Tag: piano

Aotearoa and China – a musical dialogue presented by Jian Liu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Concert Series 2026

Jian Liu (piano) presents “Aotearoa and China – a musical  dialogue”
Works for solo piano  by New Zealand and Chinese composers
– the first of four concerts as part of a CMNZ tour)

St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 14 th June 2026

Review for Middle C by Gary Wilby

What a thoughtfully curated concert by Associate Professor Jian Liu of Te Koki New Zealand School of Music Victoria University of Wellington. This was a brilliant piano journey through both the place and the culture of New Zealand and China. The programme – Aotearoa & China: A Musical Dialogue  –  cleverly paired piano solos by composers from the two places which are Jian Liu’s home.

In his introductory comments he mentioned that the programme was not the big works from the romantic period – which he had recently been playing as
member of a Quintet at the Chamber Music section of the Michael Hill International Violin Competition Semi Finals in Auckland – but rather smaller piano works from the two countries which complement and contrast place, land, and its inhabitants.

Jian Liu, who has lived in NZ for some 16 years spoke of live performance as having an energy and connection  which he wished to share with us. The programme began with Lilburn’s 1951 “From the Port Hills” one of Five Bagatelles. This  the most evocative and embedded of piano works relating to the landscape of NZ – the vista, the walking, cycling, running, the backdrop to every Cantabrians day – was played with spacious crafted phrases and dynamic range, the bass notes played with a heft to perhaps even suggest the crater’s volcanic origins.

This was immediately followed without a break by “Pictures from Bashu” by Huang Hu Wei,  referencing the cultural richness of Sichuan in a selection of four pieces from that work. Immediately the delicacy of morning, the lyricism, the dynamic virtuosity, the festivity, the sound with Chinese characteristics was
apparent.

“Three Short Pieces” by Salina Fisher, who was present in the audience, moved us to a more abstract view – amazing for a work by a school student at the time – of “Raindrops on a Misty Pond”, “Moths in the light” and then “Galaxy”, giving us a sense of vastness. Each of these Jian gave us with great clarity – delicate echoes, where every note had its place creating an almost different piano sound. And, we were made aware of that by the performer.

Salina was paired with probably the most well-known Chinese composer to New Zealanders in this programme – Tan Dun. If not for the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” maybe because of his many concertos. His “Water Concerto” has been performed in NZ as has his opera “Tea” performed at the NZ International Festival of the Arts. He also visited NZ a number of times and worked at VUW, facilitated by Jack Body and connections through the Asian Composers League Festivals. Again, only a selection of movements from this longer piece – “Eight Memories in Watercolours” – were heard  – the exciting “Staccato Beans”, the
pastoral “Herdboy”, and the evocative “Floating Clouds” almost French floating away to nothing.

Tan Dun’s work was more motivic than we had heard thus far. Dynamic with strong rhythms, tempo and beat. The “Herdboy” evoked isolation and Chinese instrumentation. I would love to have heard Jian playing the last in this suite – the very exciting “Sun Rain”

The programme then moved into love and affection – lyricism. Gareth Farr’s beautiful, sensitive “Love Songs” for three friends – subtle and beautiful melodic lines with arpeggiated left hand accompaniment. Immediately appealing but also requiring reflection. Of course, Jian played these very sensitively,  gifting us the simplicity and emotion of these pieces.

Jian then played “Three Songs from the Mountains of Southern Yunnan” by Zhang Zhao. The folk aesthetic moved though dance like activities involving children, hills, Mountain Moons and mountain Fire which sparked under Jian’s fingers and almost felt slightly dangerous.

After the Interval we had two Lullabies – “For Matthew” by Gillian Whitehead and a work by He Lu Ting. The intimacy of interacting with a child, the soothing of a child – Gillian’s rocking motion with Jian bringing out the bass part and then a work with a Chinese taste where the pianist “rang out” the melodic line. A universal act.

The children are presumably slightly older in Anthony Ritchie’s “Carolina Bay Suite” and Ding Shan De’s “Children Suite – Happy Holidays”. The former evokes a sunrise then children excitedly playing and running on one of the South Island’s most well-known beaches and carnivals. Having fun in the sun at the beach. The Chinese child getting out of the city, skipping with ropes and playing hide and seek. The perfect day for children – here and there.

The programme concluded with two early works by senior composers of the two countries’ earlier times – more formal and traditionally structured.  David Farquhar’s “Sonatina” is a work which should be played more as it reflects on and is part of a time when NZ composers were finding their own feet as part of this country, as part of this land. The programme finished with Wang Li San’s “Sonatina”. Unlike Farquhar’s typical music tempo markings (eg .Andante) for each movement, the latter has the more typical Chinese “titles” describing nature’s sunshine, new rain and “Dance of the Mountain Men” evoking dance and nature.

What an interesting programme –  so well curated and so well presented to the large audience by the performer and by Wellington Chamber Music. As one woman said leaving the venue “That was so exciting –  I didn’t know any of the pieces”. But she was converted and enthralled. Jian Liu’s playing is in its self worth hearing but in this concert he did more by creating links and dialogue for us. He brought us to the lands and the people of two countries’ cultures – especially the children.

It is worth noting that the music is available through Sounz Centre for NZ Music and also through the NZ Music Trust who published “Chinese Piano Music for Children” and also “NZ Piano Works in Two Volumes”. Jian Liu is, during the next week, presenting the programme through Chamber Music NZ to Whanganui, Upper Hutt and New Plymouth

Orchestra Wellington in full “swing” with escapist New York jazz

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON -2026 Collaborations
W:ELLINGTONMarc  Taddei with Orchestra Wellington  – Photo Credit : Andy Best

LEONARD BERNSTEIN – Chichester Psalms
– Tudor Consort / Joshua Derbyshire-Foale (boy soprano)
GEORGE GERSHWIN – Piano Concerto in F
– David Fung (piano)
ROLF LIEBERMANN – Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra
– Te Koki Jazz Band
DUKE ELLINGTON – Harlem

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 30th May 2026

Reviewed by Leila Lois
for MIddle C

What a treat to experience Roaring Twenties New York, replete with a jazz-inflected orchestra and virtuoso soloists, on an early winter evening in Wellington. This edition of Orchestra Wellington’s ‘Collaborations’ series transported audiences to the streets and speakeasies of a bygone Manhattan. The evening exuded classical jazz sophistication, with a pleasing
programme loosely fitted to the jazz era theme: Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Rolf Liebermann, and Duke Ellington.

The evening began with a gorgeous rendition of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, featuring the Tudor Consort and boy soprano Joshua Derbyshire-Foale. The chorus roused the piece with “Behold how good”, the cello foreshadowing the beauty to come. The work sat perfectly within
the Michael Fowler Centre’s acoustics, maintaining its ecclesiastical air while finding warmth in the venue’s wooden architecture.

Next came Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, with pianist David Fung bringing a syrupy fluidity to the keys. Honed by training with the Cleveland Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic, he proved a wonderful collaborator throughout. There was a playful call and response between trumpet, timpani, and piano, melting into the swoony strings under the expert direction of
conductor Marc Taddei. The helter-skelter rondo evoked Roaring Twenties Manhattan so vividly it could practically be felt — the muted trumpets a particular standout, alongside the desultory pizzicato violin and the balmy calm of flute and piano.

Liebermann’s Concerto for Jazz Band and Orchestra, accompanied by the Te Koki Jazz Band, delivered a vibrant dance-hall sound. The pacy cymbals and trombone (the latter led by Jakob Elijas) had the audience toe-tapping and shoulder-shimmying within moments. A playful turn into bossa nova, complete with cowbell and Afro-Cuban instrumentation, added a welcome frisson.

Winds, brass and percussion – Orchestra Wellington – Collaborations 2026 :  Photo Credit: Andy Best

The final piece, Duke Ellington’s much-admired Harlem, perhaps transported audiences furthest of all. Ellington once quipped that “you can’t write music right unless you know how the man who’ll play it plays poker” — and this work fully embodies that spirit, maximising the plush textures of the full orchestra to conjure a vivid, colour-drenched Harlem of the early-to-midtwentieth century.

A beautiful showcase of escapist New York jazz, this edition of Orchestra Wellington’s ‘Collaborations’ series was a real hit, and at the onset of winter, it brought welcome colour and delight.

Echoes of woodland scenes rubbing shoulders with companionable coffee-houses! – an echt-Viennese musical lunchtime experience for Wellingtonians at St. Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano), and Sebastian Dunn (horn)

EUGÈNE BOZZA (1905-1991) – En Forêt (In the Forest) Op.40
Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

FRITZ KREISLER (1875-1962) – Schön Rosmarin (Old Viennese Dance No. 3)
Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano)

JOHANNES BRAHMS  (1833-1897) – Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano in E-flat Major Op.40
Christine Wang (violin), Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, April 29th, 2026

Every now and then in a concert one encounters music one has never before heard, or even heard of, and sometimes even whose composer has a name one doesn’t know. On certain occasions audiences sit primly and attentively and at the end applaud, congratulating the composer(s) and the musicians, and of course, one another upon according the piece or pieces due attention. But on once-in-a-blue-moon occasions such hitherto unknown music can unexpectedly generate an instant impact akin to a real frisson of excitement, one which lingers on in the memory for ages afterwards. It’s happened to me a few times over my years of concert-going experience – the latest being my attendance at a recent St Andrew’s-on-The Terrace concert featuring three outstanding musicians – Sebastian Dunn, horn, Christine Wang, violin, and Beth Chen, piano.

To be accurate, the truly “instant combustion” fireworks took place most markedly during the concert’s first item, featuring horn player Sebastian Dunn and pianist Beth Chen in a vivid presentation of an ear-opening horn-and-piano piece by French composer, Eugène Bozza (1905-1991). This was En forêt  (In the Forest), a piece written in 1941 as an entrance exam piece for the Conservatoire de Paris, and one regarded ever since as embodying the entire technical and expressive capabilities of the French horn. The piece depicted a hunting party in a forest, the writing combining different horn-playing techniques with an impressionistic piano accompaniment. Both  Sebastian Dunn and Beth Chen revelled in their concerted evocations of the hunt and their individual depictions of various scenes and moods throughout – a particularly atmospheric feature was the horn’s magical use of call and distanced (or muted) respondings. The visceral impact of the piece and its performance almost literally “brought the house down” at the conclusion, so evocative was the playing of both musicians throughout in terms of recreating presence and distance, activity and reflection.

After these somewhat “larger-than-life” exertions, violinist Christine Wang next took the platform with Beth Chen to give us “something completely different” – a most charming and nostalgia-soaked piece titled Schön Rosemarin – Old Viennese Dance No.3, by Fritz Kreisler. Before the piece was even halfway though, the winsome charm and delicacy of the players’ violin and piano strains had taken us far away from the forests and the hunters, and was instead enabling us to “drink in” the ambience of the Viennese coffee-house with its traditional “Atmosphäre von Gemütlichkeit”. Fritz Kreisler, besides having been, of course, a renowned virtuoso violinist, was also a composer, but he preferred to publish some of his music under an assumed name so as to give the pieces the chance to be judged by their own merits and not by his “virtuoso violinist’s” reputation. By comparison with Sebastian Dunn’s riveting display of “virtuoso roar” with HIS instrument, violinist Christine Wang seemed to me to catch the completely different kind of “olde-worldly” ambience of the Kreisler piece perfectly, as did Beth Chen’s equally delightful pianistic identification with the spirit of the music.

These seemingly far-flung performing aureoles and contrasts in delivery then magically came together for the programme’s third item, Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio in E-flat Major. In his introduction to the piece Sebastian Dunn talked about the composer’s preference for the “natural” (i.e. “valveless) horn over the more modern version.  Obviously the “Waldhorn” as it was known, had nostalgic connections for Brahms (his father had taught him as a child to play the instrument) besides what the composer specifically referred to as the horn’s more “natural” characteristics, its intrinsic tonal shadings and generally “softer” sound. Dunn assured us that he would do his best in this performance to compensate for his own “modern” instrument’s relative “brashness”!

This work was written in 1865, and probably inspired chiefly by the death of the composer’s mother earlier that same year. As with Brahms, its genesis wasn’t perhaps entirely straightforward, as befitted his generally enigmatic response to various influences regarding his music.  The Trio’s somewhat changeable moods across its four-movement span have prompted various other conjectures regarding sources of inspiration – besides recalling his mother singing the folksong “Dort in den Weide steht ein Haus” (There among the willows stands a house) as influencing part of the Adagio Mesto slow movement, Brahms hinted at another, more mischievous song in the work’s finale, “Es soll sich ja keiner mit der Liebe abgeben” (No-one should have anything to do with love), one which ably suited his ongoing “confirmed bachelor” status. As with any piece of music its creative motivations, whether conscious or otherwise, invariably reflect a veritable jigsaw of influences.

Brahms’s combination of violin, piano and horn was innovative at the time, but has since inspired a number of other works, most obviously (and perhaps, surprisingly) György Ligeti’s 1982 work Hommage à Brahms. Here, the performance of the “original” generously brought out all of the work’s inherent qualities, the opening Andante movement enjoying its relative freedom as the only “sonata-ish” work of Brahms’ to pay little heed to sonata form! – this was more of a rondo-patterned melancholy main theme with a livelier contrasting sequence, the two sections alternating and  subtly blending gestures from one another’s material into a beautiful coda.

The second movement was a dancing Scherzo begun by the piano, and juxtaposing a leaping opening theme with occasional syncopated shouts of consenting glee, catapaulting the trajectories through to the resonantly sombre Trio, after which the Scherzo’s return restored the music’s high spirits. Came the Adagio mesto slow movement, a funereal introduction by the piano heralding a scenario of sorrowful lament, violin and horn almost weeping, it seemed, as the piano moved the cortege forwards – there appeared no respite until the movement’s end, despite an occasional “lifting up” of the melodic line, only to be brought down to earth again under the weight of emotion and gradually dissolving into the mists of gloom….

What a transformation the music then underwent with the finale’s delicious bubbling-up of energies from within!  – with rompings and frolickings spreading like wildfire through the music’s textures! Christine Wang’s violinistic brilliance, by now fully come into its own, and Beth Chen’s vigorous “foundation-rock” piano-tones were the constant “movers and shakers” of the music throughout. Interestingly, (and ironically), I’ve always felt Brahms’ writing for the horn never fully conveyed the out-and-out exhilarations of the “Waldhorn” world, one made so manifest by the Bozza piece we heard at the concert’s beginning – though, of course Sebastian Dunn’s skilfully-reproduced rumbustions during the Brahms work were sufficiently ebullient in certain places to make the instrument’s presence felt, and especially towards the piece’s end!

A group of us, amid plenty of excited babble, managed to make our way across the Terrace to a coffee-shop afterwards, where we were able to reflect anew (and not by any means for the first time!) upon our good fortune at having a lunchtime concert series in the city to attend which featured such resoundingly memorable musical treasures delivered via absolutely first-class performances!

 

 

 

 

 

Scriabin and Rachmaninov from Tony Lee – a piano-fancier’s ultimate dream concert?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ALEXANDER SCRIABIN – Preludes –  Op.11 No.1 in C Major
Op.17 No.5 in F Minor
Op.16 No.1 in B Major
Etude – Op. 2 No. 1 in C-sharp Minor

SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Piano Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 28

Tony Lee (piano)
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 22nd April, 2026

Perhaps the use of the word “ultimate” in the heading unfairly inflates the overall impact of what was, in anybody’s language, a sensational recent display of piano-playing in all aspects of the art-form.  This was delivered by Australian pianist Tony Lee at one of St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace’s free and absolute “mana-from-heaven” lunchtime concerts regularly enjoyed by the capital’s music-lovers. The “ultimate” description would of course be contested hotly by lovers of piano-playing over the choice of repertoire – and even in regard to technical wizardry opinions would differ as to which pieces might be accorded the most elevatedly demanding places in the pianistic pantheon.

Enough to say, the repertoire chosen by Tony Lee amply demonstrated the pianist’s extraordinary mastery of the keyboard challenges posed by the music of two composers, Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Scriabin. Each were themselves virtuoso pianists, Rachmaninov gaining the higher honours from the Moscow Conservatory with the “Great Gold Medal” for piano-playing, and Scriabin a close second with the “Small Gold Medal”. Their own music took markedly different paths  though each was greatly influenced by Chopin at the beginning, with Rachmaninov evolving a rather more conventional kind of individuality, and Scriabin being more the “innovator”, increasingly exploring chromaticism and tonality to almost mystical degrees in his later music.

Their different directions gave rise to contentious moments between them  – Scriabin was critical of  Rachmaninov both regarding his music and plano-playing, at one point even deriding the latter’s music as “earthbound”. And he famously told Rachmaninov at one point that a passage in the latter’s music (the opera “The Miserly Knight) perfectly accorded with his, Scriabin’s “colour-theories” relating to musical keys – when Rachmaninov expressed his disagreement, Scriabin replied, “…Your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny!…..”

Despite all of this, Rachmaninov was determined, after Scriabin’s unexpected death, to promote his colleague’s music, performing it almost exclusively on a tour of Russia, and donating the proceeds to Scriabin’s family. Since those times, the two composers’ musical reputations have continued on different courses, each being in separate ways somewhat misunderstood – rather like with Liszt’s music, much of Rachmaninov’s output has enjoyed a near-instant popularity to this day, though parallelled by strains of outright critical contempt in certain quarters, whereas Scriabin’s music has gradually risen in stature from initial bewilderment and neglect to increased fascination and acceptance on the part of the listening public.

Today’s concert underlined significant aspects of each composer’s creative achievement in terms of the piano, though surprisingly, not in relation to larger forms – Scriabin actually wrote no less than nine piano sonatas, though none were offered here as a comparison to the first of Rachmaninov’s two efforts in the genre. Instead we were given examples of the former’s music in a kind of miniaturist guise, the pieces being from larger collections, though each beautifully self-contained in effect. These exquisitely-crafted morceaux  while obviously derivative, still conveyed enough of their composer’s individuality, though It would have been interesting to have compared the two composers’ individual way with sonata form. Here, I couldn’t help but note my responses to some of the music regarding what I felt were influences, and, surprisingly, more so in Scriabin’s case than in Rachmaninov’s.

First came Prelude Op. 11 No. 1 in C Major, based on a lyrically floated phrase repeatedly used, here, with great sensitivity and imagination, both poetic and passionate in utterance, and reminiscent for me of Debussy’s early music Then we heard Prelude Op 17 No 5 in F Minor, a work with stormy cascadings, impulsive gallopings and unbridled agitations, the pianist splendidly maintaining the wildness and passions of the opening throughout until the sounds came exhaustedly to rest at the very end – it all had something of the energy and drive of Chopin’s very first Op. 28 Prelude, but seemed uncannily to me as if the music might just as well have been Rachmaninov’s.

The following Prelude Op.16 No. 1 in B major recalled for me  firstly Grieg and then Schumann, with sounds resembling  the former’s piquant harmonic explorations venturing into and mingling with the latter’s poetic evening semblances – though as with all of these there was a feeling of a growingly independent spirit already taking flight and pushing out its own capabilities.

And then, the opening of the last of the Scriabin pieces,, the Etude Op. 2 No, 1 in C-sharp Minor, strangely reminded me of Rachmaninov once again – not the stormy C-sharp Minor manner of the latter’s most famous of his Preludes, but of a similar kind of obsessiveness with the opening rising melodic motif, used by him in other pieces, such as the well-known B Minor Prelude’s constant reiteration of its opening. It was all such vividly concentrated playing! – It left me feeling that Lee’s performances would have readily won Scriabin’s music some new friends on this extraordinary showing.

After a short break there came a different kind of “extraordinary”! I had heard Rachmaninov’s two piano sonatas played many years ago on a recording by the legendary John Ogdon, and remembered how “overwhelmed” my then relatively jejune ears felt after listening to what seemed cascades and cascades of notes! Today, those same cascades seemed, in Tony Lee’s hands, to sound-sculpt a magnificently “alive” and spontaneously driven plethora of musical impulses, instantly proclaiming a sense of beginning an epic journey, and exhibiting the means by which this would happen – the portentous themes, the flashes of brilliance and the ever-burgeoning sense of expectation which drew us further into the music’s world. It couldn’t help but recall for me the opening of the Liszt Sonata, though with themes that were even more expansive, taking more time and space to coalesce.

The big repeated-note theme was allowed to sing and resound, majestically suggesting a Faustian kind of spirit, both tremulous and eager in regard to any impending journey. It was irresistibly drawn by a rolling, agitated triplet theme  elaborated here by the pianist with great “presence” and remarkable poise and control but then giving way to a rising. arpeggiated idea that suggested aspiration to a “higher goal”, a Faust-like evocation!  We were made to feel the conflict between competing urges and impulses, between passions and ideals, all building up to a majestic climax – how does Rachmaninov do it?  Then, dramatically, it all seemed to, for the moment, expiate itself – and at that point I heard the unmistakeable echoes of the Third Piano Concerto, the two-note major-key repetitions whose minor-key transition produced an inwardly rising lump-in-the-throat effect as the movement came to its close.

Rachmaninov had reputedly began this work with Goethe’s “Faust” in mind, with each of the movements inspired by the main characters in the  latter’s version of the legend – though the composer was to later downplay the specifics of his inspiration, the movements certainly fitted the “Faust/Gretchen/Mephisofeles” programmatic order, with the second movement’s tenderness and lyricism readily suggesting the innocence and beauty of Gretchen – a perfect foil for the dark turbulence and brooding self-doubt portrayed in the opening movement. Here, Lee allowed  the music to drift, dream-like out of the silences, the oscillating figures framing a gentle song whose sinuous and mesmeric trajectories could ensnare any adventurer, its spell gradually growing in insistence, resembling a flow of openhearted longing and unfulfilled desire, and reaching a point where it cascaded over and down, again fleetingly sounding those echoed reminiscences of the Concerto! Lee then gently and patiently revisited the composer’s lines of the opening dream, this time building gradually towards a kind of effervescent frisson, whose almost-visionary moment glowed and then sank into what some listeners might have described as a post-orgasmic reverie at the end.

Came the finale – a “wild-horse-ride”, tremendously exciting, and a performance which seemed to us in the audience to give every tone, every impulse, every NOTE its due place in the music’s texture, impregnating everything with its particular significance, so that we were caught up in the music’s realms of wonderment and vividly-wrought realisation! The Dies Irae theme, one of the composer’s trademarks, leapt into the fray, its trajectories defiant and remorseless under Lee’s fingers, before its Mephistofelean spirit suddenly wavered at the appearance of a plaintive descending theme, a wholehearted counterweight to the Spirit of Denial and his combatative roisterings! A war of sorts was then waged by the music with the various elements brought into play by Lee’s near superhuman resources until the opening theme of the work was again sounded as if peace had been restored – but almost as if Heaven was shutting its doors, the Dies Irae theme came roaring back and laid all to waste with a series of coruscating descending chords! We were agog as our pianist’s energies hurled the final chords at us with stupendous irrevocability!

Wow! – what a work and what a performance! As I’ve had occasion to mention a few times previously in relation to other St.Andrew’s concerts, considerations such as appetite and hunger seemed well-nigh dwarfed by what we had all experienced this time round, with Rachmaninov and Tony Lee!  At the very least, it was, certainly, a lunchtime to remember!!

Pianist Otis Prescott-Mason – an unexpected but precious gift for us of Schubert’s heavenly G-Major Sonata D.894.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in G Major D.894

Otis Prescott-Mason (piano)
St.Andrews’-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 8th April, 2026

Firstly, a bit of background, which I gleaned from the concert’s programme leaflet  – pianist Otis Prescott-Mason has recently completed his undergraduate studies with Dr.Jian Liu at the New Zealand School of Music here in Wellington. During this time, he’s taken part in several competitions throughout the country, winning firstly the 2020 New Zealand Junior Piano Competition and then both the 2022 PACANZ National Piano Competition, and the Lewis Eady National Piano Competition in Auckland that same year. More recently, in  2025 he won Third Prize at the National Concerto Competition in Christchurch with Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, and has performed with various regional orchestras such as the Christchurch Symphony, Orchestra Wellington, and the Auckland Philharmonia.

Now having completed his undergraduate studies, Prescott-Mason is looking forward to his next step on the pianistic ladder, taking him to a course of study further afield at the prestigious Yale School, of Music in New Haven, Connecticut, USA during the 2026-27 academic year, and working towards a Master of Music with the great Boris Berman, a Professor at the school, and a pianistic “hero” for the young musician. He joins a prestigious group  of past keyboard-achievers from these shores who have similarly  ventured outwards to seek further artistic and musical fulfilment.

I had seen and heard Otis play before on occasions which included a memorable 2020 St. Andrews’ solo recital (review at https://middle-c.org/2021/11/firstly-sparks-and-then-a-conflagration-pianist-otis-prescott-mason-in-recital/), as well as a “shared” recital with other solo pianists (actually a ”preparation”  concert for the aforementioned 2020 NZ Junior Piano Competition, which Prescott-Mason won!), and a sparkling lunchtime concert duo recital (four hands) with Sunny Cheng in 2021. In all, my expectations had been suitably primed by the above to regard this concert as something not to be missed!.

Upon making his appearance, the pianist explained to us that, rather than fronting up with his originally-planned programme of predominantly virtuoso pieces (which I was expecting to hear) he’d felt of late much more like spending time with an audience in the company of a composer like Schubert – so to my special delight (and partly also because I had already heard him play a couple of the originally-scheduled items, and this was something very different!) he’d decided to play the Schubert Sonata in G Major D.894, a work I’d become particularly fond of in recent times thanks to Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter’s daringly leisurely (and, for me, utterly mesmerising!) performance, especially in the case of the work’s first movement.

Though Prescott-Mason didn’t attempt to emulate Richter’s “near-timeless traversal”
of the first movement’s oceanic-like expanses, he caught at the very outset the music’s unique blend of surety and resonant utterance which the slightest hint of any haste or impatience or anything mechanical in a performance can deaden and neutralise. In fact, at the work’s very beginning the pianist “set the scene” for all of us so very beautifully by adopting the once-fashionable opening gesture of playing a series of gently-modulating figures (sometimes chordal, sometimes arpeggiated) as a kind of “storyteller’s introduction” to what was to follow. (Those readers who know of and have heard the late, great Roumanian pianist Dinu Lipatti’s legendary “farewell” recital, recorded “live” as long ago as1950, will be familiar with this enchanting and heartwarming practice!).

Schubert’s own opening chords were then gorgeously-voiced, the whole introduction entirely and disarmingly spontaneous in effect – even more elfin-like were the sounds of the following contrasting sequence, both hushed and beautifully darkened by the deeper bass notes. The music then “opened up”, gloriously amplified through its newly- burgeoning joy and intensity. Though Prescott-Mason seemed to allow the ensuing flowing trajectories of movement at first “play themselves”, he made the following filigree right-hand decorations dancing above the music’s gentle progress utterly captivating. And the timing of these decorations’ sudden downward movement was superb, generating just enough sense of momentum, strength and spontaneity to underline the sense of a kind of “arrival” at the exposition’s end, though with things remaining yet to be fully understood.

Throughout the repeat we found ourselves as entranced by the pianist’s concentration as before, the music unfolding as delightfully and spontaneously, with the descent into those declamatory chords leading to an enchanting postlude resonating with even greater gravitas and resonance this time round. Of course, the development’s sudden pitiless onset of dark-toned attack opened up a new world of frightening disturbance, from which the music’s furtive moments of “escape” into desperately-sought gesturings of consolation get beaten back by the composer’s own demons. We heard one or two instances of near-derailment as the pianist wrestled with these dark forces before managing by sheer effort of will to endure their grim purposes with sufficient patience – though I thought the recapitulation of the opening here could have conveyed a deeper, more spacious and exhausted sense of the “trauma of experience” the music conveyed so vividly in those throes of despair.

All was well by the time the coda was reached, with Prescott-Mason’s re-entry into the music’s trance-like world bringing out those almost archway-like “gates of heaven” utterances with what seemed like wonderment and gratitude, surely and generously taking us with him, as the descending phrases concluded this first part of the journey.

What enchanting song-like lines we then heard at the Andante’s beginning, the tones engaging and the mood almost joyous in its reiteration of full-throated lyrical phrasings – then, how dramatic a plunge into the second group of utterances we got here! Some  detailings seemed to have a couple of out-of-focus moments in the more beseeching parts, but the pianist kept his head and steered the music back on course  – along with the occasional unexpectedly “repeated” phrase, these felt like “corrections” of things originally mistimed…… (perhaps a by-product of the programme’s relatively late re-alignment for the recital?)

Far more important was Prescott-Mason’s maintaining of the music’s overall character, the reprise of the movement’s opening was again beautifully elaborated, with just enough suggestibility and insinuation for us to register the lasting impact of the various plungings into more shadowy and stressful sequences, a wonderful exposition of a relationship between well-being, conflict and eventual resolution. The dramatic Menuetto/Scherzo, too, was delivered with telling contrast between the opening’s muscular purpose and the wryly piquant responses, an interaction which largely dominated the movement – a lovely moment is the occasional quixotic reprise of the opening in more muted tones and with occasional wry grace-notes (as if the more bumptious manner of the opening can occasionally exhibit a more personable “inner” character, one which is brought out here to perfection. As for the Trio, it was pure enchantment on this occasion, almost like a “sleepwalking” sequence displaying an alternative side of the same coin, an “echt-Schubert” moment!

The finale here is surely one of the composer’s happiest creations, an utterly disarming instance of a composer “coming to terms” with the demons lurking in some of the music’s earlier recesses. Prescott-Mason beautifully captures the music’s charm and good humour of the opening, his technique having the spring and pliability that readily give these qualities an irresistible demeanour. And he has the gift of a delightful insouciance, which adds to the music’s appeal while keeping its significance in the larger scheme of things intact and resonant – his playing doesn’t erase memories of the journey but adds to the composer’s own achievement in  deepening the impact of the whole as a living entity. Implicit in this was his simple and heartfelt playing of the work’s final phrase, whose silences that followed were true resonances of memory. What a way to spend a lunchtime! – one, at the end of which we were left feeling such gratitude to both composer and performer!

 

 

Masterpieces from masterly musicians – A St. Andrew’s lunchtime concert, from Rolf Gjelsten and Nicole Chao

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington  – Lunchtime Concert Series

BEETHOVEN – ‘Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major Op.69
TCHAIKOVSKY (arr. Fitzenhagen) – Variations on a Rococo Theme Op.33

Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicole Chao (piano)

Wednesday 18th March 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

“Two masterpieces for the ‘cello-and-piano repertoire, delivered by a pair of musicians regarded as among the country’s top players of their respective instruments” – well, it  sounds like nothing less than a dream prescription for a concert!  Alternatively, the blurb for the occasion could have fixed as easily upon its contrast with present-day scenarios – ranging from world-wide upheavals undermining one’s sense of national and personal security to localised disillusionment and desperation faced with escalating dysfunctional infrastructure and cost-of-living price-hikes – and invited us “to escape from it all into the relative bliss of St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church for a free lunchtime concert of uplifting music”.

However one chooses to view these regular Wednesday lunchtime concert occasions they have given many Wellingtonian classical music-lovers much joy with a stimulating variety of performers and repertoire. In this case we were thoroughly spoilt as regards the concert’s essential ingredients, with cellist Rolf Gjelsten, late of the New Zealand String Quartet, but more recently affiliated with Korimako, a piano/string trio formed with pianist Michael Endres and violinist Helene Pohl, and here joining forces with pianist Nicole Chao, most readily associated with the much-acclaimed Duo Enharmonics together with fellow-pianist Beth Chen.

I had heard Rolf Gjelsten’s solo playing on a couple of occasions, most recently in an absolutely delightful performance of JS Bach’s Third Violincello Suite in C Major at a “Long Hall” Roseneath concert; but I’d not heard Nicole Chao as a solo recitalist since briefly at a 2009 song-recital concert with soprano Nicola Holt, where for an instrumental interlude she gave an atmospheric, by turns finely-detailed and splendidly volatile performance of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade. Though not solo performances this time round, today’s offerings readily demonstrated the technical and interpretative skills of each of the players, brought together beautifully here in St.Andrew’s.

As befitted such a positive partnership, the occasion featured an actual milestone in the repertoire of the solo ‘cello with Ludwig van Beethoven’s ground-breaking Cello Sonata in A Major Op.69. Though this was the third actual sonata of five written for the instrument by Beethoven, this one was the first which gave “equal partnership” status to the ‘cello in a sonata, instead of  (as with the composer’s two Op.5 works, described as “piano sonatas with accompaniment by the ‘cello”) merely providing a supporting role for the keyboard. In fact Beethoven wrote this work for the same cellist, Nikolaus Kraft, who had taken part in the first performance in 1808 of the composer’s Triple Concerto.

At the work’s beginning the ‘cello celebrates its new-found status with its solo announcement of the opening theme, effortlessly floated into being by Rolf Gjelsten  before intensifying the tones with the instrument’s alighting upon a sustained E – to which Nicole Chao’s piano then replies with a lyrical “rounding -off” of the theme and a brief flourish. What follows is an enthralling exchange of ideas which each player acts upon in a sense of both thoughtful contribution and impulsive challenge to the music’s argument – I’ve always loved the music’s ascending runs in this movement, figurations that seem to me to almost “dare” each player (but especially the cellist in the second, higher figuration!) to markedly “sound” and relish these ascents, a kind of “flight of fancy” that’s contrasted with the earthily, no-nonsense agitato plungings into the succeeding episodes by both instruments. The minor-key passage which constitutes the development is delivered with the same focused combination of energy and fancy, breathtaking in its “give-and-take” rapport throughout lyrical and impassioned sequences. And ‘cellist’s and pianist’s instinctive capacity for mutual understanding beautifully bring off the sequence which transforms what sounds like a “third exposition” into the movement’s coda, turning Beethoven’s simplest of phrase-resolutions into a precious kind of homecoming, complete with a “grandstand finish” for the pundits!

The allegro molto Scherzo became something of an “anything you can do” game of syncopated daring, exhilarating to give oneself over to and feel “borne along“ by the players’  sharply-focused trajectories – again, music with contrasting episodes afforded by an obsessively grumbling trio and a po-faced pizzicato coda. No slow movement as such – but an opening sequence of rapt lyrical beauty, wrought by playing that seemed to commune with listeners in mutual enjoyment, before abruptly and mischievously breaking into a precipitous, fleet-fingered (footed?) dance, one which delights as much in contrast of mood as anywhere else in this sonata. So Gjelsten and Chao revelled as much in the music’s “sotto voce” excitement as in the hell-for-leather passages, enabling the energies unleashed by Beethoven to tingle expectantly throughout both exuberant and more circumspect passages – such a COMPLETE performance!

Those of us who had seen the concert’s original listing were expecting the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations to follow, but the printed programme at the church had listed only the Beethoven work – so some people (feeling with every good reason satisfied with what they’d already heard) were getting up to leave when the musicians reappeared for the second item. As well most returned, because the Tchaikovsky work, normally heard in concert played by ‘cello and orchestra, was given simply gorgeous treatment by Gjelsten and Chao, to the point where I found myself preferring the ‘cello-and-piano combination to the original!

I would imagine most cellists are aware of the controversy accompanying this work from its inception, largely due to the activities of its dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, a German cellist and fellow-professor at the Moscow Conservatory, who had given the first performance of the work in 1877. Fitzenhagen had been asked by Tchaikovsky for advice regarding his finished “first-draft” for ‘cello and piano, but the composer wasn’t prepared for the extent to which his dedicatee then “revised” the score with the changes (both in the solo and accompaniment parts) then being incorporated into the published ‘cello-and-orchestra score). Though Tchaikovsky was documented as being furious at Fitzenhagen’s changes, his displeasure never actually translated into action, and the score was published in 1889 in the dedicatee’s version.

Tchaikovsky’s own version of the work wasn’t performed until 1941 in Moscow, but the score of the original had to wait until 1956 to be completely reconstructed, along with the cello-piano arrangement (though even the reconstructed version has been questioned because of the methodology used!). Several recordings have now been made of the original, though the Fitzenhagen version still regularly appears in concert and on record. It wasn’t made clear at today’s concert whether the version used by the musicians was Tchaikovsky/Fitzenhagen, or echt-Tchaikovsky (enquiries to this end are proceeding!).

I grew up with the “Fitzenhagen edition” of the work (used by practically all the  versions on record at the time), as per the recording by Rostropovich with Rozhdestvensky and the Leningrad Philharmonic, and loved it to pieces, though I also heard Janos Starker play the work with the NZSO in the1980s in Palmerston North (also a fabulous concert!). I bought what I believed to be the first-ever recording of Tchaikovksy’s original version of the work, made by cellist Raphael Wallfisch as long ago as 1983, but haven’t played it as much as I have the earlier recording, preferring to my shame the “dark side” territory of Fitzenhagen’s version – it seems to me that the only crime regarding the latter’s rearrangement of the work was that he wasn’t Tchaikovsky!

What we got here from Gjelsten and Chao sounded to my ears pretty well like the version I’d become accustomed to – and the playing gave me such pleasure I hardly stopped for a moment to consider just whose work I was hearing. Undoubtedly the sheer elan and sensitive beauties of the playing here influenced my feelings concerning the matter, but I felt the music in this instrumental format reflected even more deeply the composer’s love for Mozart and the classical style surrounding his work – and the “theme” itself wasn’t an existing rococo or classical melody, but Tchaikovsky’s own.

The work’s two concluding sequences here sounded particularly captivating – the Andante presented a sorrowful minor-key song, with the melodic line augmented by echo-like effects from both instruments, the whole rounded off by piano musings and a wistful ascending ‘cello phrase. It had an intimacy which the piano-and-orchestra version couldn’t replicate. Then, with the Allegro vivo Finale and Coda we got a spirited, exhilarating finish, with the cello’s vigorous utterances made playful by the piano’s counter-melody before both instruments finished the piece with suitably demonstrative gestures. We couldn’t have asked for anything more satisfying from two musicians in absolute accord with one another and with the music!

 

 

 

 

Impactful Shostakovich unpacked -The New Zealand String Quartet and the Ghost Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED
New Zealand String Quartet  / Ghost Trio

String Quartet No. 4 in D Major Op.83 (1949)
New Zealand String Quartet ; Peter Clark (violin) / Arna Morton (guest violinist)
Gillian Ansell (Viola) / Callum Hall (guest ‘cellist)

Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano (arr. Lev Atovmian, 1955)
Peter Clark and Monique Lapins (violins) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor Op 67 (1943-44)
Ghost Trio: Monique Lapins (violin) / Ken Ichinose (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

With: ROBERT BURCH (1929-2007) – Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich for
‘cello and piano (1975)  Callum Hall (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Wednesday, Ist October 2025

Part of a welcome (and essential) commemoration here in Wellington of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has been “Shostakovich Unpacked”, a four-part series of concerts exploring some of the composer’s chamber music masterpieces. This was the third concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s series which presents five of the composer’s fifteen string quartets along with various other chamber works from similar periods in Shostakovich’s creative life, much of which met by official disapproval, and for a time in the form of censure from no less threatening a figure than the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

I couldn’t make it to the two earlier concerts in the series; and after listening to the ensemble’s superbly-wrought reading of Shostakovich’s Fourth Quartet found myself wishing I had moved more sizeable portions of heaven and earth to try and do so! Still, gratitude for what one has and can do is a marvellous thing on its own terms – and the music-making in this evening’s concert was of an order that one was left to marvel at in astonishment! And, it was little short of luxury casting to have TWO ensembles of such quality performing in the same programme, with the added bonus of items featuring members of each group displaying as much enjoyment in the collaborations as the skills required to successfully bring them off.

I particularly enjoyed the contributions made by the two “guest” players in the NZSQ, each notable for their “blending into” the overall textures as for their individual voices, always alive to the potentialities of each phrase they articulated. Arna Morton’s violin sturdily and ambiently partnered leader Peter Clark’s instrument throughout the folksy first movement, while taking her instrument’s mosaic-like opportunities throughout the rest of the work with great surety. Callum Hall’s ‘cello had more opportunities for its solo voice to shine, repeatedly catching the ear with both rhythmic and lyrical enactments of resounding character. Both players seemed for the occasion a glove-like fit into the ensemble’s realisation of a work from a composer whose personal expressions of ideological belief frequently collided with censorious officialdom at the highest (and potentially deadliest) level.

Shostakovich wrote this quartet on a “high” after having attended as an official Soviet spokesman (amazingly, at the directive of Stalin himself) the “Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace” held in New York in March of 1949. Stalin also revoked a previous (1948) ban on the music of “formalist composers” in order to cast the visit of his “representative” to the US in a more positive light. Obviously emboldened by this, Shostakovich had straightaway begun work on the quartet on returning home in April, and finished it before the year was out. Five months later, after intense rehearsals and soul-searchings, the work was privately performed by the composer’s favourite Quartet, the Beethoven Quartet, to an invited audience, whose members immediately expressed alarm at the new work’s ostensible use of Jewish musical idioms. The upshot was that Shostakovich was persuaded to withhold the first public performance and wait “for better times” – which came with the death of Stalin in 1953, and the work’s premiere in December of that year. By this time, the composer’s cynicism at the “new era” was apparent, writing to a friend, “The times are new, but the informers are old”.

All of this history seemed of little concern as the work’s heartwarming introductory sounds were initially launched by the players – a lovely lyrical ambience whose trajectories first suggested something exotically folkish, almost bagpipe-like, with the droning lines of viola and ‘cello underpinning the rhapsodical outpourings of the two violins – tensions arose between the increasingly insistent, sometimes dissonant voices, before shifting harmonies brought viola and ‘cello into the discourse – a more sombre minor-key shift brings meanderings, a hint of a dance and a brief  return to drone-accompanied lyricism at the movement’s end. The Andantino’s first 4-note phrase on the violin straightaway had me thinking “Tchaikovsky”, but not the rest, an intensely-wrought waltz with the ‘cello silent until the player reintroduced the same “Tchaikovsky” theme  – the intensities rose and fell, with Peter Clark’s violin sounding a beautifully “covered” tone replicated by his companions, and  falling gradually away to echoed remembrances of what had gone before.

A gorgeously “chugging” figure introduced the Allegretto, Callum Hall’s ‘cello leading off with a workmanlike theme repeated by the violin, followed by a whimsical unison “trio” of violin viola and ‘cello, the ambience being of a ghostly kind of “night ride” that was then cranked up by the violin’s Jog-trot rhythms (Shostakovich paid a visit by Rossini?) and with wind-blown chromatic figurations introducing an eerie aspect to the journey. Where it eventually took us was to somewhere akin to Robert Schumann’s renowned “other realms” description of worlds of hitherto unexplored experience, a state of being often requiring courage and steadfastness for both performer and listener. Here Gillian Ansell’s viola was the ideal fulcrum for such action, a voice in the midst of the void inviting others to plunge with her into the throes of one of the composer’s most challenging, and in the circumstances, reckless undertakings.

With several audaciously delivered pizzicato chords the introduction to the finale revealed its creator’s raison d’etre for the work, which gradually built up from its robust, truculent beginnings into a kind of danse macabre drawn from Jewish-sounding dance motifs, an unbridled and unashamedly grotesque outpouring of lament in a similar vein to that sounded by the composer’s Second Piano Trio finale. It was no wonder that the work’s first private audience was disturbed at Shostakovich’s apparent insensibility to potential strife and condemnation with this music – its scale was almost orchestral in places, with powerful unisons, sharp accents, and massive chordings, all of which eventually unravelled to leave mere vestiges of desolation for us to marvel over at the music’s end.

Not in the above written order, the programme’s next item was, appropriately enough, a work written in 1975 by a little-known but still significant New Zealand composer, Robert Burch, as “An Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich, for ‘cello and piano”, performed by Callum Hall and Gabriela Glapska, one introduced and preluded by Peter Clark, who read an additional posthumous word-tribute by Burch to his illustrious fellow-composer.

Much of the work was not inappropriately sombre, beginning with heavy introductory unison notes from both instruments, stern exchanges, either in unison between piano and ‘cello or in counterpoint with one another. The mood remained serious and studious at first, occasionally highlighting a particular rhythmic five-single-note figure on both instruments – a passage with the cello played pizzicato followed, as did afterwards an almost ad lib section, the cellist bouncing the bow on the instrument’s strings by way of advancing the theme in a different form. The piano suddenly embarked on a convoluted, rhythmically rugged expansion of the thematic material before taking up a fugue-like passage which the cello interrupted, again with the abrupt five-note passage. After a series of forceful chords from the piano, the instruments seem to enter into some kind of collusion, the ‘cello sounding long-breathed lines and Elgar-like pizzicato chordings, to which the piano replied with gently luminous harmonies in the higher registers, the cello continuing to draw out the five-note patternings in more contentedly-expressed terms of acceptance of the piano’s celestial-sounding representations.

In view of Shostakovich’s well-documented sense of somewhat ironic humour, it was appropriate to have some musical representation of his facility in this respect, with ample proof furnished by a performance of several pieces arranged for two violins and piano drawn from the composer’s various suites of “lighter” music for film and other “incidental music” activities. One of his composer-friends, Lev Atovmian, was frequently assigned by Shostakovich to produce arrangements from several of his stage and film scores, one of which was the collection Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano. I must admit to enjoying looking further into the individual pieces’ genesis (at the risk of further elongating this review!) – the opening Prelude was from the 1955 film score The Gadfly, a mixture of tenderness and ebullience which the players designated with considerable relish. Then came the Gavotte, lovely and “bouncy”, from incidental music to The Human Comedy (1934), and followed by a poignant Elegy from the same work, a sequence originally titled The Panorama of Paris. The succeeding Waltz, supposedly from music for a cartoon film The Tale of the Priest and his servant Balda moved by turns through tense, insinuating and buoyant sequences involving a pompous priest, his beautiful daughter and a resourceful servant – however, the concluding Polka certainly added to its interest with further clarification as to the source –  taken from the Ballet The Limpid Stream, its full title was Dance of the Milkmaid and the Tractor Driver.  (Surely no commentator would pass on an opportunity for such a colourful mention!)

It almost goes without saying that violinists Peter Clark and Monique Lapins, together with pianist Gabriela Glapska, all readily brought out the fun, the quirkiness and the tongue-in-cheek sentimentality of these pieces, making the presentations as much fun to watch as to listen to. Other qualities far removed from such innocent enjoyments, and ironically involving two of the same performers here, then took over the final part of the programme. This marked the appearance of the “other” ensemble, the Ghost Trio, in which Monique Lapins and Gabriela Glapska were joined by ‘cellist Ken Ichinose for a performance of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, one of the composer’s defining statements concerning, in Gabriela Glapska’s own moving notes about the music, “both intimate grief and the collective trauma of a war-torn nation”.

It was my privilege to have heard the same Ghost Trio play this work less than six weeks ago, at a concert at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, to simply overwhelming effect on that occasion  – https://middle-c.org/2025/08/ghost-trios-st-andrews-concert-haunts-the-memory/ –  I don’t propose to try and describe the music all over again, merely to report on the effect I thought the work and its performance had on a different audience. When experiencing the work alongside other music by Shostakovich I felt it made a different kind of impact for me, its “shock effect”  no longer as marked, but when performed in the wake of something like the Quartet, having a deeper, more lasting sense of unease at the enormity and insidious  power of the forces that were obviously arrayed all about the composer’s world in order to keep in place a status quo of power and control – in this case characterised by fear and terror enacted upon any refusing to co-operate. I thought the St.Andrew’s acoustic more responsive to the music as well, where every sliver of impulse seemed to send shock waves in all directions – the ambiences of the Prefab Hall made, I thought, the work’s impact a tad more diffuse, though a second hearing can easily produce variants, musicians being human beings. Though, in short, less of a “knockout” performance for me this time round, the Trio further intensified my awe and respect for the composer in this music and for the people who put themselves “on the line” to bring these works off with such searing commitment!

As did the rest of the programme – a great success for all concerned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joanna Dann and David Neild – a feast of ‘cello-and-piano presentation at St. Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St, Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert series
JOANNA DANN (‘cello) & DAVID NEILD piano)

ROBERT SCHUMANN – Fantasiestücke Op.73
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano No. 4 in C Op. 102/1
SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Andante (third mvt.) from Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano Op.19
FRANZ SCHUBERT (arr. David Popper) Du Bist die Ruh (Rückert -1823)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 16th July, 2025

Some blithe spirit must have quietly done the rounds and spread the word  regarding this particular recital, with  St.Andrew’s Church close to being more-than-usually packed by eager lunchtime-concert-goers, as noted by the organiser who welcomed us and introduced the artists – it would have been especially heartening for both cellist Joanna Dann and pianist David Neild upon entering to encounter such a veritable sea of eagerly awaiting faces! The programme was, of course, a drawcard in itself, containing the kind of music which would warm both senses and sensibilities in a direct “simply add water” kind of way – and so it proved, judging by the warmth of the reception the pair’s playing of these works drew from the audience at the end.

Robert Schumann’s Op.73 Fantasiestücke opened the concert – is there another composer whose music always so quickly betrays its creator’s identity? Both performers drew forth lovely, light-and-lyrical tones from their instruments, moving easily between the major and minor modes, and with neither instrument claiming any ascendancy – the cellist almost uncannily “matched” the piano tones whether in lyrical tones or quicker figurations, producing a kind of seamless interplay. This continued throughout the second movement’s “lebhaft – licht” (Lively – light), in which the players achieved an almost fairy-like grace with their interactions, the pianist’s gossamer-like tones mirroring the similarly “will-o-the-wisp” peregrinations of the cellist. I was, however, expecting rather more forthright sounds than we got in the “Rasch und mit feuer” finale, where I began to crave more cello tone expressing Schumann’s more assertive writing, his ardour and muscularity which contrasts with those passages where, once again, the interplay between the voices seemed like a “marriage of minds” – but in other places  I couldn’t help feeling  like a kind of Oliver Twist, asking the cellist for more!

Beethoven, in his five ‘Cello Sonatas of course transformed the previous role of the cello in this genre from being either a solo instrument with extemporised “accompaniment” by one or more players, or an obbligato instrument for a keyboard sonata. His first two Cello Sonatas (Op. 5) were written in 1796, and in fact designated “Two Grand Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte with a Violincello obbligato”, but unlike those earlier “obbligato” sonatas, both of the Op.5 works had through-composed cello parts which in places were independent of keyboard figurations. By the time he had reached his two Op.102 Cello Sonatas in 1815, the composer had embarked upon his “late” period of composition, so that these works readily display those characteristics we’ve come to recognise as typical of that time, such as unconventional form, and deeper, more probing expression.

His Fourth Cello Sonata begins with a ‘cello solo, beautifully voiced, gently joined with by the piano, the lines concentrated and sonorous, seemingly “captured from the air” rather than composed, the instruments gently nudging the sounds together, until a sudden vigorous unison breaks the spell! Here the forceful piano somewhat dominated the ‘cello, whose notes one had to strain to hear in all but during the occasional quieter episodes, somewhat negating the composer’s intention of giving the instrument more of a “voice”! What I could hear of the cellist’s playing sounded true in terms of rhythm and intonation, but the piano was so much to the fore, it sometimes couldn’t help giving an impression that the cellist was playing more for herself than for us.

The Adagio brought the ‘cello back to us again, the players each giving us enough to better balance the sound, with the long sombre lines of the opening, and the beautiful exchange between the instruments that followed working really well in relative terms – though I thought there was still scope for the ‘cello to “sing” even more in places. The finale’s beginning with its playful exchanges made a properly whimsical impression, and the ‘cellist bought out some of the darker lines, but the higher, brighter melodic exchanges needed to bubble and sizzle more equally more often! One could hear there was a fine interpretation there, but it was simply a question of coaxing more tone from the ‘cello for the music’s course to sustain its full and glorious effect!

The Rachmaninov ‘Cello Sonata’s  Andante movement in places brought out the best qualities in both players, with the wonderful major/minor key sequences of the piano’s opening paragraph gorgeously realised, as were plenty of subtle gradations enticing our ears further and further into the piece; while the ‘cellist replied in kind with much sensitive articulation of those long melodic lines – though the tone lessened as the line moved up the stave she chose to give her lines a quieter, more reflective sound, even though I could occasionally have done with more “outward push” in some of the phrases – but still, what gloriously vibrant music emerged in places from these players’ efforts (I should have liked to have heard the whole sonata, accustomed as I am to wanting more of such things!)

Instead we got what was surely the highlight of the programme for most people – this was cellist David Popper’s arrangement for ‘cello and piano of one of Franz Schubert’s most beautiful songs  – the composer’s 1823 composition “Du bist die Ruh”. Both the pianist and ‘cellist by turns realised this music to exquisite degrees – a beautiful piano introduction was gorgeously augmented by the ‘cellist’s tones in her opening phrase – has anybody composed anything more heart-rendingly beautiful than this? When it came to the song’s climax, that glorious ascent towards a celestial high note, we were taken by the composer and his two musicians to some kind of Elysium-like place for a moment, not once, but twice – and of course there are as many ways to “sound” that final note as there are musicians! Between them, Joanna Dann and David Neild gave us untold pleasure with such moments – a most satisfying way to end any lunchtime’s music-making!

Home for the Winter with Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding

Posted on by Peter Mechen

“Home for the Winter”
Liam Wooding (piano) and Hannah Darroch (flute)
Music by Jasmine Lovell-Smith, Henri Dutilleux, Lachlan Skipworth, Aaron Copland and Lili Boulanger
Bedlam and Squalor – Level 1, 18 Garret St,. Te Aro, Wellington
6:00 pm, Thursday,15th May, 2025

Things were “swinging away” in great end-of-the-day style at “The Rogue and Vagabond”, the watering-place right next to central Wellington’s Glover Park, as I made my way, a little tentatively, just around the corner and further along Garret St, to where there stood, self-assuredly in its own modest way, the entrance to “Bedlam and Squalor” (ah, thought I – a first cousin to “The Rogue and Vagabond!) – but I was straightaway taken by the contrast of the sombre doorway (of the “abandon hope” sort) with the profusion, above and besides this entrance, of coloured-pencil like horizontal stripes one might have correlated to a kind of urban kindergarten or some sort of art-gallery where the Hogarth-like images I’d entertained of “Bedlam and Squalor” were in reality reverse-euphemisms  for “fun and games”, and obviously nothing worse than “madness and merriment”.

Up the stairs I went, leaving those around-the-corner jollities earthbound as I ascended, finding myself in a quiet, comfortable and welcoming space not unlike a bar itself, but with tables and chairs set up in a rounded area at the room’s end, where there was a piano, beside which the two artists, Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding, were discussing aspects of the music they were about to perform, and greeting us (myself included) as we came in. Pleasantries completed I had just settled down, finding a seat next to an acquaintance whom I’d made at previous concerts and always found most agreeable, when I discovered that, in my haste at leaving home I’d snatched up one of my notebooks, but had forgotten to bring a pen! Help was at hand in the shape and form of a bartender, who was greatly amused by the piquancy of the plight of a music critic who had come without a stylus, but who kindly brought my agony to an end by producing one – I was happy to have thus contributed a “storm-in-a-teacup” strand of incident to the proceedings now that things had been resolved!

So! – here were Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding, formally welcoming us (we were a small but appreciative audience in that relatively intimate space) and telling us about what they were going to play for us, beginning with a piece which had give the whole recital its name, “Home for the Winter”, a piece written in 2020 for Hannah by Jasmine Lovell-Smith, and whose title was inspired by the “homeward” move made by many New Zealanders in response to the Covid 19 outbreak. The sounds seemed coaxed from out of the air, firstly for the piano, and then for the flute, the lines having a natural, organic kind of flow as if wrought by impulse, a feeling for the actions of wind and water all around – having been brought into being these elements seemed to take human form in song, which became a sort of minstrelsy, a chorus that rose up as the piano intensified the exchanges, before breaking off and leaving the opening resonances as a memory.

Having proclaimed a kind of “this is where we are” introduction, Hannah and Liam took us next to more peopled terrain, with a work by French composer Henri Dutilleux. Though it was one I’d not heard before, I knew and had already been enchanted with pieces by Poulenc, Francaix and Ropartz, and this proved, to my delight, similar kind of territory. I was almost straightaway disarmed by the opening piquancies (mysterious piano octaves echoed and gracefully “danced all about” by the flute) – and I loved the “Peter and the Wolf” opening dialogues of the second movement between the piano’s predatory wolf and the flute’s frightened but intrepid bird, and the following rhapsodic exchanges between the two, suggesting something of a singular “entente cordiale”.

A sudden escalation of energies (brilliant “molto perpetuo” playing from both musicians) seemed to clear the air of menace, entirely, and give the scenario over entirely to the pleasures of tit-for-tat exchange, our sensibilities being given plenty of air and space in places by some soaring lines before being returned to the dance! Towards the end, a cadenza-like episode from Hannah’s flute took us to a Ravel-like place not unlike Daphnis and Chloe’s enchanted grove, before the pair rejoined forces for an ever-accelerating coda, exhilarating for us all in its shared energies and pleasures.

Next was a recently-composed (2022) sonata by Australian Lachlan Skipworth, introduced by Liam, and described by him as “very refreshing” to play, though adding the proviso that the time signatures in the score with their frequent changes – 20/16, 10/16, 18/16 – certainly posed something a “challenge”. From the beginning I found the work a same-but-different experience to that of the Dutilleux, here an almost Gaelic world of exhilaration, with the opening “chaos of delight” morphing into a folk-dance blend of carefree abandon and strongly-pulsed movement.

The piano breaks off to play a solemn, repeated note-pattern to which the flute adds a lovely, rustic song-like sequence, borne along by its own airiness and spaciousness, hymn-like when the piano intensifies the mood, and seemingly tossed into the play of winds and waves when both instruments dance along the hilltops of the melody’s liberated lines – entrancing! Just as spell-binding is the dialogue of voices sequence which follows, like a pair of birds enacting a defining of territories, or a courtship ritual, one which leads back to the exuberance of the folkdance – if the conclusion isn’t quite of the grand finality one might expect, one might say it has an attractively insouciant “well, there it is!” manner at the end.

Our “food for thought” interval was sufficient to process what we’d heard (delightful!) and clear our decks for the next offering, a “different again” experience promised, which Hannah described for us  as “Americana in music” – this was Aaron Copland’s Duo for Flute and Piano, again something I hadn’t heard (oh, the ignorance of some music critics!), and naturally looked forward to an introduction to the piece. The opening movement, marked as “Freely” by the composer, takes us straight into the world of the latter’s ballet “Appalachian Spring” with the flute playing solo, a “voice in the wilderness”, spacious and nostalgic, with the piano’s entry contributing to the characteristic, almost unmistakably “open” sound. The flute begins the dance, strands of movement varying its trajectories, with the piano amusingly “oom-pah” at one point just before the big flute solo! Another pronounced “echo” for me is the similar ambience to the Third Symphony towards the end, a kind of salute to an idealised past…..but, then, what a quirky kind of conclusion! – those sharply-abrupt chordings are almost amusing in their air of dismissiveness!

“Poetic, somewhat mournful”, says the composer at the head of Mvt.II – piano and flute seem to be either looking for or avoiding one another at the start – most of those open harmonies have closed up, and whatever congress the instruments strike, each seems somewhat nonplussed by the other – there’s a moment of accord in a more animated and heartfelt middle section, but compared to the opening, it’s a bit like the difference between a dream and an awakening (whichever suits which!).The piano returns to its lonely furrow, and the flute raises its head for a heartfelt and sonorous single-note look-around!

Both espy a notice saying “Lively, with bounce!”  – so the piano “bounces” and the flute catches on! And what better than a square dance? – lovely, palms-skyward trajectories, with quirky harmonic comings and goings, with the flute occasionally intoning “Where are you?” as the piano rumbles up and down the stairs! – “Back to the dance!” they both chorus, nostalgically smoothing-over the rhythms here and there, but as quickly resuming their “hide-and-seek” – suddenly Hannah’s flute espies an open window and with Liam’s piano in hot pursuit catapaults right through it! – freedom!

Has this been music I’m writing about or some sort of “anything you can do I can do better” kind of game? It just seems that way, at times – but whatever the case, we in the audience were tickled to pieces by it all – and just to show that life bears SOME resemblance to art, we were invited by our stalwart artists to return to our lives with a kind of encore, a piece by Lili Boulanger appropriately entitled “Nocturne”, the flute singing a lullabic song over piano octaves, the tones soaring and settling over gorgeous keyboard undulations, while the harmonies coalesce slowly and beautifully.

Hannah and Liam, you and your instruments brought about such delight and contentment for all of us present this evening – any thoughts of bedlam and squalor were forgotten as I took my leave of my companion (deftly remembering on the way out to return the borrowed pen!) and descended those stairs and met with the open air once again, trying to recall what day it was, where I was, where I was going and what the music was that was playing in my head as I walked through streets that bore no relation, it seemed, to any of those sounds….and I thought it was definitely all part of something well worth remembering……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Luu Hong Quang’s Liszt recording proclaims its lustre on Rattle Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FRANZ LISZT –  Etudes d’execution transcendante S.139 (Transcendental Etudes)

Luu Hong Quang (piano)

Rattle Records RAT-D152 2024

Reviewed  “Middle C” November 2024

Vietnamese pianist Luu Hong Quang is currently (2024) in Wellington while studying for his Doctorate of Music with Professor Jian Liu at Victoria University’s School of Music. It’s a far-flung location from which to throw down the gauntlet to the wider world of pianism at large – but Quang has done this with a new release from Rattle Records which presents one of the piano repertoire’s most formidably challenging works, Franz Liszt’s “Etudes d’execution transcendante”. The recording was actually one that Quang made, appropriately enough, in the concert hall built next to Liszt’s actual birthplace in Raiding, Austria (formerly known as Doborján when part of Hungary at the time of the composer’s birth). No precise recording dates are given, though the pianist recounts in a booklet note a sense of the pilgrimage undertaken over a period of eighteen months to learn and master the work, which culminated in his first public performance in December 2022 at the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi. (I have since contacted Luu Hong Quang and learned that the recording took place in July, 2023.)

The genesis of Liszt’s Etudes is well-known, having their origins in twelve studies (Étude en douze exercices) he first wrote in 1826 when barely sixteen, then majorly elaborating on them in 1837 (Douze Grandes Études), after having fallen under the performing spell of Paganini and determined to emulate on the piano what the already legendary fiddler was achieving on the violin. By the 1850s, and having long given up the life of the virtuoso, Liszt then resolved to bring some of his youthful technical excesses to heel and “simplify” the studies (only one, “Mazeppa”, is considered even more difficult in its 1852 revision), emphasising the pieces’ poetry and grandeur and generally “playing down” their overtly prestidigitatorial qualities. And while the lighter Erard pianos of the 1830s made those earlier versions less awkward to manage, the heavier “action” of the newer pianos from Russia and Vienna which were gaining in popularity made passages from the 1837 Etudes impossible for all but the fingers of a Liszt!

Even so, for years these works were regarded as the preserve of “super-virtuosi”, having to wait until February 1903 to received their first documented premiere performance as a complete set from the legendary Ferruccio Busoni at the Berlin Beethoven-Saal. Traversals of the entire set remained rare both in concert and on record in the intervening years up to the 1960s – notables such as Egon Petri (1927), Jose Iturbi (1930), Jean Doyen (1943) and Earl Wild (1957) gave concert performances – but the first complete recording wasn’t set down until 1956, when Russian/American pianist Alexander Borovsky recorded the work for Vox, followed then by Gyorgy Cziffra in 1958 and Lazar Berman in 1959. Incidentally (and surprisingly), I can find only a single concert performance of the cycle thus far documented in New Zealand, that by visiting American pianist Kyrill Gerstein performed in Auckland in 2015.

Flash forward to 2024 and it seems as if a “virtuoso revolution” has taken place in world pianism since the Millenium, with almost fifty versions of the Transcendental Etudes I counted as currently available on recordings listed on the prestigious “Presto Classical” website. And now adding to that number will be Luu Hong Quang’s brilliantly-played disc, produced and sonorously recorded and mixed by Paul Carasco, and elegantly presented by Steve Garden’s Rattle Records in association with the support of Professor Jack Richards.

I decided I wouldn’t here set Quang’s recording against any other of today’s “super-virtuosi” for direct comparison, but rather allow my responses to resonate within my own sound-world of accumulated memory and feeling from experiences of first getting to know these works well. This took place through what have since become classic recordings of the complete 1852 set made by Louis Kentner, Lazar Berman and Claudio Arrau (I also heard a recital disc of Vladimir Ashkenazy’s at this time, though, sadly, only of excerpts).  These were the performances which I’d first encountered and which had, from my first hearing of “Harmonies du soir” on that single Ashkenazy disc, drawn me irretrievably into the sound-world of what I came to regard as one of the composer’s most astounding creative achievements. In the light of those three stellar, though vastly different performances quoted above, Quang’s performances are as much redolent of my youthful impressions of this music as they seem freshly-minted to my ears – on a superficial level they most resemble Louis Kentner’s in that they seem primarily concerned with each piece’s “inner being” rather than its external display of whatever. Which is not to say that Lazar Berman, Claudio Arrau or Vladimir Ashkenazy all put virtuoso display ahead of poetic feeling in their readings, but rather that Quang, like Kentner, seemed to unselfconsciously intertwine the music’s “wow” element inextricably with its poetry, so as to constantly draw attention to the view rather than merely to an interpreter’s presentation of it.

Thus the opening “Preludio”, intended to arrest the listener’s attention right from the outset, does so with a true Lisztian combination of brilliance, quixotic wit and suggestive harmonic sleight-of-hand, Quang announcing the composer’s and his music’s credentials in an action-packed nutshell. Though most of the studies have descriptive titles, we’re then plunged straight into one of the two for whom Liszt named merely by their key, in this case A Minor, whose opening rhythmically resembles Beethoven’s famous C Minor Symphony’s opening, but whose restless, quixotic character suggests a more compulsively whimsical spirit – Quang’s playing brings to mind his own reference in the notes to Paganini himself.

Things settle down with the beautiful “Paysage”, a landscape conceived here, it seems from “out of the air’, such is the spontaneity of phrasing and colour that Quang conjures from the notes, with the wonderfully dramatic midway modulation taking us into a differently-hued world for a few precious moments before the tranquility returns. This is all precipitately detonated by the opening drama of “Mazeppa”, with its arresting opening chords and portentous stirrings of agitation leading to the remorseless drama of a wild and torturous captive horseback ride, Quang’s strength and agility ably suggesting by turns the hero’s desperate plight, his longing for release, and eventually, his triumphal redemption. And, in the wake of these heady heroics comes the alchemic magic of the following “Feux Follets” (Will-o’the Wisps), one of Liszt’s absolute masterpieces, famous for its demands on the player regarding velocity, tonal shading, finger-control and poetic evocation, all of which Quang achieves with meticulous differentiation and bewildering evanescent manifestation.

How different is the dark, mysteriously-voiced “Vision” which follows, a grim and black-toned G minor presence whose aspect takes on a proud glow from within under Quang’s fingers as the music’s heroic spirit is awakened and enlivened. Perhaps he isn’t as intensely visionary as Kentner or as granite-toned as Arrau in this music but, as in the following “Eroica”, he conveys in places as telling an awareness of the music’s poetry as its physical forcefulness – he grows the latter piece through its strong-willed opening flourishes, treating us to an intrepid journey from whimsical beginnings through a vainglorious display of valour, before circumspection proclaims that honour is satisfied. No such hint of heedfulness attends the next piece, however – the tumultuous “Wilde Jagd” beloved of German folklore as “Wild Hunt”, here given a tremendous, frenetic opening by Quang before settling to the chase in an almost carnival spirit, complete with a “hunting song”! The subsequent building-up of the music’s sheer physicality and strenuous vigour reaches cataclysmic levels in the pianist’s hands before it all seems to collapse in sheer exhaustion!

All of this leads to what seem to me the disc’s most remarkable performances, beginning with the heart-warming poetry of Quang’s playing of “Ricordanza” (Memories), a piece haunted by ghosts of memory depicted in the music’s piquant figurations and flourishes, shades of the past “filled out” with exquisitely-wrought manifestations – Busoni’s famous and incomparable “discovery of old love-letters” description of the piece is referred to by the pianist in his notes. As befits one of the great musical love-poems, Quang’s playing touches the heart of this listener for one, with its spontaneous-sounding evocations of remembrances couched in terms of a slow-moving, emotion-laden “dance” framed by frequent impulses denoting poignantly-suggestive things whose nature remains indefinite.

The following F Minor Study follows on its predecessor’s heels almost attacca – as well might a piece marked allegro agitato molto!  Quang gives the oft-repeated opening figure more urgency than does Kentner, who keeps the figurations in trajectorial step with their overall context (by contrast Lazar Berman almost eviscerates the figures’ notes themselves with his rapid-fire delivery!). But how deftly Quang manages the midway transition back to the piece’s beginning, splendidly reiterating both the angst-laden declamatory theme and the return to the opening agitations, with those exciting  running syncopations leading to the piece’s coup de grace!

I’ve written of the indelible impression made on me by this work as one wrought by “Harmonies du soir” – and so it’s fitting that Quang here brings the listener to a kind of apex of achievement with this study and its “mirror image” that follows, the equally remarkable “Chasse Neige”. But even now, fifty years after first hearing those opening notes of “Harmonies” sound their opening embrace that enfolds those impulses they give rise to, I still find myself wreathed in that same wonderment as nature’s bells are softly set ringing and then enjoined by a second theme to give full tongue in praise of creation’s beauteous manifestations – and here, nothing is forced or strained but wholeheartedly ‘’released” through the pianist’s obvious love of his subject and his palpable skills and sensibilities.

How prescient of Liszt to give the cycle’s last word to nature, leaving the listener with a sense of worldly impermanence, almost a “Sic transit gloria mundi” observation as the remorseless snows of “Chasse Neige” cover over all trace of the lives made so manifest throughout the rest of the pieces – Quang is totally at one with the composer, here, revelling in the overlapping surges of tone in the piece’s middle section and bringing off the concluding “claw-like” gesture of farewell at the end with suitable gravitas and finality.

Luu Hong Quang would do well to be proud of his response to this “marathon” challenge  with, in his own words  – “a true milestone in (an) artistic journey” – may we hope he might, before too long, undertake to put a proper girdle about the earth by enabling this astonishing work to live and breathe in concert for only a second time within these far-flung spaces of our own hemisphere!