersing ourselves once again in the music’s deeper waters, with the piano and then the winds leaving us spellbound once more, right to the movement’s end.

Played almost attacca, here, Irons set the finale on its course with supreme poise, the effect playful rather than breathless or thrusting, the phrases and rhythms having real girth – some listeners may have wanted a touch more rumbustion in the galumphing, two-note descending figures, but I enjoyed the “spin” of the rhythms, and the “delighted” interaction between the soloist and various sections of the orchestra. Irons’ occasional impishly energised impulses brough such life to places such as her perky interchange with the winds just before the final recapitulation of the opening – both the relish with which she then launched this concluding paragraph of the music, and the enthusiasm with which McKeich and the players responded, underlined for us the pleasure of its overall presentation, the musicians’ efforts warmly received at the work’s conclusion.

I had previously heard (and reviewed) a performance of Jonathan McPhee’s “reduced orchestra” version of Firebird before, presented by Orchestra Wellington in May 2017, one which on that occasion presented an orchestra seemingly at the top of its game, a “spectacularly-realised performance” (to quote the Middle C writer!). I’ve not been able to ascertain whether, amidst these somewhat astringent times, that concert was actually recorded by RNZ technicians, as I believe this present one was – if not, a pity that posterity has denied local music-lovers the chance to compare performances of the same work from Wellington’s two foremost orchestras.

As with the Orchestra Wellington performance (and I shan’t mention the latter again), the great glory of this evening’s realisation was that the work was given complete, allowing people familiar with only the “suites” assembled by the composer from the work, to place such excerpts in the context of a glorious performance of the whole ballet. This gave the composer’s idea of using folk-inspired diatonic music to portray his human characters and octatonic and chromatic music for the story’s supernatural characters far greater focus and dramatic ebb-and flow than in a performance of either of the suites. Of course this “great glory” here became like a word made flesh over the course of the work’s unfolding, with conductor and players realising, by turns, every subtlety and shade of atmosphere and detailing while, at the other end of the dynamic range conjuring up the weight and brilliance of the music’s more forthright sequences with incredibly sustained focus and
unflagging energy.

At the beginning the evocation of dark, mysterious space was palpable, the playing enabling the scene’s ambivalent interplay of wonderment and menace to register, preparing the way for the Firebird’s brilliance and her interaction with Prince Ivan, who was able to capture her, before securing a magic feather from her as the price of her freedom – all characterised with a beautiful violin solo from the concertmaster, Vesa-Matti Leppänen, and taken up tenderly by other instruments. Both irrepressible gaiety and youthful grace marked the accompaniments for the Twelve Princesses, whose Round Dance was accompanied by the fresh folksiness of the Borodin-like oboe melody, courtesy of Robert Orr. The strings’ taking up of the melody was superb, at the same time liquid and focused – how adroitly McKeich and his players were able to  move between diaphanous delicacy and full-throated feeling, as Ivan and one of the princesses fell in love! Similarly, the trumpet warning set in play a superb transition from these scenes to those depicting the arrival of Koshchey, the ogre, and his followers. As mentioned before, the famous Dance of Koshchey’s Cohorts brilliantly burst from the agitated build-up and wrought appropriate havoc (I loved the trombone glissandi, “rescued” from one of the composer’s “retouched” suites by Jonathan McPhee to great effect here!). And what coruscating playing from the orchestra as the Firebird reappeared! – the music dashing and crashing the dance to its scintillating conclusion.

None of the suites depict the actual destruction of Koshchey’s magic egg and the death of the monster, a sequence whose vivid sequencing here brought about a true sense of cathartic release from oppression, the music burgeoning from its subterranean beginnings to a tumult whose seismic force couldn’t help but move mountains. Then came the famous Berceuse, from out of which, via the golden horn-tones of Sam Jacobs, grew various manifestations of rebirth from the once-besieged land – fabulously and grandly epic phrasings at the first climax, whereupon the music burst forth excitedly and festively as Ivan and his Princess were farewelled by the Firebird and the garden’s rejuvenated inhabitants.

All of this received a properly enraptured reception from a thrilled audience, who were pleased to respond to conductor McKeich’s acknowledgement of his players both individually and collectively with the acclaim they deserved. Somebody said to me as we walked out of the hall, “Well! – if the orchestra can do that so wonderfully, isn’t it about time we had a complete Daphnis et Chloe, with a chorus? What an occasion THAT would be, with playing like this!” I couldn’t have agreed more!

NZSO launches into 2021 determined, with a splendid, dynamic programme to evade Covid 19

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Stephen De Pledge – piano
First concert in ‘Podium’ Series: entitled Carnival

Ravel: La Valse and Piano Concerto in G
Anna Clyne: Masquerade
Stravinsky: Petrushka Ballet (1947 version)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 26 March, 6:30 pm

The first of the NZSO’s main concert series, which is entitled the “Podium Series”, proved a conspicuous triumph. Though it might have seemed difficult to account for the name “Carnival” which was given to this particular concert, it was vividly illuminated in Feby Idrus’s colourful and well-informed programme notes, indirectly with La Valse, but quite specifically with Petrushka, where the word relates directly to Stravinsky’s setting of the first tableau of the ballet – Carnival or Shrovetide which precedes Lent.

However, it was a near full house, marking an encouraging change from audiences in the past year or so; it also marked the steadily rising reputation and popularity of the orchestra’s Principal Conductor in Residence, Hamish McKeich.

The programme booklet was free: an excellent move, considering the intelligence and illuminating character of Feby Idrus’s writing.

There were two distinctive aspects to the programme: two of Ravel’s most distinguished works and one of Stravinsky’s first ballet scores: Petrushka which retains its undiminished popularity as a vivid and colourful ballet as well as being a brilliant, luminous orchestral masterpiece.

La Valse
I must seek vindication for the pleasure I get from Ravel’s La valse, in live performance compared with a recording, since I’ve recently been enjoying a personal Ravel festival, recapturing CDs, recordings of Ravel from the SKY Arts channel, and on the ubiquitous You Tube on the Internet. This music reflects both Ravel’s and my love of the Viennese waltz, especially of the Strauss family, Waldteufel, Offenbach, Kalman, etc.

This performance illuminated the music’s dynamism and rhythmic energy through Ravel’s remarkably colourful scene of a Viennese dance-hall which, in her programme notes, Feby Idrus captured beautifully. She related not only the scornful reaction by ballet impresario Diaghilev to Ravel’s piano performance of the score, but an illuminating description of the evolution of the music and its ‘growing wildness’, depicting a ‘heartbeat fraught with panic’. They were words that vividly described this frenzied yet disciplined performance.

Ravel’s piano concerto (for both hands) is a profoundly different work, with the piano part in the hands of one of New Zealand’s leading pianists, Stephen De Pledge. It emerged with clarity and the careful application of rhythmic energy, even in the jazz coloured Adagio movement with its extended solo piano opening: idiomatic but essentially classical in character. To quote again from the programme notes, the concerto as a whole ‘remains aerated by jazz’s sweet perfume’. After several returns demanded by the audience, De Pledge played Couperin’s fairly familiar song La Basque with a lively spirit; though its translation from the clarity of the harpsichord to the modern piano is not quite the same.

Masquerade 
The second half began with what I assume was the first New Zealand performance of a rowdy piece written for the Last Night of the Proms in 2013 by 40-year-old English composer Anna Clyne: Masquerade; inspired by the kind of music played in London’s 18th century pleasure gardens, such as the famous Vauxhall Gardens; judging by its spirit and liveliness it would have been a hit there, as it probably was at the Proms. Boisterous and constantly varied as it was, it hardly matched Stravinsky’s melodically and rhythmically inspired ballet music that followed.

Petrushka 
Stravinsky revised the 1911 original version of Petrushka in 1946 (performed in 1947) for a slightly smaller orchestra, altering certain instrumental features, but partly because the original was not covered by copyright in all countries, and thus delivered the composer no royalties. The orchestra played that later version, probably detectable to no one but the relative instrumentalists and conductor.

Of course, the theme of the ballet doesn’t demand music of a profound character, but it is nevertheless a unique score, quite as remarkable as The Right of Spring which rather outshone Petrushka two years later with its violence, rhythmic and thematic complexity. The score derives its profundity by means of its unique, half-hour-long musical inspiration.  Yes there were moments of a certain ensemble smudginess in Petrushka, but the overwhelming energy and passion were dominant throughout the entire performance.

But if you’d like to see and hear a very remarkable, yet somehow genuine performance of the composer’s Three Movements for piano, look at Yuja Wang on YouTube.

What a splendidly successful way for the orchestra to open its year!

 

A new film commemorates the 1941 Babiy Yar Massacre of Ukraine Jews by the Nazis

Posted on by Peter Mechen

LACRIMOSA DIES ILLA – a 2020 film
Featuring excerpts from “Requiem – The Holocaust” by Israeli composer Boris Pigovat, a work for orchestra and viola soloist.

Narrator – Valentyna Bugrak
Composer – Boris Pigovat
Viola soloist – Xi Liu
Conductor – Martin Riseley
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
Designer and Producer – Donald Maurice
Director – Bill McCarthy
Assistant Producer and translator – Xi Liu
Photographer – Dwight Pounds
Sound Engineer  – Graham Kennedy

Project funded by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

A 2008 concert in Wellington given by the then Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei featured the very first performance in New Zealand of Russian-born Israeli composer Boris Pigovat’s “Requiem”, with violist Donald Maurice as the soloist.  This work, completed in 1995, commemorated the horrific massacre by the Nazis of thousands of Jewish citizens of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv during 1941. Pigovat’s grandparents and an aunt were among those murdered by the occupying Nazi forces in what has come to be known as “the Babiy Yar massacre”.

The “Requiem” was originally intended to be premiered in Israel, but (not inappropriately) the venue was changed by dint of circumstances to Kyiv itself, an event notable for the co-operation between the Israeli Cultural Attache in the city and the Goethe Institute, the work finally being premiered in 2001. Almost eight years later came the first New Zealand performance mentioned above (attended by the composer, and recorded by Atoll Records), which was followed by an invitation to the solo violist, Donald Maurice, to take part in the work’s first performance in Germany later in the year.  (The Middle C review of the Atoll recording can be read here: https://middle-c.org/2011/09/boris-pigovats-requiem-a-stunning-cd-presentation/).

All of this is by way of preamble to the 2020 making of a film, one which designer/producer Donald Maurice calls a “miracle”, considering it was all put together during a pandemic! The name “Lacrimosa Dies Illa” (Latin for “Full of tears will be that day”) is taken from the Dies Irae {“Day of Wrath”) sequence of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, words which have previously inspired various composers who have undertaken to compose a Requiem. The production boldly juxtaposes past and present images of the actual location with narrations of actual events, a commentary by the composer on the work’s specific content and general structure, and filmed excerpts from a performance of the work in the Adam Concert Room at the University’s School of Music.

The film opens with scenes from the place close to the ravine where the atrocities took place, now an idyllic park-like memorial, with long avenues of trees and various commemorative monuments and statues, one in particular dedicated to the children who lost their lives there. The latter is singled out in the presentation by a sudden orchestral cry of pain and lament during the introductory music of the opening “Requiem Aeternam” movement accompaniment. After this, Ukrainian violist Valentyna Bugrak, a member of the Kyiv Kamerata Ensemble orchestra, begins to narrate an outline of the horrific story of the massacres. Filmed on location at the park by Roman Strakhov, Bugrak appears at various times during the film to recount the continued “saga of atrocity” which took place at that location. Somehow, for me, her youthful presence and beauty, though separated by more years than would have allowed her to be directly associated with the events, seems to speak directly for the children whose lives were not allowed the chance to blossom, but instead caught up and ended by these brutal actions of the Nazis towards people they deemed expendable. Her commentary also outlines the tactics employed by the Nazis to trick the Jewish population into thinking that people were to be relocated to their historic homeland, and thus securing their compliance up to the point where it was too late for them to escape.

Composer Boris Pigovat, filmed at Rosh Ha’Ayin in Israel by Gyuqin Cao, is depicted explaining and  demonstrating on a piano the Requiem’s leading motifs, how and why they make their appearance and where they occur in the course of the music. Sitting with him is the violist we see performing much of the work, Xi Liu – I would have liked her interaction with the composer to have been rather less passive – there’s no chance for her to articulate any of her feelings about any parts of the work and its particular challenges, except via her superb playing with the NZSM Orchestra conducted by Martin Riseley. But to be fair, the film’s duration, five minutes over the hour, doesn’t waste a second in regard to what it does contain, a powerful and gripping amalgam of information, context and creative insight regarding content that’s at once fascinating and deeply tragic.

Some may find Pigovat’s explanations and analyses of his material too much of a good thing – but he does have the gift of describing his raw musical material and its relevance to the whole in emotive-based nontechnical language, which enables one to connect with a set of raw kind of impulses whose effects can be characterised in words – he readily points out his influences from non-Jewish sources, such as the Christian Requiem and its use of Latin as a language of ritual in both structure and content, but is able to set it in a kind of context of connection with faith and humanity in general, even a unifying force for those prepared to make the journey. The film is  good at demonstrating how the composer’s “raw” material is employed in the finished product, by playing orchestral rehearsal excerpts featuring the same motifs and their interaction. Pigovat is particularly eloquent when  explaining the significance of his use of the Latin title for the second movement “Dies Irae”, and its interaction with the Jewish prayer “Shema Israel”, paying special attention in the music to the idea of the horror being a kind of mechanism, a “murder machine” as well as a “devilish dance”. The orchestral performance which follows uses various concentration camp images to underline the sense of persecution and mechanised and systematic elimination of a significant body of people, the playing by the NZSM musicians under Martin Riseley’s direction building up and into a ferocious orchestrally-wrought maelstrom, followed by an equally macabre “dance of death”, concluding with the composer’s idea of a beating heart slowly dying, signifying life ebbing from those people caught up in the nightmare.

In view of the film’s title I expected much would be made of the similarly-named third movement of the Requiem – and so it proves, with Pigovat indicating his awareness of the usual response by composers to the “Lacrimosa” (weeping) text, but wanting something different in the wake of the Dies Irae movement, expressions of anger and strangulated pain, leading to a kind of madness whose intensity seems to take the human spirit to a state of oblivion in which everything is “burnt out”, the music primordial and impulse-driven – an amazing solo viola passage in which these things are unleashed is given in full, the music at once insensible and searingly eloquent in Xi Liu’s hands. Pigovat expresses the idea given to him by Prokofiev in his opera Semyon Kotko, a sequence in which a man is executed and his fiancee will not believe he is dead –  and like Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet she loses her mind with grief, the music strange and “lost”, until an “explosion” of realisation finally brings tears. Pigovat was inspired at this point by Mozart’s Lacrimosa in his “Requiem”, the music a series of finely-wrought impulses of grief ebbing and flowing between silences……

The composer thought the concluding “Lux Aeterna” would be the lightest and most serene part of the work, but felt that  it needed a “fresh” approach, with themes that had not been heard before. We hear the themes sketched out for us, and then played by the soloist and orchestra, the music calling for a renewal of faith and hope – a beautiful passage for solo flute which the film highlights “speaks” for the character of this section of the music, and the Martinu-like ostinati for various instruments takes the music to the coda, a sequence which Pigovat considers connected with the souls of the dead, the viola interacting with sombre brass and percussion, the tones allowed to resonate into silence.

Valentyna Bugrak returns at the film’s end to tell us of how much was remembered and retold by the survivors of this tragic series of events, more so that we might appreciate and understand the full extent of the atrocity and be reminded that this must never be allowed to happen again.  The film’s gathering together of history, commentary and deeply-felt creative response concerning the horrific events at Babiy Yar inevitably makes for, in places uncomfortably heart-rending viewing and listening, but it serves to further remind us of our own human capacities for inhuman behaviour which, as more recent events have disturbingly demonstrated, can take unexpected shape and form in so many ways.

A website devoted to the  film will be launched shortly, one containing the documentation through which people’s work on all aspects of the production can be fully recognised and acknowledged. As this is the 80th anniversary year of the massacre, a number of countries have already indicated their interest in screening this film at this time.  Meanwhile, a trailer for the film can be viewed at the following link: – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um-KIbm48ck&feature=youtu.be

Now on CD! – Claire Cowan’s incandescent score for the RNZB’s recent “Hansel and Gretel”, played by the NZSO with Hamish McKeich

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CLAIRE COWAN – Hansel and Gretel; a Ballet in Two Acts

Hamish McKeich (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Recording produced by John Neill and Claire Cowan
Assistant Producer: Brent Stewart
Pro-Tools Editor: William Philipson
Illustration and Design: Fuller Studio

Verses: Amy Mansfield
Reader: Jonny Brugh

Recorded 2020 at Stella Maris Chapel, Seatoun, Wellington

After reading various reviews of the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s production of Auckland composer Claire Cowan’s Hansel and Gretel, toured by the company during 2019, I’m left feeling like one of the “gentlemen of England now abed” from Shakespeare’s Henry V play, those whom the monarch prophesised would “think themselves accurs’d” for not being at Agincourt to share in the splendour of the occasion’s success. And now, having listened to the enticingly-presented double CD set of the ballet’s music which the NZSO with conductor Hamish McKeich subsequently recorded, I feel doubly aggrieved at having missed out on seeing what “sounds like” a cornucopian feast of excitement, energy, colour and drama, if the music alone is anything to go by.

Of course, judging by the critical adulation given last year’s aforementioned stage production, this could well be a work that has now begun its journey towards becoming the balletic equivalent of German composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s well-known operatic setting of the Grimm Brothers’ classic fairy-tale, and thus a staple of any self-respecting ballet company’s repertoire. So, there may be hope for me yet!

Cowan’s experience of writing for dancers previous to this production had been in the contemporary field, so writing a ballet score, with the story and music “leading the way” and dictating what the dancers do was a new experience for her. Having met RNZB choreographer Loughlan Prior, who conveyed to her his long-held desire to make a ballet from the classic Brothers Grimm Hansel and Gretel story, Cowan agreed to undertake the project with him,  firstly trying out different “slants” on the original story and characterisations to give the scenario a fresh and more contemporary feeling. Working with Prior highlighted the specific requirements for dance music , such as the care needed when choosing time signatures and tempi, even if Cowan found that her choreographer preferred her music’s symmetrical rhythms to the angularities of 5/4 or 7/4 – but she confesses she simply didn’t want to be confined to 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 the whole time!

A dancer herself as a child, she had gone back to listen to some of the ballet classics –  Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky – to “check out” what those composers did, watching a  actual production of “The Nutcracker” and finding herself surprised at how much more music there was besides those well-known “iconic” moments in the score, some of which seemed to her like “filler” – Cowan promised  she would set herself the goal in her own work of giving those continuity moments as “magical” a quality as anything else in the score through constant reiteration of variants of the main themes, so that the music’s special distinction was always present.

Though she’s actually not the first woman to compose a ballet for the New Zealand Ballet Company, as has been claimed in some quarters – Dorothea Franchi’s work Do-Wacka-Do, written in 1956, firstly as a jazz combo, and later as a suite rescored for full orchestra, was (coincidentally, like Cowan’s) a revisiting of 1920s musical styles (Franchi called her work “good old American Jazz”) frequently performed by the Company, and (again, like Hansel and Gretel) one toured throughout the country in 1961 with piano (the composer’s?) accompaniment – Cowan’s “Hansel and Gretel” is, however, definitely the first full-length ballet by a woman to be performed by the RNZB, Franchi’s work having usually been part of a “double bill”, or performed with other smaller separate items.

The 2019 tour of Cowan’s and Prior’s work, having been such a success, it seemed wholly appropriate for the venture to be preserved in one form or another – the composer certainly felt that the work could be “shared” with many more people who didn’t have the opportunity to attend one of the live performances via a recording. Conductor Hamish McKeich encouraged  Cowan to approach the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with a proposal that reflected both the success of the live performances and the obvious prestige of association with the same for the orchestra, the result being that fifty of the players’ services were donated by the Orchestra to the undertaking, with Hamish McKeich the obvious choice as conductor. The chosen venue was the Stella Maris Chapel at Seatoun in Wellington with John Neill, of Park Road Post producing the recording. Cowan embarked on a crowd-sourced Boosted campaign to make up the remainder of funds needed for the project, and with all the arrangements and the planning in place, its completion seemed certain.

This of course being 2020, nothing was thus assured, with a community outbreak of Covid-19 in Auckland in August bringing plans to a standstill. Undeterred, though at considerably greater expense, Cowan continued the process piecemeal with a series of two-and-fro operations between Auckland and Wellington , the work having to be recorded in sections with different instrumental groups, and painstakingly dovetailed together at the end. It’s a tribute to the determination, expertise and patience of everybody concerned that the end result seems to my ears as magnificent as if there were no disruptions!

From the Overture’s beginning the music is a kaleidoscopic delight of sensation and impulse, the piece illustrating a burgeoning of things to come in the story from what seem like wistful, everyday situations.  It’s beyond the scope of this review to describe the whole ballet, but the opening scene gives the listener more than enough enticement to pursue the wonders that the story in its entirety delivers. The Street with its ceaseless comings-and-goings movement illustrates the world of the children’s family, the piquant detailing of busy-ness and cheerful purpose set against the frequent singing lines which depict care and longing, as well as something of the family’s circumstances in a world of harsh economic realities.

A Mary Poppins-like frisson of premonition introduces The witch’s ice-cream bicycle, the composer cleverly blending wonderment and unease at her antics, then normalising her presence by having her disappear into the falling dusk along with everybody else. Cowan illustrates her mastery of transition here, morphing the crepuscular ambiences into a kind of night-life scenario as both colours and impulses begin to repeople the scene, taking us from this into the children’s family home (no cruel and heartless stepmother, here, but simply loving and caring parents), where Dinner is being served, the parents obviously doing their best to remain cheerful, passages for solo violin and strings expressing the family’s bonds of love and care , while various other passages (wind and brass) suggest the paucity of fare.

The ear is constantly tickled by Cowan’s invention, each impulse pf movement and phrase of melody a suggestive experience for the listener. Particularly touching is the Pas de Deux for the Mother and Father, blending characterful concerted movement with complete freedom, the imagination both shaped but unconstrained by limitations of time and space – it was here I strongly felt Cowan’s experience as a film composer coming through, in her evocation of a “state of things”, one into which we as listeners were readily invited to observe and “feel”.

The rest follows the outlines of the Grimm Brothers’ classic story, though with some particularly “tasty” ingredients added, suggested by sequence-titles like The Witch’s Baking Charleston , Cowan‘s 1920s settings having liberally spiced the music with Broadway and jazz influences. In general, the music for the second part is brighter, brassier and more extrovert, as befits the blandishments of the gingerbread house scenario in which the children find themselves. Across this, recurring themes knit the episodes into a compelling whole, with associated groundswells of emotion bubbling up in places like the reprise of the Pas de Deux for the Mother and Father while looking for their children, a self-confessed favourite moment in the work for the composer!

The CDs contain a “bonus” at the end of the ballet’s action, a retelling of the story in verse, written by Amy Mansfield, here, racily delivered by Jonny Brugh, of 800 Words and What We do in the Shadows fame, to the accompaniment of musical excerpts from Cowan’s soundtrack. Mansfield’s words, saucily mixing finely-tuned imagery with drollery and outrageous doggerel, catch the spirit of Cowan’s music with gusto and relish, a delectable introduction/reminiscence of the complete work, if perhaps not, like gingerbread houses themselves, to be indulged in too freely or frequently!

No, the music itself, its creation and realisation, is the true joy of this delectable offering; and, as with the works of those luminaries previously mentioned, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, on the strength of this recording able to stand alone and bear witness to composer Claire Cowan’s stellar achievement. Whether those words of Shakespeare’s quoted at this review’s beginning resonate with you or not, you are urged to investigate this beautifully-appointed recording of “Hansel and Gretel” without delay!

(I am advised by Claire Cowan herself that the set is available only on bandcamp at this stage. For more information click on the following link –www.clairesmusic.bandcamp.com for both physical CDs and digital copies. The physical copy comes with a digital download too.)

 

 

At last! – the 2020 NZSO National Youth Orchestra gets to show what it can do

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
“Finale” –  the NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2020

LISSA MERIDAN – Firecracker
JOSHUA PEARSON – When a pale blue dot breathes
PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY – Fantasy-Overture “Romeo and Juliet”
SERGE PROKOFIEV – Suite from “Lieutenant kije”
ARTURO MÁRQUEZ – Danzón No. 2

(Joshua Pearson is the NZSO National Youth Orchestra Composer-in-Residence 2020)

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2020
Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 18th December, 2020

NZSO Chief Executive Peter Biggs called this evening’s concert “a belated wish come true”, after the NZSO NYO’s plans for mid-year Wellington and Auckland performances together with the NZSO of Shostakovich’s epic “Leningrad” Symphony were cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. After such a disappointment, the young players were “overjoyed” that the lifting of restrictions nation-wide enabled a new concert to be announced for the year’s end, with the Shostakovich project re-scheduled for 2021.

Conductor Hamish McKeich put the occasion in an even wide perspective in welcoming us all to the concert after the orchestra had performed the first two items, Lissa Meridan’s spectacular 2000 work Firecracker, and Joshua Pearson’s 2020 NYO-commissioned When a pale blue dot breathes, by asking us, amid the joy of having our National Youth Orchestra performing tonight, to spare a thought for young musicians in other places around the world at this time unable to come together in like manner due to pandemic-induced restrictions. So, added to the relief of being able to perform was a determination on the part of all present to make the very most of the occasion, which the music-making to my ears certainly achieved.

I can still remember the excitement of first hearing the Auckland Philharmonia’s CD set of NZ commissioned “Millenium Fanfares” brought out by Atoll Records in 2000, one that began, as here, with the aforementioned Firecracker by Lissa Meridan, a brilliant evocation in orchestral terms of light, colour and energy, stunningly realised by McKeich and the players – what an “ear” for sound on the composer’s part was displayed here! Meridan wrote this fanfare while serving as the Director of the Lilburn Electroacoustic Music Studios at Wellington’s NSZM, and the music’s astonishing blend of textural fluidity and dynamic variation suggests the kind of limitless possibilities open to one well-versed in sonic explorations, the kaleidoscopic instrumental combinations as ear-catching when lightly-scored as they were overwhelming when flooding the ambiences with wave upon variegated wave of brilliant and impactful irruption.

As the thoughtful programme note by Febry Idrus indicates, NZSONYO Composer-in-Residence Joshua Pearson’s new work When a pale blue dot breathes suggested a kind of antithesis to Lisa Meridan’s scintillating creation, at the outset a realisation of a kind of William Blake-like “world in a grain of sand”, the “pale blue dot” of the title representing the earth glimpsed from outer space silhouetted in a sunbeam, a dot containing “a crowd of cacophony”. Its componentry is further characterised by sound-vignettes representing the space-ship Voyager’s “Golden Record”, one containing sounds and images from Earth as a kind of “message in a bottle” for forms of life as yet unknown to us conveying various “essences” of human existence, including examples of spoken language.  The piece’s opening underlined its subject’s relative insignificance in relation to the surroundings, the sounds creaking, shuddering and shivering into being, the ambiences eerie and strangely non-corporate, until, like nature abhorring a void, a tumult of voices rose as if an act of sheer will, looking to somehow co-ordinate its impulses, rallying trumpet fanfares and jaunty piccolo tunes putting flesh on the music’s bones and characterising the self-conscious “outreach” of humankind into the unknown, from its “best of all possible worlds”.

It’s all somewhat Tower-of-Babel-like, one that appears to lose its voice at one point when the wind and brass players “sigh” tonelessly through their instruments, as a mute recognition of language and gesture perhaps needing more, or perhaps giving way to simply being and putting faith in a process of continuance. I liked the balloons being spectacularly burst towards the end, possibly as a sign of risking all and expending empty baggage……the composer was well received by the audience at the piece’s thoughtful, enigmatic conclusion, the latter prompting thoughts of the music being a kind of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” for our time, perhaps?

After this, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture might have required something of a quantum shift of brain-cell response on the part of listeners – but in the end the music’s opening ambiences seemed to grow out of the resonances already stirred and shaken, the winds this time unusually “weighted” by the bassoon’s prominence over the clarinet throughout the introductory measures. Hamish McKeich kept everything else poised and expectant, hinting at the unease and tension which then sprang eagerly forward at the fist signs of warring unrest between two feuding families, the strings generating speed rather than weight and building the excitement towards full-blooded conflict most excitingly.

McKeich prepared his players beautifully for the famous love-theme’s appearance, the oboes deftly supported by the horns, and the strings’ veiled quality readily suggesting the tenderness between the lovers from the outset – again some lovely work from the winds and horns, and afterwards harp and cor anglais. Urgency ahead of any initial suggestiveness marked the strings’ plunge into their reiteration of hostilities between the warring families, the percussion nicely “terracing” the music’s dynamics, and delivering maximum weight when required – the return of the lovers’ theme wrung our sensibilities out properly (excitingly supported by the bass drum at one point) – and the players brought off the music’s jagged syncopations with great elan as the conflict peaked and suddenly imploded, the lower strings digging deeply into the black depths of tragedy reinforced by the shattering timpani roll, the ensuing funeral march almost perfunctory with sheer numbness.

As much as I would rather the composer had defied his mentor, Mily Balakirev, and retained his earlier, quieter ending for the piece (I’ve always found the brassy ending to the work too “stock”, too conventional, and seeming to run counter to Shakespeare’s concluding lines in his play  “A glooming peace this morning with it brings/the sun for sorrow will not show his head”), the players here made Tchaikovsky’s harshly-expressed finality hit home with all appropriate force at the end.

And what a brilliantly-conceived contrast followed! – even when separated by an interval! – Serge Prokofiev’s totally delightful Suite (originally music for a Soviet film of the same name, “Lieutenant Kije” – actually, in Russian, “Kizhe”) was put together by the composer shortly after the film’s release in 1934, with the composer’s Paris-based publisher using the French form of the name. Prokofiev then expanded the somewhat fragmentary film music soundtrack, and re-orchestrated it for full orchestra – he described the process as “difficult”, but was determined to complete the task, as he wanted to try and “normalise” his relationship with the Soviet authorities after returning to Russia from the West.

The film’s source for the story was lexicographer Vladimir Dahl’s 1870 publication of a collection of “Stories from the Time of Paul I” (son of Catherine the Great and Peter III, Paul I was Tsar between 1796 and 1801 prior to his being assassinated), the tale describing the life, adventures and death of a mythical officer, invented as a result of a clerical error, which couldn’t be admitted to for fear of angering the Tsar! It was taken up by the novelist Yury Tynyanov, who wrote the screenplay for the film. The story naturally appealed to the Soviets as an example of ridicule of the “old order”, though the bureaucratic bungling and fear of displeasing one’s superiors was to remain a worldwide trait throughout most of the twentieth century.

Prokofiev’s music was a wholly delightful affair, right from the very first magical solo cornet/trumpet strains  (it isn’t specified which one was played here, but Isabella Thomas was the flawless off-stage soloist) which announced “The Birth of Kije”, to the same theme’s slightly augmented reappearance at the Suite’s end. This dream-like encapsulation belied the rest of the music’s excitement, colour and immediacy, the characterisations of both the hero and his adventures springing engagingly to life-life, as with all rattlingly good yarns! The composer’s penchant for vivid orchestration gave the NYO players ample opportunities to shine, the percussion in particular having a proverbial field day though mention must be made of the distinctive contribution made by the tenor saxophonist (Tessa Frazer), her playing deliciously enlivening the textures of both the second movement Romance and the third movement, Kije’s Wedding. My favourite of the Suite’s movements has always been the Wedding, though its effectiveness depends on the degree of tongue-in-cheek “swagger” given the trajectories by the conductor and players – here, the “oohm-pah” brass rhythms were an absolute delight, underpinned by outrageous explosions of festive joy from the full orchestra, the percussion holding nothing back!

Concluding the concert’s listed items was a piece by Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, Danzón No. 2, a piece championed by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under Gustavo Dudamel during that orchestra’s tour of Europe and America in 2007. I thought the music had a kind of “Latin American Gershwin” kind of feeling in places, with firstly the clarinet and then the oboe voicing the melodic lines, piano, percussion and pizzicato strings encouraging the music’s impulse to ‘dance’, each refrain introducing livelier trajectories, swooning into sultry, suggestive passages which build the harmonies to expressive heights before re-energising the rhythms once again – the bursts of energy set against contrasting episodes of languor gave the piece a volatility whose climax drew from conductor and players plenty of edge-of-the-seat abandonment and a cataclysmic finish!

Despite, or perhaps because of the brilliance of the concert’s ending an encore seemed more than appropriate by way of extending the occasion’s frisson of excitement, with Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance from the ballet “Gayaneh” brought scintillatingly into play, the famous glissandi brass notes more expressive that I can ever remember, rather than producing merely the usual “snarl”, and the shock of the abrupt changes of texture and dynamics towards the end startlingly pulled off! Very great glory, indeed, to this year’s NYO, conductor and players making the most of their opportunities and to the NZSO for making it all happen in the face of unforseeable difficulties.

 

 

End of the musical year for Wellington Chamber Orchestra with an Emperor and Franck’s symphony

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Conductor and piano soloist: Andrew Atkins

Verdi: La Forza del Destino overture
Beethoven: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.5 in E flat major. op.73 ‘The Emperor’
César Franck: Symphony in D minor, FWV 48

St. Andrews on the Terrace

Sunday, 13 December 2020

Verdi: La Forza del Destino overture
The overture to Verdi’s opera, ‘The Power of Fate’ is much more popular than the opera itself. It encapsulates the drama of the opera, its lyricism and its wonderful melodies. It opens with three unison chords for the brasses, followed by repeated agitated phrases by the lower strings, which foreshadows the tragedy of the drama to follow. A beautiful mournful theme from Act 3 of the opera is introduced by the winds, followed by the haunting prayer of Leonora, the heroine of the story, played by the strings, and towards the end of the overture a theme from Act 2 is played by the oboe and winds, suggesting the emotional resolution and redemption before Leonora death. It was a great opening for the concert, testing all sections of the orchestra. Some beautiful playing by the wind solo stood out. This was a colourful lyrical reading of the piece. Andrew Atkins conducted with graceful movements and a clear beat.

Beethoven: Emperor Concerto
This concerto, Beethoven’s longest and arguably his most dramatic, is a challenge even for seasoned pianists who play it repeatedly on international concert tours. For a young musician without the benefit of such opportunities and conducting from the keyboard, this is bordering on chutzpah. But from the very beginning, the opening runs on the piano, it was evident that Andrew Atkins was up to the challenge. His playing was sensitive, lyrical, and confident.

The orchestra provided a sound support notwithstanding the distraction of the conductor jumping up and down from the keyboard during the tutti passages. The chorale of the second movement, with the fine interaction between the soloist and the orchestra stood out for its sensitivity. The last movement reflected the sense of joy of the performers. To the great credit of soloist and orchestra, every note sounded carefully considered, yet this did not detract from the natural flow of the music. For an encore, Andrew Atkins played a beautiful meditative piece, Liszt’s Consolation No.3, with the flair of a fine pianist and with a true love of music.

Franck: Symphony in D minor
César Franck’s Symphony is a difficult nut to crack. It is an amalgam of the German tradition of Wagner and Liszt, it quotes late Beethoven, yet has a certain French sensitivity. In its form it differs from the classical symphonic model of Haydn to Brahms. It is in three movements which are interrelated. The opening themes keep recurring in modified form as they modulate throughout the symphony. It is one of the landmarks of the symphonic repertoire. It starts with a hardly audible pianissimo on the lower strings, echoing the Muss es sein? (Must it be?) phrase from Beethoven’s Op 135 String Quartet, then a piercing cor anglais solo introduces the main theme. This theme recurs throughout symphony in different forms, slow and fast, expansive and agitated.

The orchestra rose to the technical challenges of the work, but somehow the tempi sounded driven and variable. I felt that the brass were not given the space to fly, or the strings the air to let the music sing. The subtlety of the symphony was somehow missing, The listeners should have been left sitting on the edge of their seats. But let this not detract from the laudable effort of every single musician in the orchestra. Just mastering this complex work deserves credit.

The concert reflected the objective of the orchestra, to ‘enjoy the experience of creating live music together’. Whatever reservations I might have had, it was great to have the opportunity to hear these wonderful works live in Wellington on a Sunday afternoon. We value the talent in our midst.

 

 

Orchestra Wellington: huge percussion resources exploited in Psathas masterpiece from Olympus complemented by huge Rachmaninov symphony

Posted on by Steven Sedley

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei
With Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion) and Michael Houston (piano)

John Psathas: View from Olympus: Concerto for percussion, piano, and orchestra
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op 27

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 5 December 2020

The large line-up of percussion instruments at the front of the orchestra would have given an inkling to the audience that they would be in for a challenging, interesting evening of music. Although the John Psathas’ View from Olympus has had many performances, premiered by the Halle Orchestra in Manchester in 2002, it is still music off the beaten track for an audience of predominantly older concert goers. The Rachmaninoff Symphony is something else, a justifiably well-worn favourite of the concert repertoire.

John Psathas, View from Olympus
This concerto work was commissioned by the internationally renowned percussionist, Evelyn Glennie. It draws on the New Zealand composer’s Greek heritage. It makes use of Greek mythology and describes in three movements 1. The Furies and their avenging spirits, 2. To Yelasto Paithi (The smiling child), and 3. Dance of the Maenads. The first movement, conjuring up the Furies opens with vigorous rhythms that echoed some of Stravinsky’s early ballet music, but the music was distinctively Psathas, exploiting the tone colours, tone quality and unique sounds of the large array of percussion instruments.

In the midst of the furious loud noises a solo violin is introduced for a few bars, something that clearly had a special meaning for Psathas and Greek listeners familiar with the music of the popular Greek violinist, Stathis Koukoularis. The second movement is calm and peaceful, reflecting, as Psathas said, ‘the feelings inspired by his own precious children. A passage with wind chimes gently ringing creates an otherworldly dreamlike sound. The rhythmic patterns suggest children’s songs, games. nursery rhymes, without explicitly quoting any. The last movement is violent, suggesting the Maenads possessed, in an ecstatic frenzied dance, belabouring each other. The loud drum beats create an unsettling impression of mayhem.

The piano was a partner in a dialogue with the percussion instruments. It was also a link, a commentator, that gave coherence to the sounds of a large group of diverse percussion. There is none of the romantic singing tone, the light and shade that is associated with the grand piano. The piece is an exploration of rhythmic texture, and asks questions about the nature of music, can there be music without melody, based purely on rhythm and various tone colours?

The constant repetition of small musical patterns suggests minimalism, but there is nothing minimal in this huge innovative concerto. It uses large resources with not only a percussion solo that involves vibraphone, marimba, simtak (a steel cylinder played with fingers), dulcimer, steel drums, wind chimes, drum stations, cymbals, tom-toms and various other instruments to hit or stroke, as well as a solo amplified piano, but also an orchestra with two percussion players, timpani, two harps, a full complements of brass, wind and strings.

John Psathas does not belong to any modern musical tradition. He is an individual, unique entity, and his music is like that of no one else according to his publisher Promethean Editions.  Innovative, different, perhaps difficult as this work might have been, it was received with an enthusiastic ovation by the large audience.

As an encore Michael Houston and Jeremy Fitzsimons played Fragments for vibraphone and piano, a work associated with this concerto. It is related in musical material to the second movement of the concerto. John Psathas joined Michael Houston to turn the pages.

Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2
Rachmaninoff harks back to a very different era. This symphony was written in the turbulent times of 1906-7 and this is reflected in the tension and drama of the music.  It captures the spirit of old Russia that was about to change. Rachmaninoff wrote it in Dresden where he moved to escape the turmoil in Russia in the wake of the 1905 revolution. He set out to write a symphony following the success of his Second Piano Concerto and establish himself as a symphonic composer after the critical failure of his first symphony.

The Second Symphony is a huge challenging work for an orchestra. It is a long, demanding work that lasts about an hour. It is very intense music which places, great demands on every section of the orchestra. The first movement starts with a brooding, dark, slow introduction. This leads to a haunting melody which is then expanded, broken up into small blocks that become a constituent part of the development. There are colourful wind and brass passages. The strings are required to dig deep to produce a lush, rich tone. The second movement starts with a hectic, driven passage that leads to an expressive melody. Then layers upon layers of the song-like melodies lead to a grand climax.

The third movement introduces a lyrical theme that has at times a fairy-tale like quality. The final movement starts with an energetic gopak kind of dance, followed by a haunting melody. It is no wonder that the rich texture of the themes of this symphony have been used in a number of films and were adopted in popular music. The orchestra mastered the challenges of this colossal work, with some beautiful playing in the solo wind and brass passages. It was a clear but restrained reading. The orchestra did Rachmaninoff proud.

This was the end of a very difficult season, but despite its challenges, the orchestra performed all its subscription concerts and gave some 180 performances. Marc Taddei, the conductor, congratulated the orchestra in a short speech.  He describes it as a virtuoso orchestra, he also congratulated the audience, and noted that this orchestra had the largest audiences of any orchestras in the country during the season,

Taddei then announced the concerts of the next season, with focus on ‘virtuoso’ music, from Paganini and Liszt to Bartók and Lutosławski as well as the orchestra’s Composer in Residence, John Psathas. It was a beautiful, moving concert, with the grand sound of the Rachmaninoff Symphony left ringing in people’s ears.

 

 

NZSO with three widely varied works: two masterpieces and a charming, approachable New Zealand concerto

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gemma New with Stephen De Pledge (piano)

Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Anthony Ritchie: Piano Concerto No 3
Sibelius: Symphony No 5 in E flat, Op 82

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 November, 6:30 pm

The audience at this concert would have been intrigued, as they took their seats, to see some orchestra members finding their way to a row of music stands in the gallery above and behind the orchestra: two players each of first and second violins, violas, cellos and one double bass.  The rest – strings only of course – were in their normal places

Vaughan Williams with Tallis
The position of players was for Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. As the programme note explained, the two groups reflected, not a sort of concerto grosso as it might have been reflecting the music of a century later, but the two fundamental manuals of a pipe organ: the Great and the Swell.

The nine concertino players, standing high at the rear, handling the “Swell” part, entered first, sounded singularly remote and ethereal (at least from my seat middle stalls) while the ripieno section, the remainder of the strings reflecting the “Great” organ sounded normal; and each took turns at articulating the Tallis melody.  To have been intrigued by this disposition suggested that I had perhaps not heard the piece played live before, or certainly not in this arrangement, and I was enchanted.

After a few minutes during which my attention was drawn to the singularly expressive gestures from the conductor Gemma New; then to a warm solo viola in the main orchestra introducing solos by other strings. New inspired the orchestra to such vivid playing, with such commitment that the entire work had the audience transfixed. The music lends itself to such treatment of course, though I can imagine that not long ago many conductors and audience members of a critical disposition might have found her intense, large-scale gestures excessive. But if it brings the music to life in such a remarkable way, then what’s to criticise?

I have been heard to lament that RNZ Concert’s Settling the Score has, I suspect through unfamiliarity, not placed the Tallis Fantasia at No 1 place instead of the Skylark. The entire audience here could be guaranteed to vote for it in 2021, if possible in this wonderful account under Gemma New.

Ritchie’s Piano Concerto 3
Anthony Ritchie’s Third Piano Concerto could hardly have been a more singular contrast. It was written in 2008 for Emma Sayers and the Manakau Symphony Orchestra and has been performed several times and been recorded by SOUNZ with its dedicatee Sayers and the APO under Uwe Grodd. Stephen de Pledge’s piano opened quietly, creating a peaceful, pensive spirit that lasts about three minutes. It’s followed by a traditional Allegro whose purpose is to be playable and enjoyable rather than an exhibition of either the composer’s cleverness or the pianist’s virtuosity. There were no suggestions of its composition by a disciple of Schoenberg or Boulez, and the end of the first movement had a piano part that could be by Rachmaninov.

The orchestral score, written for a semi-professional orchestra, creates no impossibilities, though there are striking opportunities for brass phrases. The vividness of the orchestral playing was conspicuously the result of New’s understanding of its unpretentious character.

Much of the slow second movement is for piano solo (hardly a ‘cadenza’), with orchestral instruments such as a bassoon participating quietly. The entire movement is based on a recognisable melody which develops in a charming, meditative way; as the programme notes explain, it’s in modal keys, but it’s essentially melodic and any departure from conventional harmony is for the attention of musicologists. It created a charming experience that New and De Pledge handled with great sensitivity. The last movement, much shorter, was bright and playful, offering the pianist attractive opportunities to be both demonstrative and congenial.

As an encore, De Pledge played one of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces – the charming Nocturne in C, Op 54 No 4. Is it still as well-known as it always seemed to me?

Sibelius Fifth
The performance of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony was the climax of the concert where, having got a taste of Gemma New’s dynamism and influence over the players, there was no doubt that this great symphony would be a thrilling experience. For one thing, the performance immediately created a sense of the music’s originality; every phrase, the opening horns and woodwinds, seemed to be both a fresh perception and a new revelation of a long-loved masterpiece.

New revealed a talent for building Sibelius’s several accelerating climaxes as if an entirely new experience. The climax at the end of the first movement created an outburst of applause and shouting that could in no way be ascribed to new-comers’ ignorance of the shape of the symphony. And the deliberate slow movement created suspenseful, deeply felt experience; rhythmically firm and compelling, endlessly repeated motifs that were steadily hypnotic as they accelerated.

The shift into the last movement without any sense of a missing Scherzo is the norm, but it’s always interesting to listen to the fade-out, the moment’s pause and then the clap of the timpani that begins the last movement. It created at once an expectation of the extraordinary suspense of the endless repetition and evolution, sometimes a mere whisper, of the monumental theme that cohabits with the dancing woodwind tune; but eventually takes charge into the glorious, suspenseful finale.

Again the applause was long and serious, celebrating a concert that in its imaginative entirety was a huge success.

 

 

Belated rapture from Orchestra Wellington’s “Rachmaninov 1”, but well worth the wait…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
RACHMANINOV 1 “Rapture”

DVOŘÁK – Serenade for Strings In E Major Op. 22
JENNIFER HIGDON – Violin Concerto 2008
RACHMANINOV – Symphony No. 1 in D Minor Op.13

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday 15th November 2020

Covid-19 has played havoc with many things over 2020, not the least with schedules of music performances, hence the somewhat belated “Rachmaninov 1” title for this concert. Fortunately, the quality of the music and its making seemed unimpaired by any such privations, leaving us grateful all over again for the experience, similar to the feeling engendered by the Orchestra Wellington’s previous concert I’d attended – https://middle-c.org/2020/10/riveting-performances-by-the-orpheus-choir-and-orchestra-wellington-of-works-by-faure-and-rachmaninoff/

Here, I found myself straightaway drawn in by the playing of the programme’s opening work, Antonin Dvořák’s adorable Serenade for Strings – it was all beautifully and sensitively shaped by Marc Taddei and his players, and given flight with the utmost beauty and grace, perhaps ever-so-slightly at the expense of some of the music’s “gruntier” aspects in places such as the finale, but everywhere else for me lovingly reimagining the composer’s sound-world of  intensely poetic feeling. It seemed at times as if we in the audience were eavesdropping on an almost private world of emotion, so tenderly were some of the lines voiced by the players. both in smaller groups and as a whole. The second-movement Waltz made a more impulsive contrast, with much of the string-tones sounding like either rushing water or whispering wind-blown foliage, a real out-of-doors quality. Marc Taddei’s meticulously-wrought transitions between sections to my ears sounded deeply-felt and caring for the music.

The will-‘o-the-wisp-like opening of the third movement began a truly adventuresome narrative, urgent and pent-up with excitement at first, vigorous and joyful, but then afterwards imbued with a longing quality, exemplified by the melody’s wonderfully downward-swooping intervals, and building the anxieties towards relief at the opening’s reprise – all so characterful, here, with the strings lacking only the numbers to fully activate the emotion of those deeply-affecting interval swoops! The slow movement then stole in, the sounds shaping the music’s emotion with real character, the violas in particular touching our hearts with their playing. The middle section was more urgent, more wistful than dark, returning to the main melody, sung in canon by ‘cellos and violins so tenderly, and building up to a rich and gorgeous climax – very satisfying!

The last movement began and ended with a game of chase between upper and lower strings, the syncopations deliciously voiced, and the droll second subject seeming to smile out loud! Its reprise reached upwards and bubbled over with exhilaration before allowing the work’s opening to steal back in like an old friend just before the final, joyously rumbustious payoff! I occasionally imagined still more string tone than we were getting, but the playing’s attack and intensity made up for the lack of numbers and achieved a memorable result. Bravo!

A name known to me (but not, until this evening, her music) was Jennifer Higdon (1962 – ), an American composer who wrote her Violin Concerto in 2008 for violinist Hilary Hahn with many of the virtuoso’s distinctive characteristics as an interpreter in mind (they first met when Hahn was a student in Higdon’s Curtis Institute of music’s 20th Century Music class – in fact the first movement of the concerto was given the name 1726 because it was the Philadelphia street address number of the Institute!). Hearing Hahn perform the Schoenberg Violin Concerto inspired Higdon to write the opening of tonight’s work, with its beautiful, Aeolian-harp-like string harmonics, and by association, the rest of the movement.

This opening sequence suggested to me an awakening, the dream-like reverie of the harmonics quickened into playful exchanges with both solo lines and concerted passages, finally rousing the “noisy kids on the block”, the percussionists, who “let ‘er rip”, thereby encouraging the rest of the orchestra to have its say as well. Amalia Hall’s violin-playing was right on top of the music’s complexities, conveying a sense of dancing with delight at the various interactions, and, aided by conductor Mark Taddei’s superb control of his forces, keeping the exchanges wry and equivocal-sounding in terms of their emotional significance. Episode followed colourful episode, quicksilver turnovers of texture, a mock-march enlivened with triplet rhythm, and brassy shouts calling for reinforcements, resulting in a vigorous toccata-like ensemble strutting its stuff before Hall  tackled an extraordinary sequence of double-stopped intervals such as sevenths, the effect both hair-raising and exhilarating! Gradually the sequences gradually eased in tension as the soloist drew increasingly cantabile-like tones from  instrument, and the work’s opening returned, a magic-sounding “reawakening” of nature which the percussion and winds again joined in with, before allowing the silences to surge softly backwards at the end. It was a journey that left this listener open-mouthed in amazement with both the abundance of musical ideas and their execution…..

The second movement, named “Chaconni”, was the composer’s tribute to the tonal qualities of Hahn’s playing, projecting the idea that her beauty of utterance would inspire solo players in the orchestra to reply in kind. Thus it was here, with the winds setting the scene at the outset for the soloist’s exchanges with solo cello and cor anglais over constantly-murmuring resonances, in places reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ “Pastoral Symphony”. Such wind-blown sounds from the strings and various solo lines soaring in tandem like birdsong made a beautiful evocation of orchestral tapestry for the violinist to decorate with spontaneous-sounding outpourings. The winds enlivened the music’s trajectories, and the strings unfurled their sails for a few exhilarating moments – but Hall and Taddei were equal to the task of calling their cohorts to order and bid them hold their tones fast and and look at where they had come with the music. So it all became a celebration of being, of “living the moment”, of recognising that something special had been achieved, Hall’s solo violin murmuring the last notes with rapt delicacy.

After this, I felt the finale was less striking,  promising more than it actually seemed to give – being a sucker for the obvious I relished the thought of an Olympic Games-like orgy of excitement in victory and stellar achievement, as both the composer, in interview, and the movement’s title “Fly forward” suggested. In the wake of a “ready, steady…” couple of chords, the music lifted its head and gathered speed, everything very physical  and motoric, with plenty of cumulative excitement along the way punctuated by moments of on-the-spot realignment, allowing those of us  a bit out of condition to “catch up” before the trajectories kicked in again.  However, though the final orchestral tutti generated some steam, it seemed to me as if the “race” was suddenly finished with a lap or two still to go, the suddenness of the ending taking us all by surprise and leaving this listener disconcerted (no pun intended!)…..

Whatever one thought of this movement in isolation, one nevertheless felt exhilarated by the whole, the larger work whose development we had seemed almost to collaborate in by the act of listening! I thought it a fascinating and compulsively-wrought coalescence of the creative process, one which tonight’s incredible soloist, Amalia Hall, seemed to “own” the music in a way the composer would have imagined the work’s dedicatee, Hilary Hahn, would do. Fascinating, too, for me to encounter immediately afterwards, two diametrically-opposed reactions from other people (one a composer) regarding the work, a sure sign of the music’s (and the performance’s) power of engagement – something that simply couldn’t be passed over lightly – a great choice of repertoire for that alone!

The concert’s second half could hardly have been more different to the first’s finely-wrought explorations of poetic sensibility and high spirits (Dvořák) coupled with an act of musical homage by demonstration to a great performer’s skills and salient characteristics as a musician (Higdon). The inspiration for the 24 year-old Sergei Rachmaninov in beginning his First Symphony in 1895 remains something of an enigma – the work’s dedication bore the initials of a beautiful Gypsy woman acquaintance, Anna Lodyzhenskaya, the wife of a friend of the composer,  as well as a biblical quote from Romans 12:19 – “Vengeance is Mine – I will repay” (which Tolstoy used as an epigraph to his novel “Anna Karenina”) – but the symphony itself unequivocally expresses a tragic, pessimistic view of life which was deeply rooted in the composer’s psyche from the beginning. Thanks to an unfortunate first performance in 1897 badly conducted by fellow-composer Alexander Glazunov (who was very possibly drunk), and a vitriolic review from another fellow-composer, Cesar Cui, Rachmaninov experienced a crisis of creative confidence from which I feel he never really recovered as a creative artist. With the possible exception of the final movement of his 1913 oratorio “The Bells”, he never revisited such a blatantly despairing mode to such a remarkably focused and potent extent as in this work.

I imagined this music would be a gift for the combination of talents of Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington, and so it proved, the players as per usual punching far above their weight (effectively demonstrated by the platform’s surprisingly vast empty space at the rear of the violins, a space the NZSO would have easily filled with a bigger pool of players!) and tellingly substituting sharp-edged focus for sheer massiveness of sound in the biggest orchestral moments of the work. Throughout the first movement I was repeatedly taken aback by the richness of the string-led climaxes generated from so relatively few players, ably backed by winds and brasses, with the percussion playing its part in the big moments, though I thought the cymbal rolls a tad over-loud as “colour” in that wonderful Rimsky-Korsakov-like section leading to the reprise of the opening motif, however much their incisiveness contributed to the impact of the big moments.

The Scherzo movement here evoked a world of phantoms and shadows, the urgency and sense of agitation reinforced by rapier-like strokes from brass and percussion, and a trenchant solo from leader Justine Cormack, with everything suggested rather than stated outright, and adding to the unease and half-lit nightmarish quality of the music – the strings capture a certain hopelessness in their “dying fall” phrase, as from the “inferno” sequences of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”.  By contrast the slow movement brought out the work’s first evocations of stillness, with the strings, followed by the clarinet and the other winds, creating an unmistakably Russian ambience which, on the surface, seemed “ghosted” by the shades of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, but then introduced both darker, and longer-breathed strands of deep, tragic feeling. The candour and grim purpose of these utterances made a perfect foil for the plaintiveness of the various solo strings whose tones were inexorably built up to a heartfelt lyrical climax,  winds and brass counterpointing the strings’ fervour with portentous reminiscences of the opening theme (the horns superb, here!), before allowing the sounds to subside, bringing about an uneasy close, despite the beauty of the clarinets’ playing in thirds at the end.

Vigorous, thrusting orchestral statements opened the finale, giving way to ceremonial fanfares punctuated by percussion, and answered by strings reiterating the opening rapier-thrusts, Taddei opening the orchestral throttle to great effect, the strings singing their hearts out and the winds, brass and percussion replying with frenzied outbursts. Some glorious playing from the oboe brought the other winds out from hiding, the strings joining in the lament-like figurations and seeming to placate the sufferings – but suddenly, the basses transformed the resigned mood into one of  defiance, the impulses building up to conflagrate the orchestral textures like wildfire, Taddei encouraging his players to stampede wildly and excitingly towards a sudden, fearful abyss-like silence. A pity the climactic resonating gong-stroke was activated a fraction late – it surely should have sounded in unison with the final note of the orchestral tutti, resonating in the gaping maw of the silence’s empty space.

What followed – one of the great orchestral perorations in Russian music – rendered in sound the grim “Vengeance is mine – I will repay” inscription on the score to overwhelming effect, the players giving what their conductor was asking for and more besides, lacking the sheer weight of some other performances I’d experienced, with greater numbers of players, but rivalling any in intensity and focus of sound – a thrilling experience!

 

 

 

 

Another entertaining Shed Concert from the NZSO touching the Weimar era

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich
Shed Series

Kabarett
Hanns Eisler: Kleine Sinfonie, Op. 29
Simon Eastwood: Quanta
Franz Schreker: Kammersymphonie
Erik Satie, orch. Debussy: Gymnopedies Nos. 1 & 3
Kurt Weill: Suite from ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny‘, arranged by Brückner-Rüggerberg

Shed 6, Queen’s Wharf

Friday 13 November, 7:30 pm

This was one of the few concerts, including several from the NZSO, which was not cancelled or changed (apart here, from the order of the pieces) by the effect of the Coronavirus.

Most concerts have come to be ’named’, in a way intended to reflect the character of the music, and this one was Kabarett, German for the obvious English word: the European cabaret scene of the 1920s and 30s, which was a focus not only for composers like Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, but also writers like Brecht, W H Auden and Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and artists Dix, Beckmann, Kirchner. Liebermann, Grosz.

But, not to be too pedantic, not all the music fell within the Weimar era. Schreker’s Chamber Symphony was composed in 1916; Satie’s Gymnopedies were written in the 1880s and Debussy orchestrated two of them in 1897.  The programme’s aim may well have been to suggest the nature of the music that led, with the collapse of Imperial Germany, to what came out of the Weimar Republic, and the mixed blessing of the era of the decadent Berlin scene on the 1920s. Anyway: there’s no reason to be too literal with the name ‘Kabarett’.

Hanns Eisler: Kleine Sinfonie
Hanns Eisler was a genuine, and notable composer of the 20s in Germany. He left Germany after the advent of Hitler and travelled widely in Europe and North America, finally settling in the United States in 1938. His Communist convictions eventually saw him expelled by the notorious McCarthy Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 and he wound up in East Berlin, teaching at the East Berlin music conservatory, later named after him as the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler.

His Kleine Sinfonie was written in 1932, just before the Nazi take-over. The first movement, simply called Theme and Variations, is pensive and slow though it starts with spiky trumpets, then staccato flutes and clarinets, but is predominantly thoughtful though shifting abruptly at times from one instrumental group to another: it’s a series of about 20 variations on the theme, which does take root, lasting for almost half of the four movements.

The second movement is Allegro assai, with the word ‘sostenuto’ seeming like an after-thought. Over long periods it is incessant, often led by trumpet, though there were sudden mood shifts to flute, clarinet and saxophones. The third movement, after an abrupt stop and long pause, is called Invention and is quiet and thoughtful, again with isolated winds. It seemed to go nowhere with little variety, then stopped. The finale, Allegro, alternating brisk and slow passages, finishing after a repeat of the movement’s beginning, without ado.

Simon Eastwood’s Quanta had its first hearing in the Royal Academy of Music in London. It exhibited its era with its conspicuous – important – emphasis on percussion, here tuned percussion, xylophone and marimba, perhaps glockenspiel, and roto-toms. A minute or so in, the sounds began to create some sort of repetitiveness or sequence, with hints of a tune or that some more substantial event might be emerging. But none of the conventional shapes, melodic or rhythmic, were about to arrive because what seemed to drive its course seemed non-musical notions suggested by the title that presumably refers to Einstein’s theories. Nevertheless, setting aside musical characteristics of an earlier decade or two, it created an atmosphere and a flow of ideas that, with further hearings were moving in the direction of an interesting musical structure.

Schreker’s Kammersymphonie
Then came Franz Schreker’s Kammersymphonie (Chamber Symphony). Written in 1916, Kammersymphonie was not really ahead of its time since it presents as a heartfelt and almost traditional work, perhaps anticipating orchestral music’s wide use in film. It was the Weimar republic era in fact, that wrecked his musical career: the bad reception in Cologne of his opera Irrelohe in 1924; and Anti-Semitism and right-wing agitation also caused the failure or cancellation of others.

After ten minutes or so of music that flourished engagingly, without succumbing to distinctive melodies, a series of conventional themes emerged: a happy tune from woodwinds, for example, that became an engaging episode that seemed to keep recalling other music of the time.

So I was bemused to run into this description of Schreker’s music in Wikipedia: “…aesthetic plurality (a mixture of Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expessionism and Neue Schlichkeit, timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and conception of total music theatre into the narrative of  20th century music.”

But Schreker has become a fairly well-known opera composer with the popularity of such works as Der ferne Klang, Die Gezeichneten and Der Schatzgraber which were getting a lot of performances a few years ago. On trips through Germany in the 90s and 2000s I was disappointed to miss one or the other several times.

Satie’s Gymnopedies, via Debussy
After the interval the music became more conventional, or at least a bit more familiar. Debussy’s arrangement of Satie’s Gymnopedies, Nos 1 and 3. So popular are they that one hears them in various patterns and colours. It’s recorded that Debussy thought No 2 was not fit for orchestral treatment, a typical example of Debussyish finesse. Hardly any remnant of piano sound could be detected apart from a delightful harp at the beginning of No 3 (which Debussy placed first). They could easily have been by Debussy, as their French character was hard to conceal; again, another opportunity for disapproval of the programme by pedants. However, they offered a charming intermezzo in the midst of entirely Austro-German music.

Kurt Weill and Die Stadt Mahagonny
The concert ended with excerpts from Kurt Weill’s setting of Brecht’s libretto: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny – ‘Rise and fall of the city of Mahagónny’ (rather easily pronounced as ‘Mahógany’: which is in fact derived from the German language equivalent of the tree, Mahagoni). The arrangement was made in the 1950s by the conductor Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg, consisting of Allegro giusto, Moderato assai, Lento, Molto vivace, Largo. A score that includes a range of percussion and timpani, piano, alto and tenor saxophone, banjo and guitar, captured the spirit of Weill’s mocking, ironical tunes perhaps rather more opulently than does the opera score itself, of the late 1920s. That was to be expected from a conductor associated with the likes of Knappertsbusch, Furtwängler, Karajan, with his latter years in Hamburg. It was a good choice with which to end the concert, as it epitomised the essential character of the music of that time and place.

In all, it was yet another of Hamish McKeich’s successful, well-designed concerts that once more presented a range of music that exhibited aspects of ‘classical’ music that genuinely characterised the pre-WW2 era – particularly exhibiting its more listenable and entertaining aspects. Well populated (though naturally far short of an MFC audience), it lost not too many at the interval though still finding its way with well-arranged seating and sightlines.  I am still waiting for the revival of the then National Orchestra’s promenade concerts of the 1950s and 60s that completely populated the floor of the Town Hall with their mix of very popular classics and the more experimental.