Tag: piano

Halida Dinova – Russian Soul from Tatarstan

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HALIDA DINOVA – Piano Recital

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

Music by JS BACH, LISZT, DEBUSSY, MENDELSSOHN, SCRIABIN, RACHMANINOV,  BALAKIREV, SCHUBERT and CHOPIN

Little Theatre,Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 2nd May 2012

It seemed as if I had barely recovered my poise and equilibrium in the wake of Sofya Gulyak’s stupendous recital at the NZSM’s Adam Concert Room in Wellington not a week beforehand, before encountering another wonderful pianist from the Russian Federation.

This was Halida Dinova, originally from Tatarstan, and currently living and teaching in Cleveland, USA, where she studied at the Institute of Music. From these somewhat far-flung worlds she had come here, and was giving a recital under the auspices of Chamber Music Hutt Valley at the Little Theatre in Lower Hutt.

I neither understand, nor wish to question whatever constellations in the firmament whose movements shape and influence our musical lives conspired to bring such an overwhelming juxtaposition of pianistic talent within our spheres. But all I know is that, within the space of a few days we had been presented with two opportunities of directly experiencing a “grand manner” of piano-playing one can normally only read about or experience second-hand through recordings.

So, at this point in my review, I propose to declare my intention to write about Halida Dinova’s playing as a “stand-alone” experience, and not get bogged down in a morass of comparisons between her and her compatriot, Sofya Gulyak – suffice to say that, as with Gulyak, Dinova had only to play a phrase for the listener to fairly guess that she had been brought up in a pianistic environment which favored a distinct style of playing and attitude towards interpretation.

This was playing in that “grand manner” I spoke about earlier – playing which demonstrated whole paradoxes of intensity and imagination, focus and colour, sharply-drawn edges whose parameters took in what seemed like limitless possibilities of fancy. Dinova’s sound seemed at once to speak to us directly, and yet suggest much more than what we heard – as if the music she made was presented as sound and then turned into poetry.

Her opening measures of the Bach/Busoni transcription of the Adagio from the C Major Toccata and Fugue BWV 564 which began the recital said it all, really – big, resonant, long-breathed playing, both disciplined and romantic, superbly coloured and finely nuanced.

Dinova’s own transcription and playing of the well-known Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 was what the French call a “tour de force” – I scribbled in my notes “Stokowski on the piano!”, so orchestral and impactful was her playing. For some reason she omitted Bach’s notorious “horror arpeggio” on both of its scheduled appearances in the introduction, but her playing was of an order that swept away any such incidental considerations in a torrent of sound-impulse which broke over the listener like oceanic waves. Her playing of the fugue stupendously achieved with two hands and the pedal what organists normally need their two feet for as well!

After these musical avalanches, it was somewhat ironic that we found in the music of Liszt some lighter contrast – though Dinova’s birdsong at the opening of the first of Liszt’s Two Legends, during which we heard St. Francis of Assisi preaching to an avian audience, was more than usually forthright – obviously there were skeptics in the feathered ranks, needing all the Saint’s powers of eloquence and persuasion to put across his message of love and salvation for all creatures.

For a piano supposedly on its last musical legs, as we were told by Chamber Music committee member Mike Rudge in his welcoming speech, the instrument was nevertheless made by Dinova to tingle with whatever life its strings, mechanism and frame still possessed. In fact, after the recital, she told me that she thought the society ought to get the piano reconditioned, rather than purchase a new instrument, as she really liked what it did for her!

To reproduce all the notes I scribbled while listening to Dinova play would be to try readers’ patience – enough to say that she brought to a wide-ranging program this distinctive “way” with piano-playing alluded to earlier, while realizing all and more of what one thought of the possibilities suggested by the names of these pieces and their composers.

Only during the bracket of Debussy that she played did she seriously part company with my feelings about the music – her performance of the admittedly difficult “Poisson d’or” from Book Two of Images I found oddly “rubbery” and unatmospheric, as though she was suddenly a child playing with toy fish in a bath. Doubly odd, because she had just given us a “Reflects dans l’eau” from Book One which was purely magical evocation, as watery a texture as could be imagined, but with plenty of glint and sparkle in the flourishes, a wonderfully iridescent sound-picture, at once warm and transparent. And I have never heard anybody lavish so much love and care on the salon-like Waltz La Plus que Lente, enough to transform it into something that sounded like a masterpiece (as well, Dinova was completely unfazed by a door noisily opening and shutting at one point in the proceedings!).

Dinova gave us a sharply-etched, glint-eyed Mendelssohn E Minor Scherzo, the music tripping deftly between faery and demonic mode, the pianist surviving a ‘splash” at the end of one of her runs which occasioned a wry, self-deprecating look at the keyboard from the pianist at the end of the piece, something which mattered not a whit in the context of such amazing overall dexterity. By contrast, the Scriabin left-hand Nocturne conjured up whole worlds of enchantment, the playing without smudging or clouding, but resonating beautifully throughout.

One expects, not unreasonably, to hear Rachmaninov from a Russian pianist, and Dinova’s way with two of the Op.23 Preludes reminded me of the composer’s own sharply-etched playing on his recordings. In reverse order to the programme’s listing she played the well-known G Minor with plenty of impulsive thrust, spiking the rhythms with accented notes in a way that added an element of menace to the momentums. And (bless her!) she played the throwaway ending, instead of the loud concluding chord that the composer unaccountably put into a later edition of the score! The E-flat Major she adroitly wove into a seamless surge, the central climax melting into delicacy at the end, the line, as always, both intensely-focused and pliable.

As for Balakirev’s notoriously challenging Islamey, which closed the first half, Dinova engaged with the piece on all fronts, relishing the rapid-fire toccata-like passages, whirling figurations, fistfuls of chords and sudden changes of rhythm, texture and dynamics than make this work one of the showcases for virtuoso pianists strutting their stuff. But nowhere did Dinova make us feel she was simply displaying her pianistic wares – she was too intent on bringing out the character of the different parts of the music, my favorite moment in her performance being the reprise of the toccata-like rhythms after the more lyrical central episode, where her out-and-out keyboard physicality took both music and listeners for an exhilarating bucking bronco ride – a breathtaking experience!

Being a sucker for Liszt’s Schubert Transcriptions, I enjoyed Dinova’s playing of them unreservedly, the beautiful Auf dem Wasser zu singen contrasting most tellingly with the spooky Erlkönig. In the context of this recital they made a fitting introduction to the remainder of the second half, which was taken up with Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op.28.

Pianist and pedagogue Hans Von Bulow (whom history unfortunately remembers most readily as the man whose wife Wagner stole) famously wrote a “program note” for every single one of these preludes, some of which are fanciful to the point of surrealism. His actions,of course, reflected the desire of musicians of his age to characterize the music that they played, for the benefit of their listeners. To my delight, Dinova’s programme printed Bulow’s titles for each of the Preludes.

One wasn’t aware of a specific program as such while listening to Dinova’s playing of these pieces, but such was the power of her musical “imaging” one could without too much trouble bring to mind pictures or words or both in response to what she was doing and how. They weren’t, I felt, offered by the pianist as abstracted pieces, though one could undoubtedly treat them as such if one wanted to, and resist the blandishments of the extremely vivid playing. As with nearly everything she gave us throughout the recital Dinova’s identification with Chopin’s sound world seemed at the time entirely appropriate as a synthesis of mind and heart, intellect and feeling.

Throughout the recital, but especially throughout the second half, Dinova proclaimed her allegiance to an older, more traditional manner of playing by consistently allowing her left hand to rhythmically anticipate the right, as many of the generation of pianists who made the earliest recordings known did as a matter of course. Also, from the outset the depth of tone and sense of “communing” with each of the Preludes added to a sense of their integral power – here they seemed more than usually “knitted together”, each one greater for the company of its fellows. Having said this it seems hypocritical of me to single out any for special comment – but I particularly loved her light, airy, out-of-doors way with the Lisztian No.23, which Bulow called “A Pleasure-Boat”, here, sounding like something out of the first Book of Liszt’s  “Annees de Pelerinage”  (Years of Pilgrimage).

As if she hadn’t done enough to satisfy, Dinova generously gave us both Scriabin and Rachmaninov as encores, setting the seal on what was a recital to remember. And, as with Sofya Gulyak, let’s sincerely hope we in New Zealand haven’t seen the last of her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sofya Gulyak – pianist extraordinaire

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Piano Recital by Sofya Gulyak

New Zealand School Of Music,

in association with the NZ (Auckland) International Piano Festival

RACHMANINOV – Three Pieces for Piano Op.3 / Etude Tableau in E-flat Minor Op.39

Variations on a Theme of Corelli Op.42

SCRIABIN – Two Poemes Op.32 / SHOSTAKOVICH – Prelude and Fugue in D-flat Op.87 No.15

PROKOFIEV – Piano Sonata No.6 in A Op.82

Adam Concert Room, NZSM, Victoria University of Wellington

Saturday 28th April

Former Professor of Piano at Auckland University Tamas Vesmas instigated in 2005 the Auckland International Piano Festival, an event which for the following couple of years attracted numerous world class pianists to give recitals, concerts and masterclasses. In 2008, Vesmas returned to Europe to live, and the Festival’s organization was taken over by John Eady, of Lewis Eady Ltd, the New Zealand agents for Steinway pianos. Tamas Vesmas was able to maintain an interest in the Festival as Artistic Director, which continued successfully under John Eady’s stewardship, a process which eventually saw the Festival drop the “Auckland” from its title and become the New Zealand International Piano Festival. This year, the prestigious line-up included none other than the 2009 Winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition, Sofya Gulyak. It was Wellington’s great good fortune that she was able to include a visit to the capital in her schedule, and perform her Festival program here as well.

Gulyak’s success at Leeds was historic in the sense that she was the first woman to win the top prize in the competition (Mitsuko Uchida went close in 1975, but was edged out by Dmitri Alexeev, and the talented Noriko Ogawa was placed third in 1987, though she beat the highly-regarded Russian Boris Berezovsky into fourth place). At Leeds Gulyak played the Brahms D Minor Concerto with Mark Elder and the Halle to take the honours, and her performance was praised for its “measured intensity” and its “combination of tonal weight and dark lyricism”. Her success wasn’t entirely unquestioned, as often happens in these competitions, with each of the runners-up preferred by some commentators as the more deserving of the highest award – but Gulyak was able to impress enough of the right people sufficiently to carry the day.

She was certainly able to impress her Wellington audience as well, though not with Brahms – her programme, which she had also played in Auckland, at the Festival, consisted entirely of Russian works.  It was a well-chosen assemblage of pieces designed to demonstrate unequivocally those characteristics we’ve generally come to associate with music from that particular part of the world. Added to this was a style of playing which, thanks largely to recordings of other pianists, could readily be identified as belonging to the “Russian School”, and which Gulyak seemed to me to proclaim practically from her first note of the recital, at the beginning of Rachmaninov’s Elegie from the set of Pieces, Op.3. Her depth of tone, and evocation of both a deep stillness and a wonderfully oceanic surge caught us up in her sound-world within seconds, one which rose and fell at will throughout the music’s journeyings.

The Op.3 Pieces of course contain THE Prelude,  which Rachmaninov the concert pianist grew to hate, as he was simply beleaguered with requests for its performance – “I know my duty – I will play it!” he would wearily say to his stage manager, in response to his audience’s clamouring at the end of each concert. There was nothing weary about Gulyak’s performance, which was very “chiaroscuro” throughout the sharply-delineated opening, but then brought out the variants of colour and tone, with the left hand held in check, allowing the sounds of those tolling bells plenty of space and atmosphere. A quicksilver middle section proclaimed her amazing technical facility, with cascades of sounds pealing in all directions, and then the most magical tonal diminutions of the final chords opened up the music’s vistas and merged sounds with memory.

Despite the programme’s boldly-proclaimed “Five Pieces for Piano Op.3”, Gulyak played only three of them, concluding the group with the Polichinelle, Rachmaninov’s scintillating portrayal of the well-known Pulcinello, from the Italian commedia del’ arte theatre – impish brilliance at the outset, followed by one of those rolling Russian melodies that the composer simply couldn’t help writing, and concluding with a reprise of the opening, working up to an even more brilliant conclusion. The grandly obsessive Etude-Tableau in E-flat minor from the wonderful Op.39 set of these pieces followed, its Lisztian sweep and rhetoric making the perfect foil for what was to follow – the composer’s last piece written for solo piano, the Corelli Variations.

Though the theme Rachmaninov used is not really by Corelli at all (it’s an ancient Portugese dance-tune called “La Folia”) it was used by the latter in one of his Op.5 Violin Sonatas, as well as by other Baroque composers. By this stage in his career Rachmaninov was favouring a leaner, sharper-edged style in his composing, following on from his Fourth Piano Concerto and his “Paganini” Rhapsody.  Sofya Gulyak fills out the spaces contained by these clear edges with dark, rich colours, vividly characterizing each variation (a cricket’s song in Variation Two, for example), and for me making each vignette at once modern-sounding and fantastically Schumannesque. At first I thought her playing in the finale a shade unyielding, but orchestral colours kept burgeoning up out of the textures and the rhythms acquired a real schwung from one keyboard extreme to another – exciting and extremely musical pianism! And the epilogue was brought about with such a sense of “being there”, Gulyak scattering a few roses about the devastation, her playing of the theme at the end a quiet, deep-toned tribute to the journey and its remaining memories.

Scriabin’s “Two Poemes” were played for contrasts, the first Andante Cantabile very beautiful,  limpid and watery, the second more “impetuoso” than its actual marking “con eleganza”. Though seeming like whole worlds apart, Gulyak moved from these worlds of over-wrought sensibility to the sharp, acerbic intensities of Shostakovich with complete ease, flinging the composer’s angularities at us with gusto at the beginning of the Prelude, and switching to playfulness for the child-like middle section, innocent and artless but for the occasional “wrong-note” contouring! And what a wicked, chromatically torturous fugue! Gulyak relished its motoric impulses and its spiky, “in-your-face” concluding cadences, whose ironic, matter-of-fact aspect brought a huge appreciative response from her audience.

Though the Shostakovich work had a modicum of grit, it was left to Prokofiev to provide the evening’s truly coruscating moments. His Sixth Sonata was numbered as the first of what the composer called three “War Sonatas”, begun in 1939 and written throughout the duration. Amazingly, the composer began work on all ten movements of the three sonatas at the same time, in order to be able to switch to a different movement’s mode if he felt any kind of creative “block” with what he was currently grappling with. It’s small wonder that these sonatas have things in common, but an even greater miracle that each does have its own specific thematic and schematic world.

Sofya Gulyak threw herself and all of us into the ferment with a vengeance, giving the Sonata’s opening major-minor fanfare its full clangour and spadefuls of energy, drawing us into the darkly-lit lyricism of the central section, before re-energizing things, the fanfare returning in harsher, more mocking guise. Her playing hurled the sounds across the spaces, transfixing our sensibilities and rending the fabric of things. The Allegretto movement provided a little respite, though Gulyak pointed its its angularities in-and-out of our comfort-zones, unsettling us with sudden accents and dark shadows. I also loved Gulyak’s way with the slow-waltz lentissimo, again, taking us from warm reassurance to cool unease across single measures, rather like moonlight suddenly obscured by cloud and leaving things enveloped momentarily in darkness. Her voicings throughout were beautifully modulated, her control of animation and stasis that of a master, the concluding cadences playing delicacy against darkness most effectively.

The finale here drove between bristling energies and diabolical impulses – we felt a sense of dark pursuit that gave way to a slowly-descending vortex dominated by the work’s opening fanfare-motif. Gulyak’s impulsive reawakening of the textures were the sounds of fireflies in the gloom, the energies spreading to open conflagration, and overwhelming us with explosive force – her delivery of the final “pay-off” phrase had an electric thrill whose shock momentarily knocked our receptive powers sideways, though we recovered to give her the ovation and recalls she so richly deserved. Her encore, appropriately, restored calm and order to our sensibilities – a Bach transcription of part of a Marcello Oboe Concerto, after what we had just experienced, the musical epitome of equilibrium and well-being!  Bravo, Sofya Gulyak!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pianist Nicola Melville returns to give memorable recital at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Images, Book I: Reflets dans l’eau, Hommage à Rameau, Mouvement (Debussy); Jettatura (Psathas); Nocturne in B, Op 62 No 1 (Chopin); Three Piano Rags by William Albright

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 18 April, 12.15pm

Nicola Melville holds an assistant professorship at a university in Minnesota and is on the summer faculty of the Chautauqua Music Festival in up-state New York (south of Buffalo, close to Lake Erie). She was educated in Tawa schools and at Victoria University (where she was one of Judith Clark’s many talented students) and at the Eastman School of Music in New York State. Since then, in the United States, she has had important competition successes, and won prestigious grants, has performed at music festivals and recorded standard repertoire as well as works commissioned by her.

Her programme was very well gauged for a free lunchtime concert, with pieces both familiar and fairly new.

The three pieces that comprise Debussy’s Images Book I for piano opened the recital, played with remarkable fluency and sensitivity. Reflets dans l’eau shimmered with velvety sound, suggesting not perfect calm but water rippling after the three notes are dropped into it, and regains its reflective character towards the end. Hommage à Rameau is not really ‘in the style of’ but simply a less impressionistic piece, bearing a certain formality and basically traditional harmonies that Debussy stretches and colours: in tone more like the suite Pour le piano, and perhaps kinship with Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. Melville seemed to find the essence of each – so different – characterising them with clarity and precision, stamping each with the composer’s unmistakable musical personality; Mouvement suggested a very different scene, of a trapped insect or fast-spinning machine, created by throbbing, motoric figures that do not go anywhere but move in a confined space, demanding not just speed but the creation of shapely phrasing and dynamics all of which flowed effortlessly from her hands.

Nicola described the origin of John Psathas’s Jettatura (she remarked that she had been Psathas’s contemporary at the School of Music), reading the composer’s own notes prefaced to the score about the significance of the name and the misfortunes and bad luck that have attended his visits to his family homeland, led his family to attribute to an ‘evil eye’ or jettatura (in Italian).

He wrote: ‘The belief is that a person can harm you, your children, your livestock, merely by looking at them with envy and praising them…”. On a visit in 1998 bad luck struck his wife and son and his sister consulted a village soothsayer who checked John’s aura by long-distance telephone. “The soothsayer gasped, went silent, and declared I was so heavily and completely hexed that my halo was utterly opaque.”

His talisman to defend himself against the jettatura, is this little composition.

It called for hard-hitting, impassioned fingering, and the creation of a sense of defiance and ferocity, almost out of control. Both hands are fully occupied in entirely different activities, the left hand hammering a string of ostinatos while the right hand tumbled in an apparently reckless way over the keys, reaching to the top of the keyboard. A brilliant composition that perhaps found its ideal interpreter in this brilliant expatriate pianist.

Then back to Chopin with one of the less familiar of his 21 Nocturnes. Op 62 No 2 is the last of the nocturnes published in his lifetime (there are three without opus number, two early, one late). They are not as much played in concert as the scherzi and ballades and impromptus, many of the waltzes and mazurkas but, as Roger Woodward writes, “[The nocturnes] are the key to Chopin. They represent the high art of Romanticism and a great way to begin to understand how to play melody well.”

This one has not the quite beguiling ease of the early ones of Op 9, the F sharp major, or the entrancing melody of the nocturnes of Opp 32 and 37, the F minor, or the posthumous C sharp minor.

However, some consider the two nocturnes of Op 62 the most interesting, the most contrapuntally complex, and though the shift from Psathas to Chopin might have seemed a retreat into a simpler world, Nicola’s presentation of its modest, restrained artistry had the effect of cleansing the air, with the subtlest rubato, discreet pedalling and velvety articulation.

Finally, to animate a quite different part of the brain, three Piano Rags by William Albright, pieces that had their roots in Scott Joplin  Nicola has become an Albright specialist, with many recorded on CD, as you will find if you Google ‘William Albright rags’.

The first thing you notice is the flood of notes, and a greater complexity and variety of rhythm and harmony, of dynamics and modulation than you find in the early 20th century precursors. On the other hand, there was no less feeling of an idiomatic performance from the pianist.

The frequent and unusual key changes would have surprised Jelly Roll Morton or Fats Waller. We strike the unexpected at every turn, and it struck me that the rags may have been chosen to match aspects of the character of Jettatura (or more likely the other way round). The second, Sleepwalker’s Shuffle, began softly swinging, in a relaxed spirit, which is suddenly broken by a fortissimo phase in stride style that would have woken the sleepwalker with a nightmare. The Queen of Sheba rather defied interpretation, toyed with chromaticism, pauses, surprises, her left heel tapping the floor, a presto molto burst where traditional harmonies were spiced with dissonances.

They are enormous fun, and enormously challenging, and there is no possibility that they could have been written before the late 20th century. I cannot imaging a more enthusiastic and accomplished advocate of this infectious music than Nicola Melville.

 

 

 

 

Albeniz’s Iberia – a musical traveller’s delight

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ALBÉNIZ – Iberia

Guillermo González (piano)

Adam Concert Room,

New Zealand School of Music, Wellington

Friday 23rd March, 2012

Surely the next best thing to actually GOING to Spain would be to listen and give oneself up entirely to either (or preferably both) of those two masterpiece collections for solo piano, Isaac Albéniz’s Iberia and Enrique Granados’s Goyescas. Fortunately, there are a number of fine recordings available of each of the cycles, although live performances of them are rare happenings indeed.

It was, therefore, an occasion worth celebrating and savouring, when Spanish pianist Guillermo González recently played the entire set of Albéniz’s Iberia in Wellington, at a concert given in the NZSM’s Adam Concert Room. As his was a name new to me, I was surprised to find González has actually recorded a good deal of Albéniz’s piano music,including Iberia, for the Naxos label, and made numerous other recordings of Spanish and non-Iberian music as well.

If his recordings manage to convey anything like the grandeur, energy and intensity with which González invested his playing of Iberia for us at the Adam Concert Room, then they ought to be snapped up by Hispanophiles and pianophiles alike. By dint of what seemed his total involvement with the music, González drew us into his Antipodean sound-world, one in which every note had its own organically-wrought impulse of colour, flavour or rhythm. So persuasive were his evocations that, once under their spell, one felt at times almost more like a native than a tourist.

Interestingly, the pianist presented his own order of Albéniz’s twelve pieces, one which (as he explained to us through an interpreter) he believed gave us “the best experience” of the work. However bold an initiative this first appeared, González (who has completed and published a new edition of the work) proceeded to justify his “order of vision” with playing whose sounds suggested total familiarity and identification with the music’s native substance.

The composer’s arrangement for the work’s publication involved four books of three, whereas González’s presentation involved three groups of four, and what seemed like an almost complete change of order of the pieces. So we had two intervals during the concert, an arrangement I found gave the music we’d heard in each bracket time and space to breathe and resonate in the memory. Like Debussy with his Preludes, Albéniz didn’t except the pieces to be played in an entirety – and though (as with Debussy’s work) when played as a set their greatness glows even more richly, each nevertheless has a stand-alone strength and depth which creates its own distinctive and satisfying world.

González spoke about the work as a whole before the concert, and then about the oncoming bracket of pieces after each interval. His words, in gently and melodiously expressed Spanish, were translated by fellow-musician Paul Mitchell, more familiar of course to audiences as a ‘cellist. I found the experience of listening to a musician’s thoughts regarding the music he was about to play fascinating – in this case it seemed to bring the specific worlds of Albéniz’s pieces more closely to us while still leaving some responsibility to our own imaginations for each evocation.

We began the journey with Almeria (Book II), González presiding over a beautifully-phrased unfolding of indolent rhythm, the melodic lines in places densely clustered, but with the intervals, however close or remote, sensitively voiced. Such was the focused earthiness of the pianist’s playing I felt something of a sense of spontaneous growth being tapped about it all; and as with the piece’s rhythms, the light falling about the notes not chiaroscuro-like but subtle and gradated. The music’s great climax was one whose trenchant tones rose and quickly died away, the effect being of an irradiated landscape, the occasional glint of some of the figurations suggesting the groundswell that filled its moment to bursting and then passed. Wide-eyed, transfixing stuff, indeed!

I couldn’t help write similar kinds of jottings about almost every piece, noting the impulsive intensities of the following Málaga, the droll syncopations of El polo masking the music’s ever-growing weight of intent (spontaneous applause for this one!), and the more familiar Triana, lighter in feeling but with a dark undertow of rhythm that native Spaniards probably register instinctively as a blood-pulse. Everything about each of the pieces seemed richly-conceived, the pianist’s silences in places as tone-saturated as the notes, making for tangy evocations of exotic atmospheres.

The second group was similarly introduced, with González telling us about Scarlatti’s influence upon Albéniz’s keyboard writing of Cádiz (sometimes called El Puerto), something one could hear in the playful insistence of the decorations surrounding the piece’s recurring motifs. He then talked about the composer’s swan-song, Jerez, a complex and candidly-written meditation whose material seemed to summon up a life’s work. I thought this drew remarkable playing from González, tightly-wrought at the beginning, then more spacious through some chromatically-coloured sequences, and later exploring the ambiences around and about an expansive theme whose appearance gave rise to a number of contrasting episodes. Here was both quiet ecstasy (lump-in-the-throat downward whole-tone modulations) and pain, which the pianist touched on in his spoken introduction, nothing too searing or scorching, but in the form of anxiety-ridden upward reachings of sounds towards light and liberation.

The obsessively rhythmic opening of El Abaicín provided a telling contrast, an evocation of the Gypsy quarter of Granada, one which González entered into with a will, imparting a wonderfully physical snap to his rhythms, and delivering the recitatives with passionate ardor. Following this, the Messiaen-like clustered tones of the opening of Lavapiés made a festive, almost chaotic effect in the pianist’s hands, as befitted the music’s inspiration from the streets and dance-halls of Madrid, complete with a catchy tune reminiscent of Debussy’s Hills of Anacapri, one whose workings developed beautifully towards a climax in this performance, then even more beguilingly wound down again.

González’s final bracket from Iberia contained both the opening and concluding published pieces of the entire set, beginning with Evocación, which opens Book One, and which he called “a simple expression of soul”. Its beautiful Chopin-like melody at the beginning dominated the piece, by turns passionate and  gently poetic, with some stunning gradations of withdrawn tones towards the end. The dance-like Rondeña opened engagingly (González played us a couple of bars of Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from “West Side Story” to demonstrate the rhythm), its melodic trajectories requiring fistfuls of notes in places – an engaging but demanding piece. I loved the rhythmic directness of the lively Eritaña, and the rich baritonal voicing of the melody mid-way, surrounded by such lovely ambiences. Was that the merest hesitation at one point leading up to a cadence? if so, it was the pianist’s only hiccup of the evening, a momentary hiatus before the plunge into yet another of the composer’s individual modulations, which came thick and fast before the reprise of the main theme.

Having always thought Eritaña, for all its energy and colour, a somewhat inconclusive end to Book Four of the suite, I was pleased that González gave us Sevilla at the end, here – this was music of great spectacle, the opening processional reaching a true “shimmering-point” in this performance, the pianist generating a marvellous sonority, something Liszt would have heartily approved of! The beautiful sequential melody enveloped us in a Parsifal-like halo of solemnity, its progressions, however predictable, totally mesmeric. And the ensuing build-up towards a conflagration of bells and song had a Musorgsky-like grandeur, one whose resonances drifted across our vistas and into the most satisfying of silences at the end. We were left thinking, “What music, and what a pianist!”

(A footnote in the program acknowledged the “generous assistance of the Embajada de Espana en Nueva Zelanda, the Embassy of Spain, for making Guillermo Gonzalez’s visit to New Zealand possible”.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Endres launches Paekakariki’s 2012 Mulled Wine concerts with brilliant Romantic music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mulled Wine concerts

Mendelssohn: Songs without Words, Op 19; Schubert: Sonata in G, D 894; Schumann: Carnaval, Op 9

Michael Endres (piano)

Paekakariki Memorial Hall

Sunday 18 March, 2.30pm

Last Sunday, at one of the world’s very few concert halls that stand only 50 metres from a sparkling surf beach, the year’s series of high class musical concerts was launched.

Paekakariki’s celebrated Mulled Wine Concerts, bravely and skilfully promoted by Mary Gow, started with a piano recital by Michael Endres, currently professor of piano at Canterbury University; sadly, he is returning to Germany soon.

A special piano was obtained for the concert – a Schimmel, from Auckland, courtesy of several local sponsors. Getting it to Paekakariki by Sunday was beset by a series of problems and mishaps and it was only the last-minute efforts by Mainfreight staff and by the piano tuner, far beyond the call of duty, that saw the piano in place and tuned in time.

The hard wood surfaces of the hall can make it difficult to control piano sound and that indeed proved troublesome at times

But it never obscured the essential quality of the piano or of Endres’s superb interpretations of the music, much of which demands fairly exuberant and energetic playing.  Ironically, it was the encore – Chopin’s gentle, exquisite Barcarolle – that perhaps suffered most from the acoustic.

The concert began with six of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words (Op 19, one of six sets). Many of them have been permanent favourites since they were published and Endres’s treatment of the charming, romantic pieces would have brought back memories, as well as admiration for the subtle handling of the moods, rhythmic changes and, yes, the dynamic variations inherent in the music, all of which were brilliantly rendered by the pianist.

It surprised many and confused some when, at the end of the last of the Song without Words – a Venetian gondola song – Endres launched into Schubert’s Sonata, without pause or waiting for applause. Perhaps he wanted to draw attention to the kinship between Schubert and Mendelssohn, which indeed is plainly there in the warm-hearted G major sonata. The playing of Schubert demands a special sensibility and Endres’s playing was in perfect sympathy with the composer. The last movement, Allegretto, was a special delight, as the mix of grandeur and optimism emerged vividly from his hands.  How extraordinary it is to recall that Schubert’s piano music was not, as a whole, recognised as being at least equal in greatness to his songs and chamber music until, I think, Artur Schnabel took it up, between the wars, and writers like Alfred Einstein,  after World War II, gave it proper, authoritative attention.

Perhaps the most looked-forward-to work was Schumann’s Carnaval, a sustained collection of thematically-linked vignettes depicting puppet-theatre figures as well as portraits of friends and loves and his own inventions. It’s one of the most joyous creations in all music and, as Endres demonstrated at Parekakariki, responds marvellously to the most exciting, heart-warming and  hair-raisingly virtuosic performance.

This is a review, slightly altered,  submitted for publication by the Kapiti Observer

 

Michael Houstoun’s musical journeyings at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society Inc.

MICHAEL HOUSTOUN plays music by Jenny McLeod and JS Bach

McLEOD – Six Tone Clock Pieces Nos.19-24 (world premiere)

JS BACH – Goldberg Variations

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday 12th February 2012

In her notes for the program composer Jenny McLeod pays a heartfelt tribute to the occasion and to those taking part, reserving special thanks for Michael Houstoun. Her words “a musician of such immense gifts, high reputation and tireless dedication” would have surely been echoed by those present at the recital, as we were able to sense in Houstoun’s playing something of McLeod’s “pleasure and privilege” in writing music for him to perform.

This music was “Six Tone Clock Pieces”, and was the culmination for the composer of over twenty years of work, this set completing a larger collection of twenty-four pieces. McLeod tells us that “Tone Clock” refers to a chromatic harmonic theory pioneered by Dutch composer Peter Schat, one which she adapted for her own purposes.

Having explained in her notes that composers such as Bach, Chopin and Debussy also wrote pieces in groups or multiples of 12, based on the subdivision of the keyboard into twelve semitones, McLeod dismissed further theoretical explanation of the music’s organization as “essentially of interest only to composers”, adding that she believed “structural coherence can be sensed intuitively by the listener”. Well stated.

The individual movements are evocatively titled, though McLeod admitted that these “names for things” arrived sometimes months after the music had been completed. She talked about precedents for such descriptions set by people like Debussy and Messiaen, and obviously regards her own music as similarly able to stand and be appreciated on its own unadorned merits. I did, I confess, find each of the titles a helpful starting-point for my listening fancies.

The first piece, Moon, Night Birds, Dark Pools, mixed evocation and delineation with great skill (Houstoun an ideal interpreter for such a blend of opposing sound-impulses), our sensibilities taken to the edges of a world of chromatic nocturnal fancies but keeping our status intact as spectators rather than participants in the scenario. Set against these stillnesses was the bustling energy-in-miniature of Te Kapowai (Dragonfly), which then gave way to deeper-voiced portents of oncoming day (Early Dawn to Sunrise-Earthfall), a primeval chorus of impulses gradually awakening the earth’s light, the piano tones suffusing the listener with richly golden energies, Messiaen-like in their insistence.

Haka opened darkly, the music thrustful and threatening at first, before the jazzy off-beat rhythms began rubbing shoulders with more playful figurations. Houstoun skillfully controlled the vacillating light-and-dark moods of the music, then allowed the silences of the disturbed land to creep slowly backwards. The next piece, Pyramids, Symmetries, Crevices of Sleep reminded me on paper of Debussy’s Canope, a composer’s parallel meditation upon an object honouring the dead. Of the pieces, I found this the most abstracted and self-contained, appropriately enigmatic, even more so than the final Dream Waves, with its “surfing the planet” subtitle, whose angularities and contrasts were more readily engaging on a visceral level for this listener.

At a first hearing I was fascinated by the variety of the piano-writing, the titles of the individual pieces giving me some intriguing contexts in which to place the sounds. I thought the music in general terms intensified in abstraction as piece followed piece, the last two of the set very determinedly stating their independence of any kind of glib representation whatever. Incidentally, the first eleven from the complete set of Tone Clock Pieces can be heard on a Waiteata Music Press disc (WTA 005)  available from either The Centre For New Zealand Music (SOUNZ) or the New Zealand School of Music. I haven’t yet gone back to these earlier pieces to listen, but it will be fascinating to compare them with these latest sounds of the composer’s.

Michael Houstoun gave us rather more familiar fare after the interval, a work that’s recognized as one of the cornerstones of Western keyboard literature, JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  This was a performance which I thought was taken in a single great breath, one whose flow of substance never let up, right to the point where Houstoun allowed the final restatement of the simple “Goldberg” theme to steal in even before the jollity of the concluding Quodlibet had finished resounding in our ears – a magical moment.

Of course, this s a work that demands a considerable amount of ebb and flow of mood and motion from the player; and Houstoun’s achievement was to encompass the enormity of variety between these moods, while keeping the audience’s interest riveted (on the face of things, an ironic circumstance with a work whose original purpose was popularly supposed to be that of putting a nobleman to sleep!). The evidence actually suggests that the Count Von Keyserlingk wanted not “a sleeping draught” as is popularly supposed, but music “soothing and cheerful in character” for his young chamber harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to play. This would account for the good-humored, even robust nature of the final Quodlibet, with its menage of well-known, characterful melodies, more suitable for a kind of cheerful sing-a-long than a cure for insomnia.

Throughout I thought Houstoun’s different emphases of rhythm, touch and tone-colour illuminated each of the variations. One would hardly expect a note-perfect performance of such a colossal undertaking, but the very few inaccuracies and the one-or-two rhythmic uncertainties that sounded had that “spots on the sun” quality with which commentators used to characterized wrong notes played by Alfred Cortot. Basically, Houstoun made every note sound as though it mattered – there was nothing of the mechanus about his playing, but always a strong undertow of something organic – a varied terrain, but one with a living spinal chord.

To mention highlights of the playing might seem to be placing trees in the way of the forest – nevertheless, I found the buoyancy of Houstoun’s delivery in the energetic variations created a real sense of “schwung” – the very first variation had strut and poise, No.15 had marvellously energetic orchestral dialogues and rapid-fire triplets, terrific scampering momentum was generated in No.18, and the whirl of further triplets made No.27 an exhilarating and vertiginous experience. As for some of the slower, grander, or more meditative pieces, these were delivered with a focus and concentration which played their part in ennobling the whole work. Longest and slowest of these was No.25, in which the music takes performer and listener to depths of feeling and self-awareness that give the “return to higher ground” an unforgettable, life-changing poignancy. The aria itself was strong and confident at the outset, then other-worldly and meditative at the very end, as if spent from having finished recounting a lifetime’s experience.

Michael Houstoun is repeating this program at Upper Hutt’s Expressions Theatre on Monday 16th April. For those who couldn’t get to this Waikanae concert, I would say that going to Upper Hutt to hear two very different, but equally thought-provoking works marvellously played would be, on many different levels, a very worthwhile journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Georgina Zellan-Smith – new light on the “Moonlight”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Piano recital by Georgina Zellan-Smith

Music by Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Chopin – plus some “popular favorites” requests.

House concert, Johnsonville, Wellington

Tuesday 22nd November 2011

Auckland-based pianist Georgina Zellan-Smith is, sadly, an infrequent visitor to Wellington these days. She performed here last at a commemorative concert in 2008 which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Richard Farrell, on which occasion she played an excerpt from Liszt’s Italian Book of his “Years of Pilgrimage”. On that evening she shared the piano with Maurice Till, Margaret Nielsen, Diedre Irons and Jun Bouterey-Ishido. So it was with the keenest of anticipation that I awaited her proposed house-concert scheduled for November in Johnsonville, and for which she would presumably have the piano all to herself (no reflection whatever, of course, on those other excellent pianists who contributed so movingly to the Richard Farrell evening).

In the event, she gave her attentive and highly appreciative audience a richly-conceived programme, using an instrument (a Kawai) whose tones seemed particularly sonorous at the lower end of the sound-spectrum. Whether this quality was in fact a natural penchant of the pianist’s towards middle and lower tones, or whether the player connected with and used the instrument’s intrinsic voicings to noticeable advantage, I’m not entirely sure. But in places such as throughout the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, under Zellan-Smith’s fingers the middle and bass voices of the music had a fuller, richer and darker aspect than one normally experiences in this music. The effect was to bring a somewhat uneasy, almost sinister quality to the familiar “Moonlight on the lake waters” evocation, and explore a whole new dimension of feeling and response to the composer’s vision. Never have I heard this music sounding more than it could have been out of Schumann’s “Kreisleriana”, the lower voicing emphasizing the shadows stalking the right-hand melody throughout.

In this context the second movement of the “Moonight  made for a strong contrast, the syncopated rhythms in the middle section played fully out, suggesting something more elemental than what we normally hear. The finale continued the music’s mood, bringing great weight as well as momentum, Zellan-Smith pointing the rhythmic trajectories of the music to compelling, energetic effect rather than relying merely on speed for excitement. She also made a great deal of the claustrophobic contrasting episodes, hands close together concentrating the music into obsessive repetitions before opening up the vistas with the concluding rolling arpeggiations. Alone, the pianist’s playing of this somewhat hackneyed, but still potentially magical work made the concert worthwhile for me.

Incidentally, as a kind of prelude to the “Moonlight”, Zellan-Smith gave us the beautiful Adagio Cantabile” from the same composer’s “Pathetique” Sonata – and again she found in the music such a rich well of light and dark feeling. It was her left-hand work which riveted me, the ebb and flow of tonal coloring beautifully controlling and shaping the right-hand melody (one of the world’s great tunes, I think), the tempo not particularly slow, but always giving things time to breathe, each note specifically placed instead of being delivered in a generalized way. She made a great thing of the middle section’s arched magnificence, her left hand again making certain that all the music’s voices had a part in the overall scheme of things. I could have, on this showing, happily listened to her playing an entire program of Beethoven – what wouldn’t she have done with things like the wonderful “Les Adieux” Sonata, or one of those unearthly late masterpieces such as Op.111?

But then we would have had to do without some other deliciously different things, such as the recital’s opening piece, a Scarlatti Sonata in F Major, played here with such a delicious amalgam of grace, energy and good humor – something that fellow-New Zealand pianist Margaret Nielsen would, I’m sure, have called “great character” – and a Mendelssohn work that I couldn’t recall having ever heard before (to my shame, as a piano-fancier!), his Fantasia in F-sharp Minor, Op.28 (known also as the “Scottish Sonata”), a tremendous piece, beginning with swirling, almost Gothic-like arpeggiated mists, from which developed a beautiful, melancholic theme not unlike that from the opening of Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata. In places Zellan-Smith’s playing strongly brought out the connection with Bach’s toccata-like organ works, Mendelssohn paying homage, one suspects, to those fantastic harmonic modulations that readily conjure up dimly-lit and spookily obsessive dream-like sequences of deranged organists lost in their private worlds of sound. I liked the pianist’s winsome treatment of the theme’s intermingling of major and minor at the end of the movement, and the soft drumbeats acknowledging the ending’s ghostly echoes.

As with the Beethoven Sonata, there’s a graceful ,dance-like movement between the two outer giants (shades of Schumann’s “flower between two chasms” – or was it Liszt who said that of the “Moonlight” Sonata’s middle movement?) – here, the pianist played the dance more for strength than for charm, which I liked, the music to my ears responding positively to such a purposeful approach. As for the last movement’s “diabolique” impulses, Mendelssohn’s sprites tend to be more mischievous than malevolent, though here the delicacies seemed to have flint-edges, the composer managing to conjure up a Beethoven-like mood of agitation in places (though the “Scottish” ambiences of the first movement didn’t seem to be carried over strongly into the rest of the work). Zellan-Smith kept the music’s serious mood to the fore, avoiding the “drawing-room gentility” that tends to hang about a lot of the composer’s chamber and instrumental music, and maintaining an “edge” to the textures and rhythms right up to the work’s final energetic flourishes.

A further delight of the recital was Georgina Zellan-Smith’s playing of a couple of items from her recent CD of popular piano classics, “Remembrance”, including the beautifully atmospheric “Rustle of Spring” by Christian Sinding, the piano on this occasion giving the pianist’s swirling left-hand accompaniments in places a bit more weight and body than on the CD recording, and providing the agitato feeling that the more delicate episodes o the music need to bring out their full effect. By the time the pianist reached the Chopin items which concluded the program, including the fleet-fingered Fantasie-Impromptu (another world-famous melody) I suspect that the effort of realizing both the Beethoven and Mendelssohn items so whole-heartedly was beginning to take its toll, though the G-flat waltz in particular was a great pleasure to experience. In all, there was a great deal of wonderful music and fully-committed music-making packed into what seemed like too short a time, throughout this recital. I do hope we in Wellington get further opportunities to hear Georgina Zellan-Smith play more of the music she obviously loves and illuminates with such skill and understanding.

 

 

 

Georgina Zellan-Smith – fond piano memories

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REMEMBRANCE

– and other favorite piano pieces

Georgina Zellan-Smith (piano)

 Ode Records CDMANU 5101

I must confess my first reaction upon receiving this CD was of surprise that so gifted an executant as Georgina Zellan-Smith would expend so much of her energies on “faded trifles” such as these. Especially in the wake of the same pianist’s excellent Beethoven/Hummel CD, whose interesting and unique compilation of repertoire “enlarged” the piano-playing world for me, I thought this collection seemed, by comparison, somewhat surplus to requirements, replicating many such “Great Piano Melodies”  or “Gems of the Piano Repertoire” kind of presentations.

What I didn’t take into account was the pleasure to be had from listening to a sensitive and insightful interpreter cast fresh light on these pieces. Being the child of a piano teacher, I had every note, every phrase of both “Remembrance’ and “The Robin’s Return” indelibly etched upon my musical memory, albeit refracted through the all-too-fallible fingers and youthful sensibilities of my mother’s piano pupils. I fancy she would occasionally have pushed them off the piano stool in frustration and actually demonstrated how certain passages would go, which would account for my having more-or-less musically coherent memories of each piece – and in the case of “Remembrance’ probably augmented by performances on the radio of people like Gil Dech.

Georgina Zellan-Smith plays each of these opening “flagship” pieces with what I can only describe as exquisite taste – she fuses a judicious amalgam of bright-eyed clarity with occasional dollops of ambiently-yellowed sentiment; and in each case the result is, for me, well-nigh irresistible. Apart from a slight mis-hit in “Remembrance” she makes every single note tell. The same goes for the following item, the ever-popular “Rustle of Spring”, one of the great “light” pieces of piano music, here conjuring up even more childhood memories, so that, like Dylan Thomas’s boyhood self in his story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, I’m forced to plunge my hands into the piece’s snowfall of notes and come up with whatever I can grasp – such is the compulsion of the resonances unlocked by this music.

Christian Sinding’s lovely seasonal piece reminds me, along with Edward McDowell’s “To A Wild Rose”, of other miniature works whose elegant craftsmanship has ensured their immortality – another example, though not on this recording, is Debussy’s “Clair de lune”. In all of these pieces the music’s intrinsic qualities reward in some way even the most interpretatively bland performances. “Rustle of Spring” in particular has a certain “layered” quality beneath the exquisite harmonies, allowing different performances to uncover whatever their interpretative capacities can realize. Sinding cleverly plays with both major and minor modes throughout, knowing when to flood his textures with sunbeams and when to drift the mists back through the sound-vistas – it may be unashamed emotional manipulation, but I dearly love it. Georgina Zellan-Smith’s performance of Sinding’s piece takes its time at the outset, gradually allowing the Spring’s impulses to awaken the textures, though her unhurriedness meant that some of the left-hand figurations lack the occasional touch of volatility and energy. Still, if pressed I would state a preference for her way to the rather more superficially exciting, but often somewhat mechanical renditions by other pianists I remember hearing.

Grieg’s “To the Spring” evokes seasonal change more ritualistically, though the piquancy of both textures and harmonies can’t help but exert a gradual spell upon the listener. A casual hearing suggests that Zellan-Smith plays the notes “straight” at the outset, but if one listens and breathes the phrases with the pianist, one feels their varied pulsations, sensitively and subtly delineated. Even more abstracted is the same composer’s “Papillon”, or “Butterfly”  as it’s called here, the angular delicacies of the creature’s flight being less quicksilver and gossamer, and more studied under Zellan-Smith’s hands, like an oriental etching on a screen or fan, exchanging volatility for grace and elegance.

There are too many pieces to fully comment upon individually – some are predictably engaging as performances (Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” and Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”, for example), while others lie in wait to snare the unsuspecting in nooses of delight (Liadov’s “A Musical Snuff Box” for one). Albert Ketelbey’s “In a Persian Market” is a rip-roaring success, here, its quaint chocolate-box exoticism given a bit of extra grunt by the pianist in places with strongly-etched rhythms and glowing harmonic colorings. Another success is Handel’s eponymous “Largo”, here completely avoiding the treacly ooze generated by numerous Victorian arrangements for organ and orchestra, in favor of a clearly-etched cavatina-like outpouring of lyricism, far more in keeping with Handel’s original, from the opera “Serse”. And I loved hearing the Paderewski Minuet again (I used to listen to Jose Iturbi’s 78rpm recording of the work, which was on the “B” side of Iturbi’s recording of THE Prelude by Rachmaninov). Zellan-Smith’s delight in the dance comes across as sprightly as with any polonaise.

In short, far from sounding like “faded trifles”, a lot of the pieces re-emerge as glowing gems in Georgina Zellan-Smith’s hands, with everything nicely characterized and differentiated. From the sultry indolence of Mendelssohn’s G Minor Gondola piece we’re taken to the scented elegance of the Russian night with Anton Rubinstein’s Romance, for example; and while the third of Franz Liszt’s Consolations creates whole vistas of refined romantic sentiment, its old-worldliness sets off Kiwi composer Douglas Lilburn’s bright, breezy, out-of-doors Prelude which follows, to perfection. While I thought Auguste Durand’s Waltz a bit of a long haul, I was delighted with another old friend, Gabriel Morel’s Norwegian Cradle Song, amply prepared for with a beautifully-modulated performance of the Adagio from Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata.

A beautiful and simple rendition of Princess Te Rangi Pai’s “Hine e Hine” leads to the disc’s final item, “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, by James L. Molloy, one of these songs whose main tune is familiar, but which brings with it a verse-refrain that I don’t recall, possibly through not having ever heard it. The music’s delivered with the poise and grace that distinguishes the playing throughout. Touchingly, Zellan-Smith has dedicated the CD to the memory of long-time music retailer Murray Marbeck, whose idea instigated this project, but who died before its completion. Recorded in the Music Theatre at Auckland University by Wayne Laird, and released by Ode Records, the excellently-caught piano sound rounds off a venture whose artistic success has, I freely admit, set my ears attuned to the strains of an oven-timer, about to signal that my humble pie is cooked and ready to be eaten.

 

Stop Press: Georgina Zellan-Smith is giving a recital in Wellington at a house-concert on Tuesday 22nd November: seating is limited, so e-mail mgeard@windowslive.com for booking information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delight and surprise – Piers Lane at Upper Hutt’s Classical Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Piers Lane at Classical Expressions

FIELD – Nocturnes: No.5 in B-flat H. 37 / No 10 in E Minor H.46B / No.11 in E-flat H.56A

SCRIABIN – 24 Preludes Op.11 / CHOPIN – Waltzes 1-17

Genesis Energy Theatre,

Expressions Arts and Entertainment Centre, Upper Hutt

Tuesday 25th October 2011

Though Piers Lane has been a frequent visitor to New Zealand I’d not heard him play before attending this recital. Naturally I was keen to confirm in my own mind the good things I’d heard various people report about his playing; and the recital’s first half seemed amply to confirm this impression. In the case of each composer (I knew some of Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, but not his Preludes) the music was new to me, and the pianist’s unfailingly beautiful touch and richly-wrought inner voicing throughout each of the pieces seemed by turns to suit their character to perfection. But as can sometimes happen, the concert’s second half proved somewhat disappointing, compared with the first, as if by some strangely alchemic means everything had been altered. We were given seventeen of the Chopin Waltzes, the pianist breaking them up into groups and talking to his audience about salient points in the music before each bracket. To my surprise, Piers Lane took what appeared to me a kind of gung-ho approach to the music, somewhat at odds with the quote by Schumann reproduced in the program – “Aristocratic from the first note to the last”. Whatever was in the pianist’s mind, it was only intermittently aristocratic – some of it was presented with what seemed like an air of over-familiarity, even impatience in places, as if the music’s jewelled elegance had worn thin, exposing a kind of rough-and-ready base metal.

As Piers Lane worked his way through his groupings of the waltzes (I thought his spoken commentaries before each bracket interesting but made too frequently), the music’s elegance and poise seemed to gradually creep back into some of the playing, especially in the slower, more melancholic waltzes. Occasionally, one of the quicker ones, too, would “go” with a hiss and a roar, justifying Lane’s very direct approach – though I got the feeling that in such instances that particular item had been better “prepared”. An example was the famous “three-against-two” Waltz in A-flat Major Op.42, where Lane actually captured a lovely gossamer quality at speed, and delicately brought out the cross-rhythms in a thoroughly “finished” way, characterizing both quicker and slower sections of the music with enviable fluency. Another instance was the famous “Minute” Waltz, again played with plenty of technical aplomb, enabling the piece’s vertiginous quality its head while keeping its poise – lovely playing. Yet another success was the Waltz I’d first encountered in the ballet “Les Sylphides”, the C-sharp Minor Op.64 No.2, the sinuous melody of the “answering” measures replying to the wistful opening with ever-increasing energy and suggestiveness.I liked also the recitative-like middle section, very “juicily” characterized, before the pianist returned us to the world of doubt and gentle resolve which began the piece.

It will be gleaned from all of this that, punctuating my general air of disappointment throughout the second half of the concert there were occasional delights. Still, my overall impression remained of a kind of generalized and in places insufficiently-honed response to the music. However much an interpreter plays these pieces they ought not to sound routine, or, alternatively “beefed up” energy-wise at the expense of elegance. This was what seemed to happen with some of the better-known Waltzes, such as the much-loved Op.Post.E Minor work, the agitations conjured up by the pianist resulting in an unseemly scramble through the opening episode (Chopin wrote plenty of musical agitation into the notes themselves, which speaks when the piece is played with precision and clarity). The G-flat major Op.70 No.1 which followed I thought skittery and charmless, as though the pianist feared any charge of sentimentality in his approach, while the E Major Op.18 (another “Les Sylphides” introduction for me) suffered from the same brittleness of manner – energies generalized and details insufficiently polished.

Far better to concentrate on the first half of the pianist’s recital, which I thought was splendid, both as a conception and in execution, from beginning to end. Beginning with music by the Irish-born virtuoso pianist John Field, the man credited with writing the first “Nocturnes” for solo piano, Piers Lane played three such pieces, each of which seemed to strongly anticipate the more famous Nocturnes by Chopin. The pianist gave us a short spoken introduction to the music and to its composer, after which he delighted us by illustrating his remarks with playing of the utmost sensitivity. His sound-world for this music seemed to be one which was perfectly wrought between the hands, a richly-sonorous bass working in tandem with a singing right-hand line.

While not as adventurous harmonically as Chopin’s, Field’s pieces certainly had a “stand-alone” quality, the first (No.5 in B-flat) beginning with a melody which could have easily been written by the young Schumann, as Chopin, and featuring also a gentle sequence of Mendelssohn-like chords – a true precursor of the Romantic Age. The second Nocturne, No.10 in E Minor, featured a guitar-like accompaniment of a Chopin-like melody, with gentle flourishes at the end, Lane creating a nicely atmospheric soundscape. No.11 in E-flat brought the hands more closely together, melody and argpeggiated accompaniment almost merging as one in places, except where the melody ascends an octave. The music has a middle section which borders on heroic emotion, the right hand’s strong, deliberate line briefly courting glory, and then becalming again. Field’s intensities seemed to me on this showing to be melodic rather than harmonic, the line curved and shaped over the trajectories of endless arpeggiations, progressions which a lesser pianist might have responded to with some impatience – instead of, as here, sounded by Piers Lane with an ebb and flow of subtly-varied intensities.

The earliest music written by the Russian symbolist composer Alexander Scriabin (born in 1872) owes a good deal to Chopin – though Scriabin’s set of 24 Preludes Op.11 wasn’t completed until 1896, No.4 in E Minor dates from 1888, and is among the earliest of the composer’s surviving works. Scriabin organized his set along the lines of Chopin’s Preludes, a cycle of successive major tonalities a fifth apart on the sharp and flat side of the key of C, each piece paired with its relative minor. While a number of the pieces suggest allegiances to various influences upon the composer – Schumann in a number of the pieces, such as the questioning Allegretto A Minor (No.2), Chopin in the Lento E Minor (No.4) and the Andante Cantabile D Major (No.5), Liszt in the Misterioso B-flat Minor (No.16), and Rachmaninov in the massively grand Affetuoso E-flat Major (No.19) and the final D Minor Presto (No.24) – there are occasional precursors of the mature Scriabin, such as the ecstatic outpourings found in the opening Vivace C Major (No.1)and the Andante D-sharp Minor (No.10), and the pictorial contrasts of calm and storm which characterize the Andante G-sharp Minor (No.12).

I couldn’t have imagined a more atmospheric, richly-conceived performance of these works as Piers Lane gave us – what impressed me most of all (confirmed by a friend sitting elsewhere in the audience whom I spoke with at the interval) was the unerring focus of the pianist’s touch throughout, creating tones whose translucence allowed both clarity and colour at all times. Looking through my notes recalls my constant delight at the SOUND of it all, and the ease with which Lane evoked the music’s myriads of characterful moods, and, just as readily, let each one go in favour of newly-formed impressions.

There were too many moments worthy of specific mention, except that, as stated above I was struck by how his beautifully-coloured musical focus brought out in Scriabin’s youthful pieces what seemed to be something of the spirit of Schumann’s quixotic world, echoing the latter’s questioning, ambivalent vignettes of emotion in places such as the B-flat Major Andante (No.21) and its companion, the Lento G Minor (No.22). But the important thing was Lane’s ability to sustain the musical argument throughout the whole of the set, like a journey through an intensely poetic landscape, with a guide whose sensibilities enabled the music to speak with its full range of expressive force.

I understand Piers Lane has recorded all of Scriabin’s Preludes (he wrote numerous sets of them following this one, totalling nearly ninety individual pieces) on a two-disc Hyperion issue, which, in the wake of this recital, I shall be sorely tempted to investigate. The pianist’s Chopin-playing remains a puzzle, to my mind, but one I’m happy for the moment to put aside in favour of my recollections of his Field and Scriabin, which for me were this recital’s very great pleasures.

Polished recital by Aeolian Players at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Marin Marais: Suite in G minor; Telemann: Trio Sonata for oboe, viola da gamba and basso continuo in G minor; Psathas: Waiting for the Aeroplane; Bach: Trio Sonata No 4 in E minor, BWV 528

The Aeolian Players:  Calvin Scott (oboe), Peter Garrity (viola), Ariana Odermatt (piano), Margaret Guldborg (cello)

St Mark’s church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 12 October, 12.15pm

Our last reference to the Aeolian Ensemble is in a review by my colleague Rosemary Collier of their concert in the Mulled Wine series at Paekakariki, where the same Telemann sonata was played but otherwise, a different Bach work, plus pieces by Buxtehude, Hotteterre and Forqueray.

I was a couple of minutes late and missed the first and some of the second movement of the Marais Suite in G minor. It is one of the Pièces en trio pour les flutes, violon, et dessus de viole, published in 1692.  It’s only a short step from flute to oboe, though one could argue that the shift has a significant effect on the mood of the music.

My first impression, as always, was of the way this church so enhances the sounds of instruments (it does as well with voices). So that all four instruments were clear as individuals, yet the composition had the effect of according equal status to them all, and no one dominated the melodic line. Margaret Guldborg’s cello had a warmth that brought it closer to the sound of viola da gamba (on which Marais was one of the greatest exponents) and the sound of the piano in the hands of Ariana Odermatt detracted not the least from the feeling of baroque music.

This was an altogether charming piece, played with an admirable feeling for style and with the interest of the whole placed above that of the individual.

The Telemann sonata (originally for violin, viola and basso continuo) created a quite different impression. Here the indivual instruments carried more distinct lines, each taking turns with the tunes so that the characteristics of each could be enjoyed, as for the most part they could.  The presence of the oboe in place of the violin always has an emotional effect – giving a touch of plangency or sadness – and in most cases is not out of place, and it certainly wasn’t here, even in the brighter Allegro.  As for the piano v. harpsichord issue, the character of the ensemble  did seem to call up in my mind an expectation of the lighter, non-sustaining sound of the latter, though Odermatt’s playing was crisp and sensitive to the idiom.

The inclusion of a modern piano solo was not the least bothersome. Psathas’s early piece, Waiting for the Aeroplane has become a small New Zealand classic; there is nothing difficult about its style or harmonies and it pointed, very early in Psathas’s career, to a refreshing independence of mind, removed from the sort of academic and, shall we say, pretentious music that tended to flow from aspiring student composers 20 years ago (and still does to some extent). Odermatt’s playing was most interesting, handling the rocking fourth that persists hypnotically throughout, is dreamlike; the two notes are uneven in character, the upper note fluctuating in strength while the occasional outbursts produced a quite unsettling effect.

The Bach Trio Sonata
This is one of a set of six so-called ‘trio sonatas’ for organ which Bach compiled in the late 1720s. His manuscript for the six sonatas, BWV 525-30, prescribes two keyboards and pedal.

The Oxford Bach Companion suggests the six sonatas show Bach’s frequent interest in transferring styles and idioms from one instrument or ensemble to another (particularly the keyboard). Thus it can be inferred that it is not an outrageous step for musicians to make arrangements in the reverse direction – back from a score for the organ to the original ‘trio sonata’ concept, that involved two high register instruments and a bass, or basso continuo.

To indulge further erudition, the Bach Companion also notes that the three-instrument form relates more to the concerto than to the church sonata form; and it surmises that the technical difficulty of these six sonatas, and their distance from the most common idioms for the organ, suggest a pedagogical intention (for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann who became a distinguished organist), and that they might be considered a corollary to the collected works for unaccompanied violin and cello.

Earlier versions of all movements of this sonata exist. The opening movement began life as the Sinfonia to the second part of Cantata No 76 – and significantly, it is scored for oboe d’amore, viola da gamba and continuo, composed at the beginning of his Leipzig years. That suggests, further, that other movements may also have been composed originally for instrumental trio. The Andante may date from his earliest years as it betrays the short-breathed motivic style of 17th century German music, as well as some of the ‘pathetic’ gestures of contemporary Italian opera, notably the chord of the Neapolitan Sixth.

The oboe part is again without direct authority apart from the oboe d’amore part in the sinfonia mentioned above, but it easily assumes the leading role, and in Calvin Scott’s hands fully justifies the adaptation. As the oboe and viola pass the theme of the Andante back and forth they create quite a strong and attractive emotional quality. The last movement, Un poco allegro, in triple time, creates a lovely curving line and I could again conjure a viola da gamba, together with a harpsichord in this movement, but the two talented players on cello and piano quickly dispelled any real hankering after a more historical interpretation.