Tag: piano

Rachmaninov – jubilation and bitterness, but sheer poetry from Joyce Yang

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
RACHMANINOV
Vocalise Op.34 No.14 (transcribed by the composer)
Piano Concerto No.3 in D Minor Op. 30
Symphonic Dances Op.45

Joyce Yang (piano)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 27th October, 2017

A beautifully put-together programme, this, devoted to the music of Rachmaninov, and in almost every way, superbly delivered! There could be no doubt, however as to who the “star of the show” was – Korean-born American pianist Joyce Yang gave what seemed to me a performance in a thousand of the composer’s fearsome D Minor Concerto, regarded by many as one of the most technically difficult works for piano and orchestra ever written. Earlier, the NZSO and conductor Edo de Waart had breathed into life a deliciously-poised orchestra-only version of the wordless song, Vocalise, in an arrangement devised by the composer. Then, following the concerto, came a performance of Rachmaninov’s very last work, his “Symphonic Dances” , written in 1940, three years before his death. The first two of the dances came off best, here, particularly the first, with its beautifully-played saxophone solo – I confess to being a tad disappointed with the final dance’s performance, feeling that it was wanting in “bite”, and needing more wildness and desperation in its execution.

The Vocalise, which began the programme is one of those pieces which has been arranged or transcribed for a variety of instruments – it began life as a wordless song which concluded the composer’s Op.34 collection, entitled “14 Romances for high voice and piano”, and was written specifically for the voice of the great Russian soprano Antonia Nezhdanova, Rachmaninov wishing to give the singer a vehicle for displaying the beauty of her voice without recourse to words. The composer was to subsequently arrange the work both for voice and orchestra accompaniment, and for orchestra alone, although more recent sources suggest that Rachmaninov originally wrote the work for Nezhdanova to perform with orchestra AFTER the rest of the songs were already written for voice and piano, the Vocalise being subsequently added to the “Romances” collection. Among the various arrangements, the most unusual is probably that for theremin and piano, arranged by Clara Rockmore (nee Reisenberg), who was the electronic instrument’s most well-known exponent during the twentieth century.

This was a gorgeously-played performance (the conductor’s very first of this work, as he tells us in the programme’s introductory note), enabling the NZSO strings to really show their mettle, and delivering all those qualities which bring out the work’s inherent tenderness, lyricism, depth of feeling and range of intensity. The strings at first had the lion’s share of the playing, but they were gradually joined by the winds, firstly seeming to merely echo-phrase-ends, but then to increasingly augment the harmonies of the textures, as well as contributing counterpointing lines. Towards the end the music becomes strongly reminiscent of the slow movement of the composer’s Second Symphony, by dint of a clarinet solo which takes over the theme for a few measures before surrendering it again to the ascending strings.

Though in some ways moving from the Vocalise to the D MInor Piano Concerto seemed like something of a “quantum leap”, the links between the two works were here more than usually stressed by the character of the concerto performance, soloist Joyce Yang giving one of the most poetic and sheerly beautiful realizations of this work I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing!  She and Edo de Waart had played the piece together at least twice before with different orchestras, so the interpretation was “of a piece”, with the give-and take between soloist and orchestra replete with understanding and fluency.

Among what marked out her performance for me from so many others was her conveyance of involvement with every note of the music she played – nothing sounded mechanical or “less important” (as either “fillip” or transitional” sequences), but all had its place in a kind of organically-conceived whole. Another thing was, as I’ve said, her remarkable poeticizing of so much of what she played – never did she seem interested in virtuosity for its own sake. Whatever “display element” was in the solo part was there because of the music, and nothing more.

In addition, neither have I heard another pianist bring out to the same extent the music’s impish, quixotic aspect – she found a spikiness in some of the figurations that I thought equated with Rachmaninov’s contemporaries such as Prokofiev,Ravel and Bartok, and even in places, Gershwin. Humour isn’t often a quality one associates with Rachmaninov’s music, but the way Yang articulated some of the filigree passage-work in places made me smile at the playing’s sheer character – this was no faceless perfection, seamless articulation, bland liquidity or pure decoration on show – every note, as I’ve said, had its own raison d’etre, in this performance.

I confess I had to go back all the way to 1993, and Peter Donohoe’s performance of this work with the NZSO under Nicholas Braithwaite, to recall the same wonderment and pleasure at hearing this work “live” – an example of such shared alchemy of interpretation was during that brief, but telling sequence just before the final first-movement reprise of the work’s opening, when the piano gently drifts a repeated bell-like sequence of notes across an ambient crepuscular soundscape enriched by soft horn-chordings – like Donohoe did, Yang drew out this passage exquisitely, once again allowing the notes to speak their character and make an indelible impression upon the listener, however brief and fleeting…..

As for the notorious “virtuoso” elements of this concerto, Yang showed us that she could certainly “finger it” with the greats, as well as match the orchestra in tonal depth when she needed to, putting all of her physical weight into the playing of the heavier chords, such as in the massive first-movement cadenza, and again during the build-up to the final peroration at the work’s very end, and letting her fingers and wrists do the work in the more scintillating passages. People expecting virtuoso thrills got an amazingly musical version of the same from their soloist, one which realized all of the work’s necessary excitement and exhilaration.

No greater contrast with the concerto could have been given to us than what Yang played as an encore – an enchanting performance of one of the most beautiful of Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces”, his “Nocturne” from the “Lyric Suite”. Though it seems heretical to say so, I could have gone home happily after hearing this, feeling as if I had heard a piano articulate all the intrinsic beauty that it was possible for the instrument to express. Of course, I stayed! – lamenting the degradations that have resulted over the last generation of years in visiting artists such as Joyce Yang NOT giving solo recitals in tandem with NZSO appearances, as used to invariably happen in the (good) old days! A modestly-resourced Music Society such as that in Waikanae, which hosts world-class artists such as Alexander Gavrylyuk consistently and successfully organizes piano recitals – why can’t the NZSO do the same with their visiting artists, any more?

Though the first half was a hard act to follow, the orchestra and Edo de Waart did their best with the composer’s compositional swan-song, the “Symphonic Dances”, which appeared in 1940, three years before Rachmaninov’s death. The composer wryly remarked, “I don’t know how it happened – it must have been my last spark!” – but upon closer analysis of the music itself one can hear alongside all the echoes of the past and allusions to previous works, a spirit determined to raise its voice not only in protest at and defiance of the critics who reviled his works, but in bitterness and anger at having lost his homeland and his sources of inspiration. Had Rachmaninov lived for another ten years and been able to work further through these feelings, who knows what else he might have achieved?

The work itself was received with some negativity on all sides – with bewilderment by some of the composer’s “fans”, who were expecting more lyricism and lush orchestrations along the lines of the Third Symphony and the Paganini Rhapsody, and with a good deal of both half-hearted enthusiasm and outright derision by the critics, some of whom by this stage had made Rachmaninov-denigration a kind of “sport” (readers should look up the critical warblings of one Pitts Sanborn for a particularly vicious example of this, in relation to the composer’s Fourth Piano Concerto).

Rachmaninov described himself to an interviewer as “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien”, not being able to either “cast out the old way of writing” or able to “acquire the new”. Despite this assertion, the Dances’ relative toughness, leanness of orchestration and rhythmic asymmetries are nowadays regarded as evidence of the composer’s very apparent awareness of what was happening all around him. This is opposed to the more institutionalized view of Rachmaninov as some sort of nineteenth-century compositional throwback almost right to the end. As Brahms would have said, “any jackass” could hear elements of the old Rachmaninov in places throughout the music, the aching, yearning lyricism, the exciting rhythmic snap of certain figurations, and the oft-quoted “Dies Irae” theme which haunted his work from his First Symphony onwards.

The first two dances were beautifully done, the highlight being the saxophone playing of Simon Brew in the first dance, Rachmaninov writing one of his most beautiful melodies for the instrument, before allowing the strings to take over and repeat the melody, to lump-in-the-throat effect. The whole was framed in sharply-accented, no-nonsense rhythmic fashion by de Waart and his players, who took just as readily to the spooky waltz-rhythms of the second movement, a kind of Russian “Valse Triste”, and gave its melodies a proper “yearning” quality most characteristic of the composer.

Where I craved some more “bite”, a tougher, harsher, more urgent response to the music was in the third dance, whose Stravinsky-like rhythms for me “sat” too heavily – de Waart’s steady-as-she-goes way with the music I thought produced more a feeling of petulance and bad-temper rather than galvanizing, sharply-etched bitterness. With the “Dies Irae” and exerpts from the Russian Orthodox liturgical Chant “Blessed is the Lord” literally “fighting it out” in the music, I wanted more sparks flying, more combustion, more sense of triumph over bitter adversity at the end. Perhaps while on tour with this piece de Waart and the orchestra will push this piece further and further to its limits, and achieve a harder-won but ultimately more cathartic and appropriately triumphal conclusion to an already momentous concert.

At last! Michael Houstoun’s Beethoven recordings for Rattle reach the Diabelli Variations

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

BEETHOVEN – Diabelli Variations
(33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli Op.120)
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Rattle CD RAT D070 2017

Early in 1819, Anton Diabelli, who was a music publisher in Vienna, and something of a dilettante composer, wrote a waltz, and invited all of the leading composers of the time in and around Vienna to compose a single variation on his work. Diabelli’s intention was to publish the collection as a complete set, planning to raise money for patriotic and humanitarian purposes relating to the recent Napoleonic Wars.

Included among the composers Diabelli approached were Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart , Johann Peter Pixis, Simon Sechter, the Archduke Rudolf, Wenzel Tomaschek , Jan Vorisek and Ludwig Van Beethoven. The young Franz Liszt, though not included in the original list, also contributed a variation, at the insistence of his teacher, Carl Czerny.

Beethoven’s response to the invitation has received fanciful treatment at the hands of his various biographers, with the much-derided Anton Schindler at the forefront of source material for the popular legend – that the composer refused to take part in the project, deriding Diabelli’s waltz as a Schusterfleck, or “Cobbler’s patch”, and only changed his mind when Diabelli offered to pay him handsomely, whereupon Beethoven determined to show Diabelli what he could do by quickly writing not one variation, but thirty-three! It’s now more readily accepted that Beethoven from the very start was interested in the idea, straightaway planning a considerable number of variations. And, contrary to what both Schindler and Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny claimed, Beethoven did not write the complete work “in a merry freak” (Czerny’s words), but worked slowly and fitfully on his sketches, completing twenty-three of the variations by the end of 1819 before laying them aside to finish both the Missa Solemnis and the late piano sonatas, then, early in 1823, returning to the work and completing the set of thirty-three (the mind boggles at the sheer creativity of all of this!).

DIabelli subsequently published Beethoven’s work as Vol.One of a two-volume set grandly titled “Vaterländischer Künstlerverein” (Patriotic Artist’s Association), the second volume of which contained the 50 “other” variations by the remaining composers! Since then the world has all but ignored the efforts of all of these but Beethoven’s, on behalf of the publisher’s modest but fruitful little creation.

Where Schindler did seem to “get it right”, in the view of most commentators, was in his remark that the composition of this work ‘amused Beethoven to a rare degree’, that it was written ‘in a rosy mood’, and that it was ‘bubbling with unusual humour’. Alfred Brendel, whose thoughts concerning the work Michael Houstoun frequently quotes in his fascinating notes reproduced in Rattle’s booklet, elsewhere cites another commentator, Wilhelm Von Lenz, a somewhat more reliable biographer than the enthusiastic but over-imaginative Schindler, Lenz calling Beethoven “the most thoroughly initiated high priest of humour” and the variations “a satire on their theme”.

To Brendel’s assertion that the “Diabellis” are “the greatest of all piano works”, Houstoun responds that he has “no argument” with such a view, and that the only comparable work in keyboard literature could be JS Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. Houstoun comments further that for him, the “Goldbergs” deal with spiritual certainty, whereas with Beethoven’s work, all such boundaries are challenged. He makes the analogy of Beethoven trying to “punch holes in the very fabric of the cosmos” with this work, which seems to me another way of saying that the composer is taking nothing for granted, and wants to see if there’s something else beyond normal human perception.

The Rattle booklet as well contains Houstoun’s own thoughts on each of the variations, which to me seems an invaluable insight into how the pianist views not only the music as a whole, but the function of each of its parts – we are taken into the workshop of recreation, as it were, and given the chance to experience for ourselves how the interpreter’s thoughts and words relate to his delivery of the music.

To my ears Houstoun succeeds brilliantly in “making the word flesh” so to speak. With playing less “nuanced” throughout than is the case with some pianists’ I’ve heard, he gives his listeners a strongly direct reading of the music, enabling us to get to grips with the notes quickly, rather than us having to first get to grips with the interpreter’s playing of some of them! I think he’s also suggesting that we, as listeners, have to do some work ourselves on the huge range of possibilities the music is giving to us. An active, creative kind of listening rather than a passive, “washing over one” response is required, though Beethoven’s quixotic humour certainly helps keep one in thrall!

Having applied brushstrokes of wit, charm, excitement and thoughtfulness to his realisations of most of the pieces, Houstoun, with wonderful surety, then tackles the radically different world of the final five Variations, opening up realms of intensity which transcend what we’ve so far heard. The first of the group of three C Minor pieces prepares us for what follows, as the music gradually descends to the depths of sorrow and loneliness within a sound-world resembling that of the slow movement of the “Hammerklavier”, the Bach-like No.31 described by the pianist as “a searching lament” and given the title “beacon of sorrow”. After plumbing these depths, Houstoun then electrifies us with his playing of a briliant Handelian double-fugue, NOT, as an applause-garnering conclusion, but a monumental release of energy leading to Beethoven’s greatest “surprise” of all in this work – a finale in the form of a Minuet, here patiently and sublimely realised by the pianist, in his own words, “the perfect endless ending”, the music moving like planets slowly circling the sun, with cosmic, god-like serenity.

If you already have Michael Houstoun’s Rattle set of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas, you will want this disc as an essential companion – and if you don’t have any of Houstoun’s Beethoven, then what better entry-point could you have than this, arguably the pianist’s finest single Beethoven recording? In a world already replete with recorded performances of this work, Houstoun’s can proudly take its place as one of the most strongly-focused and beautifully recorded – altogether, a most satisfying issue!

Alexander Gavrylyuk – transcendental pianism at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Alexander Gavrylyuk at Waikanae
JS BACH (trans.Busoni) Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
HAYDN – Keyboard Sonata in B Minor (No.47) Hob. XVI:32
CHOPIN – Etudes Op.10 – Nos. 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12
SCRIABIN – Piano Sonata No. 5 Op.53
RACHMANINOV – Preludes Op.23 Nos 1, 5 / Op.32 No.12
RACHMANINOV – Piano Sonata No 2 Op.36 (1931)

Alexander Gavrylyuk (piano)
Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday 22nd October, 2017

I reviewed Alexandre Gavrylyuk’s astounding recital at Waikanae last year, reflecting on that occasion, on the pianist’s ability to enchant his listeners with every note, and in doing so, display a Sviatoslav Richter-like capacity to invest each sound with a kind of “centre of being” which suggests that the interpreter has gotten right to the heart of what the music means. Last time, it was the very first note of the Schubert A Major Sonata D.664 which straightaway held me in thrall (https://middle-c.org/2016/05/11403/May) – this time round, the shock of the first item’s opening was palpable in the hall, Gavrylyuk galvanising sensibilities near and far with the opening of Feruccio Busoni’s transcription of JS Bach’s D Minor Toccata and Fugue BWV 565.

I had heard Busoni’s transcription of this work before in concert, and remember being disappointed on that occasion by what seemed to be the limited range and scope of Busoni’s realisation compared with the original – such wasn’t the case here, as Gavrylyuk’s playing seemed to take us as far as was physically possible on the piano towards the sheer impact of the organ’s power and majesty. An organist friend of mine afterwards said that it wasn’t quite the same as experiencing the thrill of those massive organ sonorities – to which I was tempted to respond (but thought better of it!) with the remark that what the pianist was missing was a cloak and a mask covering half of his face! On reflection, though, I’m glad I stuck to musical considerations!

Truth to tell, Gavrylyuk needed neither cloak nor mask to convey the music’s splendour – and (perhaps because I wasn’t an organist) I didn’t think he even needed the organ! Certainly I was thrilled to at last encounter a performance that realised something of the transcription’s evocation of the original’s glory. In fact Gavrylyuk’s playing gave us ample sense of the music’s huge sonorities in pianistic terms, while achieving a transparency of articulation often clouded by the organ’s resonances. The pianist seemed to put all of his physical weight into the Prelude’s concluding chords, and hang onto the resulting resonances for dear life, keeping us transfixed by his and the music’s alchemic power.

He then began the fugue quietly and serenely – as if a vision had appeared in the midst of the tumult. The fugal voices took on such character, each voice having a kind of eloquence suggesting the transcriber’s complete identification with the spirit of the original. Each of the sequences had both momentum and flexibility, with the pianist’s through-line giving us a real sense of “journeying”, at once taking in every detail while keeping a sense of purpose about the whole. I thought the dynamic range employed by Gavrylyuk along the journey astonishing – thunderous footsteps set against sonorous whisperings, and a gamut of eloquence in between. The whole was built up to a peroration of extraordinary power and elaboration, concluding the work with huge, properly “crashing’ chords, whose lingering aftermath stunned our responses for some time to come.

What better antidote (for all the right reasons) to such massiveness was the music of Haydn, which Gavrylyuk slyly and mischievously then set into play, rather like letting a mouse loose to scamper around and over the body of a now-sleeping elephant! Such was the pianist’s focus, we were soon transported into this new creature’s sound-world, the music of this B Minor Sonata slowly but surely adjusting its size-scale, moving from sly mischief to playfulness with the warmer, confident major chordings mid-exposition, the whole reinforced by the repeat. We then heard from the pianist in the development a miracle of fluidity between assertive and meltingly beautiful playing, Haydn’s genius being recreated for us by another like-minded genius of the keyboard. Nowhere was Gavrylyuk afraid to differently emphasise detail when revisited, reinforcing a sense of the music being created for us there and then, for our pleasure.

The Menuet was at first all exquisute grace and sensibiity, the pianist weaving gossamer threads into a pattern,taking care not to break any of the strands – then, with the Trio things became darker and more robust, geniality of a more forthright kind, with a dissonant sound or three thrown in for good measure (the right-hand ostinati clashing with the left-hand figurations), a mood which lightened once again at the opening’s return. The finale’s Presto marking brought playing from Gavrylyuk one associates with those pianola rolls made by “greats” such as Josef Lhevinne, Leopold Godowsky, Sergei Rachmaninov and Moritz Rosenthal – all feathery brilliance and rapid-fire octaves, before plunging back into a repeat! Then, after wowing us with this “do you want to see that again?” gesture, the pianist suddenly drew the music back, and with a few knowing looks and quiet gestures, packed it all away in a box – and it was all over! – one imagined the shade of Haydn allowing the ghost of a smile to warm its features at both Gavrylyuk’s playing and our bemusement.

I’d recently been listening to some recordings of Chopin’s etudes, so was more than usually ‘attuned” to them on this occasion – Gavrylyuk had chosen six from the composer’s first of two sets, his Op.10, begin with No.3 in E Major, a piece whose opening melody has been used innumerable times in different arrangements over the years – to my surprise the pianist played the melody “straight”, without any broadening at the climaxes first time through, then began the middle section softly, building up its intensities with ever-increasing power, before playing the lead-back to the beginning with the same simplicity as was delivered the opening. This time Gavrylyuk allowed the famous melody more space and ambience, drawing more poetry from it without ever resorting to sentimentality.

The pianist’s wonderful fleet-of-finger skills dazzled us in the F Major No.8 Etude, the right hand the elusive butterfly, the left hand the sober, serious plodder trying vainly to maintain contact on ground level, everything played with wonderful freedom and independence of hands. Such filigree brilliance played no part in the F Minor Study No.9 that followed – here the energies were intense and driven by the pianist, a throbbing, agitated base pursuing a fugitive melody, one which occasionally sent up beacons of light as signals of distress, urgently-repeated notes which eventually fell back into the midst of a frisson of quietly-despairing figurations.

No.10 in A-flat Major, despite looking and sounding fiendishly difficult, was given a compelling ebb and flow of feeling and tension, Gavrylyuk proving he was human after all by dropping a couple of right-hand notes in the flurry of decoration at the end of the middle section. However, it seemed that, whatever the music’s diffculties, the pianist seemed to relish the prospect of engaging with every note of it – both here and in the opening of Etude No 11 in E-flat Major Gavrylyuk conveyed both a sense of rapturous anticipation and intoxicated delight at doing what he was doing, the E-flat Major’s arpeggiations exquisitely timed and beautifully varied in emphasis and shading. And so to the notorious C Minor “Revolutionary” Etude, the last of the set, with its right-handed thematic lacerations (every phrase like a dagger plunged into a beating heart) yoked with the left hand’s rapid runs and frequent turns, a rushing, agitated torrent, but here given frequent changes of emphasis and colour by way of a narrative, one involving conflict, heroism and, at the piece’s conclusion, defiance even in defeat and disillusionment.

If what we’d heard thus far was ample food for thought, our capacities were fully extended by the recital’s second half, Gavrylyuk giving us in broadbrush-stroke terms as beautifully-contrived an assemblage here, with similar kinds of ebb-and-flow. As with the Bach transcription in the first half, the Scriabin Sonata’s opening straightaway sent an electric thrill through the hall, the pianist’s physical attack riveting our sensibilities and holding us in thrall for all that was to follow. The composer called this, his Fifth Sonata, “a big poem for piano”, and we certainly got from Gavrylyuk a most dramatic reading of its essential qualities – demonic energies set against withdrawn mysticism, physical bravado contrasted with intensely poetic feeling, and grinding dissonance relieved by moments of intense, simple loveliness. Gavrylyuk’s astonishing technique took us on the music’s somewhat hair-raising rife to the abyss’s edge, before suddenly returning us to a state of wide-eyed wonderment at some intense fragility, some passing embodiment of beauty. Always was a sense conveyed of the music trying to reach out to something ineffable, either through beauty of utterance or madcap humour or physicality marked by extremes of exhilaration/desperation. Where we were being taken to through the composer’s assemblage of self -absorbed enchantments was anybody’s guess until the music’s final declamations, Gavrylyuk gathering up all of his energies, and hurtling up the keyboard towards a zenith of spent realisation, marked with a flamboyant gesture of finality – we loved him for it!

At first it would seem that the music of Scriabin’s exact contemporary Rachmaninov might here, in comparison, pale in impact and eloquence – but Gavrylyuk’s scheme of following something cataclysmic with its antithesis worked beautifully, here, with his playing of the first of the latter composer’s Op.23 Preludes, music that powerfully spoke of simple, deep-seated emotions, bringing us down-to-earth once more in the wake of Scriabin’s cosmic galivantings! The pianist opened up the music’s vistas unerringly towards what Rachmaninov called in every piece of music “the point”, that moment to which all before it led and from which all fell away from, for him a defining characteristic in both his own playing and his composing. Gavrylyuk seemed to understand this, taking us to such a moment where the piece’s obsessive figurations reached their “moment” before allowing the tensions to slowly unwind, taking their time as part of the experience.

The well-known No.5 in G Minor, marked “Alla marcia” was played by Gavrylyuk less as a march and more of a scherzo-like dance, with occasional impulsive thrusts both of dynamics and phrasings, a volatile, even “dangerous” reading, not unlike the composer’s own. The “trio” section featured dark, swirling waters, with both treble and “alto” melodies strongly-etched, and darkly counterpointed – the reprise of the opening rhythm was built up with rapid purpose, the music growing more and more menace-laden with every phrase – so orchestral in effect! At the end I was glad that Gavrylyuk played the composer’s original throwaway ending, without the emphatic G minor chord that he later added (and recorded!).

From Rachmaninov’s later (Op.32) set of Preludes, Gavrylyuk gave us No.12 in the more remote key of G-sharp Minor. This was music which scintillated sharply and coldly at the outset, the pianist displaying razor-sharp responses to the bleakly-atmospheric texures, and the unforgiving, almost Dante-esque fatalism of the music, the theme a declamation of something like a Slavic equivalent of the portal-phrase “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, grim and gloom-laden music.

Right from the beginning of the recital’s final work, Rachmaninov’s Second PIano Sonata in B-flat Op.36, it seemed as if a “battle of the titans” was being enacted in Alexander Gavrylyuk’s hands, between Rachmaninov’s and Scriabin’s music – the Sonata’s opening threw down a jagged and confrontational Sonata’s earlier with the Scriabin – however such considerations were soon put aside as we became caught up in the web and waft of the music’s progress, here majestic and monumnetal, there volatile and angular, and working with the same building-blocks of sound shaped and moulded in countless different ways. Before the lyrical second subject arrived we heard it resounding in the figurations, growing out of the previous material – Gavrylyuk played it so touchingly, like a thing of great fragility – “A world in a grain of sand” as William Blake wrote. After flowering and rhapsodising, it was taken along with a tremendous rhythmic thrust towards a more agitated, scherzo-like world, Gavrylyuk building up the agitations to the strength of cascading church bells – fantastic! The pianist gave the music all the time in the world to breathe, its extension of the lyrical material so tender, filled with the composer’s characteristic “endless melody” , here and there reminiscent of Enrique Granados’s “The Lover and The Nightingale” in places.

But with what explosive energies the music came to life with in Gavrylyuk’s hands once again – the pianist took the music’s raw power and flung it across the vistas, varying strength with dizzying dexterity in places, then, going with the work’s amazing all-encompassing variations of mood, again bringing out a more lyrical and ruminative sequence before returning to the attack – how much more this music is “conflicted” than Rachmaninov’s large-scale works of the previous decade, the Third Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. Gavrylyuk took us through the conficts and agitations towards the grandeur of the work’s last few pages with the ardour of a foot soldier and the surety of a general. It was as stunning a display of all-encompassing musicianship as any I’ve ever had the good fortune to witness.

Wilma Smith and Friends play fine programme for Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wilma Smith (violin), Caroline Henbest (viola), Alexandra Partridge (cello), Andrew Leathwick (piano)

Piano quartets: William Walton’s in D minor; Andrew Leathwick’s No 1 and Brahms’s No 3 in C minor, Op 60

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 15 October, 3 pm

We reviewed Wilma Smith and Friends at their Waikanae concert on 24 September. There they had played Beethoven’s not-much-played Op 16 piano quartet, Dvořák’s greatly loved Op 87 as well as the piano quartet by the group’s pianist, Leathwick.  I suppose I can wait till next August when I see that Wellington Chamber Music’s just announced 2018 Sunday series will hear the Dvořák played by the Leppänen, Thomson, Joyce, Irons quartet.

Wilma’s three colleagues, two of whom are New Zealanders, all have an association with the Australian National Academy of Music, in Canberra, while Wilma herself teaches at the two principal Melbourne universities.

This Wellington programme avoided playing anything too well-known: Brahms’s 3rd piano quartet is the least familiar of the three. Played here with such finesse and musicality that its relative neglect became hard to understand.

Walton’s 16-year-old creation
However, the concert began with a, to me, totally unknown quartet, by a 16-year-old William Walton. Though it might not display the brilliance and musical delights that Mendelssohn or Mozart were producing at that age, this was a very impressive achievement, even allowing for its getting revised much later in the composer’s life (when he was 72).

It was written in the last year of WWI and so might have reflected the Englishness of Bax or Ireland or Vaughan Williams, even Elgar. All I could say is that the music had a generalised English, as distinct from a Continental feel, and Herbert Howells’s own piano quartet has been offered as a possible influence. Would Walton have heard Bartók in 1918? something at the start of the last movement suggested it. It was too soon for the iconoclastic Walton of the Bloomsbury years to be audible anywhere, but there could have been touches of Ravel, for there was much in it of a surprising sophistication.

It began with a clear conception of certain melodic ideas that seemed authentic rather than arbitrary, and an understanding of the art of building music in a formal shape. It was indeed formal in having four movements –  a bright, positive opening, a scherzo that seemed singularly assured, then a calm Adagio in a nocturnal mood, with muted strings, and finally an energetic Allegro that might have attempted to emulate the radical composers of the Continent, even certain rhythmic elements from Eastern Europe (do I mean Bartók?though what was known of him in England in the First World War?).

Writing for the quartet as a whole was quite mature, and it was clear that the young composer had a refined appreciation of the characteristics of each instrument – a solo viola passage caught the ear. Music from the first movement returned in a natural-sounding was to bring it to an end.

Andrew Leathwick’s quartet
A quartet by the group’s pianist Andrew Leathwick, followed. He introduced it, but in rather too casual a way, without sufficient care for enunciation and for the rhythms of his speech to be easily followed. The music largely explained itself – an opening that was almost secretive, improvisatory, slowly awakening with long phrases carried high on the violin strings. The second movement, entitled ‘Freely’, began with muted violin and cautious piano notes and signs that the composer became aware of the need to retain the listener’s attention with an almost Dvořákian melody. The composer seemed sensitive to the particular character of each instrument, subtly varying colours and dynamics; the viola carried a vaguely familiar elegiac tune which I couldn’t attribute. The composer recorded that ‘the great Romantic composers’ had inspired the last movement – Con moto. Those influences were clear enough. The whole piece, written in an idiom (idioms?) of earlier music made me aware of the styles of music that music students now feel free to write, far removed from the strenuously avant-garde, ‘original-at-all-costs’, audience-alienating music that I used to subject myself to in my early years reviewing for The Evening Post in the late 80s and 90s.

The style adopted in this piece is now accepted in a more open and tolerant musical environment in music schools, though one naturally hopes that it will not discourage a freedom to explore more adventurous approaches that make judicious use of influences from the music of the recent past.

Rosemary Collier’s review of this piece will be found in the review of 24 September.

Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3
The last piece was Brahms’s Piano Quartet No 3, Op 60.  As I noted above it’s not as well-known as the Op 25 quartet, or perhaps even as the second one. But here was a performance that did it credit. It launches itself in a distinctly C minor manner, commanding, weighty and serious minded, rather than seductive, first in the Adagio opening and then the Allegro non troppo main part. But it’s exactly what a paid-up Brahms-lover looks for; not what the censorious Schoenberg who orchestrated the Op 25 piece because he thought it too dense for chamber music, would have enjoyed at all.

For it is indeed almost symphonic in its textures although the quartet produced all the clarity that I needed. Though the second movement is more animated, it dwells in a similar  sound world, darkly impassioned, with energetic piano writing that Leathwick handled, though the piano lid was on the long stick, in excellent accord with the strings.

The third movement, Andante, opens with a soulful, though sanguine duet between piano and cello which offered Alexandra Partridge (and again the pianist) an admirable opportunity to be enjoyed. And the finale too confirmed that impression left from all that had gone before of a carefully studied approach in which the essence of Brahms had become thoroughly embedded. Rapport between strings and piano was always perfectly integrated in terms of balance and interpretive view.

It ended a very satisfying chamber music recital, offering a sound reason to take comfort in a cultural relationship with Australia.

 

 

To err is human, to forgive (the job of the critic): four student pianists with seriously worthwhile music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

NZSM piano students
Helen Chiu, Jungyeon Lee, Gabriel Khor, William Swan

Music by Debussy, Mozart, Ravel, Chopin

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 27 September, 12:15 pm

The lunchtime concert market has been somewhat crowded over recent weeks and both St Andrew’s and Old Saint Paul’s have provided nice venues and good audiences for end-of-year recitals. While we’ve covered most of the recent lunchtime concerts in Wellington we have been unable this year to get to the series running at St Mark’s Lower Hutt, which have been equally worthwhile.

Four pianists played today at St Andrew’s. They were first to third year students, a fact which is sometimes hard to believe, and one is almost relieved to discover evidence of the real world when an occasional finger-fault happens. Helen Chiu played two pieces from Debussy’s first book of Images for piano (there are two books containing three pieces each, apart from the Images for Orchestra – Gigues, Ibéria and Rondes de printemps – that had in fact begun life as a second book for the piano). Reflets dans l’eau is the quintessentially impressionistic piano piece inspired by the play of light on water, and this was a singularly sensitive and evocative performance, that was fluent, limpid, becoming more and more disturbed as, one imagines, wind ruffles the surface.

The second piece is Hommage à Rameau , a composer who, along with Couperin, for ardent Frenchman Debussy, was the equivalent of Bach. Rameau was born just a couple of years before Bach, and left a great deal of keyboard music, though opera came to dominate his career from 1733 when he was 50! But one could be forgiven for not finding immediate baroque sounds and shapes in this sophisticated music; its sounds are, naturally, closer to Debussy’s other piano music than to Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin. Yet there’s more formality hovering around it than in the first piece, and Helen gave it a very illuminating and idiomatic performance.

Jungyeong Lee played Mozart’s sonata in F, K 332, one of three that he wrote about 1783, shortly after moving to Vienna; it is ranked among the favourites. The first movement with sharp contrasts between serenity and an almost contrasting middle, with tempi splendidly judged; the slow movement discreetly lovely with carefully handle ornaments and a last movement encompassing a wide expressive range, now energetic, now slightly humorous, demanding elaborate episodes and constant technical challenges that put it among Mozart’s most difficult. One doesn’t often hear live performances of Mozart’s sonatas and this was a valued opportunity.

Gabriel Khor played the first two movements of Ravel’s Sonatine, a word that conveys none of its meaning around 1800 when it suggested a sorter and probably easier piece that a proper sonata. It’s not another Gaspard de la nuit, but it’s no nursery piece either; one can understand his not playing the last movement as Ravel himself refrained from playing it because of its difficulty. Khor played it carefully, sensitively, the odd slip was inevitable, but he managed to maintain its momentum and a degree of melodic warmth. The Mouvement de menuet is quieter and sounds superficially easier, and it began with a feeling of caution or timidity, but a sense of calm confidence grew.

Chopin brought the recital to an end, as Williams Swan played first the Waltz in D flat, Op 64/1 and then the Polonaise in A flat, Op 53. The waltz performance was a study in caution, laced with bursts of flashing speed, with the contrasting slower episode well related to the outer phases. The Polonaise set off very dynamically, with first notes in the bar given particularly marked emphasis; and he paid good attention to the sharp dynamic contrasts, with handfuls of fast dense chords, and I don’t just mean the hammering left hand in the central section, interspersed with those reckless scales, where occasional stray notes appeared and splendid, reckless arpeggios.

 

Two pianists: rapport, stamina, poetry at NZSM Adam Concert Room

Posted on by Jennifer Shennan

Lunchtime recital, piano four hands – Jian Liu and Hamish Robb

Te Koki: New Zealand School of Music, in Adam Concert Room at Victoria University

Friday 22 September 2017, lunchtime

Lucky we were to attend this lunchtime concert at New Zealand School of Music. It was luminous in several respects.

Firstly the choice of programme – three works, by Schubert, Hindemith and Debussy.

… with pithy and pertinent verbal introductions by Hamish Robb before each piece. Not every musician has this gift of communication, to wear his learning lightly in talking about composition in a way that makes audience feel drawn in to the work, as active participants in its performance. Two pianists, four hands, many ears.

These two men play with such rapport, stamina, clarity and poetry that we are taken on a journey out and about, round and back to ourselves… then left simply to roar our gratitude. How else can an audience communicate a transcendent experience? Actually there were plenty of smiling and talking audience members lingering for ages afterwards to confirm that it was indeed a shared experience, and that I am not making this up.

Schubert’s  Fantasie in f minor, D940 opens with an allegro molto moderato of clear strength in half the world, with a wistful motif that will return to haunt us.  The largo is next, bringing a gentle sadness … the other half of the world. Well, there is life and there is death, and stuff in between, this we all know. The scherzo, action-station, journeys out to do what has to be done. The finale confirms that although these movements are distinct in contrasting moods, and were set in 1828,  they are also tightly bound together so that the nigh-20 minute composition plays out as one, today. It seemed a kind of testament, albeit almost 200 years later, to what’s still out there. ( I had spent two days and nights of agonized waiting for news of family in Mexico. This music was a dreamed report from the field).

Then the Hindemith Sonata for four hands. What is consonant, what is dissonant? It’s Germany 1938.  I had really only known Hindemith as composer of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett, and that remains a striking piece  of 20th century dance history if ever there was one… oh, and the memory that our daughter who as a college student had played the Eight Pieces for flute in an exam – scoring honours for that (but failing in the Scales section as she didn’t realize — read, couldn’t believe — that you also had to play scales). I remember a crispness, an unpredictability, a weightlessness to that music.  Something distilled.

Debussy’s Petite Suite – in four movements that again scope the options of the ways we are in the world. En bateau – no-one composes the sea like Debussy. Cortège, a progressing, then Menuet : moderato. I’ve never known a menuet like it … calm and courteous, as any menuet would be, a friendship between two people … then whacko, a post-modern middle bit that goes awol, cats are dancing, this ain’t no menuet any more, lawks however will this end? Eventually they move back to the danse-a-deux, and safely home from a risky encounter. Then to the final movement, Ballet : Allegro giusto – and what a waltz, the world whirling in triple time, heartbeat rhythm, so it’s “yes to everything” though nothing mindless in saying / playing that.

I was aware that Debussy  knew a great deal about dance, and intuited even more …   (Nijinksy knew that too, so his Après Midi d’un Faune , to Debussy, remains one of the finest entwinings of the two-arts-into-one that we have, and the only surviving work of that output of choreographic genius we have let slip away, to our eternal loss).

This was a free lunch-time concert, all praise to Te Koki – New Zealand School of Music. Furthermore it was demonstration of civilized co-operation between two gun pianists who, in other times and places, might behave as rival colleagues — here instead they share a keyboard. Politicians should have been there.

The day before, I had attended, because a grandmother would, a school concert to hear a granddaughter play her small cello in the little orchestra. Afterwards the Principal of the school spoke to performers and audience alike, reminding us that the two things that matter most in the world are Music and Family – ( then he added Dance, since a row of keen kids had performed the cancan to one of their schoolmates’ items. Phew, that was lucky, I thought). All told and on balance, I had a very good week.

It is such an infectious affair to hear musicians performing so absolutely at the top of their game, and communicating their own immense pleasure in doing so.  It transfers to a mood of hope that people can help people, that elections within a democracy can work, more or less, that there are worthwhile things to say to children, and that daylight saving means there’s not one hour to waste in whatever we consider important. Do it.

The recital could well be repeated but by the time this review is published both pianists will have played half a dozen more programmes — they were at The Third Eye that same night …  soon leaving for China … allegro ma non troppo,  vivace, con brio. Godspeed. Safe travel. Happy returns. And I am grateful that there’s a website to whom I can offer a retrospective review.

Orchestra Wellington with scintillating programme: Grieg piano concerto midst spectacular orchestral waltzes

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei
Pianist: Jian Liu

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales
Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor
Weber: Invitation to the Dance (orchestrated by Berlioz)
Ravel: La valse

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 9 September, 7:30 pm

Orchestra Wellington’s 2017 series has followed the theme of music inspired or commissioned by the great impresario Serge Diaghilev. The two pieces with Diaghilev connections at this concert were Weber’s Invitation to the Dance and Ravel’s La valse, though there was also a ballet connection with the first Ravel music in the programme which was originally a set of waltzes for piano which Ravel orchestrated at the request, not of Diaghilev, but of ballerina Natasha Trouhanova.

Ravel based his set of eight waltzes on the many that Schubert had written for the piano: a set of 34 dances entitled Valses sentimentales, in 1823 and a set of 12 entitled Valses nobles, in 1826. Ravel originally called his orchestrated waltzes Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs.

A programme note by pianist Richard Dowling describes the original ballet performance: “It was orchestrated in two weeks in March 1912 and the ballet was performed in April 22, 1912 at the Théatre du Chatelet with Ravel conducting the Lamoreux Orchestra. Mme. Trouhanova danced the part of Adelaide. The premiere was an outstanding event, as four ballets were conducted by their respective composers, Vincent d’Indy, Florent Schmitt, Paul Dukas, and Ravel.”

Ravel composed, not just a set of individual dances, but a sensitively composed, unified work. That’s not to say it has a formal structure like a sonata movement, but a sequence that finds unity in melodic, rhythmic, emotional contrast in a way similar to the pattern of a suite or set of character pieces such as Schumann composed for the piano. The variety ensures that the listener is constantly stimulated by something fresh, but a creatively composed suite also creates a coherent, integrated group, each supporting or offering a connection with the next.

The problem with music that has been first conceived for a certain instrument or instruments, and later arranged for others, is the feeling, hard to dislodge, that the second version is something of a compromise or trade-off with the original. Here the big orchestra dramatized the waltzes, perhaps burdening the piano score with unnecessary colour and tonal variety; Taddei was careful to invest them with appropriate charm, energy, calm, delicacy, a touch of mystery or melancholy, the unexpected or enigmatic.

Grieg’s piano concerto is allegedly one of the most popular, but I’m mystified as to how it gains familiarity these days when there are so few live performances (that I have recent memory of); nor does it get played by RNZ Concert (which is surprising in light of their obsession with certain categories of the very popular classics). So what emerged as a lovely performance of a, to me, thoroughly familiar and well-loved concerto might not have been that for many of the audience. In addition, it used commonly to be belittled as a youthful, immature work, and evidence that Grieg was merely a miniaturist and couldn’t handle big forms. I’ve never agreed at all.

I used to love the Schumann concerto (which we heard played by Stephen de Pledge a month ago) more than Grieg’s, but the effect of this performance re-awoke my affection for Grieg, with Jian Liu’s luminous, calm, deeply felt performance and demeanour, and with very similar characteristics emerging from the orchestra.

New-comers to it could scarcely have had a more persuasive introduction. All its important features were in place: the big opening timpani statement preceding the arresting piano double octaves that at once subsides as the orchestra quietly runs through the opening themes long before the piano re-enters to elaborate on what we’ve heard. Jian Liu at once established his tone of poetic graciousness that really characterised the whole piece, even in the more flamboyant parts of the last movement, though I note that it’s marked ‘Allegro moderato molto e marcato’ rather that ‘molto vivace’ or ‘presto’, or ‘con fuoco’, etc. Though the long cadenza is a poetic rather than a virtuoso exercise, which Liu made no attempt to impose, all the brilliance necessary was there, and he seemed always driven by the view of the cadenza as an integral part of movement. Each phrase was given charming breathing space, and such things as slightly prolonged gaps between certain big chords at its climax were beautifully judged.

The second movement expresses a gentle calm that Liu approached almost diffidently, though the deft keyboard flutterings, at one point duetting with Ed Allen’s perfectly sympathetic solo horn and with Mark Cookson’s clarinet also distinctive. But the charms of the slow-movement don’t end, as the last movement too, passes through contrasting meditative and calm episodes between its excitable and challenging bravura passages.

Weber’s Invitation
I was ready to consider the Grieg the concert’s highlight (and really, it was), but to get a rare live hearing of Berlioz’s sensitive and felicitous orchestration of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance was a treat, and attention was rightly focused on Brenton Veitch’s beautiful cello ‘invitation’ and courteous ‘escorting of his partner back to her seat’ after the waltz ends. Marc Taddei’s own introduction, discreetly reminding those unfamiliar with it not to clap at the end of the waltz itself, did the trick. It was a lovely way to awaken those who had not already discovered it, to Berlioz’s genius in finding extraordinarily sensitive orchestral interpretations of tales, moods and visual scenes.

La valse
If I’d felt that the Ravellian orchestra weighed a bit heavily on the Valses nobles…,  La valse itself was rather different, conceived and designed by Ravel as an orchestral tour-de-force. This performance, employing very large wind and percussion sections, and two harps, emphasised the traditional character of ‘the waltz’ and for about two-thirds of its length it may have been formally modelled on the concert waltzes of Johann or Richard Strauss. But it becomes increasingly clear that the composer wanted to dramatise the potentially frenzied and chaotic characteristics that he felt impacted 19th century society, and the orchestra successfully navigated its path to the almost stupefying climax with increasing intensity, yet there was little loss of detail in the performance that was truly a credit to Taddei and the orchestra.

 

BEETHOVEN – Violin and Piano Sonata Series – a final frolic and a fury, to great acclaim!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BEETHOVEN – The complete Sonatas for Violin-and-Piano
A Lunchtime Series of five concerts from Chamber Music New Zealand

Bella Hristova (violin)
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Concert No.5 – Friday, Ist September, 2017
Violin Sonata No.2 in A Major, Op.12 No.2
Violin Sonata No 7 in C Minor Op.30 No.2

Renouf Foyer, Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

The excellently-written programme notes accompanying this series of concerts made reference to the “frolicsome” mood of Beethoven’s A Major Violin Sonata Op.12 No.2, which opened this, the last of the lunchtime series of concerts given by Bella Hristova and Michael Houstoun. The very opening of the work’s Allegro vivace beginning was smile-inducing, the buoyantly-tripping rhythms shared by both instruments, the piano slightly more dominant in this environment (and more so from my seat on the “Town Hall” side of the space this time round, compared with my “other-side” sound picture for the opening concert) – Hristova’s silvery tones were occasionally masked in unison-like passages, though otherwise the discourse was teasingly assured, the po-faced conclusion to the movement particularly so, with its amusing throw-away manner!

Big-boned, seriously-declaimed piano chording opened the second movement, a mood to which the violin responded with silvery, vulnerable-sounding beseechment. After this hint of desolation, the exchanges between the instruments became more consolatory, in a flowing middle section, the piano again sounding more to the fore by dint of the ambience, its sostenuto tones more “supported” than those of the violin. The finale seemed to restore the balance between the two, thanks to some exchanges of wonderfully assertive upwardly-propelled arpeggiated phrases, here matched to perfection by violinist and pianist, Hristova again colouring the gesture by infusing a certain “unfettered” edge to the occasional note, which brought a certain excitement to the sounds.

Though the occasional violin phrase in the second subject group seemed to my ears masked by the piano’s more overbearing presence, both Hristova and Houstoun dug into the minor/major-key moment of angst with forthright tones, Houstoun then assertively putting the music back on track once again for the last “hurrah”, the rocket-like upward thrusts again splendidly launched by both musicians, each tumbling their notes downwards once again with great glee, the piano cheekily turning a kind of somersault on its own right at the end!

By the time he came to write his Op.30 Sonatas, Beethoven was all too aware of his encroaching deafness, as evidenced by letters written at the time to trusted friends in which he expresses feelings of despair mingled with growing defiance – his oft-quoted words, “I shall take fate by the throat, it shall not overcome me!” come from one of these letters, sentiments which are just as strongly expressed by the music of the C Minor Sonata, the second of the three Op.30 works.

The piano’s terse opening phrase set the scene, the violin taking up the theme over the accompanying keyboard rumblings and grumblings. A couple of brief sparrings between the two led to the second subject’s lighter, more congenial manner, though the rhythms’ initial playfulness soon sharpened its edge as the intensities flared up again at the cadences – both Hristova and Houstoun gave these contrasting episodes plenty of strength and lyricism, driving the music into the dark wood of the development, and bringing out the relentless questing spirit of the journey. After allowing the more lyrical moments some breathing-space, the players pulled out the instrumental stops for the movement’s end, building the textures to almost overwhelmingly orchestral effect.

What relief was afforded by the beautiful Adagio cantabile! – Houstoun’s tones gave it a calm simplicity, while Hristova’s violin was rich and warm in reply, both “breathing” the lines of the music beautifully. A central section arpeggiated the music in winsome archways, both musicians deftly touching the music in, even if some of Hristova’s phrase-ends were lost in places beneath the piano’s more fulsome projections. On a couple of occasions a gently persuasive rhythmic change of trajectory was violently interrupted by keyboard outbursts, which were short-lived as they were unexpected, a combination of gentle pizzicati and long-breathed bowed lines from Hristova over conciliatory gestures from Houstoun concluding the movement.

Deceptively simple at the outset, the scherzo tripped its way along, the instruments exchanging pleasantries until the violin suddenly fixated on a single note and exchanged some brief but stinging crossfire with the piano, before returning to the opening congenialities. The Trio section of the work reminded me a little of the “Russian” melody used by both Beethoven in his String Quartet Op.59 No.2 and Musorgsky in the Coronation Scene of Boris Godunov.

Hristova and Houstoun allowed these episodes a lighter, more relaxed tone than in the finale which followed – a dark, muttered opening called for all kinds of emphatic responses, from furtive scamperings to an engaging sense of “schwung”, with violinist and pianist in determined accord, pushing their instruments along a truly epic kind of musical spectrum! After one of the oft-repeated keyboard mutterings had suddenly led the music into hitherto unchartered modulatory realms, the players straightaway saw their chance for freedom, and “pounced”, driving the rhythms fiercely and determinedly towards a resolution of will that infused the music’s spirit with something indomitable.

It was playing which brought the house down, and earned Hristova and Houstoun a richly-deserved standing ovation, as much for what we had just enjoyed as for the musicians’ stunning achievement over a week’s solid concertising in bringing us the complete cycle of these works – certainly, a landmark musical event whose reception by the audiences indicated enjoyment of a rare order, as well as warm and enduring gratitude.

Beethoven violin sonata series: Spring – molto espressivo – and its companion sonata are a delight

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Bella Hristova (violin) and Michael Houstoun (piano)
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Beethoven: the sonatas for piano and violin
Programme Two
Sonata no.4 in A minor, Op.23
Sonata no.5 in F major, Op.24 ‘Spring’

Renouf Foyer, Michael Fowler Centre

Tuesday 29 August 2017, 12 noon

We are fortunate indeed to have a full week (Monday to Friday) of these wonderful sonatas.   Having them performed in the Renouf Foyer proved to be an excellent decision – not so large and cavernous as the main auditorium, but still seating a large number of people; my rough calculation came to upwards of 300, and nearly all the available chairs filled.

Both sonatas were composed 1800-1801, for the wealthy patron Count Moritz von Fries.  Yet they were very different in character; no.4 was in three movements while no.5 was in four.

No. 4 opened with a lively and extravert presto, the instruments taking it in turns to come to the fore.  Great clarity was to be heard from both, and the players matched each other perfectly.

The  second movement, andante scherzoso, più allegretto, was not lacking in animation either, though in gentler, more playful style, with interesting off-beat rhythms that were given full play.  Balance between the performers was perfect, and the acoustic of the Renouf Foyer allowed us to hear the subtlety of both instruments easily, compared with listening to chamber music in the main auditorium.

Another fast movement, allegro molto, completed the sonata.  There was a certain similarity between the three movements.   Considerable use was made of staccato in this movement; there was delicacy as well as virtuosity.  This was as thoroughly pleasing performance.

The second sonata is much the better known of the two.  Here we were, two days away from the official first day of Spring.  Flowers are out, and even some kowhai trees – and Spring weather has been all too predominant lately.  The Spring has brought not only flowers and trees to life, but also warmed us with sunshine – literal (a little) and spiritual, through music.

The Spring of this sonata, with its rising opening allegro phrases, is utterly uplifting, whatever the weather.  They come first from the violin and then from the piano.  They are not too quick, but take us with them.  Familiarity certainly does not dull the effect of this masterpiece.  Every detail was delineated beautifully, but always with intensity.  I last heard it live, I think, some years ago, with Michael Houstoun and Wilma Smith.

The slow movement, adagio molto espressivo, was played with warm expressiveness – almost lush.  Here we heard the fine tones of Bella Hristova’s Amati violin more than was possible in the quicker movements.  The programme note described the ‘rhapsodic realm’ of this movement.

There appeared to be one treble note of the piano that sounded as if it needed some technical attention, but otherwise the tone from both instruments was admirable and refined.

The short scherzo: allegro molto, with its ‘mis-step’ between the two instruments, as the programme note described it, in other words, unsychronised writing, was a delight, as was the final rondo: allegro ma non troppo, that featured long, strong notes from the violinist and intriguing treatment of the recurring rondo theme.  The programme note stated ‘…we hear Beethoven writing in a manner that induces  contentment.’  And that was indeed the case.

Six more sonatas can be heard over the next three days.

 

 

 

 

 

Astonishing performance of complete Daphnis et Chloé ballet music, plus a Schumann allusion

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir conducted by Marc Taddei with Stephen de Pledge (piano)

Schumann: Carnaval (four scenes arranged by Ravel)
Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor Op 54
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé – complete ballet score

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 5 August, 7:30 pm

Orchestra Wellington continued its 2017 series theme that focuses on the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the genius behind the Ballets Russes which changed the face of ballet before the First World War, and also impacted on most of the other arts. For he employed the most gifted choreographers, composers, dancers and designers, of the age, and inspired them to produce work that would radically enrich and rejuvenate, even revolutionise the arts generally. One of the greatest ballets inspired by Diaghilev was Daphnis et Chloé; and the orchestra must have faced the necessity of performing it with trepidation.

But we began with an arrangement of Schumann’s Carnaval. What’s the link with Diaghilev?

Carnaval is a bit of an oddity, for it was first used, at Fokine’s initiative, in a collaborative orchestration by Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky, Lyadov, and Tcherepnin for the Ballets Russes in 1910. So it is curious that in 1914 Nijinsky asked Ravel to do another arrangement of Carnaval, this time for a London season; a Ravel arrangement was inspired no doubt by the success of Daphnis et Chloé in 1912, the year before Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps.  Most of Ravel’s score is lost and only four parts are extant: Preamble – German waltz – Paganini – March of the ‘Davidsbündler’ against the Philistines. So it was a minor work in the Ballets Russes story, but it acted as a sort of overture to this concert.

It is hard for me to adopt an objective feeling towards an orchestration of music that seems so utterly, quintessentially for the piano and which I’ve loved in that form for hundreds of years. Clearly, the orchestra decided to include it, as Marc Taddei explained, because Schumann’s piano concerto was scheduled in the first half, and the idea of some kind of link was attractive.

So, it’s essentially a scrap, a remnant in which there is not enough time to become much engaged by the sort of delightful, eccentric magic that a performance of the entire 20 pieces of the original creates, making emotional and artistic sense of the complete score.

I couldn’t avoid the feeling that it presented the orchestra with an insuperable task, to ingest the music, firstly to overcome resistance to sounds not from a piano, and to be persuaded that Ravel himself was convinced by it. Though whimsy, children’s make-believe, a chimerical world, the exotic, are common to both Schumann and Ravel, I have the feeling that they imagined them in quite different ways.

So I was not surprised to find in the scoring little that I’d have ascribed to Ravel in a blind-fold test.

Schumann Piano Concerto
The Piano Concerto was an entirely different matter: it was among my first LP purchases as a Schumann-enraptured teenager; but it’s a long time since I’ve heard a live performance. Adding the visual element to the music, I found myself noting aspects of the score that spoke of a composer not as much at ease with an orchestra as with his piano (a very familiar view which I decided was unhelpful). My attention nevertheless, was largely on the beautifully lyrical piano writing and the sympathetic, unostentatious playing by Stephen de Pledge which (in spite of blemishes here and there) soon took my attention away from the rather traditional orchestral score. Though very different in character, the reputation of Schumann’s concerto a little like that of Chopin’s two concertos: one disparages the orchestration. However, De Pledge’s playing, and particularly his cadenza that was musical rather than flashy, were enough to draw applause at the end of the first movement; that might also have indicated large numbers of the audience fairly new to classical music – one of the positive achievements of Orchestra Wellington’s policies.

The little encore was, appropriately, from Carnaval – Chiarina, a portrait of Schumann’s fiancée and future wife, Clara Wieck.

Daphnis et Chloé
The main purpose of the evening was the rare performance of, not the more familiar suites that Ravel himself took from the work, but the whole nearly hour-long ballet, Daphnis et Chloé, complete with chorus.

The huge array of instrumentalists (over 80) and the 100-strong Orpheus Choir could not been a more striking contrast to the music before the interval. These 70 years had led to music that was as different as Matisse and Braque are from Ingres and Delacroix.

Though it is in three parts or Tableaux – not, formally speaking or conspicuously in ‘Acts’, one does not notice the sort of contrasted movements that characterise traditional classical music.  The overwhelming impression is of organic growth, through a series of evolutionary mood changes and a story that moves to and fro, in and out of focus. Thus there is no point in trying to point to particular episodes as ‘effective’ or ‘unfocused’ or ‘particularly arresting’, in the way a critic often feels obliged to do. What do tend to stand out, to sound familiar, are naturally enough the parts that form the two suites that Ravel compiled, which include the Nocturne, Interlude and Danse-guerrière; and Lever de jour, Pantomime, and Danse générale, mostly from Tableau III.

Even though the impact on the listener is so overwhelming that there’s little chance to attend to details of thematic evolution, of the use and significance of contrasting keys, one has to take as read the fact that its success in maintaining rapt attention, and perhaps a longing for it to continue for another half hour, is due to those inconspicuous compositional secrets.

Though there’s no question about the singular brilliance and emotional power of the ballet, as music, there is an old-fashioned idea that the best test of the real depth of music’s originality and genius, lies in its likely impact if it could be heard without the trappings, regalia, colours and jewellery that adorns it. Would the music, stripped of its gaudy, overwhelming orchestration, reveal weakness in invention, in structure, in the unfolding of a musical narrative; would it remain engrossing if reduced to a piano score? Might it emerge featureless and drab? Who knows?

Of course, that’s as nonsensical as looking at a Turner or a Monet and asking that it be judged in a black and white reproduction. So the flamboyant and luxurious orchestration was an essential element, a major attraction, achieved through an orchestra of Mahlerian or Straussian size, and a great choir. And to think that a merely part-time orchestra, though overflowing with experienced professional musicians, both permanent and as frequent guests, had the temerity to take on one of the most famous, most challenging, sometimes acknowledged as the greatest, orchestral masterpieces of the 20th century. Not only were the wind sections enhanced with relatively infrequent instruments like bass clarinet, E flat clarinet, alto flute, but there were two harps and nine players lined up behind timpani and percussion, more than I can recall at any previous concert. Just for the record, percussion (taken from details in Wikipedia) were snare drum, bass drum, field drum, tambourine, castanets, crotales, cymbals, celesta, glockenspiel, xylophone, wind machine, tam-tam and triangle.

Then there’s the wordless choral element, present throughout most of its length: music that to some extent, is rather like what I described above: dense in complex harmony but sonically uniform. Learning the choral parts was probably more challenging than it would have been with conventional word setting where memory of words and music are inter-dependent and mutually supportive; and the choir’s performance sounded as near faultless as I imagine it gets (particularly conspicuous in the impressive passage without accompaniment). If diction was never an issue, the sheer energy and incisiveness of the singing, and the incessant demands on singers spoke of thorough rehearsal and dedication under their conductor, Brent Stewart (who was not named in the programme but singled out at the end).

This was the most courageous and momentous enterprise of Orchestra Wellington’s entire 2017 season, and perhaps one of the orchestra’s all time finest hours; it was mainly a tribute to conductor Marc Taddei, for its conception, inspiration and leadership that carried it through to a performance of astonishing dramatic and musical subtlety, insight and sheer splendour.